Mrs Worthington was warned

H.I. was looking out of the window whilst I was preoccupied with something else and she saw thousands - she swears - of Jane Austen characters parade by in the street.

We often see groups of 50 or so people dressed in early 19th century attire promenading around here, but apparently this latest lot took a quarter of an hour to file past.

When I looked out they had gone, but I did notice a poster near the bridge, warning us residents about filming in the locality. So that's it. They are going to foist yet another Jane bloody Austen film on the insatiable public.

I just don't get it. Jane Austen novels are tedious, fatuous, repetitive and boring. The films are even worse.

I feel the same way about the self-declared 'genius', Oscar Wilde. His plays are nothing but a never-ending series of trite clichés masquerading as incisive observations by the privileged upper classes, with whom he was obsessed. 

My father felt the same way about Noel Coward. Whenever Coward was respectfully referred to as 'The Master' on TV or whatever, my father could hardly contain his disdain, mumbling, "The Master my arse..."

I sort of know what he meant. Coward was an ordinary working-class Londoner who was also obsessed with the aristocracy, but he wrote some good stuff and didn't get himself imprisoned by being too clever about his homosexuality under oath, and he finished up as the darling of Society in his perpetual bow tie and silk dressing gown. That took real genius.

I suppose that my father - who came from generations of East End Londoners - was simply homophobic by today's standards and resented being preached at by people who he considered 'pansies'. Now I look back on it, he was probably the most classically masculine man I have ever known, but he was very uneasy in most social circumstances.

When my dad was being shot down by Germans as a gunner in Bomber Command, Noel Coward's contribution to the war effort was to be filmed standing on the bridge of a naval destroyer in a duffle coat with a pair of binoculars round his neck, drinking cocoa. The most discomfort he experienced was someone out of shot throwing water over him. That must have rankled.