Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse (5 page)

However, this broad consensus is only powerful if it’s genuine, and genuinely voluntary. So people were rightly outraged by the wrongful outrage provoked by ITV News presenter Charlene White’s decision not to wear a poppy on TV. This included a fair bit of racist and misogynistic abuse, much of it emanating from rightwing extremists up in arms at the disrespect they claimed she’d shown to soldiers who’d died fighting against rightwing extremists.

In a way, Charlene White is fortunate that her detractors came mainly from organisations like the English Defence League, because it’s not unknown for more respectable members of the community to have a pop at poppy-absence – and their censure is harder to shake off. The
Mirror
generated some negative publicity for the BBC out of the fact that some viewers complained about a lack of poppies on the Halloween-themed edition of
Strictly Come Dancing
, broadcast more than a week before Remembrance Sunday. And Labour MP Gerry Sutcliffe wasn’t too busy to criticise Google for sporting too small a poppy on its homepage, saying: “Around Remembrance Day it is demeaning not to have something that is spectacular.” Something more like the artillery barrage which started the Battle of the Somme, perhaps.

The effect of these criticisms is corrosive. It means that people on TV, and appearing in public in general, will come to wear poppies primarily to avoid disapproval – in fact, they’re undoubtedly doing so already. Privately they may buy and wear poppies as an act of respect or remembrance, or they may not, but publicly they’ll just wear them for a quiet life. “Lest We Forget” will be reduced to the level of remembering to check your flies are done up. That’s not a meaningful consensus any more – that’s just bland conformity.

If this development goes unchallenged, the next stage in the story of the poppy is inevitable: if people
have
to wear them to be
deemed respectable, then gradually more people will start refusing as a gesture of rebellion against the establishment. The poppy will cease to be a symbol of the horror of war and of soldiers’ sacrifice and it will become a political badge of the status quo – the Unknown Soldier will be displaced by George Osborne. The fallen will be forgotten as a direct result of the efforts of those who wish to enforce their remembrance.

It’s wonderfully humane and moving if everyone wears a poppy – but only if they don’t feel they have to, and wouldn’t fear not to. Otherwise, we really might as well doll up our poppies with sequins, because they’ll have stopped meaning anything at all.

This bit is mainly about TV, although it touches on most of the old media – by which I mean books, theatre, cinema, gardening and lasagne.

Television is the medium I grew up with. As a child, time spent watching television was time when I was winning. It was my aim. With my eyes and brain nicely distracted from focusing on anything in real life, I could relax.

I still love television, partly because of all the brilliant programmes it’s generated but, to the same extent, because of all the terrible programmes and mediocre programmes and forgettable programmes. Pretty much whatever is on television, the process of reacting to it, of working out what I reckon about it, is interesting to me. Except if it’s football or a soap.

TV has gone through hell in the last few years. Its existence has been threatened by a confluence of general economic gloom, consequent creative cowardice and, most of all, the bloody internet, which seems to change everything, but particularly seeks to change the way we have fun – and I’m not even talking about porn. The poor old entertainment media could really have done without the credit crunch and the internet happening at once.

It’s been a ridiculously long time coming but it’s here at last. What’s the guy been doing? He makes Kubrick look like Barbara
Cartland. Doesn’t he understand the country’s in recession, the media in crisis? We need product – reliable product from an established name. He has fewer new ideas than Mel Brooks and Eric Idle put together! It’s a disgrace.

And, come to think of it, it’s about time we had a serious look at what some of these playwrights are earning. I reckon the cash-strapped British public have had enough of this self-appointed metropolitan artistic elite blowing Arts Council money on quills and flagons of sack. He should get himself a Dell and pay for his own booze, just like journalists. Bet he’d insist on a Mac. Wanker.

Where was I? Oh yes, William Shakespeare has at last deigned to write a new play for his adoring public, who’ve been so supportive through all the tabloid rumours of his being dead or not existing in the first place. The project is shrouded in secrecy – it’s not even clear what it’s called, being variously referred to as
Cardenio, Double Falsehood
and
The Distrest Lovers
(oh, please! That whole comedy spelling thing is so over, Bill!). Anyway I hope it doesn’t pick up where
The Two Noble Kinsmen
left off, because I thought that was shit. I preferred that dead cat bounce in Woody Allen’s form,
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
– although I did watch it on a plane, where films with any real plot just interrupt meal service.

None of the above is quite true. (Think of the money the
Sun
would save if it adopted that simple phrase.) Nevertheless, the latest research into the 18th-century play
Double Falsehood
shows it was probably based on a lost Shakespeare work, just as was unconvincingly claimed when it was first produced.

The fact that this academic re-evaluation was reported as the unearthing of a new Shakespeare play says much more about our culture’s hunger for more of the same than it does about its literary heritage. The play isn’t newly discovered, and if it were any good, it would get performed; even in its original production, the marketing seemed keener to claim that it was associated with
genius than that it contained it. So if it’s Shakespeare, it’s not his best stuff. Desperate for guaranteed hits though our media are, we have to accept that William Shakespeare, even more than Woody Allen, has peaked. Why won’t someone take a chance on brilliant young playwrights like David Hare?

This feels like an unprecedentedly derivative age. I know that almost all periods of history have considered themselves to be the most disastrous ever – and ours is no exception – but that’s the only superlative we seem to allow ourselves. In the last few years, we’ve haemorrhaged confidence in our ability to make new stuff up. It’s not just pretending we’ve found more Shakespeare instead of writing new plays, it’s the “New Mini” and the “New Beetle”, it’s ironic relaunching of Salt’n’Shake and Monster Munch – we don’t even trust ourselves to invent new sorts of starchy crap.

It infects books, cinema and television. The last few years have seen the publication of high-profile sequels to
Peter Pan, Winnie-the-Pooh
and the James Bond books. James Patterson has industrialised his novel-writing by employing a factory of uncredited writers dedicated to saving readers from the unsettling sensation of trying a new author.

Film studios, already notorious for liking new ideas to be pitched as “It’s X meets Y”, have now commuted the formula to “It’s X again!” and are reflogging the Batman and Superman franchises with accelerating regularity. And television – poor beleaguered television, the medium that once, more than any other, had the power to make people sample new things simply because it was already in their living rooms – is becoming as unappetising a rehash of leftovers from happier times as a 27 December lunch.

We Are the Champions
, which came back recently under the aegis of Sport Relief but is doubtless being pitched for a permanent return, is just another format from TV’s glory days
brought in as a substitute for anything new. And when a new programme is commissioned, it’s often an adaptation of a novel that’s already been adapted, or a drama recreating recent political events. Whatever their varying merits as viewing experiences,
Minder, Mastermind, Pride and Prejudice, Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley, Margaret, Marple, Mo, Lewis
and
Reggie Perrin
all illustrate this trend.

I find the last particularly upsetting since it’s a good remake – written, performed and produced by talented professionals – but of a brilliant original. Why do we have a broadcasting environment where the skills displayed in the remake weren’t channelled into a new idea, a different comic take on a middle-aged man undergoing a breakdown, rather than an attempt to recreate the unbetterable. I expect those that made and commissioned it would argue that the remake actually was a new take. Well, if so, have the confidence to give it a new name, to forget the original other than as a subliminal influence, rather than piggyback on people’s fondness for it and consequently dilute their perception of its excellence.

When a very capable controller of BBC1 resigned a few years ago, he was extravagantly praised for the idea of bringing
Doctor Who
and
Strictly Come Dancing
to Saturday nights. Well, if that’s an idea, it’s certainly not his. But for one new word, inexplicably lifted from the title of an Australian film, that was the line-up in the 1970s. Are we now completely confusing the sensation of invention, of creativity, with that of deft emulation?

That’s what advertisers do. But they’re only trying to capture people’s attention. Once captured, they have nothing to convey other than their clients’ messages. The effect of defensive, derivative, cowardly decision-making at publishing houses, film studios and broadcasters, of no longer searching for anything new to express, is to reduce the popular art forms, which have the power to convince, move and educate, as well as entertain,
to the same cheap bag of attention-grabbing tricks as the adverts that surround them.

And then, when they succeed in getting attention, just like an overdomesticated dog who one day catches up with a rabbit, they won’t know what to do with it.

Since I wrote this in 2010, no other new Shakespeare plays have been discovered and the revamped
We Are the Champions
seems to have got stuck in development.

In February 2009, a different broadcasting trend was getting on my nerves …

Watching paint dry will presumably be among the attractions of
Saatchi’s Best of British
(working title), Charles Saatchi’s “nationwide search to discover the next generation of artistic talent”, to be broadcast on BBC2 this autumn.

The aim is to use television to raise the profile and improve the accessibility of modern art, but it may end up using modern art to make people finally despair of television.

I’m not entirely clear what the point is. The last generation of artistic talent managed to limp to prominence without the help of an accompanying TV series. Or maybe they didn’t and the real geniuses never even bought themselves an easel (or video camera, pickled sheep, lightbulb or bed) because TV never suggested it. Maybe the country will finally get the modern art it deserves. Can’t wait.

These days, a television series is the must-have recruitment tool for any self-respecting profession: chefs, choirs, models, footballers, entrepreneurs, opera singers, pop stars, restaurateurs and novelty acts all get picked on TV. As the medium’s power
and popularity wanes, the technology is being rejigged for other uses. Just as Roman temples were bastardised for Saxon hovels and the SS Great Eastern was sent to lay telegraph cables, so the analogue bandwidth is being sold off to mobile phone companies and half the BBC’s studios are being used for storage.

And it’s patriotic, in the credit crunch, that the process by which the country’s diminishing job vacancies are filled should itself create so much employment for people in TV. But, as physics-denying executives always say: “In broadcasting, if you’re standing still, you’re moving backwards.”

So the country’s development producers have been racking their brains to think of other careers that can be staffed using television shows. Here are just a few of the ideas currently being considered by broadcasters.

You Can Bank on Me!
is a collaboration between Channel 4 and HM Treasury. Alistair Darling has given us an unprecedented challenge: we’ve got just 16 weeks to run Northern Rock into the ground. We’re on a quest to find the next generation of ludicrously overpaid alpha males bent on bringing down civilisation with their fecklessness!

Just when most bankers are repenting, resigning or both, we’ll scour the country’s estate agencies and lap-dancing clubs for their replacements.

We’re looking for people with towering self-esteem and the morals of a virus but who, when the chips are down, behave like a frightened herd of sheep scampering towards a giant mincing machine because it’s been painted to look like grass.

Keeping Up A-Peer-Ances
(working title) is where constitutional innovation meets interactive TV meets youth-u-tainment. BBC3
has challenged us to sweep aside the sticky-fingered dullards of our upper house and replace them with teenagers.

Thanks to a hastily pushed-through amendment to the Parliament Act, we’ll be temporarily ennobling 500 16-year-olds and letting them loose on all but the most vital legislation.

Watch the drug-addled, respect-averse cyber generation have their “wicked” way with the Lords Spiritual and Temporal’s powers of amendment and delay. This show will keep the 16–25 demographic away from the advertising-dependent channels which so badly need it!

Slappersearch 09
is an exciting new entertainment format coming to Sky. We’ll scour the country for the kind of publicity-hungry babe for whom attempting to sing a song, persuading a dog to dance or even going on
Big Brother
is a bit too much like hard work, but who doesn’t mind red hair or casual racism.

Orifice Productions (makers of
Pornlocution
, the ratings-grabbing tits-and-diction strand on Bravo) want to find the next generation of feisty young lasses who dare to dream but can’t be arsed to do much else.

The finale will feature footage of the winner having full sex with Prince Harry in a luxury Dubai hotel (pending Palace approval).

Have You Got IT?
is a 43-part aspiromentary coming to BBC2 in the summer. Did you have a dream? Do you love to dance or sing or write poetry or do stand-up? Did it not work out?

We want to find the next generation of people who’ve just realised that they’re going to have to get a proper job. We’ll penetrate into the very heart of the grubby flats of dreamers blessed with neither luck nor talent and persuade them to get into IT.

We’ll be there to capture on camera the moment when the spotlight our contestants imagine they’re standing in is replaced by the flickering neon of a football-pitch-sized office just off the A1 crammed with humming servers.

ITV1’s
Britain’s Next Top Benvolio
is an unrivalled opportunity for the Royal Touring Theatre to drum up interest in what many consider to be Shakespeare’s most predictable play.

Ruth Madoc, who is also playing the nurse, will head the judging panel as we scour the country for the next generation of budding thespians who for whatever reason haven’t bothered to try and become actors by any of the conventional routes.

But only one of them will get to say “We shall not ’scape a brawl!” at the Swan, High Wycombe!

First Rule of Holes: Stop D-Ging!
is an innovative format ready to launch on BBC1 whenever Mark Thompson finally resigns. We’ll scour the country for the next generation of hand-wringing functionaries willing to sizzle on the barbie of the rightwing press’s hate.

“Like a king prawn, with these guys it’s their very spinelessness that makes them palatable to predators,” jokes Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the judges.

In the last episode, the winner will be whoever makes the best job of explaining why an episode of
Songs of Praise
in which Frankie Boyle and John Sergeant spit-roast a nun was cleared for a repeat on CBeebies.

A four-part Charles Saatchi-fronted modern art show, retitled School of Saatchi, was subsequently broadcast on BBC2 in November–
December
2009. I didn’t watch it. Saatchi has since found other ways of remaining in the public eye.