Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 24 NOVEMBER 2002

I HAVE TO CONFESS, and I suppose this is as good a place as any to do my confessing. My confession is this: I have of late, I know not why, been troubled by curious dreams. I say “curious”, but I am being discreet. These dreams are more than curious – they cause me to wake in the night, trembling and mopping myself and reaching for a glass of water. There is pleasure involved in these dreams, but they are guilty pleasures. They are not the sorts of pleasures you would want to tell your mother.

The sum and essence of my problem – the nub, you might say – is Anne Robinson. Oh go on, you know Anne Robinson. Anne Robinson is the Torquemada of Trivia, the Grand Inquisitor of the Intellect. Anne Robinson is a torturer, a tyrant, a short, female, bespectacled, red-headed Idi Amin of the airwaves. God, I love that woman.

Anne Robinson presents The Weakest Link (BBC Prime, DStv, weekdays, 7.05pm) in much the same way that Daisy de Melker presented her husband with his morning coffee. But unlike Daisy de Melker, Anne Robinson doesn’t smile. It would be fair to say that Anne Robinson is sarcastic, but only if you agree that it would be fair to say that Ronnie Biggs had no respect for the law, or that the shark in Jaws had pointy teeth and he showed them pearly white. In Anne Robinson’s hands, sarcasm is an artistic medium. It is expressive, it is aesthetic and it causes you to question your assumptions about the world, which is apparently what contemporary artists understand to be the principal purpose of art. Anne Robinson’s sarcasm, indeed, could win the Turner Prize. Come to think of it, that would be a bright day for contemporary art, when you consider the sort of threadbare balderdash that does win the Turner Prize.

The Weakest Link is an English question-and-answer game show in which a procession of spotty Brits take turns to quail and crumble beneath the gimlet gaze of Anne Robinson. (“Do you even know what a gimlet is?” Anne Robinson asked me in my dream last night. “Er … uh … it is a small tool that bores things, isn’t it?” I stammered. “And does that description fit anyone else in this room, would you say?” said Anne Robinson. I blushed and lowered my head in a kind of furious ecstasy of abasement.)

Anne Robinson’s greatest asset, besides the ability to convince you she is wearing leather thighboots and a riding crop beneath her black ankle-length coat, is a talent for making you believe she knows all the answers to all the questions. Anne Robinson, you would swear, is omniscient and omnipotent, and she knows when you’ve been naughty, and she knows when you’ve been nice. When you answer incorrectly, she looks at you with such mingled disappointment and contempt that you feel – yea, verily, you feel – that your coming chastisement is proper and deserved and you only wish she would find it in herself to punish you a little longer.

“Roy, what do you do for a living?” Anne Robinson asked a portly fellow on the show this week.

“I’m a comedian, Anne,” he replied bravely.

“Really?” said Anne, with a voice that could be used to perform keyhole surgery. “Are you a professional comedian, Roy, or do you mean your friends think that you are a bit of a card down at the pub?”

Roy swallowed heavily. “No, no, I’m a professional,” he said gamely.

“So people pay you to be funny, do they, Roy? You must be very funny indeed. Tell us a joke.”

Roy did not want to tell a joke. Roy would rather have performed an emergency appendectomy on himself using his own teeth than tell a joke at that moment. But when Anne Robinson speaks, strong men bend the knee. Roy told a joke. I could scarcely hear the joke, I was in such agonies of masculine sympathy. Anne Robinson listened to Roy’s joke. Her face was as the face of Pharaoh Akhenaten on a mural in the Luxor necropolis. The Pharaoh Akhenaten was not remembered by antiquity for his sense of humour, particularly in necropolises.

“Roy,” said Anne Robinson.

Roy shuffled his feet and dropped his eyes. “Yes, Anne,” said Roy.

“Do you know any funny jokes, Roy?” said Anne Robinson.

Oh, how she haunts my dreams. Night after night she returns, her stiletto heels clacking on my floor and across my chest, mouth pursed with the inward pleasure of kindness withheld, asking me questions, always questions, questions that torment and mock, questions with no answers. “If it’s called Business Class,” she demands, “why do they allow babies in?” and “Where is the reflexology pressure point for feet?” and “Do hot cakes really sell better than other sorts of cakes?”

And when I cannot reply, oh what awful scenes there do follow. Such scenes as I cannot describe, lest your parrot read the lining of its cage and be irredeemably corrupted. Needless to say, I am concerned. I haven’t had such dreams since those dark days in the early eighties when I was visited nightly by the lady from the Morkels adverts. Do you remember her? I can’t explain it either. I can only remind myself of the story that many of the male members of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet, and indeed her political opponents, reported erotic dreams about the Boss. Consider that, and join me in turning my face towards the heavens and asking, in a trembling voice, “Ye gods! What horrors lurk in the heart of men?”

While we strive each day to walk the straight and narrow path, through the meadows and the broad and sunlit uplands, alas our darker drives are not ours to command. Oh, we men are beasts. We deserve to be punished.