Sick of those damn 6.30 parties

Every week, Melvyn Bragg sends me* an email to let me know how his BBC Radio 4 show In Our Time went. The last one contained this delicious coda:

PPS: Something that was too late to get into last week’s newsletter but I thought worth a mention. Last Thursday I went to one of the best parties I’ve been to. The fiftieth anniversary of the launch of the Monitor programme under Huw Wheldon. It was lovely to see people like Nancy Thomas, Ann James, David Jones, Humphrey Burton and, of course, Ken Russell. Those years in the early 60s were probably the happiest of my life in every possible way. I have deeply gone off literary parties and any sort of 6.30 parties in London but this was an exceptionally happy event, full of people whose lives have been devoted to making TV programmes about the arts that brought the arts to as many people television could reach.

After the party we piled down to a nearby restaurant where conversation was free and easy until the last hour, when Jonathan Miller held forth in his inimitably brilliant manner about materialism and his view that consciousness would never be “cracked”. There was no way it was sufficiently observable for us to understand what it was and yet he declared himself a total materialist. And so the day ended as it had begun.

Being Orstraylyan and all, I have no idea who those people are — aside from Ken Russell, who I always imagine in a comedy wig. Oh, ok, and Jonathan Miller, but only because of that Pete and Dud biopic. Despite/because of this, Melvyn's PPS fills me with envy and despair. I want to be making telly about art at the BBC in the early 60s. How depressing that I wasn't even born in the early 60s. I want to be in Melvyn's gang smoking fags outside Broadcasting House in spectacles and scratchy woolen overcoats, being serious and funny and feeling just as locked out of all goings on in Carnaby Street as the citizens of Reading (see Gervais below), but not caring because we know we are the sparks of a different and far more thrilling cultural explosion, firing away in in folders and cameras and fountain pens.

It's the same London A S Byatt's Fredrika came to live in, in the 60s, in one of those books... um... Babel Tower. She's escaped her awful marriage and rents a tiny basement flat with her son and lands (oh so easily) a job hosting an arts show on TV. That was in the olden days, when youthful, alarmingly clever but not-really-that-attractive girls could get jobs in broadcasting, in the days before THE BABY BOOMERS TOOK OVER THE WORLD and no one could get any jobs at all any more, except hotties. Meanwhile, Fredrika's friend Alexander the playwrite is part of group that's deciding whether the government should abolish grammar in schools. Which is frustrating, because in the novel they're all wondering what the consequences might be, and we all no da end of dat stry, hay?

I want to live in that world and don't care that it's so seductively nostalgic mostly because it's basically imaginary.

But what's a "6.30 party", I wonder. Anyone?

I got the same overwhelming feeling of urgent envy when I saw this picture of Daphne du Maurier the other day. I don't know why. She hated being a mum, apparently, and had to get rid of those kids to write anything.

Look at that shard of face under Daphne's arm. The daughter. Already obscured by the shadow of a glamourous mother who looks desperate to escape.



*DAMN. THIS PHOTO SEEMS TO HAVE EVAPORATED. I'M SEARCHING THE INTERWEBS HIGH AND LOW TO REINSTATE IT.*





















* I think other people get it to, so, you know, whatever.