“I truly feel pity for you both. You are grown up now! And yet you still act as children, who want to do nothing but run and play. You cannot run and play all your life, Dianne!” 

Drugstore Cowboy (1989)

1992 was a bad time to graduate from university. I was lucky to have gone at all, of course; just 19% of students went on to higher education then (53% do so now). I was even more lucky to graduate without student debt. The friendly taxpayer stumped up for my tuition fees and I spent three largely untroubled years rolling around campus, giggling.

Just what is it that you want to do?
Well, we wanna be free, we wanna be free to do what we wanna do
And we wanna get loaded and we wanna have a good time

Primal Scream, Loaded (1991), after The Wild Angels (1966)

But it was a bad time to graduate, nonetheless. I remember smoking on the back step of my parents’ house on a beautiful autumn day, listening to radio news headlines about chaos in the financial markets. It was September 16 1992, Black Wednesday, and sterling had fallen out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. 

There's a disconcerting 47° slope against the Dollar, Yen and Deutschmark, and if we project in four months the Pound leg is effectively amputated, leading to a rogue leg with no hip constituency at all.

Collateley Sisters, The Day Today (1994)

The British economy nosedived, graduate salaries slumped and job opportunities dried up.1 Over that first post-university year, as it was repeatedly brought home to me that I wasn’t going to get a job in editorial at Penguin, our group of friends fell into two camps. There were a few – three or four – who found a toehold on a career path that genuinely excited them; and then there were the rest of us, who worked purely to earn money to spend in the pub. Not much money, mind you. As the theme tune to Friends (first aired in 1994) had it: ‘Your job’s a joke, you’re broke.’ 

Is there anything else you can do?
Well not much – I've not been trained
I can sit and stand, beg n' roll over

Happy Mondays, Wrote for Luck (1988)

This is, of course, a story about class. Some of us had working-class parents who had scrabbled to give us the unfair advantages they had lacked. Others came from families with a well-worn glide path from mortar board to boardroom. All of us had been carefully invested with potential; nobody had questioned whether we would fulfil it. We’d been raised on stories about turning up in London and being offered a job at the BBC by a funny little man you met on a bus, which in turn enabled you to buy a four-bedroom house in Belsize Park for £7,000. 

Why can't I have an audition? It's ridiculous. I've been to drama school. I'm good-looking. I tell you, I've a fuck sight more talent that half the rubbish that gets on television. Why can't I get on television?

Withnail & I (1987)

It’s entirely possible we would have spent our twenties in a humiliated fug even without the left hook of Black Wednesday, because being twentysomething is structurally painful. Banished from childhood and thrust into the vast anonymity of the world, the very nature of your quest – find a career, make new friends, fall in love, make a home – drives a constant, pitiless analysis of your many faults and bottomless inexperience. Almost everyone you meet, from recruiters and managers to rental agents and attractive strangers, makes an assessment of your worth. Most of them find you lacking.

Hey girl, what's it like to be in New York?
New York City – imagine that!
Tell me, what's it like to be a skateboard punk rocker?

Michelle Shocked, Anchorage (1988)

But we didn’t know this was something everyone struggled with; we thought we had been judged to be uniquely underwhelming. Our cosseted childhoods had left us unprepared for this stunted entry to the world of grown-ups. And so we lapsed into a peculiarly bourgeois strain of sulky disappointment (‘entitled’ had yet to become an insult). My grandfathers had been miners; my grandmothers had been domestic servants. As we sat in our cattle pens doing data entry, to whom could we possibly have complained? And what would we have complained about? What on earth do you do, when the world suddenly stops indulging you? There is a mature answer (try harder, learn more, focus, dig in) but we chose something else: the soft, hazy, sun-filtered option of taking a lot of illegal drugs. 

MID-TWENTIES BREAKDOWN: A period of mental collapse occurring in one’s twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one’s essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage.

Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991)

Taking drugs in the early ’90s was hardly rebellious. Youth culture was still coming down from the Second Summer of Love, and the media was full of tripped-out ravers and recycled psychedelia. We weren’t ravers, though. Rave culture had a working-class core we couldn’t penetrate, and its extrovert enthusiasm didn’t mesh with our disabling self-awareness. Instead, we aped the blissed-out insouciance and drawling disaffection of 1970s art-school freaks and dropouts; we were art-directed by Gus Van Sant, accessorising our miniskirts and oversized jackets with cigarettes and glassy stares. We consumed parts of the culture that reflected our underachievement, and there was a lot to choose from: the entire premise of Friends, the affect of Slacker (1990), the foundational text of Generation X (1991). 

Ross: What is Chandler Bing’s job?

Rachel: Oh gosh, it has something to do with numbers.

Monica: And processing.

Rachel: He carries a briefcase.

Ross: Ten seconds, you need this or you lose the game.

Friends, ‘The One with the Embryos’ (1998)

I experienced moments of total social dislocation, particularly on the Tube; a sense that I was connected to the world by a few bare strands, and that my life was nothing more than a slippery chain of accidents. I could just as easily have been a clean and neat young blonde, leaving a job in PR and going back to a fiancé, a restaurant dinner and a flat in Fulham. Being stoned enabled me: both to escape my maddening internal dialogue, and to ignore my problems. Swathed in chemical euphoria, I was constantly starring in the opening montage of my own indie film, and if I screwed up my lines I could just go again.

Most people don't know how they're gonna feel from one moment to the next. But a dope fiend has a pretty good idea. All you gotta do is look at the labels on the little bottles.

Drugstore Cowboy (1989)

Several years passed in torpor and stagnation before our sense of a birthright started to reassert itself. Some of us began to experience serious mental health and addiction issues; we all began to worry about our lungs. Couples sprung up and moved in together and we saw our smelly, chaotic lives reflected through the unimpressed gaze of new partners. The economy sprang back to life, and with barely a backward glance we scrubbed up, bit down and scrambled aboard the middle class gravy train, leaving only our affected nonchalance behind to mark where we had stood. You knew someone was moving on when an enviable purchase suddenly appeared in their home: a brand-new sofa, a fridge with a proper freezer compartment, a pram. Our thirtieth birthdays were approaching and we began – finally – to grow up. 

Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television.

Trainspotting (1996)

Sometimes now, working with people in their early twenties, underneath the bright patter about side-hustles and hype-pods I catch the same sense of desperate freefall. If 1992 was a bad time to graduate it must be even worse now, amid the relentless pulse of successive global calamities. When I’m tempted to participate in complaints about entitled young people or discourse about avocados, I try to remind myself how it felt, becoming stalled in the vastness and failing to launch. Graduating sucks, but what comes next is worse, and the single saving grace of your twenties is that eventually, they come to an end.

People may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing.

George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-72)

Next week: we sail with a wizard to find dragons via a Portakabin in South Ascot

It’s been an odd couple of weeks, waving my youngest child off to university and finding myself with an empty nest. (Tobias has taken to saying the family home is like a seaside town in winter: ‘all of the infrastructure and half of the people’.) Given that I’ve been feeling a little out of sorts (if I gave birth to you, don’t read this bit: ABANDONED, EXISTENTIALLY UNTETHERED, FALLING WEIGHTLESSLY THROUGH A PSYCHOLOGICAL SPACE OF NEAR-INFINITE PROPORTIONS) I’ve been looking for books, films or TV programmes that reflect some of this back to me, and I’ve been genuinely surprised by how little cultural coverage there is of such a common experience.

It’s not that I’ve been looking for answers, because ‘is my child allowed to grow up and leave me?’ isn’t really a question. (Well, it’s not a question you’re supposed to ask, out loud.) What I’m looking for is the feeling that somebody has been there before me, and came out the other side OK. It’s nice to have a template, a model; it’s comforting to know that you’re not the first micro-bereaved mid-lifer to watch a toddler pottering around a cafe and blurt ‘she’ll be off to university before you know it’ to her bemused granny. (Sorry, cafe lady.) So where are we all? Or, more accurately, where are the brilliant cultural artefacts that accurately represent us? Where’s my script? 

I started off by flipping through my mental Rolodex of things I’ve already consumed. There’s the Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard, a series of novels about an extended family covering a 20-year period from the late ‘30s to the late ‘50s. They feature a finely drawn portrait of a mother, Villy, and her bitterly confused relationship with her daughter Louise. As Louise grows to full adulthood and Villy grows older still, Howard gives a horribly convincing account of a relationship - already twisted by resentment and misunderstandings - whose difficulty is compounded by emotional and physical distance. 

Howard is very good at conveying this sense of lengthening space, the gap that opens at the moment of birth and just keeps growing. All of the stages, from toddler tantrums to teenage nights out, are parts of an exorable process that culminates with you standing in a vacated bedroom, looking at the things they chose to leave behind. Suddenly you don’t know anything: where they are, what they’ve eaten, how they’re feeling. The intimacy of daily family life with its intricate exchange of detail is lost overnight. Your WhatsApps make you sound like a distant aunt: are you enjoying school? Are you making friends? (Here’s a top tip: when your child finally gets in contact to ask a question - the question will be about laundry - demand three pieces of information before you tell them the answer, like a menopausal Rumpelstiltskin.) 

There’s little reassurance in the Cazalet Chronicles for the empty nester, although you will at least be distracted by how bloody good Howard is. The relationship between Villy and Louise is a portrait of pain and lifelong damage; it’s not very cheerful. And if you’re wondering where Louise’s dad is in all this, I can only repeat Hilary Mantel’s injunction on Howard - ‘Read her. That’s my advice’ - and warn you not to get your hopes up.

‘There’s no such thing as a happy family. How could there be?’ writes novelist Sarah Perry in an essay about the Cazalet Chronicles, riffing off Tolstoy’s famous opening to Anna Karenina.  This complacent and imaginatively stunted consensus - that functioning family relationships are boring, that they hold no narrative potential - began to irritate me as I looked around for comfort. I steeled myself to watch Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), a film I’d avoided because everyone said it makes you cry. (A celebrated portrait of a boy’s life from pre-school to university, it was filmed over 11 years to allow the actors to age naturally.) But by the end of it I was just cross.

Patricia Arquette’s character, Olivia, is the mother of the central character, Mason. At the end of the film as her son is packing up to go to college, Olivia turns into a snarling, sobbing wreck. After delivering some self-pitying nonsense about having nothing to look forward to except her own funeral, she screams at him to get out:

‘This is the worst day of my life. I knew this day was coming, I just didn’t think you’d be so fucking happy to be leaving.’

This is such a clumsy eruption, entirely at odds with an established character, that it can only have sprung from a failure to see Olivia as a real person. Has Richard Linklater ever met any parents? Like, parents who aren’t total fuck-ups? We feel all of these things and yet - get this - we don’t scream them at our kids. (There’s no discrete noun for ‘adult child’; it’s like the English language rejects the entire concept.) On the day they leave for university you get up after a sleepless night and you cheer them on as they kick the dust of your cherished home off their shoes, and you drive them however many hundred miles and you carry several tonnes of doohickey up and downstairs, and then you give them a hug and you walk away, carefully erasing yourself as you go. And you don’t let yourself cry until you get home and find the cold tea you made them that morning in their favourite mug.

What annoys me about this isn’t the emotions Olivia is feeling; I recognise all of them. It’s the total failure to convey the critical space between emotions and actions, which is the space where the interesting stuff of ordinary parenting happens. It’s the space where parents constantly split and reconfigure: themselves, their most cherished relationships, and their sense of what is appropriate and justified. This space contains a thousand untold stories.

Up until this point Olivia had been something of a model parent: hard-working, responsible, thoughtful, loving, physically brave. As well as being a certified grown-up she is also an actual psychology lecturer. But the film suddenly loses all interest in exploring her as an authentic person. As Mason leaves she is experiencing a fundamental rupture in the mother-child dyad, but you would expect this character in particular to simultaneously be thinking about how best to love her child and protect their future relationship. (And if that sounds like hard work, it’s because it is.) Instead of imagining how such a parent might deal with her own sadness, the script turns her into a neurotic middle-aged female lunatic to provide an oven-ready third-act catharsis. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is boring.

That aside I found Boyhood OK-to-good, although possibly that’s because it wasn’t made for me. It’s about the experience of being a young male human, written and directed by a man, and was most rapturously received by male critics. But then, where does one look to find the stories written by post-menopausal women with grown-up kids? We are not exactly over-represented in the arts. It’s almost like there might be a structural reason for that. (It was around this point in my researches, just as I was getting on my high horse, that Tobias played me ‘Poor Mum’ by Molly Drake, who was the mother and also the vocal twin of Nick Drake. A song about an ageing mother, it is so astonishingly annoying that cultural oblivion might actually be preferable.)

And so I went back to Twentieth Century Women (2016), a film written and directed by Mike Mills that’s one of my most reliable comfort blankets. Annette Bening plays a single mother, Dorothea, bringing up her son with the aid of a found family of friends and acquaintances. I absolutely love Twentieth Century Women; its characters have all kinds of flaws but in the end what matters is their intent, and their inconsistent, muddle-headed attempts to really see each other and be good to each other in amongst the serious business of living their own lives. And it has an absolutely banging New Wave soundtrack.

Mills employs an odd trick of telling you a series of stories about the central characters. Sometimes these stories are about them, and sometimes they are about their interrelationships. Each time a new story begins you think ‘Aha! And THIS will be the central narrative!’, until after an hour or so you realise there isn’t one; there are just these people and their stories. There is no central narrative, because life, and family, rarely has just one. Its texture is built up through the accumulation of stories and experiences, overlaid on personalities and preferences and dynamics, until every family, happy or unhappy, is utterly compelling. 

Twentieth Century Women is rare in its truthful depiction of adults changing and growing alongside kids; changing and growing because of their kids and other young people around them, experiencing their challenges, updating their priors, working out which principles really matter and which ones you had just acquired without much consideration. It also - which is also rare - shows the young people listening to older people and considering their points of view. There’s a wonderful scene in which Greta Gerwig’s twentysomething Abbie is playing a noisy punk record by The Raincoats and Dorothea comes into the bedroom to ask what the appeal is:

Dorothea: They’re not… very good. And they know that. Right?

Abbie: Yeah. It’s like they’ve got all this… this feeling and they don’t have any skill, and they don’t want skill because it’s really interesting what happens when your passion is bigger than the tools you have to deal with it. It creates this energy that’s raw. Isn’t it great?

As a description of young adulthood, that’s hard to beat. And the converse -which is unstated in the film, but clearly implied in Bening’s marvellously expressive face - is that getting old is about having big, powerful tools and choosing when to use them, sometimes at the expense of your passion.

Dorothea is shown as being intelligent and flexible enough to keep growing, and to recognise that while she could raise her boy alone, she could also choose to loosen her grip on her ‘ownership’ of him before he is old enough to do it himself. It’s not really a film about kids leaving home, except in the sense that everything about parenting is ultimately about kids leaving home. But this time, as with every time I’ve watched it, I felt like it had me covered.

Abbie: Having a kid seems, like, the hardest thing.

Dorothea: Yeah. How much you love the kid… you’re just pretty much screwed.

For more on cinematic mothers and their adult children, what about Carrie Fisher’s ‘Postcards from the Edge’?

Irresistible Bliss was the second album from the New York hipster band Soul Coughing (proponents of ‘deep slacker jazz’). The opening track ‘Super Bon Bon’ was a relative hit ( and breached the Top 40 in the UK when it was re-released in 2024).

4 out of 5

4 out of 5: the title of one of my favourite songs on this album, and also a state of mind. Not bad. OK. Above average. Which was something to aspire to in 1996, when British music was very average indeed.

This was the age of Britpop, which felt like the results of a public opinion survey on ‘what can you remember about the ‘60s’. And in 1996 we were suffering the worst of it: the media-confected battle between bland indie bands, and the insurmountable cringe of the officially sanctioned Cool Britannia. If the late ‘80s had been one long Boomer cultural mid-life crisis, with every middle manager blasting Brothers in Arms from the stereo as he drove his secretary to a Travelodge in his new convertible, then the ‘90s felt like their second childhood: an attempt to create a theme park version of the ‘60s, without the radical politics and the threat of nuclear apocalypse. Here’s Tony Blair in a Harold Wilson costume shaking hands with Noel and Liam, an even more stupid version of The Who (not something that had previously been thought possible). And here’s the Kod Kinks Knees-up Blur, giving us a ‘90s answer to Tommy Steele while missing that that had been a rhetorical question in the first place. Here’s Supergrass, who have somehow come as all of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich.

At least we had Jarvis Cocker, a modernised and etiolated Jake Thackray; but the British answer to American Grunge had turned out not to be something thrillingly new, but instead a mass market, microwave-ready version of a thrilling newness from thirty years ago. This was a generation trying to recreate, from memory, the records their dads had made them listen to in the ‘70s. Top of the Pops was appropriately reminiscent of those old Top of the Pops LPs, on which a covers band would wearily plod through vaguely recognisable versions of ancient hits.

Against this background, Soul Coughing sounded remarkably fresh despite being essentially a pale retread of the ‘60s New York scene. (Like the Velvet Underground and Talking Heads, they came out of a Manhattan art-music scene, this time centred on the club The Knitting Factory in Alphabet City.) But at least they weren’t trying to sound like the Velvets. They at least were aware that hip hop and electronic music existed, as did jazz and funk and new technologies that had prodded pop beyond two guitars, bass and drums. They at least acknowledged that it was, in fact, the ‘90s.

‘4 out of 5’ is a good illustration of this. It’s a sticky, intoxicating cocktail of influences: Mark degli Antoni’s woozy samples heaving into a sloshing rhythm out of which sudden tunes emerge, Sebastian Steinberg’s growling bass, Yuval Gabay’s intricate little beat, M. Doughty’s sardonic, beat poetry half-rap. Soul Coughing produced not so much songs as sound pieces, experiments and experiences. They were an impression of something that hasn’t quite happened yet. Which pretty much describes my life in the ‘90s.

The chorus of ‘4 out of 5’ is a chant composed of simple maths problems:

Four and five, therefore nine
Nine and nine, therefore eighteen
Eighteen and eighteen, therefore thirty-six
Four and five, therefore nine

This was a decent summary of my working life, which consisted of sitting in a hessian cubicle entering data into a green screen terminal. I plodded back and forth through the grimy London streets, from work to tube to flat to tube to work, surrounded by the screech of trains, the growl of traffic, the clatter of mechanical keyboards in an open plan office. That is what ‘4 out of 5’ sounds like: the bang and roar of the inchoate city, half-heard music seeping out of a pavement grate, coming from some subterranean bar the entrance to which you will never find.

The cover of their 1996 album, Irresistible Bliss, recalls that tenuous world: after computers, but before the Internet. The band’s name is rendered in Microsoft Word Art alongside a collection of junk shop and joke store finds collaged together in Paint. That’s the ‘90s, right there: a half-assed magpie acquisitiveness. Everything is a remix, everything is in flux, everything is interesting. Modern life might be rubbish, but you can make all kinds of things out of the odds and ends other folk leave behind.

In the context of Britpop, a definite 4 out of 5, I’d say. Better than average.

Soft Serve

The title of my absolute favourite song on this album, and also a glorious metaphor for late twentieth-century consumerist capitalism. Soft serve ice cream — which we Brits know as Mr Whippy, or the traditional 99 Flake — is a UHT liquid or even a powder that is flash-frozen at the moment of serving; it was invented because it was convenient to have ice cream that didn’t have to be stored in freezers. It maintains its light, creamy texture because it is full of air, ideally somewhere about 40%. There is even a persistent myth that the young Margaret Thatcher worked on formulating the British version when she was a chemist at Lyons Maid. This seems too good to be true, but let’s print the legend.

So: a mass-produced treat that is barely there at all; that was purposely designed for passing trade; an impulse purchase, made and sold in the moment; an accessory for idle afternoons, for cheap and meaningless leisure. Weightless froth: a perfect symbol for disposable petty luxuries, for planned obsolescence, for vapid marketing and meaningless advertising promises.

There is a sarcastic, disappointed tone in M. Doughty’s lyrical delivery. The ‘90s was full of cynicism about the future, and disgust at the perceived shallowness of this widening, commercialised culture. And there was the further sense that it hadn’t always been thus: that pop culture, thirty years before, had been inventive and vital and revolutionary (at least, so we were assured by endless documentaries and retrospectives). We had grown up with the idea that the ‘60s had been ‘the greatest decade in the history of the world’, as Withnail & I’s dealer Danny puts it; we were mere footnotes, the quotation generation, patching together our Cargo Cult fashions out of the cultural detritus all around us. We were living among the remains of an earlier, great culture, the decaying works of giant (sic. That’s collage culture for you: mashing up the ninth century Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer with Oasis’s idiosyncratically spelled album title).

What’s more, the generation that had apparently changed the old world had built this new one. This consumer paradise was theirs. Commercialisation had swallowed everything; they had sold hippie wigs in Woolworths, and now they were selling us flannel shirts and Union Jack dresses. Dissent had, in the words of The Baffler magazine at the time, been commodified. Every new trend was a fresh marketing option; every rebellion provided a new advertising slogan. As a result Gen X was obsessed with the horror of ‘selling out’, wary of doing anything in case it led to success, the ultimate solecism. And so we did nothing. We hung out, stayed in, got high. And we listened to ‘Soft Serve’, sweet and light like the eponymous ice cream, languid and lolloping. M. Doughty called it ‘slacker jazz’: the sound of lollygagging around on an aimless summer afternoon.

There was a voracious demand for lo-fi beats to smoke dope to, to shoot the breeze over. As well as slacker jazz outfits like Soul Coughing, G Love and Special Sauce, and Odelay-era Beck, there was also trip-hop, chill-out, acid jazz and an easy listening revival (the ‘60s the Boomers tried to hide from us). Uneasy ease was as much the sound of this era as Britpop. This was the space between so many things: the Cold War and 9/11, the City’s Big Bang and the crash of 2008, the censoriousness of the ‘80s and the Internet firehose of the new millennium, centrist governments in power and liberal democracy having apparently won.

That data entry job I had was incredibly dull and poorly paid, but I did have a job, and one that meant I could share a flat in Zone 2. A flat we could furnish with cheap accessories from IKEA because we were all surrounded with cheap consumables, a whole world of soft serve. We thought those intangible, inessential treats were just a distraction. Little did we know that that was the best we were going to get.

Also from 1996, the great classic of slacker pop, Beck’s Odelay:

Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) can’ t sleep, so he takes a job as a taxi driver on the night shift: going anywhere, anytime. This confronts him with all the worst aspects of a big city, against which political campaigner Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), looks like an angel. But Travis is incapable of wooing Betsy, and her rejection only weakens his already shaky mental health; he begins to spiral into obsessive loneliness. At first he plans to assassinate the candidate she works for but, in the end, he goes on a shooting spree to save a child prostitute, Iris (Jodie Foster). All of which means that the taxi driver is seen not as a mad, lone wolf killer, but as a hero.

The Legend

Seeing Taxi Driver for the first time as a teenager felt like being inducted into a new stage of adulthood. Here was a grown-up film. Not only was it set in the grim and gritty New York streets, but it was also a dense text, ripe for interrogation. It wasn’t a Hollywood adventure story or a carefully plotted Hitchockian thriller; it was narratively looser and more artistically controlled, an impressionistic psychological portrait packed with meaning. To me it was a new kind of cinema, not something I had consciously engaged with before.

It was also, of course, part of a new kind of cinema for America. Taxi Driver is one of the key movies of ‘the New Hollywood’, which took the techniques and approaches of the experimental Nouvelle Vague and applied them to American movies. Taxi Driver does this consciously: it includes a direct visual reference to Godard’s 1967 film Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, and marries it to a ‘50s-style score by Hitchcock’s favourite composer, Bernard Herrmann, the last work of one of the great geniuses of classical Hollywood.

The journey from Nouvelle Vague to New Hollywood was a kind of hall of mirrors, but one in which the mirrors redouble and focus, aiming bright light at previously unpenetrated murk. The French had taken the street-level grittiness of the American Film Noir of the ‘40s and developed a new visual language for a poppier ‘60s. Now that approach was being reintroduced into American cinema to create a new ‘realism’, reinventing not only movies but also the vision of the country. For instance: Travis Bickle’s obsession with the .44 Magnum revolver immediately calls to mind Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry (1971); but where Harry Callahan is just a swearier sheriff out of a Western, an authority figure whose moral correctness gives him permission to circumvent law and custom to do what’s ‘right’, Bickle is a much more questionable figure.

For Travis, self-reliant frontier individualism is not freedom but a prison. Alone among millions of other individuals, he is unable to connect; he cannot make sense of his own identity and purpose in the face of an overwhelming and implacable society. Trying to stay independent, to define himself without reference to anyone else, he drives himself mad with a young man’s rage.

As Paul Schrader’s introduction to his screenplay puts it:

He has the smell of sex about him: Sick sex, repressed sex, lonely sex, but sex nonetheless. He is a raw male force, driving forward; toward what, one cannot tell. Then one looks closer and sees the inevitable. The clock spring cannot be wound continually tighter. As the earth moves toward the sun, Travis Bickle moves toward violence.

Schrader told De Niro that the gun the actor had fantasised about using when younger was a symbol of De Niro’s talent, the hidden power he could unleash on the world. (This also gives a little Freudian insight into how Schrader thought about his own talent.) But the gun is a distance weapon, and a distancing weapon; it allows the carrier to kill at a remove, a terminal intervention without interaction.

Taxi Driver is a film about a crisis of masculinity, but it is also about a crisis of America. Schrader was inspired by his own experience of living alone in Los Angeles and feeling himself lose his connection with his surroundings; he intended it as much as a comment on the shallowness of that society as he did the fragility of the individual.

Travis, mentally unstable and a danger to himself and others, is hailed as a hero because his eventual violence resulted in the deaths of criminals, not politicians. Instead of being vilified, he is lionised; he appears to be ‘better’ than he is (better adjusted, better integrated). But the last shot of the movie tells us otherwise. Travis, having had a final, chance encounter with Betsy in which he appears to have behaved like a reasonable adult, catches sight of himself in the rearview mirror and is disgusted, instinctively flipping the reflection away so that it is replaced with the teeming streets of New York. The headlines and cover stories that say that Travis is whole, healed and a hero; but he, and we, know better.

Taxi Driver, both in its subject and its substance as a work of arthouse cinema, stands against what it sees as the commercial shallowness of ‘70s American culture. It shows the bright veneer of cultural gloss over seething social discontent. Travis’s appearance is radically different to that of the characters that surround him; with his cropped hair (and then mohican), his thrift-store western-wear and army surplus jacket, what he looks like is a punk, like all my alternative friends ten years later. He looks like the coming generation, the generation that reacted to the ‘70s with anger and nihilism.

Scorsese had to fight hard to get something so apparently uncommercial released. The fact that it was then commercially successful suggests that his vision was both right and wrong. The ‘70s audience recognised its message, and were also willing to engage with something deeper than a man in a white hat gunning down varmints in black ones.

The Reality

Part of the challenge and fascination of Taxi Driver as a work of art is that it is told entirely from the point of view of an obsessive, racist, misogynist loner whose sanity is crumbling before our eyes. It sets itself the task of looking at a crisis of masculinity, rather than society or — god forbid — femininity.

Travis is an unreliable narrator. He claims to have sent Betsy flowers, and yet his apartment is full of unsent bouquets in increasing stages of putrefaction. Is it really her he is talking to on phone, in the famous shot where the camera is forced to veer away from him in embarrassment and film an empty corridor instead? Did he ever really talk to her in the first place? Did he ever even serve with the Marines in Vietnam?

To watch the film is to sit with the worldview of a self-hating man who projects his nihilism and antagonism. Scorsese has said that he believes the film comes from a fundamentally feminist position, one that sees this form of masculinity as inherently poisonous. It is essentially a dramatisation of Germaine Greer’s maxim: ‘Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.’

...it takes macho to its logical conclusion. The better man is the man who can kill you. This one shows that kind of thinking, shows the kinds of problems some men have, bouncing back and forth between the goddesses and whores.

This can sometimes seem like the film is wolfing down its cake while shaking its head and complaining about how awful the cake is. It gets to include all kinds of transgressive language and imagery in the cause of telling us how bad it all is — which we already know, because otherwise it wouldn’t be transgressive.

Now, that language is getting less transgressive by the day. We are more aware of the Travis Bickles among us than we ever were. They are less lonely now. As Schrader has said: ‘They’re all talking to each other on the internet. When I first wrote about him, he was talking to nobody. He really was, at that point, the Underground Man. Now he’s the Internet Man.’

One of the editors on Taxi Driver was Marcia Lucas; her next project was a goofy kid’s sci-fi film made by her husband George, and that’s not the only link between Taxi Driver and Star Wars (1977). George Lucas was, at least in part, inspired by the comparative mythology of Joseph Campbell. In A Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) Campbell argues that certain heroic legends from around the world share the same basic narrative structure because they are fulfilling the same basic social purpose: they provide a metaphorical structure for the passage from childhood to adulthood. The journey of the hero — in which he leaves home to defeat monsters and returns with a prize for his people — is a model for the process by which self-obsessed and coddled children overcome their fears and narcissism to be become integrated into their society as engaged individuals, using their talents for the benefit of all. Campbell suggests that ‘it may well be that the very high incidence of neuroticism among ourselves follows from the decline among us of such effective spiritual aid.’

When George Lucas reinvented the hero’s journey in Star Wars he set in stone the structure of every Hollywood action movie since: the Call to Adventure, the Belly of the Whale, the Meeting with the Goddess, the Atonement with the Father, and the Magic Flight in return to the real world. Did Star Wars establish new rites of passage for the modern world? Well, Campbell might have been describing the present-day Star Wars fandom when he went on to say: ‘We remain fixated to the unexorcised images of our infancy, and hence disinclined to the necessary passages of our adulthood.’ But, in fairness, he warns against trying to fit these ancient patterns into modern life; society has so thoroughly changed that they can no longer be relevant.

Travis Bickle, like Luke Skywalker, has all the characteristics of a mythological hero. He is a young man from a distant rural backwater recruited into a war he barely understands; he wants to defeat the dark father, storm the evil castle and rescue the princess. He wants to be a knight errant, wandering the wild wood on his big yellow destrier. Like Galahad, he is appalled at the corruption around him; like Perceval, he wants to resist it; like Lancelot, he wants to rescue the virgin. He believes he is the main character not just of his life but of the world, and is frustrated by the world’s refusal to agree with him.

This hero’s journey cannot work in the real world. Bickle’s failure and descent into madness comes from his failure to treat the mythology as metaphor; he does not recognise the opportunity to ascend into adulthood. And Hollywood’s version of the hero’s journey has lost all contact with Campbell’s theories of initiation rites and integration into the grown-up world. It has become entirely focussed on the enchanted individual, the lone hero standing above and against society. This is the reverse of Campbell’s intention.

Taxi Driver wasn’t just part of the beginning of something, a new American arthouse cinema; it was also part of the end of something. After Star Wars, the Hollywood blockbuster took over the movies. Taxi Driver doesn’t just stand against Hollywood blockbusters: it says that the myths they enshrine can be actively dangerous, and might spawn a whole generation of Travis Bickles. The Internet Men.

1976 was considerably less alarming if you were a child. Apart from Brotherhood of Man who were almost as disturbing as Travis Bickle.

Four Seasons (2026)

: Tina Fey is about my age, so I assume she saw the Alan Alda / Carol Burnett film Four Seasons (1981) as a teenager, as I did. Which just makes her contemporary remake all the more delicious. Watching the original was, for teenage me, a tantalising window into a sophisticated, funny, grown up world, which makes the contrast with being a not at all sophisticated and frequently ludicrous grown up all the more hilarious.

One thing that struck me is that the Boomers in the Alda film are all in their forties while Fey’s Gen Xers are all in their fifties. I guess they have to be in order to have kids who have left home, but have we delayed our midlife crises the same way we delayed having kids?

The first season of this was great, so a second season was inevitable, but it was also pretty much inevitably going to be an anti-climax. It’s not as good, BUT it still has actual laughs in it, which is remarkable enough.

Star City (2026)

We have to admit we kind of lost interest in the alternate history version of the space programme in the original series For All Mankind (2019 to the present), but we’re very much enjoying this spin-off set in the USSR of the ‘60s—’70s, in which the Russians try to capitalise on reaching the Moon first, while dealing with an oppressive state and American spies.

It is, inevitably, a somewhat cartoony version of Soviet Russia, but it is very entertaining. In order to contrast it with the American original it’s full of British and colonial actors, include Anna Maxwell Martin being splendidly sinister as a KGB officer and the always-welcome Adam Nagaitis being as weird and shifty as only he can be.

Letterbox Diary

What has watched this month:

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975)

*****

So, I finally got around to watching the greatest film of all time and it turns out to be pretty good. But perhaps not at the time.

Chantal Akerman’s film is ‘slow cinema’, full of long takes with an unmoving camera, as the title character peels potatoes or has a bath or sits in an armchair, thinking. This is one of the reasons that this has been hailed as a feminist masterpiece, foregrounding unseen ‘women’s work’. And also highlighting, not coincidentally, just how dull it is.

That monotony becomes monotonous for the viewer as well, but gradually you start to realise that it is performing a narrative function. By teaching the viewer Jeanne Dielman’s routine in excruciating detail, the film sensitises you to its eventual unravelling. You start to see Jeanne’ mental anguish in her moments of inaction or wrong action. Going into rooms for no reason, starting and abandoning a series of tasks, making and remaking coffee and never drinking any of it.

Hitchcock always held up the terrifying cafe bomb sequence in The Battle of Algiers (1966) as the epitome of tension: the audience knows there is a bomb under the table even as people laugh and dance around it. Jeanne Dielman is an equal but opposite illustration of tension: not a dramatic irony, but a psychological, internal tension, a tension the audience feels build without being able to see the bomb. Not until it is too late.

I was very sorry that I had read, somewhere, the ending of the film. I wish I had seen it without that knowledge, so I’m not going to repeat it here. But I will tell you that part of Jeanne’s monotonous grind is doing sex work to keep herself and her teenage son. That sex is merely part of her rigid and unsatisfying routine is another part of the ‘70s feminist reading. It is also another task that begins to come unstuck. The eventual conclusion is a shock but, crucially, not a surprise. Having seen Jeanne slowly, quietly break apart over the previous three hours, it comes as almost inevitable.

The ‘slow cinema’ style makes for an interesting watch. At first it is a curiosity, then a bore, then, finally, a kind of deep immersion in the fiction. Meditative and engaging. The fact that it is also a gradually developing narrative of psychological insight creeps up on you, opening like a flower, with a motion you don’t see but are delighted by when you finally notice it.

This also means that the film stays with you. You absorb it while watching and then digest it over the following days. It was four-and-a-half stars when I finished it and gained half a star in retrospect for being, well… at least one of the best films ever made.

Two Prosecutors (2025)

***½

More ‘slow cinema,’ but here the metaphor is the unseen unsettling of the state, rather than the self. A newly appointed prosecutor in 1937 Stalinist Russia discovers the truth about the NKVD’s use of systematic torture and murder, and tries to do something about it.

The slowness of the film-making dramatises the inexorability of the outcome. In Hollywood’s hands this would have been full of tension and energy and personal risk. The novice prosecutor would have been angrily seeking the truth, and would have come out with at least his integrity intact. Here, instead, he is just quietly dogged in his naive quest for justice; and the state is equally dogged in its quest to see injustice done.

The wheels of the bureaucracy grind slowly and smally, but they catch up with him just as they catch up with everyone else. As the prison governor’s joke has it: ‘Do you know what Radek said when they asked him what he’d been doing before the Revolution? “I was waiting in prison.” And when they asked him: “And after the Revolution?”... “Prison was waiting for me.”’

Thames Film (1986)

*** ½

A slow documentary this time. A meditative study of the Thames mixing film of the ‘80s river with footage from the early twentieth century, and illustrations from the 18th and 19th centuries, creating an image of the Thames as living things, connecting London not just through geography but through history, too. Space and time.

With John Hurt’s narration, it inevitably brought to mind Patrick Keiller’s London (1994), but it lacked the latter’s impish sense of humour and simultaneously parodical, fantastical and insightful psychogeography.

An ‘80s seriousness in the face of the Thatcherite future, rather than the ‘90s hollow laughter from the Britain it created. And worth it for all those glimpses of ‘80s London where the nineteenth century still clung on, before it was all built over with concrete and money.

Nouvelle Vague (2025)

****

The Sight and Sound critic’s poll that ranks Jeanne Dielman as the greatest film of all time quite rightly has Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) as the best of the Nouvelle Vague French films of the ‘60s (right there in my Letterboxd Four, folks). Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (1960) is at number 38. It’s not as good a film as Cleo, but it is important. It is the opposite of Jeanne Dielman, which is a still window into the internal world. From Belmondo’s Bogartisms to the famous jump cuts, À bout de souffle is a film about film, a film by cinephile for cinephiles, by a critic for critics; it is a film in which the making, the physical and experiential object of the film itself, was more important than the plot.

And now a film about a film about film: Richard Linklater’s dramatisation about the making of À bout de souffle, which puts the Hollywood back into the film that deconstructed Hollywood. It has none of the brio or radicalism of the original, but it does have a plot, and some splendid performances. It simultaneously pokes sly fun at the pretentious critical posturing and communicates just how inventive, imaginative and innovative the movement — and Godard in particular — was.

The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968)

***½

Nigel Kneale knew the deal.

While Rowan was watching a lot of ‘90s reality programming for her piece on Big Brother, I went away and watched Nigel Kneale’s ‘60s TV play The Year of the Sex Olympics, in which he managed to predict twenty first century TV with unnerving accuracy.

It’s set in a future Britain where the populace is kept docile with a steady feed of pornography, including a sort of competitive OnlyFans in which different couples compete to appear in the Sex Olympics. When the Sex Olympics show is disrupted by an artist the producer starts to doubt his job, and volunteers for a new kind of show in which he, an old flame and their child will be marooned on an island, broadcast live around the clock as they try to survive without modern conveniences. The production is extremely period, with a lot of daft costumes and ludicrous future slang. But it does feature a young Brian Cox and a slightly less young Leonard Rossiter, so there are some splendid performances. (I have been inoculated by watching slightly too much early Doctor Who, and so can bear more of this stuff than most.) And it is fascinating to see how obvious it was where stuff was headed, even in 1968. It is particularly perceptive in seeing how reality TV would inevitably become a drama, a heightened and structured form of reality, always pushing towards greater shock and extremity.

There’s a reason why Nigel Kneale is worshipped by a certain kind of writer.

Ghost Trail (2024)

****

A Syrian refugee searches Europe for the man who tortured him while he was imprisoned. The film is particularly notable for the depiction of oppression and the refugee experience in the context of a spy thriller, which gives it a new urgency and immediacy. Themes of justice and revenge are complicated by the themes of identity and belonging that come with immigration. It features a tremendous performance from Adam Bessa as the driven but conflicted protagonist.

The Fall Guy (2024)

****

Not one of the greatest films of all time, but a lot of fun. It’s an adaptation of the 1980s TV show of the same name, but it reminded me much more of a different one: Moonlighting. It has exactly that sense of knowing precisely what kind of entertainment it is and leaning into doing it as well as it can, using the rumpled Gosling charm and Emily Blunt’s smart ease intelligently. And it has the same meta approach to the material. Set around the making of a terrible sci-fi movie, the film is a stunt-heavy action movie about stunt-heavy action movies, full of jokes about films and film-making.

The Metropolitan couldn’t help but wonder whether its lack of box office success might also have something to do with the fact that it also felt like a very Gen X film in its references, its crew — writer Drew Pearce and director David Leitch were both born in the ‘70s — its media literacy, and its meta instincts.

Badlands (1973)

****

We rewatched Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) recently and I was really struck by how the voiceover ruins it. The cod-philosophising and adolescent poetry just make the characters seem less likeable and more stupid, where the acting and direction were already having the desired effect. This is not true, however, of Holly’s (Sissy Spacek) voiceover in Badlands, which effectively complements the action and direction, adding a whole new layer to the film.

The full list is on Letterboxd

Playlist

Tobias Sturt: Here’s my favourite ten tracks for this month.

Out of Context - Library Card

Members of the Metropolitan household have started their first internship at a big corporation this week, so here’s a track about the insanity of corporate life to soundtrack it.

You’re Supposed To Be My Friend - 1990s

A friend of mine once had a gig and I got talking to a chap in the audience about how I was really there not to support my friend but to see the headline act, The Yummy Fur, because I thought they were just incredible. Anyway, that chap turned out to be Jackie McKeown, the lead singer of the Yummy Fur and now lead in the 1990s. He’s still great, too.

I Was Born (A Unicorn) - The Unicorns

Here’s a slightly more summery slice of indie pop so we can pretend we’re having fun in the sun. Which we’re not. It’s dreadful.

Strange World - La Luz

A grunge little track slightly better suited to what we are doing with our summer, which is cowering in the dark with the fans on.

Banana peel - corook

This is a lot more summery, though - musically, at least, in a delicious counterpoint to the lyrics.

pat - wished bone

Something very ‘60s singer songwriter about this one

Requiem for a Ladybug - Raya Yarbrough

Some sultry jazz for some sultry weather

Blue Chords - Shola Adisa-Farrar

A little more summer jazz

West Of Samoa - Speedy West

In case you haven’t guessed yet, the UK is having a heat wave, and this kind of weather always makes me turn to weird easy listening for comfort.

LALELEI - LEAO

And having had the easy listening version of Samoa, here’s the real thing.

The whole playlist can be found on Spotify:

There’s a lot of Soviet Russia in this month’s viewing, so here’s a link to Rowan’s piece about growing up during the Cold War:

A grim and gritty updating of Batman for the late ‘80s that put the dark back into the Dark Knight, while pushing out any sense of chivalry. An aged Bruce Wayne (55! Soooo old), realises that Gotham City has grown worse since Batman retired ten years ago, and so struggles once more into his monogrammed onesie and pointy ears to fight a feral street gang, a hypersexual psychopathic Joker and, finally, the biggest villain of all, an immigrant journalist who stands for a just and fair society: Superman.

Preface

‘Biff, Bang, Pow! Comics aren’t just for kids anymore!’

If there was one thing more common than headlines like that in the mainstream press in the late ‘80s, it was interviews with comics aficionados and professionals in the trade press complaining about headlines like that.

To be fair to that mainstream press, though, in the late ‘80s comics like The Dark Knight Returns were new -- or at least, they appeared to be new to mainstream observers. Comics about superheroes that were nevertheless not for children; comics about pulp do-gooders that were nevertheless about the moral ambiguity of crime-fighting; primary coloured cartoon strips that were nevertheless aspiring to be art. Enthusiasts were kvetching because they knew this had been going on the whole time; it was just that up till now, only kids had been paying attention.

Batman himself is an excellent example of this. The character was invented in the wake of the bolt out of the blue that was the arrival of Superman in 1938, when everyone was trying to think of a new iteration of this new idea: the superhero. Unlike the bright, sci-fi Superman, a hero who literally derives his powers from sunlight, Batman is made of older, more shadowy stuff. His Frankensteins, Bill Finger and Bob Kane, patched him together out of gothic odds and ends: Dracula, the 1926 mystery movie The Bat, the sinister, gun-toting pulp vigilante The Shadow, outlaw figures like Zorro, Robin Hood and The Scarlet Pimpernel.

In his origin, Batman’s entire purpose was to scare people:

‘Criminals are a superstitious cowardly lot. So my disguise must be able to strike terror into their hearts. I must be a creature of the night, black, terrible…’

He was supposed to be an alarming figure. His early adventures are the stuff of film noir and prohibition-era gang war, his rogue’s gallery monstrous and freakish like Dick Tracy’s mobsters, his methods summarily two-fisted with a ‘hearty sense of malice’ as Frank Miller, the writer of The Dark Knight Returns, put it.

Miller is, in fact, something of a connoisseur of pulp himself; he went on to produce the Sin City series of hard-boiled crime stories. As the ‘returns’ in the title implies, The Dark Knight Returns was not just about Bruce Wayne coming out of retirement; it was also about returning Batman to his shadowy origins.

This too was not an original ideal; Batman had already been reinvented in a gritty mode in the ‘70s by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams, who were responding to the child-friendly antics of the ‘60s TV show. But outside of comics, the TV show remained the image of Batman in the public imagination: a dependably square uncle with an odd dress sense and weird hobby; Adam West, hilariously straightfaced in his wrinkly unitard, trading Pop Art ‘BIFF’s with scenery-chewing character actors in heavy makeup.

The contrast between that childlike and childish TV fun and Frank Miller’s nihilistic, violent and explicit comic made the latter seem significantly more surprising and mature. Pow! Comics weren’t just for kids anymore. They were something more grown up: they were graphic novels.

Contents

Comic book aficionados also knew that the term ‘graphic novel’ wasn’t new; there’s a decent argument that the notion is as old as the form. Visual storytelling predates written language (indeed, it’s the origin of written language) but the closest thing to a first ‘comic book’ is the Histoire de Mr. Vieux-Bois (1827) by Rodolphe Töpffer, a picaresque novel told in graphical form.

Then there was the European tradition of the comics ‘album’, the adventures of Tintin and Asterix and Corto Maltese: pulp adventures told with graphics and bound up as comic ‘books’. Even when the great master of the medium, Will Eisner, used the term ‘graphic novel’ to describe his own work in 1978, he admitted he knew it wasn’t his coinage.

But, if only by dint of being a story about a globally recognisable superhero, A Dark Knight Returns is a key exhibit in the use of ‘graphic novel’ as a marketing term: a means of packaging and reselling monthly comics, and also a way to establish a new critical acceptability for a medium mostly seen as dumb entertainment for uncritical kiddiwinks and readers who needed the pictures to help them with the words.

The Dark Knight Returns is at least definitely a novel, in the sense of a self-contained work of extended narrative fiction. And, unlike most commercial comics, it was the work of a singular, individual vision. It was written and drawn by Frank Miller, and then inked by Miller with help from Klaus Janson (comics are generally first drawn in pencil before being inked over in clear lines and then coloured). The colouring of The Dark Knight Returns, a beautiful, muted watercolour palette, was by Lynn Varley. All three were tight collaborators, but The Dark Knight Returns is primarily Miller’s work. His artwork is of a piece with his story, tight and propulsive, while his line is expressive and full of pulp dynamite.

He uses a basic sixteen-panel grid – four rows of four panels – which makes for an exceeding dense page. The panels often feature tight close-ups, repeated with dense captions and speech around them. This gives a driving rhythm to the pages, packing in story and characters at a considerable rate. Miller builds on this with an exceptionally ‘80s multimedia approach; the panels frequently become the rounded rectangles of cathode-ray TV screens as talk-show hosts and news anchors comment on the comic’s proceedings. This builds an image of a seething, crowded Gotham, tense and ferocious like Miller’s Batman.

Against this rigid structure his art scratches and writhes, all sketchy lines and expressive, cartoony anatomy or gestural silhouettes of solid ink. When it does succeed in breaking out, as when the bright yellow of the Bat Signal breaks out of the grey, rectangular city architecture, it does so in operatically dramatic splash pages, full of action and emotion. The dialogue, boiled hard and welded to the bottom of the pan, rages inside its little boxes:

‘I play the shadows, forcing the hood to come close. He makes less noise than a Mack truck. There are seven working defenses from this position. Three of them disarm with minimal contact. Three of them kill. The other -- hurts.’

It’s not surprising that the comic was partly inspired by Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movie Sudden Impact (1983), the sort of movie that Frank Miller has referred to a ‘a right-wing version of… old [Batman] comic books’. This is the rugged self-sufficiency myth of the Wild West transposed to the diverse and culturally fecund twentieth century city, and finding itself very uncomfortable there. A politics suspicious of everything – government, reform, other people – but wholly convinced of its own correctness, the unassailable moral rightness of the Great Man.

Of all the superheroes, this mode is most appropriate for Batman, a character whose roots are in the gangster-haunted cities of Prohibition-era America. Here is a billionaire so convinced of his own exceptionalism that he spends his money not on philanthropic projects, but on a single-handed war on crime. While wearing his jimjams.

Afterword

Much like prehistory, superhero comic history is generally divided into Ages, and these Ages are thought of as having gradually declined: from the 1940s Golden Age of Superman and Batman, through the giddy Silver Age, to the grimmer Bronze Age of the ‘70s and ‘80s. The Dark Knight Returns is one of the works that introduced what is sometimes known as The Dark Age of comics.

I thrilled to its darkly cynical politics when I read the comic as a teenager, just as I thrilled to the art and the pulp action. I had a fundamental adolescent need to besmirch the treasures of childhood, just as others pointed out the hidden swearing in The Clangers, pondered the exact nature of the relationship between Bert and Ernie and sniggered at Barbie’s lack of genitals.1 It’s all part of an attempt to reconcile childish delights with the grown-up world, just as a teenager tries to fit their childhood identity into adult clothing. This is certainly part of the appeal of The Dark Knight Returns. The mesmerising revelation that the Batman I knew from the ludicrous TV show, from Dinky Batmobiles and rubbery Mego action figures, was now growling ‘Welcome to hell’ from the shadows as he beat up machine-gun toting gang members.

The Dark Knight Returns had the same impact on comics as it had on me as a teenage reader. Suddenly, all the primary-coloured do-gooders of my childhood were indulging in overwrought narration, bad language and a little bit of the old ultra-violence. This wasn’t Miller’s fault alone; a cadre of British creators also brought a more acerbic and satiric mode to American comics (although at least two of the major figures of that invasion, Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, have since repudiated a lot of this excessively grim posturing). But the influence of The Dark Knight Returns is nevertheless inescapable. It became the jumping-off point for a whole cavalcade of movie Batmen, from Tim Burton’s 1989 gothic Batman to Chris Nolan’s po-faced angst and Zack Snyder’s monochrome objectivist slugfests. And it’s still there in DC’s new Absolute Batman line, which adopts Miller’s TV inserts as a deliberate homage even as it tries to establish a completely different politics for the character. Even a working-class, anti-1% Batman must also be a massive, impassive slab of muscle, just like Miller’s.

A lot of that impact came from the fundamental idea of taking Batman seriously. What would a mask-wearing, crime-fighting billionaire actually be like? He’d be insane, right? He’d be just as psychopathic as the Joker or Two Face or The Mad Hatter, or any of the other weirdos he fights. This, ultimately, is the real legacy of The Dark Knight Returns. What if we took superheroes seriously? What if, instead of them just being halftone smudges on pulp paper, they were actual people; or at least, real-life actors in convincing costumes and not-quite-as-convincing CGI settings? What if they were multiple-million-dollar smash-hit movies? What if they were a cornerstone of global pop culture? What then?

‘Biff, Bang, Pow! Comics aren’t just for kids anymore!’

Of course, there were plenty of comics in the mid ‘80s that weren’t for kids and also weren’t, more importantly, about superheroes:

The early 2000s weren’t all sparkles and rainbows (the clothes were awful, for one thing); but there was a sense that — to adapt the New Labour anthem — things could get better. On TV, as observed recently, this mood translated into a glut of reality shows about DIY and home improvement, a deliriously satisfying weekly template in which ordinary couples looked around at their semi-detached three-beds and thought: ‘but what if we built a Moroccan souk in the conservatory?’ And, as Barry Norman used to say, why not.

Once the entire global supply of MDF had been wedged into the nation’s crevices, this sense of potential for improvement — of having the headspace and financial ease to think about how things might be better — was turned upon the self. How could we dress better, eat better, communicate better, relate better, parent our children better? How could we be… better? For the answers, TV turned to a strange mishmash of real-time soap opera and pop psychology.

The first British series of Big Brother, transmitted on Channel 4 in the summer of 2000, was initially presented as a social psychology experiment. Ahead of transmission we were told it would be an investigation into how ordinary people responded to artificial conditions: the impossibility of privacy, stressful ‘tasks’ and capricious restrictions on food intake and sleep. What would these things affect their behaviour and their relationships, and what could we learn from that? Each week there was a show dedicated to the observations of Big Brother’s tame psychologists, who at this point were still taking the premise quite seriously.

And then, instead of being a boring bit of social observation, Big Brother took off like a rocket. It became an insanely compelling real-life soap opera, in which producers chose narratives and meddled in ‘storylines’ (budding friendships, secret crushes, furtive unpleasantness). Those of us who started watching it out of curiosity — and I am absolutely including myself here — couldn’t look away; there is something absolutely riveting about the minutiae of human relationships, and, of course, there was a more dramatic narrative around ‘Nasty’ Nick and his ‘manipulation’ of the voting process. (To this day, I have no idea how much of this was real and how much of it was constructed in the editing suite). The viewers, for their part, quickly decided that their role was to determine which of the housemates were most deserving of punishment, in the form of ‘eviction’. Big Brother became a screaming success not because of the contestants, but because of the strong instincts it aroused in the audience.

One strange outcome was that in the first season of Big Brother, we were closely watching people who did not know that they had become massively famous. Suspended in an oblivious air-gapped bubble, the housemates thought they were being watched by the standard late-night Channel 4 audience, ie a couple of hundred thousand chin-strokers. None of them had entered the house with the expectation of shrieking tabloid celebrity; indeed, once the novelty had worn off, many of them weren’t even enjoying the much more limited exposure that they thought they were experiencing. At one point one of the housemates, Anna — who was missing her girlfriend — composed a sad little song and sung it quietly to herself:

And when I put my arms around you, you will know
You’re the only one for me
And when I put my arms around you, you will know
I hate being on TV

But we didn’t heed her warning. The social-psychology-TV genie was out of the box, and every channel soon wanted a self-improvement show that might also offer an opportunity for self-righteous gawping and judgement. How could we learn to feed ourselves more adventurously, and yet more healthily? Why, by watching Jamie Oliver put a squad of unemployed youngsters through an artificially accelerated cookery course in Jamie’s Kitchen (2002). How could we learn to feel more positive about our size 16 bodies? Here come Trinny and Susannah to explain What Not to Wear (2001); and if that means watching a woman standing in the middle of a 360-degree mirror and contemplating her back-fat while crying — well, so much the better.

The ‘casts’ of these reality shows often displayed a touching child-like quality: a willingness to learn, and a brave, open countenance as they uncovered their grotty underbellies, literal and metaphorical. But these formats presented an underlying problem: there is a significant difference between making over your garden, and making over yourself. Turning your back yard into a Zen gravel pit decorated with lanterns from Asda needn’t involve any personal revelation; it needn’t involve ugly emotions, vulnerability, and careful personal work. You don’t have to tell anyone that you’re doing this because your dad hated you. But when the format revolves around personal behaviours or difficulties, everything gets very serious, very fast.

Take the premise of How Clean Is Your House?, a reality format that featured the incredibly camp Kim Woodburn and her ‘scientific’ Scottish sidekick Aggie Mackenzie. How Clean Is Your House? was not supposed to be a show about personal development; it was supposed to be a show about tidying up. Each week the uncomfortable duo of Kim and Aggie (there really was not a lot of chemistry there) swarmed into a home to ‘show’ its inhabitants how to wipe surfaces and take things to the dump. It was clearly intended to be superficially similar to the satisfying ‘before and after’ format of Ground Force and Changing Rooms.

The problem was that people who let their homes get epically dirty or messy tend to have much deeper problems. If you haven’t so much as washed a mug for six months, we’re probably not looking at a skill issue. In the random episode I found on YouTube, the voiceover announces that Angela’s house is ‘letting down the neighbourhood’: ‘this is a RAT HOLE’ shrieks Kim, writing ‘FILTH’ in the dust on the TV screen. Angela’s ‘lazy’ husband David complains he’s being ‘pushed out of the door’ by the mess, over footage of him calmly watching telly in a small tunnel he has made between mountains of crap. But Angela’s fundamental distress keeps breaking through. Blink and you’ll miss it, but we learn that she is a full-time unpaid carer, and sleeps on the sofa at her mum’s house. In the opening ‘video call’ describing her predicament, she openly admits to feeling depressed.

How Clean Is Your House was a deeply uncomfortable watch because the underlying difficulties experienced by its participants were so extraordinarily visible, and so resolutely ignored. This wasn’t a show about cleaning; it was a show about distress and rubbernecking. The whole thing was a grotesque mangle of serious problems, inappropriate solutions, and irrelevant blather about E. coli bacteria.

At the other end of the problem/solution scale was the BBC’s The House of Tiny Tearaways, in which clinical psychologist Dr Tanya Byron invited families to live in a childproof ‘home’ for a week so that their children’s behaviours could be observed and addressed (which almost always meant observing and addressing the parents’ behaviours). The Tiny Tearaways house looked creepily like the Big Brother house, and was similarly full of two-way mirrors and fixed cameras. And, like Big Brother, it gave a lot of space to its subjects; each week in the house was given six hours of transmission time.

I found Tiny Tearaways utterly addictive; I only meant to watch one episode, and instead binged an entire series of 18. You quickly become genuinely interested in the subjects (both children and adults), and when Byron intervenes to address something problematic, it is extremely cathartic. Byron did proper therapeutic work (including off-camera follow-up) with the families, and most of the parents seemed to gain a genuinely improved understanding of where they’d gone wrong. She stoutly defended the show on this basis: ‘the current glut of reality programming is all about social psychology [but] you have endless programmes with people who are deeply unqualified giving advice to incredibly vulnerable people.’

No: the real problem with Tiny Tearaways was that the children themselves could not possibly have consented to any of this. Inescapably, part of the enjoyment was of the ‘look at that little shit’ variety; tantrums had by other people’s children are always glorious, as are other people’s parenting mistakes. This mean-mindedness — of which, to be clear, I am absolutely guilty — is bad enough when turned on adults.

Early on one week, one of the ‘tearaways’ rips off her mic pack and runs away from it; she is pursued by her mother, who is anxiously explaining that she must wear it at all times (this has clearly been spelled out by the production team in no uncertain terms). This kid — who also quickly susses out the precise locations of all the cameras — has understood the deal, and she does not consent; and this is one piece of behaviour, curiously, that none of the adults in the house want to address. Later in the week, aware that she is being observed and judged in moments of distress, she sobs: ‘What’s this place called?’ ‘London,’ her mum says. ‘I hate London then,’ she cries: ‘I hate that lady [Byron], I hate everything in this house and I hate everything in London.’ In other words: she hates being on TV. Smart kid.

This mistake — of shoving unwary people, and most particularly kids, into the judgement panopticon — was largely generational. Gen X parents have been absolutely terrible at shielding our kids’ privacy in an age of ceaseless public self-revelation. Newly captivated by our own potential as content-production units, we mistook our children for wholly-owned subsidiaries. Millennial parents, in my experience, are much savvier about all of this. And people who had access to the social web in their teens are also much savvier about the audience; they understand that any personal content, however heartfelt or authentic or vulnerable, carries the risk of an outsized and hostile public response.

Perhaps the self-improvement/punishment bubble truly burst with the public disgrace of Jade Goody, who had won the third series of Big Brother in 2002. When she appeared on Celebrity Big Brother in 2005, her racist behaviour towards the eventual winner (the actor Shilpa Shetty) — as well as the creeping suspicion that she was herself extremely damaged — seemed to prompt some reflection. ‘Ordinary’ people were slowly learning that these shows could be life-altering in a bad way. Twenty years later, the only people willing to take part in reality soaps are fame-seeking missiles, and the audience understands these shows as wholly artificial (not that that stops them judging). Our experiments in mass social psychology produced — as Dr Tanya would say — some real learning. It’s just that none of it has felt very improving.

Of course, even before reality shows, there was still plenty of social rubbernecking on TV:

Elevator pitch

When American radio operator June (Kim Hunter) gets a message from Lancaster pilot Peter Carter (David Niven) , who is about to jump from his flaming bomber without a parachute, she fully expects him to die. Miraculously he doesn’t and the two, who have fallen for each other across the airwaves, finally meet. But is this a miracle or a mistake? Peter starts having visions of a messenger from the afterlife (Marius Goring) who tells him he must give up this new lease of life and love. June, meanwhile, enlists the help of a friendly neurologist (Roger Livesey) who recommends Peter have brain surgery, even as he is tried in a court of the afterlife on a matter of life and death.

Made by the mid-century British film-making team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger — collectively known as ‘The Archers’ — A Matter of Life and Death is a film of contradictions. Not just the titular contradiction between life and death, or the contradictions of the story between the real and the imaginary, or the contradictions of the plot between individual rights and collective responsibility.

It is also a film about life after death that tries very hard not to be religious. It is a film about the deep animosity between two allies in a war effort, Britain and America. And it is a war film that manages to not be about the war.

At least, it’s not about the war bits of the war: the shooting and the shouting, the grand strategy and the immediate violence, the horrors and the glory. It starts with a city on fire from ‘a thousand-bomber raid’ and a Lancaster on fire somewhere over the fog-bound channel, but after that it’s all sleepy English villages, a modernist afterlife and debates about love and life after death.

Besides, even that moment of actual wartime action has already been put into cosmic context by a deliriously charming opening sequence. Normally, an opening explanatory caption and expository voiceover are signs that whoever is involved is not quite convinced of their premise, their storytelling ability or, indeed, their story.

But here it is a sign of sure-footedness, a confident introduction of tone and of yet another contradiction: it is partly whimsical and partly sardonic, simultaneously waspish and sentimental, like the titles of The Clangers being narrated by Carol Reed in the style of his opening to The Third Man (1949).

It also sets the approach to the war A Matter of Life and Death will be taking, a film about the themes and the effects, not the action. That opening is curiously reminiscent of another film of 1946: It’s A Wonderful Life, a weird mixture of the personal, the cosmic and the mystical, perhaps because both are responding to a contemporary need for spiritual succour in an all too scientifically real world. A war in which the most extraordinary technological achievements of the human mind have been combined with the worst instincts of the human soul, leaving people looking for an answer beyond that science.

It is also, though, a film about what the war was about (to some degree). Part of the inspiration for it was to try and repair some of the damage done to Anglo-American relations in the wake of the build-up to D-Day, when Britain had had visited upon it thousands of G.I.s, ‘over-paid, over-sexed and over here’, and had not liked it one bit.

The film, then, centres not just on a relationship between a British man and an American woman (the reverse of what every British serviceman abroad was fearing), but also on that central contradiction of the war: that it was a combined and centralised effort to defend the freedom of the individual against totalitarian oppression (allegedly). Indeed the film uses the term ‘the rights of the uncommon man’, meaning that no one is ‘common’; everyone is extraordinary. And that it is, paradoxically, this tradition of diversity and distinctiveness that conjoins the two cultures.1

Delights

When I told Rowan I’d re-watched A Matter of Life and Death for this piece, she asked if I’d had a little cry. Lady, I cried all the way through. I had to keep rewinding because I couldn’t see a lot of it through the tears. These were tears of joy, I should add. Tears of relief and delight. Tears of relief at watching something so enjoyable, tears of delight at the talent and craft on display, Stendahl tears of joy at living in a world where this film exists.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) might be my favourite, and every film of The Archers’ imperial phase, from Blimp to The Red Shoes (1948), is an unalloyed masterpiece; but I do think A Matter of Life and Death is probably their best. Perhaps not a major work of art like The Red Shoes, or an eccentric delight like A Canterbury Tale (1944), but one of the great movies. One and a half hours of unimpeachable entertainment.

But then I think that about whatever the last Powell and Pressburger film was that I watched.

One of the deep delights of Powell and Pressburger movies is that they are ‘Powell and Pressburger’ movies. They are not films written by Emeric Pressburger and directed by Michael Powell. Pressburger wrote the first drafts and then they both worked on the scripts; Powell directed, but Pressburger was always on set and everyone involved was constantly contributing. Apparently Powell often left the editing to be overseen by Pressburger. All films, even ‘auteur’ works are, to some extent, collaborations; but the films of the Archers remain some of the greatest examples of joint creativity, the meld of brilliant minds into a single purpose and project that does something no single creator could manage.

Disappointments

Only that it had to finish.

Look, I know some people find Powell and Pressburger films annoying. Too visually florid, too bourgeois, too whimsical. That they do not revel enough in adolescent angst, in the agonies and grit of the world, and instead concentrate too much on adult themes like love, art and spirituality.

To be fair, this is largely a matter of taste. I like the whimsical. I like the fact that there’s a whole scene in A Matter of Life and Death in which Roger Livesey’s Dr Reeves uses his camera obscura to show the village to his spaniels (actually Michael Powell’s cockers Erik and Spangle). I like the fact that when Peter Carter comes to on the beach, the first person he comes across is a naked boy playing the pan pipes to a herd of goats, and that when he goes under the anaesthetic for his final operation, two massive artificial eyelids close over the camera to mimic the oncoming of unconsciousness. It’s ludicrous nonsense, but it’s adorable and entertaining ludicrous nonsense.

But I also think that that whimsy has a point. Dr Reeves is insistent that Peter has to take what appear to be hallucinations seriously; he collapses any crude contradiction between the physical brain and the metaphysical self it generates. He believes that imaginings can be just as real to the brain as any insults to its physical grey matter. The role of the imagination as a uniquely human and humanising quality is central to the film.

Peter Carter describes his politics as ‘Conservative by nature, Labour by experience.’ This was the politics of a post-war Britain, where a war in defence of the rights of the individual had fostered a great sense of communal purpose, an imaginative sense of humanity as an identity, an imagining of how the world could be improved.

Imagination fuels our empathy and sympathy, allowing us to identify with the sorrows of others and the horror with which the world is full. But it also gives us a harbour from those horrors, an escapist hatch through which we can glimpse the wonders of the world and discover the spiritual solace of art.

Besides, one is starved for technicolour down here.

Can we show the kids?

There is one very good reason to try, especially for British kids. Right now, like a lot of places around the world, Britain is undergoing a resurgence of the reactionary right, and a poisonous efflorescence of exactly the kind of patriotism that Dr Johnson described as ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel’.

A Matter of Life and Death falls directly into a sequence of Archers’ films that mounts a little inquiry into the matter of Britain — or, more specifically, England — and clearly offers an alternative form of patriotism.

The film is admirably clear eyed about history, for a start. A key part of the otherworldly trial that unfolds while Peter Carter undergoes brain surgery is that it is impossible to empanel a jury that is not biased against the English. The actions of the British Empire means that there isn’t anyone from anywhere around the world who doesn’t have a well-founded grudge.

The one defence of the English that cannot be countered is Dr Reeves’s list of poets: ‘John Donne, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats... and Milton and Shakespeare.’ It is no mistake that Peter Carter is himself a poet.

Where the film finds Englishness is in English itself. Not in flattering and false histories or imagined national identities, but in culture. In poetry and imagination; in, indeed, film-making. In how a diversity of voices can come together to make a distinctive inheritance of language and art.

Basically I’m arguing that an easy rhyme or a bad pun are more truly patriotic than zip-typing a Chinese-made, Amazon-ordered St George’s Cross to a council lamppost.

Is It As Good As You Remember?

The Archers’ movies became somewhat unfashionable in the ‘50s and ‘60s, which meant they largely escaped the Boomer hagiography of New Hollywood and the Bank Holiday institutionalisation of Bond and Carry On movies.

They began to be rediscovered in the ‘70s and ‘80s, to the point where two of the only three British movies in the top 100 of the Sight and Sound poll of the best films of all time are by Powell and Pressburger: The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death.

This gave the young Generation X cinema-goer the sense of discovering lost classics, movies that came from a very different ‘40s to the one we had been shown in all those classic Second World War movies on long, dreary Sunday TV afternoons. Movies that gave an alternative view of that war and what it might have meant for Britain.

And that meant they also gave an alternative model of Britain to those of us growing up in the ‘80s. Not a prosaic and practical, consumerist country run by City traders, but one full of romance and poetry and mysticism. An imaginary country, in two, contradictory senses: a country the imaginative culture of which has shaped and continues to shape the entire world and, nevertheless, a country that has never existed.

And still doesn’t. But it’s nice to imagine it now and again.

The whimsey and engagement with imagination of Powell and Pressburger’s films is oddly reminiscent of the animated films of Studio Ghibli:

Absolute Wonder Woman (2024)

Thanks to an episode of the splendid Imaginary Worlds podcast, I have been checking out the Absolute line of comics from DC. Every generation remakes and reimagines classic superheroes in its own image, trying to remodel the fantasies of their childhood to refit them for their adult understanding of the world. In 2024 DC launched its Absolute line of comics with Absolute Batman, in which Bruce Wayne is no longer a billionaire orphan but, instead, a blue collar child of a single mother. He nevertheless remains, as Mayor Jim Gordon puts it: ‘Batman AF’.

DC have followed this with Absolute Superman — which puts the Man of Steel back in his original role as defender of the working class — and Absolute Flash. These are very much comics of the moment, in which superheroes are underdogs fighting economic and political inequality; they have been both award-winning and popular (for comics).

The two best (that I have read) are Absolute Martian Manhunter (2025) and Absolute Wonder Woman (2024). It is noticeable that both of these are characters that the traditional comics haven’t always known what to do with. The Martian Manhunter, of whom you will almost certainly not have heard,1 is a character from the ‘50s: a Martian brought to Earth in a teleporter accident who uses his shapeshifting powers to masquerade as a police detective. Writer Deniz Camp reimagines this as a psychedelic sci-fi horror about an FBI agent possessed by an alien intelligence, and artist Javier Rodríguez turns in an absolute masterwork of primary coloured cartooning and trippy visuals.

If anything, Wonder Woman has an even weirder origin story than the Martian Manhunter. In the early ‘40s, psychologist William Moulton Marston, the inventor of the polygraph test, wanted to create a superhero who won through love, not violence. His wife Elizabeth suggested the hero be a woman and so they modelled her on their mutual life partner Olive Byrne.

In the middle of the last century, in the middle of a World War, a throuple created a female hero whose real power was compassion and whose stories featured a surprisingly large amount of bondage and spanking. Which might explain why the comics haven’t always figured out how to handle her.

She’s been an Army nurse, the secretary of the Justice Society of America, and, during the ‘60s, a not-super-powered leather-clad spy in the manner of Emma Peel. However, after Gloria Steinem put her on the cover of Ms. magazine, she regained her status as one of the big three heroes in the DC pantheon, alongside Superman and Batman.

In recent years her identity as Diana, princess of the Amazons has led to her playing the stern but noble warrior, alongside Batman’s scheming loner and Superman’s all powerful boy scout. But Kelly Thompson’s Absolute Wonder Woman takes an entirely different tack: the baby Diana is imprisoned in Hell, where she is raised by the witch Circe. Even in Hell her personality wins out, and she always tries compassion and compromise before resorting to violence. When she does turn to violence, her weapon is more likely to be something like the magical lasso Nemesis, which punishes her victims with pain equal to their sins.

The series is a brilliant reinvention of Marston’s original themes of bondage and love, amplified by the choice to make Diana as much a witch as she is a warrior. It incorporates the idea that magic - particularly Ancient Greek magic - always requires sacrifice on the part of the magician. Hayden Sherman’s art is also terrific, full of inventive page layouts that serve to dramatise the occult elements without ever being confusing. It reminded me, perhaps inevitably, of J. H. Williams III’s work on Alan Moore’s Promethea. Promethea was Moore’s own reimagining of the Wonder Woman figure, equally full of myth and magic, although so far Absolute Wonder Woman shows no sign of becoming an illustrated text book on the practice of magic, which is what happened to Promethea.

The Absolute line of alternative versions of classic superheroes reminds one of Marvel’s own Ultimate line, which ended up heavily influencing the movie versions of those characters, to the extent that the character of Nick Fury was drawn there to look like Samuel L. Jackson, which the movies just took as a casting recommendation. You’ve got to hope that when James Gunn, who is in the process of relaunching the DC superhero movie universe, gets to his version of Wonder Woman, he takes some inspiration from Absolutely Wonder Woman, which finally seems to have figured out how to reinvent the character for the 21st century.

Letterboxd Diary

What has been watching

One Battle After Another (2025) *****

Ah, Paul Thomas Anderson, the thinking man’s Christopher Nolan.2 By which I do not mean that he is anything like as pedantic or ponderous as Nolan as a filmmaker: quite the opposite, in fact. What I mean is that he is a reliable purveyor of solid cinema, a quality bit of film-making for the bohemian bourgeoisie, like a high tone Coen Brothers.

His very loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990)3 is a splendid example of this: beautifully made, shot, acted and scored (did I hear a little quote from Moondog in Johnny Greenwood’s music for the climactic chase scene?). It is also a perfect illustration of how he isn’t Christopher Nolan.

Like the source material, the film is splendidly light on its feet while remaining a freewheeling shaggy dog story, forever circling around its themes without ever quite landing on anything too definitive. Also like the source material, it’s also very entertaining, particularly a deliciously hysterical sequence in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob is scrambling to stay ahead of the cops while still trying to find somewhere to charge his phone, which feels like every panic dream I’ve ever had.

And at last a film in which I can take Leonardo DiCaprio seriously, and in which he doesn’t look like a 16 year old who’s been run through aging special effects, but a genuine middle aged drop out.

Ball of Fire (1941) ****

This one was thanks to the ever excellent Substack Flicks and Forks. Ball of Fire is a delightful screwball rom com version of Snow White, in which gangster’s moll Sugarpuss O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck) hides out in an institution where a group of bumbling professors are researching an encyclopedia. And if I tell you that one of those professors is the upright and innocent Bertram Potts, played by Gary Cooper, I think you can guess what happens next.

Written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett and directed by Howard Hawks, the film is just as whipsmart, funny and delightful as you might imagine. As Jill Brown Sykes of Flicks and Forks points out, it’s particularly charming in its portrayal of the elderly professors, all sweetly otherworldly, never lecherous or annoying. And it’s especially a treat to have such an awesome array of character actors assembled to play them, including Oscar Homolka, Henry Travers and S. K. ‘Cuddles’ Sakall.

It lost one star simply because I can never quite buy Barbara Stanwyck in a romcom role. As the femme fatale in Billy Wilder’s own Double Indemnity (1944)? One of the greatest femmes to have ever fataled. But as a happy-go-lucky, smart-mouthed dame? Stanwyck was apparently fiercely hard working as an actress and it sometimes feels like all that hard work is visible up on the screen when what is needed is a little fizz.

On the other hand: a nightclub scene featuring solo on matchbox and matches by the great jazz drummer Gene Krupa? Worth the price of admission alone.

Red Beard (1965) ****½

What am I going to do with myself when I’ve seen all the films Akira Kurosawa ever made? Apart from go back and watch them all again, that is?

Red Beard is the story of an ambitious young nineteenth century doctor from a good background who has to serve a term in a busy rural clinic, which he feels is beneath him. Under the tutelage of the stern Dr. Kyojō Niide, known as ‘Red Beard’ (Toshiro Mifune), he eventually learns to understand the importance of the work they do for the poor and discovers his true calling.

Following Rowan’s watch of The Pitt (2025-), we have been rewatching E.R. (1994 - 2009), and the story of Red Beard made a really interesting rhyme with the progress of Noah Wyle’s character of John Carter.

What is particularly noticeable about both is how medicine seems inextricably intertwined with morality. The doctors in E.R. and old Red Beard himself are constantly using their ability to cure patients as an opportunity to school those victims on their behaviour, frequently withholding treatments from patients they feel don’t deserve it. In one sequence Red Beard refuses medicine to a wealthy patron, on whose money the clinic relies, instead lecturing him on his lifestyle.

Indeed, in the act of saving a child from a madam, Red Beard beats up the heavies protecting the brothel, breaking several limbs that he then happily sets about treating once he has taught them a lesson.

Both E.R. and Red Beard are coming from politically liberal stances. E.R. is forever tackling sexism, racism and homophobia, while the key theme of Red Beard is how political and economic inequality destroy the poor and unlucky. However, both seem unable to extricate themselves from a notion that somehow good health needs to be deserved.

Harold and Maude (1971) *****

Why didn’t I watch this when I was a teenager? I had definitely heard of it, but I suspect a large degree of Boomer hagiography just put me off. Which is a shame because I would have loved it. I still loved it, seeing it for the first time at this many years old, but if I had seen it at 17 it would have become my entire character for the rest of my twenties.

Instead, like a Burton and Speke of arthouse cinema, I have come to it by wading up the tributaries that have flowed out of it down the subsequent decades. This movie is the headwaters of all American indie cinema ever since, every movie in which a sensitive and creative young man (the director) meets a manic dream pixie girl (his lead actress) and learns important lessons about life (you must never sell out, unless Disney offers you a superhero film on the back of your Oscar nomination).

Of course, Harold and Maude is better than a lot of what followed, with Bud Cort as the perfect weirdo, goth-adjacent outsider and Ruth Gordon absolutely transcendent as the free-spirited 70-something who changes his life, a performance full of life and a sense of the ludicrous and yet somehow never cloying or irritating.

And for final proof that this was a movie made for me, a Cat Stevens soundtrack. My father didn’t have many pop records when I was a kid, and two of them were Cat Stevens ones: Tea for the Tillerman (1970) and Teaser and the Firecat (1971) so I inevitably listened to them to death, the perfect soundtrack to a ‘70s childhood. And the perfect soundtrack to a ‘70s movie, to boot.

Project Hail Mary (2026) ***½

The Pirelli calendar end of ‘competence porn’: slick, expensive looking and little more than decoration.

I’m being unfair. Not only does it have the rumpled charm of Ryan Gosling and the rocky charm of a splendid puppet alien, but it also has the always welcome presence of Sandra Hüller. Hüller, as you would expect, is splendid, managing to take what might have been a slightly one note character of a cold and determined mission head and create something of depth, emotion and humour.

Also it displays competence not just in the story but in the making. Philip Lord and Chris Miller manage to make it both engaging and good-looking and Drew Goddard’s script handles the sort of dense exposition such sci-fi often requires adroitly.

It is noticeable that for a movie that’s ostensibly about the threatened end of the world, we see very little misery and (SPOILER) none of the main characters die. But you know what, I could do with that kind of reassurance these days. Competent people do things competently, everything works out and everyone is saved. And what more could we ask?

Tobias’s full Letterboxd Diary is here: https://boxd.it/2lT6f

Playlist

: Here’s my favourite ten tracks for this month.

Come Down (69 Version) - Lord Creator

We’re having a heat wave in the UK right now and as a child of the ‘70s, a heat wave will always mean reggae to me.

Ritmo Babilonia - Mexican Institute of Sound and Meridian Brothers feat. Beck

And having been a young adult in the ‘90s, summer also means Beck

Big Storm - Jesca Hoop

There is a big storm coming, I fervently hope. We could do with it.

Talk Me Down - Willy Mason

This is a nice summery mix of yodelling cowboy and rousing indie chorus.

Mother Neff - Cactus Lee

And this is an equally summery piece of ‘70s style rock

Magic Man - The Gnomes

Made for cranking up the car stereo, winding down the windows and going screaming through the hot and heavy night. Only don’t wind the windows too far down because the dog will try and jump out. The idiot.

Do We Exist? - Spacemoth

A lovely little piece of hypnotic psychedelic pop

Billie Toppy - Men I Trust

A slightly claustrophobic piece of new wave pop

Eternal Flame - Joan As Police Woman

A perfect, yearning track for a long evening

Prophecy At 1420 MHz - Boards of Canada

We’re a self-proclaimed Gen X newsletter of course we were going to get over-excited about a new Boards of Canada release. Especially when it sounds so much like wandering around Camden Market in the late ‘80s.

All our playlists can be found on Spotify:

With all their images of run down urban America, both One Battle After Another and Harold and Maude reminded me of Alex Cox’s perfect indie movie Repo Man:

Midway through The Gold (BBC, 2023), Neil Forsyth’s series about the 1983 Brinks Mat robbery, there’s a truly great parable about British class. Terrifying underworld fixer Gordon Parry (Sean Harris) is talking to the corrupt solicitor Edwin Cooper (Dominic Cooper) while standing on the banks of the Thames in east London:

‘We used to come mudlarking down here when we was kids. Dig around at low tide. We’d find teeth. Bones. Bits of old pottery. One day we thought we’d go up West. Dig around in the mud in Chelsea. Do you know what we found, Mr Cooper? Coins. Jewellery. One lady found a silver cigar box. That’s how deep it goes in this city, Mr Cooper. The divide. It’s in the mud.’

(Apart from anything else, few things are more elementally frightening than the way Sean Harris says ‘teeth. Bones.’)

As this fictional conversation was taking place in the rotting wastes of London’s docks, the real-life bohemian bourgeois of early-‘80s London were heading to the flicks to see Merchant Ivory’s Heat and Dust, an adaptation by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala of her prize-winning novel set in India under British colonial rule. Jhabvala, who worked on more than 20 Merchant Ivory scripts, had an extraordinary life: she was born to a Jewish family in Cologne, fled the Holocaust as a child, grew up in Britain, married an Indian, divided her time between New York and New Delhi, and became a US citizen in her sixties.

As well as being a hugely successful novelist, Jhabvala was a key writer and script doctor at the Merchant Ivory production house for decades. Her experience of overlapping and sometimes fluid national and cultural identities fitted in well there; the producer Ismail Merchant — the professional and life partner of the director James Ivory — described Merchant Ivory as a ‘strange marriage’ between ‘an Indian Muslim, a German Jew and a Protestant American’. Their early films were dramas and romances aimed squarely at Anglophone Indians; Jhabvala had noticed that the elite Indian marriage market had a lot in common with the elite European marriage market as described by Jane Austen, and that it held a similar potential for engaging stories. In other words: if you’ve met one posh person, you’ve met them all.

Within a year of the release of Heat and Dust the Raj was all the rage. (Sorry.) In 1984 the BBC showed HBO’s The Far Pavilions; ITV sacrificed a young Charles Dance to the nation’s housewives in its all-conquering Jewel in the Crown; and David Lean released his final film, A Passage to India, an adaptation of E. M. Forster’s 1924 novel. All round, there was a sudden superabundance of posh white people fainting clean away in the markets of Jaipur. Perhaps British audiences were genuinely interested in reappraising their country’s colonial role in India, but the glamour, romance and class of it all surely didn’t hurt.

Over the next ten years Merchant Ivory ran through Forster’s novels like a dose of salts, and in the process carved themselves a niche in cinematic history. Lean’s seizure of A Passage to India now feels like a bureaucratic misallocation, or a trick question, like George Lazenby’s single appearance as Bond. It also had the effect of leaving Merchant Ivory only Forster’s English and Italian novels; these have simpler politics than Passage, and settings (the Home Counties, Oxford, Tuscany) that were wonderfully familiar to upper middle class people in the ‘80s. The extremely posh casts could have comfortably staffed a large prep school: Helena Bonham Carter, Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Vanessa Redgrave, Ralph Fiennes, Maggie Smith, Daniel Day-Lewis. Many of these, you will notice, are the scions of established artistic lines. If experience of British class teaches you anything, it’s that privilege accretes within families over time.

The films were full of people with secure incomes falling in love in beautiful locations, and worrying about what is and isn’t vulgar while looking absolutely stunning. The Merchant Ivory look created for Bonham Carter, in particular, slammed into a certain kind of young English woman with tremendous force. I spent at least a year swanning around in floor-length skirts with a looped section of hair jutting out above my forehead, like a shelf above a basin. And the romance was truly sweeping; girls who were young in 1985 were never the same again after the scene in which the passionate George Emerson (Julian Sands — sadly, in all senses) snogs the face off Lucy Honeychurch (Bonham Carter) in a Tuscan meadow to the strains of O mio babbino caro. Forster was gay, of course, and lots of literary critics have complained that his understanding of heterosexual relationships had no basis in reality, something that is also true of the average teenage girl.

So there’s no massive mystery about why Merchant Ivory’s films were so successful; they were beautiful and romantic and glamorous, they had great ticking Dickensian plots full of coincidence and outrage, and they were satisfyingly moral (bad people get bad things and good people get good things). They would probably have swept the board in any decade, although if they were made now they would have to include a much sterner interrogation of exactly how these rich white people had made their money. But what I find interesting, 40 years later, is what their popularity in the ‘80s suggests about how their audience was thinking about class.

The films are all about class. The story they tell is one in which bourgeois bohemians bump up against vulgar rentiers, cruel capitalists and insensible snobs. To a man and woman, the bobos are clever and warm and pretty and funny; they are the main characters. They fall in love with fervent but unfortunate working-class clerks; George in A Room with a View is a clerk, as is Leonard Bast in Howards End. (Merchant Ivory nevertheless cast exceptionally posh men in these roles. Julian Sands, for instance, is straight out of Compton. That’s Compton in Guildford.) The role of the clerks is to display instinctively noble sensibilities, and to get kicked around by cruel arrivistes until they can be rescued by a bobo in a very nice dress. The children of the unions between the bobos and the clerks eventually inherit England itself — or, at least, its prettiest houses.

This is not just romantic wish-fulfilment; it is also political wish-fulfilment aimed at a very specific section of the middle classes. There is nothing more glorious, for a bobo, than the chance to offer aid and comfort to an unfortunate but sexy poor person while wearing something casually stylish and making great jokes. The Guardian-coded Schlegel sisters in Howards End, had they been born a few decades later, would have deplored the Thatcherite economic transformation of the ‘80s; they would have been putting all their spare cash into miners’ collection buckets, and inviting people from the GLC to speak at their weekly meetings.

But — and this is where The Gold’s parable about the Thames mud comes into it — there was more to the ‘80s than industrial workers having their livelihoods and communities destroyed (although that definitely happened). Something entirely different was stirring in other parts of the country, particularly to the south and east of London; as The Gold puts it in one of its episode titles, ‘There’s something going on in Kent’. Thatcherism was disrupting the relationship between money and status, and some working people were becoming very rich indeed without pausing to pick up a Habitat catalogue, much less ask for anyone’s help. They were ramraiding the barriers around upper-middle signifiers; luxury brands, expensive cars and historic detached houses were, it turned out, highly responsive to cash, not lineage. These people were competing with the ‘80s bobos for status (as well as other scarce resources), and the bobos did not like it one bit.

Faced with working people who had real agency and real power and real money, the supposed bobo values of compassion and fellow-feeling completely collapsed. As Merchant Ivory films were raking it in, Harry Enfield (who is objectively posh) was regaling the Saturday Live audience with his ‘Loadsamoney’ character, a canonically Essexian grotesque who had committed the hilarious sin of being both rich and loud. And every year, even now, supposed lefties titter behind their fans as working class women rock up at Ascot in their tight skirts and fake tans.

The opening sequence of Howards End follows Vanessa Redgrave’s Mrs Wilcox — a bobo matriarch — as she walks through her rural garden at Howards End in the long midsummer twilight. The sequence is a tribute to the delicate, restrained glories of the English countryside, captured at the most beautiful time of the day at the most beautiful time of the year. The Schlegel sisters and Mrs Wilcox think they have a unique appreciation of Howards End; and they think this means they are morally qualified to own it. Merchant Ivory, with its truly international perspective, instead presents the English landscape as its mute riposte to Margaret Schlegel’s famous assertion that ‘England has no true mythology’; cultivated landscape is the English mythology, they argue, and the beauty of a midsummer garden belongs to humankind through the medium of film. But I think they’re both wrong. The garden at Howards End belongs to anyone who has enough money to buy it; and England’s true mythology — its explanatory taxonomy of power and fate, ogres and fairies — is class.

Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson was the only forbidden Edwardian romance making bourgeois teenage girls hot under the Laura Ashley collar in the ‘80s.

Model Maddy Hayes (Cybill Shepherd) discovers that she is bankrupt after her accountant makes off with almost all her assets. One of the few investments she still owns is one she never knew about: a share in a detective agency run by man-child David Addison (Bruce Willis). Inevitably, the sophisticated house cat Maddie and the carefree stray dog David become a mismatched, smart talking, increasingly co-dependent detective partnership, until they solve the one mystery no one wanted an answer to: Will they/won’t they?

The Anselmo Case was never solved...

The very last episode of Moonlighting ends with a title card announcing:

‘Blue Moon Investigations ceased operations on May 14, 1989. The Anselmo Case was never solved... and remains a mystery to this day.’

‘The Anselmo Case’ is a running joke; throughout the five seasons of Moonlighting it is repeatedly mentioned in passing and never explained. No one watching could possibly know anything about it, or have any investment in its solution. It is a shaggy dog story, a red herring, possibly even a dead cat; it is a reverse Chekhov’s gun. It is placed on the mantlepiece at the end of the final episode to show us that nothing more can happen, except a snapping noise and the unfurling of a little flag reading: BANG.

This is entirely appropriate. If Moonlighting was anything, it was fun. Technically it was a comedy drama, but not in the contemporary sense in which the ‘comedy’ is an excuse to keep the drama low stakes, and the ‘drama’ is an excuse not to be funny. Moonlighting takes the drama seriously, but largely consigns it to the opening and closing of cases. In between, it focuses on jokes; sometimes, it even makes you laugh.

The very first episodes are a little too typical of the cultural mainstream, that mainstream being the US in 1985; the humour is broad, boorish and fratty. But quite quickly the newcomer Bruce Willis realised he was about to become an absolutely massive star, and started to relax. When he stopped trying so hard, Moonlighting’s quirky bones began to show through. This was in part thanks to Cybill Shepherd, who -- on first reading the script -- pointed out that it was basically a light-hearted detective show in the tradition of Howard Hawks, and made everyone watch His Girl Friday (1940) before shooting started.

Shepherd and Willis weren’t Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant, and certainly didn’t have their chemistry;1 but they did both have Hollywood-level charisma, and the ability to deliver smart-mouthed back chat with speed and verve. Moonlighting scripts ran long because the dialogue was delivered so quickly; even so, they often ran out of material and had to pad with little pieces to camera.

The Hollywood influence identified by Shepherd flourished, sometimes in references but sometimes in wholesale pastiches. Early in the second season there is a film noir episode shot largely in black and white, in which David and Maddie separately dream solutions to a famous Los Angeles murder from the ‘40s. This choice clearly caused some nerves about what the audience would tolerate, or even understand; the episode starts with an introduction from Orson Welles (his last ever screen appearance), who urges the audience to push through the monochrome.

They needn’t have worried. If the producers of Moonlighting had been raised on TV repeats of movies made in the ‘30s and ‘40s, so had lots of people in the audience; when it was aired for the first time in Britain in 1986, it shared BBC2 airtime with a season of classic Hollywood movies featuring feisty female leads. Moonlighting was deeply media-literate; it knew its influences, and wore them proudly on its satin sleeves. A stylised modernist ballet sequence (directed by Stanley Donen himself) is a cheerful callback to Singing in the Rain (1952) and An American in Paris (1951), with Willis in muscular Gene Kelly mode and Shepherd waggling her gams like a primetime Cyd Charisse.

This freewheeling approach to what a TV show might be only added to the sense of giddy fun. After the brown and orange funk of the ‘70s, there was neon and bright pastels; instead of New Hollywood angst and grit, there was Tinseltown fantasy and gaiety. If you closed your eyes and didn’t think about it too hard, it was morning in America, and the sun was shining.

…and remains a mystery to this day.

But the giddiness doesn’t stop there. Moonlighting is deeply oneiric, constantly following its own loopy logic into places that, like a dream, are simultaneously recognisable and absurd. (Indeed, its pastiches of Hollywood movies -- including both the film noir pastiche and the musical ballet described above -- usually happen in dream sequences.) At times it happily acknowledges the fourth wall, and occasionally breaks it with occasional pieces to camera. At other times it climbs straight through the fourth wall, strolls through the set and right out of the studio, cheerfully unconstrained by any imaginary walls, genre conventions or sense.

Just before that final card about the Anselmo Case, David and Maddie return to the Blue Moon office to discover men taking it apart; this is because the show has been cancelled, and the production crew are striking the set. They go to see a producer, who explains to that the audience have stopped watching since David and Maddie slept together. They rush off to try to get married, thinking this might provoke audience interest; but the priest refuses. Our last glimpse of them is on the altar steps, saying goodbye as clips from the show play out. It’s all delightfully knowing; not only does the show acknowledge that it’s become less popular, but it constructs a meta joke out of the kind of desperate move writers and producers make when worrying about viewing figures.

More importantly -- and I cannot stress this enough -- throughout this sequence, we are not watching Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd; we are watching their characters, David Addison and Maddie Hayes. We are watching fictional characters who know they are fictional, and who -- while remaining fictional -- are stepping out of their fictional context and interacting with the world beyond. This wasn’t the first time the show had spiralled into this particular vortex: the closing episode of Season 2 ends with a chase sequence that runs clean off the set and onto the backlot and eventually breaks down entirely, leaving the characters to make up their own ending while worrying about the episode’s run-time.

Moonlighting is full of this kind of meta-fictional mucking about. ‘Atomic Shakespeare’ features a boy settling down to watch Moonlighting, only for his mother to make him go upstairs to do his homework; which, it turns out, is reading The Taming of the Shrew. The episode then becomes a parodic version of the play delivered in a slangy iambic pentameter, and performed by Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd playing David and Maddie playing Petruchio and Katherina. At the end, the boy runs back downstairs to ask his mother if Moonlighting is still on. No, she says, but not to worry; it wasn’t a very good episode this week.

The strength of Moonlighting was that it knew exactly what it was. It was lighthearted entertainment, an entirely disposable TV show; something that might be good or might be bad, and it wouldn’t matter. TV in that moment was disposable; go out for the evening and you’d miss it.

This knowledge that it was fun and disposable meant Moonlighting could do things with the form no one else dared to. This is one of the great joys of disposable popular culture: it allows for experimentation that more self-serious (middlebrow) art shies away from -- the hallucinatory paranoia of Philip K. Dick, the psychedelic invention of a Jack Kirby comic, the musically omnivorous melange of a late Beatles album, the dizzying weirdness of no-budget movies like Carnival of Souls (1962) or Hausu (1977). The ‘golden age’ of streaming, box-set, binge-watch TV has not produced anything so gleefully inventive, or so engaged with its own medium. We have TV that is more seriously engaged in big themes, more carefully written, more visibly acted, definitely better directed;2 but nothing that is as much fun.

For a very different approach to a detective show that’s just as full of obscure pop cultural references, there’s always the Morse prequel series Endeavour:

You can get a bit exhausted, sometimes, by the complexity of real life: the weight of people’s experiences and difficulties, and the way that absolutely everything, globally speaking, seems to be speeding towards disaster. Which is why, every now and then, I read all the Jack Reacher books in sequence.

The opening sequence of Lee Child’s first Reacher book, Killing Floor, is like a parody of ‘manly’ writing: flat, terse, repetitive sentences, subject-verb-object.

There are no feelings in the first paragraph, just material facts: the most Reacher will admit to is being ‘wet and tired after a long walk in heavy rain.’ And it has that little choppy non-sentence — ‘At twelve o’clock.’ — which suggests that Reacher sees communication as a form of artillery, like the boring guy at the bar who prevents you from leaving by telling you more and more about his experience of the ULEZ. Essentially, in the first couple of sentences Reacher comes across like someone recuperating from a heavy blow to the head. (Which, to be fair, he often is.)

This air of lumpen masculinity extends into the rigorously consistent Reacher marketing: the screaming yellow capitals; the lone butch silhouette in jeans and Timberlands; and the titles, each of which is a two- or three-word variation on ‘VERY SINISTER SITUATION’.

The thing about Child, though, is that he is not, in fact, a boring guy at a bar. He isn’t making an incompetent grab for your attention. He is unfolding his big, steady hand to show you the beginning of a story. Which, in the case of Killing Floor, continues:

By this point, halfway down the first page, we have already ticked off several of the elements in the periodic table of Reacher: the hour of the clock (has a character ever been so hell-bent on telling you the time?); the nature of the weather; coffee and food; exertion, privation; a brush with authority. And there are other, more technical tells. The presidential election, so briefly mentioned, plays a subtle part in the book’s central mystery; its casual establishment is very, very smooth. And the lively descriptions and plain but assonant word choices, like ‘pebble’.

Child is particularly pleasing when he writes about cars and driving, which is what he does next:

(Significantly, Reacher doesn’t have a car, and has never passed a driving test. Unusually for an American, he prefers to walk.)

We’re about two short paragraphs in at this point, and the plot is about to roar into action. Soon the Reacher landmarks are speeding by: his curiously significant shoes; his immense physical handiness; his investigative flair. His women (smart, mouthy, competent, violent and ‘lithe’ or ‘athletic’, which are polite words for ‘thin’). His complex family relationships; his preference for assembling a team, and then walking away alone.

‘Walking away alone’ is important. The set-up is that Reacher is the world’s most stacked, competent and self-sufficient hobo. He is ‘a giant, six five, heavily built, close to two hundred and fifty pounds’, and he spent a couple of decades in the US Army. He knows that he can ‘do anything. First his mother had told him, then his father, then the quiet deadly men in the training schools.’ People assume he’s a thug, and stay out of his way; that’s the way he likes it. Having deliberately divested himself of all possessions, he sets off to wander aimlessly across America.

(This aloneness, incidentally, is one of the reasons screen adaptations of Reacher struggle so badly. Reacher has all the hallmarks of an extremely juicy franchise, with the stubborn exception that the franchise model demands recurring characters. The other reason adaptations struggle is that Reacher’s enormous body is allied to a keen analytical mind, a combination that is both critical and incredibly unusual. So you end up with either the scuttling Tom Cruise in the movies, giving us Reacher as a surprisingly violent figure-skater; or the massive, baffled Alan Ritchson in Amazon’s TV adaptation, giving us Reacher as Scooby-Doo.)

At many levels there is absolutely nothing special about the Reacher books. They are cathartic wish-fulfilment with crazy, unrealistic plots; they are incredibly repetitive; they are rarely funny (although Reacher is hilariously Pooterish at times: ‘Piet Mondrian was his favourite painter of all time, and this exact painting was his favourite work of all time. The title was Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue. Mondrian had painted the original in 1930 and Reacher had seen it in Zurich, Switzerland.’) But, like many other weedy metropolitans, I absolutely love them. And I think one of the main reasons is that they cause me absolutely no anxiety whatsoever — not even, thanks to Child’s talent, anxiety about bad prose. The reader is at times bewildered; but she is never worried.

The entire series is an outstanding example of ‘competence porn’, the wonderful sensation that there are people out there who know exactly what they’re doing, leaving you free to burble along in your happy little rut. This goes for Child itself, and it also goes for the characters he writes. Reacher is the product of professional specialization; he brings a lifetime of brawling and military training to situations that would stun anyone else. (Child addresses Reacher’s competence and exceptionality frequently: ‘there was a portion of his brain developed way out of all proportion, like a grotesquely overtrained muscle.’ At the same time Reacher is shown to be explicitly bad at many other typically ‘masculine’ things, like sports and driving.) Reacher prepares for the worst, because that’s his training; but, like an aircraft pilot or a deep-sea engineer, his ideal outcome is that nobody gets hurt. If you read enough Reacher books you start to develop the comfortable belief that you too could win a bar fight or aim a rifle; his unbounded agency bounces right into your consciousness.

In the secondary characters you perceive Child’s evangelism for the American religion of ‘service’: baddies aside, they are thoughtful and quietly upright public servants, and each performs his or her job with a gratifying excess of skill. Incompetence is explicitly equated with evil, and is usually to be found among the top brass. (In the Reacher universe, executive authority is deeply suspect.)

Importantly for the reader’s relaxation, Reacher’s own survival is never in serious doubt, not least because you know there are always more books coming. This is not a modish TV series in which major characters get killed; it is a determinedly ‘70s-style airport thriller series, and killing Jack Reacher would simply cost too many people too much money. In 2025, when Child stopped writing the books and passed them over to his brother, Reacher joined Jason Bourne and Jack Ryan in the thriller hero Valhalla; he became an IP immortal, released from his creator and too valuable to die.

When he began writing Reacher in the mid-’90s after being made redundant from his job at ITV, Child didn’t know he was embarking on a thirty-year blockbuster spree. In Killing Floor and the three books that follow, Child writes Reacher as a developing character, a person whose circumstances might change; Reacher forms serious relationships with women, he inherits a house, he develops ties to a locality and considers settling down. If this had been a five-book series -- still an enormously successful run, in publishing terms -- Reacher’s story arc might have ended with wedding bells. But, instead, Reacher sold millions. To sustain a long-running series, Child had to reset the clock to zero at the end of each book. In the fifth title in the series, Echo Burning, the newly-single Reacher has been banished to the scorched wastes of the Texan desert, as alone as alone can be. Each subsequent book adheres to the infinite-Reacher formula: he blows into town, stumbles across trouble, metes out justice, and leaves without a backwards glance.

The clockwork predictability of the Reacher formula contributes to the overall sense of complete relaxation. Part of the deal with series like this is that you want to be surprised, but you don’t want to be genuinely unsettled. It’s good to know where it’s all going. With Reacher you always know where it’s going; you just don’t know exactly how it’s going to get there. And he’s good company: his comfortable, well-boundaried and courteous masculinity is incredibly restful. Like any romantic hero he is invested with huge reserves of potential energy held in mindful abeyance. The books emphasize his patience and good manners, his avoidance of drunkenness and his instinctive self-reliance. Even when provoked, he remains in control.

The reader’s comfort is elevated by the discovery that Reacher (presumably, like Child) holds the attitudes of a fairly standard urban, British, liberal Boomer (Child worked in broadcasting, for god’s sake). Sure, Reacher grouches about ‘the government’ despite living off a comfortable institutional pension. But he holds none of the prejudices associated with previous generations of action heroes, and evinces an instinctive respect for the ordinary people around him. Like Aaron Sorkin, his sexuality is that of the big-bush ‘70s, in an endearing sort of way (attractive women are introduced arse-first, and they are forever ‘forgetting’ to wear underwear). But that aside, there’s nothing that really makes your hackles rise; you don’t have to flinch in anticipation of what he’s going to say about women and minorities. These characters never question their own worth or their capacity to cope, and neither does Reacher.

Once the Reacher formula is established and the reader has understood the bargain — you tell me a story, I don’t have to worry about anything — Child begins to complicate Reacher’s character. His happy solitude, we learn, isn’t always so happy; his need to keep moving is born of an obscure fear. Both prevent him from living a functional adult life. Even when he is an insider, he is an outsider: his own American-ness — handily for a British author — was learned second-hand on foreign US Army bases.

But by the time we learn all this, we also know that these things are back-engineered to explain authorial choices made 15-odd books ago. Whatever his oddnesses, Reacher can look after himself. These are books you can read with a very bad cold, or while being pummelled from behind by a toddler on a long-haul flight; we are actively relieved of any responsibility, for Reacher’s wellbeing or for anything else. He is, quite simply, not our problem to solve.

For a very different — but just as reassuring — kind of ‘competence porn’, there’s the utterly reliable film making and baseball competence of Moneyball

Disc 1

Research by Cambridge psychologists suggests that our music taste changes as we age. In adolescence, for example, we tend to find music more important and gravitate towards more ‘intense’ genres like punk or metal.

And so it turns out that this was yet another way in which I was not like other 16 year olds in 1986, because I was listening to David Sylvian’s third solo album Gone To Earth, which is not intense, at least not in that sense.1 It is sombre and swooning, acoustic and lyrical; and half of it, the second disc of the double album, is entirely atmospheric instrumentals of shadowy soundscapes and strange voices.

Those Cambridge psychologists were right about one thing, though: I took it very seriously, almost as seriously as I took myself. I played it on repeat, as one does with new records at that age, immersing myself in the deep melancholy and poetic yearnings. To be fair to my 16 year old self (which is not easy), I was taking myself marginally less seriously than David Sylvian was taking himself. There was a lot of melancholy and poetry to drown in.

Even the titles held great significance to me. Before I bought the album I bought the single ‘Taking The Veil’, a title full of a dark Catholicism, of the self-abnegation and seclusion of a woman entering a nunnery. In my monstrous self-absorption, I felt this was a situation I could sympathise with.

The single’s cover was a Peter Blake illustration from Through The Looking Glass, a book full of absurdism, satire and hallucinatory images; a book both childlike and subversive, and hence close to the hearts of teenagers everywhere.

And the album title, Gone To Earth, was redolent of pastoral romanticism (with a little bit of folk horror lurking in the shadows under the trees). Sylvian says the title was supposed to be a reference to incarnation, to the individual’s birth into the physical world, but I took it as a reference to the acoustic, jazzy influences of the music.

David Sylvian had been lead singer of the pop group Japan, who had ended up as a synth-art outfit whose urban, futuristic sounds had been perfect for the cyberpunk world of the early ‘80s. Gone to Earth was different, full of folk and jazz influences, spoken word pieces and an analogue ambience. It was warmer, more human: more ‘down to earth’.

These days both titles suggest something else to me. ‘Gone to earth’ is a fox-hunting term for the moment when the fox retreats into its den and so cannot be chased further, thus ruining the ghastly fun of its unspeakable pursuers. ‘Taking the veil’ is a precursor to leaving the mundane life and all its worldly concerns. That Peter Blake Alice illustration is from the moment where the Red Queen reveals to Alice that she must run very fast to stay in the same place.

This all feels like a frank statement by Sylvian, the most photogenic and enigmatic of all New Romantic pin-ups, that he was trying to escape the business of show and find — to paraphrase an old Japan song title — ‘a new career’.

Not that he and Japan had ever been comfortable pop stars, despite their splendid cheek bones and perfect make up. Indeed, it sometimes felt like they were trying very hard not to be pop stars. They had started out as a glam rock pastiche of The New York Dolls, a style that won them paradoxical fame in the country of Japan2 before being ditched in preference of becoming a faux Roxy Music. Then a brush with Giorgio Moroder almost made them synth pop stars; but while Nick Rhodes (and Princess Di) stole Sylvian’s hairstyle, the band gallantly decided not to be Duran Duran and instead became something far more art rock, and far less Top of the Pops-friendly.

In many ways Japan were simply modelling the fashions of pop in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, during the cultural fallout of punk: the adolescent energy of gleeful glam, the DIY spirit inspiring a new generation of synth heroes, the rebellious visual style of New Romanticism. This meant that they looked like a band consistently jumping someone else’s train — New York Dolls, Roxy Music, Giorgio Moroder, Yellow Magic Orchestra — and consistently falling back off, never quite getting it right.

But, as Sylvian has pointed out, a great deal of Japan’s sound came from exactly this failure of imitation. A great deal of artistic innovation results not from deliberate invention but, in Sylvian’s words, from ‘trying to copy something else and failing miserably’; the attempted copy is so warped and distorted by the artist’s personality and worldview that it comes out as something quite new.

So it was with Gone To Earth. Despite including contributions from experimental rock legends (Robert Fripp of none-more-prog King Crimson, Holger Czukay of krautrock stalwarts Can), and being produced by Steve Nye of baroque minimalist instrumental outfit The Penguin Cafe Orchestra, it filters their influence through Sylvian’s own sensibility to create a sound that was unique to him. And to the listener.

Mind you, Sylvian’s choice of artistic collaborators still made waves. I’m pretty sure he’s the reason I discovered both The Penguin Cafe Orchestra and Can, just as Japan’s idiosyncratic covers — ‘Don’t Rain On My Parade’ from Hello, Dolly, Smokey Robinson’s ‘I Second That Emotion’, The Velvet Underground’s ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ — sent me scurrying off to raid my mother’s Barbra Streisand collection and to hunt out Tamla/Motown compilations.

And then, in the schedule at The Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, I spotted a double bill of films, one of which was called Gone To Earth (1950).3 I had never heard of it, or the other film on the bill, something called Black Narcissus (1947). However, on the strength of the weird coincidence I bought a ticket, and so discovered the film-making partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. I have this album to thank for one of the great and persisting joys of my life.

The innovation through imitation that brought Japan to such a weird place turned into something of an artistic dead end itself; no bands in the late ‘80s sounded ‘like’ Japan. For Sylvian, once the band had split up, where was there to go, but back to Earth? He was not alone in trying to reinvent himself in the second half of the decade. Sting released his similarly jazzy Dream of the Blue Turtles (eheu), Duran Duran were reinventing their sound for Notorious (derogatory), and George Michael had just left Wham! The pop stars were getting older and trying to grow up.

Disc 2

But then, their fans were growing up too. That Cambridge research is right: our music taste changes as we age, becoming mellower and more sophisticated. And that change, in turn, drives the adolescent taste; the desire to establish one’s own individuality in the face of the tastes of the older generation, of parents and authority figures.

But we are also trying to establish our identities as members of a group. Japan’s oscillations had modelled my own attempts at tribal identities, a furious cycling through signifiers and genres that mimicked the changes and discoveries of adolescence: the studded leather bracelet I wore to a Queen concert, the electric blue hair of my Gary Numan phase, the nightshirt I wore when I was a New Romantic, the Victorian undertaker’s coat I wore when I was a Goth. Perhaps the reason why I loved Japan and David Sylvian at the time, and why I still do, is that they changed with me, and vice versa.

They weren’t the only musical artists doing this at the time. The Cure were in the middle of their extraordinary self-reinvention as an off-kilter and joyous pop band, a change that made me just as deliriously happy as their earlier albums had made me reassuringly miserable. Tom Waits was transitioning from barfly crooner to hobo king of circus organists. Paul Simon had just discovered South African township music and put out Graceland.

Bands who maintain a distinct sound often come to be associated with a particular moment in your life; but artists who constantly reinvent and rediscover themselves can be ever-present. If you have never quite figured out your own specific purpose, it’s reassuring to be reminded that Sylvian has never quite inhabited a genre, and that nevertheless his distinct personality continually transmutes his influences into something new, and yet always recognisable. For all the change and innovation, there you are. Somewhere, not all that deeply buried, you are 16 years old, and listening to David Sylvian.

For more on the experience of evolving artistic tastes:

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017)

There are not many movies in the Letterboxd Diary this month because I have suffered a relapse of an old addiction: I have gone adventuring in Hyrule again.

For the uninitiated, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a videogame. It is, more specifically, an ‘open world’ role playing game — that is, a game in which you can explore the fictional world as you like, going anywhere and interacting with anything. (In this respect, open world games are much like conventional table-top role playing games.)

The Zelda games started being released in 1986, so Breath of the Wild was more or less the thirtieth anniversary version. As in (most of) the others you play as Link, a hero adventuring through a fantasy world on his way to (inevitably) rescue the Princess Zelda. The plot (such as it is) and the lore of the setting are even more ludicrous than you might be imagining; but as games, they are terrific. There are very good reasons why Breath of the Wild is rated as one of the best videogames of all time.

Many of these reasons have to do with how innovative it is within the ‘open world’ genre. Breath of the Wild’s approach to this genre has been hugely influential, changing the way other games now approach it.

But these innovations have also been incredibly useful for me. For a start, I am terrible at video games. I have awful hand eye coordination and consequently find most of them incredibly difficult to play. I want to enjoy video games, but I have, in the past year, bounced off sci-fi epic Mass Effect, cowboy saga Red Dead Redemption, and the grey and gritty Batman Arkham series, all of which required me to have split-second timing and a voluminous memory for button combinations, all of which are beyond me.

Nintendo, on the other hand, have a long history of trying to be inclusive with players and consequently have control systems that even a klutz like me can handle. And the game is incredibly forgiving. Even though, in the middle of a fight, as I struggle with the buttons, I will accidentally crouch down, or whistle for my horse, or start climbing a wall, the game is lenient enough that I won’t die too often.

More importantly, Breath of the Wild’s emphasis on player agency means I can play in a way that suits my ability: sniping enemies from a distance, or simply avoiding them altogether, playing not as a hard bitten adventurer but as a happy wanderer, exploring the wilderness stopping to chat with passers by.

And what passers by! This is the true delight of Breath of the Wild. In the tradition of Nintendo’s inclusiveness, the game is largely free of the adolescent grim n’ gritty histrionics that make the worlds of other games so tiresome. It is, instead, a little cartoony, a little whimsical, even a little funny. It is full of odd delights, strange discoveries and a constant appeal to play further.

There is a lot of discussion of how games need good writing and good plots, and goodness knows that’s true, but Breath of the Wild has neither and while it may be inventive in their application, uses the basic structures of a million other role playing games. What it does do is create a world of staggering and engrossing wonder, and invite the audience to make it their own, a thing that only a game can do and possibly where games truly constitute the new popular art of the twenty first century.

Breaking containment

It’s been a rough few weeks in the Metropolitan household: our beloved communal spaniel broke his leg, and has to be immured in confined spaces with no running or jumping while it heals. This is pretty much a spaniel’s idea of hell, although — and this is one of my most impactful learnings from this entire experience — it turns out you can get dog tranquilisers.

Worse, we twice had to leave him in the care of more competent strangers while he had surgery, and the second time we did this he gave us a look of such distress and betrayal that I don’t think Toby and I will ever recover. So in an act of self-soothing — and speaking of lapsing into old addictions — I’ve spent a lot of the last couple of weeks re-watching the early seasons of ER with one hand on a disorientated dog. My takeaways are:

• So much under-the-duvet rustling followed by people popping their heads out and saying ‘hmmmm!’ Absolute pet hate of mine.

• The ‘90s went big on cool-toned lipstick and blusher, and I’m sad we don’t do this any more. For the past ten years all lipsticks have been orange, which makes me look like a cadaver.

• It’s literally closer to being a ‘70s show than a 2020s show, and sometimes you can really see it. Several outro sequences are shot in slow-mo, and one ends in a sudden freezeframe, a practice that should have been killed dead ten years earlier by the Police Squad epilogues.

• However much we try, it’s really hard for us Gen Xers to comprehend how sexist the ‘90s were, even when we were on the sharp end of that sexism ourselves. Pat yourself on the back if you lived through it and didn’t kill anyone.

• The medics are incredibly judgemental about their patients, and use medical procedures as moral punishments. At least once per episode, someone deliberately does something that ought to be career-ending.

• On a related note: Dr Doug Ross is an absolutely massive wanker.

• The casting was astonishing: so many then-unknowns who dripped with charisma. Lots of them were gifted comic actors as well, and it’s a lot funnier than The Pitt. (Mind you, many major diseases are a lot funnier than The Pitt.) Like Casualty and The Bill in the UK it also operated as a funnel for new talent, meaning that the extras are spectacularly good value too: there’s a very young Kirsten Dunst, and lots of people who went on to star in The West Wing. At one point Toby Ziegler turns up having ill-advisedly used an entire tube of performance-enhancing cream on his schlong.

There: that’s not likely to upset anyone, is it? Last week’s essay about ER’s unacknowledged (and legally murky) successor The Pitt, on the other hand, provoked big feelings in a lot of people. Several days later there was still a full-blown row going on in the comments, and for the first time we were sent a report about a comment requiring moderation (although thankfully it was just spam). It has been a reminder that we break our ‘no hot takes’ rule at our (and your) peril.

The Metropolitan is a small-ish newsletter. We didn’t intentionally plan it that way (we hoped to make money out of this, lol). But it turns out our audience is self-limiting by virtue of being discerning, highly intelligent, and unusually attractive. That’s just the way it is. Then, every now and then, a piece breaks containment, as happened with our piece about The Pitt. Mostly this is very gratifying because it brings in new people (hello! We’re not usually this self-referential, honest). But, because this is in the internet, a few of the drive-by comments were jarring.

As I remarked to Toby at one point this week: ‘I don’t like it when people read the things I’ve written.’ Obviously I’m being a precious little hothouse flower, and I don’t literally mean this. But while talking to people on the internet is one of my favourite things, absorbing random hostility from strangers on the internet (or seeing our subscribers having to absorb it) is one of my least favourite things. It’s a conundrum alright.

So for what it’s worth, and in case we mistakenly publish something popular again, it turns out you can report posts in the comments. If you find someone in there being an unmitigated dick, let us know. I’ve moderated before and goddammit, I will moderate again if I have to.

Letterboxd Diary

What has enjoyed watching this month.

The Palm Beach Story (1942)

I know, I know, a film I should have seen by now, especially since Metropolitan co-founder Nettie Richardson has been urging me to for years, but OH MY GOD, what a dollop of incomparable delight, what a joy, what a movie.

Gerry (Claudette Colbert) is convinced that she can better help her inventor husband Tom (Joel McCrea) by marrying someone richer, so she heads to Palm Beach to acquire a divorce. On the way she falls in with millionaire John D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee) and his husband-hungry sister the Princess Centimillia (Mary Astor). But husband Tom is in hot pursuit, and when he catches up with them the highest of jinks ensue.

I haven’t even mentioned the Ale and Quail Club and their splendid spaniels, the hard of hearing Wienie King, or Toto, the incomprehensible hanger-on. You can see why the Coen Brothers love Preston Sturges so much.

Sullivan’s Travels (1941) was already one of my favourite films, so I should have known, but the moment this finished I found a Preston Sturges boxset on eBay and bought it immediately, not least because so few of his films are available to stream.

This is not altogether surprising. Much has been made, recently, of the Netflix model of movie making, where the plot is explained in words of one syllable in every other scene, in which characters must clearly enunciate their every motive and emotion, and in which exciting action must be regularly included to keep audiences watching. This is all done on the assumption that viewers aren’t viewing: they’re looking at their phones and simply have the TV on as some customisable wallpaper.

The Palm Beach Story is the anti-Netflix film. Look at your phone even for a second and you will miss two plot points, three jokes and some great performances. It is fast talking and fast moving - and, like so many ‘30s and ‘40s movies, surprisingly fast living; stimulatingly adult about relationships and life.

Tom’s invention is a sort of chainmail landing strip that could be suspended between skyscrapers to make an airport in the middle of a city. The film is a similarly ludicrous construction of filigree complexity and surprising strength. Unlike the regulated structure of modern movies, it has a habit of darting off in odd directions, filling itself with mad details and delightful decoration. This is never more evident than in the way the movie begins where other romcoms end: with a wedding. We open with a madcap marriage that seems to feature two Joel McCreas and two Claudette Colberts, something which isn’t explained until the very last scene of the film, leaving the audience in a fevered state of anticipation and confusion throughout.

Unless they look up a synopsis on their phones, of course.

The Master (2012)

Paul Thomas Anderson’s thinly veiled portrait of L. Ron Hubbard and the founding of scientology. Joaquin Phoenix is Freddie Quell, an alcoholic Navy veteran who falls into the orbit of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd, a self-aggrandising writer who is in the process of building his own cult.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Hubbard story, particularly since I came to it through reading about Jack Parsons, the rocket engineer who was also an occultist and a follower of Aleister Crowley. Parsons engaged with the young Hubbard in a magical working, and then Hubbard conned Parsons and ran off with his ‘wife’. These are the bare bones of an utterly unhinged story that someone absolutely has to adapt some day.

The Master is not that story, but it did make an interesting coda to all those war films we watched last month: it is the story of what happened next, the search for stability and identity in post-Second World War America after the chaos and regimented service of wartime.

More specifically it’s about visions of masculinity, captured perfectly in the two central performances. Phoenix’s performance is one of intensity and tightly wound energy, perfect for a man who is being burned from the inside by his own addictions and impulses and who cannot quite comprehend what is happening to him. Hoffman’s performance, in contrast, is one of huge but contained charisma, an avuncular facade on a monumental ego.

These are two models of being a man for the post-War generation. On the one hand you have the tortured masculinity of a Brando or a Dean, an extreme physicality which masks a damaged spirit. On the other hand you have the patriarchal gravitas of a Welles or a Wayne, the expression of extreme and furious control. In some ways these represent the opposition of underground with the mainstream, the son and the suburban father; the opposition, that is, of the Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation, the dynamic that did so much to determine the American culture of the latter part of the twentieth century.

Inherent Vice (2014)

The Master led, inevitably, to another PTA/Joaquin Phoenix collab, a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. The movie is appropriately baggy, free-associating and incomprehensible, although it never quite captures either Pynchon’s lyricism or his delightfully terrible sense of humour.

It does, though, capture something of that vision of mid-century California, a very Jack Parsons combination of esoteric culture and cutting edge technology: ashrams and chip fabs, hyper consumerism and alternative lifestyles, suburban sprawl and off grid cults. It’s the setting of so much of my adolescent reading: Pynchon, a lot of Philip K. Dick, Hunter S. Thompson, William S. Burroughs and trace amounts of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. It’s an hallucinatory landscape, a Fata Morgana of the World of Tomorrow quavering in the heat haze between the sea and the desert.

It makes Inherent Vice something of a hangout movie for me, albeit an odd one, with its trippy disjunction and doper’s paranoia, in much the same way I found David Fincher’s Zodiac a comfort watch during the pandemic.

Macbeth (1948)

Speaking of Welles, I finally got around to watching his 1948 adaptation of Macbeth, which he described as a cross between Wuthering Heights (1943) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). What it most reminded me of, though, is a Warner Brothers or UPA cartoon of the same period (congratulatory), most particularly the backgrounds.

The settings of Macbeth have the same sense of gigantic minimalism and stylised decoration as the modernist backgrounds of a Gerald McBoingBoing film, or Chuck Jones’s masterpiece What’s Opera, Doc? (1957). It is a theatre set grown to movie proportions, full of sound and fury and, to be fair, signifying a great deal in this case.

I wasn’t too sure about Welles’ ‘Scottish’ accent, which is better than Christopher Lambert’s in Highlander (1986) but not by much; but I did like his crown, even though he dismissed it as making him look like the Statue of Liberty.

He ended up with it because he had virtually no budget, and so had little choice in costuming. But this probably also accounts for the brutal, brooding sparseness of the sets. Ultimately the film is an excellent example of what can be achieved with little money but a huge amount of ambition and, more importantly, inventiveness.

Strongroom (1962)

And speaking now of low budgets, I stumbled across this no budget British thriller on the BFI channel, which has listed it with a recommendation from Quentin Tarantino.

It’s the story of a carefully planned bank robbery which, like all carefully planned bank robberies, goes awry and ends with two of the bank staff - the manager and his secretary - trapped in the air tight vault.

The film then cuts back and forth between the two of them trying to find a way out, and the robbers realising that if the trapped staff die it will be murder, which at that point was a hanging offence in Britain. Slowly the robbers realise they are going to have to break back in to save the people they have robbed.

It’s an amazing little set up, but what’s fascinating about it is how much time it makes for the characters, even the ramrod straight and efficient early ‘60s movie police.

There’s a lovely example of this in the scene where, struggling for air in the vault, the manager and secretary are talking about how they ended up there. He reveals that he always wanted to be a printer but his parents wanted him to go into a managerial profession. A printer! An apparently odd little gracenote but absolutely spot on for the character, a man who would have been happier racking up lead type into perfectly kerned lines. The film is full of these odd moments and is all the better for it. (Insert here the rant above about the Blake Snyder mandated movie structure and its failings.)

Playlist

: Here’s my favourite ten tracks for this month.

Concrete Trees - Annabelle Chairlegs

Some garage power pop to start us off in an appropriately enthusiastic spring mood.

Tadano Tomodachi - salyu × salyu

Off kilter Japanese pop that sounds like it was made to accompany speeded up footage of flowers bursting into bloom like fireworks.

Monkey System - Black Flower feat. Meskerem Mees

This, on the other hand, is quite shadowy and slinky with a nicely quirky jazz rumble behind it.

Tincture - Perfect Binding

There’s something quite dark about this, too, but in a more valve driven, garage rock style.

Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh - Say Hi

Big fan of the horns on this track, fitting alongside the lo-fi indie guitars splendidly.

Domino - Nicole Atkins

Lovely piece of noirish soul with a splendid chorus.

Out of Town - Water From Your Eyes

I am somewhat partial to this kind of quirky indie accompaniment to a lyrical pop tune.

Lie In The Gutter - Peel Dream Magazine

Stereolab meets Yo La Tengo - not that surprising a meeting if we’re going to be honest.

Waves - ISTA

Some psychedelic rock to match the coming sunshine.

Bad Kids - TTRRUUCES

I was thinking that this sounded reassuringly late ‘00s to me (a little bit stomp! clap! hey!, a little bit Go! Team) and then discovered that they formed in the teens in Broadway Market, where I was living at time, and realised why it sounded so friendly and familiar.

The whole playlist is on Spotify as usual:

For more Shakespearean kings on a low budget, there’s always the Hollow Crown sequence of history plays:

The Pitt was first broadcast in the US 18 months ago, but thanks to the perverse incentives of competing streaming services it has only just become available in the UK. This piece contains some spoilers, including for later episodes of the second season.

I generally enjoy using Bluesky, the ‘progressive’ micro-blogging alternative to X, but it has to be said that it is often a little insane (as opposed to X, which is often a lot insane). Even among the mostly temperate centre-left people I follow, there is now a furious anti-Americanism that I haven’t seen in the wild since the fights over missile deployment at Greenham Common in the ‘80s. I’ve seen British centrist dads talking about how they’re gleefully haranguing random US tourists in holiday hotspots, and European academics saying that any American not engaged in active insurrection is a collaborator.

It reminds me of how I felt after the Brexit vote, when good liberals around the world suddenly decided that all Brits were mad, stupid and self-aggrandising. It was a desolate feeling. How much worse that feeling must be if you’re an American progressive under Trump.

I’ve been thinking about this while watching The Pitt (HBO). The Pitt is a hospital drama; more specifically, it is a very, very thinly disguised successor to ER (so thinly disguised that it is now the subject of a lawsuit by the estate of ER creator Michael Crichton). It even stars Noah Wyle (the young Dr Carter in ER) as a now-grizzled head of an emergency department in a hospital in Pittsburgh, essentially extending the ER universe 30 years into the future.

The Pitt made me think about the experience of US progressives because, like ER, The Pitt is structurally ‘progressive’. More than any other kind of medicine, emergency care is perfect for illustrating the contingency of fate (we’re all one badly-placed ladder away from dependency). Progressive positions are inherent in The Pitt’s dramatisation of vulnerability and care, and the injustices of low wages, poor living standards and commercialised healthcare. It also illustrates the merits of funding public services through general taxation, without which (in emergency departments) people literally and quickly die.

Like ER, The Pitt uses the medical emergency as a metaphor for America. A trauma department can plausibly host pretty much anyone, from rednecks and frat boys to selfless carers and homeless people (carefully referred to, in the ever-changing lexicon of the liberal left, as ‘unhoused’). This allows all kinds of political issues to be miniaturised and dramatised. Hell, the second season is set on the actual Fourth of July and features several walking metaphors, including a sunburned woman in a Stars and Stripes bikini and a guy who’s been impaled on a literal flag. (Each season of The Pitt takes place over one day, like 24.)

Patients arrive with conditions that have worsened because they have lost Medicaid; they leave against medical advice because they cannot afford bills for ongoing hospital care. There are storylines about the experiences of people with disabilities, people with mental health difficulties, women who’ve experienced violence, and Black and trans women’s specific experiences in healthcare. Immigrant families are shown to have fewer resources than established American families. Clinicians are shown enduring insanely long hours and low wages; one student doctor is squatting in an unused ward because he can’t afford to pay rent. The focus is on the American system’s failure to recognise interdependency, support vulnerable people, fund healthcare, and value people’s identities.

So far, so ER, which had plotlines about the cruel insufficiency of the US health insurance system, and which was one of the first mega-shows to frankly portray racism and its souring effects on a diverse population. ER, too, had plotlines about sexual violence, trans women and Black women; it showed major characters with physical disabilities and learning difficulties, and tried to portray the extra hurdles they faced in accessing healthcare. As for healthcare workers, the pilot episode had Dr Benton — Dr Carter’s mentor — noting that ‘we work 36 hours on, 18 off, which is 90 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. For that, we are paid $23,739 before taxes.’

Watching ER now, though, the differences with The Pitt are stark. For ER, politics was only ever one part of the dramatic mix; the ‘90s, in the west, were a time of relative political quietude, and the show was as concerned with the staff’s romantic attachments as it was with the national psyche; the over-arching plotline in the first season was whether Nurse Carol would or would not get back together with Dr Ross. As we have discussed before it was, in effect, a soap.

The Pitt is so, so much bleaker. Its only interest in its characters’ personal lives is to show us how dysfunctional they are; there is much less banter, and no kissing. Instead it places politics front and centre. Fundamentally, it is deliberately dramatising the despair (and ineffectiveness) of the American progressive left under Trump in this specific political moment.

The main characters are all well educated and in secure work; they are all disciplined, effective people who are accustomed to working hard and reaping appropriate results. And they are all finding that, nevertheless, their daily environment is hostile, chaotic, cruel and unsafe. (The second season features a violent incursion by ICE agents that has immigrant workers and patients running for the exits.) They are all (by virtue of the specialism and workplace they have chosen) personally committed to the values of equality and compassion; and they are all working within a larger system that expressly contradicts their values. Tell me this isn’t a metaphor for the most visible parts of the anti-Trump coalition: Democrats, campus protestors, academics, posters on Bluesky; lesbian moms and literal medics on the streets of Minneapolis.

Like progressives everywhere, the staff at The Pitt are explicitly unable to cope with the catastrophic upending of their expectations: the social cruelty, the injustice, the profit-driven decision making. Suicidality is addressed many times, as is paralysing anxiety. One of the most remarked-upon scenes in the first season shows Noah Wyle’s character, Dr Robby, having a panic attack. In Season 2, it’s the turn of one of his younger staff members, a woman in her 30s, to collapse in emotional distress while at work. In explanation, she speaks for all progressives, and young progressives most of all: ‘I’m doing everything right, it’s everything around me that’s all fucked up… I had it all planned out, and now everything’s out the window.’ Despite experiencing the same symptoms so recently himself, Dr Robby dismisses his distressed staff member as a ‘fucking liability’.

The Pitt isn’t afraid to address the generational tension within the progressive movement. Robby and his friend Nurse Dana are the Gen Xers in the Pitt; they have seen a little too much, and they have been unable to change anything much for the better in the last 30 years. (Indeed, The Pitt shows many things as having got expressly worse since ER.) Worse, as the line from It’s A Wonderful Life has it: they’re discouraged. They have lost their hope, and don’t know how to offer any to their younger allies.

Robby eventually apologises to his anxious staff member for being ‘a dick’, but immediately returns to his obsession with workrate, and the merits of effectiveness over empathy: ‘now, I need you to stop feeling sorry for yourself and focus back on your patients’. And, many times, the series dramatises the benefits of experience and a cool head; the older staff do know useful things that the younger staff don’t know.

To a young student who becomes tearful while treating a dying patient, Robby advises that ‘as professionals, we have to create emotional boundaries for ourselves.’ This is true when performing a difficult technical procedure under pressure, but we are shown that it is also profoundly damaging in other contexts. Robby’s attempts at professional cauterisation are botched at best, and have terrible consequences for his own health. His idea of creating a boundary is to deny his fear and anger while shouting at his staff. A Boomer nurse has even less understanding of progressive Millennial and Gen Z angst; for her, they are all simply ‘fucking snowflakes’. ‘I’m not sure this environment is healthy for anybody,’ remarks a Gen Z medical student having a very bad day. Well, that’s unchecked right-wing authoritarianism for you.

‘A lot of what happens around here isn’t right’ Robby says at one point, in a tone that suggests everyone should suck it up. When a peer tries to work the system to protect a vulnerable patient, he says the quiet part out loud: ‘This is not about social justice!’ But the younger staff members are not ready to accept that things are as they are; they are not numb or defeated. They are consciously furious, and disgusted by the Gen Xers’ willingness to make small compromises with a brutal system. They also find older staffers significantly lacking in fellow-feeling and solidarity. As one young doctor remarks, ‘Everyone here talks about “community” and “family,” and then they throw you under the bus.’

Even worse for Gen Xers’ self-esteem, the Gen Zers and Millennials have noticed that Gen Xers are old, and they explicitly find them tedious. If the Gen Xers think the young staff are snowflakes (although they are too PC to say so out loud), the young staff think the Gen Xers are useless and senseless, offensive and mistaken. Their contempt is held in check only by their understanding that the Gen Xers are — for now — technically in charge. They are, mostly, just waiting for us to fuck the fuck off so that they can start to fix the things they think we’ve broken.

Even our stories about the early internet have lost what little charm they had. A major plot point in S2 has the hospital computer systems going offline; suddenly (in a deliberate nod, again, to ER) everything must be done on paper and clipboards and x-ray film. Older staff members (and older viewers) are relatively happy; this is a world they command, a warm bath of nostalgia for the days of Doug and Carol. But the younger staffers are just impatient. Without the fond memories, this technological time warp offers only inconvenience and difficulty. When Robby attempts to patronise a Gen Z student by starting a sentence with ‘When I was at medical school…’ she impatiently shuts him up: ‘...you didn’t have cell phones, or TikTok, or armed ICE agents. I get it.’ Robby is reduced to muttering to himself: ‘Actually, we did have cell phones. Although not at the beginning.’

Dr Robby is the hero of The Pitt, but he’s a very post-COVID hero: not just flawed but actively broken, unpredictable, angry and occasionally malicious. He is reluctant to hand over to his replacement as he heads off for a three-month sabbatical; it is not a coincidence that this replacement is younger, browner and a lot more female. He explicitly believes that he is the only person capable of doing his job. ‘White knight, white noise’, as one Black doctor says behind his back.

In the first season of ER viewers were repeatedly asked to think about the line between confidence and over-confidence. If a medic is under-confident, they will fail to act decisively; if they have too much misplaced faith in their abilities, they risk killing people. Damage is done either way.

The Pitt too has a dilemma for viewers: how do you properly resolve the tension between empathy and effectiveness? Too much empathy produces panic and paralysis; Millennial and Gen Z staff members are shown zoning out, frozen in horror, or running off into corners to cry. They have fidget toys and noise-cancelling earbuds; they listen to playlists of rain sounds and watch calming abstract videos. All of this, it is implied, is because they are so vividly experiencing the pain and distress caused by a system they cannot control.

As coping strategies go, are these things better or worse than emotional cauterisation? Is it better to feel everything, to ‘stay woke’ at the expense of tactical advantage? Or is it better — as the older staff members do — to develop tunnel vision, to focus on what you can control; to find immediate, attainable solutions to smaller, less structural problems; to stem the bleeding, and pass the problem up the line? Is structural inequity an urgent priority or an impractically vast abstraction? If only we could answer this question to our own satisfaction.

More earlier Noah Wyle adventures in medicine:

Part history, part reminiscence, and part short story collection focused on Lake Wobegon, a fictional small town somewhere in the overlooked middle of Minnesota, in the overlooked middle of America, in the overlooked middle of life. Lake Wobegon Days grew out of the humorous stories told by Garrison Keillor on his radio show A Prairie Home Companion. Most of the book contains versions of these stories, little windows into the lives of the people who live in the town, but it is padded out with whimsical and sardonic local history.

It has been a quiet week

In 1978 the BBC changed the broadcast frequencies of its national radio stations (Radios 1, 2, 3 and 4). As part of the publicity drive to make sure no one missed the cricket scores, they issued a set of little diamond-shaped stickers for the tuning dial of your radio, to remind you of the new frequency. As dutiful BBC listeners, my family added the stickers to the radio in the kitchen; and, honestly, we needn’t have bothered. Because once we’d found the new frequency for Radio 4, the tuning on that radio never, EVER changed.

We were a Radio 4 household. From the moment my mother got up in the morning to the moment she went back to bed, from The Today Programme to Book at Bedtime, there was a radio on somewhere in the house, and that radio was tuned to Radio 4. I grew up in a house of comforting, long wave voices, warmed by the bakelite and valves of Broadcasting House and hissing with the weather over London: Brian Redhead, Jenni Murray, Derek Cooper, Corrie Corfield. Everything we did — meals, housework, games — was accompanied by an ethereal chorus of financial experts and foreign correspondents.

And American humourists: because in 1986, Book at Bedtime broadcast Garrison Keillor reading extracts from Lake Wobegon Days, and he fitted in perfectly. His husky, languid, avuncular voice, the drawn out lilting twang of his accent, the gentle melody of his sentences: this was a voice made for the airwaves, a man who surely looked like the speaker grille of a radiogram. The stories were gentle too: little vignettes of small town life, with small stakes and small import.

Keillor has described himself as ‘America’s tallest humourist’, and that comic understatement and use of the word ‘humour’ are key, although his use was so understated as to be missing a ‘u’. ‘Humour’ was the dominant mode of Radio 4 comedy. This meant things that wouldn’t actually make you laugh, but were undemanding and bearably amusing; a background gurgle of cheerful satisfaction to burble along with whatever you were actually paying attention to. Comedy doesn’t have to be confrontational, despite what American stand-ups with worrying personality defects would have you believe. But ‘humour’ is always cosy. Like all comedy it relies on common understandings and culture; but it plays with those understandings gently, aiming for the knowing chuckle of recognition rather than the startled bark of surprise.

Not that Keillor can’t be funny. He can make you laugh out loud with his word choice, sentence rhythm or just the splendid comic situations. But it is a very cosy kind of funny: a wood-panelled, leather-covered funny, chummy and apparently unthreatening.

It is also quite clever, another thing that helped it fit into Radio 4. The common understandings and culture it played upon were educated and metropolitan. This is particularly true in the early part of the book, which gives a fictional history of the town of Lake Wobegon. Keillor is parodying American small town histories, and he relies on the reader knowing about French voyageurs, patterns of late nineteenth century immigration to the States, and East Coast literary culture.

This fictional history tells us that the town of Lake Wobegon was originally named New Albion (another way of saying ‘New England’); perhaps this is why it slipped so seamlessly into Britain’s flagship speech radio station. The joke has another level though, this time about the US’s relationship with Britain; we’re told that as Lake Wobegon gains immigrants from other parts of Europe, from Germany and Norway, it adopts a (humourous) new name of Native American origin, and becomes a distinctly American place.

Keillor is also parodying the form; many of his jokes lie in the structure and niceties of local histories. The book is full of wonderful footnotes (one of which is 20 pages long), ludicrous diversions and whimsical grace notes. Altogether, then, the tone of Lake Wobegon Days is distinctly that of the American middle class intellectual: people who read (or write for) The New Yorker, people who wear tweed jackets with suede elbow patches, people who watch Woody Allen films and drink small drinks in dark, wood-panelled bars in big cities.

This tone was very distinct from the tone of Reagan’s America that we Brits perceived dimly from across the pond: a tone that was all sunshine and DayGlo, go-getting and self-aggrandising, ‘greed is good’ and ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ Compared to grey and seedy mid-’80s Britain, the Reagan tone felt foreign and strange, and it provoked both contempt (for its brashness) and envy (of all that sunshine, money and giant plates of food). As teenagers, we largely consumed this tone via a loud, queasy TV show called Entertainment USA. Its British presenter, Jonathan King, has since been convicted of serious sexual crimes; but even before that, you could instinctively tell he was a wrong ‘un, and some of his slimy, malicious inauthenticity rubbed off on the teenage British Gen X perception of the States.

Lake Wobegon, the book and the town, stood against all that. As the book has it: ‘Lake Wobegon survives to the extent that it does on a form of voluntary socialism with elements of Deism, fatalism, and nepotism. Free enterprise runs on self interest. This is socialism, and it runs on loyalty.’ For all its parody, Lake Wobegon Days extols community and mundanity rather than Reaganite brashness and hucksterism. Where our vision of America in the ‘80s was all television (so many channels! So loud! So exciting!) this was radio. The sound of home, of comfort and of recognition.

Where all the children are above average

This comfort of home and recognition is the comfort of childhood. For all the joking in the book, it contains a deep strain of nostalgia for the storied childhood of the American Boomers, all long golden baseball summers and crisp, magical Christmases, white picket fences and kindly neighbours, Dad away at some ill-defined ‘work’ and Mom in the kitchen baking apple pie. This is the normality the Boomers rebelled against when they joined college protests (before they sold out by going into advertising after their first divorce); and this is the the normality that, by the ‘80s, they worried would be denied to their latch-key Gen X kids.

But the Boomer rebelliousness is in there too. Lake Wobegon Days is full of pretentiously intellectual teenagers (all male) chafing against normality. The footnote that runs to 20 pages is a list of gripes from one of them about how his parents’ politeness and ordinariness has stifled his creativity. Many of these teenagers, after all, are Keillor himself.

Keillor was born plain old Gary, but uses Garrison to denote his authorial voice. That ‘-son’ is a sonorous, distinguished East Coast appendage: Dickinson, Emerson. The book itself is a rebellion, after all, a metropolitan jest at the expense of the upwardly mobile author’s down-to-earth small town origins. The inhabitants of Lake Wobegon are unlikely to be reading Lake Wobegon Days. But Keillor makes fun of himself too, in the form of all those anxious young men. Their notions of sophistication always turn out to be laughably unsophisticated and their literary aspirations mere pulp. But their angst is real.

While Keillor’s sideways perspective may seem a little snipey, the small town mentality is hidebound and stifling, and all too often objectionable. Take ‘the Norwegian Bachelor Farmers’. Keillor makes great play of these uncouth, unmarried lunks with their terrible manners and antisocial attitudes but, while they might be outsiders in the eyes of the town, in many ways they typify the stolid, unpretentious, hidebound spirit of Lake Wobegon. Moreover, as Clarence Bunsen points out, they are kin to the ambitious and rebellious young men: ‘the bachelor farmers are all sixteen years old. Painfully shy, perpetually disgruntled, elderly teenagers leaning against a wall, watching the parade through the eyes of the last honest men in America: ridiculous.’

Outsiders in ‘80s Lake Wobegon they might have been, but now the Norwegian Bachelor Farmers are the presiding spirit of America; their watchword ‘tellwitcha’ — ‘to hell with you’ — is now the country’s motto. Minneapolis may have voted for Harris, but the rest of Minnesota, the rural parts where Lake Wobegon might be, voted Trump. Stearns County — home to Holdingford, the ‘most Wobegonic’ town in Keillor’s words, which now bills itself as ‘The Gateway to Lake Wobegon’ — voted for Trump by a margin of two to one. The metropolitan jest has, over the years, grown stale.

‘The Lake Wobegon effect’ has become a shorthand for illusory superiority, the tendency to overestimate one’s own abilities. It’s named after Keillor’s customary radio sign-off: ‘That’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.’ (It’s is a close cousin of the ‘Dunning Kruger effect’, the phenomenon where the less someone knows about a subject, the more confident they are of their ability to master it.)

It’s tempting to look for the Lake Wobegon effect in contemporary politics, or perhaps in the Baby Boomer generation themselves; but there’s a wider possible application. Most of the studies into the phenomenon of ‘illusory superiority’ have been done in the States. Researchers have found no evidence for it in East Asia, for instance. There, they have found, instead, a consistent underestimation of competence. Perhaps, after all, ‘illusory superiority’ is merely a description of being American; a state that not even the most wholesome, most whimsical, most humorous inhabitants of Lake Wobegon can avoid.

Of course some Radio 4 comedy could be very funny indeed:

One of the most celebrated comic texts in modern English, 1066 And All That was written by Punch contributor Robert Yeatman and history teacher W C Sellar, with illustrations by John Reynolds. It apes the form of a school history textbook, but one that’s been written by an distracted child staring down the barrel of an end-of-year exam. It presents a mangled, otherworldly version of English (never British) history from the arrival of Julius Caesar to the end of the First World War, confidently identifying ‘103 Memorable Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Memorable Dates’ along the way. The authors declare at the beginning: ‘History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.’

The first memorable date

In 1983 I was 12, and learning about motte and bailey castles at school. I didn’t care much about the ins and outs (or rather, the ups and downs) of castle construction then, and I still don’t care now; but I was paying close attention, because our teacher, Mrs Twombley, was one of those teachers, and she had me in a trance. It was the first time I’d been taught history as a discrete subject, and I was discovering that I really liked it. I was also discovering that Mrs Twombley had a lot of strong opinions about Mrs Thatcher: opinions that were not entirely relevant to the context of the thirteenth century. Lots of history teachers, in my experience, have strong opinions about Margaret Thatcher. I suppose she was just a historical sort of person.

It was around this time that I bought 1066 And All That from our local bookshop, using my own pocket money. I hadn’t heard of it, and I don’t think my parents had read it. But in the way that you do when you’re entering your teens, I’d decided that something (history, in my case) was going to be one of my ‘things’, and this tiny little volume full of jokes felt like that kind of thing a History Person should own.

In this I was completely right, although it took me a few decades to work out why. Although it’s only 125 (small) pages long, 1066 And All That is one of those books that repays close reading over a lifetime, because the more you know, the funnier the jokes become. My most well-developed opinion about it — aside from my belief that it’s a work of genius, and should be in those capsules that we send out into space in the hope of explaining ourselves to aliens — is that it’s one of the most accomplished surveys of English history ever written. For starters, it takes a genuinely unusual and wide-ranging level of knowledge and understanding to write jokes this good. And I have never read a better commentary on the mistakes we make with history, both in the general and in the particular. The riotous confusion of the text satirises the fallacies, prejudices and anachronisms of all truly popular histories, formal or informal; and it is also a devastatingly effective demolition of the peculiarities of English national self-regard.

In my early teens I had enough knowledge to understand the parts about the Tudors (‘Broody Mary’) and Henry VIII’s succession troubles (‘Anne had a girl too, in a way (see Elizabeth).’) But, being a student at a comprehensive school in the 1980s (and not a boy at a boarding school in the 1910s), most of the book was riffing on periods of history that I knew absolutely nothing about. Much of the section about Anglo-Saxon England, for instance, with its mentions of the ‘Venomous Bead’, went straight over my head. It was literally last month, when reading Marc Morris’s The Anglo-Saxons, that I understood one of these jokes (‘Non Angli, sed Angeli’ — ‘not Angles, but Anglicans’) for the first time.

But even so, lots of the individual jokes (‘A Wave of Egg-Kings’) were still funny, because Sellar and Yeatman had an eerie talent for language that is funny in itself even when shorn of meaning. You don’t, for instance, need to understand anything to be made delirious by the end-of-chapter tests (‘How angry would you be if it was suggested that the XIth Chap. of the Consolations of Beothius was in interpolated palimpsest?’) The proof of its universality is that so much of it has become part of the British comic lingua franca: Wrong but Wromantic, the Boer Woer, ‘Do not attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once’. The tropes are uncannily accurate to this day; most British people do mentally categorise their monarchs as either ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’, and the English obsession with being Top Nation isn’t so much a joke as a material fact.

You can find perfectly serious analyses asserting that 1066 And All That is both postmodern and anti-imperialist, and the thing is, I’m not even sure they’re wrong. Don’t take it from me: take it from History Today, which noted that it ‘gleefully rips apart the idealised conception that imperial England had of itself. “War against Zulus. Cause: the Zulus. Zulus exterminated. Peace with Zulus”, runs a line on Victorian history.’ It’s this sense of revelry in Britain’s humiliation that’s notable in a text written a century ago by two Establishment-class products of High Imperial Britain. Long before the Tehran Conference, long before Suez, Sellar and Yeatman saw that British global influence was coming to an end (and thus that ‘History came to a .’), and they seemed entirely cheerful about it; the unwritten code of 1066 And All That is that England’s pretensions to power have always been ludicrous. (It took Britain’s political class another three decades to resign itself to the end of Empire, and some of them haven’t got there to this day.)

The postmodernism is right there in its famous declaration that ‘History is what you can remember’, an assertion that provides more than enough material for a PhD thesis. It’s also in the jokes that overflow the main text and embed themselves in the frontmatter. From the title page (‘ROBERT JULIAN YEATMAN, Failed M.A.. etc., Oxon.’) to the acknowledgements (‘The Editors’ thanks are also due to their wife’), the formalities are disrupted and <steeples fingers> interrogated. This meta approach wasn’t new to me in 1983, because the other publication I was obsessed with at the time was Smash Hits, another text in which the ‘serious’ and the ‘silly’ were wrapped around each other like a double helix. Both publications signal a kind of full-body commitment to the principles of the thing: that the formal structure exists only to hold the material, and that you can bend that structure into any shape you like, if the material is good enough. It’s significant, then, that there isn’t a duff line in the whole book.

I have no doubt that the Smash Hits luminaries — Neil Tennant, David Hepworth, Mark Ellen, Tom Hibbert — knew 1066 And All That like the backs of their hands. It’s that kind of book: beloved of the upper-middles, available in all grammar school libraries, namechecked by broadsheet journalists on social media. It has the same slightly exhausting cultural valence as Molesworth, and I know (from having never read Molesworth) that if you don’t build up an intimacy with these things at a young age, the constant references (usually made by people who went to better schools than you) can feel exclusionary and snotty. But I’m here to tell you, straight from Mrs Twombley’s slightly shabby classroom, that — like the works of Shakespeare and Tom Holland dancing to ‘Umbrella’ — 1066 And All That is so good that it belongs to all of us, whether we know it or not.

The second memorable date

Slightly shamefully for a history graduate, I’m very bad at retaining information. The moment I stop actively learning about something, 90% of the relevant facts simply flee from my head. I say this is shameful ‘for a history graduate’ because I’m not any other kind of graduate, and so I can’t say whether it matters so much for other subjects; but history, done right, is a vast multi-dimensional matrix of information, in which Henry the Lion getting out the wrong side of the bed in Saxony could result in chaos anywhere between the Welsh Marches and Jerusalem. If you can’t firmly affix the points in your matrix — if you can’t remember that Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses roughly coincides with the last years of Leonardo da Vinci, the departure of Magellan, the arrival of European adventurers in new (to them) areas of Mexico and Bangladesh, and a significant expansion of the Atlantic slave trade — then you’re just not going to be very good, as a historian.

As a result, I’m always wildly impressed by people who can read something once and just remember it. For instance: about 15 years after discovering 1066 And All That, when I was 27 and working in publishing, I overheard the following conversation between my boss and an author:

My boss: So when do you think you can deliver the manuscript?

The author: Well, as someone once said: ‘Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.’

My boss [posh murmured laugh]: Oh, quite. Niels Bohr, wasn’t it?

In that moment, my boss seemed to me devastatingly debonair. I mean, I’d never even heard of Niels Bohr, and yet my boss was, evidently, familiar with all the notable things Niels Bohr (who?) had said and done; furthermore, he was able to pull that knowledge out of his arse at will. He had, I marvelled, reached a pinnacle of generalist fluency; an unfathomable number of facts clicked in his head, like tiny marbles.

And then, quite recently, I realised that this incident took place roughly two months after Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen — a play about Bohr — had opened in London. And my boss was exactly the kind of guy who would get tickets to the hot new play at the National in 1998. In other words: my boss didn’t have a brain like a card catalogue, with all the world’s most important facts codified and memorised and cross-referenced. (Some people do: the other Tom Holland seems to have a brain like this.) He had merely remembered something from a play he had seen a few weeks before. My memory is sub-par, but — and this is important — lots of other people’s memories are sub-par too. Most of us are living error-strewn lives, surfing along on mangled fragments of half-remembered bollocks; and that’s OK.

This spirit of comfortable self-deprecation — the cheerful middle-aged admission of general ignorance and defeat — pervades 1066 And All That. It’s a tone that says: don’t feel bad because you don’t understand the relationship between the Picts, the Irish and the Scots. At least you’ve paid your tax bill and you know where your stopcock is. The fundamental joke of 1066 And All That — that none of us can remember a bloody thing, and it doesn’t matter — acts on the fiftysomething reader like a hot water bottle applied to the lumbar region. As Sellar and Yeatman say in their Compulsory Preface (‘This Means You’): ‘Histories have previously been written with the object of exalting their authors. The object of this History is to console the reader.’

This consolatory proposition underlies much ‘wry’ humour, which is why wry humour tends to find favour with the middle-aged. (Younger people still have hope that they will turn out to be exceptional.) The British humorist Alan Coren deployed this tone regularly, and was extremely good at it; around the time I first read 1066 my father was reading Coren’s Golfing for Cats (1975), with regular breaks to lie down on the carpet and weep with laughter. (Coren called it Golfing for Cats because he’d observed that best-selling books tended to be about cats, golf or Nazis. In a move that absolutely would not be countenanced today, the cover of the first edition sported an enormous swastika.)

I find most wry humour insufferable; all those sloppy toilet books written by people who seem to truly believe that they know everything, and who in fact know little aside from laziness and a lack of self-respect. Most people should be firmly discouraged from looking sideways at things, at least until they’ve learned to look properly, straight-on. But in the right hands comic writing about serious things is a life-enhancing practice, precisely because the nature of things does matter. Well-executed wryness scours the line between the ephemeral and the important. Sellar and Yeatman both fought in the First World War (Yeatman was severely wounded, shot through ‘like a colander’, and won the Military Cross). You’d never know this from the way they write about it (‘Though there were several battles in the War, none were so terrible or costly as the Peace signed in the Chamber of Horrors at Versailles’), but it surely informed their sure-footedness; 100 years later you can read their summation without experiencing any embarrassment on their behalf.

Although I have read 1066 And All That literally hundreds of times, I haven’t finished decoding it yet. Even to a relatively well-read fifty-something, it’s still full of arcana. On the imprint page, in tiny 6-point print underneath the catalogue information, there is a dedication: ‘Absit Oman’. It turns out this is a play on the Latin tag ‘absit omen’ (‘may what I have written not come true’); and it is a joke about Charles Oman, a celebrated Edwardian military historian whose books Sellar and Yeatman probably had to read at school (Fettes and Marlborough, respectively).

In 2026 it took me about two minutes to find this out, but in 1983 I wouldn’t have had a hope in hell. Nobody I knew had heard of Charles Oman, or understood Latin tags. I would have read it, thought ‘that’s probably a joke, but I don’t know how’, and moved on. Like so many things, 1066 And All That is the product of a lost world, a world in which people sometimes had to just not know things, and nevertheless pick up the shreds of their dignity and move on with their lives. What was the date of the Pheasants’ Revolt? Was it King Alfred or King Arthur who married the Lady Windermere? What is the explanation for Lamnel Simkin and Percy Warmneck? The quiet humility of knowing that you don’t know, and that you might never know, was good for the soul. In one of their terrifyingly hostile quizzes, Sellar and Yeatman suddenly demand: ‘What have you the faintest recollection of?’ Not much, to be honest. But that’s OK.

Some jokes, though, were not just comprehensible by 12 year olds, they were written by them.

Library Corner

What has read this month

A Reluctant Spy (David Goodman, 2025)

A wonderfully wry, gently smart spy thriller. Glaswegian misfit Jamie Tulloch is recruited out of Cambridge into SIS’s ‘Legends’ programme, in which real-life people lead real-life lives in order to establish cast-iron ‘legends’ that can be handed over to real spies when the situation demands it. When Tulloch’s handover goes to pot, he decides to just go with it, stepping into a field agent role with no training, no briefing and no clue what he’s doing.

Two things I really enjoyed about this: the first was the invocation of Zanzibar, which sounds absolutely delightful. An odd side-effect of reading thrillers is that you are introduced to parts of the world you’ll almost certainly never see; over the past year or so I’ve vicariously visited Tehran, Damascus, Moscow and the Florida Everglades. Something about the dictates of the genre – describing the location of a dead drop, narrating the experience of cleaning your tail – incentivises wonderfully evocative descriptions. But they’re always in the service of a plot, which stops them from becoming tedious drones about landscapes.

And the second highly enjoyable thing was Goodman’s quietly intelligent refusal to impose stereotypes on his characters. Tulloch feels like a real person, as does his unwilling field colleague. Sure, there are a few Russian goons and one or two Deeply Nasty Super-Spies, but most of the characters – up to and including the slightly bewildered public school boys at SIS headquarters – are just ordinary, flawed people who are trying their best. If you’re getting a bit bored with the thudding cynicism of all the British Slow Horses impersonators – endless books in which every single senior intelligence officer has the brain of a spaniel and the morals of a Roman consul – it’s a lovely little palate-cleanser.

The Anglo-Saxons (Marc Morris, 2021)/Millennium (Tom Holland, 2008)

The Anglo-Saxons was on a 99p deal on Kindle last month (sorry if this info comes too late to be of any use) so I took a punt, and was very glad I did. Morris has a wonderfully conversational style; thoughtful and interesting but utterly clear and comprehensible for the beginner.

He opens with a brilliant anecdote about a Suffolk farmer called Peter Whatling who lost his hammer in a field in 1992 and, in the course of searching for it, made a discovery ‘so startling that he immediately contacted both the police and the local authorities’; a hoard of Roman treasure, ‘one of the most spectacular ever unearthed in Britain’, that is now known as the Hoxne Hoard and can be seen in the British Museum. The team from the Suffolk Archaeological Unit, Morris notes, ‘also found Mr Whatling’s hammer’.

This is a great way to start a book about the Dark Ages (as we’re now not supposed to call them); but opening with a good anecdote is a relatively easy trick. What grips you is where Morris goes next: why was this hoard buried in the first place? The answer, he says, lies in one of history’s iron laws. ‘There is one paramount factor that consistently prompted people in all periods to conceal their valuables in the ground: fear.’ Fear of what, in this instance? Well, you should read The Anglo-Saxons to find out.

The book ends with the Norman invasion of 1066, so after finishing it I went back to Tom Holland’s Millennium, a survey of Western Europe before and after the year 1000CE. Reading these two back to back helped me to finally understand why I really struggle with Millennium: its narrative relies far too much on the ‘Peter Whatling’s hammer’ trick, but Holland doesn’t go anywhere comprehensible with his evocative openings. Again and again he drops you very effectively into some epochal moment (he opens with the Road to Canossa), and then just gets distracted by a now-occult aspect of Medieval theology, warbling on about it in increasingly strained language. ‘Not everything is to do with god, Tom!’ you cry, desperately turning the pages trying to find the bit where he presses a cold flannel to his forehead and remembers that he’s writing a history book. How this for a sentence: ‘To those who had imagined that the convulsions of the age might spell the imminence of the end days, and who had laboured mightily in the expectation of their coming, the failure of the New Jerusalem to descend could hardly be regarded as a cause for unconfined rejoicing.’ I understand it, Holland, but I don’t have to like it.

I have a lot of time for Holland (the co-host of the all-conquering Rest is History podcast and an extremely well-regarded popular historian). In a popular culture that is terrified of intellect and formal academic accomplishment, his success is one of the bright spots. So I shouldn’t complain; I’ve really enjoyed some of his other books. But there’s something about the way he writes about Christianity that just jangles my nerves. He’s a bit like someone who’s just given up smoking and can’t talk about anything else. Perhaps it’s just no use attempting him on this subject if you’re a lifelong atheist.

Letterboxd Diary

What has enjoyed watching this month.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde is, of course, usually seen as marking the beginning of ‘the New Hollywood’, introducing Nouvelle Vague film-making techniques and a stylised grit to American cinema. At first glance it seems terribly of its time, but it remains remarkably relevant. With its meandering plot, stylised and stylish characters and frank violence and dialogue, it comes across as a ‘60s Quentin Tarantino film. Or, more accurately, the kind of ‘60s/‘70s film that Tarantino is constantly remaking. Its position now, as a work of more historical than artistic interest, is perhaps an indication of how Tarantino will be remembered, too.

As you would expect, I would also recommend watching it just to see the outfit C. W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard) is wearing when he first meets Bonnie and Clyde. Absolute perfection.

Speed (1994)

Speaking of Tarantino, here’s a film – one that’s the antithesis of New Hollywood – that he was originally approached to direct. Apparently he also likes it, despite calling it a ‘situation’ movie: a film that’s all about one high concept and nothing else. But that concept is a banger, literally: a bus has been rigged with a bomb (built around a wristwatch) that will explode if the bus’s speed falls below 50mph. The set-up is full of metaphors for the film itself: relentless movement, a clockwork-driven Hollywood plot mechanism, an object engineered to deliver nothing but pyrotechnics. The casting of Dennis Hopper, the enfant terrible and prime mover of New Hollywood, as a cackling one-note villain, emphasises that this is very much not a New Hollywood movie. It is slick, propulsive, precision-made entertainment. The setting is entirely hermetic, all enclosed spaces (lifts, buses, trains) and enclosed situations (the passengers and the police); the plot is a thing happening entirely within a movie, containing no reality whatsoever.

And, for once, Tarantino is right: it’s one of the better examples of its kind, and a terrific ride.

Das Boot (1981) / Greyhound (2020)

Another episode in the ongoing ‘finding something to watch with Rowan’s Dad’ project: this month, we fought the Battle of the Atlantic from above and below (and from either side).

First of all, we managed to find the 1984 full-length German-language version of Das Boot, which meant hours trapped in the stifling confines of U-96 with Karleun Jurgen Prochnow and his sweaty, bearded crew. Das Boot was made at the height of the Cold War, when West Germany was a key ally for the West; as with many war films of the time, it portrays most German combatants as anti-Nazi, as suspicious of the party members in their midst as they are of the British. On the other hand, it is rigorous in showing the crew of the U-Boat as fiercely dedicated to blowing up Allied convoys and fighting Royal Navy destroyers. While it is anxious to show them aghast when they discover they have torpedoed a burning Allied transport with crew still aboard, it is also careful to mete out justice at the close, with [spoilers] most of the crew killed in an RAF raid on the submarine pens. By this point it has managed to make the crew and their tribulations convincing and sympathetic enough that the moment is heart-breaking, even as it is reassuring that the war will be won by democracy in the end.

Greyhound (2020), part of Tom Hanks’s apparent mission to document every theatre of the Second World War, quite understandably does not feel the need to humanise the enemy. The view from the bridge of an escort destroyer is that the U Boat Wolf Pack is an insidious and ruthless danger. What Greyhound does have in common with Das Boot, though, is that it is very good at the business of the battles. Both also convey an acute sense of desperation and panicked struggle; not just for the survival of the crews, but for the survival of a political and civilisational idea.

Sadly, though, being an American film about an American ship, Greyhound is unnecessarily snide about the British. Das Boot, on the other hand, is commendably respectful about being hunted down and depth charged by the Brits, even if they are on a ship called something like HMS Tiggywinkle and crewed by John Mills and Richard Attenborough.

The Fabelmans (2022)

Greyhound led, inevitably, to Saving Private Ryan (1998). Rowan is never happier than when watching Tom Hanks win the Second World War, but that wasn’t the only reason; we’d just watched The Fabelmans, and were on something of a Spielberg jag.

The Fabelmans is a lightly fictionalised autobiography of Spielberg’s childhood and teenage years, and is one of the best things he has done in years. It is an example of what he is best at: films about middle class suburbia. I do not mean to damn with faint praise, being a middle class suburbanite myself.

It is customary to see Spielberg as lacking the ‘grit’ of the other New Hollywood tyros, but this is only true if you define ‘grit’ as ‘tormented, inarticulate men being dysfunctional at each other with guns and swearwords’. There’s a sequence [spoiler] in which Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams) watches footage of her extra-marital affair that her son has accidentally recorded; I defy anyone to watch it and then argue that Spielberg films don’t contain grit.

It is also a perfect example of just how good Spielberg is as a director. He doesn’t try anything fancy; he just rests the camera on Williams’s face and trusts the actor to do their job. Williams absolutely does, in spades: joy at the memory of a family holiday, pride in her son’s film, and then a mounting horror, shame, anger and fear.

Also, you get David Lynch (looking very like my old friend Ben Wallers in his military surplus jacket) as John Ford, delivering some of the best visual storytelling advice I’ve ever heard.

Playlist

: Here’s my favourite ten tracks for this month.

Nothing From Nothing - Billy Preston. The weather has turned cold again in the UK, but this is a joyous slice of ‘70s soul pop to cheer us all up.

Mystery - Boxed In. Very taken with the way the almost rave piano resolves into a lovely upbeat indie chorus here.

Golden Meadow - Ancient Infinity Orchestra. This is possibly a little too much of a sleepy, summery sort of jazz for the time of year, but it’s splendidly dreamy.

Every Beat That Passed - Lost Horizons feat. Kavi Kwai. Something about this track immediately made me sit up and take notice, and then I discovered a member of the Cocteau Twins was involved. I am nothing if not predictable.

Plate - Genevieve Artadi. Even more predictably, I just discovered that this lovely bit of wonky funk (possibly funky wonk) was featured on the soundtrack of The Bear.

Katachi - Shugo Tokumaru. This is a great bit of upbeat Japanese pop which I picked before I knew it also had an amazing video.

EXPRESS YOURSELF - Kahil El’Zabar. This is a delightful jazz reworking of the Charles Wright track, somehow managing to be both hot and cool at the same time.

Laid - The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. I was never a James fan at the time, but being the age I am, this song is a powerful inducer of nostalgia, and I think I prefer this version to the original.

Happy Djong - Twelve Point Buck. Speaking of nostalgia, this has a splendid lo-fi fuzz to it that is deeply reminiscent of all the pre-grunge bands I listened to in the late ‘80s.

Echo Beach - Martha & The Muffins. It’s not nostalgia if you still listen to it regularly because it’s still great. I don’t know why this suddenly appeared in rotation this week, but it always makes me happy. Here’s the performance on Top of the Pops from 1980, introduced by the gruesome Dave Lee Travis, not (yet) an accused sex offender (rare among that generation of Radio 1 DJs) but I warn you to never look at his book of celebrity photographs.

The whole playlist is on Spotify as usual:

Speaking of Hanks, Spielberg and World War II:

An early reality TV series in which neighbours are challenged to redecorate each other’s homes in a limited time period and with a limited budget. They can call on the resources of carpenter ‘Handy’ Andy Kane and presenter Carol ‘nominative determinism’ Smillie. They also have the help [citation needed] of one of a suite of interior designers: jumpy cool mum Linda Barker, hip head girl Anna Ryder Richardson, or foppish spaniel-man Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. The remodelling is done in secret, with each episode ending with the grand reveal to the other team, who are now going to have to eat dinner under a chandelier made out of a colander.

Rooms

In the late ‘90s some friends needed furniture for their new offices and that, inevitably, meant a trip to the fabled two towers of Croydon IKEA. Equally inevitably, that meant getting lost in Thornton Heath. Eventually, like Sam and Frodo trying to reach Minas Morgul, they had to ask a passer-by for directions. This South London Faramir was holding two differently flavoured Bacardi Breezers, with which he gestured as he said: ‘Keep going till you get to a little fuck-off. Then go left. Then there’ll be another little fuck-off, where you go right.’

Once they had discovered that a ‘little fuck-off’ was a mini-roundabout, the directions from the Bacardi Geezer — like a friendly ranger of Gondor — came good. Instead of killing a giant spider, on reaching IKEA they bought (also inevitably) a blue sofa.

The blue IKEA sofa was everywhere at the time; it’s even in the Museum of the Home’s exemplary ‘90s living room. There was an awful lot of IKEA in Changing Rooms: cheap furniture that could be easily acquired and easily — if not competently — customised. IKEA was the furniture retail equivalent of MDF, a cheap and adaptable wood substitute without which Changing Rooms could not have existed.

Both these things were relatively new: IKEA first came to Britain in the late ‘80s, around the same time that MDF started in mass production. The potential audience for Changing Rooms was also pretty new. By the late ‘90s almost half of under-35 year olds in the UK owned their own home, and were looking for cheap furniture to put in it. This was pretty much the peak of home ownership in the UK. (Within a decade, we would discover that the cheap mortgages that had enabled this boom had been a very, very bad idea indeed.)

Even those of us who were still renting tiny flats (and the tiny TVs on which we were watching Changing Rooms) were sitting on our own IKEA chairs and eating our supper off IKEA crockery with IKEA cutlery. This was not just because IKEA was cheap and practical, but also because it was stylish: all Scandinavian simplicity and understated design. Wildly affordable stylish homeware had not previously been available to the British. You could have cheap and nasty things, or florid and expensive things. The only way you could get nice furniture cheaply was to buy it second hand, with free clothes moths thrown in. Or you could ‘salvage’ old furniture other people had thrown away, which is why our sofa smelt funny in damp weather. Cheap and modish was new, and undeniably exciting. Not to mention very handy for Changing Rooms.

Watching Changing Rooms was like wandering through the exploded house of an IKEA ‘Showroom’, with all its mocked up sitting rooms and bedrooms and kitchen/living spaces. Like a funhouse mirror version of the Museum of the Home, it offered a glimpse of all those other possible lives. It was a series of domestic dioramas, like looking out of the window of a suburban train: lives suddenly opened up before you and then carried away.

We were also watching Changing Rooms, to be frank, because it was on. With a choice of four TV channels and no internet to speak of, you watched what you were given. BBC2 went on at 6pm (the moment I got in from work) for Star Trek: The Next Generation, and then stayed on until I went to bed. I couldn’t think of anything else to do, and wouldn’t have been able to afford it if I could.

But the show also held a specific appeal for me, because I was working in design. My friends who got lost in the fuck-offs were buying furniture for their web design agency (another New Thing), and I ended up working there with them. Web design has a lot in common with interior design: people think it’s all about the visuals, but really it’s all about the usability, and if that’s done well you won’t notice it at all. There’s even language in common: screen furniture, wallpaper and, in those days, an awful lot of tables.1

I felt an intense empathy with the Changing Room designers in their battles with vague and incomprehensible briefs, small budgets and over-involved clients. (Design clients always think designing is easy, and they always refuse to believe that the professionals know what they’re doing.) The fevered invention, and the desperate search for anything that could be easily reused and repurposed, was all too familiar. Frankly, I admired their professionalism. They designed, as all practical designers must, for the audience: not the battling DIYers who were going to have to pay to have that room re-redecorated afterwards, but the audience at home. Their unhinged creations were not supposed to be good interior design; they were supposed to be backdrops for dramatic reveals. They were supposed to be good TV.

Changing

In 1962, the BBC bought a derelict semi-detached house in Ealing and filmed DIY guru Barry Bucknell as he spent a full year renovating it. In the Reithian frame of the BBC’s purpose this was more information and education than it was entertainment; Barry Bucknell was there to teach the nation how to Do It Themselves. Before the Second World War most Britons had lived in rented property, but after the war an increasing number owned their own homes (by the ‘70s this was the majority). They needed to know how to lay a path, plaster a wall and put up a shelf, and the BBC was going to make sure they did it properly, while wearing a tie.

The closest television got to Changing Rooms in the ‘60s was a show called, deliciously, In Your Place (1967), in which two interior designers pitched different ideas for remodelling a room. There were two amazing things about In Your Place: firstly, it was presented by voice-of-Dougal-and-father-of-Emma Eric Thompson; and, secondly, there was no competitive element. The two designers presented their designs, everyone said how interesting they both were, and then the show ended. The point was for the viewer to be introduced to new concepts in interior design, not for them to experience any dangerous excitement.

BBC2 was still proudly ploughing the gentle education furrow in the late ‘90s. (In fact there was probably a programme about gentle ploughing somewhere in the schedule.) On the day Changing Rooms first aired, the channel also broadcast an appreciation of the apple orchards at Wisley, a display by young sheepdog handlers, and a look at the pickles of Italy and Scandinavia called A Perfect Pickle Programme. Even the less rural programmes were still relentlessly responsible. In the same week, instead of engaging in heavy-handed banter and male status anxiety, Top Gear worried about the EU mechanism for setting car part prices.

The only other show on BBC2 that was remotely as fluffy as Changing Rooms was Ready, Steady, Cook, a show in which cooks were given random ingredients and a time limit and told to conjure a meal. There are no coincidences here: they were produced by the same man, a man who was about to launch the UK’s version of the Dutch reality show Big Brother. That man was Peter Bazalgette, the great-great-grandson of Joseph Bazalgette, a Victorian engineer best known for his totemic improvements to London’s sewerage system. In other words, both Bazalgettes have been instrumental in massive changes to British cultural and domestic life. Joseph helped take effluent away from people’s homes, while Peter… well, like an episode of Changing Rooms you know how this is going to end.

If we’re trying to be fair about it, there’s an argument that Bazalgette was attempting to redress an imbalance in the way Reith’s principles had been applied. For a long time, ‘entertainment’ had been deprioritised in lifestyle programming in favour of a whole lot of education and information. Shows like Changing Rooms and Ready, Steady, Cook, which introduced competition and ‘stakes’ into lifestyle programming, were intended to right that bias. And Changing Rooms did sometimes contain trace amounts of information. Instead of magically revealing a set of MDF bookshelves, ‘Handy’ Andy would occasionally stop and explain how he had done something. But the information was a bit like the oats in Honey Nut Cheerios: it wasn’t the point. It was just there to assuage any residual guilt we might have about consuming so much rubbish.

Here’s a proper documentary about ‘Handy’ Andy himself from Adam & Joe:

From one angle Changing Rooms looks very innocent these days: a spoonful of sugar in the high-roughage BBC2 diet. But it was actually the first tremor of the approaching cultural earthquake of Big Brother, the beginning of the end of Reithian broadcasting. Thirty years later, all lifestyle programming is some form of game show; the news is dramatic wallpaper; and every documentary features a replaceable celebrity going ‘on a journey’ to discover something you already know. Broadcast television thinks it can compete with internet video by deprioritising information and education. Meanwhile, what are we doing with this glut of streaming video? Watching reviews of power tools and DIY how-to videos on YouTube.

For a (slightly) more sober form of ‘90s lifestyle programming, there’s always people and their cars, instead of houses, and From A to B:

There’s a thought experiment (most often associated with a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin) that runs like this: Imagine a perfect state. Nobody is hungry, lonely or unfulfilled; all needs are met, and everyone lives in a perpetual state of serene delight. But the price of this perfection is that one child must be kept in total isolation and darkness from the moment of her birth. She lives in filth in a dark cellar, and she eats survival rations of bread and water delivered through an air-gapped door. If she were ever to know the sun on her face, or any sense of human comfort, the perfect state would dissolve. (This proposition doesn’t make any sense. That’s why it’s a thought experiment.)

And the question is: do you think this is a defensible bargain? Or not? On the one hand: without this child’s sacrifice, many people would be hungry, unhoused, unhappy, or treated with cruelty. On the other hand: Christ on a bike.

This thought experiment pops into my head quite often when I think about the British royal family. Not that the UK offers a perfect existence to its people (insert your own hollow laugh); but that, at some level, us Brits are happy to exchange one family’s happiness, their fundamental freedom to thrive, for a broader political settlement.

What we’re avoiding, in this bargain, is putting too much power in the hands of our fellow voters. We’re avoiding an elected head of state: a President Farage, a President Vorderman, a President Corbyn or a President Martin Lewis (the last one is thought to be the most probable). You might truly believe, as a matter of sheer principle, that President Farage would be preferable to a hereditary monarch. But you have to accept that President Farage (or President Corbyn) would have the power to open and close Parliament, appoint Prime Ministers, direct the armed forces and sign (or refuse to sign) laws. Be honest: if you’d been President in January 2020, would you have signed the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act without the slightest hint of fuss or grandstanding?

If nothing else, the heirs to the throne — with a few notable exceptions — have been trained all their lives to keep their hands where we can see them, and not make any sudden moves. Which is more than you can say about the British electorate right now.

So we keep the Windsors where they are, trapped under glass. And we never admit to ourselves that we’re doing this for us, not for them. We make them rich, and give them really ugly mansions to live in, and then we scream at them to be more grateful and more entertaining; in any other context we would call the dynamic abusive. One moment we are making reverences to their magic blood; the next moment we are enraged because they’ve tried to exert the most basic rights to privacy over their pregnancies, their kids, their divorces or their terminal illnesses. Witness the way Kate Middleton (I know that’s not her name) was forced to release a hostage video after taking some time off to have chemo. No wonder so many of them are completely cracked. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor tests this sympathetic position nearly to destruction; but even he, dreadful little shit that he is, has endured a context of emotional and personal madness that few would emerge from intact.

One of the odd things about the royal family is that their most fervent persecutors are the people who claim to support them most. Those wet, empty weirdos who press up against the police cordons and buy the commemorative partworks are the same people who cannot imagine that the members of the royal family deserve ordinary human kindness. They certainly don’t accept that the royals are entitled — in the words of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights — to ‘privacy and family life’. Those of us who are ambivalent about the royals are much more likely to think they should be left alone to perform ordinary human functions in private.

It all went wrong, of course, when the royals made the tremendous mistake of re-introducing good-looking outsiders. When I was growing up in the 1970s, not one of the Windsors would have drawn a second glance in the average high street disco. The Queen and Prince Philip were in their 50s and their kids were in their 20s and 30s, and there wasn’t a pretty face to be found anywhere. As a unit, they were as jauntily compelling as a bollard in the rain. They had exactly the same valence as Sunday afternoons; they dragged on, and they had to be endured. By the time Prince Philip conceived an epochally disastrous scheme to marry Charles to a posh virgin, my fundamental opinions had already been formed; these people were square. I was required to watch the wedding of Charles and Diana in 1981 — they put it on the big projector screen in the assembly hall at school — and even as a ten year old I couldn’t get excited about it.

There is, admittedly, a strong strain of snobbery among those of us who aren’t impressed by the royals. If you’re posh enough, it’s just classic-brand snobbery; there are plenty of old English and Scottish families who think the Windsors are laughably bourgeois. More commonly, though, the snobbery of un-royalists (who are not always outright republicans) is cultural and intellectual. It is the snobbery of the Guardianistas and the grammar school kids (let’s face it, it’s quite funny that all the elite schooling in the world couldn’t produce three decent A Levels from the Queen’s children collectively, let alone individually.) We are quite capable of our own kind of nastiness; faced with the frothing irrationality of the royal fans, we respond with personalised abuse of the principals.

But our emotional detachment— and, honestly, our mild contempt — also enables a certain amount of empathy. It’s because we don’t think these people are magic that we are able to recognise them as people.

In early September 1998, just after Diana’s death in Paris, my flatmate and I had a spare room that we needed to fill. We had put an ad in Loot, as one did in the late ‘90s, and needed to decide which of the respondents we might be happy to see when making our way to the bathroom for the first piss of the day. We invited the candidates over, one by one, for a chat in our living room, and we kept the rolling news coverage on in the background as a test. This was during the ‘WHERE IS OUR QUEEN, WHERE IS HER FLAG?’ mania, after the death but before the funeral. The main story of the day was that the police were asking people to stop leaving bouquets outside Buckingham Palace, because the rotting foliage was becoming a health hazard.

Only one of our prospective room-mates — and it’s probably not a coincidence that he was Swedish — pointed at the telly and said, as an ice-breaker, ‘Can you explain to me what the fuck is going on with all this bullshit?’ Reader, we offered him the room. I suspect some of the other ad respondents had thought the same thing, but had bitten their tongues (it was a mansion flat at the top of Brixton Hill with a massive garden).

The public response was certifiable, but what was worse was the way those small boys were required to follow their mother’s coffin through the streets, and to not cry. They were 15 and 12. It still makes me angry to think about this. The usual excuse, now that everyone recognises it was a cruel shitshow, is that ‘the Firm’ insisted on it and nobody else felt able to intervene. Who knows if that’s true; during this period in particular, Downing St and the tabloids didn’t seem to have much trouble getting the Firm to do things it didn’t want to do.

There certainly wasn’t any widely expressed public discomfort that these traumatised boys were being forced to participate in the festivalisation of their own grief. The frothers wanted them there, and their tearful reluctance only made it more delicious. Like a sex aid or a lemon reamer, they enabled viewers to squeeze out something gratifying. There was no screaming headline in The Sun about their exploitation; there were no questions in Parliament. The royalists thought the cruelty was fine, and everyone else kept their mouths shut. Whenever Harry pops up these days promoting some podcast nobody wants, I think: you know what, mate? You’ve earned the right to do whatever you like. (Within the law. Which is the bit his uncle seems to have forgotten.)

In her famous 2013 essay ‘Royal Bodies’, Hilary Mantel described Kate Middleton as ‘a jointed doll’ whose ‘only point and purpose’ was to have children. For this, Mantel was excoriated by the hysterically hard-of-thinking. She was, of course, noting the suffocating fate of royal women, and the way the British public feel entitled to eat them alive. And she was, of course, also being a massive cultural and intellectual snob. It’s really hard not to be, when you’re talking about the royals. I can imagine that the essay might have been infuriating for Middleton, who seems like a perfectly smart person. (She got into a competitive university under her own steam; lots of people don’t.) It isn’t nice to be called a jointed doll, even if it’s intended as commentary on your position rather than your literal person. It was reported at the time that she was upset by it. I wonder whether, after 13 years of insanity and intrusion, she isn’t now beginning to see Mantel’s point. I like to think that Kate might be yet another middle-aged, middle class woman radicalised by the real queen.

It won’t surprise anyone that Mantel wasn’t a flag-waver, but she also wasn’t a doctrinaire republican. ‘Is monarchy a suitable institution for a grown-up nation?’ she asked. ‘I don’t know.’ But what she’d noticed, she said, was that the British public treat the monarchy as ‘an entertainment, in the same way that we license strip joints and lap-dancing clubs.’ And when you conceptualise human lives as entertainment, ‘adulation can swing to persecution.’ Call me a foaming egalitarian, but I don’t think King Charles should be giving speeches while recovering from cancer treatment; I think he should be sitting very quietly on a soft chair in a lovely garden, eating a lentil salad.

The story in which Ursula K. Le Guin described her thought experiment was called ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’. These people — the ones who walk away from the state — are the heroes. They choose exile rather than be morally complicit in the bargain that underpins their privilege.

I’m not one of these heroes; I’m far too afraid of President Farage. But if we must trap these people under glass — and on balance, I’m OK with that — we should at least have the courage to recognise that we’re asking them to make a gruesome sacrifice. As Mantel said, ‘I’m not asking for pious humbug and smarmy reverence. I’m asking us to back off and not be brutes.’ Given that we don’t live in a thought experiment, perhaps we should consider how the terms of the royals’ captivity might be changed.

This isn’t the first time Hilary Mantel has appeared in The Metropolitan and I think it’s safe to assure you that it won’t be the last, either.