ABSTRACT
On stage, Potter always wore a faded blue blazer and a straw hat. His act consisted quite simply of a monologue, solemnly delivered in a clipped, relentlessly cut-glass accent, deliberately reminiscent of the BBC news-readers of the 1930s. It always began – in a parody of BBC technique – with the words ‘This is Gillie Potter, speaking to you in English’. It was meant to be funny, to British audiences of my generation and older it was extremely funny, and that phrase was the key to it. Its absurd, insistent repetition, its bland deployment of the sublimely superfluous, was crucial. Somehow, its utter redundancy managed to produce a comic hauteur as endearing to its audience as it was infantilising. The fact that English is a widely
spoken language was part of the joke. Of course, a sharper political edge might just have emerged if that were not the native language of those whom Potter addressed: that is, in the sort of colonial setting at which his dress and slightly languid manner hinted. Its full potential becomes evident more or less at the moment when he thrived: the period before and during the Second World War, when the British Empire, like his blazer and himself, faded and finally failed.
