When Ned Sherrin cast me into outer darkness
Ned Sherrin's funeral took place three days ago. We were much of an age and his death was one of several to stop me in my tracks this year, though the others were of close friends, one - most touching - of a girl who was my contemporary at the Courtauld Institute.
At 78 no longer a girl, of course, but for more than half a century I saw her as first I knew her, scatterbrained, dishevelled, as aquiline in profile as a Florentine Quattrocento portrait, as wide-eyed as a Pre-Raphaelite heroine, the combination eerily beautiful.
Ned I hardly knew at all and was surprised to be bidden to his funeral. I did not go. Funerals are for family, close friends and peers, and Ned had earned considerable eminence in fields that are not mine. He knew nothing of my arts, nor I of his, and this was the unfortunate cause of the rupture in our fragile and unbalanced relationship. As always my own worst enemy, I was entirely responsible for his disfavour. I did not resent it, but after many years in outer darkness, attending his funeral seemed less an act of farewell by an old friend, than the intrusion of an irrelevant interloper.
Our only point of contact was Loose Ends, Ned's weekend programme on Radio 4. I was flattered to be asked to join it one Saturday, paired in some forgotten jaunt with Robert Elms, the graceless cockney cheeky chappie. Whatever it was, it pleased Ned well enough to ask us to do it again, and I have vague recollections of a street market, a drinking den, a Merry Widow at the ENO and collecting from telephone boxes the postcard advertisements of prostitutes. Naively I imagined that I was the wise old owl, with Robert in resentful pupillarity, but eventually I realised that Ned was entertained by the contrast and conflict of my High Castilian, so to speak, and Robert's dropped aitches. It really did not matter what we did as long as we prattled in our respective variants of English and sounded like Vita Sackville-West in conversation with Old Ma Buggins.
The end came on Ned's 60th birthday, when the live broadcast of Loose Ends came from his Chelsea flat. Our duty was sprung on us - it was to wander from room to room delighting in what we found hanging on the walls. But not one single painting was to be seen, nary a watercolour, not even a reproduction of a Rembrandt print - nothing but theatrical memorabilia. "It ain't art," I said; "there's nothing here," I wailed, and toyed with the idea of pronouncing Arthur Smith, whom we found lying in the bath, to be a contemporary installation. Ned, I realised, was deeply hurt by my unsympathetic dismissal of his theatrical treasures, and it is fair to say that, apart from affabilities uttered in passing, which we occasionally did, we never spoke again.
