Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: And Other Lessons From Modern Life, Page 21

  The problem with the Midlands is not that it’s an inherently unpleasant place but that there are millions of other people there – miserable people who want to leave. 81% of them going to Cornwall is only going to give that problem a sea view, while depriving it of a proper motorway infrastructure.

  Surely Midlands residents should be counting their blessings. Birmingham may be no Venice (for all its alleged canal parity) but neither is it Darfur or Luton. And there are positives: a 2009 study declared the rainy British climate, which the Midlands basks in, the ideal conditions for growing strong and healthy fingernails. That’s an important part of the body – just ask any of the Wolves players’ wives.

  I don’t think Midlanders should be downhearted about their downheartedness. Several other regions, even self-confident Yorkshire, were also found to be keen to depopulate. And a grass-is-greener attitude is far preferable to self-satisfiedly imagining oneself to be living in the best place on Earth. It reflects an engaging mix of aspiration and modesty; people living in the built-up middle indulging themselves in harmless daydreaming about moving to their vision of an idyllically quiet periphery, in the case of Scotland or the west, or a beating metropolitan heart in the case of London.

  It’s an example of the British “glass half empty” approach, the self-effacing “We’re a bit shit, we are!” worldview that English emigrants to America mistake as “hating success”. It’s not that; it’s a compassion for mediocrity, it’s supporting your team even though they won’t win and refuse to wear red. It suggests humour and integrity.

  I love the “glass half empty” approach – I’m completely “glass half full” about it, which is shamingly un-British of me. But who’d want to live in a place where 100% of the population were thrilled to be there? Anywhere like that would be so insular and parochial that anyone sane would want to leave, and probably already had.

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  Imagine you’re running an elite branch of the police, responsible for the security of the country’s nuclear material and installations. Imagine you’re instituting a programme of modernisation and reform so that it can cope better with the threats posed by international terrorism. Would you call the programme “New Dawn”?

  Personally, I would not. If I were in the Civil Nuclear Constabulary’s thousands of sensible shoes, I think I’d pick something that sounded less like the title of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie – something that doesn’t raise the question “Over what dystopian wasteland is this ‘New Dawn’ breaking?”, or conjure up the image of a heavy blood-red sun creeping across the ash-clogged skies of a new empire of cockroaches and scorpions.

  Richard Thompson, chief constable of the nuclear constabulary, which is the country’s most heavily armed police force (and that’s not even counting all the plutonium it’s packing), is of a different mind.

  I’m not saying New Dawn isn’t a catchy title but is that really a priority here? How important is it for programmes of public service reform to have exciting names? I know we live in an age when everything, from Tower Hamlets waste collection services to the branded sugar sachets of a budget hotel chain, has a tagline. Even the Kilburn High Road boasts the strap: “The closer you look, the better it gets” (which may be true for some – it all depends on how aesthetically pleasing you find the molecular structure of vomit).

  I accept that tedious projects are probably made marginally more fun by giving them dramatic names. I’m all for the NHS calling its new anal hygiene initiative “Total Wipeout” if it’ll get the job done in better humour. But these schemes aren’t films. They don’t need box office. They’re not things you have to persuade people to get involved in; they’re tasks that you just order people to complete.

  And surely there’s a public confidence issue here? It may excite those involved but it doesn’t help national morale to remind us that, where nuclear material is concerned, the stakes are terrifyingly high. Just as surgeons, to lift their patients’ mood, construct phrases such as “pop in, have a look round and then sew you up” to make the prospect of being eviscerated in your sleep seem less daunting, so the police could have referred to this modernisation as “just a spot of paint here and there – you know, keep everything tidy”, rather than making it sound so portentous. New Dawn is the equivalent of the surgeon gripping a patient’s hand and muttering, in a voice charged with emotion: “Remember, every ending is a beginning, my friend!”

  Don’t get me wrong, I’d have picked it ahead of “Dark Storm Descending”, “Half-lives Half-lived” or “Winter’s End?” but my favourite would probably have been “The Civil Nuclear Constabulary Modernisation Plan”. A bit banal perhaps but, just as many people feel there are some issues that are “not a fit subject for comedy”, I feel there are some places of work that are not a fit context for drama.

  I was blissfully unaware of the CNC until I read that questions have been asked about security around the Sellafield product and residues store, which contains the largest declared plutonium stockpile in the world. And the answer to those questions hasn’t been “It’s all fine.” Or at least not in a confident enough voice. Any terrorist who succeeded in breaking into the facility would be like a kid in a sweetshop, albeit one developing cancer at a futuristic speed.

  The police have also been under hostile scrutiny because of their handling of the student protests over fees. I sympathise: they’re in an impossible position, as there’s no real national consensus on the extent to which protesting students should be beaten up. Opinions vary from “not at all” to “completely”. The compromise they’ve reached – to let a small riot happen while hospitalising the occasional protester – is probably, like democracy, the worst option except for all of the other ones.

  But there’s more agreement about the extent to which Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall should be beaten up. In that regard, the “small minority of troublemakers” shouting “Off with their heads!” seem to have misjudged the national mood. That their Royal Highnesses should be subjected to youthful road rage on Regent Street was described by David Cameron as “shocking and regrettable”, by Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson as “hugely regrettable and shocking”, and by Boris Johnson as “very regrettable”. It’s regrettable that Johnson didn’t find it shocking. The duchess, he went on to say, was “plainly alarmed”. You’re no oil painting yourself, Boris.

  Fortunately, Charles and Camilla arrived at the Royal Variety Performance unharmed, but it’s disgusting that the heir to the throne and his wife should be subjected to such an ordeal. And the fact that their car was attacked on the way only makes it worse.

  The police’s competence to protect what our country holds most dear is suddenly in doubt. While a New Dawn is breaking over the security of our nuclear material, the royal protection squad is considering putting the prince in a less glassy car. Maybe it could convert one of the Civil Nuclear Constabulary’s old lead-lined vans.

  The two things that define our sovereignty – the royal family and our nuclear technology – are under attack. In these straitened times, we may be forced to choose. In the middle ages, people feared royalty. Those born to rule were the Lord’s anointed. They carried within them something of the divine, a spark of ineffable heavenly power. That’s why the aristocracy were so reluctant to kill kings unless they could cast serious doubt over their right to the throne. Legitimate kings were only done away with in rare and extreme cases; for example, Richard II was starved to death and Edward II got topped. So they murdered him.

  In this more secular age, we reserve our sense of mortal dread for uranium. Being a country openly in possession of nuclear technology is the radioactive jewel in our crown. Our nuclear weapons, just like our royal family, are a harmless source of national pride, but they cost a great deal more. Those missiles should be driven around London in a gold coach so that the public can have a look at what it’s paying for. I suppose that’s another simple pleasure that a small minority of troublemakers are spoiling.
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  Sometimes you don’t see victory coming. It’s been a long slog since the disaster of Saratoga and the humiliation of Yorktown but at last the empire has struck back. It’s been tough – they’ve spent decades making us feel puny and irrelevant. We’ve relied on them for money and troops. They almost made us forget there was a time when we could launch disastrous invasions of Afghanistan without their help. But finally it seems that the American colonies’ 235-year flirtation with independence is coming to an end.

  Praise be: all three of the great American superheroes-of-state have fallen into British hands. The casting of British actor Henry Cavill as Superman, in Superman: Man of Steel (presumably the sequel to the more controversial Stalin: A Super Man), completes the set: Christian Bale, the British child from Empire of the Sun whose accent is now located about where the Lusitania sank, is the current Batman; and Surrey’s own Andrew Garfield is “rebooting” the Spider-Man franchise, bringing New York’s arachnoid crime fighter to a whole generation who were too young to catch the final instalment of the previous Spidey trilogy, way back in 2007. If only someone had recorded it.

  But let’s leave aside the fact that Hollywood is now reimagining Superman and Batman twice each for every time I descale my showerhead, and Spider-Man more often than I change my mobile phone tariff, and rejoice in having turned the tide of cultural imperialism. Stateside acclaim for The Madness of King George, Mrs Brown, The Queen and The King’s Speech is all very nice but it has the patronising quality of a parent commending a precocious child on having sent up a teacher in a school play. If we were ever going to curb American self-confidence, we needed to strike at their equivalent of royalty: made-up magical people from comics.

  Yet, even in the moment of conquest, I had my doubts (as Tiger Woods used to say). So I looked below the British newspapers’ jingoistic headlines and read the actual articles – or, as I call them, “the small print”. It turns out that Garfield was born in Los Angeles and has dual citizenship; Cavill is from Jersey, not the new one, but it still isn’t part of the UK; and Bale largely grew up in Hollywood. I say “grew up”, but I suppose I mean “became older”. It looks, from YouTube, like he’s a bit of a Peter Pan when it comes to professional conduct.

  Still, they’re a bit British – they’re British-influenced: Cavill was in The Tudors and went to Stowe School; Garfield’s been on Channel 4, and not just in a Frasier repeat; and Bale was born in Wales. He’s slightly Welsh and you can’t get more English than that, unless he was also a quarter Scottish with an Irish great-grandparent. So it’s still something, right?

  Not really, not any more. This is how Charles Gant, film editor of Heat magazine, explains the new global reality: “Superman, Batman and Spider-Man might be American icons, but the primary revenue streams for these films are outside America.” The important demographic, our future Asian paymasters, neither care about nor discern the difference between Britons and Americans. If Cavill’s American accent’s a bit shaky, they won’t give a damn. We’re all just impecunious round-eyes, shaking a tail feather in front of a green screen – trying to make a quick yuan to set against our astronomical debt.

  The British are the new Canadians. We’re not taking over American culture, we’re being absorbed by it, and at the very moment when its influence is starting to wane. We’re infiltrating a dying empire, like the Scots did when they took over Westminster politics.

  This leaves me feeling ashamed at having enthused about British involvement in superhero movies in the first place. It’s not as if I like them. It feels like rooting for Andy Murray: you can suppress misgivings that he’s moody and annoying for as long as he’s still in a tournament but, when he loses, the fact that you’ve expended emotion supporting someone you don’t know, whose fortunes don’t affect you, and the cut of whose jib you don’t particularly like, makes the disappointment turn even sourer.

  Today’s Hollywood pumps out superhero stories like it once did Westerns. Not just the three superheroes of record but spoofs such as Mystery Men and The Incredibles, superhero gang shows like The Fantastic Four and X-Men, and the TV series Heroes and No Ordinary Family (which, from the trailers, looks like a non-spoof version of The Incredibles). It’s so relentlessly two-dimensional. And I concede that there are two: the characters don’t just have superpowers, they also find that strange. So, you know, bravo.

  Is this the final infantilisation of entertainment? Are we the first generation of adults who, when we reached maturity, did the cinematic equivalent of giving ourselves crisps and chocolate for every meal because we never had the concentration to develop other tastes? Most of these films, however exciting their action sequences, are deeply silly.

  Yet some critics make artistic claims. I quite enjoyed Batman Begins, but those who wax lyrical about what a disturbing character Bruce Wayne is, and claim that whichever comic it’s all based on merits comparison with a proper book full of words, have lost sight of the bigger picture: it’s all about a man so rich and mental he hangs around the streets at night, dressed as a bat, trying to drop on burglars. This is a daft story which, if it were true, would only be fit for a Channel 5 documentary about a disreputable Kevlar salesman exploiting billionaires with personality disorders.

  I think we Brits might have been wiser to stick to playing villains. It may not get the big money but it’s steady work and the villains in Hollywood superhero films are fairly similar to the heroes of British popular culture. Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Raffles and Doctor Who all have far too many ambiguities and nuances to be Marvel comic goodies.

  Some readers will refute this point by citing character ambiguities and nuances such as “obsessively pretending to be a bat every night” and “finding it unsettling to develop the powers of a spider”, but we’ll have to agree to differ. Just like Agree-to-Differ-Man who was bitten by a radioactive Liberal Democrat and travels the universe resolving arguments while sitting on his jet-powered fence. That’s a role that only someone British could play.

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  The British government has submitted its list of nominees for world heritage site status to Unesco. Known as the “UK tentative list”, it comprises a house (Darwin’s old one in Kent), an observatory (Jodrell Bank), a bridge (the Forth), a Gibraltan cave complex, a twin monastery, some crags, various islands (St Helena and the Turks and Caicos), some areas of countryside (a boggy one and a lakey one) and a way of life (the slate industry of north Wales). Among places that narrowly missed out – presumably they were on the “extremely tentative list”, the “barely a list at all” or the “few thoughts scribbled down on a scrap of paper which you must feel free to ignore” – were the former RAF station at Upper Heyford, the Great Western Railway and Blackpool.

  This is an eclectic mix of … well, what? Buildings? I suppose a bridge is a building but the Lake District isn’t. Areas? You wouldn’t really call an old house or an observatory an area, would you? Places? Is the Great Western Railway a place? If so, it’s a very long and thin place. The north Welsh slate industry certainly isn’t, although it happens in a place. It’s such an eclectic list it’s difficult to find a noun that applies to everything on it other than “things”. It’s an eclectic list of British things. And some not-so-British things that Britain owns, such as West Indian islands and Iberian caves. But, for the purposes of Unesco, they’re all sites. And often sights. Magnets for sightseers and site-seers alike.

  In putting forward this mixed bag of concepts, British government experts are responding to Unesco’s concern that the list of 911 world heritage sites has, as the Guardian put it, “become dominated by castles and cathedrals in western Europe”. So they’re mixing it up a bit. Admittedly, they’re having another punt on Darwin’s house, which has been submitted and rejected before – maybe Unesco doubts how much the building in which an important book was written retains the reflected glory of the important book, like that pub where DNA was discovered (by which I mean the site of Crick and Watson’s “Eureka
!” moment, not some old boozer where traces of blood led to an arrest). But they’re also spicing things up with some slate manufacturing and the island where history’s most famous Corsican carked it.

  But they could go so much further. There are so many other unique and valuable expressions of our culture that should have much higher priority for “world heritage thing” status than all that tedious bricks-and-mortar, than the predictable array of pyramids and opera houses. If I may be so tentative, here’s my list:

  The pound

  The beleaguered and ancient British currency has for too long been the plaything of politicians and speculators. Let’s take politics and economics out of the equation and put its fate in the hands of heritage. Basically, people like it – they liked the shillings, pennies and farthings too, but they were abolished in the interests of reducing the nation’s arithmetical agility. So let’s protect it, like we protect the Tower of London, without regard to practicalities. Nobody complains about that old fortress being outdated, expensive and much less militarily useful than an aircraft carrier. The Tower is an appealing anachronism in the modern city, so why not make the pound coin the same thing for the modern pocket, nestling next to the smartphone like a Beefeater walking past Deutsche Bank?

  The Aberdeen Angus Steakhouse chain

  These restaurants are unique to British culture and yet they’re under threat. Not for them the business model of repeat custom, these steakhouses’ fortunes rely on the much tougher technique of trying to dupe everyone once. It’s harder and harder for them to do, as the British tradition of culinary incompetence is eroded by pressures from abroad. When even Little Chef is recruiting Heston Blumenthal, these restaurants, now rarer than the Siberian tiger, are all that we have left of a proud heritage of serving shoe leather with Béarnaise sauce to neon-addled out-of-towners.