Art of humour

A David Starkey lecture is combative, outspoken, controversial and provocative, reports Alan Thomson

David Starkey did stand-up comedy as a Cambridge undergraduate and appears to have lost little of his touch.

Nattily dressed, with conspicuous green and white polkadot tie, there is clearly a touch of the theatrical about this particular historian. This was the Wednesday matinee at the London School of Economics. A house full of chattering sixth formers, juggling prospectuses and assorted bumf, awaited Dr Starkey's "sample'' lecture.

"Come to the LSE. We have the best lectures,'' was the intended message. It was up to Dr Starkey to prove the case, though, technically, he was only doing the warm up for LSE director Anthony Giddens, who was headlining this recruitment gig.

The compere - sorry, dean of recruitment - Janet Stockdale, introduced Dr Starkey describing him as one of the "liveliest of the media dons''. "Lively'' is often used euphemistically. There is no doubt that Dr Starkey is prolific. He has written two books, edited four, written a clutch of major articles, sits on a number of historical advisory groups and boards, is a regular panellist on Radio 4's The Moral Maze and has his own Sunday morning show on Talk Radio.

He is also combative, outspoken, controversial and provocative. The title of his sample lecture was "From Domesday to Diana: the end of the modern British monarchy". A subject dear to Dr Starkey's heart and surely something of a joke in itself to think that he could compress 1,000 years of history into 30 minutes.

"I thought it would be fun,'' he began, "for people to come to the LSE with its reputation for radicalism and hear a boring old farty lecture on monarchism."

The word "farty'' raised a few nervous titters from the schoolchildren. Are lecturers allowed to use words like that?

"Smut,'' he grinned, "is what everyone wants to hear.'' More nervous giggling from the pupils who were probably hoping the show did not become too adult.

He had their attention though. It was interesting that Dr Starkey mentioned the Princess of Wales in the very next breath. George IV's estranged wife, Caroline of Brunswick, he said, ended up living abroad, a cross between Diana and Fergie. More chuckles, though many may have been wondering exactly what he was driving at.

Dr Starkey is "out'' and glad to be gay. Few in his young audience could have known this, but for those that did it came as no surprise when he suggested that many of the men behind the modern monarchy, the Victorian and Edwardian architects of pomp and circumstance, were gay.

"The great spin doctors who invented the modern monarchy with its pageant and commitment to family values were gay or suppressed homosexuals. Reginald Brett, Viscount Esher, designed military uniforms to show off men's bottoms. There was competition between regiments to have the tightest trousers." There was a smack of early Woody Allen in this last line and it triggered more sniggering, particularly among teenage girls. The audience was indeed warming up.

Cosmo Gordon Lang, who became Archbishop of Canterbury, was credited with reinventing the monarchy during the first world war. He gave the hitherto austere, and decidedly Germanic Saxe-Coburg-Gothas, the family-friendly Windsor make-over. Lang "never married but had homosexual relationships'', Dr Starkey pointed out.

With the help of Lord Reith, head of the then newly formed British Broadcasting Corporation who enjoyed a "divided'' sex life, everything was going swimmingly, not least for the British monarchy who avoided the sort of sticky end that befell their relations, the Romanovs, in Russia.

So what went wrong? In a word, says Starkey, "Diana''. "She pulls this to pieces,'' he said. "She came from a broken home and refuses to play by the rules. She represents the values of California rather than Britain." The weight of blame for bringing the curtain down on a millennium of monarchy appeared to come to rest on poor Diana Spencer's shoulders.

His audience had probably felt a fair degree of sympathy for Diana until that point. They were being provoked. As Dr Starkey admitted afterwards: "I was deliberately playing with fire. Lectures are not for absorbing large quantities of facts but for imparting ideas and making people think. Humour is one of the key instruments in achieving this."

But what would the reviews be like. Sixth formers admitted to being "pretty surprised'' by Dr Starkey. One girl did indeed remember unprompted the "tight trousers bit'' while another thought Dr Starkey may have been "just putting it on'' because it was a special lecture and that ordinarily he would be "straight and boring''. Evidently, she has a lot to learn.

Suggestions for other star lecturers to the editor please.