Watching the live debates from the British House of Commons recently has been far more entertaining than anything else on television. It's a wonderful mix of drama, oratorical outrage, brazen showboating and dark comedy, not always intended. It is spontaneous theatre -- the <i>Washington Post</i> called it a "dramedy".
Star of the show has undoubtedly been House Speaker, 56-year-old John Bercow, who absolutely revels in maintaining order when things get a bit too raucous.
"Order! Order! Order!" he bellows with unconcealed relish and they usually shut up. When the House got too noisy he chided them with "Calm yourselves, take up yoga!"
Mr Bercow very much resembles a teacher trying to keep a rowdy class under control. When things threatened to get out of hand he rebuked jeering MPs, calling them "incorrigible delinquents".
When one member kept shouting he admonished him with "Calm down and behave like an adult."
Mr Bercow is not afraid of who he takes on. He rebuked one cabinet minister who appeared to be engrossed in his phone, accusing him of "fiddling ostentatiously with an electronic device".
A senior female politician who gave a running commentary from the front bench while other MPs were speaking was berated by Mr Bercow for "chuntering from a sedentary position ineloquently and for no obvious purpose".
Last year he laid into the Chancellor of the Exchequer for appearing confused, saying "Stick to your abacus, man!"
Oh, and he has a pet cat called … Order.
Blame it on the thesaurus
Son of a London taxi driver, Mr Bercow who has been Speaker since 2009, is unlike any of his predecessors who presided in a more subdued manner.
When he was elected Speaker he made it clear what the House was in for by commenting, "For far too long the House of Commons has been little more than a private club by and for gentlemen amateurs."
He has an impressive vocabulary which led one MP to comment that "It's as if he goes to bed and reads a thesaurus every night, inwardly digests it and then spews it out the next day."
Of course, not everybody appreciates Mr Bercow and his verbose manner.
Under a headline "Out of Order!" the Daily Mail newspaper splendidly called him an "egotistical preening popinjay".
During one parliamentary debate, after being reprimanded by Mr Bercow, an irritated cabinet member called him a "stupid, sanctimonious dwarf", but it did not go down in the official records as Mr Bercow said he didn't hear it.
Keeping it polite
If any prospective Thai MPs have been watching the House of Commons in action, one wonders what they made of it all. The scenes in the "Mother of Parliaments" sometimes disintegrated into frivolous shouting matches and juvenile posturing. However, I am confident exchanges in the Thai Parliament will be polite and the Speaker certainly won't have to keep shouting "Order! Order!" every few minutes.
Creatively compelling compere
Mr Bercow's style reminds me very much of a gentleman called Leonard Sachs who used to compere an old BBC television series, Those Were the Days, a re-creation of old time music hall acts from the Victorian/Edwardian era.
One suspects Sachs was also an avid reader of the thesaurus.
An erudite speaker, Sachs was known for his wonderful hyperbolic introductions for each act, in which he used alliteration to outrageous excess, but with considerable aplomb.
He often used long words that were not in common use, which were greeted by the audience with appreciative "oohs".
He introduced ventriloquist Neville King as a man of "verisimiltudenous (ooh!), ventroquial (ooh!), virtuosity".
On another occasion, actor Barry Cryer was presented as a "therapeutically (ooh!), thermological (ooh!) thespian".
Sachs would have made an excellent Speaker of the House.
Ice age
The arctic-like conditions in much of the US and Canada this past week put in perspective the "cold spell" Thailand briefly experienced over the festive season. When it gets cold in the US it really gets cold. It has even been too nippy for the polar bears which have not been allowed out in the American zoos. A shivering polar bear -- now that's something to behold. Even the penguins have reportedly been playing up.
Watching reporters in Chicago throwing boiling water into the air which immediately vaporises into snow powder is enough to make anyone shiver. But it can also be educational.
I am now familiar with the term "polar vortex" although I'm still not entirely sure what it means. I've tried slipping it into conversations, but it failed to impress anyone. People in Bangkok are more concerned about choking on the smothering smog. It's going to take more than a few toy drones to sort that out.
Cold as Hell
I recall about five years ago the US was suffering a similar icy blast. At that time The Sun newspaper in London carried a full front page photo of a snow-bound town called Hell in southern Michigan. The paper could not resist carrying a huge headline "Hell Freezes Over". I checked on Hell this week and indeed it has frozen over again.
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