Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse

by David Mitchell

  If we could just let our angrily folded arms drop to our sides for one minute, we’d feel so much better. Most of us, anyway – to some, it would feel like failure or defeat.

  I was particularly savagely slated on the Guardian website and Twitter for a column I wrote in March 2012 (it’s not included here because there weren’t enough jokes in it – but that wasn’t what got people’s goat) in which I argued against trade unionist Len McCluskey’s assertion that “The idea the world should arrive in London and have these wonderful Olympic Games as though everything is nice and rosy in the garden is unthinkable.” I reckoned that, despite the country’s problems, we weren’t undergoing a calamity sufficiently grave to call off the world’s premier sporting event, something that had previously been cancelled only during world wars. I wasn’t saying things were fine; I was saying they were less serious than in 1940.

  I stand by that. However, many online commenters considered it a disgraceful underestimation of the problems facing the NHS/retail sector/disabled/homeless/donkey sanctuaries – that any reference to our current problems in less than utterly superlative terms was a disgrace. That exemplified, for me, a pervading and angry loss of perspective.

  Saying that things could be worse, and that they have been worse for the overwhelming majority of humans throughout the overwhelming majority of history, is not the same as being complacent. It is stating an undeniable fact. It is retaining a sane sense of proportion. It should be reassuring, but at the moment many people hate to hear it.

  This wilful loss of perspective – this self-importance about our own times – means that we could do dangerous things. Our disdain for the bathwater is making the baby give us anxious looks. We’re thinking hard, casting around for solutions: a privatised NHS, an independent Scotland, pulling out of the EU, a mansion tax, getting rid of the licence fee, greater press regulation, more Tasers, a German water cannon. We’re not ruling anything out – except being careful we don’t destroy something precious, except resisting the urge to act hastily and in anger, except a period of tranquil reflection. We desperately need a break from this era. But you know the rules: as soon as it ends, another one will only start.

  1

  Taking Offence, Demanding Apologies, Making People Do Things and Stopping People Doing Things: A Guide to Modern Hobbies

  So, in the spirit of the age, let’s kick off not only with a fucking football metaphor, but also by tetchily discussing self-righteous bad temper. Which really annoys me. It puts me in a self-righteous bad temper. And I’m sure some of the things I’ve written as a result have put other people in self-righteous bad tempers. It’s all very infectious, this cross, bossy, suspicious, aggressive state of mind – and this section is full of it.

  It touches on the mockery of Hitler, the electrocution of the blind, the hysterical enforcement of respect and the pompous hauteur of French chefs. People’s irritation at piss, palm crosses, photography, Radio 4’s Any Questions, glitter, Louis Walsh’s use of language and Robert De Niro’s witticisms are all explored. It’s infuriating.

  If you’re ever going to throw a book at a wall, it’ll be during the next few pages.

  *

  When I heard that Piss Christ had been vandalised, I instantly thought of Cock Jesus. More of Cock Jesus later. In case, like me, you hadn’t heard of Piss Christ, let me explain that it’s an artwork: a photograph, taken by artist Andres Serrano, of a plastic crucifix submerged in his own quite orange urine – maybe he’d just had a Berocca. On the weekend before Easter, some devout Christians attacked Piss Christ with a hammer.

  I say that’s just a continuation of the artistic process. By creating a new work, Shards Piss Christ, these extremist Catholics made a profound artistic statement about Piss Christ’s desecration of holy imagery by themselves violating the sanctity of the gallery. It’s a devotional work worthy of comparison to the Sistine Chapel.

  I hope the process continues. Shards Piss Christ could, say, be pelted with excrement, making Shit Shards Piss Christ. That could be shoved in a bin bag, making Bin Bag Shit Shards Piss Christ. Someone might be sick on that, creating Vomit Bin Bag Shit Shards Piss Christ.

  It need never end. This captivating dialogue between the most provocative elements of the contemporary art scene and the hooligan wing of the Church of Rome, this great clash between two such fundamentally annoying groups, could one day result in the eclipse of the Mona Lisa and Hamlet by Explosion Threshing-machine Pig’s-alimentary-canal Toilet-bowl Inhaled-then-sneezed-out Set-on-fire Vomit Bin Bag Shit Shards Piss Christ, mankind’s most provocative masterpiece.

  Which brings me to Cock Jesus. Roughly 2,000 years after the birth of Christ, Robert Webb and I wrote a sketch based on the daytime TV show Watercolour Challenge, in which the peace of the sleepy contestants, staring at hillsides and dabbing at easels, is shattered by the presence of a “shocking” modern artist. To his consternation, the programme’s presenter refuses to be provoked, reacting to even his most horrific blood-, death-and swastika-strewn imagery with a patronising: “Well done, that’s very pretty!”

  In the first draft of the sketch, Cock Jesus was his final attempt to shock (it never appeared in the broadcast version for reasons of budget, taste and decency). It’s a statue of Jesus, he explains, “made out of the amputated cocks of dead Anglican vicars whose bodies I’ve been illegally exhuming for the last six weeks!” “Ooh, I do love angry art,” coos the presenter as she moves on to the next contestant to advise on a quick way of doing clouds.

  Cock Jesus and Piss Christ have more in common than penises and the Son of God. Their artists, real and fictional, both craved conflict, and only in the fictional case was the craving left unsated. In real life, someone, unlike the indulgent presenter in the sketch, always reacts. But I don’t think those who protested against Piss Christ, who insulted the artist, sent hate mail to the dealer, protested outside the gallery or finally attacked the work itself, were duped. I think they succeeded in their aims as much as Serrano. It’s the rest of us who are the mugs for dignifying these squabbles with our attention.

  I’ve come to a similar conclusion about the case of Colin Atkinson, the electrician whose employers have told him to stop displaying a palm cross in the van he drives for them. For a while I got sucked into trying to work out the rights and wrongs. Is the heavy-handedly pro-Atkinson line taken by the newspaper reporting the story correct? Is it genuinely “political correctness gone mad”, as George Carey was tempted out of retirement to say (there’s a phrase that might catch on – he’s got the gift of the gab, that guy), and “one rule for Christians and another rule for followers of any other religion”, as Ann Widdecombe broke off from dance rehearsals to add? Or has the employer got a point? Or maybe the employer hasn’t got a point and it’s just my contrarian response to that newspaper which is making me look for one? After all, what harm can a little cross do?

  Then I thought: “Hang on, I know what might be going on here. Maybe everyone involved in this dispute is awful.” It would explain a lot. Most people, if they’re not very religious and see someone displaying a cross, would think anything from “Nothing wrong with that” to “Mental note: this guy’s a bit of a God-botherer – don’t get stuck with him at a party.” It takes quite a leap of self-importance to decide: “I’m going to put a stop to that!”

  Equally, when told by their boss to stop displaying a cross in their van, most people’s response would be somewhere on a scale between immediately acceding to the request and complaining before giving in because it’s really not such a big deal. Taking it all the way to a disciplinary procedure and talking to a national newspaper is the mark of an unusual man. But is he principled or just stubborn? Righteous or self-righteous? Would it be a better world if everyone was like him?

  God, no! It would be a much better world if no one was. The only useful role for people like that is to stand up to each other. You need the unbending Churchills to save us from the mass-murdering Hitlers but, with no Hitlers a
round, the Churchills are annoying as hell.

  The media’s obsession with conflict means that we’re confronted with it so relentlessly that we’ve stopped questioning why it’s there in the first place. We ask: “Which side is right? Who do I support?” but not: “Do they really need to be arguing about this? Why is so much of our time taken up by listening to small minorities who are incensed by other small minorities, rather than to the vast majority who just want to rub along OK?”

  When watching the news, it’s so easy to forget what most of us are like: pleasant, polite, socially shy. We don’t want rows, we want a quiet life. We feel inadequate because we don’t protest and argue more – we don’t stand up for ourselves. And, in feeling that, we forget that the sort of people who do stand up for themselves are cut from the same cloth as the sort of people you have to stand up to.

  It’s a tyranny of the argumentative, an unholy alliance of the unholy and the holy, of the extreme right and the extreme left, of Stars-and-Stripes-burners and Qur’an-burners – people who define themselves by their mutual hatred, have a jolly good time doing it and leave the acquiescent majority running around in circles trying to pick up the pieces.

  Well, I’m not going to take it any more! By which I mean, I’m sure it’ll work itself out.

  *

  In April 2009, like a lot of people, I was railing against broadcasting standards …

  I was deeply offended by something on the BBC recently. It wasn’t Jeremy Clarkson reading out the menu from a Chinese restaurant in a funny voice, or Frankie Boyle’s 10 best jokes about the Queen’s genitals, or even a repeat of Diana’s funeral with an added laugh track. No, it was a new low.

  It was Hazel Blears, the communities secretary, eliciting a round of applause on Any Questions for suggesting that Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand should pay the BBC’s “Sachsgate” Ofcom fine. The rest of the panel bravely agreed with her.

  “Well, you would be offended by that!” you may be thinking. “You work in television and radio. I don’t suppose you like the idea of having to foot the bill if something you say appals the nation!” That’s true, but we live in the era of the subjective offendee and my complaint is just as valid as those made about jokes involving dead dogs by viewers who say their dog has recently died.

  As an insider, I can tell you that such opinions are deferred to by the post-Sachsgate BBC. Everything is scrutinised for potential offence by jumpy “compliance” staff who endure no professional setback if the comedy output ceases to be funny. They have the right to do this because they’re ultimately responsible for what’s broadcast – their organisation pays the Ofcom fine.

  But it strikes me that, if I’m going to have to pay the fine, they no longer have the right to censor the content. And it’s all academic anyway; if things continue as they are, TV comedies will only ever get fined for blandness.

  Let me try to fake some objectivity and seriously address Blears’s suggestion, which has since been reiterated by Jack Straw and Tessa Jowell. She says it’s unjust that the fine comes out of the licence fee, paid for by everyone, so instead the wrongdoers should pay.

  There are only four problems I can instantly think of with this. First, this idea of a net cost to the licence fee payer is nonsense; Ross was suspended for three months, saving the BBC £1.5m, and Brand resigned, saving it £200,000 a year. So the licence fee payer is well up on the deal and Ross and Brand have each taken a greater hit than the corporation will.

  Second, Blears defines the wrongdoers as only Ross and Brand and gives the BBC’s producers and executives no share of the blame. This is grossly unfair. The offending segment was pre-recorded. As a sick comedian myself, I genuinely understand how they could improvise something that offensive in that context. But I cannot understand why the station chose to broadcast it. So the then channel controller, among others, is at least as much at fault. But she’s not as rich, so suggesting she pays a massive fine is a less applausey route for Blears to take.

  Third, Blears says that regulators’ fines are supposed to hurt those responsible and that, in this instance, there was “no sense they’re going to be hurt”. I don’t know whether the fine will hurt the BBC or whether it would particularly hurt Brand and Ross if they paid it, but how can she possibly think that the fallout from the whole business hasn’t hurt that institution and those men?

  Barely a day goes by when the press doesn’t pillory them because of it, and the announcement of this fine has given it another splendid opportunity, as have Blears’s remarks. Far from the arrogant, unaccountable, elitist coterie it’s portrayed as, the BBC is now a quivering shell, rattling with neurotics. The only truth in her statement is that even losing £150,000 could barely make it more miserable.

  And fourth, the law requires that the BBC pay the fine rather than the individuals concerned. This is not a law that Blears, Straw or Jowell has ever queried before. But they’re willing to come out against it for a short-term popularity boost for a beleaguered government – for an egg-cup sized bailer on the Titanic, for one round of applause.

  It’s never a good idea for politicians to get involved in comedy. From Margaret Thatcher’s Yes Minister sketch to Tony Blair’s “Am I Bovvered?” appearance, their attempts to associate themselves with humour have generally been awful. And the reason for this is that they don’t really care what’s funny.

  Being funny involves taking risks, and no politician (except possibly Boris Johnson) can understand why anyone would take the slightest risk of public disapproval in order to get a laugh. They’re about power – they don’t understand the instinct to amuse, and that’s why Vince Cable’s pretty unfunny remark about Gordon Brown being transformed “from Stalin to Mr Bean” has led to his being acclaimed a great parliamentary wit. Well, it might make them fall about in the Commons but it would barely raise a smirk at Wimbledon, where even a pigeon perching on the net gets guffaws.

  This spineless intervention from Blears, Straw and Jowell exemplifies modern politicians’ witless, craven and opportunistic approach to communication. How long do these ministers imagine the friendships in the rabble-rousing tabloids that they’re buying with this will last? And the price is high: they’re supporting a campaign to associate the BBC, its comedians and producers – my whole profession – with all that is offensive, smug and self-serving; to encourage millions who are justifiably angry or afraid, who imagine a mugger in every hoodie, who fear for their jobs and houses or have lost both, to associate the causes of that fear and anger with entertainment and, of all things, the BBC.

  The BBC is an institution of genius, one of the great achievements of the 20th century. It’s famed for its news reporting, drama, comedy and documentaries; it provides the best radio stations and website on Earth. But there is a plot to destroy it; a plot to which Ross and Brand’s childish remarks gave an unwitting but enormous boost; a plot led by people who say they support the BBC but not the licence fee, by people who find the word “fuck” more offensive than Holocaust denial. By its competitors.

  The newspapers that take every opportunity to knock the corporation do so because they’re in the same market and the BBC is the market leader. They can’t dominate that market while the BBC exists in its current form because what they provide is so risibly inferior – the licence fee costs less than a daily tabloid newspaper. So they lobby for its destruction and whinge about the profit made by its commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, neglecting to mention how much money that saves the licence fee payer.

  Without the BBC, they’d make more money, even if the whole nation would be left comparatively uneducated, unentertained and uninformed. Their argument is the moral equivalent of private hospitals campaigning against the existence of the NHS. And now three members of a Labour government have joined in.

  I don’t think those ministers really want to damage or destroy the BBC, but they’re willing to risk it on the outside chance of saving their political skins. I, for one, find that very difficult to forgive. But then
I’m easily offended.

  *

  A statement from Madame Tussauds has been causing offence. The world’s most famous collection of wickless candles announced: “We proactively encourage our visitors to interact with the waxworks should they so choose.” No surprise that caused a stink, you’re probably thinking. It’s one of the most horrible sentences ever written. Why “proactively encourage” rather than “actively encourage” or just “encourage”? And what’s that “should they so choose” doing there? If the visitors have so chosen, you’re not encouraging them actively, proactively or otherwise, you’re just letting them. That’s the opposite of proactive: antipassive, presumably.

  That’s not why the statement is controversial, though. It’s because it defends tourists’ right to stand beside a waxwork of Adolf Hitler doing Nazi salutes. An Israeli couple visiting the attraction (“attraction” is the word people use, right? Rather than “museum” or “racket”. “Attraction” as in: “I really can’t understand the …”) were horrified both by the fact that there was a likeness of Hitler at all and that people were posing next to it doing fascist gestures. It was their complaint that elicited Tussauds’ assault on the English language.

  I’m not doubting for a moment the sincerity of the couple’s distress. Well, all right, maybe just for a moment. There. It’s over now and I’ve concluded they were properly upset. God knows, they’d just queued up to get into Madame Tussauds on a summer’s day in London. They’d be tired, hot and £57.60 poorer. Of course they’ll have been disgusted and horrified by what they saw inside. And then, to make matters worse, they notice people saluting next to Hitler’s waxwork.