I'm a Stranger Here Myself Read Free

finished.
    The television lectures, which nearly all appear to have been filmed in the early 1970s, typically involve a geeky-looking academic with lively hair and a curiously misguided dress sense (even by the accommodating standards of that hallucinogenic age) standing before a blackboard, with perhaps a large plastic model of a molecule on a table in front of him, saying something totally incomprehensible like: “However, according to Mersault’s theorem, if we apply a small positive charge to the neutrino, the two free isotopes will be thrown into a reverse gradient orbit, while the captive positive becomes a negative positron, and vice versa, as we can see in this formula.” And then he scribbles one of those complex, meaningless blackboard formulas of the sort that used to feature regularly in
New Yorker
cartoons.
    The reason that
Open University
lectures traditionally are so popular with postpub crowds is not because they are interesting, which patently they are not, but because for a long time they were the only thing on British TV after midnight.
    If I were to come in about midnight now mostly what I would find on the TV would be Peter Graves standing in a trenchcoat talking about unsolved mysteries, the Weather Channel, the fourth hour of an
I Love Lucy
extravaganza, at least three channels showing old
M*         A*         S*         H
episodes, and a small selection of movies on the premium movie channels mainly involving nubile actresses disporting in the altogether. All of which is diverting enough in its way, I grant you, but it doesn’t begin to compare with the hypnotic fascination of
Open University
after six pints of beer. I am quite serious about this.
    I’m not at all sure why, but I always found it strangely compelling to turn on the TV late at night and find a guy who looked as if he had bought all the clothes he would ever need during one shopping trip in 1973 (so that, presumably, he would be free to spend the rest of his waking hours around oscilloscopes) saying in an oddly characterless voice, “And so we can see, adding two fixed-end solutions gives us another fixed-end solution.”
    Most of the time, I had no idea what these people were talking about—that was a big part of what made it so compelling somehow—but very occasionally the topic was something I could actually follow and enjoy. I’m thinking of an unexpectedly diverting lecture I chanced upon some years ago for people working toward a degree in marketing. The lecture compared the selling of proprietary healthcare products in Britain and the United States.
    The gist of the program was that the same product had to be sold in entirely different ways in the two markets. An advertisement in Britain for a cold relief capsule, for instance, would promise no more than that it might make you feel a little better. You would still have a red nose and be in your pajamas, but you would be smiling again, if wanly. A commercial for the selfsame product in America, however, would guarantee total, instantaneous relief. A person on the American side of the Atlantic who took this miracle compound would not only throw off his pj’s and get back to work at once, he would feel better than he had for years and finish the day having the time of his life at a bowling alley.
    The drift of all this was that the British don’t expect over-the-counter drugs to change their lives, whereas we Americans will settle for nothing less. The passing of the years has not, it appears, dulled the notion. You have only to watch any television channel for a few minutes, flip through a magazine, or stroll along the groaning shelves of any drugstore to realize that people in this counry expect to feel more or less perfect all the time. Even our household shampoo, I notice, promises to “change the way you feel.”
    It is an odd thing about us. We expend huge efforts exhorting ourselves to “Say No to Drugs,” then go to the drugstore and