by Clive James
Terminal 5 happened at Heathrow, where so many irritating things happen. Terminal 5 was meant to solve them. Still boiling about the lost bag that wrecked your holiday? Relax. Terminal 5 would have the mostadvanced bag-handling process known to science. Your bags would get through the terminal faster than you did. Passengers would be dumbstruck by an unprecedented level of efficiency, fully in keeping with the staggering beauty of a building which Lord Rogers had designed to express the full lyricism of air travel. All these things were announced before the building opened. A spokesperson for BA, or it could have been BAA, said, ‘We want to give fliers an experience they’ll remember.’ A spokesperson for BAA, or it could have been BA, said that the new terminal would ‘put the fun back into flying’. And they both got their wish, although not quite in the way they might have hoped.
Thousands of passengers got an experience they’ll remember. Before the first night of the memorable experience was over, the beautiful ceiling designed by Lord Rogers had revealed its purpose: to entertain people who were lying on the floor, looking up at it. There was a shortage of chairs or benches, because why would they be needed, in a building that had been constructed for the effortless through-flow of multitudes moving almost as fast as their bags? But it was not only a memorable experience, like mumps, it was also terrific fun. The fun had definitely been put back into flying, or, in this case, not flying.
The most fun generated by the not-flying was had by those of us at home, who were watching the show on television or listening to it on the radio. It’s the most fun I, personally, have ever had since the night the Millennium Dome opened, when the Director General of the BBC, who had been invited to the launch party of the biggest British marvel since the last marvel, turned up in order to pop his cork about being admitted late, whereas those of us who were actually watching or listening to the BBC were safe at home, sobbing with laughter and hugging each other while we passed the crisps. Whether or not we should enjoy such bungles is a question easily settled. If we’re in them, we hate them, and if we aren’t, we love them. Already too afraid of meeting Social Norm on any plane I might happen to catch, I was deep in a soft couch and ideally placed to relish the Terminal 5 spectacle, first of all in the broadcast media and then later on in the newspapers, where the headline act was about to appear.
I won’t name her, because she is only twenty-nine years old, and when all this blows over there is still time for her to start a new career in some less-demanding field. But on the weekend in question, the weekend when things went terminal at Terminal 5, she held the position of BAA’s Head of People and Change. The word ‘change’ bulks large in management speak, a tongue in which nobody ever asks what is being changed to what, but only whether or not change is happening, change being a good thing in itself, or else how could somebody be Head of Change, not to mention of People? The Head of Change and People said, with all the confident wisdom of her twenty-nine years, ‘Our policy has been to create the context for change, then to apply changes within that context.’
Well, since that could mean anything it probably means something, and by now, after decades of people in management talking tripe, it is too late to expect that what someone in management says will happen will have any relation to what actually happens, even if it happens as it was supposed to, which in this case it didn’t. We can only presume that at least a few of the people who speak this kind of high-flown abstract poetry have some awareness of the prose reality that lies beneath, and that the Head of People and Change will take her lessons with her when she moves smoothly on to her next position as a planning officer in atomic waste disposal, preparatory to her elevation to the peerage.
Can Britain still do what the French call le grand projet, the big project? But of course it can. Britain does almost the whole of Formula One, for example, one of the biggest big projects in the world. It’s a matter of management, but that means real management, not management speak, which is a different thing: can-say instead of can-do. I’d be surprised if the standard of British planning didn’t go up after this: it could hardly go down. All the planes will fly again, bearing the voice of Social Norm to every corner of the world, and I’ll be glad enough to catch one next time I want to go somewhere. I’m going deaf anyway, and very soon Social Norm will be just a moving mouth.
And Britain should give itself credit for being hampered by civilized limitations. The people around Heathrow who protest at every new expansion of the airport would probably be outnumbered by the people who would protest if the airport went somewhere else. When the French planned their high-speed rail system, the arguments went on for years about how much land should be subject to compulsory purchase, but eventually the builders got their way. In Britain it would be harder, and finally there’s something to be said for a country where anachronism still has a value. After all, what’s so great about the opposite?
To the assembled minds of Ofcom, it seems obvious that the airlines should move with the times, and let mobile phones onto the planes, thus to remove one of the last vestiges of silence. But Ofcom doesn’t rule the country yet. Neither does the Queen, really, but at least she’s allowed to be old-fashioned. President Sarkozy and his ultra-chic wife looked pretty impressed with that when they sat down to dine at Windsor. No doubt the First Usher of the Mobile Telephone was lurking somewhere nearby, but they never saw him. They might have been lucky not to.
When they arrived in Britain for their state visit, the French royal couple landed at Heathrow. They were fortunate that they didn’t arrive at Terminal 5 on the weekend, in which event Carla’s suitcases might have been arriving in Windsor about now, and she would have had to do the whole visit in one frock. She would have looked fabulous even in jeans, but there are more important things than glamour. There are more important things than efficiency, although it’s seldom wise to say that you’re going to set new standards of know-how and then prove that you haven’t got a clue. But Carla knows all about that. When the Duke of Edinburgh asked her how she could change outfits so often without losing track, she said, ‘My policy is to create a context for change, then to apply changes within that context.’ But she said it in a whisper, and hardly anybody heard it except him.
Postscript
When I wrote and recorded this broadcast I had not yet realized that it would be transmitted only once, instead of twice. It went out in the usual Friday night slot but the Sunday morning slot was cancelled because it was Easter Sunday. Thus I lost two million out of three million listeners, and was no better pleased than Adolf Hitler would have been if told that the speech scheduled for tomorrow night in the Sportspalast had been relocated to a kindergarten. I didn’t precisely hit the roof, but I did a lot of skulking in dark corners. When I calmed down I realized that I had become spoiled. But I had better reasons for wishing that more people had heard me on this topic. As well as being a wonderfully amusing snafu in itself, the Terminal 5 debacle was a prime example of a peculiarly modern phenomenon. In days of old, the function of PR was to cover up the cock-up. Now, PR was causing the cock-up.
Nothing had really gone wrong with the new terminal except its marketing. Not very much later on, in what was really a surprisingly short time, Terminal 5 was working well. But almost no stories were written about that, and there was not a single television programme. One consequence of the modern vastness of the media is built-in vacuity: since the supply of talent is by miles overstretched, there are few journalists who can make any kind of story out of things going well, so there is no voice for normality, and everything is described in term of challenge, crisis and time running out, even the manufacture of a Persian rug. But a hack can improve with time, if he watches his own behaviour. When I was younger I might not have spared the feelings of the young lady carrying the title of Head of People and Change. It’s not so much that you get nicer with age. It’s that you begin to realize that common courtesy is your actual subject. If civilization is what a commentator is talking about, he should try to embody it i
n his style. It isn’t easy, though, because history is made in the heat of the moment, and by the time it cools down there are fewer people to listen. Hence the tendency to go on banging away at a topic in the hope of keeping it alive. Terminal 5 cooperated long enough to spill over into my next broadcast.
RIGHT ON THE MONEY
Dates of show: 11 and 13 April 2008
Charlton Heston died last Saturday. He was a pillar of conservatism and there were many who despised him on that account, but before we get to that, let’s consider some other news that broke about the same time. The Royal Mint, it was announced, has redesigned the coinage. The Royal Mint was suddenly a news story.
The first astonishing thing about the story was that the Royal Mint is still called the Royal Mint. You would think that by now it would have been rebranded as MintTM, in line with the way that the Royal Mail became Post OfficeTM so that it would be fully streamlined for its upcoming task of closing its own branches. But no, the Royal Mint is still called the Royal Mint. It now proves, however, to have other means of moving forward into the permanently transitional era that Post OfficeTM has already occupied.
The Royal Mint’s mode of embracing the future is to take those old coin designs that did nothing except to tell you what they were worth and turn them into works of post-modern art. This raises the question of whether there are any limits to the extent to which art should influence everyday life. You might have thought that this question had already been answered by British Airways. Long before BA’s participation in the recent and ongoing Terminal 5 launch happening – a multimedia event which has reinterpreted the connection between passengers and their luggage – BA turned the tailfins of its aircraft into display areas for modern paintings.
Though the BA PR brains who conceived the tailfin art initiative were convinced that their handiwork vouched for the nation’s thrusting creativity, the travelling public made it clear that they felt safer in an aircraft that had no visible connection with an art gallery. There might be an art gallery in the city that the passengers left, and another art gallery in the city they were flying to, but they didn’t want to be in an art gallery as they flew between art galleries. Correcting the error cost almost as much money as committing it, but eventually things were put back more or less the way they were. If turning the coinage into an art gallery similarly proves to be a mistake, it’s going to be harder to find the money to correct it, because this mistake is being made with the money.
So far there is no mention of turning the banknotes into Picassos – a possibility that would certainly not have appealed to Picasso, who was a keen collector of banknotes in all denominations, but who preferred them to look as traditional as possible. The coins, however, will be turned into small works of art, and post-modern art at that. In other words, they will deconstruct traditional concepts of coin design. The Royal Shield of Arms will be broken up into pieces, one piece per coin across the range, thus providing us with a comment on the shield’s previous unity, while releasing new possibilities of the asymmetrical and the unexpected. The young winner of the Royal Mint’s design competition, one Matthew Dent, aged twenty-six, has himself put the purpose of his breakthrough into words: ‘To intrigue, to entertain, and raise a smile.’
It’s been argued that foreign visitors to Britain might have trouble with the denomination of coins that do not feature any numerals, only words. But as a foreign visitor who can read the words, I have to say that I’m having my troubles too. I have studied the designs closely, and so far I am intrigued only in the sense of wondering how on earth this latest case of the fidgets has been allowed to get so far, and I am entertained only in the sense that a previously dignified nation’s ability to commit cultural self-mutilation is getting beyond a joke, and I am smiling only in the sense that if I laugh aloud it hurts.
Most of this adverse reaction will surely pass. When I get the actual coins in my hands I will no doubt be intrigued enough as I occupy some of my spare time in Terminal 5 trying to fit the bits of the Royal Shield of Arms together. Fitting round coins together so that they form the appropriate square picture sounds like a task for a particle physicist, but it could be intriguing to try. And it might be entertaining for my granddaughter when I explain to her that the various fragments of design add up to a decontextualized commentary on an obsolete symbol which has been simultaneously retained and rendered ironic, a bit like Thomas the Tank Engine. But I’m afraid my smile can be raised no further. It’s becoming a fixture, and I’ve started seeing it on the faces of other people too. It’s the smile worn by anybody who can’t help wondering why there is such a passion for changing anything stable at a time when instability can be relied on to rise like an unstoppable tide. It’s practically the only thing that can be relied on.
We might have predicted that Naomi Campbell would throw a luggage-related wobbly in or near Terminal 5. After all, almost everybody else did. But would you have predicted that some of the young men planning what they called ‘martyrdom operations’ designed to wipe out hundreds of people over the Atlantic wanted to invite their wives along for the ride? Neither would I. We might have predicted that Madonna would take her BlackBerry to bed so as not to miss the chance of making an important note about the mysteries of the Kabbalah, but would you have predicted that a sex worker in a Chelsea basement bordello would have captured the activities of one of her customers on a camera built into her bra? Would you have predicted the bra-cam? Neither would I. Yet after we read about these things, suddenly they seem normal.
They seem normal because abnormal happenings happen at such a rate that they cease to be differentiated. It remains true, of course, that if you weren’t plugged into the news you would miss the full force of this tumult of innovation. But a lot of it would still get to you even if you boarded up your windows, and the same would be true if you could be magically transported to ancient Rome. In fact it would feel worse. That was why the ancient Romans had so many gods and temples. It was because the flux of the arbitrary was so overwhelming. What’s new about us is not just that so many things alter, but that we give so much leeway, and even honour, to those who pride themselves on altering what doesn’t even need to be altered.
America is the great land of permanent innovation but nobody tries to revamp the money, and indeed the Americans go on minting one-cent coins even though it costs more than a cent to make each one. Andy Warhol painted dollar bills but if he had been allowed to design a dollar bill it would have been an intrusion of art into reality that would have devalued art and reality, which are separate things, neither of which would be interesting if they weren’t separate. When a chair features in a cubist painting by Picasso, it can intrigue, entertain and raise a smile. Look, there’s one leg, and there’s another, and there’s the bit you sit on. Even my granddaughter will realize that it’s brilliant, when she’s old enough to grasp that the thing and the picture of the thing can be fascinatingly different.
But Picasso, though he painted cubist pictures of a chair, still wanted a non-cubist chair he could sit on, just as he wanted money that told him where it came from, and how much it was worth: money which, no matter how carefully designed it was, still left the actual art to him. Since his death there have been stamp issues in both France and Spain that carry reproductions of some of his most wonderful pictures, but never while he was alive did anyone dream of asking him to redesign the coinage, and if anyone had he would have packed his bags and left immediately for some country where the philistines were still in charge of the mint.
There are things that need to stay the same because everything else doesn’t. This attitude is sometimes called conservatism, which finally brings us to Charlton Heston. In his later years he wanted to conserve the second amendment to the constitution, which supposedly guarantees the right of private citizens in the US to own guns. People who want that amendment changed thought he was dangerous. I myself sympathized much more with them than with him. There is such a thing as an institution that needs
to be abolished, because it is no longer any good. But there are other institutions that need to be kept. Some of those are obviously vital, and even those that might seem not to be can still have the inestimable value of providing us with a hand-hold in the storm.
Earlier in his life, Heston was a radical who wanted another constitutional principle conserved: that all are created equal. One of the tallest white champions for civil rights, he marched for justice in the open air and could easily have been shot by one of the people whose right to bear arms he later strove to protect. His memory should be respected for trying to conserve a principle so important. He’s more likely to be remembered for trying to conserve the gun laws, because he did that more recently, and only the recent counts. But that’s the very reason for trying to conserve things that are neither plainly crucial nor obviously noxious: just recognized parts of a civilized existence, and not to be replaced without adding to the uncertainties of which we already have a surfeit. You could call them the small change of life. There was a case for decimalizing the coinage. But for turning it into a jigsaw puzzle? Save us.
Postscript
One of the things I love about the essay form is the chance to introduce a few examples of fax’n’info, as it was called in my boyhood. Ideally the item of fax’n’info should be illustrative but also open up another field of interest, thereby enriching the texture. (A good rule for prose is: the shorter the piece, the more it should seem to have in it.) Note, in the piece above, the cunningly timed appearance of Picasso. Perhaps I should have equipped him with white shorts, a horizontally striped matelot shirt, and three lightly clad odalisques dancing in the background, but what I wanted to emphasize was his deep and lasting interest in money. He not only died rich, he set about getting rich quite early in his life, and even when leading the apparently carefree existence of a young bohemian he was a diligent student of his prices and the state of the art market. It never hurts for the idealistic young – I fancied that there might be a few of these among my listeners – to hear that their pleasant dreams of justice can’t be fully separated from the cash nexus. Or rather it can hurt, but the pain is salutary. Unless he makes a subject of his own early death, a genius needs money to keep going. The whole of civilization needs it, which means that one of the first things a civilization needs to produce is prosperity. Even an unusually canny mastermind like Picasso, however, can embody this principle in his own behaviour and yet still be clueless as to its truth.
