'IT’S APPROACHING BERNARD SHAW...'

The“Quote...Unquote”
NEWSLETTER
Publisher&Editor:NigelReesVol.17,No3,July2008

When Alan’s wife, Jane Hill, told me about the ‘memorial blog’ that had been launched to enable friends and colleagues to post tributes on his death, I was delighted to see that ‘Violence is the repartee of the illiterate’ was duly accorded a place among the top ten quotations on the website set up by his son, Adam.

The number of guests who have appeared on Quote ... Unquote over the years and who have, in modern parlance, recently ‘left the building’ is very sad. I would mention in particular Ned Sherrin and Richard Boston who were on the very first edition and returned several times in the early days. But then we have also recently lost George Melly, Miles Kington, Humphrey Lyttelton, Alan Coren, Gerry Fitt, Bill Deedes, John Rae, Dick Vosburgh, Anton Rodgers and, a relative latecomer to the show, Jeremy Beadle. We will miss them all but the death of one in particular brought back a very happy memory from 1985. The last time I encountered the writer and journalist Alan Brien was a year or two ago at a book launch. He asked why he had not been invited back to appear on Quote ... Unquote. I no doubt fudged some answer but the real reason was that there was no way we could repeat a wonderful moment from one of the four editions he had appeared in back then.

One of the quotations I asked him to provide a source for was, ‘Violence is the repartee of the illiterate.’ In his light, lilting voice he set about it: ‘I don’t think I’ve heard it before. Modernish, I think. Can’t be very old. Bernard Shaw would be too good for it, but it’s approaching Bernard Shaw. Perhaps it’s Chesterton, is it?’ Well, this is not a trick I can play very often on panellists – indeed, I don’t think I have ever done it to anyone else – and I was able to say, ‘Shaw, Chesterton ... Alan Brien, you wrote it in an article on corporal punishment in schools in Punch in 1973 ... ’ Oh, how we laughed. What I sometimes do – when I know who is taking part in the programme – is to see if indeed they do have any quotations attributed to them in the dictionaries but then usually feed these to other panellists. I had found ‘Violence is the repartee ... ’ in Frank S. Pepper’s Handbook of 20th-century Quotations. When I told Alan this, he said he would immediately go and buy a dozen copies and give them to his friends for Christmas. ‘Not quite Shaw, not quite Chesterton, but very good Alan Brien,’ I said. He responded: ‘That describes it very well. That’s what I was trying to be!’ It was a good joke to play on him but, as I say, it was absolutely unrepeatable.