Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy

by David Mitchell

  This is what puzzled me. Our society, most would agree, does not underrate the importance of money. Money is deemed, usually rightly, to be behind everything, to be insidious and pervasive. Even those who lust after power are suspected of secretly lusting after money more. Money is the ultimate ulterior motive.

  Yet, according to Kavetsos’s persuasive analysis, where the Olympics is concerned, the situation is reversed. Money isn’t the ulterior motive for hosting the Olympics, it’s the ostensible reason. Money, in the form of economic prosperity and urban regeneration, is what’s set out, front and centre, as why a city should hold the games. The evidence shows, however, that this money, this greater long-term prosperity, hardly ever materialises. But people still want to host the games. What, then, is the ulterior motive?

  It’s partly money too, probably. The Olympics may not make cities wealthier, but any given Olympiad enriches many individuals. A lot of public money always flows into private hands, both legitimately and corruptly. Those people can honestly say, “The Olympics will make us richer,” and only have to start lying if pressed for a specific definition of “us”.

  But my hunch is there’s more to it than that. I think a big part of the ulterior motive, the unspoken reason, for wanting to host the games is simply that people really want to host the games. They want to do it because they think it’s exciting and fun and good. But those reasons sound feeble or untrue to cynical contemporary ears. On one level, we think avarice is shameful, but on another, we think it’s the only sensible or believable reason for doing anything. The apparent absence of avarice, we suspect, is just conclusive proof of the lurking presence of sloth, envy and pride.

  “You can’t put a price on happiness,” we airily say, but we don’t mean it. We think you can and, in their study, these happiness researchers actually have. A moderate increase in happiness because of a successful civic event is worth eight grand, they say. I’m sure we could get them to price up some other stuff: falling in love, having a child, a crisp autumn day, a satisfying fart. Or, in the debit column, the death of a grandparent, getting beaten up, an awkward silence in a social situation. It could all be expressed in monetary terms.

  Since the dawn of time, humans have wanted to quantify things, so we’ve invented hundreds of units of measurement – kilograms, pints, amps, miles, hours, miles per hour. But it seems we’re now trying to use currency as the overall measurement, the uber-unit, the way of quantifying the whole human experience.

  It might have been better for Britain if Shakespeare had died poor. The fact that England’s, and the world’s, greatest writer was also financially astute skews how we rate those skills. People mention his business acumen as often as his sonnets. It almost makes us forget that the man’s only genius was for writing. The big house and the second-best bed and all that are just antiquarian colour. His affluence adds nothing to his contribution.

  We might be more willing to put money in its place if something as indisputably worthwhile as Shakespeare’s oeuvre hadn’t also turned a financial profit. It might allow us to remember the unifying, lovable, slick, magnificent, friendly, joyous, expensive success of London 2012 without forcing ourselves to add a tinge of regret.

  * * *

  It’s 6 August 2017, and the Christmas countdown has already begun …

  “Any customers that aren’t really into Christmas this early can always ignore it,” said Eleanor Gregory, Christmas and home buyer at Selfridges, about the opening of its Christmas store last week. Am I wrong to project a slight tartness on to that remark? As if the first draft of “can always ignore it” had been “know where they can stick it”?

  I probably am wrong. Eleanor seemed fairly upbeat in her other comments: “This new extension to our usual offer is addressing this growing demand for convenience – domestic customers who love to Christmas shop very early in the year to get it wrapped and taken off their to-do list.”

  At least, I think that was also her. The Guardian says it was, but the Telegraph attributes the phrase to a “Selfridges spokesperson”, as part of a long speech that also includes this sentence: “We’ve been opening the doors to our Christmas shop during the summer for years now and have become a real destination for fans of Christmas and festive decorations,” which both The Times and the Independent claim was spoken by Geraldine James. Not the actress, but the “Christmas home and decorations buyer at Selfridges”.

  So the whole thing is a bit of a mystery. Are Eleanor Gregory and Geraldine James the same person? Or deadly rivals? Why are both of their surnames men’s first names? And has the fact that Geraldine James’s name is the same as Geraldine James’s held her back? Or has the actress been unaffected by the rise of the Selfridges buyer?

  Whatever the truth, Gregory and James have had a great week. Selfridges opened the fake snow-sprayed doors of its Christmas store on Monday 31 July, and the press has been lapping up the story like alcoholic cats around a splat of eggnog. Because it’s so early, isn’t it?! “147 days early”, according to The Times and the Guardian, which presumably advocate doing your Christmas shopping on Christmas Day itself. It’s still summer! It’s ridiculous! Whatever next?! Driverless buses? A tweeter laureate? A government using chemical weapons on its own people?

  Whoops, I’ve slipped news genres. Which isn’t the point of this at all. You’ll have got the wrong sort of tut ready. But please don’t worry: you’ll only need your “Christmas retail push getting earlier every year” tut from here on, and you can save your chemical weapons tut for another time. Doing the two next to each other never feels great and calls into question the whole efficacy of tutting as a force for positive change, an embarrassing sensation for well-meaning westerners.

  So Greg and Jim were happy, and the press was happy, and the Selfridges shoppers whose views were sought out by the press were happy – and enjoyed the affectation of interest on the faces of the reporters, to whom they either said “I think it’s silly” or “I think it’s fine”, with just a smattering of “It seems a bit silly but I suppose it’s fine”. Bloody Lib Dems.

  But I was surprised. All my life, people have bemoaned how retailers start gearing up for Christmas earlier and earlier in the year. In my childhood, adults never missed the chance to spoil the fun of a first glimpse of tinsel on an otherwise joyless trip to buy a duffel coat. So, all these years later, it was a shock to discover that the process has still only got as far as the end of July.

  Let’s get it over with, I say. The sooner the Christmas retail serpent’s ravening fangs make contact with its own juicy tail and we have a year-round, ever more tightly constricting festive embrace, the better. We can then accept the situation and move on, like we’ve accepted post-office closures and the new KitKat wrapper and Winnie-the-Pooh’s American accent and a thousand other small worsenings that powerful people have decided we deserve.

  Speaking as a miserable sod, I look forward to it. Instead of lamenting a trend, we can settle down into patronising younger people with anecdotes about how great it was when there were great stretches of the year when you genuinely couldn’t buy lametta (except on the internet).

  A major reason this seasonal department is such a PR hit is that Christmas is more interesting when it’s incongruous. Hence the perennial popularity of those news stories about local odd-balls who never take their decorations down and eat turkey with all the trimmings 365 times a year. Set against a background of everyday life, we can see Christmas’s strangeness more clearly: the curious food, the weird music, the garish interior design and the baffling proliferation of apparently unlinked symbols – snowmen, reindeer, Middle Eastern shepherds, parcels, stars, bells, bearded geriatrics dressed in red, triangular trees, babies and holly.

  Christmas is like our whole culture putting on a disguise – different customs, music, cuisine, symbolism, way of life. If aliens observed us throughout December, they might think they’d got a handle on what we’re like, but then, suddenly, it would all change. “What’s happened to
the jingly, present-giving, arguing, snow-obsessed overeaters?” they’d ask in January. “Suddenly they seem depressed – which is odd because it’s finally started to snow.”

  When I was at university, we nearly put on a Christmasthemed summer revue. We were planning a sketch show to tour the country in July and August and were racking our brains for a theme, when we got very excited about making it a Christmas show, with all the sketches about Christmas and a festively decorated set (this was pre-internet, so I don’t know how we’d have got hold of lametta). The show was to be called Deep and Crisp and Even, with a big picture of a snow-topped pizza on the posters. But none of our usual touring venues would take it. So we did one about the seven deadly sins instead, which sounded much more original to unoriginal people.

  But if, like the small touring theatres of the mid-90s, you’re not amused by incongruous yuletide references, be of good cheer: despite what the papers implied, the festive retail push isn’t actually starting earlier. In 2016, the Selfridges Christmas store opened on 1 August. So just a day later than this year (and the equivalent Monday). Back in 2011, it opened in late July. The trend is at a standstill.

  Perhaps Christmas has hit maximum commercialisation, or perhaps our economic system is dying. Let’s hope it recovers in the spring. In the meantime, we could drag some greenery indoors and pray.

  * * *

  For some reason, Samsung has commissioned a study into what people think are the worst interior decoration fads of the last 50 years. I say “for some reason” because, at heart, I’m an optimist. I try to believe there’s a good reason or, failing that, some sort of reason, for most of the things people do. But I must admit, in this instance, I’m struggling to think of one.

  Raising brand awareness perhaps? It certainly will do that, to a modest extent. Articles mentioning the study will probably mention Samsung, so it’s getting more mentions. But are they apposite mentions? It’s not as if Samsung makes interior-designy things – or, if it does, there’s still a lot more brand awareness work to be done where I’m concerned. Can you get Samsung sofas, or curtains, or lamps, or wallpaper? Why didn’t Dulux or Laura Ashley or Ikea pay for this survey? I thought Samsung made mobile phones?

  To give Samsung’s marketing team credit, they have managed to corner me into mentioning that the firm makes mobile phones. So is that the strategy? To associate the brand with such weirdly unconnected areas of commerce that it forces people to contemplate the fact that it makes phones and puzzle over what links there might be between those phones and whatever interior design study or real ale festival or turbot-breeding initiative the logo is randomly stuck on?

  How tortuously cunning! It makes me feel like a dupe for having repeatedly written the word “Samsung” in the last few paragraphs, and moves me to say that I once owned a Samsung mobile phone and, in all honesty, I thought it was crap. Much worse than a Nokia or an iPhone, in my view. And if I was ever interviewed by someone doing a survey into mobile phone use, perhaps sponsored by Robinsons Barley Water or Stanley Gibbons, that’s what I’d tell them.

  I suppose you can probably get Samsung TVs and surround-sound clobber, which are vaguely to do with interior design and may explain why “situation room levels of audio-visual equipment in what is supposed to be a lounge” isn’t one of the study’s top 10 most derided trends. Personally, I hate surround sound when I’m watching television. I want the sound to be made by what I’m looking at – and the pictures don’t surround you, so it’s just distracting when the noises do.

  Sometimes it literally makes me turn away from the TV to see what’s happening behind me. Which obviously turns out to be nothing. But then, by the time I turn back to the screen, I’ve potentially missed a key bit of whatever’s going on. I mean, I hardly ever have missed anything, but you can’t be sure until you’ve rewound and checked. Otherwise, later on, when you inevitably find some element of the plot totally baffling, you become convinced that it would all be clear if you hadn’t missed that crucial instant of screen time. That’s my strong view. It’s not always the view of the person or people I’m watching TV with. So, all in all, surround sound is a disaster.

  But it’s not something the 2,000 respondents to the survey were bothered by. When asked to rank their least favourite of the last half-century’s home decor ideas, from a list of suggestions drawn up by design writers, their collated responses produced the following top five: first, furry lavatory rugs and loo seat covers; second, stuffed animals; third, avocado bathrooms; fourth, chintzy furniture; and fifth equal, waterbeds, Artex and carpeted bathrooms.

  So what do we learn from this list? On the plus side, it shows a timely rejection of trends for absorbent surfaces in the rooms most prone to stray excreta. Anyone who’s ever lived in a shared house will have come to view any little pink rug clinging round the communal lavatory pedestal with the sort of awed respect for extreme toxicity usually reserved for a nerve agent.

  But, on the minus, it’s a lamentable reflection of how susceptible people are to fashion, not just in what is popular, but also in what is unfashionable. It’s long established that fashion can make people think they adore the daft and hideous. But this list suggests it can also make them dutifully loathe the completely inoffensive.

  I’m talking about avocado bathrooms. A decade ago, I co-wrote a TV sketch about how our culture has completely lost its sense of perspective about avocado bathrooms. And, as further proof of the complete impotence of satire, the situation has only worsened in the intervening years.

  It’s just green. An avocado bathroom is just green. All that’s happened is that a thing, the colour of which can be dictated in the manufacturing process – as it can with clothes, cars, crockery, carpets, toothbrushes and many, many other items – has been made green. An extremely normal colour. It is one of the main colours for things to be. Many things are naturally green, but many others are deliberately rendered green, or partly green, in order to look nice.

  But people behave, and are being encouraged by designers to behave, as if having a loo, sink and bath that are coloured green, or indeed any colour other than white, is hideous and insane; as if it shows the worst excesses of “What were we thinking?!” fashion craziness – kipper ties, mullets, puffball skirts and bound feet all rolled into one; as if some final epiphany about the wrongness of baths being any colour apart from white has been reached.

  It’s not that green sinks aren’t currently fashionable; the implication is that it’s been decided they never will be again. It’s something society has permanently moved on from, like slavery. This reeks of the arrogance of the contemporary: we are the era that’s got it right, that finally understands. We will never look daft again.

  Well, anyone who observes the world as it currently is and seriously believes this is the age that’s definitely cracked it about anything at all, even bathroom design, is an idiot.

  * * *

  The hull of the ship they’re not actually going to call Boaty McBoatface is complete. By the time you read this, it will probably have already slid into the River Mersey, bobbed along massively for a bit and then been tugged off into a harbour. It won’t be the first time that’s happened.

  It’s going to be called the RRS Sir David Attenborough instead of Boaty McBoatface, despite the fact that Boaty McBoatface won an online poll to decide its name. I think we can all agree, though, that RRS Sir David Attenborough is a much more sensible name. Then again, to put the contrary point of view, RRS Sir David Attenborough is a much more sensible name.

  We can’t know why all the people who voted for Boaty McBoatface did so, but it’s a reasonable guess that very few of them thought it was a sensible name. It’s a silly name, a funny name. They voted for it because they wanted this big, sensible, expensive boat to be called something daft and trivialising.

  Perhaps some of them thought it should have a funny name because they believe that, in general, more things should have funny names – that it would add to the gaiety of nation
s, to the sum of human happiness, if London were called Big-Botty-Town or the UN was renamed the U-Smell-of-Poo. And perhaps some of them thought it should have a funny name to take those self-important polar scientists down a peg or two: “They needn’t think they’re all that as they take all their measurements in the freezing cold, because they live and work in a thing called Boaty McBoatface! Idiots!”

  I genuinely think it’s a very funny name – I’ve thought about it many times and it continues to amuse me. Not because it sounds inherently hilarious, like a fart or a burp or a well-timed honk, but because it seems to come from such a dismissive and flip-pant point of view. “Who cares what the sodding boat is called?” it proclaims. It’s so disdainful of the patronising condescension that the whole notion of asking the public what a boat should be called, as if they’re children and it’s a Blue Peter hamster, absolutely reeks of.

  It’s a sign, incidentally, of Sir David Attenborough’s colossal, ocean-going credibility that his name was the one chosen to supplant such a good joke. Jo Johnson, the then minister for universities and science who overruled the Boaty McBoatface vote, must have instinctively sensed that people would go along with it being named after Attenborough. Nobody resents Attenborough. Anyone would feel churlish objecting to its being named after him.

  In other humourless name-changing news, I learned last week that the Tricycle theatre in Kilburn, just round the corner from where I lived for 10 years, has been renamed the Kiln theatre. This sounds like Prince Charles saying “the Kilburn theatre”. Perhaps they’re hoping he’ll come and cut the ribbon when it reopens after its £7m refurbishment, make the whole place feel a bit more royal and posh. It would be a surprising change of direction for an edgy off-West-End arts venue, but then The Crown has been huge for Netflix and that whole post-war meritocracy drive seems to have pretty much petered out, so perhaps we’d all better get back to social climbing.