Reaching For A Revolver

An article at The Grauniad on the BBC’s dire Culture Show*, which treats ‘culture’ as a form of playtime. A sort of Playdays for the metropolitan ‘culture consumer’, for whom knowing what is currently hip is more important than knowing what is worthwhile.

For example, the programme spends an inordinate amount of time on rock music which has been of decreasing cultural significance since the late 70s and now is little more than the pop music it sprang from. Although events like Glastonbury may have some sort of significance for sociological study, culturally it is no more important than the entertainment put on at any other holiday location, a sort of trendy middle-class version of this.

The same thing happened with those other aspects of popular culture that briefly flowered in the late 60s to late 70s, but died, like TV and film which the Culture Show also features to excess. Film and TV too in those decades seemed to acquire some deeper sensitivity that would take them beyond mere entertainment and grow up into forms that could be taken seriously and approach serious concerns without trivialising them.

All that has – mostly – gone now of course. That period was – unsurprisingly – the period when the TV arts and culture programmes were worth taking seriously themselves, several of which like The Ascent of Man, Civilisation etc have become all-time classics of serious TV programme making. This was mainly due to the fact that they took themselves and their subjects seriously and weren’t afraid to be serious. It was an all too brief period when it seemed that the serious (in art, politics, science, philosophy, history and every area of human endeavour) could be made popular and the popular could be therefore worth taking seriously. The sort of thing that can now only be found on the radio in a few programmes like In Our Time, Analysis and so on, on radios 3 and 4.

I suppose all this is the result of the deadening effect of the anti-elitism argument, inevitably flattening everything down towards the mediocre rather than allowing the overlooked a chance to stand – or fall - on its own merits, which was its original aim. There are signs that this anti-elitism - brought about by the wholesale adoption by the universities of academic cultural theory - is dying of its own contradictions and dead ends. However, the people now in change at places like the BBC, and other such cultural institutions, are the ones infected with its inanities whilst they were at university. So, it may take some time for any significant changes to take place in our cultural institutions, that is if they do survive this current fashion for ‘dumbing down’.

Luckily, though, with the collapse of ‘New’ Labour, people are beginning to see that the whole Left philosophy which has dominated the humanities in universities and in academia as a whole is intellectually barren, and unable to come to terms with the real world. Just as Left economic notions collapsed in the late 70s, it seems that the remnants of the Left philosophy – mainly social policy – are all now having a crisis of their own as we see that the application of these theories creates more problems and leads to more unintended consequences than the problems they were intended to solve.

I used to believe in the ideals of the Left, but now that I see what it has done from this deadening of a once thriving culture and on right throughout all the rest of its social policies, I feel it is time it should be put out of our misery.

[N.B. For an interesting discussion of the quotation my title alludes to, see here (scroll down a fair bit)]

*WARNING – this link leads to a silly little… well… I don’t know what to call it, apart from a waste of time.