The public is only just coming to terms with the grisly phenomenon of “manspreading”. Guys on buses and trains let their knees flop apart and their buttocks shift territorially, taking up two seats instead of one. This week we saw something just as insidious, but weirder: splaying. George Osborne was photographed in a strange position, standing with his legs spread wide apart and his feet slightly pigeon-toed. It wasn’t a fleeting instant captured by a photographer. He really held that pose, like Marilyn Monroe enjoying the warm air from a vent in the pavement. Splaying is the new fighting talk in political body language: Boris Johnson and even Theresa May have been seen doing it. The legs-apart position derives from martial arts. A lower centre of gravity means you’re harder to knock over. It signals to your opponents, rivals and the press that you are up for a scrap – that you are hugely confident physically as well as mentally. It’s very strange. I have, admittedly, seen examples of splaying in the cinema. At the end of the last James Bond film, Skyfall, Daniel Craig stood on a roof looking out at the London skyline and he was doing such extreme splaying that his testicles were almost touching the ground. But splaying isn’t natural: any more than the four-abreast walk down the street that the cast of Sex and the City used to do. It’s just odd. The longer I looked at Osborne standing like an inverted Y with that curious thin-lipped smile, the more I thought he should be holding a guitar and wearing an outsize pair of glasses. Look at the cover of Elvis Costello’s first album, My Aim Is True: Costello is splaying. In fact, he was the king of splaying. Punks were always splaying in that era, cavorting in drainpipe jean-legged angularity. It was a sign of rebellious attitude. I can remember, ahem, splaying myself to the Buzzcocks’ Boredom at a school disco. Osborne says he’s a fan of NWA. Nope. His quirky splaying marks him out as a retro new wave showoff.
Telly repeats a nelly?
The BBC is considering bringing back Frank Spencer from the classic 70s sitcom Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, along with his wife Betty, with Michael Crawford and Michele Dotrice reprising their characters 37 years on. That must have been a tough call. Remaking Dad’s Army as a feature film was difficult enough – but there could be no question of “remaking” SMDAE with different actors, either in a 70s setting or the present day. No actor could feel comfortable “doing” Frank Spencer because the character was “done” by impressionists so widely at the time – a fictional character who had become as real as Malcolm Muggeridge or Robin Day. And what type of person was Frank Spencer anyway? Betty was a recognisably daft, quavery-voiced character who owed a lot to June Whitfield’s plaintive Eth on Take it From Here. Frank was completely daft and a couple of Green Shield stamps short of a home brew kit. He was also an odd, asexual type, best captured by that entirely obsolete word “nelly”, a bit like the people Charles Hawtrey used to play.
In 2015, you might have to explain him much more clearly in ironised terms of sexual identity or learning difficulty. Not in 1973. What are Frank and Betty going to look and sound like now, as old people? Ooh …
Spend it like Peston
I am a fan of Robert Peston’s brilliant journalism and likably eccentric drawn-out delivery in live broadcasts, in which he hits each word with equal emphasis in a monotone rallentando, apparently unsure how, or if, the sentence is going to end. His new ITV pay packet has excited jealousy, and a remark he once made is held against him: “I genuinely don’t understand people who want more money than they can spend. I have a psychological problem with that.”
But who says Peston won’t be spending it? I like to think of him cruising around the streets in a ketchup-red Ferrari, wreathed in bling, playing loud rap, with a glass of Cristal in the hand that’s not on the wheel. Perhaps he can make that the opening title sequence of his new programme.
