Alan Bennett’s 2000 Diary

Letters

Vol. 23 No. 3 · 8 February 2001

From Simon Barley

It was around 1950 when my brother and I – amateur sleuths beside whom we considered Sexton Blake a mere beginner – saw an advertisement in the Hotspur for the Seebackroscope. Like Alan Bennett (LRB, 25 January) and his brother, we experienced a mixture of puzzled disappointment and rage at being cheated of our pocket money by such a spectacularly useless object. I prefer now to see the Seebackroscope not so much as a con, but rather as the fruit of some helpfully ingenious mind – of the same inventiveness that litters the pages of Exchange and Mart with suggestions for things that enable you to have a pee in your car or make tea in a foreign hotel (two devices, these, not one).

Simon Barley
Sheffield

From John Cunliffe

I had a Seebackroscope probably at about the same time Alan Bennett did, and found it equally useless. I wonder if Bennett also came across some of the catchpennies that could be bought at the stalls along the sea-front in Blackpool and Morecambe. One was a small box with a label on it printed so that the box looked like a tiny radio. This would be described as 'The Smallest Receiver in the World – 2/6'. A tiny radio would have been a technical impossibility in those pre-transistor days and when you opened the box, you'd find a tiny plastic or wooden chamberpot inside. Many adults must have had to explain this joke to their bewildered children. Another object was advertised as a patent bug-killer. It consisted of two blocks of wood, linked by a piece of string, and marked A and B. There were printed instructions: 'Hold block A in the right hand. Place the insect on block A. Hold block B in the left hand, and bring it smartly down upon block A.' The lesson pointed out at the time was never to trust advertising, and never to 'buy a pig in a poke'.

John Cunliffe
Ilkley, West Yorkshire

Vol. 23 No. 4 · 22 February 2001

From Mary-Kay Wilmers

More on Tyson the lapsed psychoanalyst: he used to say he'd have liked to pin a note to the wall of his consulting room, legible from the couch, that read: 'Least said soonest mended.'

Mary-Kay Wilmers
London NW1

From Stuart Griffiths

I am of an age with Alan Bennett and must have visited the Diaghilev exhibition at more or less the same time (LRB, 25 January). I do remember the innovative use of music, but above all I recall the unsparing, almost profligate use of Guerlain's Mitsouko, said to be Diaghilev's favourite perfume. Several of the exhibition's rooms were doused with it every day – which could only have been Richard Buckle's idea. Happily Mitsouko, with its envoûtant presence, lives on.

Stuart Griffiths
Paris

From Caryle Adams

Alan Bennett is right to describe the BBC's mismanagement of its archive as a 'scandal'. When I asked the BBC shop for videos of Jonathan Miller and others' Shakespeare productions, intending them for Christmas presents, I was told the BBC had sold off the series to W.H. Smith, which had promptly disposed of them as unlikely to sell.

Caryle Adams
London N6

From Joseph Nuttgens

My memory is that in the sketch Alan Bennett describes, the crucifix doubling as a pipe-rack is incidental to a telephone consultancy which has been set up by the vicar to provide potential suicides with instant access to God's advice, and about which he is being interviewed. The vicar was preoccupied with his own ingenuity with the pipe-rack and the interview is conducted over the persistent ringing of a never answered telephone. Would it not have been this, rather than the pipe-rack, that raised a question in Parliament?

Joseph Nuttgens
High Wycombe