Taylor Swift has just released 1989 and 12 Years a Slave has won best picture at the Oscars. Kim Kardashian and Kanye West recently wed in Florence and Stephen Fry is hosting the Baftas. Mark Bonnar, by the way, is killing it on Line of Duty. And did you see Dapper Laughs on Newsnight, apologising in a demure turtle neck for making a joke about rape? Europe is mired in a debt crisis, the New Statesman has turned 101, and here’s the line up for Alan Carr’s Chatty Man: Phillip Schofield, Cher Lloyd, Pharrell Williams and Nicole Scherzinger.
Step into the warm bath of 2014 – when there were still vestiges of coalition-era bonhomie; before Brexit and Dominic Cummings exposed Britain’s gnarly, divided soul; while Pelé, David Bowie and the Queen were still regnant; long before Emily (in Paris) wittered her inanities into our ear canals; and when there were still a few opportunities left to watch Gordon Ramsay verbally abuse a beleaguered, broke restaurateur in an American flyover state. We had not yet jumped headfirst into the world-by-algorithm; we were blissfully unaware of just how good Donald Trump would be at tweeting – life was good.
The BBC – cognisant of this national yearning for a happier time – has whacked the great big NOSTALGIA button. The first episode of Celebrity Traitors airs tonight, like a friendly embrace from Nick Clegg. Stephen Fry, Alan Carr, Charlotte Church, Paloma Faith, Tom Daley, Jonathan Ross, Clare Balding and a coterie of hangers-on will join Claudia Winkleman in a Scottish castle to play Britain’s favourite reality TV game. This is pre-influencer, old-fashioned, establishment fame – which is to say, almost none of these people are creatures of 2025. Say what you like about all the innovating forces of big tech, AI and the smartphone economy: mainstream cultural production is obsessed with the past.
An entire subgenre of criticism has emerged, with the sole purpose of making this redundantly banal observation. And here are the attendant complaints: there are too many remakes (live-action Snow White), too many sequels (another Avengers movie – how?), no new stories (whence the creativity of Pixar’s imperial phase?). Everything is mimesis; nothing is original. Whatever happened to the instinct to Make It New, as Ezra Pound beseeched his fellow modernists? The cast list for Celebrity Traitors is merely further evidence of this backslide into a repetitive, flattened universe – producers seeking inspiration from 11 years ago, because why bother thinking about what’s relevant now?
Yap yap yap. Enough! And not because the point is wrong – culture is stagnant, the revolutionising influence of technology on artistic production was overstated, this is a list of people last interesting in 2014. But the point is ahistorical. Cultural novelty has not been an unassailable virtue for long. Take the entirely self-referential Romans, for example, and their centuries-long tradition of carving men’s heads out of Carrara marble. Even high-agency societies are susceptible to mimesis.
So why all the societal self-flagellation? We have wrongly assumed that everyone who came before us was sharper, more innovative, and making more novel stuff. Our current stasis is, in truth, the default setting. And so: a reality TV show that should have been produced 11 years ago? A slightly dated attitude to commissioning at the BBC? Another live-action remake? It’s nothing to fret about. History is long, and it bends towards Stephen Fry on your TV screen. But novelty will return.
[Further reading: GB News will never love Kemi Badenoch]
Content from our partners
Related
