Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

The Beasthouse is Dreaming

I have just been introduced to the online diary of writer Lawrence Miles. He was born in the same year as me, is a writer of Doctor Who novels (which I've considered doing), and is also... er... and was born in Middlesex, where I am currently resident. Anyway, his diary makes fantastic reading. Surely this is the kind of thing for which the Internet was made - an intelligent person rambling on about whatever comes into his head without any interfering editors. It's like Notes From Underground all over again.

Anyway, the last post on the diary says:

This journal won't be here much longer. Please take this opportunity to copy the best bits, paste them into a Word file with a possible view to using them as sig-files one day, then store it in your "unused porn that seemed much more interesting eight months ago" folder and see how long it stays there before you forget what the file called "beast.doc" is and have to open it just to make sure it's not what it sounds like.

That was dated August the 27th, so it's possible he's forgotten to demolish it, depending on what he meant by "much longer". Perhaps it will come down tomorrow. I'm going to take his advice, in a way, by cutting and pasting my favourite part (so far) from the journal into this blog entry. I would like to encourage others to do the same. Anyway, my favourite part of Lawrence Miles' online diary so far:

On Growing Up Stupid

Today: why am I clever?

No, another question first. When did contestants on University Challenge stop “reading” and start “studying”? There was a time when the use of the word “reading” was as much a part of the programme’s catchphrase-arsenal as “starter for ten” and “no conferring”. Every contestant would, from behind the twin safety-barriers of the studio desk and his own spectacles, introduce himself according to the formula “Martin Spatula from Northampton, reading microbiology” / “Tony Nabisco from Aberdeen, reading anthropology” / “Blackie Lawless from Wolverhampton, reading particle physics”. But now they’re studying these subjects rather than reading them, and if this is the case, then it can only mean that there’s been a conscious decision by the programme-makers to change the formula. Why? Presumably it isn’t because BBC producers have a problem with reading, or because they’re worried that it might subconsciously prod people to switch off the television and pick up a book instead, or because they don’t want members of the Open University to feel self-conscious. And yet…

…and yet even when I was a child, the word “reading” seemed peculiar, in this context. I never heard anyone in the real world use it that way, although admittedly, I didn’t know many university graduates when I was eight. These days, producers tend to have a problem with words which seem awkward, obscure, or just too elaborate for the lowest rung of the audience. This isn’t confined to television, either: I once had an editor who always made me replace the words “in retrospect” with the words “with hindsight”, apparently on the grounds that he thought “retrospect” might be too confusing for some of the readers. Is this the reason for the University Challenge change, I wonder? Did somebody look at the format of the programme and worry that the unexpected use of a verb might disturb viewers enough to make them switch channels? It sounds unlikely, especially since anyone who has trouble with unexpected verbs isn’t likely to be watching University Challenge in the first place, but television is known for the amount of pointless meddling that goes on there.

This presents us with another great bugbear of early-twenty-first-century Britain, somewhere just down the list from “Chavs” and “Americans” (the two natural enemies of the modern nation, one internal and one external). I speak, of course, of “dumbing down”. This is an argument that’s usually presented in terms of either class or out-and-out elitism, as if it’s a clash between Oxbridge-educated Old Boys who spend their days memorising poems in Latin and people whose idea of education is the ability to know when to say “bank”.

But I don’t think I know anyone over the age of thirty who doesn’t believe, either rationally or instinctively, that people are intrinsically stupider than they used to be. Why is this? True, most teachers will tell you that the education system went to pieces after the 1970s, but this doesn’t ring true as an all-round explanation. I don’t seem to be stupid, at least not in any sense but the social one, and yet I can say in all honesty that school never taught me a bleeding thing. So I’m amused by the current “anti-poverty” advertisement which insists that as well as food and healthcare, ‘every child has the right to go to school’. To me, school means bigotry, ignorance, terror, repression, savagery, and teachers whose idea of moral training seems to owe more to Jim Davidson than Mahatma Gandhi, so this is one of the many “rights” in our culture which I feel we could probably do without.

Then where did I get my smarts from, if indeed I can be said to have them? From my family? It seems doubtful: none of them ever tried to teach me anything at all, apart from my Stalinist granddad, and he was such a nuisance that I generally ignored anything he said. From reading, then? The usual assumption is that anyone literate must have learned everything they know from books, but I was never a big reader, and I used paperbacks to build castles more often than I tried looking inside them. From playing with Lego, possibly...? It sounds fatuous, but it did give me a keen sense of object-manipulation, and construction toys do have a proven effect on the minds of the young. And yet I didn’t spend that much time playing with Lego. Which leaves… television?

Yes. I did watch a huge amount of television. I’d certainly say that most of the “hard” knowledge I have about the world – knowledge of things and people and places, knowledge made up of solid facts rather than odd experiences – has come from television, not from the written word. Today, this sounds like the admission of someone with the intellectual faculties of either a footballer’s wife or a Dancing on Ice contestant, but the truth is… I think I’m part of the last generation in Britain which could realistically claim that TV makes you smarter. Before the 1980s, the BBC genuinely believed itself to be a public service, rather than just using the phrase “public service” as an excuse to draw in the licence fee. The gulf between BBC TV and the commercial channels was wider then, and I was brought up in a household that barely ever watched ITV. In those days, television was supposed to teach you things, it was supposed to take you places you’d never heard of and make you ask questions about the world. In effect, I’m the embodiment of BBC Man: middle-class and literate, but with no university background and educated almost entirely by my own sense of curiosity. This used to be seen as a kind of ideal, and perhaps the thing which bothers me most about the modern media is the knowledge that if I’d been born twenty-five years later, then I almost certainly would have grown up stupid. I, Claudius was no more historically accurate than a Mel Gibson movie, yet thousands of people felt compelled to find out more about ancient Rome after it was broadcast. The programmes Johnny Ball made for children’s television were basically just science lessons with jokes and big props that occasionally went “zzzoom” or “woop” or “ka-bang”, yet we went straight home after school and watched this stuff of our own free will. Is there any populist programme now, on any channel, that even considers the notion of “finding out”? Even documentary series like Horizon come across as soundbite versions of the subject matter, rather than trying to get the viewers genuinely involved.

(Actually, the only modern programme I can think of which ostensibly tries to rouse the intellectual curiosity of the audience is Q.I., despite the offensive host and the rule which seems to demand that one panellist per week will be utterly unbearable. There’s a risk of repeating myself here, so I’ll simply say that in a programme that’s meant to be about strange and interesting facts, repeatedly hiring Jo Brand to sit on the panel and shout ‘who cares?’ is like hiring someone to stand behind the chair on Mastermind and make farting noises whenever the contestant tries to answer a question.)

I said, just a few days ago, that marketing has done more damage to our culture than anything else in the Western world. What they call “dumbing down” is part of the same process: a universal blanding-out, a system of removing all the awkward, unexpected details in order to get the widest possible audience response. But generation by generation, this just makes the audience stupider. You end up clever if there are things in your environment that make you want to find out how the world works. You end up stupid if you’ve got no reason to even ask questions. Remove the interesting crinkles, take away the awkward spiky bits, and… yes, you probably do get a better audience appreciation index. You also get a society full of dullards.

I don’t know whether they really did change University Challenge because they thought “reading” might confuse the audience. But the point remains that intelligence has got nothing to do with how much you know, and everything to do with your ability to contextualise. When someone tells you they’re reading microbiology, you instinctively know that “reading” means “studying”, because nothing else would make sense in that context. Changing it seems like an admission that the viewers might not be able to work it out for themselves. So if the two words essentially mean the same thing in this context, then why should I think “reading” is preferable…? Quite simply because it does come across as a bit odd, because the curious, almost-archaic sound of it made the English language seem slightly more interesting, even if it didn’t exactly liven up the programme. Now things are slightly less interesting, which is what “dumbing down” really means.