Miles and Miles: The Selected Writing of Miles Kington

By Miles Kington

An incomparable collection of wit and wisdom from a master of comic writing

After creating the popular Franglais! series, Miles Kington always had an ambition: to write a book in English as well.

An “endlessly curious and observant hack”, as he described himself, here a gentle wit and wide-ranging intelligence are brought to bear on everything from the curious geography of Jersey to anthropological studies on German prisoners of war; from an interview with the Mona Lisa to why there’s no such thing as a good jazz singer, via an interrogation of Nostradamus.

Originally written for a wide range of publications, these pieces show Kington really letting his hair down, largely on the grounds that he never expected anyone to read them anyway. Together, they form an effervescent collection of light verse, memoir and listicles (yes, he was there first). In Miles and Miles we have a demonstration of a comic master at work, and a testament to the timeless class of one of Britain’s most-loved humorists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canelo
• Release date: Aug 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781910859162

Miles Kington

Miles Kington was literary editor of Punch and a writer for the London Times. He also wrote a regular column for The Independent, from its earliest days until the week he died. The author of several bestsellers in the UK, he died of cancer in January 2008.

Book preview

Copyright

Miles and Miles

Miles Kington

Canelo

Introduction

‘From an early age,’ Miles once wrote, ‘perhaps confused by my shifting geography, I knew I wanted to be a humorous writer and a jazz musician… and when I went to Oxford University I spent most of the time playing the double bass in jazz groups and writing undergraduate humour. Thus when I left university I was almost entirely unfitted for life, and consequently went to London to try my luck as a freelance humorous writer, where I nearly starved to death.’

He had set his sights on joining Punch, bombarding them with articles till they finally relented and allowed him in. At Punch he created the hugely popular ‘Let’s Parler Franglais’ columns. These columns, which poked fun at the Brits’ determined inability to speak any other language, were later published in book form, which he described as ‘probably the most popular bilingual lavatory books of the 1980s.’ And at Punch he wrote prolifically, not just for the magazine but for a myriad of other publications, plus endless sketches for television.

By 1980, Miles seemed set to embark on a career in broadcasting. He was a regular on ‘Call My Bluff’, and he had gone with the BBC to make the documentary for the ‘Great Railway Journey’ series in Peru. By now he was being courted by other programme makers and looked set to become a popular TV personality. Then, to everybody’s astonishment, he eschewed a career on television, turning down the role of presenter on ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ and Barry Norman’s seat on ‘Film Night’. It was, he said, because it got in the way of his writing…

When Miles parted company with Punch he set his sights on having a daily column in the Times. Harry Evans, the editor, wasn’t sure but when Miles sent him a humorous column every day for ten days, he succumbed. A space was found on the Obituaries page. ‘Over My Dead Body’ was Miles’s suggested title, quickly rejected on the grounds of bad taste. They settled on ‘Moreover’ and thus he began to write a daily column, the quality of which inspired the admiration of fellow writers and a huge following of regular readers.

In 1987, he switched to the Independent, again writing daily. He remained with them until he died in 2008, by which time he had written over 4,500 humorous articles, as well as contributing on a regular basis to other journals, including the Oldie, programmes for BBC Radio, as well as sixteen books.

Miles wrote because he found words endlessly fascinating. He was a humorist because he loved playing with them, making language stand on its head to look at life’s experiences in a different, tangential way. His writing provided unexpected perspectives that made his readers smile, laugh and see things afresh. And it wasn’t just in his writing. One can hear it in his broadcasting; and similarly, in his personal life, everything was subjected to the same quirky, humorous dissection.

His ideas came from everywhere. A vast pile of newspapers and magazines and an equally huge pile of cuttings, some dating back to the early eighties, filled his study. Stacks of books dominated every room, and his recordings of television and radio programmes reflect an almost obsessive anxiety not to miss anything that might be interesting.

‘The main challenge for a humorist,’ he once wrote, ‘is to get humour out of the unlikely. Anyway, a humorist shouldn’t often write about something. He should start in an obvious place and shoot off at right angles…’ So having been diagnosed with cancer, there was no way in which he would not write about it; or that, devastating though it was, it would be given the same treatment as anything else he’d ever written about. Cancer became a scenario, a situation that he could view almost dispassionately, winkle out the quirky elements, find the humour, turn tragedy into comedy, neutralise the fear.

‘How do you do it, day after day?’ and ‘how do you churn it out?’ were two questions he was most frequently asked. He strongly objected to the use of the word ‘churn’ and with justification. Everything he wrote was thought about, worried over, re-read and checked again when in print. His fellow hacks regarded his output with awe. He lived to write, and it was entirely apt that his last column appeared on the day he died.

As well as his humorous writing, Miles wrote wonderful descriptions of his travels, beautifully crafted pieces of nostalgia, and witty observational pieces about his life and times. To choose the best of an output of such magnitude and such quality has been daunting but hugely rewarding and we hope the reader of this selection will have as much fun and enjoyment out of it as we have had in putting it together.

Caroline Kington

May 2016

Punch

An Introduction to The Pick of Punch 1998

When I left Oxford in 1963, I only wanted to do one thing: write humour. In my last university days I met another young man who also wanted to be a comic writer, called Terry Jones, and together we determined to collaborate on some of the most brilliant comedy scripts ever to hit the BBC. By the time we had written together for a year and had nothing accepted, it began to dawn on us that either the BBC was blind to talent or we were doing something wrong.

It was Terry who worked it out first.

One day he took me aside and said: ‘Look, Miles, I think to be honest we are going in different directions. I want to write stuff to be performed, preferably stuff that I can perform myself, whereas I think you just want to write for the printed page. I honestly think we would be better off going our separate ways. Together it’s not going to work. In any case, there’s a friend of mine just leaving Oxford called Michael Palin who I want to write with…’

What Terry was saying (apart from the fact that he wanted to write with Michael Palin) was that I was a humorous writer by bent and he was a comedy writer. He wanted to get up on stage. I wanted to see my words in print. He wanted to see his face on TV. I wanted to see my name at the top of articles. How right he was, proved by the fact that half a dozen years later he was one-sixth of Monty Python’s Circus, while I was one-sixth of the staff of Punch magazine. In other words, he was facing firmly into the future and I was facing fearlessly into the past.

Because the pedestal occupied by the humorous writer, and probably by the cartoonist too, has been forcibly repossessed, and they have both been replaced by the comedy writer, and the strip cartoonist and the animator. There is still a place for a humorous columnist like me, as there is for the travelling rug, the open log fire and the individually hand crafted stink bomb, but I have to recognise that history has passed on by another route, into television and film, and that I am in danger of becoming part of a heritage industry.

Nevertheless, there was a time when the humorist and the cartoonist were the most modern comic performing animals it was possible to conceive, and Punch was the repository of the best of them, and if we look back to its golden days we will see both at their best. Not only that, but I was incredibly lucky to be able to be a staff member of Punch while it was still within hailing distance of its great days, and after visiting the archives for the purpose of assembling this book, I am not sure that the golden days weren’t closer to the present than we generally think.

At any rate, the things that made me laugh out loud were almost all written or drawn within the last fifty years or so, and for the contents of this book I have drawn largely on the years 1950-1980. Now, I know this is not conventional wisdom. I know that the golden age of Punch cartooning is generally said to centre on Leech and Keene, and later on Phil May and du Maurier, and that the great writers of Punch were the A.P. Herberts and E.V. Knoxes and H.F. Ellises from before 1950. Well, yes and no. Yes, they drew and wrote beautifully. No, they don’t seem that funny any more.

But then it was always said of Punch that it wasn’t funny any more. The accepted wisdom in this century is that the dentist’s waiting room was the proper place for it, and even in its heyday it was considered normal to laugh about it. Auberon Waugh used to maintain that even very good and funny writers were bad in Punch. Private Eye used to send out rejection slips marked "Why not try Punch? Timothy Shy, in World War II time, used to excuse limp jokes by saying Good enough for Punch". Going back a century, a Victorian editor of Punch once said to W.S. Gilbert, ‘Do you know, we get hundreds of jokes sent in every week!’ ‘Really? Then why don’t you print some of them?’ said Gilbert caustically.

In my experience the only people who were ruder about Punch than these outsiders were the staff itself. We were so conscious of the great cartoons and good things done by Punch in the past that it was rather depressing to bring out a weekly issue and realise that nothing in it was nearly so good. It was also depressing to bring out issues in which there were good things and have nobody notice, just because nobody expected Punch to do anything new or good. We felt the weight of the millstone of history round our necks. We felt the force of inertia of a somewhat dozy readership. But as much as anything we felt that we had to fight against the editor as well, whoever he might be.

This was especially true of the tenure of William Davis, in the 60s and 70s. Davis felt that he had to drag the magazine kicking and screaming into the twentieth century. He wasn’t the first. Malcolm Muggeridge had been hired in the 1950s to get rid of the old readers and attract a new set. His brand of modernism had managed to get rid of the old but not attract the new, which had helped Punch on a downward slide in circulation which was never to be halted in the next two or three decades.

In a vain attempt to staunch this, Davis nailed his colours to the cause of being in touch, that is, being topical, being political, being satirical. Nothing wrong with that, except that Private Eye and TW3 were already doing it much better, and Punch was the wrong magazine to do it with. There seemed little point in our planting little squibs under the Vietnam War, or Scottish nationalism, or the three-day week, if we were always a week late and didn’t add anything to it. Look back through the Punch of the 1979s and 1960s, and you will find a lot of dead humour washing around in the shallows, attached to long-forgotten TUC leaders, and car strikes, and now unrecognisable Cabinet ministers. We all know the sensation of opening an ancient volume of Punch and wondering exactly why Gladstone is getting cross about Bulgaria (or rather, not caring in the least why he is doing it) but you can get exactly the same effect in recent Punches. Who IS Jack Jones? What WAS the Cod War…?

(There was one week when I was actually acting editor of Punch because both editor and deputy, Davis and Alan Coren, were away. I put into that issue things which I liked because I thought they were good and funny, including one of which I am quite proud, because it was the only portion of his autobiography ever penned by Paul Desmond, the saxophonist with Dave Brubeck. It is a very funny piece, and when Davis came back and saw it in Punch he exploded. ‘I turn my back for a week, and rubbish like this gets in!’ I have put the piece by Desmond in this book.)

So you will not find any topical humour in here. You will not find classic chestnut cartoons of the kind normally found in Punch treasuries (curate’s egg’; I keep thinking it’s Wednesday; bang went saxpence, etc) or indeed venerable chunks of prose. What you will find is pieces which have had me creased up with respect or laughter over the last twenty years, such as pieces by unexpected figures like Anthony Burgess, Barry Humphries and William Boyd, by regulars like E.S. Turner and Basil Boothroyd, and by people who probably don’t even remember writing for Punch, like Peter Buckman and Andrew Barrow. Or by Alexander Frater, who when he is writing his fantastical dream-like stories set mostly in the South Seas, is – in my opinion – the funniest man who wrote for Punch since the war.

You will also find pieces and cartoons which I came across quite by accident in the Punch library, the unexpected shrine to humour which these days sits rather oddly opposite Harrods. To get to the Punch library you have to go through the ultra-modern offices of the ultra-modern version of the magazine (still alive at press time) and then pass back a hundred years into the leather-lined library, where the first time I visited it a Japanese scholar was silently scrutinising the private letters of Tom Taylor, the Victorian editor of Punch whose main claim to fame was that he wrote the play at which Lincoln was assassinated…

Help! I am sinking back into history already, succumbing to the historical spell of Punch again. I don’t really want to go back down that road. It was lovely to go back again for a while, and I hope you enjoy what I have brought back, but I escaped from Punch fifteen years ago, and have lived a comparatively normal life ever since, despite what Terry Jones forecast.

I have not resisted the temptation to include one piece of mine. Still, it was nice to find a piece by Terry Jones and Mike Palin which made me roar with laughter, so that has gone in as well. A pity they didn’t write more. They could have been very good humorous writers, those two, if they hadn’t gone off and wasted all their time making films and going round the world…

Latin Tourist Phrase Book

Quid pro quo: the sterling exchange rate

Post hoc propter hoc: a little more wine wouldn’t hurt us

Ad hoc: wine not included

Adsum: small extras on the bill

Exempli gratia: token tip

Infra Dig: terrible accommodation

Primus inter pares: the stove has fallen into the fire

Compos mentis: mint sauce

Carpe diem: fish frying tonight

Non anglii, sed angeli: fishing absolutely prohibited

Curriculum: Indian restaurant

Casus belli: gastro-enteritis

Sic transit gloria mundi: the nausea will pass away, and you’ll be fine by Monday

O temporal o mores!: The Times is no more, alas!

Quis custodiet custodes ipsos: do you keep the Guardian?

Post meridiem: the Mail does not arrive until midday

Fiat lux: car wash

Rara avis: no car available

Volenti non fit injuria: the accident was caused by a badly fitted steering wheel.

Reductio ad absurdum: road narrows

Nil obstat: River Nile impassable

Nil desperandum: River Nile overflowing

De minimis non curat lex: Lex garages cannot undertake to service small cars

Terminus ad quem: bus station for Quem (small Romanian town)

Ceteris paribus: restaurant facilities are available on the Paris coach

Post mortem: mail strike

Expostfacto: not known at this address

Sub Rosa: rather unattractive Italian girl

Sal volatile: rather attractive Italian girl

Gloria in excelsis: very attractive Italian girl

Noli me tangere: I do not wish to dance with you

Ars longa, vita brevis: unsuitable bathing costume (literally: big bottom, small brief)

Hic jacet: old-fashioned coat

Ecce homo: gay bar

Timeo Danaos et Dona Ferentes: that nice couple we met in Portugal

Mens sana: male massage parlour

Ex libris: dirty books

Ex cathedra: ruined church

Inter alia: an Italian airline

Summa cum laude: peak holiday period

In loco parentis: railway family compartment

Quondam: part of Holland reclaimed from the sea

Dum spiro: stupid Greek person

Festina lente: shops shut on Continent (literally: Lenten holiday)

Aut Caesar aut nihil: an Italian football result

Tertium quid: 33p

Punch Magazine

Blairgowrie Highland Games

Somewhere in his journals Evelyn Waugh mentions a visit he made to Scotland, during which he happened to pass by a place where they were holding the Highland Games. He was not very impressed. The men tossing the caber, he reported, did not seem to be very good at it; hardly one of them managed to throw it right over, and most could only land it on the end.

As one of the main ideas in caber-tossing is not to throw it right over, but to land it on the end, this must go down as yet another example of an English writer getting the facts about Scotland wrong. But I know how he felt – I was equally ignorant of Scottish life, sport and culture when I was sent from south of the border at the age of thirteen to spend five years at Glenalmond. I simply had no idea what games or sports they played up here, except for a vague notion that when it got cold people went curling.

I soon started learning. Not long after I arrived at Glenalmond I made the acquaintance of a Perthshire farmer’s son called Sandy Thomson. The way I made his acquaintance was by him setting on me and trying to beat me to death with his fists.

‘Why are you doing this to me?’ I exclaimed, not unreasonably.

‘Because you’re English,’ he growled.

Thus it was I came across my first Highland sport: beating up the English. Of the other games I had played down south – hockey, soccer – there was no sign. Glenalmond was strictly a rugby school during the winter (which lasted a lot longer than down south) and during the summer there was a brief interval while people pretended to play cricket. Rugby seemed to be rather like beating up the English, but more broad-minded; you were allowed to beat up the Scots as well. Cricket should have been a sophisticated oasis in all this, yet I had the feeling that nobody took it very seriously. I soon found out why. It was seen as an English game. Not only that, but it was a colonialist, imperialist game, as it had been introduced to Scotland after 1745, when the English soldiers had taught the game to Scottish prisoners of war at Perth. On the North Inch, if I recall correctly. At any rate, you were allowed to opt out of cricket at Glenalmond and do something else, which you were never allowed to do with rugby unless you had a broken leg. Two, preferably.

I started my cricket career quite well at the school by hitting a ball for six over a hedge. It took ten minutes to find. The next ball I advanced down the pitch to do the same to, when the umpire, a teacher, cried: ‘For God’s sake, Kington! Not into the Mad Wifie’s Cabbage Patch again!’

I was so startled by this unsporting, most unumpire-like intervention that I missed the ball altogether, was bowled and promptly opted out of cricket for athletics. And this is where I should have been inducted into the delights and mysteries of Highland Games, so that in later life I could have earned a bob or two putting the shot, heaving the hammer and tossing the sword dance. But it was not to be. The kind of athletics they had there was the kind you got everywhere, with javelins, and discuses, and pole vaults, and stuff you would never get at any Highland Games seen by Evelyn Waugh.

Which is odd, when you think about it. The only reason we do all these strange Olympic things is that they did them 2,000 years ago in Greece, which is no reason to do them now. The old Olympics in Greece, after all, were not international. They were local. They were, if you like, the Greek Highland Games, and no more universal than the modern Scottish Games. If Evelyn Waugh had gone on a motor tour of Greece in 400 BC, he would have seen all these contestants hurling things that look like 12 LPs or throwing spears immense distances without hitting anyone, and he might have written in his diary: Passed Sparta Highland Games, saw men attempting to vault over a hedge with a pole, but they were all terrible: not one of them managed to get the pole over the other side", because it would all have looked terribly parochial and foreign to him.

If things had turned out differently, discus-throwing and javelin-hurling might now be something you only saw in Greece, whereas the main Olympic events could be the caber, the hammer and so on. There might be Olympic curling, or hunting, shooting and fishing, stalking and poaching. Munro-bagging could be an international sport…

But I think things turned out for the best. The Greeks, after all, have gained nothing from giving birth to the Olympic Games, except the occasional nod of thanks. They do not get royalties on their invention. If you want to see some foot-racing and discus-hurling, do you go to Greece? If you want to see a marathon, do you go to Marathon? Whereas, by cleverly refusing an export licence to Highland Games, Scotland has ensure that anyone who wants to see them, or partake, has to come to Scotland and swell the Scottish coffers. It would be nothing less than a tragedy if the marathon was named after some Scottish battle, Bannockburn perhaps, and the result that everyone who ran the Bannockburn went everywhere to do it – except in Scotland.

Incidentally, Sandy Thomson and I became great friends after he had beaten me up once or twice. This was partly because I joined in alliance with him against another Scottish boy, who came from Kirkwall and was a bit of a Bible-puncher. Sandy was against organized religion. I encouraged him in this, if only to deflect his energy away from me and against the boy from Kirkwall. This is technically known as dividing the Scots against each other, and conquering. But that is an old English game.

Oedipus and His Mum, a Cautionary Tale

Oedipus was an Ancient Greek

Whose future seemed to be quite bleak

For as the baby looked so weedy

His mum and dad took little Oedy

To ask the Oracle if he knew

What lay in store for baby blue…

‘Oh woe!’ the Oracle did intone,

As if through mournful megaphone,

‘This lad will have a cursed life

For he will take his Mum as wife’

‘How can that be?’ his father cried.

‘He cannot do that till I’ve died!’

‘I have another bit of news,’

He heard the Oracle enthuse,

(For nothing gives an Oracle joy

Like bringing doom to a little boy)

‘Your lad won’t just take mum as bride.

But also indulge in patricide.’

Now Father was an ancient Greek

Whose grasp of Latin was quite weak.

‘Patricide?’ he said. ‘What’s that?’

When told, he said: ‘I’LL KILL THE BRAT!’

‘No, don’t!’ said mother. ‘Darling, see

He’s making googoo eyes at me…’

‘Oh, IS he?’ said his father. ‘No!

The little blighter’s got to go!’

And so they came to a compromise.

The next day, as the sun did rise,

They left the baby high and dry,

In the desert, doomed to die.

But as is normal in this part,

Some interfering bleeding heart

Found the baby lying there

And took it home and into care…

To cut a rambling story short

The lad was fed and up was brought,

Until at eighteen off he sped

To pass his gap year round the Med.

And in a road rage incident

He killed a passing aged gent

Which wouldn’t have been half so bad

If it hadn’t been his Dad.

And later, which was worse by far,

He unwittingly wed his Ma.

He had a baby by his mother

Then two more, then another.

Reader, imagine if you can,

Children calling their mother ‘Gran’…

When