About Camilla

I was hoping not to have to say anything about the royal family here for a long while; fortunately, the excellent Bonnie Greer has pretty much said it for me.

Want to know why the #RoyalFamily are going nowhere?

They're the space where a "body language expert" can ply their wares ;
You can project your own life on them: the good; the bad and the ugly;
The national #piñata for anything and everything.

They know it, too.#Camilla https://t.co/gK1svGiMlC

— Bonnie Greer (@Bonn1eGreer) October 17, 2022

About the queue

The queue to view the Queen’s coffin will live on, in sociology theses if not in blessed memory, mainly because the end point was a bit of a disappointment. A few people, especially those with some kind of military background, had prepared some sort of ritual (a salute, a curtsey, just a brisk nod) but many, even after all those hours living off sandwiches and some warped folk memory of the Blitz spirit, spent their 10 seconds of communion with the late monarch frozen in the headlights, so afraid of committing some arcane faux pas that they just stared, then waddled off.

An analogy with Brexit seems apt. People definitely wanted Brexit, but many of them weren’t sure why, and even more had no idea what to do after it had happened. Endless iterations of “we’ve got our country back” aren’t really a basis for operating a major, if declining, 21st-century economy. And gawping mutely at a wooden box under a flag for a fraction of a minute is no substitute for a functioning constitution.

I’ve consumed the events of the past week and a half with a sort of baffled scepticism. As I’ve said before, I wish no ill on the Queen, and I hope her family and friends have had a chance to grieve properly. And I don’t really have anything against the people in the queue; they simply have a hobby that doesn’t ring my particular bell, like golf or potholing or light opera. But this morning I discovered that two people I vaguely know through social media have had medical appointments cancelled at the last moment, because it was thought to be more important that NHS staff get a chance to watch the funeral. My scepticism is hardening into anger; to mangle Elvis Costello, I used to be amused, now I fully intend to be disgusted.

PS: Will the sentimental Stalinism never end? Corgi owners throughout the land claim their dogs are in mourning too...

PPS: From Mic Wright, a trilogy of invective that goes into more detail. (This is part 3, links to 1 & 2 beneath the pic.)

PPPS: From the new Private Eye:

About the Queen

And so the Queen finally enters Valhalla, not lasting quite long enough to tell us what she thought of Cobra Kai season five. Now is not the time or place to cast aspersions on the late monarch. Whatever you think of the institution itself, she clearly discharged her role with commitment and aplomb; and, in any case, she's someone’s mother, someone’s grandmother and so on. That said, we seem to have entered a moment – with uncomfortable similarities to the period following the death of her daughter-in-law – when those who aren’t swept up in the mood of collective melancholy feel uncomfortable about conducting business as usual. We don’t mock the Queen herself, but surely some of the bloody awful poetry and awkward corporate tweets are fair game? And as for faded celebrities trying to get in the act...

As far as big public events go, it seems that the effective shutdown of normal service at the BBC and other broadcasters when Prince Philip died last year is now rightly seen as overkill; but the laissez-faire attitude from the Palace has led to some anomalies and inconsistencies. So there was cricket, but no football. And we were allowed a few daft game shows on Saturday night, even if they were shunted to BBC2, but not the Last Night of Proms. This last cancellation seems particularly odd; wouldn’t a bit of sentimental flag-waving be just the ticket? And there are precedents. In 2001, the Last Night took place four days after the 9/11 attacks, surely a more brutal shock to the collective system than the passing of a 96-year-old? The mood was a bit more sombre than usual, exemplified by Leonard Slatkin conducting Barber’s Adagio for Strings. And it was beautiful and respectful and wholly right.   

Not about the Jubilee

No, I will not be indulging in bunting-related shenanigans over this inordinately extended weekend, and not just because even Radio 4 has taken to calling the whole thing “PLATTY JUBES”. Instead, here are two things that have amused me recently. First, Jacques Derrida playing cricket.

And then this, which may or may not be sincere: 

Niche film twitter question: is the French title of Emmanuelle 2, Emmanuelle: L'antivierge (1975), a pun on Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972)?

— Matthew Sweet (@DrMatthewSweet) June 1, 2022

About vandalism

In the spirit of Georges Le Gloupier, a man dressed as an old lady yesterday leapt from his wheelchair and entarted the Mona Lisa, apparently with an environmental agenda. No harm done (the world's most overrated painting is protected by glass) but publicity was achieved, which was presumably the point.

Meanwhile, the good folk in charge of Stonehenge have projected images of the Queen onto the sarsens, annoying a few pagans and prompting derision from much of Twitter.

Question: which act was the more worthwhile (aesthetically or otherwise)?

About Fergie

Today I was (very briefly) on Radio 4’s Feedback programme, among several grumbling about their imbecilic interview with Sarah Ferguson, who was briefly famous in the 80s.

About Prince Philip again

There is much generic media mulch sustaining a collective derangement over the death of an old, old man, but one or two useful responses – very few of them originating in Britain, sadly – have appeared. Anthony Lane in the New Yorker, for example, who analyses Philip’s strange social status, half macho action man and half placid househusband (and to some in Vanuatu, of course, a god), wittily but not without sympathy. And while others compile jolly listicles about the Duke’s various sub-Bernard-Manning one-liners (“slitty eyes”, ho ho ho), Lane pulls out one quote that is at once genuinely funny and rather poignant. Called upon to cut the ribbon at a new college building, he declared:

A lot of time and energy has been spent on arranging for you to listen to me to take a long time to declare open a building which everyone knows is open already.

It’s as if he was entirely clear-eyed, fully aware of the daftness of his role, but even if he drew attention to it, nobody listened; like Brian declaring he’s not the Messiah, or a first draft for a particularly bleak sitcom, one in which Tom Good never dares to try self-sufficiency, Reggie Perrin never goes for that naked swim, and they just carry on and on in an unpleasant dream from which they can’t be roused. I almost feel sorry for the old boy.

PS: Patrick Freyne in the Irish Times a few weeks ago:

Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.

PPS: Stewart Lee on a collective delusion from years past: 

PPPS: Michael Rosen, whose nib appears to have been sharpened by his recent brush with death, on the monarchy: 

I gather 

they give us continuity 

I gather that 

if we didn't have them 

we wouldn't feel continuous. 

If I want continuity 

I read an old book 

I gather 

they give us permanence. 

I gather that 

if we didn't have them 

we wouldn't feel permanent. 

If I want permanence 

I look at a rock.

PPPPS: And I’m not sure who did this, or how sincerely it was intended but, um...

PPPPPS: Clearly someone didn’t think the above was quite mad enough. This is what passes these days for proper journalism by a proper journalist in a proper newspaper:

About Prince Philip

I will not be pointing and laughing at an old man who has just died, nor at a woman who has lost her husband of over 70 years. However, I hope I’ll be permitted to raise an eyebrow at the various media organisations that have seen fit to pad out what’s at best a 20-minute story (he’s dead; here’s some archive of when he was alive; here are some people saying nice things about him) into a rolling news juggernaut that’s swept all other programming before it. The BBC in particular is tugging its forelock across all channels, which is pretty impressive for an organisation that’s supposedly a quivering nest of Trotskyite wokeness.

Special mention though to Reuters which ran a live feed of an aerial view of Buckingham Palace, which would have been an odd thing to do even if Prince Philip had died there (he was at Windsor Castle) and then it turned out the footage was of the Tower of London anyway.

PS: A reminder of the wonderful Kastom people of Vanuatu, who worshipped the late Prince as a god.

PPS: And this.

PPPS:

PPPPS: The BBC. Eight hours. Across all channels. Now try to imagine what it’ll be like when *she* goes...

About The Crown

The Crown has been one of the most successful TV products of recent years, and it’s not difficult to see why. It’s the story of the most famous family in the world, whose loves, losses and fashion choices are hung upon with a devotion that must have even the Kardashians seething with envy.

But, according to some – including Oliver Dowden, the Culture Secretary – fans of the show need to be reminded that The Crown is not a scrupulously accurate documentary and some of the stuff has been, you know, made up. Aside from the fact that this could apply to pretty much any nominally historical drama, it rather misses the point of how the British monarchy works its spell.

In his 1867 text The English Constitution, Walter Bagehot identifies the success of the political system as a seamless meshing between the mundane efficiencies of good governance and a more ethereal, ornate institution, the presence of which is to entrance those who are to be governed, and a good many onlookers as well:

In fact, the mass of the English people yield a deference rather to something else than to their rulers. They defer to what we may call the theatrical show of society. A certain state passes before them; a certain pomp of great men; a certain spectacle of beautiful women; a wonderful scene of wealth and enjoyment is displayed, and they are coerced by it. Their imagination is bowed down; they feel they are not equal to the life which is revealed to them.

Bagehot argued that for this part of the system to work, an air of mystery must be maintained: “We must not let daylight in upon magic.” Obviously the modern Royals have had to tolerate a level of intrusion that Victoria would never have countenanced, but there is still a sense that they are somehow beyond the mundane realities that afflict our tiny lives. Of course, only a minority, the sort of diehard monarchists who camp out for three days to catch a glimpse of a passing coach, accept this as an empirical fact; and another minority reject the whole institution altogether. There’s a third section, though – larger than the other two combined, I reckon — that knows what’s on offer is a “theatrical show” — but is prepared to go along for the ride, just as they go along with soap operas and structured reality TV. They know what they are being presented with isn’t the full-blown meat-and-mucus reality, that these are people performing a role, acting out a script, but they’ll suspend disbelief because, well, life feels a bit nicer if they do. Few adults believe in Father Christmas either, as a literal entity, but they believe in the power of the story and woe betide if you ruin that magic with nasty, Grinchy, Scroogey daylight.

Dowden’s complaint, surely, is not that The Crown is fiction; it is that it’s the wrong, unofficial, unsanctioned fiction, a type of theatrical show to which we are less likely to defer. One that succeeds as art but fails as politics. Or at least the type of politics that he wants to prevail.

PS: I was on LBC just now, reiterating the above in a more garbled manner.

About stuff

Three things I found in the past few days.

About prorogation

Jamie Reid’s 1977 image of the Queen has gone from iconoclastic to iconic and back again; inevitably for the work of an old Situationist, it’s been détourned and/or recuperated more times than I’ve had hot safety pins. Here’s this morning’s edition of Spanish paper ABC:

To be honest, I don’t know what the classic punk and/or Situationist position on Brexit would have been; probably squatting in the middle, lobbing paving slabs at both sides. John(ny) Rotten/Lydon has reinvented himself as a Faragiste but apparently hasn’t always been that way inclined. And this article by Padraig Reidy (which also hijacks the essence of that 1977 image) points out how the “potential H-bomb” has been reclaimed as an emblem of hope against Brexit by her mortal foes, the liberal chattering classes. It’s another flavour of détournement, I suppose, but a polite one.

Also, not big, not clever from Mark Thomas, but funny:

I know we have to coordinate and organise to fight a no deal Brexit but it can’t hurt to pray for a well timed intervention in the form of an autoerotic accident.

— Mark Thomas (@markthomasinfo) August 29, 2019

PS: Coincidentally, someone has catalogued a letter I wrote to Select magazine (gulp) a quarter of a century ago.

About the Earl of Rocksavage

There may or may not be a rumour that the Duchess of Cambridge (the one who’s married to the bald one, not the one who’s married to the ginger one, who people hate because they’re racist, I think) has had a falling-out with someone I’d never heard of until a couple of days ago.

She’s called Sarah Hanbury in real life, apparently, but in the weird neverwhere where this sort of thing matters, she’s known as the Marchioness of Cholmondeley (pronounced “Chumley”, obviously), which is less a title, more a disreputable pub in Soho that puts on bad drag acts on Thursdays.

Of rather more interest is her husband, who’s called David (so far, so dull), an Old Etonian (fancy!) and the Marquess of Cholmondeley (see pronunciation note above), but also the Lord Great Chamberlain of England, which I assume means that one of his ancestors was tasked with wiping George II’s bottom or suchlike. Even better, before his accession to that title, he was called the Earl of Rocksavage, which just has to be one of David Bowie’s more fleeting alter egos, probably less cool than the Thin White Duke but far, far better than Screaming Lord Byron. Just imagine swaggering around with that title in your teens and twenties, only to be informed, not only that your dad’s dead, but you’ve got a new, very silly name that you’ll have to spell out for people for the rest of your life. And that your 15 minutes of fame come when your wife has, or hasn’t had a row with someone that racist royalists prefer to the other one.

Never mind, at least they’re happy.

About Lewis and Diana

Lewis Hamilton, a man who drives cars very fast, has written a poem dedicated to the memory of Princess Diana, a woman who died in a car that was was being driven very fast (but not, it must be said, by Mr Hamilton).

Englands Rose

The day we lost our Nations Rose
Tears we cried like rivers flowed,
The earth stood still
As we laid her to rest,
A day you & I
Will never forget
The people's princess
Who came to see,
The love from a Country
We'd hope she'd lead,
Englands beauty
Captured in one sweet soul,
Carried the torch
God rest her soul,
With the gift she had 
She'd light up the way,
With a smile to show us a brighter day,
Hearts still full 
of the love she gave,
20 years since she laid in her grave
There will never be another like you,
Now a shinning star in the midnight sky
I will always remember you,
Princess Diana
As our sweet nations Rose🌹

It’s not terribly good, is it? I mean, even if he’d taken the trouble to sort out the punctuation and spelling, and find some better rhymes, and learn a bit about scansion, it would still be fairly mundane.  But, hey, what do I know? Many people appear to have liked it. “Beautiful” is a very common response. “Heartfelt” as well. And, in one case, “I can’t wait to call me nan later. Read her this poem. God is great.” Some are even prompted to respond in kind:

A rose, you never used your thorns, the ones you loved abandoned you, your angel face made hearts so warm, you helped the sick... but who helped you?

offers olivercsmith90, perhaps channelling the spirit of Rik the People’s Poet.

A few, though, are less charitable:

wow your just too easy to please, now go read a John Keats poem , and see if Lewis 's poem still ranks with you!!! Yeah it probably would!

suggests simonnoble389. But sofiashinas shoots back:

You can't compare Lewis to Keats, apples and oranges. One is a champion race car driver, another is a brilliant poet. Either way Lewis's homage to Diana goes straight through my heart ❤️ and bring tears to my eyes .. he obviously loves her spirit as most of us did and still do.

Of course, Sofia is setting up a false dichotomy here; one can be “a brilliant poet” and something else as well. TS Eliot worked in a bank; Wallace Stevens sold insurance. Keats himself was a doctor. There’s nothing to say Lewis Hamilton can’t be a champion driver *and* a brilliant poet as well. I mean, his homage goes straight through Sofia’s heart and that’s what matters.

My own response to Mr Hamilton’s efforts was simple and, I hope, sincere.

You are the poet the British people deserve.

Let’s just leave it there.

The royal baby, the Society of the Spectacle and some adorable old lesbians

OK, so Kate and William are doing another baby. My immediate reaction is... well, not much, really, but apparently that’s not an option. I blame The Archers.

Allow me to explain. There I was, on a Facebook page devoted to discussing the resilient radio soap opera about sexually incontinent country folk when I raised the question of how the scriptwriters might deal with the news of the forthcoming junior royal. I also wondered aloud whether any character on the soap had ever expressed an opinion relating to the monarchy that was anything other than deliriously obsequious. For example, when the Duchess of Cornwall visited Ambridge (it being that sort of show) not a single soul made any half-jokey remark about how she’d probably murdered Diana, thus rather denting the programme’s claims to verisimilitude. Meanwhile, Linda Snell practically wet herself with delight when she came into vague proximity with the royal consort.

Someone asked whether this meant that I wanted a character to say that it was a terrible thing that a new baby is on the way. Of course not, I explained; any healthy, wanted new child should be a cause for happiness. What I might expect from one or more residents of Ambridge (I’m thinking Jim or Jazza, Pat or Matt) is at least a raised eyebrow at the torrent of media coverage, at once demented and banal, that this pregnancy will undoubtedly attract. I did try to float the idea that the people we know as “the royal family” are in fact characters in a hugely complex soap opera with more than a hint of reality TV, a Truman Show with tiaras. This may have been pushing things too far (and yes, I did drop Baudrillard and Debord into the conversation) but was it not telling that a speech by the general secretary of the TUC about the return of a Downton Abbey-era Britain was interrupted by a newsflash announcing the new tenant in the Duchess’s uterus? And that’s before we get to the timing of the announcement vis-à-vis the Scottish referendum.

“Oh, why do you have to make it so political?” they ask, implying that to question the monarchy is a political stance, whereas to support it isn’t. “You’re just being divisive. Why can’t you just let people be happy for a change?” But the thing is, if we really want something to bring us all together, to make us happy, we don’t need to seize on the fact that two rich people have created another rich person. On the same day the news came through of Kate’s pregnancy, I came across this story, from the Quad-City Times, about two women in Davenport, Iowa, who are finally able to marry each other after a relationship of – so far – 72 years. And that’s what makes me happy (albeit in a slightly choked-up, salty-eyed, I’ll-be-all-right-in-a-moment way). I wonder if they’ll mention it on The Archers.

PS: Then there’s this, via Jon Russell:

Swastikas over Asia (and the royal baby, obviously)

A few months ago, walking down Sathorn Road, one of the poshest thoroughfares in Bangkok, I passed a young Thai man wearing a t-shirt. It bore a swastika, the name and image of George Lincoln Rockwell, founder and leader of the American Nazi Party, and the slogan “WHITE POWER”.

Of course, it’s very easy to read too much into such things. In Thailand and beyond I’ve often seen people sporting texts that they clearly don’t understand; my favourite was a septuagenarian lady whose shirt was emblazoned with a Pepsi logo tweaked to say “PENIS”. But that sort of occurrence prompts nothing more than sniggering condescension on the part of farang, aka gweilo, gaijin, etc; the same westerners, incidentally, who will happily (albeit ignorantly) acquire a Chinese tattoo that proclaims their own intellectual limitations. They’re less relaxed when they see a young Asian decked out in the imagery of the Third Reich. And sometimes they voice their disapproval. In recent years, various levels of brouhaha have been provoked by a school in northern Thailand staging a Nazi-themed parade; a billboard featuring Hitler at a graduation ceremony in Bangkok; Nazi cosplay in Japan and elsewhere; and restaurants in India, Korea, Thailand and most recently Indonesia appropriating a Nazi aesthetic to promote their wares.

So is Asia a time-bomb of neo-Nazi sympathies? No, but it’s not quite as simple as that. Certainly there are widely held and openly aired attitudes to racial difference that would make many good western liberals feel slightly nauseous; and in Muslim-majority countries such as Malaysia, anti-Jewish polemic is accepted as part of the political discourse. Moreover, the historical perspective on World War II and its outcomes is different from that generally held in Europe or North America. Countries such as Britain and France were colonial occupiers and the Indian independence campaigner Subhas Chandra Bose was certainly not the only one to favour a pragmatic alliance with the Axis powers as a means of securing self-determination. The concept of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, which would supposedly have replaced the economic infrastuctures of the western empires had Japan prevailed, must have looked like an attractive alternative to being ordered around by some whey-faced product of Eton and Oxbridge.

But for the majority of people who wear swastika t-shirts or carry cuddly Hitler dolls or perform Nazi salutes at inopportune moments, it’s nothing to do with wresting the historical narrative away from its Eurocentric perspective. It’s pure, honest-to-goodness ignorance, with a side-order of not giving a shit. When Sid Vicious or Siouxsie Sioux wore the hakenkreuz, it was a conscious decision to provoke and outrage. But Asian teens today know as little about der Führer as their counterparts in London or New York know of Chairman Mao, General Tojo or Pandit Nehru. Adolf’s just this funny-looking guy from the olden days who did this wacky thing with his arm and had a bad hipster haircut. And in some ways that’s even more disconcerting to a westerner than the thought that the kids might have absorbed his ideology.

Which leads – no, bear with me for a moment – to the as-yet unnamed offspring of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Now, I wish the child no particular ill; but I’m already thoroughly sick of the media’s obsession with his gestation, birth and now his existence. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the likes of the Mail and Telegraph have gone batshit for this, but I couldn’t find any respite from the coverage on Radio 4. The next time someone bleats about the left-wing bias of the BBC, ask them why they couldn’t dredge up a single republican voice to counter the sentimental wittering. Not that I’m a particularly trenchant anti-monarchist; to me, it’s just another manifestation of tacky celebrity culture, which other people are more than welcome to enjoy but I get annoyed if it impinges on my own consciousness too much and too often. However, even the expression of this state of disgruntled apathy is too much for some of the starry-eyed supplicants; “If you really don’t care, why are you going on about it so much?” seems to be a consistent refrain on social media when commentators such as Brian Reade and Andrew Collins articulate the extent of their apathy. Well, why shouldn’t they? Why does it perturb you so? Possibly because you know that the British monarchy will never succumb to the threat of pitchforks and guillotines because that’s not the way we do things; but not caring one way or another is a psychological weapon with its own special potency.

PS: The last word on media coverage.

PPS: This is quite good as well.

Absolutely the last word on Kate Middleton’s frontbumps

Oh dear. All sorts of issues bump together; the privacy of the individual; the status of the celebrity; the power of the media; the implied misogyny of the male gaze; hooray, boobies. And yet what is there to say? Essentially, it was wrong of the photographer to take the photos and wrong of the various magazines to publish them; but it was probably also a bit dumb of the Palace to get quite so openly annoyed about it or to take it to court; a deep sigh of disappointment might have done the trick better. (And the same goes for Muslim reaction to that idiotic film that probably doesn’t even exist in its full state.) Essentially, this is the sort of crappy thing that happens to celebrities these days. Do the royals really want to be celebrities in the modern sense? Because they do have a choice, to some extent at least.

But it could be worse for them. Imagine that someone took the photos, and nobody wanted to publish them; not out of any sense of propriety, or even because of fear of legal sanctions, but because they didn’t think that anyone would care one way or the other. What would that say about the status of the monarchy today? Or – worse for the Duchess herself, maybe – what if the pictures were spurned because the dugs in question didn’t match some industry standard for bounce and perkiness? Or imagine that they were published and ignored because it turned out that all that wishful blather about the Olympics finally shaking us out of our celebrity semi-coma had come true and for now on we would only get excited about people with real talent and real personalities. And their tits, of course.

Daily Mail? Arse!

Carping about the Daily Mail is as easy and pointless as throwing confetti at a rhinoceros but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. And this time it’s (very tangentially) personal.

A few days ago, the Mail ran an article about Carole Middleton, the mother of the woman who is married to the Queen’s balder grandson. It’s a rather snotty, sneery piece, focusing on her “little social weaknesses” – which is odd because I would have thought Middleton’s story (one-time air hostess who made something of herself) matches the Mail’s default readership profile, or is at least the sort of narrative to which they aspire. But I don’t want to add to the reams that have already been written about the paper’s extraordinary ability to persuade women to read articles that tell them how vile they are.

No, the real problem comes a few paragraphs in, when the article’s author Paul Scott suddenly starts discussing one Tim Atkinson who apparently “writes a regular blog for the Party Times” (the website of the Middletons’ hugely successful business). In his blog, Tim occasionally pokes gentle fun at the royals and, on this occasion, mused about that batty Palace directive that Kate Middleton should curtsey to the offspring of Prince Andrew, her husband’s cousins, the gormless-looking ones with the bizarre headgear that looks like beige fallopian tubes. Scott quotes the post’s headline – “Sister of woman with nice arse officially inferior to Beatrice and Eugenie” – which began life as one of my tweets and which Tim A very politely asked if he could borrow, because he’s got good manners. See, I told you it was all a bit tangential. I thought the Mail asterisked words like “arse” though, preferring “derrière” or “posterior”. Apparently not.

Anyway, Tim Atkinson doesn’t write a regular blog for the Party Times. Whoever puts together the Party Times has chosen to link to Atkinson’s blog. Scott does actually mention that the offending screed “appears on the tackily titled ‘blogroll’ section”, but he doesn’t appear to understand what a blogroll is. Look, I’ve got a blogroll. It’s a roll of blogs, so that’s why it’s called a blogroll. It lists some blogs I quite like. But the people who write those blogs aren’t writing regular blogs for Cultural Snow. They’re doing it for themselves. And if Annie Bookcrossing suddenly declares that all Paraguayans should be drowned at birth, or Blackwatertown suggests that punching baby pandas in the face is fun, that’s not my problem, OK? Atkinson offers his view of the whole thing here.

OK, so Paul Scott is a silly old fart who doesn’t understand how social media works. Big deal. But the problem is, he’s writing for the Mail, which operates the most-visited news website in the world. Millions of people are (apparently) gulping down their tales of minor celebrities and their bikini malfunctions, and how Katie Holmes ate an ice cream so she’s probably OK now. Columnists such as Peter Hitchens, Melanie Phillips and Simon Heffer meanwhile bellow about the increasing banality and shallowness of modern culture, ignoring the fact that said banality is helping to pay their wages; the exquisite doublethink is neatly dissected here. But maybe they’re just like Scott, and still haven’t got to grips with how this big, strange interwebby thing really works. Maybe none of the Mail journalists really understand, and neither do the editors or the owners, and they’re all just helpless little hamsters in an Escher-like continuum of interconnected wheels that’s been thrown together for a giggle by some malevolent HAL 9000-type computer that turns out to be the cyborg love child of Mary Whitehouse and Paul Raymond. And as they die of exhaustion and embarrassment and self-loathing, the last thing they hear will be the voice of Carole Middleton explaining what a blogroll is.

The BBC, the Jubilee, the Daily Mail and the hard cash value of abject stupidity

I won’t, if you don’t mind, spend too much time pontificating on the BBC’s coverage of last weekend’s Jubilee fandango, chiefly because I didn’t watch it, apart from a brief YouTube clip of a hula-hooping Grace Jones, who was utterly superb, and a rather briefer moment of Cheryl Cole sounding as if all the toilet attendants in that world had chosen that moment to punch her in the vocal cords; or maybe she’d caught Prince Philip’s bladder infection. Apparently the rest of it wasn’t very good. 

But the subsequent commotion over the inadequacy of the Corporation’s work is about far more than mediocre pop stars and posh people looking at boats. As I understand it, the problem is that the BBC’s programming over the weekend was geared too much to celebrities who didn’t know what they were talking about. My instinct is that this is indeed a bad thing: the shift in all news media over the past 30 or so years from an emphasis on empirical facts and informed debate to vapid, glossy, concocted quasi-realities where fame (however transient) trumps ability is something to be deplored. 

What sticks in my craw, however, is that the media outlets leading the charge against the BBC are the worst offenders when it comes to replacing hard news with vacuous, airbrushed twattery. Look at the homepage of the Daily Mail. Look at the stripe of shrill banality down the right-hand side, the gibbering sub-Kardashians falling out of limos and bikinis, the gittish prattle about shoes and hair and cellulite, the cheerful dishonesty that this cynical collusion with media PR machines might in some way be described as journalism.

Ah, says the Mail, but that’s just celeb fluff. The Jubilee was a royal occasion, and worthy of more respect. Well pardon me, but which were the media organisations that hitched themselves to Diana three decades ago and turned a stuffy, self-effacing entity into just another manifestion of Celebrity Inc? Who was it who started prattling about the Queen’s grandson’s wife’s sister’s arse? Was it the BBC? Was it? The Mail and the Telegraph and the Sun are not annoyed that the BBC’s coverage of the jubilee was superficial, banal and ill-informed. They’re furious because superficial banality is what they do and they don’t like anyone else encroaching on their turf.

Now, I believe in a free press. If the Daily Mail wants to make a few quid from morons looking at pictures of other morons, it should be allowed to do so. But isn’t there a certain level of hypocrisy, cognitive dissonance even, in burrowing so deeply into the steaming shitpit of vapid, pointless celebrity, then shrieking like Cheryl Cole’s singing coach when the BBC skims a little off the top?

The problem, of course, is nothing to do with the Jubilee. The problem is the licence fee. The privilege of public funding brings with it the responsibility to maintain a certain level of quality, below which the Daily Mail happily ducks every day. But if everyone pays the licence fee, that includes a certain proportion of fudge-brained Kardashian fans who switch off if anything more demanding stumbles into view; and the BBC has a duty to cater to them as well. There’s a serious debate to be had here, and a difficult one because it touches not only on money but also on notions of cultural hierarchy and social class, and the British find it very embarrassing to talk about such things; although since the mainstream media seems entirely capable of celebrating the embodiment of inherited status and privilege without once mentioning social class, maybe it’s entirely possible to sidestep that particular elephant. But until the Mail admits that it wants to fart raw, wet stupidity into the dull eyes of its readers and what it objects to is subsidised competition for said eyes, its own contribution to that debate should not be taken seriously.

Jubilee, schmubilee

When it comes to the crunch, I just don’t care. I’d be quite relaxed if the British monarchy were to resign en masse, but I wouldn’t want to see guillotines in Grosvenor Square. I see the institution as something akin to subsidised opera: in principle it makes no sense, but it keeps a few strange, posh people out of mischief for what is, in the grand scheme of things, not that much money. There are more important battles to be fought, surely.

The difference is, of course, that opera is a minority pursuit, while a majority of Britons want us to stay happy and glorious. But do they really? They lurve the Queen, but don’t much fancy Charles, and would rather the succession skip a generation to the husband of the sister of the woman with the famous arse. But monarchy doesn’t happen that way; the whole point of it is that you get what you’re given. If the genetic tombola deemed that the next monarch would be Prince Andrew or Princess Michael of Kent or the second corgi from the left or Wee Jimmy Krankie, that’s what would happen, opinion polls be damned. Which suggests that people want a monarchy but can’t be bothered to exercise the intellectual curiosity needed to understand how it really works. Monarchy doesn’t have the democratic impulse of Britain’s Got Talent, but like all manifestations of celebrity culture, it demands a certain suspension of credulity.

Still, as I say, I’m fairly laid back about the whole thing. There’s a temptation to play the Smiths or the Sex Pistols or even McCarthy very loud, but ultimately what would be the point? If you’re doing something Jubilesque over this weekend; maybe trying to break the world record for lying in a bowl of slightly-off Coronation chicken; or watching Gary Barlow galumphing around on the roof of Buck House, desperately wanting a knighthood but stopping short of actually offering a sacrifice of his firstborn to the sovereign; or just making the same joke about the word “bunting” over and over and over again; then I hope you have a nice time of it.

As long as you remember that when you turn 86, they won’t come to your party.

Of putrefactive brainfarts and fanciful testicles

My recent ambles through the ones and zeroes have thrown up two nicely judged slabs of wording, separated by 400 years or so. First, Grace Dent, in The Independent, characterises the qualities required to be nominated for a Turner Prize as a “dogged determination to grab fanciful brainfarts and build them.” Which is, if you think about it, the same tenacity required to do anything that isn’t tedious and banal. We then turn to the anonymous surgeon who carved up the corpse of the monstrously inbred King Charles II of Spain, whose unhappy life ended in 1700. The autopsy revealed “a very small heart the size of a grain of pepper, the lungs corroded, the intestines putrefactive and gangrenous, in the kidney three large stones, a single testicle as black as coal and his head full of water.” Had chronology been more accommodating, perhaps the operation might have been recorded and entered for the Turner.