Ian Martin is many things. He is a man, certainly. I know this to be a fact as I was once behind in him in the passport queue at Baltimore Airport and the lady doing the checking didn’t so much as flinch. He is unique among people who don’t actually behave as if they’re the only person in the world to have written and acted in both The Thick of It and its American cousin Veep. He is what certain kinds of journalists would call ‘an ex-rocker’ who can be provoked to violence by three bars of jazz and soothed again by being shown a picture of Bach. And he is without doubt my very favourite writer of comic prose in the English language.
The best comic writers are those who not only squirt their ink at the right targets or hammer out the perfect images, they make the language itself funny: the rhythm, the sound, the colour. They’re the ones who make you laugh at the very words they use. That’s Ian Martin. He can spin the English language round his fingers like a conjuror’s coin.
Take the occasion – as related in this book – when he was appointed Architectural Nickname Czar to ensure that new buildings are given better epithets than ‘The Shard’ or ‘The Gherkin’. The list of suggestions that follows is a sustained cannonade of impossible inventiveness and comic poetry, including but not limited to: The Shiny Tumulus, The Stilty Lump, The Skyfister, The Extrudel, The Glandmark and The Sentient Plume. And I simply cannot imagine any other columnist currently thumping a keyboard on a regular basis who would title a piece anything like ‘I Sense My Enemies Massing Like Simpering Starlings’.
That voice is beguiling, unique and rather influential. You’ll find it, among other places, in the mouths of Malcolm Tucker and Selina Meyer, even when it isn’t Ian himself doing the writing. The great Tony Roche, one of the original quartet of filthpots who dishonoured the BBC with the vilely crude unnecessariness of The Thick of It, has said that he coined the word ‘omnishambles’ – later named Word of the Year 2012 by people who imagine such things are a worthwhile expenditure of calories – partly in homage to Ian’s style.
The present volume which you hold in your hands – or, for future readers, which you have think-accessed on the Kindle Mindwave Intranexus™ – is essentially a long bar on which are lined up over a hundred espresso shots of pure Martin. A collection of satirical pieces written for the Architects’ Journal, they naturally, and indeed contractually, take architecture as their subject, but their targets are far wider ranging than that. If you’ll allow me to be a ponce for a minute – or more realistically, if you’ll allow me to continue being a ponce for quite a long while – I would say that they are satires on an entire culture: our politics, the inanity of the consumer society, journalism, faddishness, regional developmental funding, social media, ‘Heritage’ and, in fact, pretty much everything else.
But more than anything, they are a satire on language itself. Or rather, on the way that it’s used now: the self-satisfied idiocy of corporate-speak, the emperor’s-new-clothes-pretension of architects and ‘creatives’, the banality of marketing. I’m reminded about seventy-four times a day of ‘I need some marketing blurt in a nice font. Neutral to the point of meaningless’ from his piece ‘Magnetic Values’. He catches the tone and the timbre of the use and misuse of English and twists it into his own filigree comic structures. By turns angry, contemptuous, resigned, pitying, self-pitying, mischievous, despairing and hopeful, these pieces are never anything less than whirlingly funny; inventive and invective in perfect measure – like S. J. Perelman stubbing his toe.
I once met Ian for lunch. (Not the time he threatened to stab the music speaker with a fork if they didn’t turn the jazz off, but another one.) I was two minutes late, and on arriving at the table I discovered him already seated and a cocktail by my place setting.
‘Hope you don’t mind,’ he said, fishing an olive from his drink, ‘I ordered some martinis.’
Then he got us some stout to go with the chicken livers (you can take the boy out of the East End, etc., etc.), wine for the mains and Armagnac with the dessert.
‘It’s so nice,’ he subtly belched as I tried to remember how to sit on a chair, ‘to find someone who’ll stick with you right from the martinis through to the brandies.’
And that’s what I recommend you do with this book: Don’t dip. You’re in the finest, most entertaining company you could want. Just start with the martinis and go on through to the brandies. Your head will be joyfully spinning as you leave.
Chris Addison, 2016