The art of the untruth

A subtle lie. Is it all bad?

“Why don’t you call it, F**k it Friday,” she suggested, trying to be helpful, I’m sure, when I shared my thoughts with a friend about where to take the Friday edition of this Halfway to Maybe thing.

Pic: Jametlene Reksp

The Halfway to Maybe person would probably think; “That is not a bad idea,” but wrestle with it on account of the policy I have where I blank out the saucy words as my gran would say, and some of the power of the alliteration might well be lost.

Many years ago, I worked at a radio station where the controller banged on incessantly about the importance of having features on your show, things you could signpost, where people thought, “Oh, now I don’t wanna miss that, I like The Monday Moanline, so I’ll just make myself another cuppa and stay in for the day.”

He insisted that all features alliterate, so your hook became a kind of earworm, once heard, never forgotten. Easy to remember. Simple, irreverent, and everyone remembers irreverence, apparently, according to him and those horrible focus groups.

I came up with Monday Mayhem, a sort of travel report on steroids to start the week, Trivia Tuesday, obviously a quiz, and Throwback Thursday, a lazy music feature where people got to choose three songs that were essentially just old. Not big, not clever, but it alliterated, and the boss appreciated that facet of the creative process.

I filled up the week in the end, although I can’t remember what Wednesday or Friday was at the moment, and actually, I was quite proud of them until one of those darned aforementioned focus groups, essentially twenty people in a room having free tea and milk chocolate Hobnobs, claiming a five pounds voucher to shop at the Savacentre whilst they were about it, decided to lay into my little show one meeting.

In a very early case of fact-checking, one person had identified a clutch of answers to my quiz that weren’t correct, and another suggested the golden oldies music feature called Throwback Thursday might as well be retitled ThrowUP Thursday, because the music chosen was always terrible. Actually, in the report, the word used was something more anatomical.

F**k it Friday, was the idea of taking the ball and just running with it in another direction, as far away as possible from the light Ladybird book Friday philosophy I sometimes offer up.

I suppose the Fffff of F**k it does alliterate well with Friday, certainly as well as the Phhhh of philosophy, but I was thinking more along the lines of Freeform Friday, something where my gran wouldn’t have spat out her tea over her Roberts Radio. See? That alliterates. For all my life, I imagined a Mr Roberts, some bearded gentleman, for whatever reason, inventing a radio that was classic, and covered in different coloured leatherettes. Turns out it may just have been the alliteration. I shall have to go and look that one up.

So features. What about a Friday feature? For this podcast?

I thought of The Art of the Untruth as a play on the Art of the Deal, or the Art of the Undeal, as one political commentator mused this week, though fear not, this is not one about politics, otherwise we could be here until Stupefied Sunday.

No, this is more about the fibs passed off as the truth, ones that hopefully don’t harm of course, and have an impish side to them on the part of the untruth teller.

I like the TV show Would I Lie to You? I could do something similar about all the funny fake news stuff that’s flying around, although I’m not sure I could tell the stories well enough.

Sam, my wife, says I am too easy to read in this department, a reason why I have never been entered into the family poker tournament. My face is not so much a readable book but a town crier in a bright red, two-sizes-too-large tabard, in the middle of the market square, with a very loud bell.

My story about Mum, earlier this week, is a case in point.

When she tried to make me drink coffee as a child, poured from a flask during those refuelling stops on a long, gruelling holiday cliffside walk, she passed it off as CoffeeTea, when I protested I only liked tea. Mum made coffee you could stand a stick in, which works as a small cup of whatever that Turkish coffee is that you can use in place of cement, but not as a flask full.

You see, CoffeeTea is silly and probably impish, isn’t it? Or is it just a big fat Whopper, minus the cheese?

I’ve recounted before enjoying the last moment we could properly tease our kids, turning the gullibility counter up to number 11, when I told them — driving over the brow of a hill and seeing the coast for the first time on a summer holiday — how lucky they were that they got to see the world in colour.

“Yeah, we only had black and white in my day, colour wasn’t invented until 1971. All this was black and white once.”

“What, Dad? Really?”

“Yeah, really! The sea — that was grey-ish black, the sky the same, everything you see for as far as you can see was black and white.”

“I’m really pleased I wasn’t young when you were, Dad,” and with that went the last moment I was ever able to josh in that manner, because later on, when they were still asking me questions about what colour the cars were, and if the fish and chips were black and white too, I let on that I was teasing, and they had become wily enough at that point to question my future April Fools’ jokes on any day of the year.

I still grin when I see the sea for the first time if I drive to the coast, and I replay the joke in my mind over and over.

I miss those days of being able to lightly tease our kids, and I think in a world that’s currently in a state of readiness due to so-called fake news and AI, there’s a chance our ability to have fun with language and slightly stretchy reality could atrophy. Are we about to lose the ability to tell a story?

There’s a whole branch of philosophy dedicated to lying, which probably tells you something about how much humans enjoy doing it, or at least thinking about it. Philosophers tend to draw a line, sometimes a very firm one, between the lie and the fib, though they rarely call it a fib, because philosophers don’t really do impish.

Immanuel Kant, obviously research helped me here, I can’t lie, like I would know Immanuel Kant. Anyway, he was the sort of man who would absolutely not have enjoyed CoffeeTea, because he took the hardest possible line.

I feel I should have known him, and the philosophers in the room are undoubtedly tutting, because IK, to his friends, is considered one of the most important philosophers who ever lived, which is quite a billing. Every day is a school day.

Lying, he argued, was wrong in every circumstance, without exception. Even if a murderer knocked on your door asking where your friend was hiding, you had a moral duty to tell the truth. The friend’s fate was not your moral responsibility. The lie was. This may explain why everybody looked the other way when he came into the pub, and nobody was his friend on Facebook, despite the fact he died in 1804.

On the other side of the argument sits another philosopher, John Stuart Mill, who would have been much more relaxed about the whole business. If the outcome of a lie produces more happiness, or prevents more harm, than the truth would — well then, John would say weigh the whole thing up.

But none of this really covers what my mum did with the coffee, or what I did with the sea. Those aren’t lies in any philosophical sense. I think they’re something else, a kind of collaborative fiction, where the joy is partly in the telling but mostly in the moment it unravels.

I think the pleasure of the black and white world story isn’t the deception; it’s the look on a child’s face when the world briefly makes a different kind of sense, and surely there’s no harm in it.

There’s actually something generous in it, because I’ve just handed them a story they’ll carry around with them. They still mention black-and-white fish and chips, after all.

On Tuesday this week, I photographed a wedding, and during that time in the afternoon when I, with the videographer, had disappeared for fifteen minutes with the bride and groom to grab a few nice portraits, we found ourselves in a sort of secret garden, part of the wonderful estate hosting the wedding. It’s a place I know quite well actually, but the videographer hadn’t been there in his life.

He commented that the loud birdsong was lovely, which given the showers and time of day I thought seemed a little strange.

“Ha,” I feigned choking, “That’s not real, it’s piped into the garden through speakers. Look, up there,” I said, pointing to a bat box.

I kept a straight face, but not for long enough. He saw the curling of my lips and realised he’d been done. Had I found my poker face, I reckon he’d have left that venue that night, looking for bat box speakers in every venue’s secret garden from that moment on.

Somehow we got onto the subject of Disney, but my cover had been blown, and he wasn’t about to believe that staff paint the flowers more vibrant colours before guests enter the park each morning.

I think I’ve clearly lost my touch, and a life of seriousness awaits, living on Immanuel Kant’s moral high ground, high enough to cause a nosebleed.

Although I wasn’t to be beaten, and yesterday morning on my riverside dog walk with my best four-legged buddy, as we came back down a path we often take that runs adjacent to a piece of land recently acquired by a well-heeled fishing club, a grumpy-looking gent was poking at the high entry gate that was installed about a month back, with a number code.

“I used to like walking in there,” he bemoaned, as I passed by.

“It was amazing woodland.”

“Oh, it’s private now,” I said.

“I can see that,” he snapped, “and it’s bloody wrong. This is a bloody nature centre. We should be able to go and sit anywhere we like round here.”

“Well, I’m not sure you’d like what’s going on in there these days,” I countered.

“Why?”

“Apparently it’s Thatcham’s naturist woodland. If you go in — and you can get a code for that gate from the centre — you’ll have to leave your clothes in a locker, though you can keep your shoes or boots on.”

“What?” he spluttered.

“I’m not going bloody naked for anyone. Why don’t they go down to Brighton like all the rest of them?”

With that he stormed off, and I’m convinced he’ll be down at the Swan spreading the news. Perhaps I just started one of those local, hopefully harmless rumours.

Or perhaps he secretly went back later, when I wasn’t there, and asked for the number combination.