Barry Humphries

Thursday

29 Oct 2015
Barry Humphries

Diary - 29 October 2015

I’m counting ‘Wows!’ Suddenly everyone is using this irritating expletive expressing incredulity, amazement and nothing at all. I’ve heard it from the lips of daughters in law, professors of literature, rabbis and housewives. No doubt at least one priest has said it after a particularly lurid confession. It is spreading like leprosy over ordinary discourse and will, in time, die out like ‘Zounds’ or ‘Gee whizz’. I wonder if it will turn up as an anachronism in Downton Abbey? I saw on television the other night a superb production of Priestley’s An Inspector Calls with great performances from David Thewlis, Ken Stott and Miranda Richardson. The adaptation was impeccable and no one said ‘Wow!’ but there was a jarring moment when one actor referred to ‘the bottom line’, briefly wrenching me back into the present.

Diary - 29 October 2015

Thursday

6 Nov 2014
Barry Humphries

Barry Humphries’s diary: The bookshop ruined by Harry Potter

Do fish have loins? Last Tuesday, in a pretentious restaurant, I ordered a ‘loin of sea trout’. It looked just like an ordinary piece of fish — a bit small, as is usual in pretentious restaurants — on a plate sprinkled and drizzled as though the chef had perhaps coughed over it rather violently or vigorously scratched his head before giving it to the waiter. In Australia, I was once offered a shoulder of some other fish, so I suppose one might even be able to enjoy a rump of whitebait or even a saddle of flounder. But generally speaking I don’t mind loin when applied to the loinless, and somehow a loin of fruitcake sounds appetising, or even a loin of sourdough bread. After all, a loaf of bread has a ‘heel’, which I always pluck out of the proffered basket.

Barry Humphries’s diary: The bookshop ruined by Harry Potter

Thursday

12 Dec 2013

Thursday

29 Aug 2013
Barry Humphries

Barry Humphries: in praise of Australian art

In my career as a music hall artiste I travel the world, mostly in the Dominions, the United States and the cleaner countries of Europe. Aside from giving incalculable pleasure to thousands of people, I love, on my days off, to visit picture galleries: usually the porticoed kind, in search of those overlooked little masterpieces that lurk, not seldom, in provincial museums. Today, most art galleries have a shop selling postcards of paintings from other museums, Magritte oven mitts and Piero della Francesca fridge magnets. They sell books as well, sometimes useless coffee table tomes like Art Deco Cufflinks Down the Centuries and London Transport Textiles and Their Creators.  However, it was in Toronto that I first came upon Tom Thomson, a ‘Canadian master’ of whom I had never heard.

Barry Humphries: in praise of Australian art

Thursday

11 Apr 2013
Barry Humphries

Diary - 11 April 2013

Whenever feminists have complained in my presence about neglect of female high-achievers, other than rock singers and courtesans, I always like to mention brilliant Margaret Thatcher. It always makes them furious. They can’t bear to think of her as one of the most successful women of the 20th century. I had afternoon tea with her and Denis once in their chintzy flat at No. 10, where she expressed a great interest in Rupert Murdoch, whom she rather admired. My father-in-law, Stephen Spender, was also a Maggie fan and once, after he had delivered a speech about Henry Moore at Westminster Abbey, she repeated the whole speech back to him at the party afterwards word for word. Tragically her prodigious memory failed her in the end.

Thursday

1 Nov 2012
Barry Humphries

London Notebook | 1 November 2012

What is a real woman? My difficult client, the Australian gigastar Dame Edna Everage, is seriously miffed at BBC’s cancellation of her forthcoming appearance on Have I Got News For You. She flew from Australia especially to record this show, installing herself, as usual, in the Oliver Messel suite at the Dorchester Hotel at her own expense, but the producer changed his mind yesterday and politely gave her the shove, claiming that the show only featured ‘real people’. The insult is all the more hurtful since she has, in the past, done Desert Island Discs and published a volume of autobiography which was always listed in the ‘non-fiction’ category. ‘Not a real woman!’ the Dame spluttered to me on the phone last night.

London Notebook | 1 November 2012

Saturday

2 Jun 2012
Barry Humphries

Diary - 2 June 2012

Whenever, in an idle moment, I dip into one of my own books, I am almost immediately consumed by an unstoppable fou rire. It is immodest of me to make this confession, but I find my own work irresistibly funny. It pleases me to know that other more illustrious authors whom I admire are also deeply amused by their own books. Kafka, Max Brod tells us, always exploded with laughter while reading aloud from his own desolate tales. Ronald Firbank cackled uncontrollably while writing his orchidaceous novels and D.H. Lawrence, not famous for his sense of humour, laughed often and not seldom inexplicably at his own writings. Even the saurian countenance of Samuel Beckett was creased with laughter as the author contemplated his own sardonic playlets.

Saturday

24 Sep 2011
Barry Humphries

Slovenia Notebook

Last week I headed to Maribor in Slovenia for a music festival featuring the Australian Chamber Orchestra under the directorship of maestro Richard Tognetti, the virtuoso violinist. I even briefly performed a couple of Edith Sitwell poems to music by William Walton, but my efforts were at the beginning and end of a long programme featuring the New York avant-garde of the Sixties, including a work by John Cage which contained a long movement of complete silence disturbed only by the sound of the audience leaving. I think I once read that Cage believed there to be three different kinds of silence required by his music: the silence of expectation, the silence of appreciation and the silence of paralytic boredom. I’m not sure about the last.

Saturday

13 Aug 2011
Barry Humphries

An Australian in Lautrec’s Paris

The remarkable career of Charles Conder At the small but distinguished exhibition at the Courtauld Institute — Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril (until 18 September) — we glimpse many of the habitués of the Moulin Rouge with the exception of Charles Conder. A marginal figure in at least four works by Lautrec, he is also the subject of a fine portrait drawing at the Art Gallery of Aberdeen. Conder was born in London in 1868 and as a child went to Australia with his parents. He showed an early aptitude for art and at the age of 15 was employed as an illustrator for the Sydney Morning Herald. In the next few years, with another group of Australian painters including Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts, he painted a number of plein air works of extraordinary preciosity which are landmarks of Australian impressionism.

Saturday

19 Dec 2009
Barry Humphries

Christmas Notebook

I felt immeasurably old this morning in Sydney when a youth on a bicycle yelled at me in the street ‘I love your body of work!’ I returned the flattering salutation with the modest smile I keep for such occasions, but my fan had already pedalled into the traffic.I felt immeasurably old this morning in Sydney when a youth on a bicycle yelled at me in the street ‘I love your body of work!’ I returned the flattering salutation with the modest smile I keep for such occasions, but my fan had already pedalled into the traffic. But it was the first time that my not inconsiderable achievements as a music-hall artiste had been publicly described as ‘a body of work’. Perhaps the sapient cyclist had intended to compliment me on my oeuvre, but had decided that the French word might not have been audible above all those cars and trucks and filthy white vans.

Saturday

20 Jun 2009

Monday

15 Dec 2008
Barry Humphries

San Francisco Notebook

I am in San Francisco where I began an American theatrical adventure ten years ago. It is a beautiful and stylish town but it is impossible to enjoy a stroll in the city centre without being pestered by beggars. Not seldom hostile, these pungent tatterdemalions seem to be accepted by the locals as though they existed, like the cable cars, Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge, in order to lend their city its special identity, as did the flower children of the Sixties.During the big sales last week, the walk from Saks to Neimen Markus was like struggling through a crowd scene in Les Misérables. Marie Antoinette populated her park with faux milk maids, shepherds and picturesque peasants, and a whimsical 18th-century grandee — was it Beckford? — liked to decorate his estate with peasants, banditti and beggars who would slip into their habiliments before dawn, and take up their assigned positions in grottos and follies.

Saturday

10 May 2008
Barry Humphries

London Notebook

Only the most venerable and knowledgeable London cab driver has heard of Belsize Circus, a roundabout near the slums of Kilburn Heights where I have my lodgings. During the second world war many bombs fell nearby but, as was the case with most of London, the worst damage by far was wrought after the war by local councils and town-planners. This morning I saw a massive new building arising on the site of an innocuous petrol station. It is already so transcendentally hideous it could only have been enthusiastically approved by Camden Council. It claims to have been put up by something called the Notting Hill Housing Association and is emblazoned in huge rainbow letters with ejaculations like ‘Hello! Affordable! Smile! Unusual and curious!’ Unusual probably just means uncomfortable and badly designed.

Saturday

15 Dec 2007
Barry Humphries

Christmas notebook

The trouble with living in London is that apoplexy is always just around the corner. A few weeks ago my telephone developed a funny sub-aqueous rustling noise sufficient to drown all conversations, so after a few stiff cups of tea, and setting aside several hours for the task, I phoned BT to have it fixed. The next day a nice man appeared with a name a bit like a Sudanese teddy bear, and within a mere hour had found and fixed the problem — a corroded wire outside the house. He departed smiling into the sunset, having refused a £10 tip. The next day we realised that in fixing the problem he had cut off all extensions within the house: the bedroom, the kitchen, the office, all except the sitting room.The next day I was back on hold with BT, waiting half an hour (they hope you’ll hang up) to speak to a ‘Customer Service Executive’.

Christmas notebook

Saturday

10 Nov 2007
Barry Humphries

Diary - 10 November 2007

When will the Americans withdraw? I don’t mind how long they stay in Mesopotamia but it’s high time they got out of Grosvenor Square. They’ve been muttering about relocating their embassy, but will it happen? Mayfair, my favourite English village, is ruined by their barricades, tank traps and miles of concrete Toblerone. Grosvenor Square and surrounding streets are becoming impenetrable and it looks as though there are going to be more hideous constructions and obstructions judging by the builders’ sheds and huts that are proliferating in this once tranquil square. Perhaps they should relocate to the old BBC Television Centre in Wood Lane. That is also an area more convenient for terrorists, who would find Mayfair a bit of a schlep.

Friday

25 Aug 2006
Barry Humphries

Diary - 25 August 2006

SydneyI am here to announce a new stage show. When last here I was having breakfast in a harbourside café with a composer friend and I was just telling him about a particularly vile freelance paparazzo who haunted the area. Suddenly I saw the glint of a telephoto lens across the street. It was him! Emerging from the restaurant at a brisk pace I saw the wretch jogging towards me, grey ponytail threshing and camera rampant. He got so close I could smell the morning drink on his breath. The spirits of Russell Crowe, Sean Penn and Kate Moss suddenly inhabited me, and in trying to brush aside the intrusive Nikon, my knuckles accidentally collided with the photographer’s pulpy jowl, causing his trendy wire-rimmed spectacles to skitter on to the road.

Friday

12 May 2006
Barry Humphries

Diary - 12 May 2006

When the gifted Australian actor Russell Crowe threw a telephone at an American hotel desk clerk, I sent him a letter of congratulation. As one might expect in a wonderful but barmy country like America, the desk clerk became an overnight millionaire. I have just completed a 15-week theatre tour of the US, so I have been in a lot of hotels and been tempted in nearly all of them to maim, and possibly even disembowel, arrogant illegal aliens loitering behind computer screens at the front desk, or impersonating waiters, or gender non-specific ‘servers’, as waiters quaintly prefer to be called. The stupidity and ‘attitude’ of most receptionists in designer boutique American hotels would test the sanity and patience of Prince Charles, who is, without doubt, the best-mannered man in the world.

Saturday

17 Dec 2005
Barry Humphries

Diary - 17 December 2005

If I die I hope it won’t be in Melbourne. The chief obituarist of a Melbourne morning paper takes a dim view of me, and since the London Daily Telegraph pioneered the custom of pissing on the recently deceased, the Melbourne obituarist is pretty likely to do the same to me. A couple of years ago he wrote an autobiography in which he impugned my patriotism in a rather nasty way. It’s quite a fat autobiography, as are usually the memoirs of uninteresting people — the women who talk longest on the telephone are invariably women who have nothing to talk about. Anyway, I suppose this little prick’s obituary is already on file awaiting the distant date of my demise, and all those people in my home town who thought I was nice will learn what an ingrate I was, turning my back on the Australian cultural renaissance and seeking cheap fame and fortune in distant and unimportant countries.

Saturday

19 Feb 2005
Barry Humphries

Diary - 19 February 2005

As I approach a worrying age (don’t ask!) where everyone — as in this morning’s obituary page of the New York Times — is younger than me, a terrible thing has happened. An American fan has told me that she went to Madame Tussauds in London recently, with the intention of being photographed next to the effigy of Dame Edna, only to find that Edna wasn’t there any more. This information depressed me even more than the recent Washington inauguration of the blinking frog. When my client Dame Edna was first installed at Madame Tussauds about a quarter of a century ago, I was keen to know who had been melted down to create her, and I think they told me that it was partly a 1970s pop group called The Y-Fronts, and most of Mandy Rice-Davies.

Saturday

18 Dec 2004
Barry Humphries

Diary - 18 December 2004

New York In Brisbane there was, and may yet be, an old-fashioned shopping arcade with a little tea shop on an upper gallery. There you could sit at a table with a cup of tea, a lamington or perhaps an asparagus roll (two Queensland staples) and, having drained your teacup and inverted it over the saucer, receive a ‘reading’ from one of the psychic ladies who shuffle from table to table ministering to the credulous. You may assume that I am a regular patron of astrologers, palmists, tarot readers and assorted sibyls. I can’t resist a glimpse, however occluded, into the future. At Byron Bay, a famous New South Wales beach and hippie time-warp, where barefoot and patchouli-scented odalisques still loiter, I found an authentic Irish witch who has converted the ramshackle tool shed in her garden into a spooky consulting room.

Saturday

29 Nov 2003
Barry Humphries

Diary - 29 November 2003

I keep forgetting where I am. A different American city every week makes it hard to remember where the light switch is on the bedside table. Is it up or down, do you push it or twiddle it or is it connected to a more complicated system that you have to get out of bed to operate? The ‘turn-down service’ also seems to be a turn-on service: that’s to say, you come home from the theatre to music, or ‘Mozak’, leaking into the room from an invisible source. Finding where it’s coming from reminds me of the old days, looking for the bug in Prague hotel rooms, but it’s not so much fun. Stopping the music, or calling for someone to stop it, usually takes about half an hour. I have given up telling housekeeping to stop putting those poisonous chocolates on my pillow.

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