There was a German fellow I once met, who walked from village to village in Liberia, learning old customs and local dialects; he was gathering material, he said, for a dissertation at Berlin University.
He hoped to put together a grammar of the languages he came across.
He was bland and enigmatic; he always wore a clean shirt, a pair of tight-fitting fawn trousers, a round white topee, and he carried an ivory-headed stick and long cigarette holder.
There were rumours he could not leave the country because of some trouble at the border, although he seemed to be on very good terms with the district commissioner, so there may have been no truth in it.
His face was long and drawn, as if he had been pulled forcefully upwards by the hair as a youth, and his mouth was strangely twisted; perhaps he developed that distortion of the visage as a result of his prominent, crooked and decayed teeth.
He was inclined to mendaciousness - and for that reason I generally steered well clear of him.
But he once told me he had come across Graham Greene and his cousin Barbara when they were tramping through Liberia on the 1935 trip that gave the novelist such insight into human purpose and behaviour, and strongly influenced his future work.
I relate this titbit, because since that time, when watching television, I have always wondered what the Graham Greene who was suffering the privations of 1930s' jungle exploration would make of the show I was taking in.
I wondered this again just the other night while watching a preview of Friday Night Dinner, the very funny British comedy that begins its second season on June 5.
I like to think that despite the cultural changes in the past 80 years or so, Graham Greene - were he to have stopped, perhaps in a Bolahun village that had television (yes, I know, before it was invented) - he would have had a good laugh had he watched it.
Friday Night Dinner on UKTV stars Simon Bird (The Inbetweeners), and the very good Tamsin Greig (Green Wing and Episodes).
The show depicts Shabbat dinner in the secular Jewish Goodman family, reflecting, apparently, the upbringing of writer and producer Robert Popper (who produced the third and fourth series of Peep Show, was script editor on The Inbetweeners and The IT Crowd, and wrote four episodes on series 14 of South Park).
Episode one of the new series has Dad (Paul Ritter) sneezing on people and things, as a personal diary becomes less so, and a toy rabbit becomes the source of a brotherly feud.
It is extremely funny.
Graham Greene would have laughed and laughed.
- Charles Loughrey
