Critic Bashes Critics Shock Horror
There was a good spot of critic-bashing at the weekend when A A Gill rounded on theatre critics in the Sunday Times, accusing them of not being as good as Bernard Shaw or Kenneth Tynnan.
Hmmm, well,sorry about that, but as a television critic, A A Gill may not be quite as good as Clive James or Nancy Banks Smith.
I don’t think we can blame him for that. He’s a good knockaboout act, Gill, but when it comes to the serious stuff — the Mike Nichols flm of Angels in America comes to mind, appropriately this week– he’s absolutely hopeless; and as a television reviewer (oh, and by the way, he may be better looking than Mark Lawson, but he’s not as good as him, either) he seems to be suffering from guilt about ignoring the theatre.
Historically, this is interesting. Tynan said that if he was starting his career again in the 1970s, he would be writing about and working in television. This is what happened in respect of James, Russell Davies and Julian Barnes, to name but three.
Robert Cushman, a really fine critic on The Observer, seemed like an anomaly at the time. The New Statesman’s theatre critic, Philip French — French on anything is better than Gill on toast — became The Observer’s film critic. Theatre lost its appeal save for the star-struck rump.
Actually, Gill turns up at quite a lot of first nights with his old chum Nick Allott, Cameron Mackintosh’s right-hand man, and seems to have had a favour returned by being photographed smugly well-dressed in the stalls of one of Mackintosh’s theatres. I wonder, in fact, if he invests in Mackintosh’s shows? Is he possibly smarting from a few commercial failures?
He pokes gleeful fun at a few gushing compliments the critics paid to The Sound of Music. But the point about that show’s critical reception was the high level of critical revisionism in the reviews, a discovery of a great musical about the joy of singing and the bravery of the human spirit where once there was just mush.
Gill himself wrote about in The Sunday Times and went straight down the easy middle road of anti-mushness. He could not have possibly been influenced by his chum Nick Allott’s antipathy towards the show’s producer and theatre owner Andrew Lloyd Webber could he? I shall ask him when I next bump into “Adrian” (as he’s known) in Fred’s Cafe.
He has a point on the critics’ dress sense. If any of them turned up looking like that at my front door, I’d call the police. Most of them are strangers to the after-shave bottle, let alone the dry-cleaners. (And that’s just the women.) I’d make an exception for Paul Taylor, though, who exhibits more intelligence and erudition in one short paragraph than Gill does in a month of Sundays.
Actually, I rather like Taylor’s donnish physical grubbiness. Gill looks like a homosexual male model, and certainly talks and walks like one. Does he hate the theatre so much, I wonder, because his mother was a not very successful actress? And why doesn’t he have the courage of his lack of convictions by naming the producer (not Nick Allott, surely?) who is so unhappy about the critics?
Critic-baiting has a long and honourable history, mostly along the lines of the composer Max Reger informing his assailant that “I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. I have your review in front of me. In a moment, it will be behind me.”
In this lavatorial spirit, the playwright Christopher Hampton, on being asked what he felt about critics, replied that you may as well ask what a lamppost thinks about dogs. And when the tramps in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot decide to pass the time by insulting each other, the declension of abuse is “moron, vermin, sewer-rat, cretin…critic.”
Gill’s tirade is a feeble little fart in this tradition, with lots of give-away snobbisms and general ignorance. Bernard Levin, for instance, was a brilliant cirtic on the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, but a really terrible one on the Sunday Times (where John Peter still evinces more humanitarian passion and sense of history — political and cultural — than does Gill in another month of Sundays).
And Gill’s traffic warden analogy was much better done by David Hare, who said critics were like rubbish collectors: going out under cover of darkness to pick up whatever refuse is on the pavement and rushing off quickly with their swag bags.
Incidentally, Gill should ask Hare when he next bumps into him in the men’s wear department of BHS what he, Hare, thinks of one of Gill’s critical exemplars, Frank Rich. Stand by for a torrent of abuse that not even Gill on a good day could match.