Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse

by David Mitchell

  You may be uncertain of what I’m talking about. What are all these occasions when chefs say, want or bemoan something? you may wonder. Maybe my chef-irritability is making me delusional, but to my mind it’s constant. Some chef is always saying something, and it’s never just: “Can you make sure that doesn’t boil over? I’m popping out for a fag.”

  It’s probably the fault of the media – most things are. When you’ve retyped all the news agency stuff about Syria and Ukraine, and reprinted today’s cameraphone snap of a goose swimming past someone’s upstairs window, what are you going to put on page two? Probably best just to ring up some chefs and find out what’s bugging them.

  My view of chefs as a vocal part of the community is reinforced by the fact that most television programmes are now about cookery – about 52%, according to a survey I just conducted into what would bolster my argument. I quite like cookery programmes – something I have in common with every other viewer. That’s why there are so many. The future of television, according to haircuts and focus groups, is stuff that everyone quite likes, rather than stuff that anyone particularly likes. It’s best just to make cookery programmes, because dramas are expensive, nature documentaries are fake and those horrible panel shows are brash and rude and have more chefs on them than women. But no one ever got annoyed by shots of a casserole.

  So I already had more metaphorically folded arms than a metaphorical millipede exchanging insurance details with some chefs who’d just crashed into his car when I heard the latest from the chefs: they’re annoyed by shots of a casserole. Or probably not actually a casserole – that sounds a bit 70s – more likely a reduction or a daube or a posset or a phucking pho. They’re cross that customers often photograph (or pho-tograph) their food and put those images online.

  These particular chefs are French, which, I must admit, doesn’t allay my suspicions that they may not have quite got over themselves. So I’d completely prejudged Alexandre Gauthier (of La Grenouillère in La Madelaine-sous-Montreuil) before I heard what he had to say – which, as it turns out, was an efficient use of time.

  “They used to come and take pictures of themselves and their family, their grandmother, whoever, as a souvenir,” he said of his customers. “Now they take pictures of the food, they put it on Facebook or Twitter, they comment. And then the food is cold … I would like people to be living in the present. Tweet about the meal beforehand, tweet about it afterwards, but in between stop and eat.” To this end, he printed pictures of cameras with lines through them on all the menus.

  You may think he’s got a point. People’s urge to photograph every aspect of their lives is pretty wearing – I wish they wouldn’t do it too. But my sympathy for him melts like sorbet under a flashbulb when he progresses from wishing they wouldn’t to trying to stop them. They’ve bought the food: if they want to take a picture of it, that’s their choice. Just as it’s his choice to be irritated rather than flattered.

  The implication that these plates of grub should be treated with reverence makes me bridle. And it’s even worse because they already are being treated with reverence, but he’s objecting to the nature of that reverence. It’s too disrespectful a form of respect: he doesn’t want people cooing and snapping with joy as if his masterpieces were merely a birthday Knickerbocker Glory with sparklers in it – he wants the murmured acclamation of an art gallery.

  Nevertheless, Gauthier claims that he’s “not banned photographs at all” (which doesn’t make much sense as I don’t see what else could be inferred from the signs on the menus). And neither has his fellow complainant, Gilles Goujon (inventor of the goujon?) of the Auberge du Vieux Puits – but that’s only because he hasn’t “yet found the right words that won’t be too shocking”. He hates his food to be photographed because “it takes away the surprise”, “it takes away a little bit of my intellectual property” and “a photo taken on an average smartphone … doesn’t give the best impression of our work”.

  I understand his feelings, but basically he needs to suck it up. If his customers have trawled strangers’ Facebook pages and Twitter accounts for inexpertly photographed gourmet meal spoilers, they only have themselves to blame if their expensive dinner’s appearance fails to exhilarate. And Goujon’s still got whatever the food tastes like to wow them with – you can’t put that on Tumblr (at time of writing). As far as the intellectual property is concerned, I feel his pain, but he should take comfort from the fact that whoever first arranged a fry-up into the shape of a smiley face almost certainly never earned a penny from it.

  But what irritates me most about these chefs is that they’re being so clever. They may come across as precious, but it won’t make anyone think less of their cooking. On the contrary, by heavily implying that their food is beset by the greedy lenses of photographers – that it looks so good it gets papped and is forced to shun the limelight like Garbo – its deliciousness is taken as read. This is a problem, we all assume, suffered only by the best restaurants, the big chefs. At a Little Chef, it’s not an issue – largely because they already provide photographs of the meals on the menus.

  *

  Have you noticed those special sparkly poppies that some people on television have taken to wearing instead of the normal ones? I don’t know when they first cropped up – it feels like about two years ago, which usually means it’s roughly 10. It took them a while to get on my nerves, but now they have.

  I don’t know why I was initially fine with them. That’s not like me. Maybe it’s because of the context. The X Factor, where I first noticed them, is such a hellish environment, such a horrendous, screaming, Klingon parliament of a space, that even those glittery whored-up symbols of remembrance seemed to have an incongruous innocent simplicity about them, rather like the original poppies which grew out of the cordite-wrecked soil of the western front.

  But then Louis Walsh changed my mind. I was flicking through the channels when, like a moth drawn to the flame, like an addict returning to the needle, like an early 20th-century emperor lured into a conflict he will be able neither to control nor comprehend, I paused to watch some hopeless hopefuls forgettably finish singing a song and then line up to hear it described as unforgettable.

  Walsh, his very presence a more devastating refutation of the principle of the sanctity of human life than Verdun, was repeating a platitude that had been expressed seconds earlier by someone else – only altering the word order slightly so that it didn’t quite make sense. His mouth was opening and closing, his ears were waggling, his voice was straining to be heard over the screeches of audience approval which his empty praise was generating, and my eyes, drawn to the screen yet repelled by his face, lighted on the blinged-up poppy on his fucking shirt. I saw it clearly for the first time.

  How dare television designers adapt this token of remembrance to blend in with their trashy aesthetic? How dare they make it twinkly? The poppy is an incredibly moving symbol. This flower somehow flourished on battlefields smashed by the world’s first experience of industrialised war – a war of unprecedented carnage which became almost as terrifying to the statesmen who had let it start as it was to the millions of soldiers who were killed or wounded by it.

  Such was the international shock that, even after our side had won, no one could bring themselves to remember it with anything other than unalloyed sorrow. Not with victory arches or triumphal parades, but with the plain, mournful Cenotaph and a tradition of wearing paper versions of the flowers that had grown among the dead, the petals with which nature had rebuked the murderousness of men. That’s why, while I understand the point they’re trying to make, I disagree with those who eschew the red poppy but wear a white one for peace. To me, the poppy is already a pacifist rather than a martial symbol – a sign that war should be rejected at almost all costs.

  The poppy represents the consensus that existed after the armistice – not a military or political consensus, but an emotional one: an overwhelming sense that the indiscriminate bloodletting of total war
was too terrible ever to be forgotten, that only in solemn remembrance can any sense be made of those millions of deaths. On that simple point, almost everyone was, and continues to be, agreed. And for the symbol to be powerful and meaningful, I think it needs to be uniform – as uniform as the franchise. We should all wear the same type of poppy or it’s like some of us saying “I’m Spartacus” in a funny voice. By encouraging the sparkly poppy, TV producers almost literally gild the lily. And literally glamorise war.

  However, this broad consensus is only powerful if it’s genuine, and genuinely voluntary. So people were rightly outraged by the wrongful outrage provoked by ITV News presenter Charlene White’s decision not to wear a poppy on TV. This included a fair bit of racist and misogynistic abuse, much of it emanating from rightwing extremists up in arms at the disrespect they claimed she’d shown to soldiers who’d died fighting against rightwing extremists.

  In a way, Charlene White is fortunate that her detractors came mainly from organisations like the English Defence League, because it’s not unknown for more respectable members of the community to have a pop at poppy-absence – and their censure is harder to shake off. The Mirror generated some negative publicity for the BBC out of the fact that some viewers complained about a lack of poppies on the Halloween-themed edition of Strictly Come Dancing, broadcast more than a week before Remembrance Sunday. And Labour MP Gerry Sutcliffe wasn’t too busy to criticise Google for sporting too small a poppy on its homepage, saying: “Around Remembrance Day it is demeaning not to have something that is spectacular.” Something more like the artillery barrage which started the Battle of the Somme, perhaps.

  The effect of these criticisms is corrosive. It means that people on TV, and appearing in public in general, will come to wear poppies primarily to avoid disapproval – in fact, they’re undoubtedly doing so already. Privately they may buy and wear poppies as an act of respect or remembrance, or they may not, but publicly they’ll just wear them for a quiet life. “Lest We Forget” will be reduced to the level of remembering to check your flies are done up. That’s not a meaningful consensus any more – that’s just bland conformity.

  If this development goes unchallenged, the next stage in the story of the poppy is inevitable: if people have to wear them to be deemed respectable, then gradually more people will start refusing as a gesture of rebellion against the establishment. The poppy will cease to be a symbol of the horror of war and of soldiers’ sacrifice and it will become a political badge of the status quo – the Unknown Soldier will be displaced by George Osborne. The fallen will be forgotten as a direct result of the efforts of those who wish to enforce their remembrance.

  It’s wonderfully humane and moving if everyone wears a poppy – but only if they don’t feel they have to, and wouldn’t fear not to. Otherwise, we really might as well doll up our poppies with sequins, because they’ll have stopped meaning anything at all.

  2

  Just Turn On Your Television Set and Stay In and Do Something More Boring Instead

  This bit is mainly about TV, although it touches on most of the old media – by which I mean books, theatre, cinema, gardening and lasagne.

  Television is the medium I grew up with. As a child, time spent watching television was time when I was winning. It was my aim. With my eyes and brain nicely distracted from focusing on anything in real life, I could relax.

  I still love television, partly because of all the brilliant programmes it’s generated but, to the same extent, because of all the terrible programmes and mediocre programmes and forgettable programmes. Pretty much whatever is on television, the process of reacting to it, of working out what I reckon about it, is interesting to me. Except if it’s football or a soap.

  TV has gone through hell in the last few years. Its existence has been threatened by a confluence of general economic gloom, consequent creative cowardice and, most of all, the bloody internet, which seems to change everything, but particularly seeks to change the way we have fun – and I’m not even talking about porn. The poor old entertainment media could really have done without the credit crunch and the internet happening at once.

  *

  It’s been a ridiculously long time coming but it’s here at last. What’s the guy been doing? He makes Kubrick look like Barbara Cartland. Doesn’t he understand the country’s in recession, the media in crisis? We need product – reliable product from an established name. He has fewer new ideas than Mel Brooks and Eric Idle put together! It’s a disgrace.

  And, come to think of it, it’s about time we had a serious look at what some of these playwrights are earning. I reckon the cash-strapped British public have had enough of this self-appointed metropolitan artistic elite blowing Arts Council money on quills and flagons of sack. He should get himself a Dell and pay for his own booze, just like journalists. Bet he’d insist on a Mac. Wanker.

  Where was I? Oh yes, William Shakespeare has at last deigned to write a new play for his adoring public, who’ve been so supportive through all the tabloid rumours of his being dead or not existing in the first place. The project is shrouded in secrecy – it’s not even clear what it’s called, being variously referred to as Cardenio, Double Falsehood and The Distrest Lovers (oh, please! That whole comedy spelling thing is so over, Bill!). Anyway I hope it doesn’t pick up where The Two Noble Kinsmen left off, because I thought that was shit. I preferred that dead cat bounce in Woody Allen’s form, Vicky Cristina Barcelona – although I did watch it on a plane, where films with any real plot just interrupt meal service.

  None of the above is quite true. (Think of the money the Sun would save if it adopted that simple phrase.) Nevertheless, the latest research into the 18th-century play Double Falsehood shows it was probably based on a lost Shakespeare work, just as was unconvincingly claimed when it was first produced.

  The fact that this academic re-evaluation was reported as the unearthing of a new Shakespeare play says much more about our culture’s hunger for more of the same than it does about its literary heritage. The play isn’t newly discovered, and if it were any good, it would get performed; even in its original production, the marketing seemed keener to claim that it was associated with genius than that it contained it. So if it’s Shakespeare, it’s not his best stuff. Desperate for guaranteed hits though our media are, we have to accept that William Shakespeare, even more than Woody Allen, has peaked. Why won’t someone take a chance on brilliant young playwrights like David Hare?

  This feels like an unprecedentedly derivative age. I know that almost all periods of history have considered themselves to be the most disastrous ever – and ours is no exception – but that’s the only superlative we seem to allow ourselves. In the last few years, we’ve haemorrhaged confidence in our ability to make new stuff up. It’s not just pretending we’ve found more Shakespeare instead of writing new plays, it’s the “New Mini” and the “New Beetle”, it’s ironic relaunching of Salt’n’Shake and Monster Munch – we don’t even trust ourselves to invent new sorts of starchy crap.

  It infects books, cinema and television. The last few years have seen the publication of high-profile sequels to Peter Pan, Winnie-the-Pooh and the James Bond books. James Patterson has industrialised his novel-writing by employing a factory of uncredited writers dedicated to saving readers from the unsettling sensation of trying a new author.

  Film studios, already notorious for liking new ideas to be pitched as “It’s X meets Y”, have now commuted the formula to “It’s X again!” and are reflogging the Batman and Superman franchises with accelerating regularity. And television – poor beleaguered television, the medium that once, more than any other, had the power to make people sample new things simply because it was already in their living rooms – is becoming as unappetising a rehash of leftovers from happier times as a 27 December lunch.

  We Are the Champions, which came back recently under the aegis of Sport Relief but is doubtless being pitched for a permanent return, is just another format from TV’s glory days b
rought in as a substitute for anything new. And when a new programme is commissioned, it’s often an adaptation of a novel that’s already been adapted, or a drama recreating recent political events. Whatever their varying merits as viewing experiences, Minder, Mastermind, Pride and Prejudice, Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley, Margaret, Marple, Mo, Lewis and Reggie Perrin all illustrate this trend.

  I find the last particularly upsetting since it’s a good remake – written, performed and produced by talented professionals – but of a brilliant original. Why do we have a broadcasting environment where the skills displayed in the remake weren’t channelled into a new idea, a different comic take on a middle-aged man undergoing a breakdown, rather than an attempt to recreate the unbetterable. I expect those that made and commissioned it would argue that the remake actually was a new take. Well, if so, have the confidence to give it a new name, to forget the original other than as a subliminal influence, rather than piggyback on people’s fondness for it and consequently dilute their perception of its excellence.

  When a very capable controller of BBC1 resigned a few years ago, he was extravagantly praised for the idea of bringing Doctor Who and Strictly Come Dancing to Saturday nights. Well, if that’s an idea, it’s certainly not his. But for one new word, inexplicably lifted from the title of an Australian film, that was the line-up in the 1970s. Are we now completely confusing the sensation of invention, of creativity, with that of deft emulation?

  That’s what advertisers do. But they’re only trying to capture people’s attention. Once captured, they have nothing to convey other than their clients’ messages. The effect of defensive, derivative, cowardly decision-making at publishing houses, film studios and broadcasters, of no longer searching for anything new to express, is to reduce the popular art forms, which have the power to convince, move and educate, as well as entertain, to the same cheap bag of attention-grabbing tricks as the adverts that surround them.