Appealingly tragic

Towards the end of his Diaries, Kenneth Tynan complains that the older he gets, the more estranged he feels from his glamorous persona. In a sense, this is a rift that still exists today. Tynan’s posthumous reputation grows ever more glorious with each passing year, yet if you bother to read anything he wrote — particularly the Diaries — he seems completely idiotic, like a parody of a dissipated champagne socialist created by Craig Brown.

There are constant reminders of just how ridiculous he was capable of being in Tynan, a one-man show performed with an air of nicotine-stained melancholy by Corin Redgrave. On the birth of his son, the great critic tells us that he’s decided to include the name ‘Blake’ on his birth certificate, a reference to some long-forgotten convict and author who was a left-wing cause célèbre at the time. In another passage, we find Tynan claiming it’s a ‘fact’ that no communist country has ever deliberately bombed a civilian target — proof, apparently, that China and the Soviet Union are morally superior to the United States.