Yes, let them throw eggs

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto Author and historian

A MAN in nappies dangles in a glass box from a crane near Tower Bridge. Other idiots pelt his cage with rotten eggs and rattle it with golf balls. It's a silly season story. Sillier still are the people who react with highminded outrage. Civilisation may be in danger and Britain may be in decline. But David Blaine's dilemma is no reason to think so.

According to Uri Geller - an authority on pointless activities who used to make his living by stroking spoons - this is a case of yet more British bad manners. The eggwielders of Tower Hamlets are like the bum-barers of Faliraki, yobs from a culture too coarse or cash- strapped to educate them in decency. It never happened in America where folks treat Blaine with common human respect. The eggwarriors are sad losers. They should lay down their eggs and get a life.

Geller's partly right. It is a bit sad to find people with so much time on their hands that they can waste some of it victimising a harmless exhibitionist. The saddest of the lot take themselves seriously and claim that they are " protesting" against world poverty.

That's not just stupidity: it's pretentious stupidity.

What's really happening at Tower Bridge isn't a confrontation of crusaders and capitalism, or a battle of barbarism against civilisation, but a good old-fashioned bit of comic knockabout. Blaine's a street-mummer, inviting audience response in the spirit of this ancient form of popular entertainment. Sometimes they fling flowers at his feet, sometimes fruit at his face.

JUST across the river from the scene of his current self- humiliation stands the Globe Theatre, a reconstruction of the great arena of the Elizabethan groundlings who took food with them into the play not because they needed nourishment but because they needed ammunition.

In the music hall, the last heir of the tradition in modern times, squashed tomatostains were an uninsured risk performers had to run. Even in the more decorous environs of the playhouse and operahouse, it is only recently that audiences have come to feel too inhibited to hurl insults, at It may be bad manners to pelt David Blaine but there's something very healthy about unbuttoning ourselves enough to take part in such public spectacles least, at the stage. Underlying this venerable custom, there is, I admit, a nasty streak in human nature: the tendency to throw things at anyone or anything unable to get out of the way. Throwing is natural to humans: it is the only physical skill in which we are superior to competitor-species.

A primitive instinct urges us to target practice. In the Middle Ages, people didn't pelt criminals in the stocks out of a sense of outraged justice: they did it because the poor blighters were unable to dodge. It is as normal to chuck a golf-ball at Blaine's cage as to shy at a coconut. If you dangle a cat's paw, you must expect a passer- by to strike it.

Usually, we think we should curb instincts. Just because a practice is primitive, that doesn't make it good. Still, the best way of civilising instincts is often to learn to live with them: to give them rein within their proper sphere, to indulge them in confined spaces where they can do no harm.

No one, for instance, would moan at the mooners if they indulged their bum-baring in places where other people weren't obliged to watch it.

The throwing instinct could celebrated next to Tower Bridge with no adverse consequences for the rest of society.

Indeed, this might be the only useful or worthwhile function David Blaine's otherwise purposeless dangling might have.

As long as it stops short of violence or cruelty - as long, for instance, as thick glass deflects the missiles or thick skin bounces back the boos - the eggs and obloquy can be indulged as part of the fun.

Maybe we ought to go farther and congratulate Blaine's victimisers on reviving a healthy tradition.

Entertainers are fair game because we willingly expose ourselves: clapping and catcalls should both be part of the deal.

On the stage or the lecturepodium, I shouldn't welcome a barrage of cast-off groceries, but if I let my audience down I'd willingly brave their nonviolent equivalents: heckling and loud complaint. We are too respectful of entertainers: not only does the excessive delicacy of our manners inhibit us from deriding their bad performances, we smother them with excessive adulation, collaborate in the luvvie-culture and scatter birthday honours where we might do better to spatter eggs.

Indeed, it's not bad manners that are the problem: it's excessively good ones. London theatre, for instance, is now more often than not a disappointment to audiences, who pay sickeningly high prices for productions which are often shoddily directed and negligently performed. Yet we go on clapping politely. You never hear a boo: even for work of shameful, unprofessional awfulness.

THE most daring - and utterly justified - intervention I've witnessed from the auditorium in recent years occurred at a Chichester Festival production, where a member of the audience rose from his seat in mid-play to tell the actors that they were inaudible. The rest of the audience reacted with shock, but the actors responded nobly and for a few scenes at least we heard most of the dialogue.

I have not seen David Blaine's current performance.

I don't have time to watch his dangling, much less to pelt it.

So I don't know whether it's bad enough to deserve the treatment it has had from spectators. I suggest, however, that, to be scrupulously fair, we should give pelters and performers an equal round of applause.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's latest book, Civilizations, is published by Pan.

(c)2003. Associated Newspapers Ltd.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.