Friday 4 July 2008
Columnist who wrote on theatre and inspired Auberon Waugh to don a false beard
Daily Telegraph Obituaries Friday July 4 2008
Alan Brien, who has died aged 83, was a sparkling columnist sought after throughout Fleet Street in the 1950s, 1960s and the 1970s; like all pundits he was driven to exaggeration by the need to write something fresh, but in a couple of paragraphs he could cast a penetrating light on any subject, whether it was the pleasures of whisky, the pessimism of the Irish or Tudor building.
He was at various times film critic for the Evening Standard, television critic for The Observer, political pundit for the Sunday Pictorial and a trenchant denunciator on all subjects for the Daily Mail.
But his keenest interest was the theatre, which he covered for the Evening Standard, The Spectator and, most notably, The Sunday Telegraph from 1961 to 1967.
He described Michael Hordern's Macbeth as resembling "an Armenian carpet-seller who would not have been allowed into the back portcullis of Dunsinane".
Leo McKern's Volpone had "all the rubbery, tireless pugnacity of an overgrown toddler freaklishly endowed with grown-up glands and adult organs"; while Madge Ryan, in Entertaining Mr Sloane, was "a nymphomaniac Goldilockse parodying adult sexuality with many a roguish twinkle and a girlish skip, like a debauched Shirley Temple".
Brien pointed out that The Merchant of Venice was "a fairy tale with a plot as full of holes as a string bag" and groaned at the popularity of the "well-made" play, epitomised by Noël Coward's explorations of drawing-room embarrassments.
Yet while relishing such playwrights as Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker and then Tom Stoppard, he recognised that "the Theatre of the Absurd is nowhere to go for a laugh".
The fifth son of a tramways inspector, Alan Brien was born on March 12 1925 and educated at Bede Grammer School, Sunderland, before going into the RAF to become a pilot. He then transferred to train as an air gunner before joining No 207 Squadron in June 1945. After going up to read English at Jesus College, Oxford, and staying on to edit Isis, Brien arrived in London with an influx of ambitious northerners determined to give assured Oxbridge figures a run for their money.
Soon he was was appearing in most well-known publications as well as on television, most notably when he chaired the discussion programme Three After Six. A gregarious character, given to frequenting all the journalists' favourite watering holes, he once had a fight with the Panorama reporter John Morgan at a Private Eye lunch over which of them was the more working-class.
In 1967 Brien was snapped up by Harry Evans, The Sunday Times editor, who declared that his new recruit could get interesting copy from the fluff in his navel. He reported from abroad, reviewed films and wrote a diary. But the latter, which ran with a photograph of his bearded face, prompted Auberon Waugh to write a cruel parody in Private Eye (topped by his own face in a false beard) with regular references to "when I was in the RAFe_SLps " and conversations with Lord Beaverbrook, who had once sued Brien.
Like many journalists, Brien proved surprisingly sensitive when attacked, with the result that Waugh kept up his campaign; and long after Brien and his beard had vanished from The Sunday Times Waugh's column marched on.
After leaving the paper in 1984 Brien retired to Wales to write a long, well-researched novel, Lenin, which earned some respectable reviews. He also produced Domes of Fortune, a volume of essays in which he hymned the breasts of his third wife, the feminist journalist Jill Tweedie, for being the shape of Roman helmets.
She died in 1993, having affectionately written that he had none of the attributes of a mythic lover, being neither chivalrous nor very polite; he reminded her, she added, of an old warthog she had once seen in the African twilight.
Alan Brien suffered from poor health in later years, and died on May 23 at Denville Hall, the actors' home. He is survived by his fourth wife, Jane Hill, and by the four daughters and one son of his first two marriages.
Alan Brien, who has died aged 83, was a sparkling columnist sought after throughout Fleet Street in the 1950s, 1960s and the 1970s; like all pundits he was driven to exaggeration by the need to write something fresh, but in a couple of paragraphs he could cast a penetrating light on any subject, whether it was the pleasures of whisky, the pessimism of the Irish or Tudor building.
He was at various times film critic for the Evening Standard, television critic for The Observer, political pundit for the Sunday Pictorial and a trenchant denunciator on all subjects for the Daily Mail.
But his keenest interest was the theatre, which he covered for the Evening Standard, The Spectator and, most notably, The Sunday Telegraph from 1961 to 1967.
He described Michael Hordern's Macbeth as resembling "an Armenian carpet-seller who would not have been allowed into the back portcullis of Dunsinane".
Leo McKern's Volpone had "all the rubbery, tireless pugnacity of an overgrown toddler freaklishly endowed with grown-up glands and adult organs"; while Madge Ryan, in Entertaining Mr Sloane, was "a nymphomaniac Goldilockse parodying adult sexuality with many a roguish twinkle and a girlish skip, like a debauched Shirley Temple".
Brien pointed out that The Merchant of Venice was "a fairy tale with a plot as full of holes as a string bag" and groaned at the popularity of the "well-made" play, epitomised by Noël Coward's explorations of drawing-room embarrassments.
Yet while relishing such playwrights as Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker and then Tom Stoppard, he recognised that "the Theatre of the Absurd is nowhere to go for a laugh".
The fifth son of a tramways inspector, Alan Brien was born on March 12 1925 and educated at Bede Grammer School, Sunderland, before going into the RAF to become a pilot. He then transferred to train as an air gunner before joining No 207 Squadron in June 1945. After going up to read English at Jesus College, Oxford, and staying on to edit Isis, Brien arrived in London with an influx of ambitious northerners determined to give assured Oxbridge figures a run for their money.
Soon he was was appearing in most well-known publications as well as on television, most notably when he chaired the discussion programme Three After Six. A gregarious character, given to frequenting all the journalists' favourite watering holes, he once had a fight with the Panorama reporter John Morgan at a Private Eye lunch over which of them was the more working-class.
In 1967 Brien was snapped up by Harry Evans, The Sunday Times editor, who declared that his new recruit could get interesting copy from the fluff in his navel. He reported from abroad, reviewed films and wrote a diary. But the latter, which ran with a photograph of his bearded face, prompted Auberon Waugh to write a cruel parody in Private Eye (topped by his own face in a false beard) with regular references to "when I was in the RAFe_SLps " and conversations with Lord Beaverbrook, who had once sued Brien.
Like many journalists, Brien proved surprisingly sensitive when attacked, with the result that Waugh kept up his campaign; and long after Brien and his beard had vanished from The Sunday Times Waugh's column marched on.
After leaving the paper in 1984 Brien retired to Wales to write a long, well-researched novel, Lenin, which earned some respectable reviews. He also produced Domes of Fortune, a volume of essays in which he hymned the breasts of his third wife, the feminist journalist Jill Tweedie, for being the shape of Roman helmets.
She died in 1993, having affectionately written that he had none of the attributes of a mythic lover, being neither chivalrous nor very polite; he reminded her, she added, of an old warthog she had once seen in the African twilight.
Alan Brien suffered from poor health in later years, and died on May 23 at Denville Hall, the actors' home. He is survived by his fourth wife, Jane Hill, and by the four daughters and one son of his first two marriages.
34 things every sociologist knows
Published 14 August 2006
Taken from the New Statesman archive, 1 May 1970.
How many of these might you hear today? Number 2 and number 12, certainly, and perhaps number 34, which like a few others at least ought to be true. Whatever the reality was in 1970, I wonder how many modern Hull bridegrooms have met their wives at public dances. Alan Brien, critic, columnist and wit, was a regular contributor to the magazine in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Selected by Brian Cathcart
My sociologist friends complain that we laymen possess very little scientific information about our fellows, yet whenever we are faced with some elaborately researched generalisation about human behaviour we sneer and say: "But everybody knows that!" In order to muddy the waters of controversy, I have constructed a list of apparent truisms. I do not vouch for their accuracy, and reserve the right not to enter into correspondence with anyone about any of them.
1. The divorce rate is higher among the rich than the poor.
2. Men have a lower pain threshold than women.
3. No one has ever contracted lung cancer through smoking pot.
4. More soap is used per head per year in the north of England than in the south.
5. More men commit suicide than women but more women attempt suicide than men.
6. As 5, with the addition of the phrases "except in the north", "before 1945", "of childbearing age", and "collected from a random sample taken from readers of the Guardian woman's page".
7. London bus conductors have the lowest rate of heart disease of any British manual workers.
8. London bus drivers have the highest incidence of ulcers of any British socio-economic group.
9. The sales of tinned food to housewives are significantly lower in Wales than in the Home Counties.
10. Most serious accidents in the home in Scotland occur when the male wage-earner falls downstairs on a Saturday night.
11. The likelihood of any Member of Parliament bearing the same surname as any other MP is six times greater than the same likelihood among any group of the same number.
12. Most criminals are the product of broken homes.
13. 67 per cent of all London taxi drivers are Jewish.
14. The average annual income of authors in Britain who have published more than one book is £178.
15. More sexual offences are committed on the night of the full moon than on any other night in the lunar month.
16. At the 1966 general election, 27,264,747 votes were polled out of a UK electorate of 35,957,245.
17. The Daily Mail has had seven editors since the last war.
18. This is the same as the Spectator over the same period.
19. The chances of any cheque being marked "return to drawer" increase with the number of hyphens in the name of the signatory.
20. On a test measuring group attitudes, Hong Kong Chinese showed most hostility to Japanese and Asiatic Indians and least to Americans.
21. Married couples are more likely to share any physical characteristic - colour of eyes, hair, skin; height, weight, blood group - than not.
22. Criminal statistics show that in Britain the characteristic crime of the Irish is drunkenness, of the Scots violent assault, of the Jews fraud, and of the Welsh petty larceny.
23. That of the English is cruelty to children.
24. The amount of tax relief allowed to owner-occupiers in 1969-70 was £215m.
25. Britain has one acre of woodland to every 13 people.
26. There are 19 Briens in the London telephone directory.
27. Only 7 per cent of all people murdered in the UK in the past 25 years were killed by someone who was a total stranger to them.
28. The drop-out rate among students is highest among those from large families and lowest among those who are an only child.
29. The majority of motorists prosecuted for motoring offences have criminal records.
30. One bridegroom in four in Hull met his wife at a public dance.
31. Three married couples out of four in southern England were born, or brought up, within half a mile of each other.
32. Mental illness decreases in time of war.
33. There is a small, but distinct, tendency to bronchial ailments to be found among middle-aged people who have owned a dog for more than five years.
34. No long-term increase in the sales of any goods has ever been proved to result from an increase in advertising expenditure.
Taken from the New Statesman archive, 1 May 1970.
How many of these might you hear today? Number 2 and number 12, certainly, and perhaps number 34, which like a few others at least ought to be true. Whatever the reality was in 1970, I wonder how many modern Hull bridegrooms have met their wives at public dances. Alan Brien, critic, columnist and wit, was a regular contributor to the magazine in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Selected by Brian Cathcart
My sociologist friends complain that we laymen possess very little scientific information about our fellows, yet whenever we are faced with some elaborately researched generalisation about human behaviour we sneer and say: "But everybody knows that!" In order to muddy the waters of controversy, I have constructed a list of apparent truisms. I do not vouch for their accuracy, and reserve the right not to enter into correspondence with anyone about any of them.
1. The divorce rate is higher among the rich than the poor.
2. Men have a lower pain threshold than women.
3. No one has ever contracted lung cancer through smoking pot.
4. More soap is used per head per year in the north of England than in the south.
5. More men commit suicide than women but more women attempt suicide than men.
6. As 5, with the addition of the phrases "except in the north", "before 1945", "of childbearing age", and "collected from a random sample taken from readers of the Guardian woman's page".
7. London bus conductors have the lowest rate of heart disease of any British manual workers.
8. London bus drivers have the highest incidence of ulcers of any British socio-economic group.
9. The sales of tinned food to housewives are significantly lower in Wales than in the Home Counties.
10. Most serious accidents in the home in Scotland occur when the male wage-earner falls downstairs on a Saturday night.
11. The likelihood of any Member of Parliament bearing the same surname as any other MP is six times greater than the same likelihood among any group of the same number.
12. Most criminals are the product of broken homes.
13. 67 per cent of all London taxi drivers are Jewish.
14. The average annual income of authors in Britain who have published more than one book is £178.
15. More sexual offences are committed on the night of the full moon than on any other night in the lunar month.
16. At the 1966 general election, 27,264,747 votes were polled out of a UK electorate of 35,957,245.
17. The Daily Mail has had seven editors since the last war.
18. This is the same as the Spectator over the same period.
19. The chances of any cheque being marked "return to drawer" increase with the number of hyphens in the name of the signatory.
20. On a test measuring group attitudes, Hong Kong Chinese showed most hostility to Japanese and Asiatic Indians and least to Americans.
21. Married couples are more likely to share any physical characteristic - colour of eyes, hair, skin; height, weight, blood group - than not.
22. Criminal statistics show that in Britain the characteristic crime of the Irish is drunkenness, of the Scots violent assault, of the Jews fraud, and of the Welsh petty larceny.
23. That of the English is cruelty to children.
24. The amount of tax relief allowed to owner-occupiers in 1969-70 was £215m.
25. Britain has one acre of woodland to every 13 people.
26. There are 19 Briens in the London telephone directory.
27. Only 7 per cent of all people murdered in the UK in the past 25 years were killed by someone who was a total stranger to them.
28. The drop-out rate among students is highest among those from large families and lowest among those who are an only child.
29. The majority of motorists prosecuted for motoring offences have criminal records.
30. One bridegroom in four in Hull met his wife at a public dance.
31. Three married couples out of four in southern England were born, or brought up, within half a mile of each other.
32. Mental illness decreases in time of war.
33. There is a small, but distinct, tendency to bronchial ailments to be found among middle-aged people who have owned a dog for more than five years.
34. No long-term increase in the sales of any goods has ever been proved to result from an increase in advertising expenditure.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
