John Caine MBE, the celebrated and honoured writer of acclaimed television soap-opera scripts, is an eminent and respected judge of literary quality, as his membership of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire attests. (Anthony Burgess, unlike Caine and also unlike Jimmy Savile, was not good enough at his craft to be worthy of one of these coveted British honours.) Caine explained just why Miss Piggy had been awarded a 'blue plaque' in Chiswick over the claims of Burgess, an obscure, forgotten novelist, critic and composer. Caine stated that Burgess's 'objectionable moral behaviour' and the 'objectionable sentiments expressed in his novels' made him 'unsuitable for recognition'. Caine did not give examples, on the assumption that we all knew all too well what he was talking about - Burgess's works are in the modern Index Librorum Prohibitorum and will remain there for many years. He has become England's equivalent of Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
Year after year for decades, the proposal has been submitted by the good burgesses of Chiswick, a faubourg of London, that a blue plaque be placed on the exterior of the onetime residence of Burgess, who lived and worked at 24 Glebe Street, a little terraced house, with his first wife Lynne between 1964 and 1968. (When Lynne was out of the house, Burgess shared the marriage bed with his mistress and soon-to-be second wife Liana. After Lynne drank herself to death, the Italian student moved in. Later the couple let the house to a taxi-driver friend and went to live in a Bedford Dormobile, travelling across mainland Europe in it.)
Most recently, the plan for the blue plaque historical marker has been turned down in favour of one for the erstwhile home of the creator of Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog. The begetter of the Muppets is considered by the authorities to be of considerably higher significance in the development of Western culture than Burgess, the author of a lot of forgotten novels, critical works, symphonies, things like that. They appear to regard Burgess as a 'pillock with an Olivetti' who achieved little other than once playing a very minor rôle in the preparation of the screenplay of a Stanley Kubrick film.
Modern Britain sadly once again reveals to the world the crudity of its culture, its æsthetic degeneracy, and the ignorance - indeed, mental incapacity - of the Philistines paid by the State to administer extremely degraded cultural institutions.
The decision was handed down by a Muppet of a woman described as the 'curatorial director' of the State agency 'English Heritage'. This body, which has time and again revealed its distressingly debased taste, apparently has the power to award the plaques. The crack-brained woman haughtily averred that Miss Piggy was of much greater importance than Burgess in England's heritage. The woman shrugged off a chorus of protest across Chiswick and far beyond. She enraged many taxpayers when she excreted the following statement: 'At present, the durability and extent of Anthony Burgess's overall literary impact is not sufficiently clear.' Yet this vulgarian regards as indisputable the enduring contribution of the creative genius who sired Rizzo the Rat, Pepe the King Prawn, Dr Bunsen Honeydew, Marvin Suggs, Fozzie Bear, and Camilla the Chicken.