The Embarrassing Parents [antikvár]

ForewordI never turn to Victoria Mather s and Sue Macartney-Snape's Social Stereotypes in the Saturday Telegraph without a creeping anxiety that I might come face to face with myself. It has happened at least five times already: The English Family on Holiday, The Smug Couple from Notting Hill, The Couple Crippled by School Fees, Man Packing the Car Boot and The Couple Who Have Moved to The Country. It is impossible to read them without the flustered suspicion that it is my own life and my own family Victoria and Sue have so vividly in their sights. And here, of course, lies the genius of Social Stereotypes. Every Saturday, all over the country, thousands of different people are utterly convinced that they must be the models for The Pony Club Official or The Obsessive Tanner. Victoria and Sue have a mind-reader s gift for rootling around inside our heads, and serving up every last nuance and pretension as spot-on social comedy.It is a mystery how they get it exactly right, week after week. It isn't that either of them hangs out with most of the groups lam-pooned with such deadly accuracy in this latest collection. Neither of them belongs to a gentleman's club or spends their weekends going caravanning, or has children at prep school or teenagers who holiday at Rock in Cornwall. I know for a fact that Victoria never flies anywhere in economy class, and shudders at the thought, and yet she instinctively captures the myriad indignities of travelling on the wrong side of the curtain. And how come Sue Macartney-Snape, who pads around bohemian Westbourne Grove in a zebra-skin coat, has such an unerring eye for the school fathers' race or elderly swimmers?The answer, of course, is that they are brilliantly observant and intuitive, alert to every foible of character, which is the key to all