Politics
Forget cool: it's greedy Britannia now
Published 04 December 2000
From Asian Babes to Zeta Jones, ours is an unashamedly decadent society
You do not have to search hard for illustrations of how decadent we have become as a society: you merely need step outside your front door, open a newspaper or switch on the television to understand that the Labour election victory of 1997 did nothing to alter the prevailing greed and materialism of modern Britain. We are a people who have grown bloated and banal, a people insidiously in thrall to money, for whom the only measure of value and fulfilment seems increasingly to be fiscal.
How else to explain the hysterical media reaction that accompanied Judith Keppel becoming the first contestant to win £1m on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, ITV's egregious game show? Or the unsavoury legal wrangling between the celebrity magazines Hello! and OK! after the latter had paid £1m for the exclusive right to publish the wedding photographs of the actors Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones? Or the threat of a strike from the England rugby team, who less than a decade ago were committed amateurs playing the game, if not for fun, certainly for something more noble than simply money?
And how else to explain the decision by Leeds United to pay a record-breaking £18m transfer fee for Rio Ferdinand? Newspapers reported that the 22-year-old defender, not satisfied with earning an estimated £30,000 per week at his new club, had demanded a severance payment of at least £1m from West Ham, the team that had nurtured his talents from boyhood. Or the action of Lord Hollick, a Labour- supporting newspaper proprietor, who thought so little of the once great Daily Express that he sold it for £125m to Richard Desmond, a career pornographer whose fortune was amassed through publishing skin titles such as Asian Babes?
Time was, however, when such stories as the Douglas-Zeta Jones wedding would have merited no more than a minor paragraph in a respectable broadsheet. The self-confessed sex addict Douglas, after all, long ago entered the twilight of what was already a mediocre Hollywood career.
But such is our appetite for celebrity gossip that it was no surprise to see a photograph of the self-savouring couple, tricked up in opulent wedding garb, splashed across the front page of the Times (and across the red-top tabloids as well).
That these plutocrats should then have asked for and received £1m from a magazine for their wedding snaps (a new and disturbing trend among celebrities) suggests that we have sunk to a level that even our greatest cultural pessimists did not think possible.
On Saturday afternoon, conducting my own one-man strike against watching England's rugby players in action, I went to have my hair cut at a local women's salon (one of the girls in the shop is my younger sister's friend). I was bewildered by the experience (even if the haircut I received was pretty good). Not only were copies of OK! and Hello! scattered around the shop, the conversation led seamlessly from wonder at the calm of Judith Keppel on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? ("She was a real toff") to what each of the hairstylists would do if they won the Lottery (a staple, this one) to the admirable extravagance of Elton John ("You can't blame him, can you?").
I could have screamed; where, I wondered, could one find respite from this incessant money chatter? And it got worse. On Saturday night, my wife and I met up with some old friends. Before too long, in search of a subject of common interest, the conversation had settled on . . . yep, you guessed it, money. The trigger, this time, was that one of the women had noticed that another was wearing a particularly "white diamond" in her engagement ring. Soon everyone was talking about Keppel and her million pounds, and what they would do with a comparable amount.
"What would this money mean to you?" the multimillionaire Chris Tarrant gleefully asks his hapless contestants on the game show, whenever they are confronted with the opportunity of winning life-transforming amounts. Their answers have a sad inevitability: this money would mean a new car, a new house and, although they never say so, a new life. And that is the crux of the matter: capitalism endlessly stimulates desires that can never be ful- filled, forcing us to believe that if only we had more money, everything would be all for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
E M Forster, in Howard's End (1910), offered a convincing portrait of working-class aspiration in the figure of Leonard Bast, a lonely autodidact who longed to be part of the world of learning and high culture. In Forster's novel, Bast is befriended (and later rejected) by the Schlegel sisters, liberal intellectuals who are amused by the young man's earnestness and clumsy striving. But Bast is poor and feels humiliated when drawn into the sisters' circle, humiliated not so much by his lack of money but by what money can buy - in this instance, the time to read, listen to music and to think.
It is impossible to believe that anyone would create such a character in today's decadent Britain - because a contemporary Leonard Bast would not be wasting time reading and going to concerts; he would be trading financial futures, working for a dotcom start-up, or peddling celebrity gossip on a newspaper diary.
And if he ever found himself on national television, being asked by Tarrant what he would do if he were to win £1m, he would most certainly say . . . well, does it really need saying?
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