Mock 3 — Reading and Use of English

Talking about the weather

The British talk about the weather, the visitor concludes, 1 ______ want of anything else to say. It is a reasonable guess and it is wrong. The weather is discussed not because it matters — it seldom does, in a country where extremes are 2 ______ unknown — but because it is the one subject on which two strangers can safely 3 ______ an opinion without either of them being committed to anything.

The remark is not information. “Turned out nice again” is not a forecast, and it does not 4 ______ for one. It is an offer: I am prepared to talk, it says, and here is a subject on which neither of us can be wrong. The correct reply is agreement, 5 ______ pain of being thought difficult. To answer “Actually, it's rather cold” is to 6 ______ the offer back in the other person's face, and the one who does so will find the conversation 7 ______ to a halt with a politeness that is hard to distinguish from silence.

Foreigners who master the grammar in a year can take a decade to master this, and those who never do are 8 ______ off as rude by people who could not tell you why.

The Shipping Forecast

Four times a day, at hours 9 ______ which most of the country is asleep or at work, BBC radio broadcasts a weather forecast for the seas around Britain that 10 ______ of its listeners will ever need. It lasts about ten minutes, it is read in a flat, unhurried voice, and it consists almost entirely of names — Dogger, Fisher, German Bight — followed by numbers.

Sailors use it, of course; it was written for them and it is 11 ______ their lives may still depend on. But the audience is many times larger than the fleet, and at a quarter to one in the morning it is listened to by people 12 ______ have never set foot on a boat. They listen, they say, because it is calm. Nothing in it is addressed to them, nothing in it can be argued with, and 13 ______ long as it is being read the country feels, briefly, like a place with edges.

14 ______ a broadcaster has tried to move it or shorten it, the letters have arrived within the day. It is, 15 ______ all its strangeness, one of the few things the British will defend 16 ______ being asked to explain why.

Pantomime

Every December, in theatres from Aberdeen to Plymouth, Britain stages a form of entertainment that is almost 17 ______ to anyone who did not grow up with it. (COMPREHEND) The pantomime is a fairy tale performed with 18 ______ bad jokes, (DELIBERATE) a hero played by a young woman, a comic old woman played by a man, and an audience that is expected to shout. The 19 ______ are strict: (CONVENE) the villain enters from the left, the audience hisses, and at least one song will be 20 ______ to every child in the building. (RECOGNISE)

Critics have been announcing its 21 ______ for a century, (DIE) and every year the box office proves them wrong. Its 22 ______ puzzles outsiders (ENDURE) because the form looks so 23 ______ — a joke a century old, (CARE) a costume that appears to have come from a dressing-up box, a plot that nobody has bothered to check — but nothing about it is accidental. The chaos is rehearsed to the second, and the actor who lets it slip is 24 ______ corrected by nine hundred children at once. (MERCY)

The critic's duty

I have been reviewing theatre for a national newspaper for nineteen years, and in that time I have been asked one question more than any other, usually by actors, usually late in the evening: what gives you the right? It is a fair question, and the honest answer — that somebody has to — has never satisfied anybody, so I have tried over the years to find a better one.

The case against the bad review is easily made and I will make it. A production is the work of sixty people over six months; the review is the work of one person over ninety minutes. It is written fast, printed once, and read by more people than will ever see the play. A single dismissive paragraph can close a show and cost those sixty people their winter. Set against that, the critic's claim to be serving the reader looks thin, and the critic's claim to be serving the art looks thinner.

And yet I notice that nobody who makes this argument ever objects to a good review. The power that is so dangerous when it closes a show is apparently harmless when it fills one. This is not a small inconsistency. If praise is legitimate — if it is acceptable for me to tell forty thousand strangers that they should spend their money on a Thursday night in Islington — then the same authority, exercised in the other direction, cannot be illegitimate merely because it hurts. Either the critic is entitled to a judgement or she is not. The wound is not the test.

What is the test, then? I have come to think it is specificity. A bad review that says a play is boring has told the reader nothing and the company nothing; it is a shrug in print, and I have written a few and regret them. A bad review that says the second act fails because the writer has given the villain the only intelligent lines, so that the audience is rooting for the wrong person by the interval, has said something that can be argued with, acted on, or — and this happens more than you would think — quietly fixed by the following week. The first kind of review is an exercise of power. The second is a contribution, and the fact that it is an unwelcome one does not change its nature.

There is a further duty, which is to the reader rather than to the theatre, and it is the one I find hardest. The reader who has paid for the paper is entitled to know what I think, and to know it plainly. A review that hedges — that finds something to admire in every failure, that reaches for “interesting” when it means “dead” — is not kind. It is a small fraud on the person who trusted it, committed in order to spare the writer an awkward evening. I have been to the parties. I know why critics hedge. It is not a good reason.

None of this means the critic is always right. I have been wrong in print perhaps a dozen times that I know of, and the knowing is instructive, because in every case the error was one of two kinds: I was tired, or I had decided before the curtain went up. The remedy for the first is sleep and the remedy for the second is honesty, and neither of them is silence.

So when I am asked what gives me the right, I now say this. Nothing gives me the right. What gives me the duty is that the reader has asked, and that the alternative to an honest bad review is not a kinder theatre but a quieter one, in which the only voices left are the ones with a ticket to sell.

Four writers on the licence fee

A · A media economist
The licence fee is cheap — by any standard of what it buys, absurdly so — and it is also the most regressive charge in British public life, because the widow in a bedsit pays exactly what the banker pays, and the fact that both of them get a bargain does not make that right. Its defenders say the fee keeps the government's hands off the corporation. I have never understood this claim. The government sets the fee, decides when it rises and whether it rises, and has used that power in every negotiation for forty years; a paymaster who fixes your income every five years is not at arm's length. The honest solution is to fund the BBC from general taxation, which is at least progressive, and to accept that a subscription model — the alternative usually proposed — would narrow the output to whatever the subscribers happened to want, which is a different organisation with the same name.

B · A former BBC producer
I spent twenty-two years inside the building and I will say what people inside it rarely say aloud: the licence fee is the whole point. Not the money — though the money matters — but the fact that it comes from everybody and belongs to nobody. A minister who dislikes a programme can complain, and they do, but they cannot cut the cheque, and that distance is the only independence a broadcaster has ever had. The objection that every household pays the same has always struck me as overstated; everybody pays the same for a stamp, and nobody calls the postal service regressive. What would change under subscription is not the funding but the schedule. The things that lose money — the orchestras, the language services, the six-part documentary about a nineteenth-century canal — are precisely the things no subscriber would tick a box for, and they would go within a decade.

C · A newspaper columnist
Every year the same ritual: the corporation announces that it is a bargain, and every year several million households are threatened with prosecution for owning a television. The fee is a tax, and it is a tax levied on a purchase rather than on an income, which even its friends concede is indefensible. Nor does it buy the independence it is said to buy, since the government fixes the amount and has never been shy of reminding the corporation of the fact. I would end public funding altogether and let the BBC sell subscriptions like everybody else. Its defenders say this would change what it makes. I hope so. An organisation that has to persuade people to pay for its programmes will make programmes people want, and the ones nobody wants will be missed by fewer people than the corporation likes to imagine.

D · A broadcasting historian
No method of funding a national broadcaster is fair, and the licence fee is merely the least unfair of the available options — though I would not pretend that charging a pensioner what one charges a banker is anything other than a defect. What the fee does, and has done since 1927, is answer the question that undoes every other system: who writes the cheque? Where the answer is the government, the broadcaster serves the government; where it is advertisers, it serves them; where it is subscribers, it serves the people who can afford to subscribe. A charge on everybody is the only arrangement in which the answer is nobody in particular, and that is worth its awkwardness. I am less alarmed than my colleagues by the prospect of subscription changing the programmes. The BBC would go on making largely what it makes now, because the audience for it exists and would follow; what would change is who was allowed to watch.

The open door on the hill

Scattered across the Scottish Highlands, and in smaller numbers through the Lake District and Wales, are about a hundred small stone buildings that anybody may sleep in, free, without asking. They are called bothies. Most were shepherds' or estate workers' cottages, abandoned when the people left the hills; they have a roof, a floor, a fireplace and nothing else, and the door is never locked.

41 ______

Visitors from abroad, in particular, tend to assume there is a catch. There is no booking, no fee, no warden and no key. You walk — there is no other way to arrive — and if the building is empty it is yours for the night, and if it is not you share it with strangers who were there first.

42 ______

That code is unwritten and mostly kept. It asks you to leave the place as you found it or slightly better, to carry out what you carried in, to leave dry kindling for the next arrival, and never to bring a group so large that others cannot get in. Nobody enforces any of it. The only sanction is the knowledge that somebody will arrive after you, wet, at dusk.

43 ______

The organisation that keeps them standing is small, voluntary and almost invisible. Each bothy has a maintenance officer — a title that means a person who walks in twice a year with a rucksack of slates — and the money comes from members who will, in all likelihood, never use most of the buildings they pay for.

44 ______

For decades this was enough, because the number of people who knew was small and self-selecting. A bothy was found by being told about it, in a pub or on a hill, by somebody who had already judged you fit to know. The locations were not secret, exactly; they were simply not published.

45 ______

The results were what anybody could have predicted. Buildings that had received a dozen visitors a month began receiving a dozen a night. Firewood was stripped from woods that had never been touched, rubbish accumulated, and the code — which had depended on every arrival having been vouched for by somebody — began to fray at the edges.

46 ______

Whether that holds is the question the next decade will answer. What is already clear is that the bothy was never really a building. It was an agreement between people who had not met, and an agreement is a harder thing to maintain than a roof.

The mistake that taught me most

A · Nell, a thatcher in Norfolk
Mine was a roof in my fourth year, and it looked perfect. The reed had been cut late in the season — I knew that, and I took it anyway because the customer was waiting and the supplier was a friend — and three winters later it was rotting from the inside. Nobody could see it. That is the thing about a roof: the part that matters is the part nobody can inspect, and a customer has to take the whole trade on trust. I stripped it and re-laid it at my own cost, which took the profit of that year and most of the next. What I learned is that the material makes the decision and I do not. I now turn jobs down — good jobs, from people I like — when the reed is wrong, and I have lost work over it, and I would lose it again.

B · Osman, a bookbinder in Bath
I was rebinding a book from the 1690s and I trimmed the edges of the pages a fraction too far — perhaps a millimetre — and cut through the end of a note that somebody had written in the margin three hundred years ago. The client would never have noticed. I telephoned him the same afternoon and told him, because my teacher had a rule, which he repeated until we were sick of it: the customer's ignorance is not your permission. There are cuts you cannot uncut. I did not lose the client, oddly. What I lost was my speed on the irreversible steps, and I have never got it back and no longer want to. On everything that can be undone I am quick. On the three things that cannot, I am the slowest binder in the west of England.

C · Grace, a bell-founder in Loughborough
A bell is cast in a single pour and it tells you everything the moment you strike it; a bell cannot lie. Mine was a tenor for a church in Devon, and I rushed the mould because it was February and the workshop was cold and I wanted the pour done before the frost got into the sand. It came out a semitone flat. You can tune a bell down, by shaving metal from the inside; you cannot tune one up. There was nothing to be done but break it and melt it and begin again, which we did, and which cost the firm a sum I still do not like to say aloud. What it taught me was that there are errors with no repair in them — only a return to the start — and that the calendar is part of the process. We do not pour in February now.

D · Rhys, a glassblower in Bristol
Nothing broke and nobody was harmed, which is why it took me so long to see it as a mistake. A restaurant ordered forty wine glasses and I made, I think, a hundred and sixty, because each one had some small unevenness in the bowl and I threw it back into the furnace. When I finally delivered forty that were identical, the owner looked disappointed. She had seen the early ones in the workshop and had wanted those — the slightly different ones, which is why she had come to a glassblower and not to a shop. The error was not in my hands, which were doing exactly what I asked of them. It was in what I had asked. I had been solving the wrong problem for a month, and solving it well.

E · Ida, a tailor in Edinburgh
I measured a man for a suit in my second year and I measured him beautifully. Every figure was right. What I had not noticed was that he was nervous — first bespoke suit, a wedding — and was standing like a soldier, and when he relaxed the suit did not. On the table it was flawless; on the street it pulled across the back. He was very kind about it, which was worse than anger would have been, because I had to stand there being forgiven. I re-cut it. The lesson was that you measure the person and not the body, and the practical result is that I now talk to a client for twenty minutes before I pick up the tape — about anything — so that by the time I measure him he has forgotten he is being measured.