The blogtown rat...
Never let it be said that I don't move with the times (for if thou shalt besmirch me so, I shall offer you out on the cobbles for a darn good thrashing with a rolled up newspaper and mine butler's heel) as here at Reservation Towers we are constantly striving for new and modern living. Our sound system, RoBono, pipes bland, self important muzak into my brainspace 28 hours a day. I get world information through News Internanal, a continual news feed that keeps me up to date on current events through the medium of my own colonic irrigation detritus being spread onto the bathroom window whilst my personal psychic steals the spirit of Rupert Murdoch from his own weakling frame long enough for a ghostly forefinger to smear cryptic messages into the grizzly mess outlining the current status of the Levinson enquiry. Our big screen entertainment is obtained entirely out of my newly installed 4D Tellysaurus which allows you to wallow in the self satisfied smell of Jamie Oliver's farts as he squirts the recipe for plastic olives out of his pudgy jowls.
Not every mansion (everyone has one of those, right?) can be as rad as that though. Apart from looters with a local Curry's and a handy homemade cosh, most people have to pay for such sublime entertainment and surprisingly choose to prioritise food, shelter and paying off leg breaking debt collectors over obtaining tedious gaudy techno arsewipe. Not that this has led to a revival in sitting around playing Mousetrap, Connect 4 or actually conversing with real people, as we remain distracted and bored in equal measures by the technological what-nots we retain or failed to trade in for porridge.
As we reject those outmoded forms of pleasure, I've noticed strange ghosts from the past cropping up on TV. Just recently I've been feeling like I'm watching a continual re-run, seemingly descending into a personal "I love 1984". Last weekend I finally caught up with Sherlock, the latest in the BBC dramas trying to tap into the mystique of icons who have fallen out of fashion (Robin Hood, Dr. Who, Merlin, Charlie Brooker's hair) and been rebooted, saucified, cult-ificated and thrust, genitals forward, into the prime time.
The trend of updating a previously bankable gimmick by furnishing it with some heavyweight writing talent (Steven Moffat, Russell T Davies, Dominic Minghella) and a budget that would make Fred Goodwin cough up his swan fritter, has enabled these writers to grasp the mandate to enliven TV schedules and breathe life into dead corpses. A hard hitting Paul Abbot re-imagining of He-Man as a urban terrorist battling a disenfranchised, youth culture Skeletor (he's a hoodie, after all) can only be days away.
This has extended into light entertainment, with the One Show starting the trend for providing retro style 'naf' TV, gaining a following based partly on it's own whimsy. The success of the televised village fete The Great British Bake Off, provided a sunny hearted alternative to sneering, hard nosed, Cowell based cluster fucks that continually barked at feeble willed contestants while press ganging the audience into dialling premium rate phone numbers to whittle the saps down to the least offensive. The embracing of more traditional, revivalist programming harks back to a time when TV laughed with, rather than at, the general public.
This all feels rather nice, especially as all the above mentioned shows are generally exciting or compelling. But, although each is individually good, they only exist on a platform of nostalgic understanding and complicity. Take the names Sherlock or Dr. Who out of the title and the knowing, nodding references to well known baddies such as Moriarty or the Daleks, but keep the exact same scripts and acting and I wonder if they would have been made at all? Would the BBC have had the guts to chuck a disturbed detective or a psychopathic face changing alien onto the screen at all? They did once, of course, but does the same sympathy for something totally new exist? It seems that the new can only be experimented with on the outskirts of BBC 8 at 9pm every other Wednesday to see if it catches on.
The fear seemingly filters down into all areas, where people trying to create original concepts are frustrated by a cultural aversion to anything which steps outside of the comfort zone of instant cool provided by the past. Amy Winehouse's soulful singing sounded like something half remembered, which was then followed by Adele's post Springfield warbling. Folk and 80's revivalist bands add to the mix of Hollywood's love for remakes and biographies until, suddenly, popular culture feels like it's riding on the back of a one legged duck in ever decreasing circles. It's also increasingly difficult to take financial risks on totally original work thanks to the world apparently being in so much debt we owe Mars a fiver for red soil and eggs.
The purse strings are pulled tighter than Victoria Beckham's butt cheeks and the effect is to cut the UK Film Council and restrict access to grants and support from public money. I feel that we are stuck inside a continual mash up, DJ'd by a retro mafia of angular haircutted Tweeters not concerned with creation but a preoccupation with a new kind of Anxiety of Influence; not an anxiety born out of doing justice to the old masters, but the anxiety of being seen to be influenced; to be better read, better watched, better than you.
I long for a backlash of neo-punks, ready to take control of the cultural landscape, armed not with a showy offy desire to inform me how much they can quote, but an iconoclast spirit which says; 'I've read nothing, but look what I made'.
In the meantime, I'm going to stick the telly on. It's pretty good, but not as good as the first one...
EverythingIdoIdoitforyouandyouandbahbabahbabahba
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