More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
5 February
I was going to come back to this topic of Eric Morecambe, and someone - to-day or yesterday - has been looking, so here goes:
A good deal of Eric Morecambe's stage business, however much of it was actually worked out by Eddie Braben* (rather than, spontaneously or otherwise, by him - as Ernie Wise made a fine art of looking taken aback and confused), revolved around the incongruous: in the Cleopatra play (as in every one of Ernie's plays), although we are in Ancient Egypt, his signature spectacles and no less sock-suspenders are undeniable and out of place.
With the item thrown into the air and caught in the bag, I believed - and still like to believe - that what is tossed up is real, but only leaves a trace by the noise that it makes entering the bag.
There are levels on which e-mail (or a text-message) isn't real, but it betrays its presence in the list of the contents of one's inbox. The phantom e-mail, the one that one could almost swear that one had written (or that one can swear did not reach one's inbox), but it just doesn't show up in the 'sent' folder, is not so far distant from Eric's stone - or coin.
Another incongruous aspect of e-mail is that a person can get so familiar, in a way that - one hopes - he or she wouldn't think (or dare?) to do face to face: e-mailers can burn their bridges, nail colours to their mast, or take pot-shots in a way that, if one could be divorced from the person to whom their messages are directed, would make one wish that they had, instead, made an about face, abandoned ship or sheathed their weapon.
In a way, these hostile - or unexpectedly amorous - exchanges seem, to some people's mentality, to have a different status (and that precisely because they are deemed to happen in that non-existent reality that some call cyberspace). It is as if, in due course, meeting the person to whom the things were written will somehow erase, unwrite, them, or as if both were undisclosed players in an on-line game who encountered each other. Or it's just a bit like - deliberately, who knows? - getting drunk and letting rip.
For what it's worth, my practice is to treat every e-mail that I write as if it were a letter - I remind myself that it could have the same consequences as a letter, and that it should only contain what I would be happy for a letter to contain, and I do so by pausing
* To put the date at the top, and
* Then by addressing the intended recipient properly: 'Dear Helen' or 'Hi, John!'
Whether I am right about the effect that this has (and whether it would work for anyone else - anyone else who hates getting an e-mail (or text-message) that could have been meant for a different person), I do not know, but I do it.
It is a gesture, just like hoping that the stone - or coin - that cannot be seen will land in my waiting paper-bag...
End-notes
* Whose eighty-second birthday falls on Hallowe'en.
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