Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy

by David Mitchell

  But there are nice moments when you can let yourself off that decision hook and film things in a way that allows you to “decide in the edit”. It’s a wonderful phrase. We don’t have to work out what’s best now, all tired and stressed; we can defer the decision to “the edit” – the promised land of future wisdom where the right course of action will become clear.

  With that in mind, I found the news that Netflix is planning a new kind of TV show, in which viewers get to decide key plot decisions for themselves, incredibly relaxing. It’s been described as the TV equivalent of those “Choose Your Own Adventure” and “Fighting Fantasy” books that were big in the 80s. In this utopian vision, programme-makers wouldn’t just get to defer difficult decisions to the edit, but to their viewers’ very living rooms. “You bloody decide!” we’ll be able to say. “We’ll shoot it both ways and you pick. And if you hate it, it’s your fault!”

  This would be a return to people making their own entertainment, but instead of singing “D’Ye Ken John Peel?” to the wheezing of an accordion, they get to assemble their own classic comedy and drama from a bewildering array of scenes with glitteringly high production values laid out for them by the world’s wealthiest online broadcaster. Just don’t lose the remote.

  This plan is brilliant in two ways. First, it is the sort of thing people will always say they want, like New Coke. If you survey people or herd them into focus groups and ask them if they’d like more control over a thing, they’ll invariably say yes. It feels lame to say anything else, particularly if you’re the sort of person who ends up doing surveys and taking part in focus groups. By doing that, you’re already signalling a desire to affect things, to make your view count. The chances of such a person saying “No thanks – I’d rather the people who made the programmes decided the story” are never going to hit the 50% required to generate negative feedback about this crackpot scheme. So it’s guaranteed a positive buzz.

  And second, by announcing this, Netflix must know it will further put the wind up other, more conventional broadcasters. There’ll be a worried meeting at the BBC about the technical limitations of the red button, Channel 4 will start examining logos for their version and having meetings with execs from Tinder in the hope they’ll pay for it, and ITV will buy the rights to The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. It’s brilliant propaganda, like a country at war starting rumours of a new super-weapon. Suddenly their enemies’ resources start being wasted on trying to compete with a phantasm.

  The only downside is that no one will want it. It’s like 3D, which every generation of film-makers makes another fruitless attempt at getting cinema-goers excited about. I’d be amazed if lower-tech versions of Netflix’s notion haven’t been pitched every eight to 15 years since the dawn of TV. And, in the current technological context, the idea falls perfectly equidistantly between the two stools of fiction and video games. It has the strengths of neither and the weaknesses of both. The fact that people enjoy both hot baths and rollercoasters doesn’t make the two experiences ripe for merger.

  People like stories. Not as much as they like food or shelter, but a lot. And a good story is held together by one question: what happens next? It’s a question for the audience to ask and the storyteller to answer. It’s something an entertained audience wants to find out, not decide. There’s no suspense if the denouement is of your own devising.

  * * *

  Nowadays the BBC seems to get attacked by everyone, but back in March 2016 it was left to the Conservative government to do most of the kicking …

  There’s a new word in the lexicon of media bullshit: it is “distinctiveness”. A report, commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and published last week, argues that “greater distinctiveness” in the BBC’s output will allow its commercial rivals to make an extra £115m a year.

  That seems pretty great, doesn’t it? The BBC’s output gets massively more “distinctive”, which sounds like absolutely unanswerably superb news, and at the same time commercial broadcasters make millions of extra pounds. How hugely splendid all round. Hooray.

  So what is this “distinctiveness” that we’re all going to be enjoying? What are distinctive things? Well, I’m immediately thinking of the taste of chicken liver, the sound of James Mason’s voice, the design tradition of Citroën cars until the late 80s, the smell of pipe smoke, the style of Raymond Chandler’s prose. Those are all thoroughly attractive attributes, and I can’t wait for the BBC’s TV and radio programmes to sort of somehow start having more of that kind of thing about them.

  And, in other related brilliantness, ITV, Sky, Heart FM et al. will have lots more money – which obviously isn’t distinctive at all, a certain uniformity being an unavoidable drawback of any currency, but is still nice to have, and they can always choose to use it to buy lovely distinctive things, like sci-fi chess sets, pool showers made out of telephone boxes, toby jugs and clown shoes. So that’s great too.

  Unfortunately, the distinctiveness of a Hitchcock movie, a Lowry painting or a Cole Porter lyric doesn’t seem to be the sort the report is getting at, because that’s a kind people really like. That would be entirely counterproductive to its stated aims. By “distinctiveness”, the report means that the BBC should deliberately target smaller and more niche audiences, in order to allow the commercial sector to take the bigger ones. Its distinctive flavour would be less like chicken liver and more like calves’ brains. Because that would be fairer on the marketplace.

  This repellent tang is to be achieved in broadly three ways: the corporation should generate more content in less populist, and indeed less popular, genres; it should schedule programmes less aggressively; and it should take more risks in commissioning new ones. So Radio 1 should be more like Radio 1Xtra, broadcasting more obscure music and talking. The news website should ditch entertainment and soft news stories in favour of in-depth analysis. And BBC1 should do arts documentaries in primetime, make more new programmes and stop using Strictly Come Dancing as a stick with which to beat The X Factor.

  These aren’t terrible ideas. Aggressive scheduling is annoying. I’m sure many viewers, as well as ITV’s shareholders, take the view that, if the BBC were to rise above the fray and schedule Strictly Come Dancing at a time that doesn’t clash with The X Factor, it would be serving the public better. And the notion of more primetime arts, science and history programming, more analytical journalism and more risk-taking new commissions is metaphorical music to ears that scorn Radio 2’s literal kind.

  But these ideas have not been arrived at in order to improve the BBC, but specifically to make it do less well. The report doesn’t advocate highbrow content despite the fact that it might not be popular, but because of it. If a new BBC1 documentary about Turgenev for seven o’clock on Saturday nights turned out to be a runaway ratings winner, then that too should be axed and replaced by something else.

  The report’s authors advocate greater risk-taking specifically in the hope that such risks do not pay off. For them, the only risk is that they do. If the distinctiveness they claim is vital were actually to be enjoyed by more people than the corporation’s current output, then ITV, Sky and Channel 5 would be complaining about that and the culture secretary would have to commission a report calling for more blandness, less risk-taking and more audience-despising primetime bilge.

  This puts the BBC in an almost impossible position. How can a broadcasting institution be expected deliberately to perform less well than it’s capable of? To put shows on at a certain time, when it knows more people would watch them at another time? To stop making its most popular programmes and not merely take risks on new shows that might not be so popular, but on ones that had better bloody not be or there’ll be hell to pay in Whitehall? This is like telling a boxer to throw a fight and make it look realistic. And what’s to be the corporation’s reward – its equivalent of a bookie’s massive bribe? At most, to limp through charter renewal with comparatively little further pummelling. For now.

  T
he BBC is under unprecedented political pressure, its morale is low and those who work for it and run it are understandably asking the question: what do we have to do to assuage our critics, to be allowed to continue? This report’s answer can be summed up in one word: fail. Fundamentally, that is the requirement. “More distinctive” is just a way its authors have found of saying “less successful”, but which they think will nevertheless sound vaguely positive to media wankers who flatter themselves that they’re creative. Idiots with clever-sounding jobs can nod along with the uncontroversial-seeming concept of distinctiveness and are very unlikely to bother working out what it actually means.

  It will be a fight to get rid of the BBC. Of the nearly 200,000 people who responded to a government consultation also published last week, 81% said the BBC was serving its audience “well or very well”. People still like it, they still consume its services more than any other broadcaster’s, and so, crucially, they would miss it. This report is in favour of reducing its audience – but, according to Mark Oliver, one of the study’s authors, it “would still leave BBC reach at a level that would be sufficient to maintain support for the licence”.

  Maybe it would. For now. But this report makes the strategy of those commercially or ideologically opposed to the BBC startlingly clear. An overt challenge to the corporation’s existence remains politically unfeasible – the public would miss it too much. The first step, then, is to turn it into something that fewer people would miss – and eventually, over time, to make it so distinctive that hardly anyone likes it at all.

  * * *

  My parents are the owners of what I’m pretty sure is a bad painting of Neath Abbey. I can’t be completely certain because I know nothing about painting and I’ve never seen Neath Abbey. But it doesn’t look much like anything I have seen, so I’m willing to believe it looks like Neath Abbey. Though not that it looks exactly like Neath Abbey – it’s not credible to me that any medieval ruin (Neath Abbey is a medieval ruin) could, in real life, so closely resemble a vertical plane of dried paint.

  My best shot at an objective conclusion about it is that someone of above average painting skill for a human, but below average for a professional artist, has rendered on canvas some shapes which, if you knew Neath Abbey, would remind you of it but wouldn’t come close to fooling you that you were really looking at it.

  These are deep waters, I realise. Ignorant about art though I am, I’ve still heard the whole thing about some paintings not having to look exactly like their subjects, or anything at all, to be deemed good. I get that – it’s not photography. Everything’s valid in a certain sort of way. Unless it isn’t.

  Because, of course, there is another category: paintings that don’t look exactly like their subjects, but were meant to. They look wrong, but not in a Picasso two-eyes-on-the-same-side-of-the-nose way that pushes through into being applauded. They’re a narrower miss: nowhere near the triple 20, but it’s hit the board, so the thrower can’t get away with claiming he wasn’t playing darts in the first place. I reckon that’s what we’re dealing with here.

  The artist, by the way, is long dead. I don’t know his name, but the story in our family is that, about 100 years ago, he gave the painting as payment of a bar bill to an ancestor of my mother’s who ran a pub. He obviously didn’t owe very much.

  For all that, I love it. It’s large, dark and old, and it’s got a thick gilt frame. It’s extremely painting-like. It’s a big old painting and, deep in my middle-class soul, I know there’s nothing better for making a room seem posh than a big old painting on the wall.

  So I was interested to see it reported that big old paintings are falling out of favour. Sir Nicholas Penny, former director of the National Gallery, wrote in the London Review of Books that art investors and collectors are suffering from “a sort of collective intoxication” with contemporary art and that institutions founded to house “old art” were now “determined to welcome” new works.

  It appears the market for top-end modern artworks is booming because, Penny says, they’re being “bought as investments, more than has ever previously been the case; they are deemed to constitute a secure ‘alternative asset class’”. This trend is receiving “strong institutional endorsement from the museums that hope to receive, or at least to borrow, some of this art” and is further enhanced by “a background of popular enthusiasm”. This last point is illustrated by the fact that visitor numbers for Tate Modern are much higher than for its elder sister, Tate Britain.

  Now he comes to mention it, I think I’ve noticed this going on. Everything seems increasingly modern arty. It goes with that clean and spacious interior design style that magazines and hotels are so insistent on. All glass and marble and exposed brick. Big expanses of floor or wall, perfect for some interesting “piece”: perhaps a giant pair of neon lips, or a floor-to-ceiling shiny acrylic rendition of part of the word “February”, or half a Fiat Uno with Marilyn Monroe’s head bobbing through the sunroof on a spring.

  I’m probably letting myself down with these dated or inexact references. Maybe it isn’t Marilyn Monroe any more, though vaguely Monroeish imagery seems to have been a resilient feature of this kind of clobber ever since Warhol kicked it all off. So perhaps I mean tall nobbly taupe sticks, or giant aluminium fish, or a huge, voluptuously lashed eye with a tiny golden ear at the very centre of the pupil, or a giant hunk of cheese marked “chalk”, or a small watercolour of the front at Sidmouth with a swastika daubed on it in dog shit.

  I’m not being fair, but I’m not really talking about the art, which I don’t understand and never will. I’m talking about the “modern art” domestic look, as opposed to the “old pictures” domestic look. For these purposes, I lump Constable in with the Neath Abbey bar bill guy, and whoever incontrovertibly does modern art well with whoever incontrovertibly does it badly (and if there’s no consensus about who’s in which camp, please don’t tell me as I’ll find it frustrating).

  You see, to me, modern art usually looks vulgar. Not in a gallery, where it looks appropriate – I mean at home. I don’t much like it – I think it’s jarring and is often an attempt on the part of its owner to project both taste and originality. In my view, you have to pick one. Going for the double is hubristic, and the physical manifestation of that hubris is a horrible living room you’re pretending to like. Get some bookshelves up and a bunch of old paintings, maybe a little table covered in family photos and knick-knacks – that’ll be much nicer.

  I’m now just shouting at hippies to get a haircut, and of course people can do whatever they want with their homes (and who cares about my approval anyway? I like a bad old painting of Neath Abbey), but I’m finding it liberating to admit all this. My whole life, the culture has been pushing various versions of a “designed” environment in which it is advocated that we should live. To me, it always looks broadly the same, from the 1950s to the present day – all part of a massive and relentless reaction to the dark clutteredness of the Victorian era.

  I like clutter, and I don’t think that’s unusual. But I think the appeal of old, comfy stuff is one of those feelings people mistrust in themselves. They think they’re supposed to want to “de-clutter”, so they dutifully replace their shelf of dusty and chipped porcelain dogs with a single grey bowl of silver pebbles. And they tell themselves that’s much better.

  Meanwhile, the gallery sends another lorry load of gilt frames into storage so it can clear a whole wing for self-referential Perspex.

  * * *

  The presenters of the BBC’s new TV version of arts programme Front Row have already sparked controversy. Before I get into it (or rather, after I’ve got into it but now I’m going back and putting this in at the start), I should say that one of those presenters is my brother-in-law, Giles Coren. Which means you’re even freer than usual to ignore everything I say because of bias. If so, I applaud the choice – go on your way with my blessing, helping yourself to a history GCSE on your way out.

  The controversy is
about theatre, one of the art forms the new show will be covering. In an interview with the Radio Times, all three presenters made remarks about it that annoyed people. Amol Rajan said he didn’t get to the theatre as much as he’d like to because of his young baby, but that his “favourite place is Shakespeare’s Globe and I love musical theatre. I went to New York a couple of years ago and saw Andrew Lloyd Webber’s School of Rock”.

  Nikki Bedi said she likes a “fresh new piece of theatre”, but “film is my passion”. She added: “I resent going to the theatre and not having an interval for two hours and 45 minutes. I want more intervals. I like tight, fast-paced, creative theatre that moves away from tradition.”

  Giles also mentioned his young family as a reason for not having seen many plays recently and said he found theatre stressful because “I just worry about the poor bastards forgetting their lines”. When asked how theatre-going could be improved, he said: “The seats! Why is it that in the theatre the seats are never as comfortable as the cinema? … I’d also like easier access to the loo.”

  So what’s your reaction? “Those unforgiveable philistines should never be presenting a programme about the arts!”? Or “Bloody hell, the currency of controversy is pretty devalued! Isn’t that what everyone thinks about the theatre?”

  Unsurprisingly, the theatre world is solidly in the former camp. Dominic Cavendish, theatre critic of the Daily Telegraph, said he was “almost speechless”, but rallied impressively to add: “What is the BBC doing, given the world-envied pre-eminence of our theatre culture, handing over the invaluable job of informing the TV-viewing public about what’s on stage, what’s good, what’s not and why, to a Come Dine With Me melange of lightweights who between them seem to have quite liked going to Shakespeare’s Globe and School of Rock IN NEW YORK!”

  Mark Shenton, of the Stage, said it was “dispiriting” that the presenters were “so casually dismissive of theatre”, rejecting Coren’s worry about actors remembering lines as “spurious”, as it’s something “they’re paid to do, and mostly succeed at”. And WhatsOnStage’s Sarah Crompton lamented “the way in which everybody thought it was acceptable to talk that way about theatre”.