r e a l r e v i e w . i e

Recently, Stephen Fry made a speech to BAFTA, in which he said that television wasn’t quite as good as it used to be; that it was clearly more aimed at demographics than was once the case; that it didn’t challenge the audience as it should.

Now, this is a pretty uncontroversial statement, albeit one that seems a bit odd coming from Stephen Fry. After all, this is the man who made and starred in Kingdom, and has a nice line in persuading the BBC to film him while he goes on holidays before calling it a documentary. Still, he’s clearly got a point and, even if it’s obvious to most people outside TV-society, there’s not many people within that society bothering to make it. It’s a shame (but drearily predictable) that the press have instead reported it as an attack on Doctor Who, on account of how Stephen Fry had the gall to say it’s not an adult programme - for no better reason than that it, um, happens to be perfectly true. Doctor Who fans across the world were infuriated, apart from the very few millions with a functioning sense of perspective, and of course those who couldn’t give a toss what Stephen Fry says about anything.

The only mistake Stephen Fry made was in not going far enough. When he mentions actors being made to wear seatbelts, or programmes not wishing to offend, he suggests a world where TV is enslaved to a faceless bureaucracy. This may well be true, but it’s not the cause of the problem; the defining obsession of the last fifteen years isn’t a bureaucratic mentality, but a corporate one. I don’t mean this in the sense of Evil Corporations, but something more insidious and subtle; namely that we’ve been quietly encouraged to view society entirely in the same terms as we view a business and, because it’s now so commonplace, many people have stopped noticing just how much this mentality defines almost everything in our culture.

I could produce all sorts of examples at this point: I could talk about how the prevailing view of politicians as people who should run the finances, and society as a thing that just sort-of-happens around the economic framework, a view that would have been unthinkable even in the early 1980s; I could mention the glib references to things such as the “Nanny State”, a two-word objection to the role of government (a body legislating for the public good) that would once have been met with blank incomprehension. The overwhelming majority of our commentariat are so used to thinking about society in corporate terms that they lazily transplant business rules onto entire nations, and very little about current economic debate makes much sense if you don’t bear that in mind. Take Social Welfare, and the low-level resentment with which it’s viewed by many, even as a concept; this comes from an instinctive view that we should be able to somehow fire people who aren’t producing, and moronic ideas like “workfare” come almost entirely from a conditioned, instinctive desire to get the nation’s employees (sorry, citizens) doing something. “Make people work for the dole” isn’t an economic or social idea, it’s a purely aesthetic one.

Aesthetics are defined by culture, so it’s culture that should take centre stage. Over the last fifteen years, popular culture in Britain and Ireland has become increasingly self-absorbed, increasingly unwilling to make any jabs at the establishment or run the risk of making its audience uncomfortable. This has long since been a problem, ever since people like David E. Kelley got their hands on television and started filling it with their warm-milk brand of evil, and it became perfectly acceptable to portray characters in any drama as having an endless stream of money from a non-specific job; however, as the background has changed, it’s now more glaringly obvious than ever before*. This is a time when the political paradigms of the last couple of decades are shifting or imploding, when the economic prosperity shared by all (except the poor, but of course they didn’t really matter) has been exposed as a Visa bill that we kept avoiding by increasing the credit limit, when the truisms peddled by out leaders (The Markets Will Decide, What’s Good For Business Is Good For Ireland, Get On The Ladder, Reward Enterprise) have exploded and spattered everyone with claggy grey shrapnel. Economically and socially, these are times of hardship. But culturally…?

Culturally, this is as exciting a time as anyone could hope to live through. The placid complacency of the last couple of decades that gripped our media-classes has fallen to bits, and nothing is yet taking its place beyond a vague sense of austerity. All in all it’s time for a new aesthetic, a new idiom, some shiny new movement in music or television or cinema or gaming or whatever it is the internet does. So why, given that we’re in a society that’s ripe for reinvention, is it so difficult to remember a time when popular culture was been more banal than it is now?

One of the charges that used to be levelled at TV was “dumbing down”, which has now been superseded by Fry’s charge of demographic blandness. These are all linked to the phenomena know as Political Correctness, which I’ve long since argued doesn’t actually exist at all… however, in a sense it does, it’s just called “political” instead of “Corporate”. The vast majority of popular culture is firmly enslaved to corporate mentality, and one of the key axioms of that belief is that a product should never run the risk of offending anyone. It’s a universal truth that no film should risk having a minority figure as a villain, even though I’d imagine that Lawrence Fishburn and Denzel Washington would be as game for wearing fake scars and putting on an Evil English accent as anyone; this isn’t borne of any political pressure, it’s because films are financed by businesspeople and they don’t want to risk alienating a black demographic. Dumbing Down, Political Correctness and Demographics are all a form of graded blanding-out, a process of removing anything unusual or challenging or eccentric from stories, in case it a particular section of the market objects.

Of course, this is nothing new; it’s just that it has permeated the minds of those who make the films in the first place. The best example was the BBC’s only ambitious drama of the last year, Five Days. It was multi-stranded, and intelligent, and had some cracking characters and a decent cast; then, about half way through, it revealed one of the central figures had been to a terrorist training camp. As soon as this was revealed, the character said he was very sorry and very stupid and shouldn’t have done it… and that was it. Now, seeing a drama do something as crass as introducing a topic like Islamist terrorism and then change the subject before things get too awkward is bad enough. Worse, though, was that it was somehow supposed to be worthy that the issue had been raised at all, even though the programme had fuck-all to say about it. There was a time when raising uncomfortable truths was just the sort of thing that drama should do - programmes like I Claudius, The Boys From The Blackstuff, Our Friends in the North, Prime Suspect and Queer as Folk were all obsessed, in their own very different ways, with showing viewers a view of society they’d never seen before. There’s still the occasional programme doing it – Bodies comes to mind, and the Torchwood mini-series had elements of this - but these are very much the exception.

It’s fashionable to associate the risk-averse nature of modern popular storytelling to patrician voices in the BBC assuming they speak for the people. In fact, it’s just that the maximise-the-target-market mentality has become the default setting for anyone involved in drama. Young creative-types like to imagine they’re on the edge, stifled by The Man, but in fact are so fully a part of the establishment and don’t even realise it. They produce bland programmes for exactly the same reason that a generation of property-development programmes have made everyone paint their walls in neutral colours – the most easily-sold product has become the default aesthetic. The recent, appalling, unforgiveably bowdlerised BBC adaptation of Money got this point across, albeit unintentionally. John Self was a grasping, unpleasant and slightly stupid character making a shit film, but his film also sounded six times as textured as the actual programme we were watching – in much the same way that his gaudy 1980s apartment was far more interesting, and full of character, than any of the houses Sarah Beeney advises people to produce. Everything in our culture aspires to be tasteful – a meaningless word that has somehow acquired meaning, a shorthand for a well-matched ambient atmosphere that alienates no-one and says nothing. The only debates anyone now has about television is how it can compete with the internet. Discussing content is ridiculous.

If all this is sailing pretty close to nostalgia, I might as well add that the vast majority of popular culture has always been crap, and that a fair slice of today’s television is better than what came before it. Documentaries are the things that leap to mind here – Welcome to Lagos and Wonders of the Solar System were tremendous efforts that benefited from the increased budget and exposure documentaries are now given - while “family programming” has enjoyed a renaissance after a long ten years where Ant and Dec were seen as the pinnacle of the genre. It’s interesting that both these break-out successes cut against the grain. Family drama has been lead by Doctor Who, widely forecast to flop when it returned, at a time when viewing-by-appointment was assumed to be dead. The resurgence of the documentary can possibly be traced back to Michael Moore**, who almost single-handedly reinvented it as something that could be shown on a cinema screen and have wide appeal. In the 80s, the thought of a documentary being in the cinema was ludicrous, certainly as ludicrous as we now find the idea that the most popular film of the year could be a romantic comedy about a time-travelling ancient Egyptian woman incarnated in the body of a shop-window dummy.

It’s perhaps interesting to finish off by looking at comedy. Ever since Brand-and-Ross, there has been much talk of comedians being afraid to be “edgy”. But comedy has been in a black hole for years, and there hasn’t been a genuinely “edgy” comedy since The Office. In the late 90s, Pegg, Wright and Stephenson tried to make Spaced about a corner of society nobody had really documented, and it wasn’t their fault that every subsequent comedy began to assume that everyone has an encyclopaedic knowledge of TV and cinema stretching back to 1968. In the last few years, the only British / Irish comedy that tried to document anything was the godawful Pulling; meanwhile, we keep being asked to pretend that The IT Crowd is acceptable, or that Peep Show is anything more than acceptable.

Comedy writers are convinced that British comedy is in a wonderful state. Of course they are; they’re in a monopoly position, where the same few names dominate all the channels that mean anything. Their comedy is selling because there’s no alternative, because we now just expect it to be toothless and vapid and about middle-class people we couldn’t give two shits about; those writing it, of course, are so enslaved to the Mentality Corporate that their work’s existence, the mere fact that it is selling, is all that really matters to them.

Here’s the clincher:-

…this is all sorts of things comedy usually isn’t; it’s silly, and irreverent, and the funniest, most accurate view of Irish politics for years. It came from the RTE sports department, from three guys who have somehow crept under the radar and wangled their way onto television. Meanwhile, the established comedy professionals keep making glib cracks on panel shows and think calling John Prescott fat, or taking the piss out of Willie O’Dea’s moustache, somehow qualifies as satire. There are no real digs about the recession, because someone might take them the wrong way.

Besides, recession is nothing to laugh about. It isn’t appropriate. It isn’t tasteful.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010 at 7:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, yes I know I haven't produced anything myself so leave me alone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.