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:

Gormenghast is a vast and labyrinthine castle, immured by tradition and ritual. But new life has come in the form of Titus Groan: a son to the melancholy Lord Sepulchrave Groan and the countess Gertrude, a brother to the wilful young Fuchsia. There is also Steerpike, a youth who has escaped the monstrous kitchens to become an assistant to the family doctor Prunesquallor and who wishes to rise further. To do so he embarks on a campaign of manipulation and destruction that ends in the death of Sepulchrave. Change and youth has come to Gormenghast, and that may not be a good thing.

The Legend

Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy -- Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950) and Titus Alone (1959) -- is one of the great fantasy epics of post-Second World War Britain. However, it is not one of those fantasies.

Largely identified with the legacy of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (1954-55), fantasy as a genre has become associated with pseudo-medieval secondary worlds, complicated maps and names with apostrophes in them. There are other traditions associated with C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56) and T. H. White’s Once and Future King (1938-58), although those are, respectively, secondary world and pseudo-medieval.

Titus Groan is not like these books; it is not an heroic fantasy of kings and monsters. To begin with, Peake goes under his full name, Mervyn, instead of his initials, which tells us something about the man. And while the book is full of silly names, it has no map in the front; indeed, the castle defies cartography. Titus Groan has more in common with Kafka than the Brothers Grimm, and more in common with Dickens than Beowulf. It is fantastical, rather than a fantasy.

What it does have in common with these other post-Second World War epics is that it is a product of its times. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (1950) is set during the Blitz and concerns a moral struggle with forces of oppression. The Once and Future King is about an Albion modelling for the world a better way of living than ‘might makes right’. Much as Tolkien resisted any contemporary political parallels, The Lord of the Rings features a struggle against a world-dominating power in which victory is won, ultimately, through the selfless service of the petit bourgeoisie (and his batman).

Peake sees mid-century Britain in a more acerbic light. The aristos are mad, and everyone else is a servant. Whatever glories it might once have had are mouldering or gone; the infrastructure is moribund and meaningless. The whole thing is bound together with maddening ritual and suffocating tradition that allows for no innovation, no life, no joy. Gormenghast is a model of post-Imperial Britain, and instead of looking back at past splendour it looks forward to future squalor: the Britain of the ‘70s and ‘80s, a grim little isolated island full of decaying relics and weird characters.

This was the last book I had read to me as a child. Well, not the whole book: my father read me the first paragraph or so and then handed it to me to finish for myself. Reading it subsequently at a British boarding school in the early ‘80s, I recognised its world immediately. Not only because I too was trapped by tradition in a crumbling pile of masonry haunted by monstrous individuals, but because that wider vision of an outdated and inward-looking culture was all too accurate.

The first paragraph captured me instantly:

GORMENGHAST, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat: by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

Yep, that’s just a paragraph. Remember the reference to Dickens I made earlier?

Peake was better known as an illustrator and painter before he wrote Titus Groan. And he writes like a painter: his style is Impressionistic, piling up language like paint to create an impasto, a physical landscape of verbiage, full of light and shade. But the effect is Expressionistic. Everything is packed with emotion. He looks as an artist, seeing everything minutely; but he describes what he sees with the pathetic fallacy of a poet, investing it with meaning. Everything becomes present and alive. It is, for a certain kind of reader, an intoxicating experience.

Peake was a child of Empire. The son of missionaries, he grew up in colonial compounds in China; he was an outsider there, and was subsequently an outsider in Britain. That view from without, and the Chinese culture he grew up around, deeply influenced the style and subject of his books.

This makes Titus Groan itself an outsider in the British post-War fantasy canon. It is not quite a secondary world, but it is also not quite ours; it is not pseudo-historical, but it is also not quite contemporary. It is not quite anything else; it is wholly itself.

Its legacy does not compare with the vast shadow that Mordor casts over contemporary culture, but it is perceptible in some places: in ‘All Cats Are Grey’ and ‘The Drowning Man’ on The Cure’s album Faith (1981); in characters in George R. R. Martin’s books; in the fugitive corridors and odd rooms of Hogwarts.1 A certain kind of reader will always find Titus Groan: outsiders, or those who would like to be outsiders. And then the book will find its way into them.

The Reality

‘A certain kind of reader’. Let’s be honest, a male reader, most likely. A young male reader. Probably not great at PE, possibly given to writing bad poetry, definitely with a high opinion of their own intellectual or artistic abilities.2

Like many ‘cult’ works, the cult is as exclusionary as it is inclusive. Peake’s prose bears a lot of responsibility for this. He is an artist with a thesaurus as a palette, picking obtuse and esoteric words to fling at the page. The reader is either going to embrace this kind of sesquipedalian extravagance, happy to have their vocabulary expanded along with their mind; or they will quail in horror, overwhelmed and under-entertained.

The prose is symbolic of a deeper theme. Peake’s paragraphs are as torturous and antiquated as the castle; the language models the dark complexity of his setting and typifies the density of the culture he is depicting. It also models a certain personality: the trivia-hound, the snapper up of unconsidered trifles, the flaneur, the collector. Gormenghast, the castle, and Titus Groan, the book, are as full of weird detail and strange objects as the bookshelves, pockets and mind of a certain kind of small boy.

Along with all that junk there are, of course, bright gems: startling visions that lodge in the imagination. The Hall of Bright Carvings. The Room of Cats. The Tower of Flints. The sisters, Cora and Clarice, taking tea on the trunk of a dead tree growing horizontally out of the top of a tower. Fuschia’s attic, populated with imagined characters who caper for her amusement. Gertrude’s bedroom, dark with ivy and rustling with birds and cats.

There is a moment in Titus Groan that is easily overlooked, but which I think is key. In an obscure corridor, in a heap of rusting and cobwebbed armour, Steerpike finds a swordstick. He purloins it, cleans it up and uses it as a cane. The swordstick is a metaphor for Steerpike; it presents as purely practical and useful, but contains the potential for violence and death. It is also emblematic of Steerpike’s role in the world of Gormenghast: crafting a new sharp reality out of untidy remains.

And it is also emblematic of a major theme of the book: that this terrible, stifling place is full of wonders, for those who look for them. Steerpike is one of those people; the Lady Fuschia, Titus’s older sister, is another. These are the young people who struggle against the dead weight of tradition and the stones of Gormenghast.

Steerpike, though, is the villain. Peake is very clear that his ruthless individualism is just as horrible as the relentless ritual of previous generations. Peake evidently has a cynical view of the coming generation of the ‘50s, seeing them as a mixture of rebellion for rebellion’s sake and of naked self-interest.

Fuschia has the soul of an artist, and covers the walls of her room with drawings; her mind is full of fertile imaginings, and she is consequently doomed. Neither the traditions of Gormenghast nor the manipulations of Steerpike have room for her. Titus, who is an infant for most of this book, will eventually flee the castle entirely.

The hero of the series turns out to be the unlikely Dr Prunesquallor, the family doctor. He is a ridiculous figure, etiolated and effete, and cursed with a hideous whinnying laugh. Behind his thick spectacles his magnified eyes swim like jellyfish. A member of the educated, tasteful, professional bourgeoisie, within the castle he belongs neither to the ruling class nor to the servants. He scorns the affectations and traditions of the aristocracy, but he also suspects the greedy insurrection of Steerpike. He is the only one with an independent and functioning mind and, more importantly, a moral core of iron.

In placing his hero among the bourgeoisie, Peake is finally in accord with the other post-Second World War British fantasy epics. T. H. White’s King Arthur is not raised as a knight, but as a lowly member of his foster-father’s household; he comes to Camelot as an outsider. Narnia is saved by a gaggle of middle-class kids; Middle Earth is saved by an independently wealthy gentleman and his gardener.

After all, these polite country squires and small town doctors and modest gardeners had just joined in epic journeys across North African deserts and South East Asian jungles and up onto European beaches to help save civilization. And these were the people who were to define the post-Second World War country, a country which is now majority ABC1s (although, tellingly, half of them claim to be working class).3

Perhaps the thing that has stopped the Gormenghast trilogy reaching the national treasure status of Lord of the Rings or the Chronicles of Narnia is that, for all its fantastical setting, it’s entirely too truthful in its vision of that nation.

Speaking of treasures, national and eldritch, here’s where that ring came from:

Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts, but the Boomers did more than perhaps any other to reinvent popular culture and explode the canon. So what did we, Generation X, make of the things they insisted were hits?

Pre-teen Nigel Molesworth, curse of St Custard’s, introduces parents and prospective pupils to life in a ‘50s British prep school using his own idiosyncratic speling, jaded portraits of boys and teachers, and a lot of obscure references. As any fule kno.

The Legend

Down with Skool has its origins in the meeting of two great British institutions: long-running humour magazine Punch; and the fictional St Trinians School for Girls, famous for the violence and unruliness of its pupils.

St Trinians was created by the writer and artist Ronald Searle as an amusement for some young relatives and quickly became a smash hit, spawning a series of film adaptations. Naturally, Searle tired of it more quickly than his publishers, who carried on demanding more books. When writer Geoffrey Willans approached him with an idea for another school story, Searle was sceptical. But Willans’s ‘Molesworth’ pieces for Punch were so good Searle couldn’t help himself, and everyone had another hit on their hands.

The partnership between Searle and Willans was inspired. Searle doesn’t so much illustrate Molesworth’s ramblings as expand the world around them. There are occasional spot illustrations tied to the text, but most of the time Searle is producing his own visual version of St Custard’s to parallel Willans’ written vision: galleries of masters and pupils; illustrations from imaginary and bizarre textbooks; the weird inventions and flights of fantasy of Molesworth and his chum Peason (‘Acktually he not bad tho we argue a lot saying am not am not am not am etc until we are called on to tuough up a few junior ticks.’) Between them Searle and Willans created a sort of antidote to school stories: a jaundiced view of British institutions for a new Elizabethan Jet Age.

At this juncture it might be worth elucidating a couple of terms. In British English, ‘prep school’ means a school at which one is ‘prepared’ -- generally between the ages of 8 and 12 -- for ‘public school’. Like ‘public schools’, ‘prep schools’ are private and fee-paying. They also often offer ‘boarding’, in which parents pay schools to take their children away and keep them away. Or, as Molesworth puts it:

Being a baby is alright but soon all the boys who hav been wearing peticoats chiz chiz chiz begin to get bigger. they start zooming about like jet fighters climb drane pipes squirt water pistols make aple pie beds set booby traps leave tools about the garden refuse to be polite to visiting aunts run on the flower beds make space rockets out of pop’s golf bag and many other japes and pranks. It is at this time that parents look thortfully at their dear chicks and sa IT IS TIME WE SENT NIGEL TO SKOOL.

That these elite, fee-paying private schools are known as public schools is revealing. The ‘public’ bit comes from the fact that they were often originally founded as charitable institutions, but its retention is indicative of their role in British society. Since Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), the ‘school story’ has largely been a public school story of japes and injustices amid gloomy neo-gothic Victorian piles. It tells us how small boys are made into officers and gentlemen, and how a certain kind of stereotypical Englishness is formed. (Any Scottish or Welsh child sent to a public school is automatically rendered ruling-class English by the process, I’m afraid, despite what they might protest).

Down with Skool and the other Molesworth books make fun of this wilful class structure while revelling in the brutal and shabby reality. It is no coincidence that Down with Skool and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) were published just one year apart. To anyone who has been to one of these institutions, Lord of the Flies is not so much a fantastical allegory as a plain and accurate account of what goes on among public schoolboys when masters are not around. After the stark horrors of the Second World War, it became harder to maintain the old, comfortable myths about these institutions; when composing his portraits of comedic cruelty, Searle admitted that he drew on his experience as a Japanese prisoner of war.

The fundamental role that the public schools play in British society and imagination meant that a book satirising these ideas could become a massive hit. Indeed, its language and jokes became such a part of the national demotic that Smash Hits magazine -- that great champion of British ‘80s popular culture -- would use a Molesworthian ‘any fule kno’ without thinking twice about it.

The Reality

Down with Skool might seem like tame stuff now, but to its contemporaries it played into a fundamental change in British society after the war. A new, nationalised education system was creating new opportunities for the middle and working classes; coupled with an economic boom, the social orders were upended. The Empire which had -- in fiction at least -- been carved out by all those public school boys dwindled; Britain’s new global cultural dominance was driven by ordinary kids with cameras and typewriters and guitars.

This social revolution was not, of course, total. Of the eighteen British Prime Ministers since the Second World War, five -- over a quarter -- had attended Eton. When we think of one of them in particular, Boris Johnson, it is hard to dismiss thoughts of the perpetually shabby, slipshod and shiftless Nigel Molesworth. Even Clement Atlee, the Prime Minister who did so much to usher in that new post-War social compact, had gone to boarding school. But the cultural role of those schools has changed. Old boys like me are more likely to gloss over the fact that we went to public school; we long ago threw away the school tie, and on our LinkedIn profiles we carefully omit our alma maters.

I first met Nigel Molesworth when I was at prep school. A prep school in the ‘70s wasn’t that different to one in the ‘50s; we learned Latin from teachers who had fought in the War, listened to the radio instead of watching television, wore short trousers, and called teachers ‘beaks’. I understood all of Searle and Willans’ jokes. Forty years later, this has become more unlikely. I suspect few would now get Willans’s joke about Bathsheba (‘Then there was another nasty business about Saul puting a chap in the front line in fact as mum would sa the whole thing is rather like the news of the world’) or the Dan Dare reference (‘You hav caught me, sir, like a treen in a disabled space ship’.) They don’t teach the classics any more.

The social upheavals heralded by Down with Skool have led to its own irrelevance. These days it is part of the idiolect of the class it satirises: a marker of a certain kind of Private Eye-style taste formed in dorms and on cricket pitches, like P. G. Wodehouse and Gilbert and Sullivan.

Is it ok?

It is worth pointing out that, like P. G. Wodehouse and Gilbert and Sullivan, it is often very good and, more importantly, very funny. In writing this piece I frequently committed the ultimate solecism and read bits out to Rowan because I was so desperate to share them. We both laughed out loud for a solid minute at Searle’s drawing of the football team photograph, and when she sent a picture of it to her 20-something sons, they laughed too.

We laughed at that photograph because we recognised it. Willans and Searle are pulling off a classic satirical move: using a child’s point of view to reveal the accepted realities of the world. There is a lot of satirical mileage in ventriloquising the opinions and observations of one to whom this is all new, and who is straining to understand the world into which they have been peremptorily pushed. This allows Willans to place statements like ‘History started badly and hav been geting steadily worse’ into Nigel’s mouth and have us all recognise it as a universal truth.

Parts of the jokes rest on culturally specific knowledge, but many of them manage to be funny anyway. Look at the joke opposite the football team photograph. The Headmaster is quizzing Masters about their activities:

“Hav you been guilty of imperialist dogma in break by pinching a boys cup of coco?” “I hav.” “Hav you practised sabotage against the skool piano by cutting wires so that low C sounds plunk?” “I hav.” “Do you admit this led to subversive singing of D’ye Ken John Plunk in his plunk so gay?”

Part of the joke requires knowing about Maoist self-criticism sessions; but part rests purely on the fact that ‘D’ye Ken John Plunk in his plunk so gay’ is a delirious sequence of words.

The humour writing that once typified magazines like Punch has largely disappeared; the people who would have been writing it are all running ‘character’ accounts on social media instead. Willans is terrific at it, mixing foolery and satire in equal measure. He is able to both describe the school as having been ‘built by a madman in 1836 and he made a few improvements before he was put in the bin e.g. the observatory to study worms’ and to sum up modern history as ‘the Rise of the People and the People hav gone on rising ever since like yeast until you kno where they are now hapy and prosperus you ask them when the television programme is over.’

And Searle is a genius. Like Willans, his style is peculiarly of its time, mixing a filigree Edwardiana with an inky, jazzy cynicism, a recognisably ‘50s product like the weird contraptions of Rowland Emett or Ealing comedies. However, his art is so accomplished that it creates its own world, asserts its own reality.

Between them, Searle and Willans create a world that, even shorn of its contemporary cultural milieu, is coherent and inviting, a clearly defined setting and cast of characters that becomes its own self-sustaining comic invention. It exceeds its own references to become a reference in its own right. Characters no longer remind us of people; people remind us of the characters. Irritating optimists become Fotherington Thomas; corrupt authority figures become GRIMES the headmaster; crumbing institutions become St Custard’s.

And its legacy, as a place and as a book, continues. In How to be Topp (1954), the sequel to Down with Skool, Nigel -- under the pen name Marcus Plautus Molesworthus -- writes a Latin play. It is called ‘The Hogwarts’. School stories are still very much with us, set in odd and antiquated buildings, peopled by alarming and monstrous figures, and with their own occult and obscure terminology. J. K. Rowling is very much the inheritor of Molesworth’s world, and not just fictionally. Her democratic socialist instincts were set by the post-Second World War Britain that Down with Skool heralded. Her school stories rail against the snobs and bullies who exclude and persecute the hoi polloi1; and yet, like Willans and Searle forty years earlier, she could not resist the ineffable allure of the elite. Chiz, chiz.

Did you know that Adrian Mole was almost called Nigel Mole until Sue Townsend realised who that name reminded her of? Adrian’s a more Gen X name anyway.

Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts, but the Boomers did more than perhaps any other to reinvent popular culture and explode the canon. So what did we, Generation X, make of the things they insisted were hits?

Expelled from yet another prep school, mixed-up 16-year-old Holden Caulfield absconds to New York before the end of term. Knowing he’s going to have to face his parents in a few days, Holden holes up in a hotel as he tries to think of what to do. After an excruciating experience with a prostitute, a disastrous date with an old girlfriend and an awkward visit to a sympathetic teacher, Holden meets up with his little sister Phoebe at a carousel in the park and decides to go home.

The Legend

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

Boys don’t read; everyone knows that. Especially adolescent boys. They can’t stand all that ‘David Copperfield kind of crap’. But what if you had a book about one of those adolescent boys who can’t stand Dickens? A book apparently written by one of those boys, in their voice, full of slang and non-sequiturs, and obsessed with sex and booze?

Then you’d press a copy of Catcher in the Rye into their hands and hope that the cloying stink of adult recommendation would wear off enough for them to start reading. Because surely, if they did, J. D. Salinger’s writing would draw them in, and they’d finally finish an actual novel.

It’s a decent bet. Catcher in the Rye was a smash hit, and is still frequently listed in catalogues of modern classics, so we can probably agree it's pretty readable. Indeed, the book was so popular that Salinger ended up going into hiding to get away from all the fans, eventually becoming a complete recluse.

And surely teenagers readers will recognise the peculiar agonies of adolescence that they share with Holden Caulfield: his inability to predict his own mood or actions; his craving to fit in, and his desire to stand out in his bright red hunting hat; his sorrows for lost childhood and his straining for maturity; his teenage combination of hopefulness and cynicism; his mistrust of anyone over 30.

Surely, even if it’s a set book in an English class and they are forced to slog through it instead of a weight of foggy Dickens, they will be overcome with the quality of the writing and the truth of the characters and come to you, eyes shining with an imaginative wonder you thought had been long lost in memes and pornography, and thank you for it? Surely they will tell you that, despite you being a phoney grown up, they kind of get a kick out of you, they really do.

The Reality

The Catcher in the Rye wasn’t written for teenagers. It was written for adults. It evolved out of a series of stories Salinger wrote for very grown-up magazines including Colliers and The New Yorker; the kind of magazines teenagers only read when they’d forgotten to take a comic to the loo.

Moreover, teenagers barely existed in 1951. Post-Second World War teen culture was just getting started with the bobbysoxers and Frank Sinatra fandom. Rock‘n’roll hadn’t been invented, Elvis hadn’t happened, and the Beatles were younger than Holden Caulfield.

The whole cultural and commercial brouhaha of Boomer adolescence was all yet to come. Catcher in the Rye is, instead, full of jazz clubs and ballroom dancing, houndstooth jackets, buzzcuts, and making sure your tie is straight. Part of what Salinger is doing is exhibiting this new generation — this coming thing, the teenager — to an adult audience.

All of this also means that Holden has the opinions of his time. And not just opinions: one of the mainsprings of adolescent culture is that style and slang change with a relentless, inventive verve, and Holden’s is 80 years old now, as well as having the cultural homophobia, misogyny and smoking habits of the late ‘40s.

All of which rather suggest that the adult who tries to make a teenage boy reach The Catcher in the Rye today is liable to come across as yet another out-of-touch, cringe, phoney grown up. At the very best they might earn some pity, like Holden's favourite teacher Mr Antolini, a ‘pretty young guy’ you could kid around with but still not trust.

Is it ok?

When I was Holden’s age our set text for ‘O’ Level English was Great Expectations (1860) rather than David Copperfield (1850), and I hated it. It was an unholy grind through the grimy maze of London streets and the verbal labyrinth of Dickens’s prose. I read it, but I refused to take it in. I resented it, and the experience put me off Dickens for a decade.

The Catcher in the Rye, though, I loved. I inhaled it, then I inhaled Salinger’s other books, particularly the Glass family books. Then I inhaled Ring Lardner, because Holden liked him, and then I inhaled all those other mid-century New Yorker writers like Dorothy Parker, James Thurber and S. J. Perelman, so entrancing was Salinger’s world.

Even forty years after it had been written, I identified with Holden Caulfield. This was partly because I was in the process of failing to fit in at a private school myself, being the kind of antisocial nerd who hides from sports in the library, reading S. J. Perelman, for crying out loud. But it’s also because the pain of being an adolescent is universal.

Holden is in considerably more pain than most teenagers: his younger brother has died of leukaemia, and he has witnessed the gruesome death of a bullied friend at a previous school. He is fairly obviously in a precarious mental state and suffering from a great deal of trauma. He is, after all, writing his narrative in an institution, as part of his treatment for his breakdown. But adolescence is nothing if not egomaniacal. One’s own pain is by far the greatest, and only the hyperbole of Holden’s misery is adequate to equal it. This is undoubtedly why the book had such resonance for mentally ill shooters like Mark David Chapman and John Hinckley Jr.

One central theme of the book is the earnestness of children. Like many adolescents, Holden is obsessed with ‘phoniness’ and honesty. He yearns for the openness of childish engagement with the world. For all the cynical affect of adolescence, one is still prone to these towering enthusiasms, falling in love with a character and a book and a writer.

But for all that, The Catcher in the Rye is still a book that was written for an adult audience, not an adolescent one. There is, one suspects, a good deal of J. D. Salinger in Holden Caulfield. His professional seclusion mimics Holden’s desire to live in a cabin in the woods, pretending to be a ‘deaf-mute’; his refusal to allow any adaptations of Catcher echoes the protagonist’s dislike of Hollywood. This sort of thing isn’t unusual in writers but Salinger uses it all expertly, just as he is no doubt using his own wartime trauma (D-Day, the Bulge, interrogating Nazis) to plumb the depth of Holden’s misery.

He captures the voice and character of a 16-year-old brilliantly. It may not be accurate as regards an ‘80s teenager or a 21st-century one, but it is true, which is more important and longer lasting. And because he is writing in the voice of a teenager, all his observations about the adult world that Holden doesn’t yet understand remain as subtext.

I didn’t spot this subtext when I was 16, because teenagers are bad readers who don’t like Dickens, for crying out loud. Landsakes, I was an idiot. There’s a lot of things that make me very grateful to be middle aged and not a mixed up, muddle-headed teenager any more, and enjoying Dickens is definitely one of them. If ever you needed an example for why adolescence is absolutely the worst time to take the exams that will influence the rest of your life, it's The Catcher in the Rye. Absolutely the worst age to teach anyone anything. Apart from all the other ages.

For example, at 16 I found Holden’s idealisation of small children hard to understand. Like a Wim Wenders film, the book is full of tots saying unexpectedly wise things or being conspicuously winsome. My experience of small children was not this. To the best of my knowledge they were grubby little brutes, the bullies of the playground and the dimwits of the classroom, who lived in their own inexplicable, irrational world of inchoate wants and needs.

On re-reading one finally realises that Holden desperately craves the wisdom he attributes to them, but he doesn’t want to go through the adult experiences required to earn it. He dreams of being ‘the catcher in the rye’, a person who stops children running over a cliff: a metaphor for his desire to arrest his own childhood as the endless plunge of adulthood approaches.

Re-reading it as an adult one identifies, inevitably, not with Holden Caulfield, but with all those phoney, exasperated adults around him who are just trying to do their best. Sure, plenty of them are phoneys, hypocrites and bullies, spouting platitudes about knuckling down and growing up. But the thing is, they’re not wrong. And many of them are trying to help Holden, like poor old Mr Antolini, who has this moody teenager crash the end of a party and who is just drunk and tired and trying to be nice, and not making the pass Holden thinks he is.

Drunk or not, all of Mr Antolini’s advice is excellent and all of it is wasted. I wish I’d paid attention to it when I first read the book, because goodness knows I needed it. But, like Holden, I was never going to heed it because I needed it. Adolescents need all the help they can get, and are largely determined to reject all of it. They are bent on fixing their own problems despite not yet having the requisite tools to do it competently.

Which is why so many of us spent our adulthood unpicking all those disasters we made for ourselves at 16.

Swear to god, we were just goddamn madmen sometimes.

I don’t know why.

The British equivalent of Holden Caulfield is Adrian Mole. Discuss.

Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts, but the Boomers did more than perhaps any other to reinvent popular culture and explode the canon. So what did we, Generation X, make of the things they made us watch?

The Goon Show (1951—60)

The Goon Show was the hit British radio comedy of the 1950s, and made the careers of Light Ent stalwart Harry Secombe, movie-star-to-be Peter Sellers and comedy genius Spike Milligan. (Co-founder Michael Bentine left the show after the second series and so got to be merely a cult hero, rather than a national treasure.) Mostly written by Spike Milligan, it was essentially a variety show featuring loosely-plotted comedy plays interspersed with musical turns. It relied heavily on Sellers’ ability to do a wide range of silly voices, producing a host of recurring characters with audience-pleasing catchphrases.

The legend

The story goes that the suits at the BBC didn’t like The Goon Show. Milligan partly attributed his various breakdowns and worsening mental health to the fact that he had to fight the BBC every step of the way to get the programme made.

The suits mostly didn’t like it because they didn’t get it. One producer was absolutely mystified at the raucous audience response to a character called ‘Hugh Jampton’. The producer didn’t know that in Cockney rhyming slang, ‘Hampton’ = ‘Hampton Wick’ = ‘dick’; Milligan had just introduced a character called ‘Huge Penis’ on prime time BBC radio.

There’s also the legend of a BBC manager peering quizzically at a broadcasting schedule and asking what this ‘Go On Show’ was. It was the most popular comedy show in the country, and high-ups didn’t even know its name.

‘Goon’ was wartime slang. Like ‘Jeeps’ and ‘Wimpy Bars’ the coinage came from the Popeye comic strip, in which ‘goons’ were weird lumpen creatures. The term soon got applied to German soldiers and then became an all-purpose term for idiots. And so a group of ex-Forces comedians and twits who gathered in Jimmy Grafton’s pub on Strutton Ground in post-War London started calling themselves Goons.

The BBC hadn’t got this memo either, and tried to insist that the first series of show went out under the title ‘Crazy People’; ‘The Crazy Gang’ had been the most popular pre-War British comedy troupe and the BBC were hoping to ride their coat-tails. But, in just one of those many fights with management, Milligan put his foot down and won.

This nomenclature struggle is significant, and points to one reason that the Goon legend was so readily embraced by the children of the ‘70s and ‘80s. ‘The Crazy Gang’ were the great comedians of their time; but their time was the 1930s, when everything was in black and white and the map was Imperial pink all over. The Goons were were a product of the jet-powered, technicolour and increasingly post-Imperial 1950s. They were separated by less than two decades, but the psychological gulf was enormous. I mean, look at them in the early photographs: the trad-jazz tweeds and the long hair, Bentine with his Beatnik beard. They were hipsters. They were instinctively anti-Establishment, determinedly revolutionary.

This, then, is the legend: The Goon Show was the origin point, the Big Bang of post-war British comedy. Michael Palin described hearing it as like hearing ‘Elvis singing “Heartbreak Hotel”’. The BBC manager’s mispronunciation was oddly prophetic: the Goons encouraged a generation of weirdos ‘go on’. You are not alone, they said; there are other twits out there just like you. You can even do your own silly voices. Then you can see if there’s anyone at Oxford or Cambridge interested in doing silly voices with you. This is the Apostolic Succession of British comedy, from The Goon Show to Beyond The Fringe to Monty Python to alternative comedy to a bunch of shouty stand-ups on a panel show where silly voices stand in for actual jokes.

I probably first heard it when it was repeated on BBC Radio 4 in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. It reappeared just as a whole new generation was discovering the joy and power of poking fun at the suits (in silly voices); it was the perfect spoken word accompaniment to the punk and New Wave music over on Radio 1 and The Young Ones on BBC2.

Milligan was born and grew up in India, the son of an Irish Sergeant Major in the British Army, and didn't actually come to Britain until he was in his early teens. He was a member of the Young Communist League and a gifted jazz trumpeter. He was bipolar and struggled with his mental health all his life. He was — by circumstance, character and conduct — an outsider. Like any good surrealist, he looked at ‘real’ life with a detached eye and then described it as he saw it: absurd and often hilarious.

And this was the final key part of the legacy and legend of The Goon Show: that comedy should be anti-establishment. Not least because the establishment was anti-it.

The reality

Or was it? Hang on to your skeleton because you are about to cringe harder than you have ever cringed before.

A clip from a Channel 4 documentary featuring a home movie made in 1973 by the then Prince of Wales in which he does Goon voices while on military service

I’m not sure you can really claim that something is anti-establishment when its biggest fan is the fucking King.

Now, I wish to be clear. The reason that this clip is embarrassing — so embarrassing, in fact, that I have still not been able to watch it all the way through — is not because the-then heir to the throne is doing silly voices. I’m generally in favour of kings doing silly voices. Being a king is a pretty silly thing; being a king in a 21st-century democracy is even sillier. Charles should do a silly voice. It would add much to the gaiety of the nation. Although, to be fair, he kind of does.

No: the reason why the clip is embarrassing is that it is not funny. Charles is doing silly voices instead of being funny; he thinks the voices are the jokes, rather than the actual, beautifully constructed lines that Milligan wrote and Peter Sellers read out. Albeit in a silly voice.

This is how most of my generation first became aware of The Goons: grown men — tedious, unfunny, worrying grown men — repeating decontextualised catchphrases in not-quite-silly-enough voices. They did it with Monty Python too. It’s an extraordinary feat, to take this thing of exquisite joy and laughter and reduce it to mechanically-recovered punchline. And it is testament to just how popular The Goon Show was. It was one of the highest rated radio shows of its time, and in the 1950s that was a very big deal. Only a third of the country had televisions; the Home Service, which later became Radio 4, was the mainstream.

The silly voices and catchphrases became part of the country’s conversation. Just as Monty Python later came to replace the Church of England as the national religion, so, before them, like a Jan Hus of silly voices, The Goons gave the country a new liturgy with which to supplant the Book of Common Prayer. Every baptism in the country was accompanied by a chorus of uncles squeaking ‘he’s fallen in the water’.

As that joke about Hugh Jampton suggests, part of the ‘anti-establishment’ sense of The Goons was that they were just talking like almost everyone else did — but, crucially, not like the other people on the BBC. As Secombe put it, most of their laughs came from the punchlines to army jokes, the feed lines of which were too rude to broadcast. It didn’t matter; a good deal of the country had all been in the army together for half a decade and knew all those jokes already. Part of what made The Goons central to the national conversation was that they sounded like the nation.

By the time I was discovering the Goons through the repeats on Radio 4, they were just part of the background noise. Hearing the shows was like seeing Hamlet for the first time and discovering that it's made entirely of quotations. And, because all those dirty set-ups had been cut to make it acceptable for the ‘50s nation, it was also perfectly acceptable for ‘70s children. It is so often the fate of the revolutionary art of one generation to become the light entertainment of the next, just as the riotous jazz of the ‘20s became the easy listening tootling that filled the music breaks of The Goon Show.

We had a radio station at school. I mean, we didn’t, of course. The school had a tannoy system which, some afternoons, we were allowed to take over and operate as a radio station. And one of those things we broadcast were ‘performances’ of Goon Show scripts. I too have been one of those people parroting catchphrases, not really understanding the jokes but finding the silly voices perfectly amusing enough.

Is it ok?

Ah, but those jokes. Here’s a sublime bit of business from The Mysterious Punch-up-the-Conker (1957):

It is beautiful, spiralling nonsense, with Eccles’ illogical logic being wielded persistently and consistently to the ends of absurdity. But as so often in Milligan’s comedy, it has a sliver of deeper truth to it.

After all, our conception of time is itself absurdly arbitrary. ‘The time’ in Bluebottle’s question, clock time, doesn’t exist; the hours and minutes are a purely human abstraction. Eccles’ piece of paper is only slightly more ridiculous than a wristwatch in a world where there are stars in the sky. One really close, and very bright, a near infinite number of much dimmer, further away ones, all ticking past in a celestial clockwork.

In some medieval time systems there were 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night, no matter the season, which meant that summer daytime hours were really long and night time hours much shorter, squeezing and stretching to keep up with the sun. But is that any more or less ridiculous than arbitrarily dividing everything up in units of 60, just because that’s how Sumerian astrologers counted? Is it any more ridiculous than Eccles’ bit of paper?

It is customary at this point to refer to Milligan’s mental health and make some fatuous correlations between madness and genius. But I think it’s true that part of his genius was for pointing out the madness of ‘sanity’. Having been born in India he later had to apply for British citizenship, which was refused, partly because he would not swear allegiance to the family of his biggest fan. Because of the relentless mechanisms of the law, this hero of British comedy — who had, like his father, fought for this country — had to be officially Irish. To be rational in a continually irrational world is to practise that definition of madness: repeating the same action and expecting different results.

Also, though, some of Milligan’s mental health issues may have been exacerbated by arguing with studio technicians over the increasingly complex sound effects he wanted. Listen to the sound effect at the start of that skit: ticking, chiming, clanging, crowing. All that just to set up the ‘what time is it?’ joke.

The Goons was also beautiful, spiralling sound. Radio is key to understanding a great deal of British comedy. At the time The Goons was broadcast radio was the mainstream, but for decades after the rise of TV radio retained a key role as a cheap medium in which to break new talent. It became part of the clichéd profile of a certain kind of comedy career: Footlights, Edinburgh Fringe, Radio 4 show, BBC2 series, national treasure status.

Radio prioritises speech. This is handy for English, which is already at least three other languages in a trenchcoat and contains a lot of material with which to muck about, especially for an Irish man who grew up in India. But it also provides freedom from the literal. Without visuals, space and time can be easily bent and reconfigured. The imagination of the writer can run free of the fetters of the real, which means that so too can the imaginations of the audience.

This was perhaps why it resonated so much with us as children that we felt compelled to re-perform it ourselves. This is, after all, the experience of a child; to be endlessly confronted with inexplicable rituals and customs, trying to understand the arbitrary and absurd behaviour of adults, and having to construct one’s own context and explanations, which seem equally absurd from the outside.

This is also why Jonathan Miller, alumnus of Beyond The Fringe and Britain's foremost pretentious intellectual, compared Spike Milligan to Lewis Carroll and called him a ‘major imaginative artist of the twentieth century’. Because within those army punchlines and elaborate sound effects was a refreshing and encouraging challenge not just to the establishment, but to established consensus reality.

And also some very silly voices indeed.

Speaking of silly voices, Monty Python weren’t adverse to doing them either:

Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts, but the Boomers did more than perhaps any other to reinvent popular culture and explode the canon. So what did we, Generation X, make of the things they made us watch?

Easy Rider primer

Motorbike-riding hippies Wyatt and Billy sell a shipment of cocaine and take to the road with the proceeds, heading for New Orleans and Mardi Gras. On the way they visit a commune, tangle with prejudiced cops, give a lift to an oddball lawyer, visit a brothel and — in the end — run fatally afoul of a redneck with a shotgun.

The legend

Easy Rider is the most legendary of the Boomer legends. In fact, when we came up with the premise for ‘OK, Boomer’ it was the very first thing that came to mind. You have to respect the stomping great literalism with which Hopper and Fonda – two hairy, stoned weirdos – confronted mainstream America by making a movie about two hairy, stoned weirdos confronting mainstream America. It’s not just counter-cultural; it’s also self-obsessed. Could it be more ‘60s?

Easy Rider is the acme of West Coast hippie culture at the far end of the ‘60s, way past the pop fun of The Beatles and The Beach Boys. It’s set down in the underworld of drug running, far out on the frontier of cultish desert communes. These people aren’t performing a teenage rebellion against staid ‘50s conformity; they have dropped out of mainstream culture altogether. As the alcoholic lawyer George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) tells Billy (Dennis Hopper), ‘normal’ people hate Billy and Wyatt because of what they represent:

This all seems a little hysterical now, but when Easy Rider was made some people really did perceive the hippie lifestyle as a genuine threat to the established order, rather than a faintly risible exercise in exploring the limits of dietary roughage. And you didn’t have to be a hippy in 1969 to believe that America was killing its children – at Kent State, in Vietnam, in Memphis, or on the road in the Louisiana backwoods – because it was scared of them.

A huge part of the Easy Rider legend lies in the moment of its making: the particular circumstances of 1969. The psychedelic age is ending, and what Tom Wolfe himself called ‘the Me Decade’ is about to begin. Goodbye to inner expansion and outward exploring; hello to talking loudly about yourself in a disco. (It’s significant that Wyatt and Billy subsist on weed and acid, but the drug deal with which they finance their trip involves a huge quantity of coke.) As Wyatt says at the end: ‘We blew it.’ The very same moment inspired Withnail & I (1987), and both movies have an explicitly elegiac quality, a sense that the era they’re recording is already fading.

But, as any hippy will tell you, in the end you will find the beginning. Easy Rider played a key role in the transformation of American cinema in the ‘70s, a sea change that became known as ‘New Hollywood’: away from back-lot Westerns and war films and technicolour extravaganzas, and towards guerrilla-style portrayals of underground culture made by people working outside of the studio system. Oh, and it featured an awful lot of very hip needledrops. (There’s a rumour that the music licensing cost three times as much as the production.)

The re-watch reality

Meet the New Hollywood, same as the Old Hollywood.

For a start, Easy Rider is essentially a Western of the kind Hopper had been starring in for the past decade1. This is clearly intentional: the lead characters are named for Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid, and there are long sequences shot in Monument Valley, so beloved of John Ford (director of many Westerns). An early sequence foregrounds two cowboys shoeing a horse as Billy and Wyatt repair their bikes, emphasising the resonance.

We are being encouraged to see these two bikers as the cowboys of the late twentieth century, as emblematic of American freedom and frontiers as the sheriffs and bandits of the century before. The hippie dream is the American dream: self-sufficiency and self-determination. As Wyatt says to a rancher who offers them a meal: ‘It's not every man that can live off the land, you know? Can do your own thing in your own time. You should be proud.’

The old-time rancher and the new hippies want the same things: to drop out from society, to owe nothing, to receive no stipend. Well, that, and to have a compliant wife. These twentieth century cowboys have the same sexual politics as the nineteenth century ones: they like to roll into town and blow their wad in a brothel. The only difference is that they also get to have strings-free sex with earth mothers in communes.

Also, I don’t remember seeing a single black face in the movie, and all the Latinos are either drug dealers or gurning peasants. As is often the case with Boomer cultural legends, the discomforts of Easy Rider lie in its resolute refusal to take note of anything that doesn’t directly affect healthy young white men. For a movie that makes big claims about its own radicalism, this is a particular flaw. (This is also the inherent difficulty in its specific libertarian politics; in this respect it’s relevant to note that Dennis Hopper was a Republican.)

George Hanson’s speech about freedom begins with a phrase that’s slightly too resonant to contemporary ears: ‘You know... this used to be a hell of a good country. I can't understand what's gone wrong with it.’ By the time he has started on his flying saucer conspiracy theories, it’s hard not to think of all the Boomers spiralling down QANON rabbit holes on Facebook.

Is it OK?

Dennis Hopper was a lifelong ‘character’, by which we mean self-obsessed, self-destructive, confrontational and paranoid. He made a large amount of trouble on the Easy Rider set, at one point trying to steal the film cans and hide them from the cinematographer, who had to physically fight him to get them back. That enigmatic ‘We blew it’ was probably as much a verdict on working with Hopper as anything else.

The multi-talented Henry Jaglom was brought in to try to make something out of Hopper’s footage, and the resulting film appears to be as much to his credit as to anyone else’s; he worked miracles. He used an array of interesting approaches, including jumpy intercutting between sequences and flashes forward to the tragic ending, to create a watchable film. Apart from the sequence in which everyone takes acid in a New Orleans graveyard, which is about as interesting as someone else’s drug experiences ever is; ie, not at all.

Even Hopper’s tantrums could be beneficial. That fight with the cinematographer resulted in the Mardi Gras sequence being shot on different stock to the rest of the film, but in Jaglom’s hands the grainy, blurry partying streets perfectly capture the loss of resolution that is characteristic of the extremely stoned. And he edited perfectly to the needledrop music, creating one of the most famous sequences in cinema: the motorbikes racing down the Californian highways to the sound of Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to be Wild’.

All of this paid off. This low budget, countercultural film ended up being the fourth highest-grossing of 1969, just behind two other New Hollywood Westerns: Midnight Cowboy and the slightly more traditional Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. For all their modish outsider identity, these were still movie stars who, like their characters, stood to make bank off their little road trip. It’s a prime example of what The Baffler called ‘commodification of dissent’: or, as Danny from Withnail & I (1987) put it:

‘They’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, man. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over. And as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black.’

The film understands this, and is explicit about it. Right from the start Wyatt and Billy were doomed to ‘blow it’. It acknowledges that the whole project – the film, the hippies, the ‘60s – is about to be sucked into the maw of the mainstream marketplace. This is the unending dichotomy of the American dream: the freedom of the frontier versus the civilizing power of a legislative republic; the endless push west to recruit more sheriffs, build more suburbs and sell more stuff.

This is, perhaps, where the movie best stands up to a rewatch now. As a vision not of the ‘60s dream but to its grubby and disappointing reality. It ends up being remarkably clear eyed about the whole venture. That this was how it always going to end: in disappointment, failures and a lot of cocaine.

For more on the end of the ‘60s (as seen from the end of the ‘80s), complete with Withnail and Doctor Who:

Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts, but the Boomers did more than perhaps any other to reinvent popular culture and explode the canon. So what did we, Generation X, make of the things they made us watch?

Sir Charles Lytton (David Niven), an international jewel thief known to the world as ‘The Phantom’, has his sights set on a fabulous diamond called ‘The Pink Panther’, so named because of a flaw shaped like a cat. The diamond is in the possession of Princess Dala (Claudia Cardinale), who is in exile in an Italian ski resort. Only one man can stop Lytton: the famed inspector of the Sûreté, Jacques Clouseau (Peter Sellers).

The Legend

This is the story of an audacious robbery, in which a master of disguise steals ‘The Pink Panther’ out from under the nose of its rightful, aristocratic owner.

I am, of course, indulging in a little chicanery of my own here. I’m not talking about the plot of the film; I’m talking about the film itself. (If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know that [spoiler] the diamond known as The Pink Panther is never actually stolen.)

The Pink Panther was conceived as a vehicle for Stowe old boy and Second World War commando David Niven, a man whose picture you can easily find by looking up ‘debonair’ in the dictionary. This tale of an internationally notorious jewel thief who flits from Alpine ski resort to European capital in a haze of champagne, lounge jazz and nippy sports cars was intended as a comedy-thriller-pan-European romp, much like Stanley Donen’s Charade, which was released in the same year.

Charade similarly dashes headlong from an Alpine ski resort to a European capital, starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, another man to be filed (neatly) under ‘debonair’. Like The Pink Panther, it has a funky jazz score by Henry Mancini and inventively animated titles.1 Charade even features a police inspector with a moustache, a mac and a thick French accent, this time played by an actual Frenchman, Jacques Marin.

It is, in other words, the mirror image of The Pink Panther, which almost starred Audrey Hepburn in the role of the Princess and Peter Ustinov as the police inspector having rings run around him.

And then, at the very last minute, just as filming was about to start, Ustinov backed out and a replacement had to be found in a hurry. Director Blake Edwards was talked into hiring British comedian Peter Sellers. He had only seen Sellers in I’m Alright Jack (1959), in which Sellers plays the dumpy, middle-aged Union foreman Fred Kite, and was not convinced he was right for the part. However, in the car ride from the airport to the set, the pair bonded over their love of Stan Laurel. Once on set, Edwards discovered that he had stumbled upon a precious gem with a remarkable flaw.

Sellers was already famous in Britain, after starring in the radio comedy The Goon Show and many Ealing and Ealing-ish comedies of the ’50s. The Pink Panther, however, was a crucial part of his becoming an international star. His perfect timing and sense of comic character allowed him to stumble onto the set of The Pink Panther and steal the movie right out from beneath David Niven’s dapper, moustachioed nose. As soon as Sellers appears, the film stops being a Niven vehicle and becomes the first in a whole series of films dedicated to a legend of comedy: the inept, deluded, ill-fated Inspector Clouseau.

The Reality

Sellers’ fame in Britain had arisen from his character work, particularly his voice. In the Goon Show he played at least 16 regular characters, all with different voices. In The Ladykillers, he was a young Cockney spiv; in The Smallest Show on Earth he was a doddery old projectionist; and in I’m Alright Jack he was a middle-aged union agitator with pretensions (‘Ahhh, Russia. All them cornfields and ballet in the evening.’)

What he was not especially known for was his physical comedy. Even at his advanced age, you can see Cary Grant’s vaudeville background in his elegant horsing about in Charade, but that was not Sellers’ skill. Yet it was what Clouseau became best remembered for after his on-set collaboration with Blake Edwards. Edwards was, by his own admission, a very clumsy man. He found that his retelling of his various mishaps always got a laugh, so he figured they ought to work the same way in a film.

In some ways The Pink Panther owes a big debt to American comedy director Leo McCarey, of whom Edwards was a huge fan. McCarey had a knack for patience, letting the comedians do their business in front of the camera with little editing but often with masterful blocking. In the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup (1933), which McCarey directed, there’s a famous mirror scene in which both Harpo and Chico pretend to be Groucho’s reflection. The Pink Panther features a homage in which the camera stays stock still as two thieves dressed as gorillas try to break into a safe from opposite ends, aping each other’s mounting confusion.

Edwards was particularly influenced by McCarey’s theory of the ‘pain barrier’, in which disaster upon disaster is piled upon the protagonist until the audience stops feeling sorry for them and starts laughing. Thus indignity is heaped upon indignity for Clouseau, both within scenes and across the plot of the entire film, which starts with his wife cuckolding him with the villain he is trying to catch, and ends with him being convicted of the crime he is trying to solve.

But Clouseau bears all of these indignities with dignity. McCarey is thought to have been the man who paired Oliver Hardy with Stan Laurel, and — as we know — both Edwards and Sellers idolised Laurel. The onscreen Laurel is a holy fool, a creature of naive optimism and a bewildered poise. The Clouseau of The Pink Panther is his screen descendent.

Clouseau is not yet the agent of chaos of the ‘70s sequels. He is even a competent detective: he discerns the Phantom’s M.O., figures out where he will strike next and, eventually, correctly identifies him. He’s just an extremely accident-prone competent detective. He, not unjustifiably, continues to take himself seriously, even as the universe doesn’t.

What Clouseau is, in The Pink Panther, is that classic comic figure, the man out of place. He is an ordinary if somewhat clumsy man who has wandered into the world of a sophisticated and sparkling caper, full of extraordinary and elegant figures like Capucine (who plays his wife), Claudia Cardinale, Robert Wagner and David Niven. Out of his depth, Clouseau is nonetheless determined to get by, his striving becoming the source of a lot of the comedy but also earning a lot of the audience’s sympathy, which is why he became the star of the movie instead of Niven.

Is it still ok?

It's still funny, if that’s what you mean. But then, so is Charade. Hepburn isn’t that great at comedy, but Grant is good enough for both of them, and the script is terrific. Charade is precisely what The Pink Panther would be today without Sellers: a period romp of interest only to completists and obsessives (present!).

Blake Edwards said he initially thought The Pink Panther would be only worth doing if he could film somewhere exotic with nice restaurants and good hotels, hence the flitting between Rome and Cortina d'Ampezzo in the Italian Alps (precisely why a French detective is investigating an Italian case is, quite rightly, never explained). This is the world in which Clouseau is an interloper: the world of the jet-set, of royalty and the wealthy, of fashion and skis. Ski resorts feature in both Charade and, more centrally, The Pink Panther. They were a marker of the exotic and luxurious in 1963.

(Indeed, most of my image of skiing comes from The Pink Panther. I am not a particularly well coordinated or physically competent man. I have never been skiing nor am I, for the safety of both myself and bystanders, ever likely to start. So all I have is the image of the hotels and chalets of The Pink Panther, of blazing open fires, gorgeous knit-wear, antique painted woodwork and tiger skin rugs.)

Sellers apart, one of the chief joys of The Pink Panther today is its early ‘60s setting, that exclusionary, rarefied, luxurious European world in which hotels in the Italian Alps look like hotels in the Italian Alps, rather than being entirely indistinguishable from hotels in Nicosia or Edinburgh or Berlin. A world the charm of which relies entirely on its being unattainable, unaffordable and lost in time.

Not that it seems that exotic any more. All these things – nice jumpers, international travel, ‘vintage’ furnishings – are widely and easily attainable in the twenty-first century. After all, 1963, the year The Pink Panther was released, was the year sexual intercourse began for Philip Larkin. The year of the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP, the beginnings of a cultural, class and commercial avalanche that would sweep this rareified world away.

The Pink Panther is set in a vanishing milieu, more of the ‘50s than the ‘60s. But its a charming one to visit, even just for an hour and a half, especially if you can see it while drinking beer from steins next to a roaring fire, watching Fran Jeffries sing a sublime bit of Mancini-written Italian language pop.

Speaking of The Fab Four, you can catch up with what they did next in our piece on 1964, A Hard Day’s Night and Doctor Who:

Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts, but the Boomers did more than perhaps any other to reinvent popular culture and explode the canon. So what did we, Generation X, make of the things they made us watch?

Grieving the accidental drowning of their daughter Christine, John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) find themselves in off-season Venice, where John is helping restore a church. Laura falls in with a pair of English sisters, one of whom claims to be psychic and warns her that there is danger for them in the city. This warning seems to ring true when they hear their son has been injured while at boarding school and Laura rushes back to England to see him. John, however, believes he sees Laura still in Venice and raises a fuss, leading to the sisters being apprehended by the police. Laura returns to Venice but only just in time to make it for the shock ending.

Anyone familiar with Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) will have already realised that I’ve left several key elements out of that summary of the movie. Shiny red macs, for one; Donald Sutherland’s pallid lanky shanks, for another. I’ve also left out the context in which John thinks he sees Laura – a funeral procession – and what, precisely, that shock ending is.

This is partly out of deference for spoilers, but largely because most of those elements constitute:

The Legend

The legend of Don’t Look Now has two major parts: the ending and the sex scene.

So, here come the spoilers.

The first time you see the movie – presuming that someone like me hasn’t spoiled it for you already – the ending takes you completely by surprise. All the way through the film, you are drip-fed the fact that there is a serial killer on the loose in Venice. But as far as the audience can tell, all the victims are women and you are led to suspect the two sisters that Laura has befriended. Meanwhile you are also being drip-fed the idea that John is psychic and that the figures he keeps glimpsing, dressed in red coats like his dead daughter, are visions he is having of her ghost.

This means that when, at the end, he is stabbed in the neck by a wizened killer in a red duffle coat and bleeds out in a ruined palazzo, it comes as a shock. You finally realise that the one psychic vision he did have was of his wife attending his own funeral.

It sticks in the mind partly because of the weird little serial killer, of course, shaking its head with a kind of admonitory distress, as if it is very sorry that John finally caught up with it and now its going to have to murder him; but it’s also memorable because it's so unexpected as an event.

Up til this moment, Don’t Look Now hasn’t been a violent slasher movie. Instead it's been largely quiet, chilly and spooky, like off-season Venice itself. It's been a film about bereavement and hauntings and unresolved premonitions, both for the characters and for the audience. You know something strange is coming, but you’d never expect that. After all, this is the kind of film that has that sex scene.

The sex scene is a key part of the legend of Don’t Look Now for two reasons. One is the fact that it is extraordinarily explicit even for a ‘70s sex scene, all of which were apparently deliberately crafted to make actresses feel uncomfortable on set and teenagers uncomfortable when watching them on BBC 2 in the same room as their parents.

This led to the inevitable rumour that Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie actually had sex on set and that Roeg had simply cut out the literally pornographic bits. This is obviously nonsense, but watching today and knowing what one knows about the ‘attitudes of the time’ makes one squirm somewhat over just how happy the actors (particularly Christie) might have been with what they were being asked to do.

The other reason is how Roeg did have to cut round the explicitness to appease the censors. He chose to do this by intercutting the act with shots of the aftermath, John and Laura getting dressed and ready to go out after having had sex.

It's a brilliant choice, turning an otherwise potentially grubby sex scene into a portrait of a marriage, sex as part of an adult relationship, as a display of their married intimacy. This intercutting of mundane physical and emotional intimacy focusses us on John and Laura as a couple, placing their relationship at the core of the movie.

The reality

The sex scene is also emblematic of the film as a whole. It is a bravura piece of filmmaking, a complex interplay of time, motion, emotion and relationship revealed entirely through montage, using the editing to build a sensory gestalt that transcends dialogue or conventional linear storytelling. It is, to a degree, showing off.

It is also very ‘70s and very on the nose. Faced with the need to establish John and Laura’s recovering relationship after Laura has been reassured about their dead daughter by the psychic sisters, it chooses to do this through sex, visual fireworks and some lovely ‘70s clothes.

But it remains, however, unusual and unexpected. It is not a thing anyone else has ever tried, or, at least, succeeded at. It's certainly more extraordinary than the shock ending.

In the decades since, horror movies have become increasingly gory and rely more and more on the startle of the jump scare rather than the building of atmosphere and discomfort.

What distinguishes Don’t Look Now is not the ending but what it's an ending to. The film itself, full of intimacy and chill, of everyday strangeness and disturbing mundanity, remains a masterclass in building sensation, creating a mood around the audience in which the story remains almost incidental, glimpsed only in the corner of frames, never where we’re looking, until the very last few minutes of the film.

Is it ok?

What’s remarkable, looking at Don’t Look Now now, is just how chill it isn’t. On first viewing, the film feels subtle and elusive before it becomes suddenly shocking and unnerving. On rewatch it becomes evident quite how over the top it is.

Roeg takes the core themes of second sight and the failures of ‘first’ sight - the way the characters are always looking in the wrong place, looking at the past and the future instead of the present – and goes for them like a kid with a toy. Like a psychopath with a meat cleaver. Like a director on a movie set.

The film is an endless parade of visual metaphors for vision. From the beginning it is full of images of images, slides and photographs, of reflective surfaces, glass and water. From the shattered pane and garden pond of the opening to the dark windows and still canals of Venice, from mosaic tesserae to stained glass, magnifying glasses and the clouded eyes of the blind, it is full of images of sight and not-seeing.

The sex scene is constantly intercut with the characters in their hotel bathroom, which is heavily mirrored, so that they are constantly seen from many angles, reflected and extended back and forth across the screen. Donald Sutherland’s skinny bum is multiplied into the distance, the Donald Nether-lands, ever receding, just as we are seeing him multiplied across time through the editing.

That, and the red, of course. The shiny red mac their daughter was wearing when she drowned is a key symbol in the movie, echoed by the red coat the killer wears at the end. But the more you watch, the more red coats you see. Sutherland and Christie are dressed almost entirely in dull browns and tweeds, reflecting their diminished selves after their daughter’s death. Around them all of wintry Venice is muted and faded and then in the background of almost every Venetian frame is a flash of red somewhere. The whole film is haunted by Christine and, of course, the serial killer.

As well as the over the top visuals, there’s also the sound. Don’t Look Now goes heavy on the dubbing, with lots of very present foley and ADR. Foley are the sound effects laid onto a film over the action captured on location; ADR is a vague abbreviation which usually stands for ‘additional dialogue replacement’ and is a practice by which actors re-record their lines in a studio to be dubbed over the film. 

It is not that either are amateurish or distracting in Don’t Look Now, but they are subtly unsettling. The sound becomes slightly detached from the visuals and the sensation emphasises the sense that we are not looking in the right place, that we are not quite seeing correctly.

It also emphasises Don’t Look Now as a cinematic artefact, a deliberate piece of filmmaking work. Don’t Look Now is very ‘70s and displays many of the regrettable attitudes of its time: the cultural misogyny, the prurient sexuality, the othering of the disabled. But it also displays some of the more admirable attitudes, too: an approach to what film can be which is wholly different to the four-quadrant content products that dominate the 21st century multiplex.

That, and some of the most beautiful ‘70s outfits ever put on film. Seriously, that suit Donald Sutherland’s wearing in the final sequence? Worth killing him for. Assuming you can get the stains out afterwards.

As far as twist endings go, ‘Don’t Look Now’ holds up considerably better than ‘The Usual Suspects’

Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts, but the Boomers did more than perhaps any other to reinvent popular culture and explode the canon. So what did we, Generation X, make of the things they made us watch?

An eccentric explorer, his stylish wife and pilot son set to sea in a specially customised ship, crewed by a motley gang in matching outfits with little red hats, on the hunt for exotic marine life that they can harass, film and occasionally blow up.

The paragraph above describes The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), Wes Anderson’s whimsical midlife-crisis movie about dysfunctional fathers; but it also describes The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, a series of marine life documentaries from the ‘60s/’70s. Jacques Yves Cousteau was a pioneer of underwater photography and his groundbreaking films brought the ocean into living rooms around the world.

A caption at the end of The Life Aquatic denies all connection with Jacques Cousteau. I imagine a large number of lawyers insisted on this, because the resemblances are clear. Anyone who didn’t grow up on Cousteau – anyone who wasn’t already familiar with his ship, the Calypso, and its crew, all his weird gadgets and dramatic storytelling – must have been absolutely baffled by Life Aquatic.

At one point in his film Conshelf Adventure (1966) Cousteau shows a cut-through model of his undersea base. In moments like this you absolutely could be watching a Wes Anderson movie. Like (I assume) Anderson I was obsessed with Cousteau as a child. In the UK his films were shown as part of The World About Us, a BBC documentary strand. They were undemanding viewing for dreary Sunday evenings, sending children off to bed to dream of teeming coral reefs and intrepid submarine adventures.

This is what nature documentaries were like in the ‘60s and ‘70s: the exoticism of the Imperial travelogue, the larger than life adventurer, a sense of Victorian exploration and acquisition rather than scientific observation and discovery.

The Legend

Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s biography is itself like something out of a children’s story, or an inter-war pulp novel. He trained as a pilot in the French Navy in the ‘30s before a car crash put an end to his flying ambitions. He took up swimming as a form of recuperation and fell in with a couple of maverick sport divers on the Mediterranean coast. It was there that he invented the aqualung, a device that finally enabled free diving for long periods at depth. After the Second World War (which he appears to have avoided by staying underwater), Cousteau acquired a decommissioned minesweeper, which he rechristened The Calypso, and roamed the world with a gang of mismatched scuba experts, having extraordinary adventures exploring the unknown depths. 

At first he took oil company money to conduct underwater surveys (something of which he appeared justly ashamed in later years), and recruited a young film student called Louis Malle to record his exploits. Le Monde du Silence (1956) won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Oscar for Best Documentary Film, and a legend was born.

Cousteau wasn’t the only extraordinary figure on The Calypso; the whole show came across as a live action Hanna Barbera cartoon. Cousteau was joined by his pilot, cameraman and shark-bait son Phillippe; his team, all in their matching red beanies (a tradition among French divers); and his wife, Simone, who fulfilled the Smurfette role by playing soi-disant ‘Shepherdess’ (her name for herself) to the whole crew. They even had a bizarre array of Thunderbirds-like vehicles, including the Sea Saucer, a UFO-shaped, bright yellow mini-sub.

Ah, that yellow. If there was one thing that marked out Cousteau’s team as distinctly French it was the peerless design and solid branding. From the opening titles to the vehicles and equipment, everything – aside from the red beanies – featured a distinctive yellow that stood out superbly against the submarine blue. The aqualungs were stylised into sleek backpacks; the masks were streamlined helmets with built in headlamps. Everything was in a black and yellow colour scheme that made the divers look like a cross between Bond villains and The Fantastic Four.

All of this contributed to what now feels like the strange tone of his documentaries. They are frequently framed as ‘adventures’, with titles that sound like lost Tintin books: ‘Lagoon of Lost Ships’, ‘The Smile of the Walrus’, ‘The Sleeping Sharks of Yucatan’. As with other shows made before the advent of dispassionate, scientific nature documentaries – like the young David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest (1954–63) and the films of Hans and Lotte Hass – the crew become characters in the story, and their underwater explorations and experiments were often dramatised.

This technique made them feel deeply futuristic. In Conshelf Adventure Cousteau was conducting experiments in building permanent submarine labs, a strong theme in contemporary science fiction. Shows like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964–68), Gerry Anderson’s puppet show Stingray (1964) and the Japanese anime Marine Boy (1965) all featured sci-fi submarines, undersea bases and undiscovered marine mysteries. By the ‘70s the promise of life underwater was everywhere, with the Usborne Book of the Future (1979) promising Sea Cities by the year 2000. 

Man had been to the Moon, but the depths of the Earth were still unexplored. Inner space was where we should be venturing. Space exploration was largely the province of two global superpowers – and only one of those could actually manage to land a man on the Moon – but a single obsessive Frenchman could build a minisub and discover whole new parts of our own planet. 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface is covered in water but we have mostly travelled over its surface, terrified and tantalised by the deeps. Cousteau’s innovations hinted at a frontier that was within the reach of almost anyone.

The Reality

In The Life Aquatic the adventurer Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) is explicitly a failure. He is an amateur charlatan whose adventures spring from his childish egomania and whose films are slipshod, fictionalised schlock. He has fallen deeply out of fashion, and is driven to silly stunts to keep his fantasy afloat.

None of this is true of Cousteau. To be fair, he seems to have had an almost stereotypically French personal life, with at least two families, and his oldest son did die in a tragic plane crash much like [spoilers] Ned ‘Kingsley’ Zissou (Owen Wilson)1, but he was not, by any measure, a failure.

Cousteau’s films were shown on TV all over the world and he was massively famous throughout the ‘70s. Footage of meetings of The Cousteau Society (founded in 1973) look like fan conference appearances by film stars; rooms packed with starstruck adults and awed children gazing at their hero in wonder. His fame faded, though, as fame always does, and his earlier films did go out of fashion in later decades; but he carried on making new ones. The problem wasn’t so much that they were outdated; it was more that they were depressing.

Cousteau was making his films at a crucial moment, just as the global networks of the post-War world began to tighten international connections and the impacts of the Industrial Revolution on the environment began to become visible. To his alarm, he started to realise that the ecologies he studied were disappearing before his eyes. At a meeting of the Cousteau Society, he was asked by a small boy about the prospects for the submarine cities we had all been promised. He replied:

‘I don’t think we are going to build an underwater civilisation. I think we should first build a good civilisation on land.’

His enthusiasm for the underwater world fuelled his environmental campaigning: ‘I  believe that some day people are going to revolt and begin to care’. Where Wes Anderson portrays the Steve Zissou Society as a childish fan club, the Cousteau Society still campaigns on marine preservation.

Is It OK?

I think we can grant that ecological campaigning and marine preservation are ‘OK’. More specifically, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau was instrumental in engaging an entire generation with the natural world. You can still see Cousteau’s techniques of building stories into scientific observation in the work of David Attenborough, the great master of the genre. It was a textbook example of the core principles of popular science, summarised perfectly in the BBC mission to ‘inform, educate and entertain’. He hooked the audience with the narrative structures of pulp adventure and the promise of a magical unseen world; then, once he had their attention, he delivered a new perspective on our actually-existing planet and the forces that threaten it.

Cousteau was one of the first people to do this because he helped to invent the equipment that allowed it to be done. His team were able to swim with sharks and go and annoy octopi because Cousteau had developed the aqualung and built his minisubs. They were able to show us their adventures because of the innovations into filmmaking they had pioneered. In The Life Aquatic the creatures Zissou encounters are all stop-motion fantasies, but the crew of the Calypso were able to film the genuine wonders of the sea and share them with the world, a remarkable and fascinating achievement.

And anyway, I do not want to put his ‘period styles’ aside. Because they’re wonderful. Wes Anderson paints Steve Zissou’s world as faded and down-at-heel, a relic of a more colourful, more romantic moment. I suspect he does this because, like me, he finds Cousteau’s world colourful and romantic. All those bright yellow submersibles, those little red hats, those sharks and ships and submarine adventures; they’re all so cool. Watching Cousteau’s documentaries now is like looking through a delightful porthole into a technicolour world in which a merry bunch of weirdos sets off into the wild blue yonder, just to see what is there.

Cousteau’s motto was ‘Il faut aller voir’. It’s a shame it was in French, because the English translation offers a lovely pun: you have to go to see; you have to go to sea. There is a shot in the credits of the show which features Phillippe Cousteau, in a splendidly ‘70s beard, piloting a seaplane. It soars over a calm sea, under a clear blue sky, seabirds swirling in its wake, and I still want to climb into the television, pull on my little red hat and join the Calypso. It remains deeply romantic, an image of a world in which things were undiscovered, things were unknown, and you could have adventures with your friends. In a sea plane.

For more ‘70s science programming, there’s always Dr Jacob Bronowski and ‘The Ascent of Man’

Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts, but the Boomers did more than perhaps any other to reinvent popular culture and explode the canon. So what did we, Generation X, make of the things they made us watch?

Playing out over seven episodes, this is a slow-moving, serpentine adaptation of John le Carré’s bestselling meditation on betrayal. Retired spy George Smiley is called back into action to investigate his old colleagues – the most senior members of the British Secret Service – one of whom is a KGB double agent.

In August 1979 electricians at Thames Television went on strike, closely followed by staff at all the other regional stations. This caused ITV to go off the air entirely for the duration of what would turn out to be the longest strike in British television history. ITV’s holding screen, which explained the strike and promised that transmission would soon resume, regularly clocked up over a million viewers.

For those eleven weeks between August and October the two BBC channels had the skies to themselves. Broadcast in September and October in the ‘classic serial’ slot usually reserved for ruffs and bonnets and curates and cads, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy consistently reached around eight million viewers. While we can perhaps discount one million of these as the kinds of people who would rather watch an inanimate title card than turn the telly off, these audience figures were nevertheless pretty good for a complicated spy story. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was a hit. 

The Legend

1979 was the year of Moonraker, in which Bond went Star Wars: space shuttles, laser guns, and a timeless double entendre (‘I think he’s attempting re-entry, sir’). In what passed for the mind of the British public, intelligence work was closely associated with trick cars and jet-setting sexcapades. The cultural chasm between Bond and George Smiley made the viewing figures for Tinker Tailor all the more surprising; the closest it gets to Bond is Ricki Tarr, a loose cannon agent who is despised by the ‘grown-ups’ back at headquarters. 

This was an altogether unglamorous vision of espionage. It referred baldly to real-world truth that the betrayals and defections of the ‘50s and ‘60s had crashed the morale of the British secret services and delegitimised them in the eyes of the Americans. These were not suave and deadly super-spies; they were institutional failures, grey men in grey rooms, shuffling bits of paper while other, better spies settled the world’s fate thousands of miles away. All the shooting takes place off screen. The most tense sequence shows Smiley’s right-hand man, Peter Guillam, illegitimately accessing a file in a library.

But it was done so well that it captured the nation. And then it entirely mystified it. The plot is complex, full of flashbacks, cover names and double talk. To follow it you have to marry up a chance word there with a significant look there, and sift seemingly accidental encounters for hidden inferences. The script carried over a lot of Le Carre’s fictional spy jargon – ‘lamplighters’ and ‘scalphunters’ and ‘product’ – and did even less to explain it than the book had. It relied on the actors to do some actual acting, to tell us as much with looks and expressions as they did with words. 

Despite being impenetrable (BBC Radio legend Terry Wogan ran a regular Tinker Tailor quiz on his Radio 2 show entitled ‘Does anyone know what’s going on?’) viewing figures for the show remained consistent throughout. This was because the script was brilliant, the direction was thoughtful and gripping, and those actors really did some acting. It helped to have one of the greatest screen actors of his generation, Alec Guinness, in the lead role. 

The legend, then, is that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was not only a good adaptation of a good novel, but that it was one of the great TV shows, full stop; the holotype of the serious, aspirational TV series, the forerunner of the shows that make up our ‘Golden Age of TV’.

The Reality

In this case, the legend checks out. Beautifully considered and made, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy really was a milestone in the evolution of TV as a serious art form. Right from the opening sequence it builds a complex structure of character, visuals and story.

This opening scene is a slow and apparently mundane sequence in which a group of men arrive for a meeting. The pacing, and the ordinariness of the location, tells us something important about the story we’re about to see. We’re being encouraged to watch, to pay attention to small details. Because the way each man comes into the room, and the things he does as he sits down, and the clothes he wears: these all tell us something important about him. Toby Esterhase is punctual and prissy in his awful shirt. Roy Bland is bullish and Percy Alleline is patrician. Bill Hayden, late and louche, covers his cup with a saucer less he, ahem, ‘spill the tea’, as the kids say. 

At this point the viewers don’t know a lot of things. We don’t know that one of these men is a ‘mole’, a double agent. We don’t know that they were all identified as suspects by Smiley’s now-dead boss, and that before he died he gave them codenames: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier and (for Esterhase) Poorman. (We don’t know that we are meeting the characters who give the series its title.) We certainly don’t know that we’ve even been given something of a clue as to who the mole might be. But we’re aware that we’re being offered something dense, something that will reward our time.

The apparent elusiveness is key to the success of the serial. It is, at its heart, a detective story, in which George Smiley picks up clues and tries to determine which of the suspects is the double agent. The audience has a double puzzle in front of them. If they are going to play Watson to Smiley’s Holmes, they are going to have to understand this hidden world first. Only then will they be able to plumb its depths. We’re not just looking for clues, we’re looking for clues as to what a clue might look like.

Moreover the detective story gives the show a core structure, with episodic progression and revelation, and a propulsion around which it builds its larger themes: patriotism, betrayal and failure. Using a core episodic structure to build wider and more complex stories is a common narrative technique. It was regularly deployed by that former occupier of the classic serial slot, Charles Dickens, and by subsequent ‘serious’ TV shows including at least the first season of The Wire (2002).

It has its flaws, of course. Hywel Bennet as Ricki Tarr for one, who appears to have come as David Cassidy, complete with eye-liner. Indeed, the whole Tarr flashback, which takes up most of Episode 2, is probably the most clammily seventies sequence of the show.

And, of course, any fan of the book is going to have their own idea of the characters. Ian Richardson is superb as Bill Hayden, but he doesn’t have the large charisma of Colin Firth in Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 film (come to that Tom Hardy is a much better Ricki Tarr). But there are also some inspired bits of casting: Michael Alridge is splendidly pompous as Percy Alleline, Michael Jayston is terrific as Peter Guillam and Beryl Reid is, predictably, wonderful.

But there is one bit of casting that makes up for any other deficiencies, of course. Alec Guinness was something of a ‘get’ for Smiley. He was a genuine movie star three times over: the young lead of Ealing comedies, the character actor of sixties epics and now the wise old mentor of eight year children all over the world as Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars (1977). 

Movie stars didn’t usually do TV in those days, TV was domestic and dirty, not like the great, glittering screen, and the two rarely mixed. But Star Wars may have helped, paradoxically. Guinness, not entirely convinced by the script, had negotiated for a percentage of George Lucas’ royalties, a deal that made him an awful lot of money. This perhaps meant he was more willing to take the lower salaries the BBC could offer for work that was not what he called  the ‘bloody awful, banal lines’ of Star Wars. It’s rather fitting that Guinness was there not just for the infantilization of cinema but for the maturation of television.

The unassuming and soft-spoken Smiley is the centre of Tinker, Tailor, and having Guinness, who is so visibly unnoticeable and so eloquently quiet, in the part, gives a drive and solidity to a story that is essentially a dumpy, middle-aged man reading old files and thinking about what they mean.

Is It OK?

That Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy stands up today is actually a testament to how of its time it is.

Where other classic serials may have dated - the seventies version of Victorian London being all studio over lighting and incongruous mullets - Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - a story of ‘70s Britain filmed in ‘70s Britain - works perfectly. And it enhances the story. The Britain of the show is worn and soiled, all brown and small, run down institutions in run down buildings in a run down country. This only amplifies the themes in the book of the end of Empire and the diminishment of Britain on the world stage.

It means too, that they can carry key concepts from the book into the show. Cast members like Aldridge and Guinness had served in World War II, just as their characters were supposed to have done. It is a setting in which the sexism, racism and, most of all, the classism on which the book concentrates, is still in place. You can believe that these are the officer class spies, trained to betrayal and subterfuge in their upbringing. Betrayed by their parents and sent into the enemy territory of boarding schools like the one featured in the story, where they must adopt the cover of nicknames and the casual deceit of not caring. That chilly aristocratic insouciance that is the only defence against the treachery of the system and the promise of inevitable disappointment.

Disappointment is a key theme of the book. Not just for the characters personally, but in their calling and in their country. But it is also about the possibility of redemption of and from failure. Smiley’s life has largely been a failure: he has been exiled from the Service, he not only failed to recruit his nemesis Karla, but Karla has placed a traitor among his own friends, even his wife habitually betrays him. But even at this moment, he can save himself, his service and his country. The flabby British democracy that seems so bloodless and poor in comparison to the fervent Americans and ruthless Russians, can redeem itself by its very moderation and stolidity.

Filmed over the winter of 1978, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy literalises the disappointment of ‘70s Britain. The world-spanning Empire shrunk to one bleak island, the multi-coloured mod revolution of the ‘60s now bleached of life and colour, mean and tight and miserable. A country beset by strikes that could turn off television channels for months on end. But which could also produce such extraordinary and splendid television. Like Smiley and his serious, patient investigation, Guinness and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy redeem their disappointed country and tell it it can still be great.

For more spies, betrayals and Colin Firth, try Rowan’s piece on male relationships:

Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts, but the Boomers did more than perhaps any other to reinvent popular culture and explode the canon. So what did we, Generation X, make of the things they made us watch?

Polish-British mathematician, polymath and public intellectual Dr Jacob Bronowski puts the ‘70s BBC travel budget to good use by cavorting about the globe – from the Rift Valley to Auschwitz – to tell the story of human progress.

The founder of the BBC and its first Director-General, John Reith, articulated its purpose as being to ‘inform, educate and entertain’. You’ll notice that entertainment comes last. When, in the 1960s, David Attenborough became Controller of BBC 2 (note for non-Brits: yes, that is a job title in the UK; no, we don’t often think about how odd it sounds), he set about fulfilling the first two parts of the BBC remit with a clutch of high concept, high-brow series: Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation (1969), Alistair Cooke’s America (1972), and Dr Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (1973), in which the brilliant mathematician and thinker packed the entire history of science, culture and humanity into 13 episodes. As a taster, here’s Wikipedia’s summary of the first four episodes:

1. Lower than the Angels: Evolution of humans from proto-ape to the modern form 400,000 years ago.

2. The Harvest of the Seasons: Early human migration, agriculture and the first settlements, and war.

3. The Grain in the Stone: Tools, and the development of architecture and sculpture.

4. The Hidden Structure: Fire, metals and alchemy.

The legend

I’ve been hearing about The Ascent of Man my entire life, because in my parents’ considered opinion Bronowski is the public intellectual par excellence. Among other things, my mother has always been thrilled by the fact that Bronowski did the school run for his own children. She thinks she picked this up from a newspaper profile, which sums up a great deal about cult of The Ascent of Man: a great man machete-ing his way out of the halls of academe to bring priceless nuggets of wisdom to the common masses, and being adoringly profiled in the papers in the process. 

Bronowski was famous and feted not for being a pop singer or a comedian, but because he was both clever and knowledgeable, and was able to put the two together in enlightening and engaging ways. Every so often throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s a BBC Outside Broadcast Unit would pull up outside a university, snatch away a badly dressed man, and plonk him down again in front of a UNESCO heritage site, where he would gesticulate vigorously to camera while monologuing about art history or scientific discovery. This was done simply because these men knew what they were talking about, and were entertaining when talking about it.

This is not the sort of documentary that gets made much in the twenty-first century. Aware of a thousand competing TV channels and the knowledge that the audience is not watching any of them but staring at their phones instead, the twenty first century documentary dare not do anything difficult or thoughtful. Instead inexplicable celebrities are shoehorned into bland social history that’s the factual TV equivalent of lazy observational comedy: ‘What is it with spoons? There’s always one we hate and never use, am I right?’ An unthreatening face looks up from a bowl of soup: ‘All my life, I’ve wondered where spoons come from - and now I’m going on a journey to discover their extraordinary story.’ This is followed by half an hour of ineptly summarised history. Academics – who, if they were allowed to speak, might tell us something we didn’t already know – are confined to nodding in the background. ‘Join us at 9 tonight on BBC2 as Ben Fogle digs into spoons.’

The Ascent of Man was the BBC doing what it was supposed to do: educating and informing, with a little bit of entertainment slipped in, like the proportion of insect cadavers that is legally allowed in jam.

The reality

The Ascent of Man is, of course, a thing extremely of its time. Erudite and complex pieces to camera are interspersed with Blue Peter-style demonstrations of scientific principles using bits of driftwood found on the beach.  There are hauntological interludes in which prog electronica burbles under library footage of sunsets and stop-motion plants. Large parts of it are essentially a Boards of Canada video. And yes, there, in the credits: Ken Morse! Rostruming away over mediaeval woodcuts like a good ‘un. Gen X viewers will be reminded of the times when the cuboid school TV was wheeled into the classroom, bringing with it the promise of a somnolent half hour in front of Programmes for Schools: resource extraction in Silesia, an introduction to business French. 

Of course, a great deal of the history in The Ascent of Man is of its time too. You could pick any number of arguments with the title alone. ‘Man’? That’s terribly sexist, obviously. And even if we accept it as a common shorthand for ‘human’ – which you wouldn’t, nowadays – it still conflicts with an holistic vision of humankind existing within an ecology. What about the heavy hands of disease and natural disaster and climate, aimlessly spinning the wheel of fortune like a lackadaisical croupier on the roulette of history? Isn’t ‘of’ unnecessarily possessive? Does scientific progress ‘belong’ to anyone? It hints of an innately capitalist way of looking at the world. And ‘Ascent’? Give me a break. The whole idea of human culture as an inevitable progress – the Whig version of history – is outdated; it takes some cheek to talk about ‘Ascent’ when your penultimate episode is about the Holocaust. 

As the subtitle says, this is the ‘personal view’ of Dr Bronowski. It’s just, like, his opinion, man. As in an Oxbridge humanities tutorial, you are expected to disagree with him; and if you aren’t familiar with Oxbridge humanities tutorials, why are you watching BBC2? To which the answer is: it’s bloody 1973. There are only three TV channels. They shut down in the afternoon and play the National Anthem before going off-air at midnight. This little gnome of a man quacking away in a field, looking like Hoggle from Labyrinth in NHS specs: this is the only entertainment available. 

You could see all this as the patronising elitism of the old-school BBC writ large.

Is it OK?

Or you could see it as the glory and treasure of the old-school BBC writ large.

The BBC’s nickname ‘Auntie’ derives from the phrase ‘auntie knows best’. This is how the BBC was characterised: establishment figures, the private school and University educated middle classes, intent on improving the nation and educating the unwashed. Oxford graduate Joy Whitby comissioned RADA-trained actors to read Kaye Webb’s Puffin-approved classics on Jackanory. Shrewsbury-educated John Peel was going to make us listen to The Fall whether we liked it or not (usually not). Gurkha officer Tony Hart was going to make us colour inside the lines.

Except that, of course, no one was making anyone do anything. They were, like Tony Hart, enthusing us, inspiring us, inviting us in to these new worlds of knowledge and art. How else would we have discovered these things? Was the Capital Radio breakfast show going to play us The Fall’s 1978 single ‘No Xmas for John Quays’? Was school going to make us read the Swedish comedy detective stories of Agaton Sax? How were we supposed to know about the transmission of Greek knowledge through Arabic writings into mediaeval Spain, without Dr Bronowski to tell us about it?

There is a legendary story about that first Director-General, John Reith, leaving Broadcasting House one night in the 1930s. As Reith approached the front doors, the doorman - who had been listening to that evening’s physics lecture on the National Programme - greeted him with a hearty: ‘Good evening, Lord Reith! What’s new in thermodynamics?’ This story is told to illustrate the somewhat ludicrous indigestibility of early BBC radio programming. But the alternative reading is that it was digested, with pleasure, by people whose curiosity and intelligence outstripped their formal education. From the very beginning, the BBC’s entertainment came with a crucial serving of wholesome information and education.

In the final episode of The Ascent of Man Bronowski argues that what matters most in human history – and in the human present – are those BBC values, information and education. His contention was that without them, ‘Western civilisation’ would decline, and the 21st century would be dominated by China and India. We can argue with this, but we can only do so because, in the intervening 50 years, we have been informed and educated, often by those who Bronowski informed and educated first.

For an entirely different form of BBC documentary, there’s always the obscure ‘90s series about people and their cars: ‘From A to B’

Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts, but the Boomers did more than perhaps any other to reinvent popular culture and explode the canon. So what did we, Generation X, make of the things they made us watch?

On Saturday 14th February 1900 a party of schoolgirls from Appleyard College picnicked at Hanging Rock near Mt. Macedon in the state of Victoria. During the afternoon several members of the party disappeared without a trace…

The title card to Picnic at Hanging Rock does an excellent job of setting up the premise of this most totemic mid-’70s piece of Australian New Wave cinema. Adapted from a late ‘60s novel, it was the second full-length film directed by Peter Weir, who went on to make Hollywood blockbusters Witness (1985), Dead Poets Society (1989) and The Truman Show (1998). It was a sensation in Australia on its release, a critical success everywhere, and exactly the sort of film we watched over our parents’ shoulders, baffled, throughout the early ‘80s.

The legend

The web is full of blog posts about Picnic at Hanging Rock, and most of them mention two things: the dreamy visuals and - notoriously - its ending. Or rather, the absence of an ending. Picnic, famously, is a film that refuses to resolve itself. One of the missing women returns from the rock without an explanation, and we never find out what happened to the three others. 

This infuriated some early, unaware viewers; Weir recounts a man at a screening who threw his coffee cup at the screen when the credits started rolling. But it also infuriates the characters. The women disappear, and then everyone gets more and more pissed off that the film they’re in is evidently not going to get an ending. The townspeople start barracking the local police; the main male character runs back to England; and the lone survivor is surrounded by furious classmates shouting: ‘You know what happened. Tell us!’

This elliptical noncommittal is a core part of the legend. It marks the film as being above such mundane pursuits as ‘plot’ and ‘entertainment’: it is Art, and as such is open to endless, delicious interpretation. Is it about young women, female sexuality, and agency in a class-bound patriarchal society? Is it about Empire? Is it about the doomed attempt to impose Home Counties etiquette on the wild Australian outback? (As Rachel Roberts’s sturdy headmistress puts it: ‘as the day is likely to be warm, you may remove your gloves once the drag has passed through Woodend.’) It is about the end of the ‘60s psychedelic adventure and the passing of the Flower Children? The film refuses to tell us how to read it. And so we can read it any way we like.

And then there are those visuals. Art should be aesthetically pleasing, or at least aesthetically interesting, and the film is both. Weir eschews modish editing and psychedelic effects for long, exquisitely composed frames that gradually build an intoxicating atmosphere, sedate and seductive. It is a collage of image, sound and impression; a decoupage, like the ones the girls make in their bedrooms. 

It is not for nothing that the camera lingers over a print of Frederic Leighton’s Flaming June in the headmistress’s office. The film conjures the limpid sensuousness and mysticism of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, beyond the rational bounds of Classicism. Other frames reminded us of Manet and Gauguin, but in fact Weir was referencing the Australian Impressionists, which sound (to Old Country ears, at least) like a Peter Cook joke but were in fact a real thing. 

The reality

Picnic At Hanging Rock inevitably feels very much of its time, but that’s not the same thing as saying it has aged badly. It is just indelibly timestamped, in part because it is so admirably committed to the bit. The British ‘60s cultural boom had a bright Australian substrain, full of intellectually fearless creators: Richard Neville (Oz magazine founder), Germaine Greer, Clive James, Robert Hughes. In Picnic, Australia - its creative citizens, and the geography itself - rises up and devours its colonisers.

In its atmosphere of folk horror and the reassertion of the implacable forces of nature, it is very mid-’70s indeed (see 1973’s The Wicker Man). The Rock is an active character in the film, personified in pareidolic crags and a deep bass rumble on the soundtrack. It becomes a threatening, alien presence, like the Venice of Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (also 1973). 

If you’re playing the interpretation game (and what else is there to do with Picnic at Hanging Rock?), another gambit is that it’s about the comedown from psychedelia and the awful realisation that the doors of perception open onto the inside of your own head. (As a meditation on the end - or lack of it - of the ‘60s, it also feels of a piece with another Roeg film, The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976).) The characters can be divided into those who are looking for transcendence - whether via poetry, philosophy, sex or wild nature - and those who have given up on it, or were never interested in the first place. All of the characters who become bewitched by the Rock are searching for answers beyond the mundane, including the maths teacher who was engrossed in her geometry textbook before heading up the Rock in her bloomers. It’s also shot through with glimmers of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (a key psychedelic text): see the flourishing of pocket watches and the disappearances of schoolgirls down holes. 

Is it OK?

One way in which Picnic feels extraordinarily contemporary is in the young women’s costumes and their blank, affectless acting. The girls are forever plaiting each others’ hair and stroking each others’ heads while talking tonelessly about love; the disappearances happen on February 14, after a high-pitched cabbalistic ceremony in honour of St Valentine. The young girls wear white; the older, sexually experienced women wear dark colours. The young girls have long hair with precise centre partings; they sport no-makeup-makeup, all perfect skin, clean eyes and moist neutral lips; they wear modest dresses, with tiers and high necks and yards and yards of broderie anglaise. All of these could come straight from a summer 2023 look-book or a Wet Leg promo image, and the consensus among fashion historians is that we owe all of it to Picnic at Hanging Rock. 

Its archetype of sly, inscrutable, youthful female sexuality, visually and emotionally balanced between innocence and self-consciousness, has been profound and astonishingly long-lived. And it plays into a nasty sweet spot: the requirement that attractive young women should be self-aware, but ego-free; virginal, but full of ancient wisdom; perceptive, but silent; mere days past pubescence, but down to fuck.

If we are to credit Weir with the pieces of genius in this film, we can’t entirely absolve him of this nastiness - although we should, in fairness, note that these themes were established in the original book, which was written by a woman. The only truly bum note in the film concerns the ‘fat’ girl, whose weight is explicitly tied to her dreary character and lack of adventurousness. The fat girl doesn’t want transcendence; she does not want to explore the rock cock, and the rock cock doesn’t want her galumphing about on it either. Given what happens to her more eager schoolmates, perhaps the whole film is a sly argument for celibacy and cream cakes. (If a director makes an art film without an ending and invites you to interpret it, what’s to stop you choosing pleasing interpretations, even if you know they’re wrong?)

It’s literally illegal to write a piece about Picnic at Hanging Rock without discussing its relationship to the films of Sofia Coppola. It is most obviously related to The Virgin Suicides (1999), Coppola’s film - again adapted from a novel - about a family of pubescent girls who are held a little too closely by their parents, and whose attempts to break free end in devastation. The sisters in Suicides share the calm, affectless style of the schoolgirls in Picnic; they also share their Brady Bunch hair and modest clothing, their penchant for mutual hair-touching, and an inscrutable sub-verbal communication that feels as though it is deliberately exclusive. It reminded us of a small bit in Wolf Hall, in which Cromwell’s young nieces are introduced to an even younger family member: 

His nieces, two good little girls, still clutch their rosary beads. Ignored, as the people talk over their heads, they lean against the wall, and flick their eyes at each other. Slowly, they slide down the wall, straight-backed, till they are the height of two-year-olds, and balancing on their heels. ‘Alice! Johane!’ someone snaps; slowly they rise, solemn-faced, to their proper heights. Grace approaches them; silently they trap her, take off her cap, shake out her blonde hair and begin to plait it. 

Note the repetition of ‘silent’ here: Mantel didn’t repeat words through carelessness. Society wants to look at girls, but it doesn’t want to hear from them. As with Picnic, you are never sure whether or not the sisters in The Virgin Suicides are mocking you, or whether they’re just ethereally unaware that they are driving you nuts. But Mantel, as ever, captured the nub of the problem. Young girls, en masse, don’t deliberately resist interpretation; it’s just that - sexuality aside - society is fundamentally uninterested in them, and does not want to understand what they’re feeling. 

In Picnic, the girls are a mystery to Weir - a mystery he chose to summon - and so to the viewer; in The Virgin Suicides, Coppola is inside the sisters’ magic circle, trying to show you what it’s like. The sisters are characters, not symbols. When Kirsten Dunst’s Lux loses her virginity to a dumb lunk on a football field and is left to walk home alone, Coppola conveys every aspect of her experience, from excitement to disappointment to sadness. Despite her moist, youthful fruitiness, Lux is not a cipher; she is a person. 

It’s important, here, to record the legend that Weir cast several of his young women actors for their looks alone; their voices had to be dubbed by more skilled actors in post-production. (Some of the performances in Picnic - and not only those of the young women - are epically dreadful.) Coppola absolutely casts young women actors for their looks; she has worked repeatedly with Dunst, Scarlett Johansson and Elle Fanning, among others. But you’d better believe her young women actors are bloody good at acting too. Weir is not remotely interested in his young women’s characters; Coppola is more interested in them than she is in anything else. 

But still: the art of it. Just as the characters try to escape from convention, so does Picnic at Hanging Rock. In not having a conventional ending, in exceeding its ending and never resolving it, it opens a space for our own engagement and involvement. It is stylish and provoking, and still intriguing.

Also, you will stare for a while at the face of the actor playing the maths teacher (Vivean Gray) and grope distractedly in your memory before you shout at the screen: it’s Mrs Mangel! Out of Neighbours! You’ve had the experience of watching Mike-from-Neighbours (Guy Pearce) develop into a serious movie actor; in Picnic you get to see the same process happening in reverse. Which is all very satisfying, when you’re discussing Australian cultural behemoths that refuse to have endings.

Speaking of Sofia Coppola, we’re still trying to make ‘Macaron timeclash’ happen:

Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts, but the Boomers did more than perhaps any other to reinvent popular culture and explode the canon. So what did we, Generation X, make of the things they made us watch?

The Legend

The fundamental premise of the BBC’s entirely mad long-running Radio 4 comedy is right there in the scripted intro to the show, read by the continuity announcer and unchanged for decades: it’s ‘the antidote to panel games’. In 1973, the team behind the radio comedy show I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again were looking for a project that required a little less writing to a weekly deadline. Preferably no writing, in fact. Which is how they hit on the idea of a parody panel game.

Radio 4 panel games were then, and still are, a byword for high-concept, middle-brow, low-effort entertainment. Timeworn formats like Just A Minute have been endlessly repeated - with little deviation and no hesitation - for decades, peopled by interchangeable non-specific celebrities. They are cosy, unthreatening and very much in the business of taking a wry, sideways look at the prospect of being funny.

So: a panel game that wasn’t a panel game. A panel game that revelled in not being a panel game, that sent up and subverted the whole idea. A show that made the games themselves ludicrous. They took, for example, the central idea of Just a Minute - in which contestants must talk about a subject without repeating any words - and applied it to inevitably repetitive pop songs  lyrics in ‘Just a Minim’.

Early shows often started with a game called ‘What’s Your Name?’ in which contestants had to say their own name, for points, or a version of ‘Guess Who’ in which the panellists would ask each other questions such as ‘Do you kill people for money?’ and ‘Is that your own hair?’ It went on to include games that have crossed over into British cultural lore: ‘Swanee Kazoo’, in which panellists play instrumental versions of deeply serious songs such as ‘Chanson D’Amour’  on the swanee whistle and the kazoo or the national pastime of making the late, lamented, tuneless Jeremy Hardy sing.

The show featured comedians so good they had actually killed people; one viewer of The Goodies (BBC, 1970-82) - created by panel members Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie - had laughed so hard that he died of a heart attack. In I’m Sorry, their aim was to make a panel game that had a similar, if non-lethal, effect. By 1974 the format had gathered the core personnel it would retain for the next few decades: Oddie left, Willie Rushton and Barry Cryer joined, and in the chair there was Humph.

When Second Lieutenant Humphrey Lyttelton came ashore outside Salerno as part of Operation Avalanche in 1943, he carried his pistol in one hand and, in the other, his trumpet. His very first, inadvertent performance on the BBC was during the VE Day (‘victory in Europe’, May 1945) celebrations, when the microphones captured him tootling away while sitting in a wheelbarrow.

Gen X grew up with grandparents who had lived through, if not actively served, in the Second World War. This was a generation who had taken part in a global struggle for the future of civilisation, who had survived bombing, campaigning and terror. And yet all the popular culture they handed down to their grandchildren was deeply silly, full of weird noises, daft songs and clowning: The Goons, Flanders and Swann, Norman Wisdom.

It was as if, having been sent around the world to take part in events of existential gravity, they just wanted to go home and be ridiculous for a bit. The Goons? They were in the Royal Artillery and the RAF. Michael Flanders served in the Royal Navy and Donald Swann drove ambulances as a conscientious objector. Norman Wisdom was an Army boxing champion, of all things. It seemed that a whole generation had realised quite how serious it was, to be alive and enjoying yourself. Humph had been to school at Eton and then joined the Guards; he was the epitome of the English establishment. But he was also a cartoonist and a leading light of the trad jazz revival of the ‘50s (Louis Armstrong himself said that Humph ‘swings his ass off’). 

Boomer comedians grew up steeped in the silliness of their parents’ entertainers, and perceived in it the possibilities for the anti-establishment satire that you find in Beyond the Fringe and Monty Python, or the Zen Buddhist koan-like reality-hijacking of John Lennon and Oz magazine. With this absurdism they could subvert and outmanoeuvre the powers that be, who wouldn’t even recognise what was happening.

But their silliness needed the stuffy setting, the dumb shackles against which they strained. One running joke in I’m Sorry concerns the show’s ‘scorer’, an entirely fictional young woman called Samantha. TV game shows of the ‘70s and ‘80s almost always featured glamorous young women as ‘scorers’; like those women in bikinis at boxing matches they were there purely there as mute eye candy. I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue’s treatment had at least four levels: the meta joke of having a glamorous (imaginary) scorer on the radio; the poking of fun at  ludicrous entertainment conventions; wince-inducing double entendres; and the sheer fun of making Humph, this apparently refined old man, say the most awful things.

Samantha tells me she has to nip off now as her trusted aged gardener is coming round to identify the mysterious trailing plant that's growing in her privet. Obviously she's keen not to miss him if there's a chance she may have an Old Man's Beard in her bush.

Ancient rules of ‘decency’ imposed by the BBC had required postwar radio comedies such as Round the Horne to delve deep into innuendo. In I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue the use of innuendo - which was, by this stage, feeling less revolutionary and more tired - becomes part of the joke’s texture. But the editorial restraints, which still pertained in the 1970s, were crucial; without any censorship at all you get Derek and Clive, which is at its funniest when you are fifteen and think that saying rude words is just intrinsically amusing. 

The Reality

‘It’s now time to play the game called Mornington Crescent.’

‘Mornington Crescent’ is perhaps the most iconic of the I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue games. It appears to be a game in which contestants have to navigate routes around London using Tube stations, the winner being the first to arrive at Mornington Crescent. It appears to have fiendish rules, with multiple complications requiring ingenious and experienced play. None of this is true. Contestants simply name places around London until someone decides the game is over and announces ‘Mornington Crescent’. The playing is in the pretending, pretending there are rules, pretending there is strategy, pretending there is a game at all.

I have a distinct memory of playing the Mornington Crescent at university with friend of The Metropolitan Jonathan Stroud, much to the befuddlement and irritation of further friend of The Metropolitan Simon Stephens, who had no idea what we were doing and found it extremely annoying. Which is to say: I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue can be just as cosy and cliquish as any other long running show.

Radio 4 is speech radio, and as befits ‘Auntie’ - as the BBC is sometimes known - it is a very middle-class, middle-England kind of speech. Even among the vanishingly small handful of speech radio stations, to be on Radio 4 is to be among a rare and exotic elite. The station is as much a habit as a listening choice, a set of familiar voices and tropes that becomes a set of beliefs, and a byword for a certain kind of listener. I grew up in a house where BBC Radio 4 was switched on before breakfast for Farming Today and wasn’t switched off until after midnight, when the supremely sedate mid-century strings of Sailing By serenaded us to bed. 

I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue is emblematic of this elitism and in-group comfort. As is probably inevitable for any long running show, it has collected its own mythology, which is relished by its fans and incomprehensible to everyone else. Any mention of Barry Cryer’s drinking or Jeremy Hardy’s singing would be greeted with a warm chuckle; mentions of entirely imaginary figures - the ‘scorers’ Samantha and Sven, random interlopers Hamish and Dougal, keen letter-writer Mrs Trellis of North Wales - would be instantly applauded. Its catchphrases were legion: ‘the laser display board’, ‘bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia’ and - of course - ‘Mornington Crescent!’

This stuff is inevitably cliquish; it is only funny because you already know it is funny. If you don’t already know that there are no rules to Mornington Crescent, you won’t find it in the least amusing that there are no rules. You will spend your time trying to work them out and getting increasingly infuriated at all the smug, bourgeois giggling going on around you.

Is it OK, Boomer?

But once you do know there are no rules to Mornington Crescent, ah, what a wonderful game it becomes.

Here is a round from 2006 plucked at random from YouTube

It begins with some liturgical call-and-response with the congregation, then there is mention of Mrs Trellis and some folderol about the putative rules of the game. And then the game starts, with the players taking turns to call out London (mostly) Tube stations (mostly).

There are three different kinds of joke in that first exchange, piling on top of each other. The first is the joke of the show itself, the feigned knowledge of and adherence to ‘rules’ in a show where the dedicated audience knows there aren’t any. The second is that asking Barry’s Cryer’s opinion cannot amount to anything as useful as ‘conferring’, something that only a regular listener would understand. Lastly, there is the whole business with Graeme Garden’s visible ‘point’, an example of what yet another friend of The Metropolitan Lucy Thomas refers to as ‘a Radio 4 joke’: a double entendre that is clearly just instinctively ad-libbed. It is simply a reflex on Garden’s part, the kind of joke that has been hardwired into his brain by a lifetime of writing and appearing on Radio 4 comedy shows.

Together these three modes form the general shape of I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. They rely on the familiarity of the audience; they are symptomatic of its cliquey-ness. But they also explain why the show is such a gem. To listen to I’m Sorry, I Haven’t A Clue is to indulge in an act of mass improvisation. Mornington Crescent is willed into being by the audience’s active participation; it becomes real only through that pretending, through the common understanding that it is not and has never been a real game. This convivial, collective, creative silliness creates intense, joyful mutual entertainment that is found in few other places. Sporting events, perhaps; religious worship; crowd singing. It is a club, but it costs nothing to join, and once you’re in, you receive all the benefits, and contribute to them too. A cooperative of larkiness, a democratic socialism of silliness.

It’s also, of course, gloriously funny.

For more Boomer absurdism, there’s always fellow I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again cast member John Cleese’s side project: Monty Python.

Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts, but the Boomers did more than perhaps any other to reinvent popular culture and explode the canon. So what did we, Generation X, make of the things they made us watch?

The Legend

Dark Side of the Moon is the classic rock long-player: the record that launched a thousand stoned conspiracy theories about The Wizard of Oz, brought prog rock into the mainstream, and made Pink Floyd millionnaires. The holotype of the album, it is more than a collection of songs; it is an experience. A complete and indivisible work of art. It built on the psychedelic multi-track studio wizardry of The Beatles to create an immersive soundscape of voices, wordless soaring melodies, strident rock hectoring and swirling philosophical musings. A whole world etched into 12 inches of vinyl.

And then, about a decade later, into plastic.

Introduced in the early ‘80s, CDs represented a whole new gold rush for the record industry. Not only could they re-release the great classics in a new format, they could sell them all over again to people who already owned the vinyl (and probably the cassette, too). At the same time a whole new generation of music fans were growing up. Smash Hits readers, weaned on the great early ‘80s British explosion of pop brilliance, were starting to expand both their horizons and their earning potential.

In 1986, David Hepworth and Mark Ellen, erstwhile editors of Smash Hits, came together to launch a new music magazine: Q. Q was a glossier, weightier product, aimed at an older readership than Smash Hits, thick with not just reviews of singles and albums (and film, and TV, and radio) but features and interviews. I bought it from issue one and right on through the late ‘80s. I’m sorry to say that that collection is long gone now.

This conjunction - CD reissues of classics, and an audience who didn’t yet know that these were classics - made records like Dark Side of the Moon quintessential Q magazine fodder, exactly the sort of Boomer canon that Generation X was being persuaded was important: like Exile on Main Street and The White Album, you had to know, understand and adore it.

The reality

Listening to Dark Side of the Moon now is like watching an Adam Curtis documentary. A wash of doomy, tuneful music, a kaleidoscopic montage of odd, captivating images, and a clever-clogs conspiratorial voice in your ear insisting on your own stupidity and lack of agency. It has the hectoring quality of the auto-didact 21 year old, the young man who has seen through all of society’s facades and realised something no one has ever realised before, and insists on their voice being heard, their opinion being shared.

Autodidacticism is, of course, an excellent and noble thing, and I am being an intellectual snob. But having discovered how much has been kept from you, how much there is to discover, there is a tendency towards paranoia, towards conspiracy theory. All those intellectual snobs, after all, genuinely are sneering and excluding you from conversations and cultural in-jokes. A degree of suspicion is justified.

I grew up on the insistent first-person of punk and New Wave: ‘I am an anarchist’, ‘I am lost in the supermarket’, ‘I wanna hold her, hold her tight, get teenage kicks all through the night’. So it’s striking how often Dark Side of the Moon talks about ‘you’: ‘You run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking’, ‘You get a good job with more pay and you're okay’, ‘And all you touch and all you see/Is all your life will ever be’. It’s like being cornered at a party by someone intent on listing every one of your failings.

This is the worldly wise voice of the older brother who’s clever and mature enough to like prog rock: it is educational and condescending, intimate and irritating, interesting and tedious, as only a family member can be.

The Dark Side of the Moon is the audio equivalent of a Christopher Nolan film: somewhat reactionary, not nearly as clever as it thinks it is, but so well made it’s hard to resist.

Is it OK?

And that’s the thing, isn’t it? Because there are some absolutely banging tunes on The Dark Side of the Moon; the singles, the music used in adverts and soundtracks: ‘Money’, ‘Time’, ‘Great Gig in the Sky’ - are all pretty good songs.

And yet, and yet. I listened to this record a lot as a teenager, as instructed by Q magazine. I really tried to get into it, and I never did. And relistening to it for this piece, I didn’t all over again. In fact, I had to re-listen to it over and over again because my concentration kept wandering. Those pretty good songs get derailed into pretty tedious guitar solos and pretty self-indulgent production. It’s a luxury saloon of a record, perfectly made instruments let into a seamless walnut dash. It is beautifully crafted and just a little bit staid and boring.

What I kept hearing was the contemporaneous records that I have discovered since. ‘On The Run’ sounds like a motorik offcut from some ‘70s Krautrock outfit like Can or Neu! ‘Money’ could quite easily be a minor track (like ‘Graham Greene’) on John Cale’s 1973 masterpiece Paris 1919. I hear traces of Nick Drake, and Captain Beefheart’s weirdly mainstream Bluejeans and Moonbeams (1974).

Because The Dark Side of the Moon is a gateway drug. Not only did it take Pink Floyd mainstream, it took underground music mainstream too. It acted as the curator, pointing out all these new and interesting sounds and ideas to us. It was the big brother who was helpfully opening the doors of perception for the rest of us to wander through. This means, of course, that it has had a lasting influence, and not just on music: when Douglas Adams said he wanted his radio comedy show Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978) to sound like a rock album, he was undoubtedly thinking of Dark Side of the Moon. The trouble is, it no longer stands out like it did before it changed the world. As Dave Gilmour himself pointed to out (to Q magazine, of course):

‘I thought it was a very complicated album when we first made it, but when you listen to it now it's really very simple.’

It is a mainstream record that contained homoeopathic amounts of the underground, and therefore acted as a slip road, a junction in rock music. A glimpse of bright yellow ragwort, of butterfly flickering buddleia and a fox asleep in a discarded tyre, and then it’s past and gone, and you’re on with your journey, off to the next adventure.

Still, the cover’s really good.

Of course, compared to pop music of the mid-’70s, Pink Floyd were a rare treat:

Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts, but the Boomers did more than perhaps any other to reinvent popular culture and explode the canon. So what did we, Generation X, make of the things they made us watch?

Recorded in early 1959 at Harvard, An Evening (Wasted) is a collection of comic songs by mathematician-pianist Tom Lehrer. It was his second album; he recorded his first, Songs by Tom Lehrer, in 1953 and flogged it around the Harvard campus for cash while his reputation built - as he said - ‘slowly, like herpes rather than Ebola’.  

The legend

Lehrer - who was born in 1928 and is still alive today, although I don’t mean that as regretfully as it sounds - has the kind of biography that makes you want to give up. A maths prodigy who enrolled at Harvard at the age of 15, he was also a talented pianist and began writing and performing comic songs while he was an undergraduate. His musical career took him from student revues to the US version of That Was The Week That Was and the BBC’s Frost Report, while his simultaneous mathmo career took him from teaching posts at Harvard and MIT to the atomic research facility at Los Alamos and the National Security Agency (where he claims to have invented the Jello shot). He ‘retired’ from music in the early 1970s, leaving a remarkably compact body of work: 20 years, 37 songs, 109 live shows. His final public performance was at a rally for the doomed Democrat presidential candidate George McGovern, who was pulverised by Nixon in the 1972 election.

When I was a student in the early 1990s, finding out whether someone knew or didn’t know about Tom Lehrer was one way to appraise your new-found friends, like knowing or not knowing about Gallon Drunk (I didn’t) or Withnail & I (I did). I made at least one instant friend by singing ‘The Vatican Rag’ on my way out of a seminar about the Reformation:

Two, four, six, eight
Time to transubstantiate!

In Lehrer’s case what we were really finding out was what kinds of parents each of us had. If your parents had been sophisticated young graduates in their time; if they were broadly left-leaning; if they spent their twenties nursing a cigarette and a black coffee in a damp bedsit while watching TW3; if they followed American politics and knew who Wernher von Braun was, well, the chances were they had introduced you to Tom Lehrer at some point. And I know this makes him sound ghastly, a smug class signifier like having a Habitat chicken brick and not watching ITV, but that it’s not Lehrer’s fault. Anyway, teenagers have to have heuristics for finding like-minded souls, and Lehrer had more conversational potential than asking whether someone’s mum read The Guardian.

Watching my parents piss themselves laughing at Lehrer is one of the standout memories of my childhood. His songs are all the good things: genuinely funny, grown-up and intensely catchy (‘a tune… that people can hummmmm’, as Lehrer says in one of the spoken-word passages on An Evening Wasted that will be imprinted on my brain until I die). He was also very educational, if your parents could stop laughing long enough to explain the joke. I honestly know the story of Oedipus because of this album.

From the Bible to the popular song
There's one theme that we find right along
Of all ideals they hail as good
The most sublime is motherhood
There was a man though, who it seems
Once carried this ideal to extremes…
Yes, he loved his mother like no other
His daughter was his sister and his son was his brother
One thing on which you can depend is
He sure knew who a boy's best friend is

About ten years ago I realised my dad was doing it all over again. He took my sons on holiday to Wales for a week and when they came back my kids knew all the words to ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park’. It turned out that my dad kept a tape of An Evening Wasted in the car, and it was the only form of entertainment that brought equal pleasure to all three of them: a 70 year old, a 10 year old and an 8 year old. I like to think that some time in the 2070s a pint-sized descendant of mine will ask ‘Bampy, what’s the Audobon Society?’ from the back seat of a flying car.

The reality

The science fiction writer Isaac Asimov was a fan of Lehrer’s before it was cool. He happened across Lehrer singing ‘I Got It from Agnes’ - a jaunty song about venereal disease - in a Boston nightclub in the early 1950s, and was delighted by two realisations: firstly that ‘it’ was an STI - it’s never spelled out in the song - and secondly that Lehrer was describing a mindblowing variety of (then) largely illegal sexual combinations:

Pierre gave it to Sheila
Who must have brought it there
He got it from Francois and Jacques
A-ha!
Lucky Pierre!

One thing you could say about Lehrer - there are hundreds of things you could say about Lehrer but these pieces are short, so I have to make some choices - is that he’s an example of a particular tradition in American songwriting: erudite, witty, delighted by words, and with a comfortable appreciation of the comic potential inherent in sex. (This kind of worldliness was in extremely short supply in the UK in the 1980s.)  In other words he belongs in the tradition of Cole Porter, another songwriter tickled by the possibilities of ‘it’:

Birds do it
Bees do it
Even educated fleas do it
Let’s do it
Let’s… fall in love

Comic songs can, most of the time, be pretty exhausting. Few jokes are good enough to withstand the kind of repetition that comes with singalong, and few comics are fluent enough to make a joke ring true while also hitting a rhythm and a metre. And then you have the problem of the actual music. The UK in the ‘80s was awash with ‘comic’ songs that nobody ever, ever wants to hear again: Cliff Richard and the Young Ones singing ‘Living Doll’, Black Lace with ‘Agadoo’, Not the Nine O’Clock News with ‘Nice Video, Shame About the Song’ and the everliving shitehouse of ‘The Chicken Song’ by Spitting Image. (I have a feeling it was my brother’s insistence on playing the last of these that sent my parents screaming to their record collection in search of Lehrer.)

There is, in short, something of the April Fool about most comic songs: it’s comedy for children and for people who know, in theory, that humour is a thing, but don’t have the faintest idea how laughter actually works. But every now and then you get someone who has both the comic and the musical chops to truly pull it off. Victoria Wood’s ‘The Ballad of Barry and Freda’ is a standout example (another song about ‘it’), as are Monty Python’s ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’, ‘Springtime for Hitler’ from The Producers and ‘Turn It Off’ from The Book of Mormon. (I’m sure you’ll have your own selection.)

Even in this company, Lehrer was unusual in at least two ways: that he wrote so many songs that have held up so well (this piece hasn’t even touched on ‘National Brotherhood Week’, for example) and that they are still funny despite being so specific to the politics and culture of young, lefty adults in 1960s America. Perhaps that is a part of their appeal: 1960s America was, to put it mildly, a fairly important political and cultural context, and Lehrer’s pinpoint sarcasm still bites decades later. 

Bullshit or brilliant?

I mean, come on.

It’s tempting, in any piece about Lehrer, to simply fill it with his lyrics. (Reproducing lyrics usually attracts swingeing copyright fees, but at the end of 2022 Lehrer renounced all copyright on his songs.) Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and in Lehrer’s case nothing I write could come close anyway.  So perhaps it’s best to end this piece with the words of another proper writer. Reflecting on the night he stumbled across Lehrer performing in Boston, Asimov said: ‘I haven't gone to nightclubs often, but of all the times I have gone, it was on this occasion that I had by far the best time’. Whether it’s a long-lost ‘60s student hangout, your parents’ living room, your granddad’s car or your undergraduate hovel, listening to Lehrer and having by far the best time just seem to go hand in hand.

For some of those more witless comedy songs:

Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts, but the Boomers did more than perhaps any other to reinvent popular culture and explode the canon. So what did we, Generation X, make of the things they made us watch?

Everyone knows the Life of Brian bit of the title, but there’s also the Monty Python bit that comes before it: ten years before it, in fact. ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ was first broadcast on the BBC in 1969 and was an integral yet mysterious part of Gen X’s childhood, omnipresent but out of reach. It was constantly implied that their comedy blew your mind and changed your world - that the title of their ‘Funniest joke in the world’ sketch was a literal description - but we were too young to watch any of it even if the BBC deigned to repeat it. We just had to sit there and be told repeatedly how good it was while we waited to become teenagers and for someone to invent VCRs.

The legend

The Life of Brian legend is foundational for British Boomers. It tells of a group of sophisticated, brilliantly educated, mould-breaking young Boomer comedians who made a film so clever, so scathing and so funny that it nearly dismantled the established church; like the Reformation, but funnier, and more effective.

This account was hugely bolstered by the strenuous efforts that were made to suppress it. It was very nearly strangled at birth when the original producers pulled out, before being saved by the intervention of George Harrison and his Handmade Films company. And then, once it had been released, the bannings began: in county councils across the UK, in the whole of Ireland and (weirdly) in Norway, it was banned for being blasphemous. At the peak of the controversy, Michael Palin and John Cleese took part in an extended edition of BBC2’s ‘Friday Night, Saturday Morning’ to debate the matter with the Bishop of Southwark and Malcolm Muggeridge. Which is a sentence you would never be called on to write today, for a variety of reasons but principally because this film would not seem remotely controversial if it were released today; indeed, if anything, it would not seem controversial enough.

The reality

To state the bleeding obvious, Terry Jones is right: this isn’t blasphemy. As in this scene featuring the Beatitudes, the Gospels are treated respectfully throughout Brian, with actual Biblical happenings taking place just at the edge of a shot. The film could not be more explicit that a) Jesus was a historical figure and b) Brian is not Jesus (as when the Wise Men realise they are in the wrong stable).

At some point between 1969 and the present day the UK stopped being an actively, professedly Christian country. It is still - as celebrated Spider-Man actor Tom Holland argues - a largely Christian culture, but these last few decades will be remembered, among other things, for the precipitous decline of active Christian observance. In 1969 daily acts of Christian worship were compulsory in schools, shops were closed on Sundays by law, and everyone - of whatever faith, or lack of faith - knew the words to the Lord’s Prayer. These things, to put it mildly, no longer hold true.

One of the things that strikes you most forcibly now about Life of Brian is its admirable religious literacy and - in its respect for the Gospels and careful treatment of incidents from Christ’s life - its revealed Christianity, a faith so deeply ingrained that it was all but invisible at the time. In 2023 only truly specialist nerds know enough to make jokes about the Roman occupation of Judea or first-century eschatological cults (‘There shall, in that time, be rumours of things going astray’). But almost everyone matriculating at Oxford or Cambridge in the ‘50s and ‘60s, as most of the Pythons did, had a decent working knowledge of classical history and Christian theology. Like 1066 And All That, and indeed like some parts of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the jokes are so good because the writers had such a deep understanding of their subject.

One suspects that this evident theological erudition was one of the film’s more infuriating aspects for religious conservatives; they were, clearly, not dealing with idiots. Terry Jones, for instance, gleefully inflamed the situation when he pointed out that while Brian isn’t blasphemous (in the sense of mistreating the sacred), it is heretical (contrary to Christian orthodoxy). 

Like the good Protestants they are, the Pythons were going for the Church, and for the lore, special pleading and paraphernalia placed between the believer and the man who was nailed to a tree for suggesting that people be nice to each other (to paraphrase occasional Python collaborator Douglas Adams). The emotion and outrage they provoked - the militant, spluttering insistence that people must not poke any sort of fun, even of the most intelligent and well-versed kind - revealed a great deal about the Church’s perception of its own authority. To Python’s generational contemporaries, revelling in the contrast between the blustering old bastards and their clever, light-stepping target, it merely revealed the Church to be utterly ludicrous.

This, after all, is a film that opens with a Shirley Bassey sound-a-like performing something called ‘Brian Song’ with the assistance of a tremendous horn section. In the very act of opposing Life of Brian religious conservatives went a long way towards ensuring that they would never be taken seriously in Britain again, just as their brethren in the USA were gearing up for a multi-decade culture war.

Bullshit or brilliant?

It’s brilliant, obviously. If the Monty Python team were The Beatles of comedy, then Brian is their Sgt. Pepper. Like Sgt. Pepper, you can see their influences; like Sgt. Pepper, it contains some crowd-pleasing bangers that have been hollowed out by repetition (‘He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy’; ‘You’re all individuals’; ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’). And like Sgt. Pepper, it is so extraordinary that it has become a monument.

It is also incredibly well made. The decision to assign Terry Gilliam to production design and Terry Jones to direction was inspired: Gilliam may have an brilliant eye for visuals (the depiction of first century Judea is extraordinary) but Jones - crucially - knows how to film a comedy routine.

We do, though, have to talk about Gilliam’s ‘bit’, a part-animated alien abduction skit that bears no relation to anything else and goes on far too long (much like the rest of his career). The Editors of The Metropolitan conducted an inadvertent litmus test of this over Christmas, when - needing a film that could be enjoyed by people whose ages ranged from 17 to 83 - we put on Life of Brian. It held everybody entranced apart from the bit with the aliens, when everyone wandered off to the loo or started looking at their phones. 

But apart from that bit, it held all of them entranced. This is a testament (pun intended) to how consistently good the jokes are, and that is why (and this is blasphemous) Life of Brian stands out in the Monty Python canon. 

Because the terrible truth is that much of the Pythons’ output was a dreadful disappointment when you were finally old enough to actually watch it. This is partly because many of the shouty Cleese/Chapman sketches hadn’t been that funny to begin with, but principally it’s because we came to know the sketches, word-for-word, through their ceaseless recitation by bores. (Fittingly, these absolute Colin Hunts echoed the tedious twerps and swivel-eyed obsessives who populate Python’s sketches.) Richard Curtis’s Not the Nine O’Clock News sketch, in which a Bishop furiously denies that the Gospels are a tasteless parody of Life of Brian before leading the panel in a solemn recitation of the Parrot Sketch, is somewhere between a joke and a documentary. 

Python was a phenomenon, a bona fide, mould-breaking international British success story, and people would not stop going on about it.  Among Python’s works Life of Brian is rare in being strong enough to withstand this crippling hagiography. Even now, when you can recite the entire script backwards, it remains a genuinely enjoyable, intelligent, funny film.

According to Co-op Funeralcare, the third most popular song at funerals in the UK - just after ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ and ‘My Way’ - is ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’. This is how people want to leave the world now: shepherded not by prayer and religious service, but by Monty Python whistling into the fade. It turns out Life of Brian did destroy organised religion after all. 

For more stern reappraisals of Boomer favourites, check out our rewatch of The Godfather:

The Metropolitan

The Godfather

Boomers: the generation that did it all. From Joy Division to Def Jam, from Spike Lee to The Young Ones, from Prince to Hilary Mantel, they blew it up and smashed the pieces back into different places. They also compiled the reigning cultural canon - some of it their own, much of it older - in which Generation X has been marinating for decades. It’s tim…

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3 years ago · 7 likes · 5 comments · The Editors

Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts, but the Boomers did more than perhaps any other to reinvent popular culture and explode the canon. So what did we, Generation X, make of the things they made us watch?

Some disaggregation is necessary. There is The Godfather, the 1969 novel by Mario Puzo, which started the whole thing off; there is the Francis Ford Coppola film The Godfather, released in 1972; and there is The Godfather Part II, another Coppola film, released in 1974 and widely regarded as one of the best films ever made. (Coppola also made The Godfather Part III, released in 1990 and widely regarded as not very good.)

We like to think there are some weirdos among our readership, so for the benefit of the glorious shut-ins and refuseniks among you: The Godfather is the story of a New York Italian Mafia family, and in particular its ageing, outgoing boss Vito Corleone (played by Marlon Brando) and its young, incoming boss Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino). Robert De Niro plays the young Vito in scenes set in early twentieth-century New York and Sicily.

Puzo’s novel was a sensation on release, selling a bazillion copies. A few years previously the world had been gripped by the Valachi hearings in the US Senate, in which a renegade Mafioso broke the code of omerta for the first time and revealed the nature and extent of Mafia influence in US society. 

The legend

What were we told about The Godfather? It began with snatches of dialogue everywhere, from Morecambe and Wise to conversations in your local corner shop: I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse, he’s sleeping with the fishes, I thought I’d wake up with a horse’s head in my bed. ‘Well OK then’ you’d think as you paid for your Toffos and wandered out; just another case of adults saying weird shit. (For a long time we thought putting horses’ heads in beds was a standard gangster thing, rather than a one-off occurrence.) Then there were the Marlon Brando impersonations, Mike Yarwood stuffing his cheeks with those little cotton wool padding rolls you get at the dentist. Brando: every adult you knew just wet themselves every time he was mentioned. 

At some stage you put all of these things together, perhaps when an older male relative (they were always men) bought the films on video and told you solemnly ‘Part I is good but Part II is the best film ever made’. And then suddenly there were nipples and garrottes everywhere and your mum made you go to bed.

When we were old enough to watch it for ourselves, the cultural cringe remained firmly in place: yes it is the best film ever made; no, The Princess Bride is not as good, shut up. Yes that is good acting, it’s not just mumbling. Yes OK these women are made of cardboard and people keep punching them in the face but they do get their breasts out and that means it’s a serious film for serious people. Yes we know they’re bad men and they do bad things but it’s interesting isn’t it? Isn’t it? You do sort of empathise with them don’t you? DON’T YOU?

The reality I: the book

Puzo’s novel is easily dealt with: it is bad. The writing is very similar to Ken Follett, all tiny sentences and prickly pomposity. It’s also an outstanding example of the misogynist seepage that uniquely dates and degrades Boomer Bullshit. 

It’s a real problem, this, with so much of the mid-century canon: a whole generation of male creatives luxuriated in the ‘60s sexual revolution without recognising or dealing with their own misogyny. It took them about five minutes to convince themselves that everything that had previously been done to women, everything that had been thought about women, was fine. The only mistake, which they were now intent on remedying, had been a lack of sexual explicitness. As a result, a yellowing glaze of frenzied pornographic contempt disfigures many otherwise-OK artefacts. And indeed, as with Puzo’s novel, artefacts that are otherwise extremely bad.

In one of the weirdest and creepiest passages in modern literature, an entire series of chapters is given over to a woman’s slack fanny, which - Puzo fondly imagines - is ruining her life. Her fiance knows a frightening amount about vaginal tightening surgery (an outstanding example of an author shoe-horning his nutty research into a novel) so he tracks down a surgeon to perform the procedure on her and scrubs in himself so that he can stick his fingers up her vagina while she’s unconscious and tell the surgeon how tight he wants her. And he is - get this - written as a good guy; the couple go on to marry, God help her, and are presented as having the only well-functioning marriage in the book. 

Anyway, on very much a secondary note - because, yes, women are more important and profound than the Mafia - the novel was most notable for revealing Mafia vocabulary to the general public: capo, omerta, consigliere, all that jazz. Every single article about the novel’s influence also points out that it was the first time the structural hierarchy of the Mob had been explained - capo di tutti capi, under-regime, soldiers - which just goes to show that some people are really into organograms.

So it is with some relief that we move on to the films. They are by no means a festival of feminism  - Coppola and Puzo worked on various scripts for almost a year and in all that time didn’t give any of the female actors a line anyone could say out loud with conviction - but they do at least have the good sense to dispense with vagina nutcase guy. 

The reality II: the films

As Meg Ryan says in Nora Ephron’s romcom You’ve Got Mail: ‘What is it with men and The Godfather?’ 

The films of the New Hollywood movement are mostly the product of modern men worrying about how to be a modern man. The films of Martin Scorsese are about how to be a Catholic man in the modern world; the films of Brian De Palma are about how to be a modern man in a Hitchcock film; and the films of Woody Allen are about how to be Woody Allen in a Woody Allen film. The Godfather, in one sense, is about how to be a modern film-making man in the hidebound, hierarchical world of Old Hollywood. 

Like Michael Corleone, Francis Ford Coppola wanted out. He and his pal George Lucas moved to San Francisco to get away from LA, and to establish their own kind of film-making. And like Michael they got pulled back in; or rather, they pulled themselves back in. They took their non-Hollywood ways of film-making and applied them to the films they had watched as kids, and became Hollywood gods in the process. Lucas took Flash Gordon serials and invented the modern special effects industry to create Star Wars; Coppola took gangster movies and applied a whole new visual approach to create The Godfather.

Technically and atmospherically, they are extraordinary films. Coppola deliberately eschewed the conventional fast editing and modish tricks one expects from a gangster action movie. He opted instead for wide, static, tableau shots, creating scenes and ensembles in which actors moved together, building a world.

It is full of beautiful framings, such as a car isolated against a wall of reeds in the “take the gun, leave the cannoli” assassination. It has brilliant sound design by editor Walter Murch, using the rattling roar of a passing train to dramatise Michael’s turmoil as he gathers the nerve to kill Sollozzo. It has inspired casting: John Cazale is heartbreaking as the family fuck-up Fredo, and consigliere Tom Hagen might be the best thing Robert Duvall has ever done. And the low, often natural lighting - exceptionally difficult to pull off in film-making - is extraordinary, like an endless sequence of sinister Vermeers, as in the conversation between Michael and Fredo against the cold winter window in Godfather II.

Although they have much more dialogue than the female characters, the male characters are given as little to say as possible. Just as Michael Corleone is obsessed with making the family ‘legitimate’, The Godfather (and similar New Hollywood films like Scorsese’s Mean Streets) make the gangsters themselves legitimate, dressing violence and cruelty in a nice sharp suit of agonising soul searching and questions of honour. This is a film about male stoicism and repressed emotion; who needs words when Al Pacino can look soulfully agonised for five minutes in close up? That it makes art out of male emotional inarticulacy is part of its legacy.

Bullshit or brilliant?

The Godfather Parts I and II aren’t bullshit; the problem is that they are too good for their source material. Coppola hated the book but saw an opportunity to deepen it into a story about American culture and capitalism. Fifty years later it’s apparent that while he gave us a compelling and immersive account of a particular phenomenon, he didn’t quite pull off a story for the ages. The book’s fundamental lack of interest in any humans who aren’t committed gangsters means that Vito and Michael Corleone don’t have much to say to us now, and the films become less palatable with each passing year. 

Their impact on popular culture has been deeply mixed. On the one hand they have helped bring us later, more thoughtful gangster movies, including GoodFellas and Takeshi Kitano’s Sonatine; on the other hand they are endlessly referenced, fawned over and used in PowerPoint presentations by twerps, and have inspired and legitimised an awful lot of macho nonsense.

Increasingly, these are films for enthusiasts and students; films that will remain on the BFI and AFI top 100 lists, but gradually fade from public view. (We rewatched them with a 20-year-old  - a big fan of GoodFellas and Pulp Fiction - and he couldn’t see what the fuss was about.) The (male) performances, the direction, the storytelling and the technical work are great, but in the way that John Ford’s The Searchers is great; terrific film-making, important culturally and in the history of its medium, but so of that moment that they become a little more difficult to watch each time. 

Frank Sinatra wasn’t in The Godfather - although there is a character based on him, which he hated - but there is plenty more violent gangstering in our look at all the other crime movies he wasn’t in:

The Metropolitan

He didn't do it his way

This article is mostly about films Frank Sinatra wasn’t in. Obviously, this is most of the films in the history of cinema. He wasn’t in The Battleship Potemkin, for instance, or Avengers: Endgame. (Unless he was in that bit at the end, standing at the back among the Guardians of the Galaxy. Could have been. Everyone else was.) No, I mean the films that …

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4 years ago · 4 likes · 3 comments · Tobias Sturt