Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: And Other Lessons From Modern Life, Page 6

  I know daytime TV isn’t primarily provided as brain massage for lazy comedy writers, but I wonder how many of its regular viewers are as displeased with it as the BBC Trust? My suspicion is that those trustees don’t usually watch it; they’re not familiar with the genre. They’re comparing it to prime-time programming, which people are perfectly able to watch during the daytime instead – on DVD, cable repeat, iPlayer or Sky/Virgin/Freeview Plus. Daytime pap has never been so avoidable. If it’s still getting viewers, isn’t that a sign that it’s not just feckless freelancers who are in the market for inconsequential television?

  I still take issue with that slogan, though. I have a suggested replacement: “BBC1 Daytime. Because there’s always tomorrow.”

  *

  On the occasion of the launch, in August 2011, of JK Rowling’s new website, Pottermore …

  Harry Potter is like football. I’m talking about the literary, cinematic and merchandising phenomenon, not its focal fictional wizard. He isn’t like football. He’s like Jennings after being bitten by a radioactive conjuror. But, as with football, reports of Harry Potter-related events, products and personalities are everywhere. Like football supporters, Harry Potter fans seem to have an insatiable desire for more news, chat and retail opportunities related to their enthusiasm. They’re standing in a monsoon screaming “I feel so dry!” while the rest of us are getting soaked.

  It’s bizarre. It has the intensity of a fad but it’s been going for the best part of two decades. I think I’d find it easier to understand if I hated it. At least that would be an emotion of equivalent strength to the fans’. But, for me, it doesn’t conform to the Marmite model: I’ve read three of the books and seen three of the films. I quite enjoyed them. I liked the third of each no less than the first two. I didn’t feel the series had “gone off”. It was just something that I only liked enough to consume so much of. It seemed perfectly good but I’d got the idea. I didn’t mind not knowing what happened.

  And then, obviously, because I am perverse, I was put off it by its ubiquity and other people’s enthusiasm. Others’ loss of perspective about its merits made me lose my own. Maybe I was trying to lower the average human opinion of the oeuvre closer to what it deserves by artificially forcing mine well below that level. Incidentally, this is where the parallels with my view of football end: even if that were a struggling minority sport only played by a few hundred enthusiastic amateurs, I would still consider it an overrated spectacle that lures vital funding away from snooker.

  The most amazing aspect of JK Rowling’s achievement and that of the Harry Potter marketing machine is that they have produced so much stuff for so long – kept the profile so high, the advertising so pervasive – and yet somehow contrived to leave a huge section of their audience still wanting more. They’ve given Harry the attributes of pistachio nuts and crack cocaine without the health risks (opening thousands of pistachio nuts can cause severe thumb-bruising, I can tell you from bitter experience of my life on the edge).

  But, with the launch of the new Pottermore website, are they finally pushing their luck? In its opening weeks, trial access has been granted to a select group of a million fans. That’s the real hardcore. Having a Harry Potter tattoo won’t be enough – it has to be on your face. The site boasts material that didn’t make it into the books, such as 5,000 words about which types of wood should be used to make magic wands and anecdotes about where Rowling found inspiration: why she called an unpleasant character Petunia, for example. But a fan writing in The Times wasn’t impressed: “As a reader who has grown up with Harry over the years, the site dispels the magic of the wizarding world by removing the air of mystery behind the narrative that sparks debate among fans.”

  That’s an attitude that strikes a chord with me and reminds me of Star Wars. Every generation must lose its innocence, must see the brightly painted nursery wall smashed away by the wrecking ball of betrayal to reveal a blighted landscape. For our predecessors, it was the Somme, the Great Depression, the Holocaust or Vietnam; for my generation, it was The Phantom Menace.

  The problem isn’t just that it’s terrible but also that it retrospectively spoils the original films. George Lucas took the hinted-at, mythical, ancient yet futuristic realm of his first films and filled in all the detail like a tedious nerd. He ruined his own creation. It was as if Leonardo da Vinci had painted a speech bubble on the Mona Lisa in which she explained her state of mind. Everything that was magical, mysterious and half alluded to, Lucas now ploddingly dramatised, making it seem dull and trainspotterish. Those three prequels worked like aversion therapy for my addiction to the franchise.

  I’d wanted the prequels to be made – I’m sure most fans did. We were desperately keen for Lucas to answer all the questions that the original films had posed. But he was wrong to accede to our wishes – not financially, but artistically. When it comes to art and popular culture, consumers are like children and chocolate, students and alcohol: they don’t know what’s good for them, they can’t predict when certain behaviour will make them feel sick.

  As with junk food, so with books, films and TV, the current trend is to give people what they think they want, rather than to leave them wanting more. Presumably that’s the motivation behind making a new series of Inspector Morse featuring the character as a young man. ITV knows that fans of Morse will watch it (God knows, they watch Lewis). The original series brilliantly hinted at the character’s troubled, melancholy past, so we’ll tune in to find out the details.

  It’s like with a magic trick: you’re desperate to know how it’s done but, when you find out, the mundane truth usually disappoints and undermines your enjoyment of the illusion. Similarly, the specifics of Morse’s past can’t possibly live up to our imagined versions. Like a good magician, ITV and Colin Dexter would serve their audience better by resisting its curiosity. Fans don’t really know what they want or they’d make up stories for themselves. (Some do, and “fan fiction” is an excellent way for them to slake their thirst for content without destroying the mystery for everyone else.) With a story, as with a well-chosen gift, we’re happiest when surprised by something we didn’t know we wanted.

  So it annoys me that there’s such pressure to provide more backstory and more information about films and TV. DVDs are packed with deleted scenes, out-takes, “making of” documentaries and explanatory commentary. The experience of making a TV show today is to be perpetually distracted from working on the actual programme by demands from the broadcaster’s website for additional material that will inevitably be of a lower quality. Some of this is harmless, but a lot of it is telling people how the trick is done.

  I hope the new Harry Potter website won’t undermine the enjoyment of the Potterverse for those million golden-ticket holders. But it’s a possibility. In the real world, chocolate isn’t made in a magic factory by Oompa-Loompas. And as for Ginsters slices … there are some things that you just don’t want to know.

  *

  “OK, this is the worst thing I’m going to say,” announced outspoken chef Skye Gyngell. Ooh, what might it be? thought the interviewer. Casual homophobia? A libel against George Osborne? A final denunciation of the carrot? “If I ever have another restaurant, I pray we don’t get a star.” Bit of an anticlimax. But odd. Gyngell was talking about the Michelin star awarded last year to the Petersham Nurseries Cafe, from which she has just quit as head chef. “It’s been a curse … Since we got the star we’ve been crammed every single day … And we’ve had lots more complaints.” Not least from the head chef about the restaurant being too busy.

  But I understand what she means. She was only running an informal cafe in a garden centre – a posh cafe in a posh garden centre, admittedly, but not really a restaurant. “People have certain expectations of a Michelin restaurant but we don’t have cloths on the tables and our service isn’t very formal,” she explains. Her bare scrubbed wood tables (in 2004, when the place opened, there was only one of them) and seasonal ingredients wowed the
Michelin men’s jaded appetites. Sick of starch and the sommelier’s bow, they found her approach refreshing. A tear was brought to the gastronomes’ eyes by her honest home cooking in a leafy environment a world away from the tarnished splendour of haute cuisine’s saline trickery. At its best, you can’t beat home cooking. But Mum doesn’t always make a roast and your favourite pudding. Sometimes it’s fish fingers with a side order of yesterday’s sprouts. Those attracted by the star, less tired of intricate dishes in swanky restaurants than the judges, may have thought the Suttons seeds rack and display of watering cans detracted from the ambience of their anniversary dinners.

  In the end, the award robbed customers of the very feeling of serendipity that made the Michelinsters commend the cafe in the first place. They had denied others their delight in the food being much better than they’d expected. It’s like a review of a farce which tells people they’ll roll in the aisles. “They won’t now,” I always think. Nothing short of an earthquake will make an audience roll in an aisle when they’ve braced themselves.

  Our level of expectation is crucial to our enjoyment of food, wine, holidays, plays, films and TV shows. We flatter ourselves that we’re objective but our judgments are clouded by our hopes, by whether something was better or worse than we’d anticipated. The films I’ve most loved, as well as those I’ve most hated, are the ones I’ve known least about in advance. When I’m well briefed, my range of responses clusters more closely around the average. It’s almost impossible to find a brilliant film brilliant if dozens of people have told you it’s brilliant in advance. “You have to see it – you’ll be amazed!” they say, and then I can’t help expecting it to transcend the medium – to be more than just a film, even though I can’t imagine how. A film with free sandwiches, perhaps, or useful tips for putting up shelves.

  So it’s difficult to know what to do if you think something’s excellent. You want friends to discover it by chance, like you did. But you want to make sure they do. How do you push them towards it without elevating their expectations and increasing their capacity for disappointment?

  This was a worry for me after seeing The Muppets recently. I hadn’t read any reviews or spoken to anyone who’d seen it, so I watched with few expectations, other than having adored The Muppet Show as a child. And I loved it. I was alternately moved and amused. I laughed and, had my education not severed the link between my tear ducts and my brain’s emotional centre, I would have cried. But, just by saying this, I may have Michelin-starred the shit out of any joy you might derive from it. Sorry.

  A lot of my enjoyment, with the greatest respect to those who made the film, came from my nostalgia for the TV show. I’m a great one for sneering at remakes but, in this case, my reminiscence glands were aflame; I was desperate to experience again the warm hilarity which had made me love that programme three decades ago.

  I can’t help feeling that they don’t make shows like that any more – that the 1970s was the golden age of television, certainly of children’s television. The medium had come of age but not yet lost its youthful verve. A joyous psychedelic creativity was finding its outlet in programmes such as Rainbow, The Magic Roundabout and The Muppet Show. Crazy, brilliant things which wouldn’t make sense on paper were being tried out because TV was still insufficiently organised to ruin itself.

  I genuinely can’t help feeling it but I doubt it’s true. I suspect there are brilliant kids’ shows nowadays and there was plenty of crap then. All I’m really bemoaning is my loss of innocence and childish wonder. When I first saw The Muppet Show, I had no expectations and I was blown away. I can’t ever watch anything in that spirit again.

  People say that we tend to read the books that impress or move us most before the age of 25. Not because we read less in later life but because we get too sophisticated to be so easily awestruck. Once you’ve read Great Expectations, anything you subsequently read would have to be even better than Great Expectations to impress you to the same extent as Great Expectations did – it would have to compensate for your greater expectations as a result of having read Great Expectations. That’s asking a lot of Nick Hornby.

  To make matters worse, we’re living in an era when the media constantly try to manage those expectations with trailers, adverts and reviews. At the end of episodes of TV shows, they tell you what to expect next week. These packages of clips are designed to intrigue, to draw you in, to build keen anticipation which next week’s show will then struggle to fulfil. We’re consigned to a perpetual hype–disappointment loop.

  There’s no joy without peril. If you’re not willing to risk massive disappointment – if you only eat at award-winning restaurants or watch films with five-star reviews – you’ll experience it in a mild form all the time. And you’ll never wander into a garden-centre cafe for a spot of lunch and have your modest expectations blown away by the bill.

  *

  On the subject of an arrestingly incongruous image from October 2012 …

  There was an amusing photograph in the papers last week. It shows all the Disney theme park favourites – the human-sized but giant-headed mice, dogs and ducks – dressed up as Star Wars characters. Goofy is Darth Vader, Donald Duck is sporting elements of an imperial stormtrooper’s uniform, Minnie Mouse is wearing a Princess Leia dress and Mickey is in full Jedi get-up, light sabre raised, giant immovable mousey grin turned perkily to the camera as he prepares to use the force to make Walt proud.

  But the most entertaining figure is in the middle – a rotund, bespectacled old man, also holding a light sabre, dressed scruffily in shirt and jeans but with gleaming white trainers, a neat grey beard and hair as precisely coiffed as a Mollie Sugden perm. His facial expression is somewhere between exhaustion, sorrow and bafflement, as if some kindly carers have taken him on a day trip of which he has little understanding. Of course, in reality he fully grasps his surroundings, for this is billionaire film-maker George Lucas and the photo has been taken on the occasion of the sale of his movie empire, Lucasfilm, to Disney.

  I don’t understand why he agreed to the picture if he wasn’t going to enter into the spirit of it and make some attempt with his comparatively tiny human features to echo the massive Disney grins surrounding him. So maybe this snap caught him in a downbeat instant between exaggerated cheesy gurns. Or maybe he thought his glum look was more appropriate to the dignity of the great moment, like when a statesman signs an important treaty. Maybe he felt Mickey and co were lowering the tone with their gaping mouths.

  The announcement caused excitement among Star Wars fans, not just because it adds another range of funny outfits to the Disney parade wardrobe, but because, along with the purchase of Lucasfilm’s renowned high-tech production companies, the Indiana Jones franchise and the rights to manufacture cuddly mouse-eared R2-D2s, this deal allows Disney to make a new Star Wars film. That’s something which, very recently, seemed unlikely ever to happen again. Lucas told the New York Times the previous January that he would never make another: “Why would I make any more when everybody yells at you all the time?” I think we can rule out his writing a column for the Guardian website any time soon.

  The guys at Disney have promised to bring out Star Wars episode seven in 2015 and to follow that with episodes eight and nine. Thereafter their plan is to release a new film every two or three years pretty much indefinitely. Basically, they want Star Wars to go Bond.

  To Disney’s investors, the prospect could hardly look more appetising. The latest release from the 50-year-old 007 franchise is being showered with critical praise and box-office cash. Having seen Skyfall, I can’t say I understand why. I mean, it’s fine. It’s probably an above-average Bond movie, but then it benefits from budgetary and technological possibilities that most of its predecessors lacked. It certainly isn’t the “best Bond ever”, as many are claiming. It is very nearly the longest Bond ever, narrowly beaten by Daniel Craig’s first appearance in the role, Casino Royale. Maybe Craig has ambitions to be the longest-serving Bond but wants
to get there in the fewest possible films.

  There’s a lot wrong with it. It takes itself far too seriously, and the suavity of the character is lost; the heartless charmer, the well-dressed psychopath who will unhesitatingly deploy violence to get what he wants – but who wants nothing more, due to an accident of his nature, than the furtherance of British national interests – has been replaced by a gnarled potato-headed bruiser haunted by his own past. Batman without the gear. I miss the jammy sod in the bow tie whose toast always lands butter side up. Yet, for all this self-importance, the plot is still as daft as in the campest days of Roger Moore. I won’t spoil the ending for you – the writers have already done that – except to say: have courage, the film does, eventually, end.

  Comparisons with the Bond franchise are bound to make hardcore Star Wars fans nervous. Most would balk at an open-ended series of adventures vaguely set in the Star Wars universe, but with the same variance of style, tone and competence that the Bond franchise has displayed. Will they have to endure different actors taking on the central characters? They’ve already seen Ewan McGregor struggle to fill Alec Guinness’s shoes. But, as the roles of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia are taken forward, the opportunities for other actors to screw them up – or rather “put their own stamp on them” – are endless.

  Will they have to cope with a moody Russell Crowe interpretation of Han in middle age, complete with inexplicable and shaky geordie accent? Will Maggie Smith turn an aged Queen Leia of the Universe into a wise-cracking old gossip? Will Mark Hamill be allowed to reprise the role he created or will he have to stand in line to audition with the likes of Bill Nighy, Steve Martin and that bloke from Breaking Bad? Or are Disney’s real intentions hiding in plain sight in that photo? Are they going to give the galaxy to the Great Mouse?