On with the greasepaint

It was 1929 and Wall Street had just crashed. Backstage in a Broadway theatre Groucho Marx and his brothers sat staring at each other; but mainly the other brothers were staring at Groucho. He was refusing to go on with the show. He had lost everything in the financial meltdown: savings, investments, the whole shebang. After years of treading the boards of the lowest dives in the country, the Marx Brothers had finally reached the top of the tree. The big money had come at last . . . only to go straight out of the window along with quite a lot of suicidal businessmen.

Of all the brothers, Groucho was suffering the most. He had been the most prudent with his cash. He looked at Chico and now wished he had been as profligate as his gambling, womanising elder brother, for now they were both skint and Groucho hadn't had nearly as much fun along the way to show for it. He announced he was finished - it was all pointless.

The curtain went up. To save the show, its composer Harry Ruby began painting on a black moustache so he could take Groucho's place. It was then that Groucho changed his mind. 'All right, I give in,' he groaned. 'No audience deserves to look at you all night.'

On went the moustache where it belonged. On went Groucho where he belonged - out on the stage, not out of the window. There were no antidepressants in those days. Not unless laughter is classed as one, of course. He immediately had the audience rolling in the aisles with a string of one-liners about the crash. So good were the gags that many of them remained in the show on a permanent basis.

Groucho Marx and his brothers had developed an inner strength during their rise from poverty to stardom that stood them in good stead when the winds of change shifted and blew into their faces. Years after the Wall Street Crash, when they had recovered and gone on to even greater glory in Hollywood, Groucho came out with one of his most famous lines: 'You're heading for a nervous breakdown, why don't you pull yourself to pieces?' He wasn't being cruel . . . he was just speaking from experience.

Wasn't there a pub here once?

One by one they are disappearing. The bolthole of the wayward, the weary and the downright thirsty; the refuge of the lonely, the gregarious, the henpecked husband and the hopeful Jack-the-lad. Yes, it's the local pub . . . being sold off, cast off and brassed off at an alarming rate of something like forty-odd a week. If only greedy, shortsighted brewery executives and spineless local authorities would fizzle away up their own cellar pipes at the same speed we might gain some respite.

The closure of a public house and the subsequent granting of planning permission for the siting of a new housing project is getting mighty tiresome as well as disrespectfully quick. Now when a customer goes outside for a smoke he could well find that the place has been flogged off while he was fiddling with his roll-up. How many small communities have suffered the loss of their only pub in recent times? Often, local residents have attempted to stave off the building of new houses that inevitably follows as soon as the dust of demolition has been blown into the distance on the back of a wind of sad resignation. Their efforts almost always fail. They are told by councillors (those high priests of social psychology) that their lives will be enriched by new faces and new families. They never seem to be told the hard fact that very few people talk to each other these days unless they meet in a local drinking establishment, where they can't cross the road to avoid each other.

So, as we move into this liberated and enlightened era of smokers lighting up outside in the non-drinking area while one man and his non-smoking dog are inside at the bar, and the For Sale sign obliterates the view of the hand-painted masterpiece, villagers old and new may be forgiven for asking each other one question: "Can I get a drink around here or is the war still on?"