I was recently getting a bit self-indulgent about how blogging used to be a community but now feels like howling into the wind. Which I guess says something about its place in the continuum of massive leaps in communication technology that were identified as a big threat to existing formats, only to die in their own right (see faxes, BlackBerry, MiniDiscs, VHS, smoke signals and more). One of the victims of the social media onrush, or so we are told, was the notion of TV as a collective experience, the whole Morecambe-and-Wise-Christmas-Show meme, watercooler moments even before offices has watercoolers. It was best expressed during my brief, inglorious stint teaching secondary school English, when I asked a bunch of 13-year-olds what TV or movie they liked and one girl declared flatly that the only thing she liked was “stuff on my phone”.

I have an instinctive fondness for the notion of a culture war, but inevitably it turns out to be less fun than it sounds, being shorthand for dim bigotry. First up, the Tory MP Katie Lam, who argues that the scorched-earth repatriation policy she’s floating will leave a population that’s “culturally coherent”, whatever that might mean. Do we all need to believe in God? Support the monarchy? Declare that Del Boy falling through the bar is the funniest thing that ever happened? And if we are an incoherent people, with differing cultural assumptions and aspirations (a “nation of strangers” as another politician put it), might that not be something to do with private and/or selective education, gated communities and all the other manifestations of class and income inequality? Nah, let’s just point at the brown people, it’s easier.

Here we are again. The core audience for Mastermind is apparently viewers who know that People Just Do Nothing is a TV comedy show, but not that Nero was a Roman emperor.

A tiny snippet in my ongoing effort to determine that which we are expected to know. On ITV’s The Chase this afternoon, a contestant was asked, “Who is the patron saint of surfers?” Now, I didn’t know the answer. Given the options (Valentine, Peter, Christopher), I would have guessed Christopher, because of the myth of him carrying Jesus across the water, but it would have been a guess.

The contestant didn’t know either, which is fair enough. But more than that, she didn’t understand the question. I’m not inferring that from her look of bafflement: she actually said as much. She didn’t understand what a patron saint was. Maybe she didn’t understand what a saint was. In the end she picked Valentine, because maybe he surfed.

Interesting/depressing article by Benjamin Svetkey in the Hollywood Reporter highlighting the fact that there are barely any films on Netflix that are more than 50 years old. As he points out, any number of budding cinéastes and auteurs honed their own aesthetics via the serendipity of late-night TV, a set of happy accidents that may be unavailable to the next generation. I had similar experiences, discovering Wilder, Hitchcock, Buñuel, Astaire/Rogers and 1930s Universal horror thanks to the eccentric generosity of BBC2 (and the absence of much useful competition). Svetkey laments:

Obviously, it’s decided that making and streaming its own content, rather than paying licensing fees for older films, is a more profitable business model. And that’s OK for Netflix. Nobody appointed the streamer guardian of the cinematic temple... But it’s worth noting what’s being lost in the process, as streaming and its cold algorithmic imperatives continue to take over the culture and turn us all into cinematic illiterates.

To be fair, other streaming services such as Amazon Prime offer a rather better selection of films that have the sheer bloody cheek to be old, or black-and-white, or even foreign. But it doesn’t make it that easy to find them, unless you know what you’re looking for, which rather defeats the object, doesn’t it?

PS: And now I realise that when I was watching all those glorious old movies for the first time, most of them were still under 50.

Sad to hear that Tony Slattery has died, and it inevitably prompts a slew of posts, many incorporating clips from the TV show where most of us first encountered him, Whose Line Is It Anyway? This one, for example, which gives us a chance not only to mourn a mercurial talent, but also to gaze back at a time when a major channel would put out a show with the working assumption that a critical mass of the audience would know who William Burroughs and Anthony Burgess might be.

I mentioned a few years ago that the two best ever instalments of the Sunday Times magazine’s venerable A Life in the Day feature were both by actors called Tom. What I hadn’t realised, because like so many others, I’ve lost the habit of burrowing into the weekend papers, is that the Telegraph has for some time been running its own pallid simulacrum of ALitD and, unsurprisingly, it’s not as good.

Well, until the gurning greengrocer Gregg Wallace took his turn and, well, it still wasn’t good but at least it was funny.

I’ve come to think of adaptation as a conversation between two writers, colliding at a specific moment in time like strangers at a dinner party... But the scriptwriter shouldn’t dive too deeply into the author’s opinions and beliefs – it’s a party after all, not an interrogation. Adaptation is not some kind of biography. How rude would that be? Like Googling your fellow guests under the dinner table... As an adaptor, there’s no need to become an expert in the writer behind The Book. I take them at their word, in the moment of writing, as expressed on the page alone. Their past, their future, are none of my concern.

PS: Unfortunately, it wasn’t very good. 

In one of the remoter corners of the tributes to the late Michael Parkinson, I discover that WH Auden was an early guest on his talk show. (John Gielgud was on the same programme, and Cleo Laine sang a version of Auden’s own ‘O Tell Me The Truth About Love’.)

MP: But there’s still a kind of elitist feeling about poetry in particular, I mean, isn’t there? 

WHA: No, I think obviously it appeals to a minority. I know certainly when I have to read there are a lot of students there, that’s all I can say. And they seem to enjoy it. 

MP: But the key word there was ‘minority’. Why should it be a minority? 

WHA: Well, because it’s a rather difficult art. You’ve got to have, both to write it and to read it, you’ve got to have this passionate love of language. 

MP: Yes. 

WHA: And that is probably... a minority who have this. 

Having written a whole bloody dissertation on the subject, I’m all for interrogating the criteria on which questions are chosen for quiz shows. However, James Delingpole’s article about University Challenge in the Spectator jettisons any pretence of objective investigation in favour of snobbery and perhaps worse.

I said when Amol Rajan was announced as the new host that those grumbling about so-called diversity hires should be satisfied that, like his predecessors, Rajan is a Cambridge-educated male. Not good enough for Delingpole, apparently, who sneers that, apart from dropping his “H”s, he went to “insufficiently medieval Downing”; he hints that there were “any number of reasons” that he got the gig but judiciously avoids mentioning them, The Spectator finally having cottoned on that explicit racism is more trouble than it’s worth. Then there’s a bit of knee-jerk transphobia, and a chance for the author to air his preposterous climate change scepticism. So far, so Delingpole.

But then he gets on to the questions themselves and his biggest worry appears to be that there are just too many mentions of people who are, and I can hardly bring myself to say this, female and/or non-white. Again, there’s a valid debate to be had about whether the content of the show should represent what the canon is, or what we might want it to be, but Delingpole has decided already, apparently from a position of blimpish ignorance. Dismissive references to “whatever it was Clara Schumann may have written” say far more about the author than about the question setters or Schumann herself. If Mrs Dalloway is “unreadable”, one has to assume Delingpole hasn’t read it, so the value of his opinion on its worth is negligible at best. And rather than show any curiosity over a book of which he’d never heard (Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man) he simply assumes because he didn’t know it (and, implicitly, because it’s about black people) it isn’t as good as Dostoevsky. Many books have been written defending the glories of the traditional Western canon, but Delingpole’s argument seems to be that he went to Oxford – and a proper medieval college at that – so he knows best.

Ultimately he falls into the same trap as Nick Fisher did when responding to Derek Malcolm’s list of the greatest movies; he’s confusing his own limited intellectual horizons for good taste. But there’s one more thing that grates. Delingpole defines himself as a libertarian conservative, a supporter of market-based solutions to most of our problems. One of the landscapes that such policies have changed beyond recognition in recent decades is academia, where syllabuses now have to reflect what the customers want to study. And yet when the customers decide they’d rather read Woolf or Ellison than Chaucer or Dostoevsky, and the universities accede, the right-wing media suffers a collective aneurysm. You won, James. Get over it.

I’m not that familiar with the work of the Elizabethan writer John Lyly so I’m not going to judge whether those behind a new production of his play Galatea are justified in calling it “explicitly queer, explicitly feminist, explicitly trans.” I’m rather more interested in their thinking once they’d incorporated British Sign Language into the mix: 

Once they had made translations for deaf actors, they extended the idea. “Why not translate the text to fit better in the mouth of someone using spoken English, too?” Frankland asks. And so Lyly’s text stretched to fit the new hosts of its words.

Which sounds good, until you realise that what they’re really doing is erasing Lyly’s own text because it’s too old and difficult and they don’t expect the audience or even the actors to understand it. 

See also the just-concluded BBC adaptation of Great Expectations, with its utterly baffling amendments to the plot (no Dolge Orlick; no trip to Cairo; Miss Havisham doesn’t die in the fire, but does shoot Compeyson; Estella doesn’t marry Drummle; Pip ends up marrying Biddy). And while we’re at it, pray for the soul of ITV’s incoming Tom Jones, the star of which thought  at first it was a biography of the Welsh singer and only managed to read the first 10 pages of the novel, complaining, “It’s so beautiful but so dense.”

Watching the latest TV iteration of Great Expectations and suddenly I'm 18 again and in a tutorial and Dr Chris Brooks of blessed memory pretty much devotes all 90 minutes to the first paragraph, including his contention that “Pip” represents potential, but also something apparently insignificant that might be spat out.

It’s not the fact that John Lydon’s Public Image Limited is in the running to represent Ireland at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest that’s startling. It’s that the song – about his love for his wife, in the throes of dementia – is actually rather good.

The BBC, we are informed, will attempt to attract viewers from less affluent socio-economic groups by producing more sports documentaries, crime dramas and other “lighter” products. Except that nobody asks why such groups (allegedly) prefer such material. Furthermore, does an individual’s socio-economic status determine the media he or she consumes, or is it the other way round? Does the choice of media put them on the path to a specific rung on the socio-economic ladder? By giving the punters what they want (which is supposedly restricted to variations on what they already know), the BBC would be fulfilling its remit to reach out to all social groups, but at the same time reinforcing the inequalities that keep those groups apart – and pissing the Reithian mission to educate all over the walls of Broadcasting House. And then what’s the point of the BBC?

Wednesday is the latest in a noble tradition (Inspector Clouseau, Frasier Crane, PC George Dixon, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, et al...) of secondary or marginal fictional characters being spun off to become stars of a new venture; in this case, it’s Wednesday Addams, scion of the proto-Goth family that began in cartoon form in the New Yorker as far back as 1938. In Tim Burton’s new Netflix product, the character (most famously played by Lisa Loring on TV and Christina Ricci on film) is wrenched from her kinfolk and deposited in a New England boarding school.

It has a lot going for it, including an excellent overall look, and some nice one-liners. (Presented with a black dahlia as a welcome gift to the school, Wednesday deadpans, “It’s named after my favourite unsolved murder.”)

But there’s a fundamental problem. In their move to the status of protagonist, previously sidelined characters are inevitably fleshed out, given enhanced back stories, friends, families, jobs that we don’t know about. But the whole point of Wednesday is that she’s a blank-faced vacuum, a vehicle for existential bleakness, with nothing behind the stare. The new version, played by Jenna Ortega, is on screen almost the whole time and a vacant glower isn’t enough to keep a big-budget show running on its own. So, although she’s still dressed in black and expresses bristling contempt for conventional pieties of niceness, Ortega’s Wednesday is humanised. Even before the opening credits, when she dumps piranhas in a swimming pool to punish the jocks who are bullying her little brother Pugsley, she allows herself a small smile of triumph. Old Wednesday, real Wednesday, would never allow her cool to crack so much.

Overall, she’s closer to the high-functioning autistics inhabiting The Big Bang Theory than the (literal and metaphorical) monsters that Charles Addams created. Ultimately, she’s good. And, in this case, that’s bad.

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

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

Two gems from the Telegraph obituary of the writer Philip Purser. First, that the first choice for the job of TV critic at the newly-launched Sunday Telegraph in 1961, was the blind journalist TE Utley, because he wouldn’t be distracted by the pictures.

And the conclusion to the obituary he wrote for a colleague: “He is the author, I believe, of my obituary held on file at The Telegraph. I wonder what it says.”

In the New Statesman,  Stuart McGurk describes the first shambolic months of the TV channel GB News and the most startling moments come not when stuff goes wrong, but when the company tries to explain away the wrongness. When asked why it tried to go on air without most of the equipment that TV professionals would regard as necessary – indeed, without most of the professionals – the official line is:

GB News is an entirely different broadcasting model. We never set out to replicate the legacy infrastructure or roles of establishment broadcasters.

Yet again, the libertarian battle-cry of “disruption” is a less-than-convincing euphemism for amateurish incompetence. (Not coincidentally, my recent reading has been dominated by meditations on why modern society increasingly tolerates such abject mediocrity, for fear of being thought elitist, and how a surprising amount of this anti-elitist thought originates with the political right. See Frank Furedi, Where Have All The Intellectuals Gone?; Eliane Glaser, Elitism: A Progressive Defence; Ronan McDonald, The Death of the Critic.)

But how do we respond to this? Do we really have to bite our lips when confronted with crap, for fear of hurting the feelings of those who produce crap and/or those who buy it? Who’s a snowflake now?

PS: And a reminder that, yes, it comes from the left too. From a couple of years back, John Halle defends Kenny G, and implicitly all else that is “fundamentally unserious and beneath discussion.”

PPS: On similar lines, an old friend, Caroline Langston, ponders what you really need to get into college:

The admissions system today, I read somewhere, rewards not the “bright well-rounded kid” (abbreviated BWRK by admissions reviewers), but the “pointy” kid instead, by which is meant an outsize and distinctive feature—like innovating a patentable medical device, launching a business, or testifying before Congress. Three sports and extracurriculars are nowhere near enough.Conversely, in the absence of such achievements, one way to mitigate it is by being able to foreground an experience of personal disenfranchisement or suffering, and demonstrate how one has overcome it... This is a problem not just for college admissions but also for the nation’s intellectual culture—and literature—in general. Books, online culture, radio interviews, novels, podcasts, all of them swept up into one... Basically, it’s a darkling plain where ignorant armies of the nation’s Pointy Kids-in-Chief clash by night.

I can’t claim to have been a devotee of the late composer Harrison Birtwistle but I do recall the brouhaha that arose when his defiantly dissonant Panic was premiered in 1995 during the Last Night of the Proms, an occasion more usually graced by flag-waving singalongs. What I had forgotten is that the TV broadcast was fronted by the twinkly, urbane Richard Baker. Not even Stravinsky managed a stunt like that.

Back in the days when blogging was a thing and people used to read this, every now and then I’d use a post as a repository for various bits of stuff and nonsense that had caught my eye over the past few days or weeks, a sort of snapshot of my cultural life at that moment. 

In that spirit, Matt Doran, the man who forgot to listen to the Adele album, offers an apology that sounds like something from a Stalinist show trial, except that I’ve got a horrible feeling it’s genuine. And just when you think being under-prepared is a sin, BBC4 runs a documentary about Geordie singer-songwriter Alan Hull, which kicks off with the presenter admitting he doesn’t know anything about Alan Hull. I’ve got a horrible feeling that the success of You’re Dead To Me has given the Beeb the idea that ignorance is a qualification.

Also on a musical theme, I offer you Olivia Lane’s review for Pitchfork of the new Robert Plant/Alison Krauss album, for no reason other than that she uses the words “effulgent”, “magmatic” and “empyreal” and doesn't explain or apologise, so there. Then there’s Andy Bull’s quip about the Tim Paine scandal: 

Paine sent an unsolicited “dick pic” to a female employee of Cricket Tasmania with the caption “finish me off right now”. Four years later, she has...

A line from Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ that made me giggle foolishly:

I arose and argued about trifles...

And this, via Richard Blandford on the Twitters, which also made me giggle, but not as much as the trifle thing did.