So around about this time each year (for the last two years) I like to read something by Evelyn Waugh.
Last year it was "Decline and Fall" and this year I have plumped for "Brideshead Revisited", which, if you read the entry from last year, is my Waughian nemesis, as it was the TV adaptation of this that led to me missing out on watching several episodes of Al Fresco. But also, of course, I went to Oxford University and blamed this book for giving people the image they still have of students there, as crapulous, lazy toffs who carry teddy bears with them everywhere they go. Ironically due to the popularity of Brideshead in the 80s there will still a few tossers trying to live up to that image when I was there, but even in 1986 when I first arrived, Oxford was getting a lot more inclusive and most people got there through merit rather than because of who their dad was, or because they'd paid or because they had a teddy bear that they imagined had emotions.
As a comedian in the late 80s and early 90s, having been to Oxbridge was something you tried to keep quiet about as everyone was convinced that there was some kind of conspiracy in the media to give graduates of those two universities the best jobs. There may once have been some truth in this and perhaps on the production side the BBC still favoured those establishments, but in reality the changes had already happened. The largely non-Oxbridge Alternative comedians (ironically the very ones I wanted to watch whilst my mum insisted on watching Brideshead) were ruling the roost. And there hadn't been any significant Oxford comedians since the male members of Radio Active and before them, Rowan Atkinson. And also you can't show a comedy audience your degree and then tell them they have to laugh. You have to be funny. That's all they care about. And in any case I have never picked up my degree. I am one of the most famous graduands in the country. But only because I am the only person who ever goes on about being one.
It always felt a bit of a shame that rather than feeling pleased with myself for managing to get into one of the best universities in the world, especially when I worked so hard to get there (and then stopped working once I was there), but those are the breaks. And the prevailing feeling then was that if you'd been to Oxbridge you were a cunt and you'd better keep quiet about it. As I've remarked before a generation of comedians who didn't want to judge people by their skin or sexuality or sex, didn't mind having preconceptions about people based on their education. And even those people who went to public school didn't choose that for themselves.
But having said all that, I can understand the justified resentment and can even forgive those involved for enjoying their eventual victory over the old school and kicking us when we were down (though Cambridge in particular does still seem to be turning out a large proportion of your current TV favourites).
Anyway I had steered clear of this book for a long time for all these reasons, but now I decided to put aside my own prejudice and stop blaming Waugh for some uncomfortable times in the late 80s and early 90s and actually read the thing.
And it's pretty good. I enjoyed it. The bear is actually a pretty funny bit of it and I was only disappointed that (unless I missed it) we don't find out what becomes of Aloysius. I think the book may be responsible for my brother's poor degree. He too went to Oxford a few years before me and was much more of an intellectual than me and fiercely bright. But there's a bit in Brideshead which says that the only honourable degrees to get are a first or a fourth and I recall my brother saying the same thing (though updated to a third for the lower degree as there were no longer any fourths - which would make it even cooler to get one). He stuck to this code and walked out of any exam papers that he felt he couldn't get a first in, ending up with distinctions on the papers he sat and nothing on the ones he didn't do. Does that make him cool? Yeah maybe. They gave him a pass, so maybe he got that fourth after all.
Reading the book also made me suddenly, for the first time in my life, feel a bit sorry for all the public school boys who had made it to the University. I had been tarred with the same brush as them and was also guilty of disliking them for their privilege and the fact that whatever I said earlier, it was still much easier for someone from Eton to get to Oxford than it was for someone from the Kings of Wessex comprehensive school (and yes, I know it was still way easier for someone from my lovely school than someone from an inner city comprehensive, but hopefully that is changing too). But the good thing about being the only person from your school to be in your year at University meant that it was a clean slate - I could start again, without anyone I knew there to reaffirm old nicknames or reputations or whatever. I could be whoever I wanted to be. If you went to Eton then probably half your class were at your college. You'd be tarred with those childhood memories and it would be harder to move on and discover who you were as a grown up.
It didn't make much difference to me as I just acted like a prick for the first year anyway, so everyone pretty much had my number. But only now, a quarter of a century on, do I think of it from their point of view. Even if you got on with the people from school, it would still be good to form new friendships and move onwards.
And of course ultimately Brideshead is about the sun setting on aristocratic privilege and the world changing. Maybe the modern world shouldn't have Oxbridge at all and it should be replaced by something more egalitarian. I hope that by small increments that is what is happening. It's never going to be fair, I suppose, but in the end I got a lot out of it all, even if it terrified and depressed me for most of the time I was there.
Perhaps I should write an updated Brideshead of what things were like back then. The book looks back twenty or so years as well with a sense of nostalgia. And it's odd to think that there is a direct link between the people who were at the University in the 1920s and me and my contemporaries. Only sixty or so intakes of students separated us. Which is remarkable given what had changed and what had stayed the same. But there was an unbroken line of newbies having information passed down to them by second years, linking us to those men (and women? Mainly men) - apart from possibly during the second world war. Damn Hitler for ruining my point.
As you get older the decades do tend to cram together a lot closer. Sixty years would have seemed like eons to me back then, but now I can almost feel Sebastian and Charles' breath on my neck. God knows what the people there now would make of me!
