Will Self

At the end of the first half of Derren Brown’s current stage show, Svengali, the accomplished prestidigitator and manipulator of minds makes a plea that no one in the audience should reveal any of his act’s content, lest they ruin it for others. Fair enough. A cynic might say that Brown’s more concerned that no one devalue his shtick, but actually these are two sides of the same palmed coin – and besides, I happen to believe Brown is generally a good thing who adds to the gaiety of the nation.

True, he’s not an illusionist with the stature of, say, the Great Lafayette (né Sigmund Neuberger), who perished in Edinburgh in the notorious Empire Palace Theatre fire of 1911 while performing his signature “Lion’s Bride” illusion, wherein a smallish woman was metamorphosed into a big cat. Such was Lafayette’s hold on the public that when a fault in a stage light caused it to plummet and ignite the set, the audience, assuming this was all part of the show, sat still and watched while the illusionist and ten other crew members were incinerated.

As I say, I’ve no desire to rain on Derren’s parade, but I do think the methods he employs to obtain the raw material of his performances are worth discussing because they teach us so much about that critical component of human folly – suggestibility. Besides, I think it unlikely that the Venn intersection between New Statesman readers and potential Derren Brown audiences comprises many members – possibly I’m the sole one. The first time I saw Brown, a few years ago, he told the massed ranks of the goggle-eyed in no uncertain terms that nothing he was doing in any way involved the supernatural. In this he was following a grand tradition of professional magicians acting as debunkers of the paranormal, the most notable example of which was Houdini himself. Nevertheless, during the interval I overheard several people saying to their companions words to the effect of: “Ooh, he says it’s not real magic – but I think he’s lying.”

Two psychological phenomena were operating simultaneously here. First, the average Derren Brown audience member must be more suggestible than most: why else would she or he be there in the first place? After all, if you don’t unconsciously wish to be fooled, why go and see an illusionist? Second, Brown’s impassioned assertion of the rationally explicable nature of what he was doing constituted an example of negative suggestibility – primed, by him, to disbelieve everything he did and said, the audience flatly denied this truth.

I assert that Brown primes his audience to disbelieve everything he does and says, but I should qualify this: like all adroit manipulators, he wishes them consciously to question everything overt while unconsciously they absorb a great deal of covert instruction. To give one example: at the very beginning of each of his feats he throws balls or frisbees out into the audience, then asks whoever has caught one to come up on stage. This appears a completely random way of selecting his participants, but in fact he has already refined his selection to the more suggestible – because, when a frisbee flung by a magician is flying across an audience, who but someone who wishes to be manipulated would stick their hand up to catch it?

Once these gullible souls get up there, he subjects them to a further culling. In poker circles, good players become extremely adept at spotting another’s “tell”, the unconscious tic that reveals when someone is bluffing. Brown is a master of reading these tells: the little spasms we make when someone has hinted at a truth about ourselves we are concealing. Holding their hands, looking into their eyes, persuasively uttering their names, Brown has only to ask these already self-selectively suggestible people a few questions in order to establish whether they are what he requires for the rest of his act – namely, people who can be told what to do without being aware of it.

Hm, I wonder what other social groups exhibit the same characteristics as Derren Brown’s audiences? Let’s see . . . self-selecting for a willingness to suspend disbelief while also desperate to be told by a charismatic figure what they should do . . . That sounds uncannily like the psychological profile of a typical political party member, and, like Derren’s dupes, party members are also fond of hand-holding and first-name-calling. Indeed, the only distinction between the audience for illusionists called Brown and the one for, say, party leaders also called Brown is that the former are unlikely to become disabused given that what they’re after is purely entertainment, practised by some one they actively chose.

Birds Eye sold £7.5m worth of its Traditional Chicken Dinners last accounting year – and as these meals are made in the Republic of Ireland with imported chicken breast, “homestyle” gravy, potatoes and garden vegetables, I can understand why. True, they’re not exactly what I’d call hearty, but the chicken tastes fine, and while Birds Eye cannot vouch 100 per cent for the bonelessness of any given foreign breast, mine was reassuringly pliant, and even had a stippling of recognisable skin. The roast potatoes were firm little nuggets, the stuffing – shaped like a pellet of solid fuel – worked for me, and although the gravy was insipid, the carrots and peas swam friskily in its brown slop, and were surprisingly al dente. I can say with some certainty that I have paid five times as much for a chicken dinner in a restaurant – while enjoying it five times less and having to wait five times as long for it. The only cooking required here was an eight-minute spin in the microwave.

Yet, when I triumphantly bore my Birds Eye Traditional Chicken Dinner home from Mohandra’s convenience store, Mrs Self was dismissive: “Oh, you’re going to eat a TV dinner, are you?” Mohandra, when I queried the £3.90 price tag – there were other frozen roast dinners in the gondola costing less than two quid – observed that: “You pay for the brand.” Both of them implied I was engaging in unspeakably infra dig behaviour. And yet . . . and yet, what could be more real than a Birds Eye Traditional Chicken Dinner?

Patented in the late 1920s by Clarence Birdseye, the quick-freezing method, whereby food is pressed between cold metal plates while bathed in super-cooled air, has become the staple food-processing technique of our era. Birdseye was quite a character, perfecting his method while ice fishing with the Inuit of Labrador. That frozen food should have allowed for a colossal expansion of the volume of exploitable resources in the world, and so undoubtedly assisted in the destruction of the Inuit’s traditional lifestyle, is hardly Birdseye’s fault – unintended consequences of actions that seemed perfectly all right at the time are all around us. I’m one myself.

No, quick-freezing food has to be seen as the fourth agricultural revolution, which followed in a direct line from Mesopotamian domestication, through crop-rotation and the synthetic production of nitrogen fertilisers, to our own benighted decade. No! I was not having a TV dinner – I never eat in front of the television. (Mostly, it must be admitted, because applying a knife and fork to something in my lap always makes me think of the sequence in that film La dernière femme, where Gérard Depardieu cuts his penis off with an electric carving knife.) No! I ate my Birds Eye Traditional Chicken Dinner in the traditional way: at the kitchen table with my children, who were tucking into fancy Waitrose chicken goujons.

To begin with, the kids showed some interest in my novel menu choice, and we all marvelled at the non-standard shape of the compartments in the tray (something like cedillas), but they soon veered off on to other subjects – string theory, Boulez vs Stockhausen, the deciphering of Minoan Linear B – leaving me to wonder how they might have fared if sent to sea with Captain Birdseye, an advertising personification of such legendary effectiveness that a nationwide poll once established him as the best-known sailor in the realm after Captain Cook.

I have to say the continued plain-sailing of Captain Birdseye in the current miasma of paedophile obsession is something of a mystery to me. You don’t have to be that paranoid to be suspicious of a white-bearded fellow in a yachting cap who likes hanging around with a “crew” of pre-teens. Still, I assume he’s been CRB-checked – so that’s OK. Nor can my enthusiasm for Birds Eye altogether blind me to the human costs of that form of corporate cuisine, whereby one fat enterprise chows down on another.

In 2006, Unilever sold the business to that sinister form of words “a UK-based private equity group”. This one’s called Permira, which sounds to me like a neologism coined out of pudenda and permafrost – and possibly a rather suitable one. Back in 2005, Unilever closed the Grimsby factory where fishy fingers had been made since 1929, with a loss of 650 jobs. There’s no suggestion that Permira is contemplating any further closures, although when I called the Birds Eye press office to ask for sales figures, they did seem a little . . . wary. So, I thought I’d do my bit for the recovery and urge all of you to stay in this week and eat a Traditional Chicken Dinner – and none of your home-cooked muck: make it a Birds Eye.

What psychologists term the “availability error” is prominent in so many different forms throughout our mental life that it’s debatable whether this constitutes a form of delusion at all. Still, some examples are so egregious that unpicking them may help us in the general direction of better mental hygiene.

A few weeks ago a serviceably pretty young woman went to a big ugly house to meet a handsome man who happens to be the president of America, and his mildly steatopygic wife. For the occasion, the young woman slipped on a fairly nondescript dress. In due course, when photographs of this prettyish woman wearing said dress appeared in the papers, there was a frenzy as thousands upon thousands of crazed punters attempted to log on to the website of the British high-street label Reiss to buy it.

Put simply, the availability error consists in judging by the first thing that comes to mind; in this case, we can summarise the thought processes of the wannabe Reiss-buyers thus: Kate Middleton is wearing that dress and looks good, therefore if I put on that dress I will look good as well. We could elaborate, because undoubtedly there is a further murkier tier to such unreasoning: Kate is wearing that dress, therefore, if I wear that dress, one day I will be queen of England (as well as Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Bongo-Bongo Land, etc), hobnob with the Obamas, wear diamonds the size of pigeons’ eggs – and so on.

A variation of the availability error that I’ve discussed in this column before, in connection with my propensity – or otherwise – for urinating into the Dyson Airblade hand dryer, is the halo effect. The halo effect implies that if one person has a single, very obvious, characteristic, the rest of his or her attributes are invariably perceived in the light of it. This is why – despite all evidence to the contrary – good-looking people are often viewed as sagacious, amusing, possessed of phenomenal ball control, and so forth.

Ms Middleton is no film-star beauty, nor has she ever done anything in her short life worthy of note save part her thighs for the heir to the throne, then marry him. Be that as it may; paradoxically, her approachable, girl-next-door vibe becomes incorporated into her halo, so that potential dress-buyers formulate syllogisms of this sort: “All girl-next-door types wear mid-range fashion labels, Kate Middleton is wearing a mid-range fashion label, therefore Kate Middleton is a girl next door.” This conclusion won’t necessarily sell that many £175 Shola dresses (the Reiss design that Middleton wore to meet the Obamas), but it will, of course, sell the object – the Windsors – to their subjects, at a time when the populace might well resent the spectacle of hereditary multibillionaires lording it over them without even minimal concessions to such coalition virtues as choice and fairness.

The use of the availability error and the halo effect by advertisers is nothing new – when I was a kid, there was a scare to the effect that big corporations were pushing their product by inserting subliminal imagery into feature films. The rumour was that, for a split second during some parched scene of Lawrence of Arabia or another, an ice-cold can of Coca-Cola was flashed up on screen, ensuring that, come the intermission (remember them?) everyone would rush to the foyer and begin guzzling down the sinister sarsaparilla.

In fact, most advertisers have no need for such subterfuge – they can openly supply the imagery and we will subliminally influence ourselves. Thus shampoos provoke orgasms, mobile phones collapse cities like packs of cards and cars . . . Well, cars morph into just about everything imaginable and then chomp up the road. Do I believe that there is something intrinsically wrong with this? Yes, I think there may be.

Take Chinese Elvis. He runs a not terribly successful restaurant on the Old Kent Road, and once or twice during the evening’s sittings he emerges from the kitchen dressed as the King to sing “Suspicious Minds” or “Heartbreak Hotel”. He doesn’t look a bit like Elvis, and he certainly doesn’t sound like him, but such is the potency of the late rock monarch’s halo effect that, even years after his death, it can still garrotte the unsuspecting. In fairness to Chinese Elvis, he’s only helping to sell his food – which isn’t too bad – but it remains a bizarre aspect of contemporary commerce that stuff can now be sold not only by the famous, but also by their impersonators – and how mad is that?

There are 55 branches of Yo! Sushi in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, so this is clearly a threat worth paying attention to. Naturally, when Scotland secedes, it may take its Yo! Sushis with it; the alternative – that they be expelled from the country to form a latter-day Antonine Wall of conveyor belts bearing tuna maki – is a strange, though not altogether displeasing, possibility. After all, the resistance of Scotland’s premier to a foreign cuisine, one of whose chief components is a raw version of his near homonym, would be entirely understandable.

Not that there’s anything very Japanese about Yo! Sushi. For a start, I don’t imagine any self-respecting Japanese person has ever said “Yo!” in their lives, as such a fatuous exclamation runs utterly counter to a culture that prides itself in a disciplined and meditative conformity. No, Yo! Sushi is the brainchild of some clever Brit who sold out to a big corporate years ago, and who now enjoys his moneyed reclusion – I imagine – listening to old Steely Dan albums and raising epigones.

Indeed, it’s equally difficult to imagine what cultural nexus Yo! Sushi belongs within as it is to analyse the semiotics of, say, Hey! Cottage Pie or Whoops! Sorghum. The restaurants feature lurid orange paint jobs, curvilinear vinyl booths straight out of 2001 (the movie and the year), functionalist ducts trumpeting down on the diners, and the much-talked-about conveyor belts.

Let me get this straight: I love the conveyor belts at Yo! Sushi, just as I adore any food delivery system that incorporates the automated. To sit at the counter picking colour-coded dish after dish from the cheerful, rattling segments of the conveyor belt, and to watch that belt wend its way past the diners, then loop back into the exposed food preparation area where another dish is added . . . Well, this is some kind of crazy bliss. The first time I visited Yo! Sushi

I said to my companion: “I haven’t had so much fun since my childhood, when I would spend mealtimes at my grandparents’ with my head stuck inside the dumbwaiter.” Nowadays most people would probably call that paedophilia.

I love the conveyor belts at Yo! Sushi – love them rather more, I suspect, than the food they convey. Not that there’s anything bad about the sushi rolls, sushi nigiri, sashimi, etc that they churn out at Yo!, but the sheer fact of it arriving on a conveyor belt sadly militates against the credo of freshness otherwise promoted by having the kitchen in view. It makes the eating experience curiously confusing – there you sit, watching your titbit being assembled right in front of you, yet by the time it’s made its way around the counter you’ve become convinced that because it’s on an assembly line, it must be stale factory food.

Once, in the Yo! Sushi at Paddington Station, I was so discombobulated by these countervailing gastronomic currents that I tried to eat the conveyor belt instead of the food on it. The management immediately called the police, and I was detained. I mean, as a campaigning journalist, one expects to get arrested from time to time in the pursuit of one’s beliefs – but to be banged up for eating a conveyor belt, the shame of it! Still, it hasn’t put me off Yo! and I’m glad of that, because the other evening in Brighton I took Number One Son along to his local branch and we had a rather tasty repast. Why? I think ordering mostly off the hot menu helped, that way avoiding the conflict between preparation and conveyance. I also took full advantage of the Yo! deal whereby if you order green tea or miso you can have unlimited refills. There’s something about a grossly distended belly, like one of those happy pseudo-Buddhas, that makes it impossible to think ill of the world.

There were these factors – and there was my golden boy, first fruit of my loins, a budding historian studying at Asa Briggs’s old university. It was a pleasure to sit with him beside the trundling conveyor belt of bogus futurism and discuss the rumbling tumbrels of the recent past. Golden Boy, being something of a rightist, took the view that the extrajudicial killing of Osama Bin Laden was wholly acceptable; I demurred, pointing out that Bin Laden didn’t pilot any of the 11 September attack planes and that, far from being a hierarchical command structure – like the US army – al-Qaeda was more in the manner of a franchise: you approach them with your death-dealing idea, and they provide funding, expertise and branding.

“Sort of like a restaurant chain,” GB mused, “like al-Sushi . . . or possibly Yo! Qaeda.”

I make some apology for writing about the Paul chain of French bakeries – some but not much. After all, the first Paul opened in Britain only 11 years ago, and while there are just 29 outlets in the UK to date, all confined to London, you can confidently expect, given the gathering speed of its territorial acquisition, to have a Paul on most high streets within another decade or two.

The Blair government argued for the liberalisation of licensing laws on the grounds that it would facilitate a change in our national drinking pattern. No longer would we be northern horn-heads, knocking down pint after short until we went berserk (or, at any rate, berT-shirt); instead, we would sip vin de pays at sidewalk cafés while gently tinkering with our boules.

But how could major thinkers such as James Purnell have failed to anticipate this development? That, instead of taking French cafés as our model, we would seize upon the bakeries. If anything characterised the Blair years, it was a huge appetite for speciality breads. We began the 1990s as a nation besotted with Ridley Scott’s atmospheric Hovis adverts and stuffed full of Mothers Pride; we ended the decade deftly dipping focaccia in olive oil, our hot heads wrapped in Egyptian flatbread.

In la belle France, many regard Paul rather derisively. It may be une maison de qualité, fondée en 1889, but as it is the largest chain bakery in the land, it has the cachet of our beloved Greggs. My French teacher, Arlette, would often refer with disdain to the branch of Paul on High Holborn next to the language school where she was valiantly attempting to inculcate me with the grammar of Montaigne, the vocabulary of Sainte-Beuve and the speech rhythms of Baudelaire. So often did she employ patisseries and coffee-style drinks from Paul as examples in our conversations that I began to conceive of Paul as an individual, picturing him in my mind’s eye thus: a dapper type with a waxed moustache, sporting a lightly checked suit and sitting in a fake empire saloon – reclaimed wood panelling, chandeliers and so on – awaiting the arrival of some pseudo-salonnières. “Ça va, Paul,” I found myself saying involuntarily, when I popped in to get a coffee on my way to our lessons.

Still, however much we can deride Paul for his – I mean, its – French finish, the fact remains: Paul is the French Greggs! That’s how advanced French gastronomy is, in comparison to that of our own bicarbonated isle. Instead of sausage roll, there’s a “chaud saucisse” (complete with béchamel sauce, Emmental cheese and pain à l’ancienne); in lieu of a polystyrene cup full of tepid tomato soup, there flows a wide variety of soupes du jour; and where Greggs might tempt us with a mere iced bun, Paul enacts a full seduction with his grand macaron framboise, a titbit of such extreme sweetness that I suspect it may be more than 100 per cent refined sugar.

The other afternoon, feeling that life was altogether de trop and finding myself limping through the subterranean concourse of London Bridge Station, I didn’t hesitate to stop off at a dinky little branch of Paul for a tourte aux légumes followed by a tarte aux abricots. “Wow!” I thought to myself, as I staggered towards a table laden with boxes labelled “Paul” in that distinctively neoclassical and austere typeface. “This is a lot of pastry.” And it was – about the most I’d eaten at one sitting in around a decade.

There’s a lot to choose from when it comes to contemporary fast food – within sight of my table at Paul London Bridge, there were branches of the following: Banger Bros, the Bagel Factory, Cranberry, a South African-themed delicatessen called (get this) the Savanna, and a Cards Galore. I suppose some readers might object that Cards Galore isn’t, as such, a food outlet – but as I’d never consider buying a card from there to give to someone, eating them seems a reasonable course of action.

What I’m trying to get across is that, until Paul has secured market saturation, elbowing out Greggs and even taking down Subway, it will remain the thinking man’s – and woman’s – bakery. Apart from me, there were only femmes d’un certain âge at my Paul – at least, I thought this was the case until the longish, dyed-blonde coiffure at the next table turned to expose the careworn features of . . . the former secretary of state for culture, media and, um, sport.