Books
When the world was at one. According to the BBC broadcaster Nick Clarke, Britain is in cultural decline - and television is largely to blame. Is it really as bad as all that? By Robert Winder
Published 09 June 2003
The Shadow of a Nation: the changing face of Britain
Nick Clarke Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 277pp, £20
ISBN 0297607707
English is a language comfortably stocked with off- the-peg phrases to the effect that things are getting worse. If they are not going to the dogs, they are going downhill, from bad to worse, down the drain, the plughole, or to hell in a handcart. They are running to seed, on the ebb, in decline or on the way out, and are often collapsing, falling apart or spinning out of control. This has been true since medieval times, when the Latin ubi sunt formula - where are they now? - provided the bass note for elegy after elegy. Recently we have imported a couple of American equivalents - we can be running out of gas or dumbing down - but the theme remains the same. Civilisation as we know it is hanging by a thread.
Nick Clarke's jubilee-inspired social history of the past 50 years is quick to see our Elizabethan age as one of decline and disarray, and has no doubt where to lay the blame: the "villain of the piece" is "the box in the corner". The rise of television, its blaring populism and the culture of celebrity it inspires has encouraged the country to slip its moorings and drift on a choppy tide of cynicism, envy and discontent. It has undermined once-respected institutions and professions by depicting teachers as slobs, lawyers as charlatans, businessmen as greedy fat cats and the police as corrupt. Along with its bilious handmaidens - the tabloid newspapers - it thrives on discord and unhappiness, which it simultaneously promotes and bemoans.
These are important arguments, and well worth debating at length. The jury is still out on what the impact of today's mass-market, multi-channel television will be. Clarke, who presents the BBC's World at One, grew up at a time when there was no television in the mornings or on Sundays: who knows what effect round-the-clock cartoons and vampire fantasies will have on today's children? But rather than arguing the case, Clarke has put together, a la Lytton Strachey, brief lives of a handful of typical celebrity-mongers. Taken as an ensemble they are intended to dramatise the compromises and vulgarities that have led to our fall from grace.
Princess Margaret's flighty, pointless life allowed the media to get their fangs into both the royal family and the royal idea; Arthur Scargill wrecked the trade union movement by promoting a narcissistic class war, when a more sentimental appeal on behalf of the nation's coalminers - heroes of the British underground - might have inspired both sympathy and action. A comparison between Elizabeth David and Delia Smith reveals a slide from the idea of food as a sensual and aesthetic fantasy to an impress-your-neighbours chore. Charles Saatchi and David Frost feature as potent but empty icons of advertising, fashion and self-promotion.
Clarke is able to demonstrate with reference to this arbitrary group (it would not be hard to choose six figures who tell a different story) that success, wealth and fame are not index-linked to talent. This is hardly new, but Clarke finds some nice passing ironies: the more cookery programmes we watch, the less we cook; and the more the working class shrinks, the more we consider ourselves members of it (68 per cent of us, according to a MORI poll in 2002). And he succeeds in describing a world, or at least a country, suffering what he calls "the dry rot of unreality".
Throughout, he looks back in anguish with an eye more attuned to what has been lost than what has been gained. As such, he runs the risk of seeming ridiculous, little more than a nostalgic whinger. When people lament the loss of the certainties that seemed to govern life in the past, they are often grieving only the loss of their own youthful convictions. And Clarke begins with an assertion as bold as it is questionable. "Everyone knew where they were, and who they were back in the 1950s," he writes. Can this be true? Everyone? Was no one lost or confused, dejected or alienated, back in those halcyon, orderly times when sugar, bacon and butter were rationed, when the memories of the war dead still ached every day, when Britain's once supreme place in world affairs had been mauled by decolonisation, when the new cold war threatened to engulf us altogether?
Clarke chooses his own father to represent the dutiful ethics to which "everyone" subscribed. A noted journalist, his father kept careful notes, itemising his spending on sausage rolls and prunes and tabulating the journey times on the railway. He quotes with amusement his father's response to parenthood. "If I take myself aside for a second I can see all kinds of squalid things ahead," moans the budding writer, fearing the pram in the hall. "We ain't got a home, nor a stick of furniture, nor a stitch of clothing. We shall be two people tied to an infant in a squalid screaming flat . . ."
Is this the work of a man who knew where he was and what he was? Or is it what nervous dads have said and thought for centuries, and still do think and say? Clarke contents himself with the observation that "it wasn't as bad as all that", but declines to let his father's panicky attitude dent his central argument. Perhaps he is right that for his father this was a practical rather than an identity crisis, not sufficient in itself to shake his faith in the larger absolutes: the crown or the church. But though he does concede that some things have improved in the second Elizabethan age ("starting handles were a wretched nuisance"), he does not develop this into what would, if taken seriously, be a mighty list. Quite apart from the new technologies to which we are all addicted - at the coronation, even widespread international travel was a thing of the future - the past 50 years have seen some far-reaching alterations in Britain (the greater liberation of women and the scale of modern immigration, just to name two) which barely rate a mention in this sad story.
In the end, is it really so terrible that modern life should throw up a Delia Smith - "providing reliable recipes for the masses" - rather than an Elizabeth David, who wrote delicious hymns to sunny Mediterranean foodstuffs not even available in austere Britain? If that is as bad as it gets, then all may not be lost. Perhaps the best bon mot comes from Germaine Greer. "This is not a threat to civilisation as we know it," she writes of the reality-show, tabloid culture that makes Clarke grind his teeth. "It is civilisation as we know it." Which is a hard-headed concession that civilisation is not stable. And there might be something futile in wondering whether this is a good idea or not. It's a bit like growing old: it doesn't much matter what we think, because it's going to happen anyway. The only question is how to make the best of it. Fashionable pessimism is all very well; it shows breeding. But even a half-empty bottle, looked at from another angle, has plenty of juice left in it.
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