The Light's on at Signpost (28 page)

Note, too, that the men I have just mentioned did not suffer from the delusion that journalism is interesting in itself, or that the public was fascinated by journalistic feuding carried on ad nauseam. One exchange of broadsides, fine, but the childish serial sniping of some modern writers is just a bore.

To conclude, I confess to a slight worry about press freedom. When I was a young reporter you could report anything in a court of law except the evidence in divorce cases (you had to rely on the judge’s summing up), and the names of juveniles; I’m pretty sure you couldn’t give the name of the accuser in a rape case either; anyway, you didn’t. But today there seem to be all kinds of censorship: we hear of “reporting restrictions”, and that names have been suppressed for “legal reasons”; in local government the closed meeting which prevents the electors knowing what the elected are doing, is commonplace. These are bad things in themselves, and a sign of times when it is possible for a Home Secretary (admittedly an unusually clownish one) to propose interference with the jury system, and it is suggested that in certain cases an accused shall have no right to confront his accuser.

It is also possible that some government will be so misguided as to try to bring in a “privacy” law. Now, in spite of politicians’ babble about the “last chance saloon” there is no way in which this can be imposed in a free society, except in marginal prohibitions on photographic intrusion in certain circumstances. But there it must end. Press freedom was dearly bought in Britain, and any government short-sighted enough to let their civil servants tamper with it (assuming they had the intelligence to frame legislation through which any competent barrister couldn’t drive a horse and
cart) would just find themselves defied. You can’t impose bad law on the Sun and the
News of the World
unless you assume totalitarian powers. And we are still some distance from that.

In the long run, one has to hope for a sense of decency and responsibility in journalists, but when it is lacking—as it sometimes is—there’s nothing to be done but put up with it. God knows there is plenty wrong with our press, and always has been (even in the halcyon days of which I prattle so proudly); its standards have slipped, and it can be intrusive and beastly, but we must console ourselves with the words of A. P. Herbert: “Just be thankful that it’s there.”

P.S. I can’t end without pointing out a distinction which politicians love to ignore and confuse, and about which the average reader may not have thought much. “Of public interest” and “in the public interest” are two entirely different things, as is plain if one looks at them closely. The first refers to something in which the public are interested, and will be happy to know; the second refers to something which, in the opinion of authority, it may or may not be good for the public to know. So when you hear either phrase used, correctly or not, pay very careful attention, because the bastards are probably up to something.

The sight of a pig urinating may seem an odd accompaniment to an observation on Montaigne, but that’s British television for you. Gone are the days when it could claim to be the best in the world; now, in addition to the decline in programme quality, it seems to be suffering from a curious desire among producers to shock and disgust the viewers. The Montaigne-pig juxtaposition was unpleasant, unnecessary, and the product of a mind insensitive to the point of coarseness, a gratuitous vulgarity certain to offend normal sensibility while appealing to the laddish element whom the producers presumably regard as the norm. This leaning towards
the ugly and distasteful is likewise seen in the close-ups of abdominal operations and carnivores tearing their prey to bloody shreds; the camera dwells on them even more lovingly than it does on stag beetles disembowelling each other, frogs and stick-insects copulating (along with the rest of the animal kingdom), and piles of festering rubbish featured in a programme about people whose occupation is cleaning up filth. (Muggeridge was right; you couldn’t make it up.)

But while one would rather not have such things sprung on one out of the screen, and wonders occasionally what kind of mind plainly revels in showing them, they are infinitely preferable to the late-night obscenities, the foul-mouthed “comedians”, the leering, filthy-minded chat show hosts of dubious sexual orientation mugging for their audiences of braying morons who think four-letter words the height of wit, the interminable explicit sex scenes, the sniggering innuendos of scruffy yobs on panel games, and the truly pathetic full-frontal displays by young idiots who think themselves ever so liberated and daring and haven’t the brain or imagination to wonder how they’ll feel when their grandchildren download the old fools’ shameful antics from the internet fifty years hence. Or perhaps they don’t give a dam.

Now, I know that I and my generation look prissy, prudish, and fuddy-duddy to a degree in Cool Britannia, being in thrall to those derided “Victorian values” which are such a hoot in the “in-yer-face” age. Of course we’re old, but even in our youth we wouldn’t have shared the modern delight in obscenity and ugliness and vicariously enjoyed suffering. We were squeamish that way, although no strangers to stark horror, death and disfigurement and pain and cruelty, and we committed and condoned deeds which are regarded as atrocious crimes today—but paradoxically, while our language was frequently foul and our sense of humour scabrous, and our behaviour uncouth, we did not care to have our maiden aunts offended, we cleaned up our language in public, we treated women
as ladies and they responded in kind, we had a strong sense of privacy and decent reticence, we knew what was “done” and what was “not done”. (Gad, how pompously antique can you get?)

Which probably looks like arrant hypocrisy to the youth of today. I don’t think so, but even if we were, a bit of judicious hypocrisy never hurt anyone in civilised society.

We had just as many faults as the young today, but they were different faults; we were of our age just as moderns are of theirs (God help them). And being of our time, we wonder why so much television is frankly godawful, and even horrible and disgusting—to us, that is. Can it be that the teenagers and twenty-somethings of today are simply unaware of how revolting some of their entertainments look to their elders—and would look to every previous age since time began? Possibly; it’s what they have been conditioned to accept and enjoy; they know no better.

But the children of the swinging sixties do, for they grew up in the twilight of a time when the old-fashioned values and ideals still lingered on in their parents, and one cannot help suspecting that resentment of that time and those people and values, a desire to raise two fingers to the past, and a rather unworthy intent to put the boot into the crumblies’ sensibilities, is at work in the broadcast media, particular in TV.

It is as though they had taken as their watchword the execrable dictum of an odious BBC director-general of their time, who said that there were some people whom one would be glad to offend. What an odd ambition, and what a curious state of mind. Some people one might reasonably be glad to kill or banish, perhaps…but to offend? How ill-mannered. But his outlook is plainly reflected by those in television who lose no opportunity of rubbing the viewer’s nose in filth, sparing no pains, apparently, to find new ways to upset and distress those who do not share their taste for the obnoxious.

There was a Scottish comedian whose declared ambition it was
to see how far he could go with his adult material. I’ve worked with him, and he is genial and charming; he is also one of the funniest men I’ve ever seen, a natural comedian who epitomises that delight in the ridiculous, that sense that life is essentially one tremendous joke, so characteristic of the Glaswegian. That is what can infuriate me: the man doesn’t
need
to be filthy. But he is internationally famous, and filth is the flavour of the time. A pity, when he has shown that he can be so much funnier without it.

I suppose it’s all part of the permissive society, and can be traced back to the Lady Chatterley case, which had the literary trendies dancing in the streets, and to the late Kenneth Tynan who, in uttering his notorious four-letter first, coined his own appropriate epitaph. The tragedy is that when the floodgates are opened only slightly, and possibly with the best of intentions, it’s only a matter of time before they’re torn off their hinges by the torrent. And eventually we have the diverting spectacle of those ultra-liberals who rejoiced at the Chatterley decision, pursing their lips and wondering if things haven’t gone a bit too far…

It is not only the eagerness to offend, so reminiscent of the third-former gleefully scrawling indecencies on the lavatory wall, that is deplorable in television; there is a morbid, garment-rending, often almost ghoulish quality about so much on our screens, a constant harping on disease and disability, on poverty and squalor, on social problems and alleged injustices and deprivations, on gloom and doom and all those fashionable obsessions which can be used to make the viewer feel thoroughly miserable—and, whenever possible, guilty. During the war, there was a prohibition against “spreading alarm and despondency”; with modern television it’s a fine art.

Could any viewer, listener, or broadcaster fifty years ago have dreamed of a time when an evening’s TV fare (and I have picked it entirely at random) would include
Vets in the Wild, Children’s
Hospital
, an episode of
The Bill
in which “Hollis uncovers strange
goings-on at a crematorium”, a report from South Africa on disabled athletes, an episode of
Brookside
in which “Mick is outraged at Gemma’s school for their harsh approach to drug-taking”, and on radio a report on brutalities by prison staff, plus life on three psychiatric wards?

Well, thank you, Noel Coward. I know I and my kind are trivial and light-minded, and that the modern media take their duties seriously, but really…I’m surprised the evening’s spot of homely fun didn’t include a programme on depression, or the victims of religious persecution in Lower Slobovia, or the endangered state of the great crested gob-stopper, or lingering coverage of emaciated beggars crawling with flies, presented by a reproachful TV commentator. Why not? We have already been given a series on Embarrassing Illnesses (“socially sensitive medical disorders”) with a riveting segment about piles.

I am not being heartless. I know it is considered proper and even essential that we be shown all these things, and feel care, concern, and compassion—but there’s a difference between presenting a balanced picture of the world’s activities and obsession with the unhealthy and unhappy. In my time I’ve seen enough of the world’s miseries close to, and I don’t need them shoved in my face night after night.

The depressive tendency in news and documentaries spills over into soaps and dramas, with the emphasis on the sordid and violent in series about the police, hospitals, women’s prisons, and just about every subject that lends itself to tragedy, enacted by coarse, unpleasant plebeians whose mode of communication is all too often an aggressive snarl or a hysterical scream, usually in a Cockney accent. Possibly this is some sort of therapy for the real-life Royle families (who I’m sure are legion), but it brings no comfort to those who see it for what it is: a shocking example, a picture of society, especially working-class society, that is neither attractive nor healthy, accompanied by a steady, persistent dumbing down,
a reduction to the lowest common denominator, a presentation of the worst kind of model for impressionable minds, especially in children. Nature has a habit of imitating art, and television is doing nothing to instil good behaviour, good manners, or good nature, to say nothing of morality or decency. Indeed, quite the opposite.

It is contended, frequently by purveyors of pornography and violence, that their programmes have no corrupting effect on the young. This is a wicked lie. The power of TV is acknowledged, even by the lunatic fringe, when it’s a question of discouraging excessive dieting in thin women, or helping to stamp out smoking, or promote safe sex. If TV had no influence, what would be the point of banning cigarette advertising? No, there is ample evidence of the effect of pornography and violence on the immature. What is less obvious is the slow, steady erosion of values, and the gradual deterioration of behaviour.

I cannot measure the effect on juveniles of programmes which show teenagers, plainly stoned out of their minds, raving under psychedelic lights, or flailing the air like religious fanatics in adulation of some squealing blonde or dreadlocked caterwauler, or being encouraged to talk smut by a frenzied slattern with a microphone, but I doubt if it’s good. I confess I even worry about such seemingly unimportant things as the sheer ugliness of teen fashions, of mere children with studs in their noses and tongues and navels, of their manipulation by a media which worships false gods like the appalling national lottery, and of their lack of ambition to improve themselves socially and culturally.

Once it was the ambition of young people to speak well (affected posh it would be considered nowadays), to talk like, say, the old BBC news readers or Alec Guinness or Valerie Hobson. Not now; the broadcast media have entered on a deliberate policy of encouraging regional accents—which are perfectly acceptable so long as they remain
universally
intelligible and are backed by a decent education. All too often they are neither; the dreadful Estuary English,
especially jarring in the quacking female, has replaced received pronunciation, and decent enunciation has followed good diction through the floor.

Naturally I have noticed most of all the deterioration in Scottish accents. Whether it is thought to be worthy and robustly Caledonian to talk like a Gorbals news vendor, I cannot say, but many Scots do who would once have aspired, if not to the mincing tones of Kelvinside and Morningside, at least to a pleasant articulation free of glottal stops—which interestingly enough have crept into Southern English speech of late, as company for the intrusive “r” on vowel endings. But in Scotland the voices of Alastair Sim and Andrew Cruickshank are heard no more, and even debate in the Scottish Parliament can sound like the rowdier exchanges on the Ibrox terracing.