As part of the Llangollen fringe festival, there weill be an Audience with Will Self at the Royal Pavilion, Llangollen at 7.30pm on July 22. Tickets cost £15. For more details go here.
Totally Dagenham
The latest Madness of Crowds column:
I hope you have noticed my forbearance throughout the recent football tourney, resisting the urge to prate upon the follies of fandom, let alone the poisonous catalysis that ensues when they are admixed with patriotism. But now, with fair Albion lain out upon the veldt, the Boerfarter’s jackboot on her heaving breast, the time has come for me to put my own boot in.
On the day after the catastrophic defeat, Richard Littlejohn “wrote” in the Daily Mail: “If the Few had defended as badly as England, we’d all be speaking German now.” Someone in television once told me that he’d been present at a meeting where a reality show was pitched called Daily Mail Island, the conceit being that contestants were marooned on an island where the only news they had of the outside world came to them via the Daily Mail. Needless to say, the pitch failed when one of the commissioning execs observed that such a land mass already existed – and it was called “Britain”.
But even on Daily Mail Island, the equation between la gloire of football and national self-regard is delusory. The sage Montaigne once wrote words to the effect that it was unwise to trust a man who took games too seriously, for it meant that he didn’t take life seriously enough. But I’m perfectly willing to concede that there are millions of men and women who take both football and life seriously indeed.
Therein lies the madness, because it must be utterly bizarre to be one moment living in a world in which your entire sense of wellbeing is concentrated upon how well 11 super-fit adolescents (and I say “adolescents” advisedly, for recall: these are “men” who almost mutinied over their access to their PlayStations) are kicking about an inflated leather bag, and the next to accept that this previously all-consuming passion is not important at all.
In psychiatric circles – which encompass me rather more than is healthy – the maintenance of two such utterly inconsistent belief systems would be termed something catchy like “acute mental diplopia”, but in my part of the country we just call it Dagenham (two stops short of Barking). In fairness to all you England fans out there, I do perceive some political logic in your passionate advocacy; harder to comprehend is the gut-churning empathy experienced by the supporters of English Premier League teams.
I suppose I am a bit of a dinosaur – and a triceratops at that – but when I last went to see Arsenal play, I felt as if I’d inadvertently slid into a parallel world. It didn’t help that my companion, a season ticket holder, is an eminent psychoanalyst who has written numerous papers on acute mental diplopia. Like Papa Sigmund whacked on cocaine, he was his own case history, for within seconds of kick-off, he transmogrified from a calm, urbane man into a screaming loony.
“Youuuu fuuuuucking f-f-f-f-fuckers!” He strafed the Gunners with his own fricative fusillade; and so it continued, volley after expletive volley, until at half-time I taxed him: “How can you feel such a close affinity with this polyglot team, drawn from the ends of the earth by the lodestone of gelt?”
“Aha,” he explained, “you don’t get it – it’s not about partisanship at all, it’s about catharsis. These young players are mythological heroes for middle-aged, middle-class men such as me. We rant and we rave, we bellow and exult; then, when the hurly-burly is done, we can return to the dull accommodation of our strip-lit lives.”
“You don’t really believe that bullshit, do you?” I asked him. “Surely you of all people understand that to flip from hysterical identification to passive indifference is tantamount to psychosis?”
“Maybe.” He bit into his gourmet sausage roll and small flakes of pastry speared my tender cheeks. “But what’s the alternative? Think back to when, everywhere you went, you saw men and women in No 7 England shirts with ‘BECKHAM’ blazoned across their shoulders. What a fine madness it would have been if all those fat Beckhams, short Beckhams, infant Beckhams and ancient Beckhams really had believed themselves to be England’s striker. No asylum in the land would’ve been big enough – they’d have required some kind of special colony.”
“Daily Mail Island.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, nothing.”
RFI – Focus on France interview
A short interview with Will Self (and Martin Amis) at the Shakespeare&Co festival in Paris. Here’s the written version.
Teach us to Sit Still – it’s the real thing
Teach us to Sit Still: A Sceptic’s Search for Health and Healing by Tim Parks, Harvill Secker, £12.99
Do I have to say this? Yes, I suppose I ought: Tim Parks‘s digressive memoir of his debilitating but ultimately life-affirming struggle with pelvic pain made me leak a few tears, guffaw a lot, and besides quietly instructing me in some fresh perspectives – on such matters as Samuel Beckett and Buddhism (and that’s only the Bs) – ultimately taught me an eminently practical lesson about coping with age and mortality. Must I utter the blurbish cliché? Why the hell not: Teach us to Sit Still made me laugh it made me cry and it made me seriously think about taking up Vipassana meditation.
I’ve been aware of Parks’s writing for a number of years, but apart from his Booker-shortlisted novel Europa – which I liked well enough – this is the only other book of his that I’ve attempted. An elegant essayist, who describes well the tortuous labyrinth of contemporary Italy – where he has lived for 30 years – his pieces crop up from time to time in the literary reviews and are notable for their air of quietly insistent rationalism. Parks is one of those writers whose prose seems always to be muttering the subtext: You and I, we understand each other perfectly, don’t we, and in so doing we can comprehend also this crazy world.
It’s the sort of confident comity that Orwell inspires in his readers, and it speaks to me of a very English empiricism: this is this – and don’t you forget it. It was no surprise to learn in this book that Parks is the son of a Church of England vicar (albeit one who tended towards the charismatic) and that while he may have rejected faith in miracles when he was a teenager, Parks retained the concomitant – and equally Anglican – faith in science (so long as it knows its limits). Like his parents, Parks had a deeply ingrained resistance to all crystal-dangling, Om-chanting and tableturning – indeed anything that smacks of mumbo jumbo.
Up until his early fifties, Parks’s very familiar brand of lapsed Anglicanism served him perfectly well. From his own luminous descriptions of kayaking and hill walking, we gain the impression of a man who was comfortable in his body, and while not exactly brimming over with job satisfaction – what ambitious writer is? – he nonetheless found his work lecturing on literary translation in Milan perfectly rewarding. From the asides he lets fall, we can gather that he is also a thoroughly married and familial man. And apart from an infection of the prostate gland that he had had in his twenties (and from which, against the odds, he had completely recovered), Parks enjoyed good health. Then came the deluge: to be precise, intense and searing pains throughout the pelvic area that yet remained curiously nonlocatable.
Accompanying this was the irritable bladder, the six-times-a-night micturition, the need to be constantly within range of a facility, the creeping impotence – all the panoply of mental and physical discomforts that zeroes in on the ageing human.
Good Cartesian that he was, and so viewing his body as a mechanism that should be fiddled back into functionality, Parks immediately hied himself to the doctors. His experience from then on was wearily familiar: the tests, and then more tests – blood, urine, semen – the breezily overconfident consultants, then the firm recommendation of radical surgery.
In Parks’s case this took the form of a procedure known as a Turps (Transurethral resection of prostate surgery), which is precisely what it sounds like: laser-burning one highway through the pesky gland, while suturing up another. The medics were so keen to begin blasting that when they had him in the stirrups for another test – a cystoscopy – one suggested that they just do the other procedure while they were at it. But Parks cried, no! And he was right to do so, because the cystoscopy revealed there was nothing wrong with his prostate, while punching the words “prostate pain” into Google conjured up 6,820,000 hits, many of which turned out to be the cris de coeur of post-Turps patients who were in more pain than ever.
Of course, while by no means Damascene, Parks had already started his conversion some time before while on a trip to India for a translation conference he had consulted an Ayurvedic doctor. Dismissive of the astro-babble surrounding the diagnosis offered, he nonetheless took note when the doctor’s wife observed ? apropos of Western mechanistic medicine ? “You only say psychosomatic … if you think the mind and body are ever separate.”
What’s most interesting about Parks’s journey back to health is that he convincingly portrays, from within, what it’s like to abandon an assumption – the mind-body dichotomy – that is itself, of necessity, ineffable.
True, there are digressions into the neurotic compulsions of Coleridge, the subtle velleities of Virginia Woolf’s characters, and the radiant verisimilitudes of Velazquez, but the main thrust of this book is towards a new kind of gestalt. Parks’s turnaround came courtesy of breathing exercises he read about in a book with the deliriously unappealing title: A Headache in the Pelvis. The authors stressed that the “paradoxical relaxation” aimed for could be achieved only under their own medical supervision, but Parks was desperate – and disciplined – enough to go it alone.
The relief from his chronic pain was dramatic: “Suddenly my belly drew a huge breath, absolutely unexpected, and a great warm wave flooded down my body from top to toe. I nearly drowned. Shocked and tensed, I sat up and opened my eyes. ‘What in God’s name was that?’.” It would be misrepresenting Parks if I portrayed him as going belly-up to his breathy belly – in fact, his journey back to health was circuitous, while throughout he retained his gentle but insistent scepticism – no credulous crystal-dangler he. Nevertheless, there was no gainsaying the intense effects of these breathing exercises or the even more intense ones when Parks begins Shiatsu massage – then the Big One: fullblown Vipassana meditation.
Here is an insistent scepticism – and an even more insistent humour. I think it’s this ability to crack a deadpan joke, whether discussing his bowel movements or the doughnut addiction of a doctor friend, that makes Parks’s descriptions of the romantic internal landscape of the meditational pupil – jagged peaks of ego lit by lightning, deluges of watery remorse – so compelling. There’s this, and his screamingly funny pen portrait of an overweight and slightly lecherous American guru who nonetheless – or perhaps because of this – is wholly authentic.
I’ve been interested in Buddhism for years, but I would say that Parks’s account of the transformations that occur to him when he goes first on a three and then on a ten-day silent meditation retreat is among the most convincing I’ve read. The realignment that Parks achieves is not some high-flown transcendence, but more akin to GK Chesterton’s credo that “even mere existence, reduced to its most primary limits [is] extraordinary enough to be exciting”.
Then, towards the end of this elegant and rewarding book it began to bother me that I was enjoying Teach us to Sit Still quite as much as I was, simply because I was its ideal reader: another questing middle-aged writer with his own undelivered prize speeches (Parks digresses hilariously on the false humility of self-deprecating Booker prize-winners) and his own chronic pain. At the time of reading Parks’s book I was plagued by a torn ligament in my shoulder and, like the author, I am a stressed man who cannot find an hour in the day to sit down and breathe easily. The parallels don’t stop there: Parks grew up in Finchley, North London I was only a couple of miles away in East Finchley. True, I didn’t up sticks and move to Italy, and nor do I have the unusual mental diplopia – and again, Parks evokes this brilliantly – that comes with being bilingual.
And nor do I have Parks’s lightness of touch. It’s difficult to think of a memoir that manages to be at once as intrusive of its subject as a Turps laser, while still managing to leave the emotional tissue surrounding it entirely untouched so that while we hear of Parks’s wife and children, we never feel we have intruded on their lives.
But then, although I finished this book a few weeks ago and put it to one side, it has managed to stay with me, like an inverse corollary of the pain that it so marvellously evokes. In a world dominated by cheap self-revelation and quack self-help, I suspect that Teach us to Sit Still may be the real thing: a work of genuine consolation that shows the way out of the dark wood of middle age in which everyone, at some time or another, will inevitably find themselves lost.
This review originally appeared in the Times on 26 June 2010
Real Meals: Kebabs
The latest Real Meals column is here:
I often have a kebab, though not as often as I might. In my part of the world – and along countless other urban arterial roads the length and breadth of the land – you can proceed from one samey shopping parade to the next, your forward movement registered only by the thinning and thickening of the stylised doner kebabs depicted on the signs vertically mounted above fast-food joints. What is it about the kebab? And more to the point – if you’ll forgive the pun – what is it about the Turkish community, which has percolated into this country with scarcely a perturbation of the body politic?
True, from time to time, there is talk of Cyprus, or Armenia, or a multimillion-pound heroin bust – but, on the whole, all we see of the Turks among us are these lumps of compressed, ground meat greasily adhering to shopfronts. Moreover, the subtle occupation of the takeaway niche formerly occupied by fish-and-chip shops is equally unregarded. After all, a Turkish establishment will offer fish, chips, pies and kebabs – so what’s not to like?
As I say, I often have a kebab; I had one in Bexhill-on-Sea the other evening, on spying a likely establishment en route to the station. My train was due in about 15 minutes, so I had to make a decision: should I have the doner kebab (a nasty gustatory experience, its pinky-grey strips of meat visibly fizzing with bacteria) or the shish (often surprisingly good, the meat charcoal-grilled and succulent). I stress: the kebab choice is never to do with a marginal unit of cost – at most there’s a quid’s difference between the two – but a marginal unit of time.
There’s something about choosing the shish that brings out the artiste in the average kebab-joint operative. Yes, he will assure you that it will only take a few minutes but, once he’s begun barbecuing, he becomes subject to some strange atavism. Once more, he is a sheep herder, high on the Anatolian plateau. In his mind’s eye, he crouches, eyes narrowed, to spear the precious lamb chunks on his wickedly sharpened dagger. The winds howl all around, the wolves join in, the dogs yowl, the sheep “mmmaa-aaa-aaa” in dread anticipation. Outside, the yoof of Bexhill-on-Sea may be swigging Bacardi Breezers and talking arse, but inside the kebab shop it’s a mystic communion between man and fire of Zoroastrian significance. Or so I thought, as the minutes ticked away and I cursed myself for not having risked the doner: “Um, I really do have a train to catch,” I remonstrated with the Turk as he fiddled with his meaty spillikins. “I know, I know,” he shot back, “but you can’t have these underdone.” No, indeed – an underdone shish kebab would be as bad as . . . well, as bad as a doner kebab.
Needless to say, I made the train and sat in the plastic, aseptic interior as it toggled its way through Collington, Cooden Beach and Pevensey and Westham. I unwrapped the hot buttock of the kebab from its outerwear of off-white paper, and then its underwear of grey-greasy paper. Naturally, the kebab man had asked if I wanted salad – and I had consented to this. Of course, he had offered sauce – and to this, I had also agreed.
A kebab stuffed to the seams should only be attempted with an armoury of cutlery and a full roll of quilted kitchen roll to hand – but I had neither. Within seconds, the tabletop was bedizened with chunks of tomato, onion and meat, with dollops of sauce and juice.
It was a very good kebab – and I was in hog-eat-sheep heaven. Chomping on, I meditated on the bizarre fact that oblong countries invariably have bad human rights records – Turkey, of course, but also Israel/Palestine (with the nasty sub-oblongs of Gaza and the West Bank), to say nothing of Egypt, Nepal and Saudi Arabia. There must be something about the rectilinear that does it to the collective unconscious of a nation, making its inhabitants feel as if they’re all in jail together, and so they divide up into sadistic guards and cowering inmates . . .
The kebab was finished. It had taken me so long to get through £3.95 of food that the train was trundling through the outer suburbs of London. I looked down from the embanked line on the rivers of halogen light and the knots of the inebriated gathered outside late-night takeaways. It was with something like a thrill that I picked out the first, tapering oblong of a stylised doner kebab on a lit-up sign. Ah! It would be good to smell the greasy kebabs of home.
‘Tis Pity He Was a Horsley
To Sebastian Horsley’s funeral at St James’s in Piccadilly. I first met Seb in the early 1990s, he was living in Mayfair in order – or so he maintained – to be near to the prostitutes. He had the dead-white face of a Weimar cabaret compère, and the lisp of a studied aesthete. When we went out to the cash point together to get money for the dealer, Seb revealed that he had a loaded revolver back at the flat. I was furious – I’ve never liked guns, and guns and crack cocaine (as history seems to bear out), are seldom a good combo.
I can’t say I ever exactly warmed to his publically cultivated image: yet underneath the dandiacal shtick – which was time- as well as shop-worn – there lurked a sensitive, kind, tormented man. On top of addiction (itself a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder), Seb was riddled with the gamut of repetitive counting, hand-washing and magical thinking. He took smack because he was an addict, for sure, but I think he also used it to silence this psychic Babel.
He climbed on and off the wagon many of the rest of us managed to ride – but in this there was no disgrace. Less easy to take was the attitudinising – at least when you understand, as I believe I do to my marrow, that once someone has crossed the line, far from being a lifestyle choice (albeit of an arid and unprofitable kind) intoxication is nought save a pathology. I saw Seb as trapped inside a performance that he was powerless to give up – one that did for him in the end.
We joined the cortege at the top of Lower Regent Street and followed the horse-drawn hearse past Bates, the hatters. There was a representative sample of the existentialist inhabitants of the inner city: suited and booted sub-Goths twirling skull-topped canes, demi-whores in corsets with BDD (Breast Dismorphic Disorder). Stephen Fry offered me a large, soft, cool, moist hand and greetings, and then observed that we were unlikely to see the likes of such a funeral again in Soho. Unkindly, I suggested that he might prefer us to be dropping like gaudy flies, if spectacle was the object.
In fact, Stephen’s address to the mourners was measured, calm, only a little wry, and quite moving. He didn’t play to the gallery who look upon the likes of Sebastian Horsley as some kind of freak show. Seb was predeceased by a few weeks by Michael Wojas, ex-proprietor of the Colony Room, the private members club where he often hung out. I knew Michael back in the day, and used him – quite unashamedly – as the model for the barman, Hilary Edmonds, in my story Foie Humain from Liver.
As I said in the story, the real tragedy of these Soho denizens was not that they belonged to some kind of avant garde, but that the cultural revolution they spearheaded was carried forward without them: as outside in Old Compton Street everyone got gayer and happier, inside the Colony Room everyone got sadder and older. Wojas died of chronic alcoholism at 53, Horsley of a heroin overdose at 47. There’s no way you can paint up either death as anything but miserable and futile.
The God of Small Things
En route for the tiny and remote Hebridean island of St Kilda I found myself grappling with a tiny and remote problem. I have told myself time and time again that there are no technical solutions for writers, only imaginative ones – but that doesn’t stop me from falling prey to these delusions: this computer/typewriter/research will catapult the work in hand to new levels.
My tiny netbook had burnt out after I’d stupidly shut it while it was shutting down then left it to burn out its mother board. Or so Nomi, the guy in the local cyber-café-cum-phone-unlocking hangout, told me. He ordered a new mother board from Hong Kong to replace it, and when the job was done (160 shitters), we checked that it booted up and I tucked it away in my rucksack.
But on the train the keyboard obstinately refused to work at all; disaster: I had two pieces to file before I got beyond internet range in 36 hours. I called Toby the computer man: “Oh,” he said, “it sounds like this guy failed to reconnect the keyboard, it’s a simple enough job but you have to open the machine and obviously you need to know what you’re doing.”
Obviously I wouldn’t know what I was doing: I orbit the world of handiness in a space station of cackhandedness banged together out of old 2x4s and six-inch nails. Some years ago I reached the tipping point and had to acknowledge that I would probably never be able to put up a set of shelves or flambé a crème brûlée. I concur with Dr Johnson that to be unhandy is in itself a form of stupidity, and although I once – to please my wife – spent something like a fortnight installing a new toilet-roll holder (I did drilling and everything!), when she returned home from her holiday, she tartly observed that it was the wrong way round.
When I came off the phone and was sitting there gently weeping, the young man sitting in the seat behind me leant over and said, “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation and I think I might be able to fix your computer.” Yes, bizarre – but true: a good computer Samaritan. A Phillips screwdriver was quickly obtained from the train guard and Alex (for this was his name) set to work. I couldn’t bear to look, given that manipulations like this seem like neurosurgery to me. Within what seemed to be a few minutes, Alex had done it and the world breathed a collective sigh of relief, safe in the knowledge that it would have another pretentious art catalogue essay by Will Self after all.
Alex wasn’t just a whizz at mending computers, he was also a soon-to-be-qualified psychiatric nurse who was thinking of going on to qualify in law so he could act as an advocate for mentally ill people. Moreover, he also grew all his vegetables on allotment near his home in Glasgow, and liked to go bare-bones backpacking around the Highlands. Indeed, rather like Bruno who took me down the London sewers a few weeks ago, he was one of those young men who seem to move lightly and efficiently around the world, and to me – who when young moved heavily and inefficiently around the world, trashing bits of it along the way – this seems far more of a miracle than a pathetic little netbook.
If I Ruled Television: Less is more
This is the speech that Will Self delivered at the Broadcast and Beyond conference on 19 May 2010 in which he addressed an audience of professional broadcasters and told them what he would do if he ruled television:
To me, if there’s a spirit of British television it’s this: a title sequence for a current affairs or news programme that unites the individual viewer with the commonality.
Back when I were a wee lad and Michael Barrat’s hairstyle dripped over his forehead like a melting ice cream, the Nationwide title sequence quickened my pulse every time. A snappy clarion of horns, a rappel of strings: “Dada-daaa-Dada-daaa-Dada-daaa!” The Good Word by Johnny Scott leaping down the scale as archetypes of modern Britain appeared in quick succession: a car accelerating up on to the Severn Bridge; a man with a child in his arms; the Tyne at Newcastle; a man speaking on a car phone the size of a small car; electricity pylons stalking across countryside; the ectomorphic cooling towers of a power station with sheep grazing in the foreground; a train disgorging commuters – to look upon each of these was to experience a thrill of recognition – this is us, that could be me – but most of all, as the threads of Ns and Ws merged in the centre of the screen to form a spinning cog or mandala suggestive of that mystical desideratum, technological progress: You. Are. Here!
It was the same buzz for me watching the News at Ten’s title sequence in the 1980s: the first brass trump of Johnny Pearson’s The Awakening sounding somewhere in the heavens, then the earth, cloud-shrouded and spinning in space – Who are we? the sequence implied, alien visitors perhaps, intent on abducting Alastair Burnet and subjecting him to perverse sexual experimentation – but no! because as the timpani began to chunter: “Brrrumbumbumdoodoodooo! Brrrumbumbumdoodoodooo!” And the POV swooped down we sensed that we were both invaders and invaded – a suspicion rapidly confirmed as we curveted along the Thames and came to a screeching halt, vis-a-vis Big Ben with the famous bongs hammering home exactly the same message: You-bong! Are-bong! Here-bongggg!
It’s a well-known axiom of the character that the cruelest of people are also the most sentimental – so the cage fighter boxer cries at the Andrex puppy while Myra Hindley knits baby bootees. I suppose, as a professional satirist, my title sequence foible represents the same extreme cognitive dissonance: for I loathe patriotism of any kind – regarding my British nationality as an accident of birth on a par with a cleft palate; and I hate the thought of belonging to any demographic group, class or even club; while, as for the spirit of the times, the ceaselessly doubled rhythms of contemporaneity – well, much as it pains me to admit it, in my frenzied evacuation from the Dunkirk of the present, back towards an imperfectly recalled – and so wholly romanticised – past, I resemble just about every other bad tempered old bitch and bastard in the realm.
And yet … and yet, even the asinine title sequence for the news on BBC News 24 still does it to me every time. As the stream of scarlet info-spunk spurts around the world from satellite dish to satellite dish, arcing over Matt Frei’s shoulder, skimming past Reeta Chakrabarti’s cheek – “Doo-d’doo-doo! Doo-d’doo-doo!” – so my pulse quickens and my heart swells with a wholly perverse pride: we may be a shit country … I think to myself – “Doo-d’doo-doo! Doo-d’doo-doo!” – … a nation of buy-to-letters, City wide-boys and knicker-boxers moored off Europe – “Doo-d’doo-doo! Doo-d’doo-doo!” – … and we may be the complaisant poodles of US foreign policy – “Doo-d’doo-doo! Doo-d’doo-doo!” – but, by golly, look at those kiddies hula-hooping in the South African townships, and those bearded Afghanis earnestly talking to our man in the blue flak jacket, they know what we all know – “Doo-d’doo-doo! Doo-d’doo-doo!” – that our glory days will never be over so long as – “Doo-d’doo-doo! Doo-d’doo-doo!”, the red jism homes in on the great commode of TV Centre – we still make such brilliant news title sequences!
The brief I was given for this lecture was as baggy as the pants a morbidly obese TV viewer’s just removed so he can watch his umpteenth entertainment factual on gastric band and tummy-tuck operations in comfort while snacking on 99 tubes of Pringles. It was quite simply this: If I Ruled Television? And so, here is my first royal commandment: There shalt be long news programme title sequences – incredibly long, so long they take up whole hours of broadcast time on all channels, so long that they induce a collective hallucination in viewers that they are, once more, part of a commonality who are all watching the same shows in the same place, at the same time. All watching the news! All watching Corrie! All watching the Magic-bloody-Roundabout! All watching Yosser Hughes nutting another unsympathetic official and crying out, “Giss a job!” All watching the little boy traumatically watching his mother getting – metaphorically speaking – a good seeing-to by a squaddie in Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, and indeed, all watching Potter himself, in his final television interview during which he informed the perkily brown, handsome walnut formerly known as Melvyn Bragg that he called his cancerous tumor, Rupert. And I think you all know why.
Simon Cowell may worry that the pool of available British talent has been drained, but as his have been some of the few shows to consistently gain ratings up above 10 million, I venture to suggest that it may actually have been this fact alone that’s poisoned the water supply. But then again let’s face it: British television has been in steady decline for years now – albeit through no fault of its own. In decline, because what made British television seem great was that it operated as a medium through which the country dialogued with itself: we were a small enough and homogeneous enough society that the tube was a speaking tube, one end pressed against broadcasters’ lips, the other against viewers’ eyes so they could read our lips.
There are a few programmes that in recent years have seemed to pull off this trick – the talent show we know about, and the celebs eating kangaroo testicles, and the wannabe celebs eating kangaroo testicles, and the kangaroos trying to stop David Attenborough getting at their testicles – but they aren’t actually the real thing: they are passivity-inducing entertainments, not rousers of public debate. So, let’s turn back the clock, let’s do away with multiplatform delivery, watch-on-demand, and the balkanization of the bandwidth that means that there’s a channel for every available foodstuff (my favourite being Lettuce TV, its ident a perky radicchio leaf with a cartoon rabbit nibbling an L, a T and a V shapes out of it). Because really, there’s no pressing need for more than three terrestrial channels: two public service and one commercial.
Indeed, why stop at terrestrial, when what I really mean is that there’s no need for more than three channels altogether. This shall be my second commandment: Rip up the cable! Stack the satellite dishes! Re-analogue the signal! And while we’re at it, remember black and white? It’s a fact that every medium’s perceived fidelity is a function of its novelty – the first time people heard scratchy Victrolas playing the Volga Boat song they thought Chaliapin was standing in the room with them; while the first time people saw films of trains choo-chooing towards them out of the screen they turned tail and fled.
Sure, I don’t expect the reintroduction of black and white television to be met with great enthusiasm by our mephedrone-snorting iPad-rubbing yoof, but give ‘em a few months and they’ll be amazed to discover that greyscale has become a scintillating spectrum, while a sole tinny speaker in the base of the television delivers all the punch of Dolby surround-sound. Think of the benefits of this savage curtailment in the amount and technical sophistication of television produced: for the taxpayer a drastic improvement in the quality of product delivered by their license fee, and for the commercial advertiser an enormous increase in the reach of their spend. I was in Hollywood a couple of years ago and graciously took a meeting in Culver City with Michael Lynton, the head of Sony Pictures. It emerged that what exercised him the most was the advent of PVRs. He told me: “In the 70s there were maybe 60 or 70 movies released a year – now it’s 400. If we want to get people into the multiplexes we have to focus our big TV advertising on the weekend before release, but now, well, if they skip the ads … ”
Of course, it would help if the studios also reduced the amount of releases, but still, I feel confident that if we go back to this future we could also see a revivified British film industry – and wouldn’t that be something? I was hoping to see Jeremy Hunt, the new Culture Secretary, here this afternoon, taking time out from his lambada classes to rub frilly shoulders with us power-dressers. With his background in IT, PR, directory publishing and flogging educational courses to Johnny Foreigner he’s ideally suited – under my benign aegis – to oversee this retrenchment of British TV. If he behaves himself, I’ll even allow him to keep a salary somewhere in the region of 20 times that of the most lowly gofer on the most crappy documentary that airs in the graveyard slot: which will henceforth be 10.30pm, as my three channels all cease transmission by midnight, and only begin broadcasting in the middle of the following morning.
Because, you guessed it, that’s my next commandment: a savage curtailment of salaries. I know that altruistic folk such as you realise we’ve all got to tighten our belts a few score notches, but what better way than to lead by example in this most trailblazing of industries and head back to the kind of pay differentials there were in the late 1970s? Back then there was widespread understanding that the expression “television personality” was an oxymoron to set alongside “military intelligence” or “light well”; TV hoofers and talking heads may have been divvied up a decent wad but there was none of the likes of Wossy creaming off millions for asking superannuated starlets if they’re wearing underpants. Vast emoluments for Simon-coated-with-Cuprinol-Cowells and Jeremy-tailpipe-Clarksons of this world don’t just represent the tail wagging the dog of television, they’re akin to every single viewer in the country standing there with a steaming bag full of freshly presented ordure.
I blame New Labour’s much-vaunted policy of choice: choice in schools, choice in healthcare – these were only ever delusions: rich people have choices in all these things, poor people have to take what’s handed out to them, and in the coming climate there are going to be no free lunches – Turkey Twizzlers or otherwise. I’m sure Jeremy Hunt, as a supporter of David Cameron’s “big society” understands that letting the people have too much of a choice when it comes to television is an equally pernicious idea, after all you supported the Digital Economy Act, now why don’t you enact some more radical restrictions on the great tide of free effluent that’s engulfing us? Currently, the average adult Briton watches four hours of television a day. Four hours! With an eight-hour working day, an average hour’s commute, an hour or so for sucking off a Turkey Twizzler and another hour shouting at your kids to stop playing Call of Duty on their Xboxes, this leaves no time at all for the kind of voluntarism that our new prime minister assures us is going to rebuild broken Britain.
We have to find some more time somewhere, people – and a sharp reduction in television viewing would seem the best place to begin. Accordingly, my fourth royal commandment is to limit television viewing per adult to an average to two hours a day.
Released from their burden of choice I see the great British public getting out there and exercising – thus obviating the need for all those documentaries on obesity and all that spectator sport; involving themselves in charities – thus curtailing any requirement for heart-rending appeals shows – no more Red Nose Day telethon! No more Children in Need! Oh, happy day! Hosannas! – and now at last there will be an answer for Channel 4 executives to that terrible and vexing question: what can we find to replace Big Brother in the schedules? The answer is simple, guys: in place of reality television, we’ll have reality, just as in place of Strictly Ballroom we’ll have ballroom dancing, and in place of sniggering at talentless people, Britons will cultivate their own talents.
Look, I realise that you are probably the least receptive audience possible for my new ideas on broadcasting. I understand that your lives have been dedicated to making more television, and that you believe in what you do – you don’t see yourselves as mere manufacturers of the cultural equivalent of bubble-wrap: something for people to idly pop while their brains run in neutral. You quite reasonably view yourselves as integral to British culture. But I ask you: wouldn’t it be something of a relief to not have to be ever-expanding? And wouldn’t it reduce the pressure on you all if you didn’t have to be all things to all viewers, if your content could be tailored to appeal to people who have proven appetite for what you do? And if rather than being driven by the new technology to dilute both revenue streams and the creativity they support, you were to become its masters?
Which brings me to my fifth commandment: Thou shalt ignore da yoof. Recently, the BBC has been screening a series of 1980s-themed programmes, and on the Review Show the other evening I saw some cultural wonk propose that the reason for an upsurge in interest in this terminally naff decade was: da yoof. Bollocks, da yoof couldn’t give a toss about the 1980s, and I bet my sagging middle-aged denim backside that the audience for the Boy George biopic on Sunday evening and the 80s docco that followed it were almost exclusively Baby Boomers in their 40s and 50s.
A big problem for you senior broadcasters is that you mostly grew up in a society in which da yoof were becoming the majority: the reason why the 1960s and then the 1970s were such influential decades was this burgeoning of the young postwar generation. But now we’re all middle aged – and we’re in the majority. There have been no youth movements since the late 1970s that have had the remotest influence on mainstream culture: what did acid house rave give us to compare with 60s psychedelics – a few Tango ads is about it. The avant garde has become something to flog Right Guard with.
No, if the kids have anything to teach us it’s that their sole maxim in life was “Don’t wanna pay, won’t pay” and will no doubt soon be: “Can’t pay – won’t pay.” Still, what can you expect of an entire generation that has been reared on the fantasy that anyone can be a star if you only put a camera in front of them, especially when that camera was embedded in a mobile phone, and that clip was then uploaded to YouTube and seen around the world? Only shit things – like shit itself – are free, ipso facto: free is shit. In one of my own areas of work, journalism, I see the depredations wrought by content providers running scared with the free barbarians in hot pursuit: newspaper circulations falling five and 10% a year, basically because no one dared from the get-go to assert loud and clear: the opinions of Gary down the pub on world politics aren’t worth a fly’s fart in a hurricane. In my other area of expertise, writing fiction, it’s often remarked – by those who know no better – that, “Everyone has a novel in them”, which may be true, but the business of a functioning cultural industry is to make sure that stays inside them, because it’s crap.
OK, obviously the entire three-channels-only riff was just that: a riff. I don’t rule television; in fact, I barely have control over my own set, which is either babbling Cartoon Network at my eight-year-old or reruns of Sex in the City at my wife. But I do think there’s some truth in the adage that less is more. Now that the movies are self-destructing in a spiral of downward marketing and not-so-special effects, television is unique in being an informational resource, a mass entertainment medium and a high artistic one. The balance between public and commercial models in this country has produced great television – and I believe it can continue to do so.
However, user-generated content and file sharing – these are the pincers of the cancerous crab that’s gnawing away at all our creative industries, so please don’t allow it to consume television – don’t end up like the music business, with all the talent having to go on the road in order earn a crust. I mean, there’s only so many times the punters will pitch up for Grand Designs Live before they head round to Kevin McCloud’s own house and torch it. Pretty please do what it takes to put together a funding model for commercial television: sponsorship – I can wear it; subscription cable – better still. The argument that we don’t have sufficient demand here to fund the kind of productions that HBO put out won’t altogether wash – the secret of HBO’s success is as much the licence it grants its content providers as the budgets it affords. Besides, why not consider a subscription cable channel originated here but sold in the US? This could be a commercial proposition, or it could be a more valid revenue stream for the state broadcaster, whose core undertaking – in my view – beyond news and current affairs, should always be loss-leading content.
Clearly, a complete free-for-all in the commercial sector can only benefit the biggest players, whether they’re content providers, platform builders, broadcasters – or all three. The Ruperts and Richards of this world are like the fictional character of Hiram Potter, the multimillionaire press baron in Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, according to Potter: “A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on its circulation, and you know what the circulation depends on.” Well, I don’t believe any of you take that view 100% about television, nor do you have to be a pinko who lives by sucking pages of the Guardian dipped in semi-skimmed milk to think that there has to be regulation in broadcasting that helps to foster radical innovation specifically for minority interests.
The BBC has always been anomalous in our national life – and it continues to be so. When George Orwell satirised it as The Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four and furnished this bogey-bureau with observations drawn from his own wartime experience as a BBC radio talks producer, he was as ever very close to the bone: a huge public-service broadcaster like the BBC is more suited to a Soviet-era communist regime than our own deregulated dystopia. Mark Thompson is only the latest BBC supremo to realise that the threat to its revenue stream lies in success quite as much as failure. The BBC is now so big, and operates across so many markets, territories and media, that it is in danger of sucking the life out of whole swaths of the private sector, let alone the other public-service broadcasters.
But you know this – and you probably also appreciate the institutional inertia that means that once an organisation has grown to a certain size it becomes impossible for it to countenance its own diminution, yet successive governments always half-look to morbidly-obese Auntie herself for the self-discipline required to shed all those pounds. If Jeremy Hunt is serious about tackling the politics of British television then he’ll need to get out from behind all the post-Thatcher and now post-Hutton bad blood that lies between the BBC and government; he’ll have to disregard his own strategic inclinations – which will be to play politics with the PBS. He’ll also need to go against his own free-marketeering instincts: the whole concept of imposing the market ethos on public services has failed in this country – it’s failed in the NHS, it’s failed in schools, and it’s failed in broadcasting; hell, it’s even failed in the markets themselves. Someone needs to have the balls to geld the BBC and get it trotting back round the paddock rather than galloping madly through every room of everyone’s house everywhere in the world.
Still, we must be sympathetic; after all, it’s painful for politicians too: they feel our pain, and they feel their own a lot more intensely. Despite the huge ratings, the first prime ministerial electoral debate secured, it remains the case that politics is essentially showbiz for ugly people – ugly people who are, paradoxically, vain. But if the debates taught us anything it was not that the British are a sophisticated electorate, willing to make new choices on the basis of new policies, but that they are a very sophisticated television audience. Let’s recall: we spend four hours a day watching television on average, whereas I doubt even the most committed anorak spends four hours a day reading Lib-Dem position papers.
The Lib-Dem bounce in the polls after the first debate was a positive reaction to a good piece of television, but as the second and then the third debate ground on, viewers tired of the spectacle that had all the intrinsic excitement of watching three six-year-olds chuck darts at the bull’s eye while standing two feet in front of it. And because the Boy Cleggster was really doing well as a TV performer, it’s no surprise that he couldn’t translate this into an electoral result for his party: we may watch a lot of TV, but we aren’t complete morons.
We aren’t complete morons, and we understand that there are testing times ahead – but things couldn’t go on the way they were, I mean, to take just one example: how many media studies graduates can a country physically produce before it begins sinking beneath the waves under the weight of them? No, the harsh truth is that recessions can often be very stimulating for creativity: once again, less becomes more, and people are compelled to cheaply innovate rather than expensively replicate existing formulas. The ideal, surely, must remain the same: to make television worth sitting down for, not simply television that people can’t be bothered to stand up and switch off.
Shakespeare & Company interview
Watch Will Self being interviewed at the Shakespeare & Company festival in Paris at the Louis Roederer Champagne website here.
The crime of the queue
The latest Madness of Crowds column:
To the Musée d’Orsay in Paris for an exhibition entitled “Crime et châtiment”, which celebrates (can this be right?) the 190 years of French punition between Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau’s calling for the abolition of the death penalty (1791) and its final abolition (1981). On a chilly June morning, with the wind blowing grit off the quais, now would seem a good time to meditate on the bizarre fate of Saint-Fargeau himself.
Allegedly the casting voter for the regicide of Louis XVI, he was assassinated in January 1793, on the eve of the king’s execution, by a former member of the Garde du Corps. The usual Revolutionary canonisation followed: body laid out in the Place Vendôme, buried in the Panthéon, then a four-act musical celebrating his life staged within a month of his death. A cartoon for JL David’s painting of Saint-Fargeau’s final martyred moments is on show inside the Musée, together with his later Death of Marat. But what’s weighing on me, comme d’habitude, is the madness of the crowd.
It’s only 10.30am and there are hundreds of them swarming around the entrances and grudgingly sorting themselves into long, snaking lines. It looks as if a formidable pan-European moiety awoke with a start in its chain hotels and rushed along here for a little crime et châtiment of its own.
What is it that makes us put ourselves through this torture, this ordeal-by-boredom designed to prove our aesthetic blamelessness? I say “we”, but of course I mean “them”, for my companion and I soon made with our press cards and swanned inside. But hey, c’mon – before you start inveighing against me for this queue-jumping, please observe that I am writing about “Crime et châtiment”, although probably not in the way the Musée d’Orsay’s PR flacks would prefer.
In truth, I’ve come to regard my membership of the NUJ as effectual solely in such situations. Indeed, I even think of it as the National Union of Jumpers, since I’ve bunked into more museums, art galleries and historic sites than I care to remember on the strength of my avowed commitment to fair wages and working conditions for all manner of hacks. Yet think not unkindly of me, for my childhood memories of the terrifying press of vulturine humanity in search of artificial carrion are seared deep. In 1969, in Amsterdam, my parents insisted on dragging me to a huge Rembrandt tercentennial exhibition where the punters were almost tearing chunks out of each other, so keen were they to get inside the Rijksmuseum.
And then again, far from one’s first trip to the Louvre being a breathless dash in the style of Godard’s Bande à part, like me you probably found yourself shuffling in a herd of schoolchildren, wheeled en masse to confront the tiny, glassed-in postage stamp of La Joconde, while wondering: “What’s so great about that?” Indeed, it sometimes seems to me that there’s an inverse correlation between the size of the object on view and the size of the crowds that swarm about it.
There is timed entry to exhibitions these days, so in theory there need be no queuing. But need be doesn’t really enter into it: the museums must increase their throughput, and so the queue is simply relocated inside the exhibition. Nowadays, no signature show is complete without its halting
march and the stop-glimpse-start of the hallowed objects.
Where will it all end? Every time I attend some fashionable Hoxton opening and see the great mob of the rich, the aristocratic and the useless teeming about the entrance to a gallery that cannot possibly contain them, it occurs to me that, were the more proletarian queue for a museum to be bussed in, a Terror of some kind would undoubtedly ensue.
All of this courses through my mind as we stumble through the semi-darkness of “Crime et châtiment”. Ahead of me there’s an object that seems to be the focus of considerable attention, the queue backing up and lumping into a throng. What’s this? Why, it’s Madame Guillotine herself, in all her steely finesse, her gaunt and wooden exactitude. But who sits below? Not cackling, stitching, purling tricoteuses, but a couple of plump security guards, walkie-talkies warbling on their hips. The crowd is cowed, sedated by the gloom and its own animal heat.
We move on – our time will come.
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