A Bit of Fry and Laurie

Today I found myself thinking about this sketch from "A Bit of Fry and Laurie" , a series which ran from 1989 to 1995. I can't easily find when this sketch dated from.

Basically, it's about a guy who goes to a psychiatrist and loudly announces he's mad and wants to be cured. The psychiatrist is sceptical until the client mentions, in passing, that he writes letters to the newspapers. The psychiatrist picks up some newspapers in his office and asks him if he wrote two (very banal) letters which appeared in them, to which the client cheerfully admits. The psychiatrist then asks him his chest size for a straitjacket (much to the client's satisfaction).

I find this funny because I've had a longstanding fascination with letters to the editor. For a good few years I was an assiduous writer of them. I'm rather proud of my letter-writing days because it's proof (in cold print) that I was pushing against political correctness and other progressive manias when I was relatively young and when such pushback was less common than it is now. (They were mostly written in my thirties. I am now exiting my forties.)

Someone who worked on a letters page once told me that she was, indeed, convinced that many letter-writers were mad.  I don't think mine were missives of madness. But then, I wouldn't, would I?

By the end of my letter-writing days, I had a very good publication rate. I'd guess three-quarters of my letters (or even more) got published, in national newspapers. Of course, I don't know how many letters they get, so maybe there's nothing special about this.

My days of writing letters to the editor were, possibly, a good training in concision of expression. People would often mention them to me and sometimes I'd get correspondence from strangers (always positive).

I'd imagine it's much more difficult to have a letter published in a British national newspaper, given the population is so much larger. I did send a couple of letters to a British film magazine, but those ones didn't get published.

I also enjoy reading the letters pages in archived newspapers.

Once, when talking to a colleague, I expressed disappointment that my letters had never provoked replies along the lines of: "Your correspondent Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh is a complete idiot". He very wittily replied: "Well, it's like phoning for the fire brigade. Everyone presumes somebody else has done it already."