Now That I Run The Country

It came as a real shock at Christmas 2011 when I realised that I now run the country. News reached me in November that year when I discovered that the John  Lewis Christmas advertisement was to feature 'Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want' by The Smiths. The Smiths? The soundtrack of my youth? One of the first bands I liked that the adults totally didn't get? That swaggering mixture of shimmering guitars, gutsy rhythms, and Morrissey's profoundly subversive lyrics and profoundly subversive presence? Now attached to the middle-aged, middle-class solidly respectable ordinariness of John Lewis? But of course it was. Because I now run the country.

When I was young, pre-teen, one of the most familiar figures on TV was Max Bygraves. He was a guest on a lot of chat shows. He would come on, tell jokes and sing songs on various TV programmes. Comedians would tell jokes that assumed we knew who he was. He was a standard part of any impressionist's repertoire alongside Frank Spencer and Eddie Waring. But I knew who Frank Spencer was. I also knew who Eddie Waring was - well, no I didn't; I assumed the beginning and end of Eddie Waring was keeping the score on It's a Knockout (younger readers may need to Google It's a Knockout because for complicated moral and legal reasons, you will never get to watch that again). Max Bygraves was a singer and, somewhat, a comedian. His schtick was his cockney accent, his working class childhood and a series of songs, alternately childish ('You're a Pink Toothbrush', 'Gilly Gilly Ossenfeffer Katzenellenbogen By the Sea') and syrupy ('You Need Hands'). He had some big hits in the 1950s but they dried up in the sixties because, well, The Beatles and, well, The Sixties and he just clearly wasn't a figure of the times any more.

So why was he on TV two decades later in the late 1970s/early 1980s? Because the people who were making the creative decisions at the major television companies at that time were probably in their mid-forties and when they were teenagers in the late 40s, they loved Max Bygraves. They remember his humour, his alternatively childish and sentimental songs, his stories about growing up in the East End, the sketches he did between the numbers, and they probably thought he might speak to a new generation, and at least he'd speak to the generation that grew up with him and anyway, fuck it, let's get our childhood hero on the TV. Max had spent some of the seventies trading precisely on this nostalgia with his series of Singalongamax (etc.) albums throughout the decade, so he wasn't going to complain. Which is why, in 1979, a ten-year old kid in Lambeth, South London, could do a Max Bygraves impression to his friends and they all knew who I was impersonating. Because the people who grew up with Max Bygraves were now running the country.

I don't run the country, obviously. I've never been asked and anyway I'm busy. But my generation runs the country. David Cameron and Nick Clegg are between a year and eighteen months older than me. George Osborne and Ed Miliband are both a couple of years younger than me. As in government, so in theatre: Rufus Norris and Vicky Featherstone are only a wee bit older than I am. My generation's childhood is everywhere. The adverts are full of the music and imagery I grew up with, the way that adverts in the 1970s parodied wartime scenes, Angel Delight was sold with a Cole Porter song, and Ovalteen revived The Ovalteenies and everyone probably thought it was brilliant. My childhood is part of official nostalgia now. On X Factor, they have a Queen night, everyone likes Wham! and hipster bands studiedly revisit the New Romantics and David Cameron apparently likes The Smiths. Last year, they decided to remake Robocop too, because now I run the country.

But I don't like it and I'll tell you why. Not because I think The Smiths have sold out - that would be an quite ridiculous thing to say for someone who goes to John Lewis as much as I do. Not because they shouldn't be on an advert. I love the song; why not stick it in an advert? Not because it was a bad version. Hell, it was pleasant. A bit dull, a bit respectful but it was okay.

The reason I don't like it is that I can't bear the habit of cherishing the way things were when we were young. It's one of the dullest, dullest clichés of the middle aged that we so often believe that music was much better when we were teenagers. Music meant different things when I was 18, when I was frantically forming new synaptic connections along to the minimal amounts of music I could afford to buy; when I was newly adult and independent and I was making my own choices for the first time so every song shaped you like a mortar shell slamming into a field. The fact is that we will always find music that we love when we are 18 because that's what being 18 is. The mistake is to assume that it's the music that's special. It's not the music that's special; it's you, aged 18, that are special.

Which brings me to Michael Gove.

Michael Gove must be the most interventionist Secretary of State for Education this country has ever had. And by interventionist, I mean he paddles his interfering fingers in things about which he knows nothing. Now, given the tendency of Education Secretaries of all political stripes to meddle in the the structures of education at every level, this is saying something. But Gove has ignorantly interfered with education all the way from the macro - introducing Free Schools that compete for resources and children with the state sector - to the micro - he's just had Of Mice and Men removed from the syllabus on the unimpeachably pedagogical grounds that he doesn't care much for the book.

What is intriguing about Gove, though, is that, unlike most of his fellow Cabinet members, I don't believe his attacks on education are purely ideological. I don't think Gove is all that political. I think he just acts from a peculiarly intense sense of nostalgia for the way things were for him.

Take GCSE and A-Level. When Gove and I were teenagers, we did O Levels (almost entirely timed, formal, sit-down exams, almost entirely unseen, almost entirely writing essays, or great lists of questions) and we did A Levels (almost entirely the same). Doing a resit was virtually unheard of. You spent two years on an A Level and it all hung on maybe six hours in an exam hall over a couple of days. Having a bad day? Tough luck. A considerable amount of the preparation for History or for English was preparing a series of instantly modifiable skeleton essays that you could like lightning adapt to fit virtually any question asked, together with a handful of laboriously learned facts or quotes, adaptable to all exam situations. 

I was good at exams so I hope what I say now will have the force of experience. I was good at A Level exams, because I had worked out how to do exams and nothing else. I hadn't worked out how properly to evaluate the Enlightened Despots, or read Sense and Sensibility, or talk engagingly to a French person. Formal, timed, sit-down exams prepare you (a) to blag your way through intellectual challenges and (b) for literally nothing that will ever happen in your life outside the exam hall. In how many jobs does your boss say, you're going to be trained for two years and then you'll have to demonstrate your ability once and never again and you'll be judged on that for literally ever? Not many. More important, all the research over thirty years has shown that exams don't test people well, that they are particularly biased against girls, that they model a very narrow range of intellectual skills. 

When they introduced GCSEs - a year or two after I did my O Levels - they introduced an element of course work. The A Levels became a bit more modular: not everything happened at the end. The exams changed, requiring less cramming and learning of quotes, and more an ability to respond to new experiences. They tested a much greater range of people's abilities than essays. They meant that teachers were preparing their students for genuine intellectual skills: the ability to think intelligently on your feet, identify a problem, search for solutions, frame an answer. Unsurprisingly, exam results started to go up. At which point all those people who then ran the country started to complain because clearly education was magically perfect when they did their exams and now it's too easy.

Then Michael Gove showed up. Gove also thinks exams are too easy. Gove's reforms of A Level and GCSE are to turn the clock back. He wants to scrap most of the course work. He wants to make the qualifications, in the unfortunate terminology, terminal. He wants them to be linear. He wants them to be the exams he took when he was a teenager. And the thing is, there's no real ideology in this. I mean, sure, he thinks it's all very odd when lots and lots of people do well because in any competition there should be losers as well as winners, and I'm sure he has his party's fundamentalist conviction that introducing competition to a system always works, but I think he mainly just prefers things the way they were. Now, I'm not terribly fussed about Of Mice and Men being taken off the syllabus - sure!  give another book a chance! - though I do think it bizarre that this decision should be made purely because Michael Gove doesn't care for it. But then he's trying to remake the whole education system to be like the one he happened to do, so should we be surprised?

I think this is an ethical matter. Exams do not prepare you for openness. They prepare you to be tensed against the curve ball; they prepare you to be resilient and bloody-minded enough to face a new question and say what you already knew. Is this how we should live our lives? Should we not aim to be engaged, curious, alert, open people, as fully alive as we can be to the new experiences that world can offer? Isn't that a better, richer way to experience the world? To insist that I can change, I constantly change, because I take seriously the possibility that any experience, any book, a new friend, a piece of music, that loops the loop through my imagination might change who I am?

We all know people who have the opposite attitude, who affect a pose of boredom at everything, who are never happier when finding fault with the play or the song or the novel. People who Know What They Like and Know What They Think and Have Seen It All Before. People who can't wait to be the first person to say how much they disliked the show you've just seen (these people can often be heard on Radio 4's Saturday Review). These are the people who literally and metaphorically put The Smiths on the John Lewis advert, because they formed their tastes when they were 18 and have just been putting intellectual fat around it ever since. It's a deeply conservative view of the world; it's embodied in Gove's education reforms, and I hate it.

Michael Gove is only six months older than me and so I feel I have to apologise. Because these terrible things are happening now that I run the country.

Soap Opera

A row has broken out over the reviews of a new production of Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier at Glyndebourne. The critics have objected to aspects of the performance, specifically to the body-type of Tara Erraught, who is playing Count Octavian. Here's what they've said:

'Tara Erraught’s Octavian is a chubby bundle of puppy-fat, better suited to playing Mariandel in Acts 1 and 3 than the romantic rose-cavalier of Act 2 - ' wrote Andrew Clark in the Financial Times, adding, as if this is a distantly secondary consideration - 'albeit gloriously sung'. At least Rupert Christiansen in the Telegraph applauds her singing before turning to her figure: 'she is dumpy of stature and whether in bedroom déshabille, disguised as Mariandel[,] or in full aristocratic fig, her costuming makes her resemble something between Heidi and Just William. Is Jones simply trying to make the best of her intractable physique or is he trying to say something about the social-sexual dynamic?'. Richard Morrison in The Times makes even swifter work of her performance: 'Unbelievable, unsightly and unappealing'. In The Independent, Michael Church originally called Erraught a 'dumpy girl', though has had the cowardly decency to get that quietly edited out. Even The Guardian gets in on the act with Andrew Clements declaring that 'it's hard to imagine this stocky Octavian as this willowy wom[a]n's plausible lover'.

These critics are wrong at so many levels, that it's hard to disentangle them. First, of course, it's really disgraceful to say these personal and unpleasant things about another human being who, let's remember, has to go on stage every night in front of an audience and sing this role. At this level the problem is one of impoliteness. Second, there is the horrible, sneering misogyny of these comments. As if being 'unsightly and unappealing' to Richard Morrison is something an opera singer should be criticised for. Kiri Te Kanawa was on Radio 4 this morning and her dreadful defence of Erraught was to say she'd been frumpily costumed and anyway she's a 'lovely little girl'. Look, I think the picture at the top of this article shows how beautiful Erraught is, but that is not the point. It's about male opera critics thinking they have a right to judge a mezzo-soprano almost entirely on her looks. As we've seen Andrew Clark only adds a comment on her singing as an afterthought; Andrew Clements deals with the three women leads' voices in a sentence. Michael Church and Richard Morrison don't mention Erraught's  singing at all.

There has been some push-back, notably from the former North American editor of Gramophone, Anastasia Tsioulcas, who is wonderfully icy and determined in her remarks. The great Alice Coote has written a powerful attack on these reviews. Her argument is simple: these criticisms are entirely out of place because 'OPERA is ALL about the voice'. Any reference to the visual aspect of a body is irrelevant, because Opera 'is about and really ONLY about communication through great singing'. 

Is that right? Let me first say that I've not seen this production. Let me also admit that I'm not an avid operagoer. But I think there are some principles at stake here that overlap opera and theatre, about which I do know something. I am sure it is true to say that the vocal performance in opera is supremely important and by that we mean something live; it is not true to say that everything you can from live performance can be got from a recording. As in theatre, it's not just the performance but that the performance is happening there, right there, for us, by that extraordinary human being only a few arms' length away and which will never be repeated in quite the same way again. But that doesn't mean that this is the only thing that opera is about. In the nineteenth century, operas were frequently given as little more than recitals in some form of costume. Audiences were there for the live performance but not for the theatre of it. After Wagner and other innovators, the production became much more important and opera became immersive theatre avant la lettre a fusion of all the arts at the highest level, straining to give experiences of transcendent ravishment. So while opera may place the vocal performance at its heart or its height, it does not seem correct to say that comments on the visual aspects of the performance are out of place. Sexist and misogynist comments are - for other reasons - disgraceful but that doesn't mean critics should not be entitled, indeed encouraged, to assess the visual aspects of the performance.

Which leads me to my main point. It seems to me not a problem that the critics are making comments on the visuals; I don't even think that the fundamental problem is the sexism. It's the preposterous literalism of these comments that seems so out of place. 

Let's just recap here. This is the story of Der Rosenkavalier: Octavian is the young and secret lover of the older Princess von Werdenberg, whose husband is away. After a night of passionate sex, they are repeatedly interrupted and almost discovered, so Octavian dresses up as a chambermaid 'Mariandel' and thereby attracts the attention of the Princess's cousin, Baron Ochs. The Baron himself has been wooing the beautiful and wealthy heiress Sophie and is seeking a rose-cavalier, a young nobleman to take a silver rose to her as a way of proposing marriage on the Baron's behalf. This Octavian does but he and Sophie fall in love at once and Sophie spurns her fiancé. The Baron is furious and in the confusion is scratched with a sword, whereupon he pretends to be gravely wounded; the marriage is back on the cards. Octavian sends a letter purporting to be from Mariandel, accepting an invitation to dinner, so the Baron thinks he has both women. But as they are dining together, some hired hands have created a strange pantomime in which ghostly figures accuse the Baron and others appear claiming to be his wife and children. All is chaos, topped by Sophie's father discovering the tryst and fainting. Eventually the Princess arrives, sees off the Baron, and gives up her young lover Octavian to marry Sophie.

Chekhov it ain't. This is a farcical story, a broadly comic opera with some deeper resonances about the fickleness of male affection and the toll of time on women's attractiveness to men (a thematic which might have given - but didn't - those opera critics pause before they declared themselves on the matter of Erraught's figure). There is, to be sure, some degree of psychological truthfulness - it's not an entirely surreal fantasy - but its brush is broad and the strokes are vividly coloured. 

Can I just point out a couple of other obvious things? Octavian is conceived as a breeches role. It's a male role, to be played by a woman. This creates all sorts of non-realistic resonances: we watch a woman playing a man playing a woman; it allows for all sorts of queer frissons in the relationships between Octavian and the Marschallin and between Octavian and Sophie and between Octavian and the Baron Ochs and between Octavian and Mariandel; it also creates pleasurable intertextual references to similar breeches roles like Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro. And finally: they're singing. The whole way through, when we know that in the imagined fictional world they are speaking, here we are seeing them singing. 

This is not naturalism. What we see is not what we take to be happening in the opera's fictional world. This is probably truer of opera than any other kind of performance. 

But look at the miserable defences that these critics have made of their comments? Richard Morrison in The Times this morning declared that audience 'expect dramatic credibility. They get that in films, in TV dramas and in the spoken theatre and don't see why exceptions have to be made for opera. When they are paying up to £215 a ticket, as at Glyndebourne, those expectations are pretty high'.

What a crock of shit. First, just because you see something in one cultural area, it does not mean you expect to see it somewhere else. On TV and film I see images projected against a screen; I don't expect to see that in the theatre. When I read novels and poetry, I see words printed on a page; I don't think I have a right to see that in an Opera, even if I were paying £500 a ticket. The problem here is that he's used this weaselly term 'dramatic credibility' and then secretly decided it means realism. But it doesn't mean that and he's offered no explanation for why he thinks it means that. And, let's also remember: this is a Richard Jones opera production. Richard Jones, who has probably gone as far from naturalism as any major director in this country; a man who has staged a scratch-and-sniff Love of Three Oranges for ENO in the early nineties is probably not really fishing in the naturalism pond.

This is important, because if the idea that the theatre can only represent the world through visual verisimilitude takes hold in opera, we're all sunk. Opera is like the bulwark against this kind of thin-lipped, flat-minded literalism in live performance. It has everything going for it: music (never realistic), the plots (never realistic), the scale (never realistic), the casting (never realistic), the designs (mostly unrealistic). There is always this push towards the directly realistic, the relatable (hideous hideous word), the accessible (defined as narrowly as possible). And these things are modes in which theatre can move and has moved very valuable from time to time, but it is a small percentage of what the theatre can be. How much will we impoverish ourselves and hurt the grandeur of a culture by telling extraordinary women like Tara Erraught that she's too fat to play a man who could attract two women. And there again, we see the thinness of this so-called realism: how many big, fat, generous, fleshy guys do you see with slim and beautiful women? Loads. This isn't realism; it's literal-mindedness which in turn is a mask for ideology.

Morrison suggests that it would be hypocritical to suggest that the production doesn't want us to comment on the bodies: 'The curtain goes up on the Marschallin, played by Kate Royal, gyrating - totally naked - in a shower of glitter. What is that except a blatant incitement for the audience (and critics) to take an interest in the bodies on stage as well as the voices?' See again, the duplicity and confusions. First, one naked body doesn't licence you to simply write the entire review with your cock in hand. Second, there's a keyword there: glitter. Is this a deliberate appeal to your lust or is it a knowing, camp, representation of desire as excess? Is it not referring to the gaze of the male/female Octavian, staging it as problem and question? Third, taking an interest in the bodies on stage is not the same as rebuking a woman for her weight. You should notice the bodies, but the bodies are part of the whole system by which the production is asking us to look again at this story, these characters, these feelings, that music, this opera. It is not an invitation for critics to fat-shame a young woman.

Fair's Fair

There's a thing people have started saying which interests and puzzles me. It's 'to be fair'. Now, I know what 'to be fair' usually means, but what's happening now is that people are using it exactly in place of 'to be honest'.

It's a very subtle shift of meaning but it's definitely happening: I've noticed it for a couple of years now. I first heard it in footballers' post-match interviews. 'Our defending just isn't good enough, to be fair', 'if we want to escape relegation, we're going to have to give it 110%, to be fair'. But it's spread elsewhere. Last week, I heard a chef in a TV cookery competition admit 'If I don't up my game I'm going home, to be fair'.

Each of these comments would have made perfect sense with 'to be honest' in the place of 'to be fair'. They make slightly less clear sense with 'to be fair'.

What's happening here?

First let's recap on what these two different adverbial clauses mean. 'To be honest' announces, as it says, a confession, a new level of honesty. It says, 'I'll come clean'; it suggests sincerity and honesty ('to be honest, I just haven't got round to it', 'to be honest, I just don't know'). It doesn't just have to mean laying oneself bare in a vulnerable way; it can also be used to announce the removal of euphemism and tact ('to be honest, I'm really wondering why I don't just sack you', 'to be honest, you're getting on my tits'). It adds force or authority to an utterance by drawing attention to one's personal attitudes, beliefs and opinions.

'To be fair', previous to this new shift, meant a re-establishment of balance. Either I have been unfair to you (or another), as in 'to be fair, though, he does work very hard' or 'no, you did say that, to be fair'; or you (or another) have been unfair to me, 'to be fair, you'd have to admit I've been saying this since July', 'to be fair, that was not in our agreement'. 'To be fair' in this context adds force or authority by drawing attention to impersonal facts about the world.

What is interesting then, is that people using 'to be fair' in this new context are replacing a directly personal declaration with one that has the appearance of being impersonal. 'Our defending isn't good enough, to be fair' has the patina of reasonableness, objectivity as if we're talking about someone else; 'our defending isn't good enough, to be honest' sounds, in comparison, like a vulnerable admission; it is almost a confession that brings about a crisis. It charges the present encounter with meaning and momentum; I am saying something to you. Something has to change, both in the fault being admitted and the nature of the present encounter. But 'our defending isn't good enough, to be fair' allows acknowledgement of error but holds it at a distance, cools it down.

In that sense, I wonder if it is similar to the epidemic of 'myself' that I've noted before. Its an impersonalisation of a personal utterance, as if our language is reflecting an aversion to personal encounters. It's a way of avoiding the emotional intensity of the situation. 

Interviewer. How happy are you with your own performance?
Footballer. I guess that's for yourself to judge.
Interview. You must have an opinion.
Footballer. Our defending isn't good enough, to be fair.

This is not an implausible exchange (listen to BBC 5Live on any Saturday, you'll hear versions of this). I think in this context, it may be about a footballer not wanting to come out and say 'I played badly', because of (a) ego and (b) not wanting to let down team morale. But it has spread into the wider culture and I wonder if we do culturally have a problem now with face-to-face contact. I'm sure I'm not the only person who prefers to email or text than to speak on the phone. That's partly about control and convenience; rather than commit to a negotiation, you can just send off your question and now it's up to someone else to deal with. But this creates an attenuation of everything else that's involved in communication; maintenance of friendship beyond mere utility, checking in on a sense of community, the  exchange of informalities, small acts of emotional labour, the grain of the voice.

And what if the values and practices of email and text were to creep further into face-to-face contact, such that the latter becomes reduced to utilitarian exchanges, hemmed in by health warnings and risk aversion? Odd verbal formations like the new 'to be fair' are perhaps the linguistic equivalent of those warnings at the bottom of corporate emails. This from the BBC:

This e-mail (and any attachments) is confidential and may contain personal views which are not the views of the BBC unless specifically stated.
If you have received it in error, please delete it from your system.
Do not use, copy or disclose the information in any way nor act in reliance on it and notify the sender immediately.
Please note that the BBC monitors e-mails sent or received.
Further communication will signify your consent to this.

There's something about 'to be fair' that suspends the situation, holds it in tongs, sanitises and quarantines what we're talking about.

This new 'to be fair' seems to me part of the way we are turning away from personal contact, allowing a form of privatisation of the public sphere. How can we reacquaint ourselves with each other, commit ourselves once again to just being with one another, unlimited by what we need to get out of any exchange?

And in case you think I'm pointing the finger anywhere else, I'm really not. This is a note to self, to be fair.