• Home
• /
• Opinion

The idea died long ago

MOST shocking news of recent days, to me anyway, was that Marcel Marceau had died.

Shocking not because I was that desperately close to the feted white-faced begloved colossus of Frenchie mimeuses, but because I'd had no idea that he had still been alive.

It battered my time-compass. It was like bearing that George Bernard Shaw had suddenly bad a dotage-child, or Napoleon suddenly had a blog or some such: surely, surely, MM had died in the 60s? Forty years ago, give or take?

GK Chesterton once defined journalism as announcing "Lord Jones dead" to people who had never known that Lord Jones had ever been alive; now, apparently, it's the telling of news of deaths to those of us who had assumed they had happened a long time ago.

Partly, I blame Tony Blair. What has been going on for 10 years? He had us all on hold. "He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument," was a line in Love's Labour's Lost. Now Gordon Brown has done exactly the same, 10 years on. Nothing has really changed, and we have to define the passage of years not by the changing of society but by the deaths. And, finally, I get on to what I wanted to talk about. Films. Humour. Tiny cartoons.

They kill, more than any lengthy cogent argument, the idea of someone. Marcel Marceau died, for me, about a third of the way through Tootsie. Dustin Hoffman was in such a foul mood that he pushed some preening white masked pimpo to the pavement. Marceau and, as importantly, the idea of him died then, surely. Michael Foot died when Private Eye ran a cover of a 98-year-old woman smothered in a tartan rug with the bubbleline "Just nod if you want to stay on." David Steel died when Spitting Image bad him in Owen's top pocket. Kinnock at Brighton beach: slipping, flatling, about to bizarrely lose.

That David Cameron cannot make any difference is less important than that we -- idiot satirists; cartoonists with bemusing unseen facial characteristics and issues; wondering local Tories who want more, or less, to be talked to by their elected wives or representatives; people who simply want shorter sentences -- cannot find him out. Nor Brown. Mime artists both, and good at it, and aren't you just waiting for one to take off the gloves, and hit and shatter and talk to and break the bloody glass?

Guardian News Service