Jonathan Maitland | The Spectator columnists & writers

War of words: Scrabble players are being censored

For some of us, world war has already broken out. Since 1 January, when a decision to ban 419 ‘offensive’ Scrabble words became ‘law’ on the orders of game owners Hasbro and Mattel, the previously genteel world of competitive Scrabble has become riven with hostility. The conflict started three years ago when the North American Scrabble Players Association polled its members about the issue. After more than 1,000 ‘passionate responses’, it decided to inflict a word cull. According to the association’s head John Chew, the 91-year-old game needed to be ‘more inclusive’: ‘How can we tell prospective members they can only play with us if they accept that offensive slurs have no meaning when played on a board?’ But the ban on hundreds of words has left many players – particularly my fellow travellers in the London Scrabble league – seething.

Is the life of Jimmy Savile a suitable subject for drama?

One day in 1975 the Israeli cabinet found themselves being lectured on the most intractable political problem of our age — how to bring peace to the Middle East — by a peculiar white-haired British entertainer wearing a pink suit with short sleeves. His name? Jimmy Savile. That’s how he told it anyway. Remarkably, witnesses back up the generality if not the specifics of the anecdote. Savile indeed visited the Holy Land in 1975. And he did talk to the Israeli president Ephraim Katzir, saying (so he claimed): ‘I’m very disappointed because you’ve all forgotten how to be Jewish and that’s why everyone is taking you to the cleaners.’ Jimmy Savile’s life was, in every respect, eye-popping, and full of pitfalls for the dramatist or director: how best to summon it all up, without letting his crimes and bewildering conduct become a form of cheap entertainment? By using actors? Or by getting someone who was there to tell the story? This creative dilemma — how do you solve a problem like Jimmy? — has been exercising the minds of TV’s finest for some time as there are six shows about Savile, or featuring him, streaming or imminent: two dramas and four documentaries.

Why great speeches are made for stage and screen

Curious thing, writer’s block. If you believe it exists. Terry Pratchett didn’t. ‘There’s no such thing,’ he said. ‘It was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.’ He had a point. Writers write, period. But there is a syndrome in my house known as Not Starting Anything New Through Fear Of It Being Not Very Good. Less catchy than ‘writer’s block’, but arguably a more accurate description of the condition. My Covid-induced version of the above involved endlessly ‘honing’ an already completed play about my mother to devastatingly little effect and musing on the oldest creative question of all: is there a formula for writing success, and if so what is it? The short answer, despite the many how-to-write-a-hit books (Robert McKee, Christopher Booker et al.

The idiot box

How to sum up David Frost? The lazy writer’s friend, aka Wikipedia, calls him ‘an English journalist, comedian, writer, media personality and television host’. To which I would add only: ‘Britain’s first TV superstar.’ (To some he was also ‘The Bubonic Plagiarist’, but we won’t dwell on that.) That Was The Week That Was, The Frost Report and The Nixon Interviews made him a key cultural figure of the 1960s and 1970s. But his true significance struck me only recently. He may have damaged Britain, unintentionally, as much as anyone in living memory. Frost, in my view, was a Pied Piper who helped to lure a generation of the brightest and best away from meaningful careers and into the often vacuous, inconsequential world of television.

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