Every time I visit England I’m delighted at how much further English popular taste has degraded. It’s most encouraging to see the ‘dumbing down” of England is keeping to schedule, that the pandering to what the producers and proprietors no doubt believe is the generalised bog-level intelligence of their viewers, listeners and readers is kept on target.
Who or what takes the credit for this? First name to pop up is, of course, that of the most efficient of all media grunge merchants, the Australian Rupert Murdoch who, in a sort of corporate feeding rage, has devoured great slabs of formerly independent newspapers, satellite television and much else. But then, it can’t all be Murdoch. Something else has been at work, which has caused a widespread abandonment of once enviable and entrenched standards. If you accept that the media have long since usurped the role of spine and musculature to the English establishment, then you wonder what other forces are at play — apart from gleeful profit-taking. What is the real incentive for what the apologists term an ‘overdue broadening of viewer appeal and communicative parameters”?
Over the three weeks I’ve been here several stories have had prime coverage in the papers and on television. All of them have shared a kind of frenzied cheapness. The big one was the murder trial of a school caretaker, Ian Huntley, found guilty of the sexually motivated killings of two 10-year-old schoolgirls. Hordes of reporters outside London’s Old Bailey criminal courts competed with word-by-word gloatings over the sometimes gruesome evidence. There was ponderous studio analysis of the prosecution and defence strategies, ‘dramatic reconstructions” of the crime, to include a studio mock-up of the bathroom in which one of the murders took place. If Huntley’s crime was appalling, its coverage in the papers and on television harmonised closely. Worse still was the sticky plaster of sentimentality the editors saw fit to publish. Of dozens of examples, I choose one as a typical illustration of decay. The Observer was once a quality Sunday paper, but even this old bastion has gone a-slumming. Before their deaths the two girls were last seen wearing David Beckham T-shirts. The Observer celebrated this in a piece of mawkish slush under the stomach-churning headline: ‘Images of the two little Beckhams that will haunt the nation for ever”.
Not that they did. No sooner was the trial off the front pages and out of the columns than another pustule was erupting. This time it was the birth of some D-string royal infant, an event treated by the press as though it had been accompanied by the sighting of a new star in the East. This was followed in short order by some groin-level humiliation involving one of the growing list of ‘celebrities” that seem to fascinate the media. In England, to be a celebrity is now apparently a vocation unto itself. A woman on the BBC last week was captioned quite simply: Alice Broome — Celebrity.
Most depressing of all has been the latest nosedive into the death of that sempiternal princess of media pests, Princess Di. She’s dead six years but that doesn’t mean her story is showing any signs of decomposition. Channel 4 television is currently showing a series called The Diana Years. Another recent grave exploration had the publication in one of the tabloid newspapers of a letter in Diana’s handwriting in which she speculated that senior members of the British royal family had been planning her demise by fiddling with the brakes on her car. With her death Prince Charles would be rendered free to marry his horse-like paramour, Camilla Parker-Bowles — when eventually he ascends the throne he’ll wear the crown, she a nosebag. The English press went nutty on this one, in their enthusiasm quite overlooking the obvious absurdities. All this was grist to the mill of one Mohamed al Fayed, the Harrods owner and father of Di’s Egyptian prodder of the time, Dodi al Fayed, who also perished in the crash. Mohamed had meanwhile funded a Scottish inquest into the Paris crash. Like some nonsensical butterfly, the whole thing has now mutated into a formal police murder inquiry, at formidable cost to the public purse.
One thing the English papers still afford is an array of wonderful columnists.The London Independent‘s Mark Steel wrote a withering and magnificently funny piece on the latest Princess Di nonsense, hypothesising on how the various functionaries in a royal assassination plot would have conducted themselves, with Prince Philip karate-chopping his way into the Parisian ambulance station so as to take over the switchboard, Prince Edward twisting the surveillance cameras, the Queen Mother stalking through the sewers to the fatal underpass so as to spray the accident scene with disinfectant. It was the appropriate satirical savaging of the prime idiocy of the notion. But not enough it would seem to rescue the wastage of funds. Will this bloody woman never go away?
One could write tomes on the English media’s degradation, analyse the socio-political promptings for the swallow dive into populism. But profit will always stand out in the line of prime suspects of cause. Accountants are really taking over the world.