I’VE always loved theme-park rides; Dr Burp’s Bubbleworks at Chessington has got to be my all-time favourite, though I wouldn’t kick the Pirates of the Caribbean out of bed on a cold night. So it’s thoroughly appropriate, in a piquant, bittersweet sort of way, that one of the best, if bumpiest, rides of any sort I’ve ever had in my life came out of a really boring one.
It was a hot day in the summer of 1990 (or so I’m told; it doesn’t seem 15 years ago, though but!) when my then husband Cosmo Landesman, my four-year-old son Jack, my best friend Toby Young and myself piled through the gates of Thorpe Park in Surrey. I was just Jack’s mum, but though I was five years younger than Cosmo and only five years older than Toby, I often felt like the mother of all of them — responsible for their happiness, which often seemed dependent on my own cheer and approval. And pretty quickly I realised that I had led my flock up a blind alley.
I like boats, and as was my habit I quickly took control when I spied a huge Southern-riverboat-type craft moored on a large patch of water not far from the entrance. I figured that the steamboat might be a slow splash-ride, my favourite type, like Thorpe Park’s famous Thunder River or indeed the Bubbleworks of Dr Burp himself.
But immediately the thing started moving, I realised exactly what it was — crowd control on water. The park was packed that day, and the punters set on a small selection of cutting-edge rides; what better way to disperse the crowd than to tempt a sizeable section of it on to the water and send them, as slowly as possible, right to the other side of the theme park, TO THE PETTING ZOO!
I had two sophisticated young men about town with me, and I had tempted them away from their beloved London, on a summer’s day when there were Soho brasseries to sit outside. So as the faux steamer inched tortuously along, I began to talk soothingly to Toby and Cosmo — both a bit nervy, and never exactly relaxed when more than 100 yards from an espresso machine — as one would to a fretful child. And, mind working like lightning, I promised what I felt would surely be the toy to end all toys; a magazine — Lord help me! I named it on the spot: The Modern Review.
Advertisement
It would be an all-sizes-fit-one solution to the problems my boys had finding gainful employment in journalism. Cosmo, for instance, had buckets of charm, but it took the poor bastard a full morning to write a shopping list, so the commissions were hardly forthcoming. Toby, on the other hand, had talent to burn and application to die for, but he was also cursed with what he himself called “negative charisma”: the ability to walk across a room, ostensibly doing nothing bad, and still have half a dozen people hate him by the time he got to the other side. Frankly, I feared for the futures of both of them.
And so The Modern Review was born — the gift of a rich girl to two poor boys who I knew, one day, would have to get along without the warming spotlight of my love. And, unlike the boring old Thorpe Park steamboat, what a big bumpy — not to say bumptious! — ride it would turn out to be before it eventually crashed and burned in the embers of fraternal envy, financial meltdown and sapphic sex. It beat Rameses’ Revenge into a cocked hat, frankly.
Whatever, to rephrase the Prince of Wales a cocked hat is.
IT’S a steaming great cliché, but the early days were the best. “Struggling along on cheese and kisses”, wealthy American parents would say fondly of their newly-married offspring in the 1920s; we were struggling along on coke and disses, and it felt great. I remember the three of us sitting up all night stuffing envelopes with the first issue to the tune of — tragically — Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer. And the time we ordered those “cognitive enhancers” from Switzerland, which were allegedly so powerful that one squirt of an inhaler had one’s brain’s synapses snapping to attention; of course, we inhaled the whole lot at once and had to guzzle Scotch by the quart to bring us back to earth. Writing TMR in coke in letters six inches high to welcome Toby back from the printers clutching the very first copy, grinning and blushing like a high-school kid back from his first, and rather successful, prom.
Advertisement
We had a manifesto! And didn’t we know EXACTLY how to whiten Mother’s hair; bollocks to Beethoven, and sod off, Shakespeare — WE LOVE AMERICAN CULTURE, THE TRASHIER THE BETTER! Many people, looking back on the short life and messy death of The Modern Review, have remarked that it was before its time: our wholehearted embrace of American culture, and our insistence — obvious now, but revolutionary at the time — that NO, THEY’RE NOT STUPID.
But it isn’t the early championship of America the Beautiful that people tend to remember about The Modern Review; rather the way it ended. Wherever you get a bunch of media whores together and hothouse them with drink, drugs and conceit, there’ll be fireworks before bedtime, and bedtime before tears.
I’m not going to play the blame game because it was on both sides; mine for just sitting back and letting Toby do all the work while I took most of the credit; Toby for letting his libido lead his wit — Liz Hurley on the cover, I ask you! He was always a bit too liable to judge by appearances; I remember the first time I noticed the young, unknown, brilliant Nick Hornby’s early record reviews in Time Out, and convinced T we had to get him on board. At our first dinner my short balding friend ignored Mr Hornby from start to finish. When the poor man had gone home, leaving the dog-eared manuscript of some hopeless little effort called Fever Pitch, I asked Toby why he had been so uncharacteristically quiet.
His sneer was almost audible: “He’s hardly one of the Beautiful People, is he! Are you sure that’s the sort of image we want for The Modern Review?”
It’s a wonder we lasted five weeks, let alone five years. Nevertheless, I’d often thought about El Tobe over the decade we’d been apart. When BBC Four suggested a documentary to mark the tenth anniversary of the Mod Rev’s demise, I was happy to oblige. It was only on meeting the director that I couldn’t help thinking it all sounded a bit . . . boring, to be honest. So I suggested a bit of an Oprah moment: that my first meeting with Toby in ten years could be caught on camera. I bet you’re all on tenterhooks, aren’t you! Not!
Advertisement
I don’t regret The Modern Review — I don’t regret anything, because in my experience that makes your mouth turn down at the corners, which is such a bad look. If we made a few more hacks give pop-cult the respect it deserves, fair play, though I sometimes think that low culture is way better before its practitioners become aware that smart people are sitting in book-lined rooms THINKING VERY HARD about them — Madonna, be my witless witness! One of the 20th century’s most brilliant cultural analysts — and Mod Rev bankroller! — Peter York wonderfully coined the word “glinting” to describe the moment when various hoofers, warblers, thesps and drolls catch on that they’re being Looked Out, and how it drains them of their differently-abled brilliance. And there’s no getting away from the fact that many of the magnificent dumbos that the Mod Rev championed are now seven shades of shit, to be crude.
Most of all, I’m grateful for The Modern Review because if it had never existed I wouldn’t have met Charlotte, and if I hadn’t met Charlotte I wouldn’t have met her brother, Daniel, with whom I have been as happy as a pig in muck for the past ten years. The Modern Review, heir of Emerson and Leavis, as a souped-up introduction bureau/dating agency — oh my gosh! But somehow brilliantly appropriate: there’s trashy for you.