The Dull Men's Club

In the long ago, when good king Franklin was president – he was the man known to his enemies as Roosevelt II – he used to gather his children around him at Christmas time by the fire in the big library at Hyde Park, which I hasten to say is the old Dutch colonial family mansion overlooking the Hudson River, and he began to read. What he read was the same piece every year and one year, he read it over the radio to the whole nation.

In those days, and perhaps for most of the preceding century, this little book was, at this time of the year, undoubtedly the best known and the most frequently read book among families, big and small, everywhere in Britain and America.

There is in the first chapter one little exchange of dialogue which did not strike Roosevelt's children, or mine, as odd but which, today, is quaint, almost to the point of being uproarious. This is it:

'You'll want all day tomorrow, I suppose?' said Scrooge. 'If quite convenient, sir!' 'It's not convenient,' said Scrooge, 'and it's not fair. If I was to stop half-a-crown for it, you'd think yourself ill-used, I'll be bound.' The clerk smiled faintly. 'And yet,' said Scrooge, 'you don't think me ill-used when I pay a day's wages for no work.' The clerk observed that it was only once a year. 'A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every 25 December!' said Scrooge, 'But, I suppose, you must have the whole day. Be here all the earlier next morning!'

Well, as we all know, Bob Cratchit got the whole Christmas Day off. Now Dickens was writing this in 1843. It would be six more years before the word, the phrase 'Boxing Day' came into the language, or anyway got into print. I don't know how long it took for Boxing Day to become a public holiday. Certainly, you may be sure, not until Scrooge was dead. It took longer still in the United States where the term is still unknown.

However, I imagine it was all part of the movement to ease the working week which didn't get going until well into this century, thanks mainly to the trade unions. Their biggest triumph came when they established the notion that all work, except maintenance work, should end at noon on Saturdays and 90 years after 'The Christmas Carol', employers began to grumble to their Bob Cratchits, 'You'll want all day Saturday, I suppose?'

Well, in 1933, in this country, Saturday became an official holiday. Not for the stock exchange though. Those poor, sweated brokers had to keep at it for another 20 years and then they succumbed to this recent Western custom of taking the whole of Saturday and Sunday off which, I now begin to see, has left our children or grandchildren two whole days and five nights free to play their battle games and wars of the planets on TV.

It's been figured by some marketing research outfit that about one-third of America's children this Christmas time will get in their stockings – and another third would like to – one or other of these electronic games. This report led some sourpuss to write a letter to the New York Daily News which said, 'While the young people of our country are playing Atari and Pac-Man, the youth of Russia and Japan are playing a different game. It's called 'homework'.

I suppose the proper response to that is to say that the puritans will always be with us, but in a progressive age they are conspicuously offset by their opposites. I see where the New York Police Department has authorised special leave for any policeman wishing to attend the Christmas dinner party of the New York Gay Officers Action League.

Well, all this is by way of recognising the fact that in some countries of the Western world, anyway, the stress of modern life requires us to claim a restful ten-day break at Christmas, which means that this talk has to be recorded well before the weekend so that I cannot be blamed for being totally ignorant of some earth-shaking event that may happen on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday or Saturday or Sunday. You'll all read about it and so will I because this ten-day coffee break does not apply to newspapermen, as old H. L. Mencken snorted when the American Newspaper Guild was formed. An actual trade union for journalists, imagine! He said, 'It's preposterous! An eight-hour day for a reporter makes no more sense than an eight-hour day for an archbishop.'

So, as it is, I'm on tiptoe, agog with suspense to know if the government of the United States will be solvent by the time you hear these words. I mean, whether there will be any money in the till to pay the hundreds of thousands of regular government workers who were warned, last weekend, that unless the Congress comes through with a stopgap spending bill to pay government workers' salaries between now and next October, then the government will be officially broke and the workers will have to take a furlough. This takes in everybody who works for the federal government, except what are called 'essentials' – medical care, air traffic control, prison wardens and the like – for whom President Reagan signed last Saturday emergency appropriation bills.

But there'd be nobody working in the departments of defence, education, energy, justice, labour, the state department, the treasury, need I say and this sit-down or enforced walk-out would apply to clerks, librarians, secretaries, the internal revenue service – good! – the national parks and forests and monuments, down to those humble, necessary drones who carry long sticks with little spikes on the end and are known as park picker-uppers.

I have to admit that I don't find it difficult to step down from my tiptoe. This has happened before. In fact, it happened at this time last year. Americans love the cliffhanger. After all, they invented the 'Perils of Pauline' and whenever you hear that a labour union and its industrial employer are deadlocked on the night of a strike deadline, even though they've been holding bargaining sessions for a month or more, it's almost predictable that an agreement will be reached by the bleary-eyed parties as the sun comes up on the day of the threatened strike. I have no doubt that the last act of the dying, lame-duck Congress will be to pass a funding bill at six in the morning which will shell out the money for the stricken 570,000 federal workers and will guarantee the survival of the United States government.

You can imagine what headlines, true headlines, this situation could inspire in Moscow and Warsaw. 'American Government Bankrupt, No Pay for Half a Million US Government Workers'. That should convince the people queuing up for a vegetable or a meat ration that things could be worse.

Now if the government was neglecting to pay its own workers, what was it doing? Well, the House of Representatives, which has the final say on who gets how much for what, was in session night and day trying to ram through little bills and big bills and amendments and riders on everything from a petrol tax and limiting immigration to saving the tuna fish industry – the only industry – of Western Samoa.

In my situation, bereft of up-to-the-minute news and not daring to speculate on what might happen two or three days from now, I've been looking round for what the BBC used to call 'a deathless topic' when it wanted to have on hand a talk to use while if I was, say, in the hospital. I have found such a topic. Indeed, an American hero who I trust will be with us for a very long time. He is not unknown to fame. Some of you may have actually heard his voice but I hope that these words will help to give him a little, heftier promotion.

His name is Joseph Troise. He lives up in the Rockies in Boulder, Colorado. He's 40 years old, has black arching eyebrows, a bird-wing moustache and looks like a pensive Terry Thomas. He's the president of the International Dull – that's D-U-L-L – Dull Men's Club, an organisation which, if it's not yet growing like a prairie fire, has over a thousand members around America.

Finally, the New York Times has smoked him out, if that's the word. It's not quite the right word because it suggests that Mr Troise has been in hiding. On the contrary, he's out in the open. He boasts of having been the first of his kind to declare himself for what he is – a dull man.

Mr Troise is fed up with whatever is chic, with it, in or – as we now say, using one of our rare borrowings from the British Isles – whatever is 'trendy.' He's a native New Yorker and perhaps it's the memory of his birthplace seen from a couple of thousand miles away that convinced him he ought to do something about the general enslavement to fashion. Certainly, New York City must be THE world capital of trendiness in clothes, food, music, art, drinks, books, cars. Not least, in ideas.

Mr Troise says it's time the dull people declared themselves for what they are. 'After all,' he says, 'they fix our cars, run our elevators, drive our cabs, type our reports. Behind every flashy facade sits a humourless and fastidiously competent drone who keeps the whole damn ship afloat!'

You can qualify for membership in the International Dull Men's Club if you don't wear designer jeans, don't jog, do wear pyjamas in bed, drink tap water and call the woman you live with your wife. The club's slogan is 'Dare to be Dull!' 'The great strength of America,' Mr Troise says, 'is in its 200-odd million people who will never be in "Who's Who", who go bowling, wash their own cars, wear suits and push lawnmowers.'

A couple of years ago, he inspired a museum of the ordinary which, in a ratty little building, exhibited ash trays and hub caps but this, in itself, could have looked like a flirtation with a new art movement. It died. The club has no funds, no magazine, no meetings. They might get to be chic. Mr Troise ended his interview by bravely stating his aim, which is to relieve the social pressure on people to appear interesting, to be trendy.

By publicising the International Dull Men's Club, his ambition is no less than, in his own words, to help millions of Americans to come out of the closet, be honest about themselves and say, 'we're out of it and proud of it!'.

PS: Congress passed that stopgap salary bill. The president signed it and the American government has survived.

Since it's chic in Britain these days to say Happy Christmas, I will offer you the old, dull salutation, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.