Let’s face it — there’s going to be a lot of World Cup parties going on this summer. Most of them, one hazards a guess, will involve a couple of crates of ale, “both kinds” of crisps — ready salted
and cheese & onion — and maybe one of those ashtrays that looks a bit like a football, if you can find it in the kitchen cupboard, where it was stored after the last World Cup. The dress-code will be “something that was on the chair in the bedroom this morning”, and “entertainment” will be provided by watching Martin and Mary fidgeting on the “uncomfortable” chairs, as all the good sofas and chairs are full. All will be pleasant.
However, as we know, the Beckhams are not as other people. They buy each other castles as “Happy Breakfast!” presents, and eat diamond cake — but not much, because their minute bottoms are the subject of international news. So when the Beckhams throw a World Cup Party, they spunk £1 million on a gigantic marquee decorated like a “magical woodland”, order 250 magnums of Moët Rosé studded with Swarovski crystals, invite Tom Cruise, have Gordon Ramsay do the food, ask Robbie Williams to do a few numbers, and get ITV1 to film the whole thing. They’ve never had, it’s probably safe to say, someone on the toilet screaming “Stuff it up them, England!” down the stairs on hearing the sounds of a goal.
Of course, as with almost anything ludicrous these days, the whole thing is for charity — you could probably broadcast live bear-bile milking, as long as Mencap got a tenner out of it — and so we are morally disallowed from tuning in to the whole thing to laugh at Wayne Rooney’s sad face looming over the vol-au-vents. Or, indeed, sneer at a couple who are worth more than £100 million but still think that booking mime artists would make the whole day go with a bang.
Personally, I think this moral obligation of respect in the viewer is a good thing, as I believe all millionaires should broadcast their parties. I cannot see how a world with a permanent Millionaires’ Stupid Parties Channel wouldn’t be a better one, and we will never get one if everyone laughs like a drain at the Beckhams.
My highest instances of swanky parties are the Brits and The Times’s dos — parties that anyone who has held every single one of their parties in the pub would imagine to be fairly glamorous, witty, impressive occasions. Something a bit like Truman Capote’s Black & White Ball, but with more pashminas from Accessorize. In reality, of course, every party in the world — no matter who attends and how much money is thrown at it — ends with someone crying, a group of women screeching about some luckless colleague’s sexual performance, and a jacketless man face-down in reception. Any broadcast event that allows us to see millionaires, politicians, artists and captains of industry doing the same thing — but in a gondola encrusted with emeralds, with Liberace dug up and doing a special “one-off” set, for charity — gets my vote. Apparently, David Cameron managed to blag a ticket. I’d love to see him three sheets to the wind, rugby-tackling a mime-artist at 4am.
Cynthia Payne, of course, wouldn’t be in the least surprised to find that £1 million parties are just as messy and stupid as £10 ones. If you want someone who is realistic about privilege being unable to obscure the fundamental aspects of humanity, then talk to a high-society brothel keeper. It’s odd, but in all my years, I’d never thought of Britain’s most famous madam as having actually had sex with people. I think I just presumed she sat on her sofa in her semi in Streatham, knitting, and saying vaguely Beryl Reidish things as the orgies went on around her. But here, in Madame Cyn’s Home Movies (the first in a series entitled Sex in the ’80s) we see Payne all gussied up in leathers with whips, or naked, or looming over a hog-tied client, but all with a very sensible, merry air about her — as if she’d never heard of sin, or shame, or the Daily Mail.
Although it was surely pitched merely as chance for Payne to earn a bit of cash from her old cine-films, Home Movies turns out to be an admirably down-to-earth, heart-warming, very British guide to how prostitution can make the world a better place.
“I wanted the place to have a nice, homely atmosphere,” Payne explains, in a nice, snug cardie. “Every party I would invite two disabled blokes and not charge them. That was my bit for society.”
If an elderly client had performance difficulties, Payne would take him into the kitchen and make him hot Bovril and poached egg on toast. “The old guys loved my poached eggs!” Prostitutes would travel from all over the country to work in such female-friendly conditions, while clients who wanted Payne as their mistress were charged with decorating the house, or doing Payne’s gardening. That Payne was shut down and jailed, while Zoo magazine (“Win your girlfriend a boob job!”) is sold in WH Smith is one of those telling measures of how mad we still are.
An unexpected life-twist in ONE Life. As a beautiful young TV presenter, Gail Porter was thought of as a bimbo. When her marriage collapsed and she attempted suicide, she was thought of as mad. But now the stress has caused all her hair to fall out — in all likelihood, leaving her bald for life — she is getting “serious” presenting work and the most sympathetic press of her life.
“It’s started off as an illness, and turned into a test,” Porter says, with affecting stoicism.
Full Length and Fabulous: The Beckhams’ World Cup Party, Sun, ITV1, 9pm; Sex in the ’80s: Madam Cyn’s Home Movies, Wed, C4, 11.05pm; ONE Life, Wed, BBC One, 10.40pm.
