Oque?

John Bayley

• Byrne by Anthony Burgess
  Hutchinson, 150 pp, £14.99, October 1995, ISBN 0 09 179204 5

Many years ago, before soundbites and even before That Was the Week that Was, I found myself pushed by the late Brigid Brophy into taking part in an early TV quiz show. In those days such things were done in a touchingly amateurish way, with make-up persons fussing about and everyone, even the cameramen, looking highly nervous. It was a literary guessing-game, done almost like charades used to be at a country weekend. An actor read out a bit of poetry or prose, and sitting in a semicircle we attempted in turn to give it a date, a context, the name of an author. By today’s standards the whole thing was élitist to a suicidal degree. We were lemmings of literature, evidently bent on the destruction of all we stood for. The idea was to show off by not showing off, to be languidly erudite, wittily and unobtrusively learned. High culture, wide culture, men of letters, like Aldous Huxley, who indeed was then still alive ... It was the exact opposite of Brain of Britain.