Читать книгу In Praise of Savagery - Warwick Cairns - Страница 15

As a child, I once watched a sketch on a television comedy show—The Benny Hill Show, it was—about a man who wants to go on holiday. He goes to the travel-agent, and when he gets there he is offered the choice of two rival operators. I can’t remember the names of the companies now, but let’s say that they were called Bennytours and Cheapdeals, for the sake of argument. They both seemed to offer more or less the same thing—same destination, same flight, same hotel and so on and so forth, but with the difference that Cheapdeals (or whatever they were called) was ever-so-slightly cheaper. It was an infinitesimal difference; absolutely tiny—let’s say that the Bennytours holiday cost £40 and the Cheapdeals holiday cost £39 19s 6d, or thereabouts. It was a long time ago.

So our man bought the Cheapdeals ticket, as you would.

And then there followed one single joke, which was dragged out for about half an hour. The joke was this: the Cheapdeals holidaymakers were herded onto the plane with electric cattleprods by boot-faced Russian shotputter-types and served cold gruel and whatever as their in-flight meal, while the Bennytours people, up at the front of the same plane but tantalisingly visible beyond a flimsy curtain, got velvet chaises longues and champagne, and grapes individually peeled by beautiful air hostesses in barely covered underwear. And then you got endless variations on the same joke over and over again in the hotel, at the pool, at dinner, on the way home. At the age of eight I found it all hilarious.

But when I saw it on the television, back then, what I thought was that it was comedy, and I thought that it was something that someone, probably Benny Hill himself, had made up.

It wasn’t until I chose an Aeroflot flight to Nairobi in preference to one with Saudi Air—for the sake of saving £5—that I realised it was actually a closely observed documentary. Except that with Aeroflot the experience lasted for eighteen hours each way, and the joke, if ever there was one, wore thin considerably sooner.

It was not so much the length of the flight, although it was, all in all, more than twice as long as you might have expected, given the distance. This was down to all the stops—stops which included several hours in Larnaka airport; followed by eight very long hours sitting on the floor in Moscow airport, there not being enough chairs there for all who wanted them; followed then by several hours in the sweltering airport in Aden, in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, which at that time had rows of bullet-holes in the windows from the recent coup attempt.