Opinion

Anita Robinson: I fear I will never catch up with celebrity culture

Kit Harington as Jon Snow in Game of Thrones. Picture by HBO 
Kit Harington as Jon Snow in Game of Thrones. Picture by HBO  Kit Harington as Jon Snow in Game of Thrones. Picture by HBO 

There comes a stage in life when you realise you’re so far behind the zeitgeist you’ll never catch up.

My ignorance of current popular culture was brought home to me last week on a London to Belfast flight when the woman in the neighbouring seat, returning from the aircraft loo confided excitedly: “Kit Harington’s sitting in the second row.” “Who?” I said. “Y’know, Jon Snow from Game of Thrones.” Confessing I’ve never watched the series, the conversation rapidly foundered.

Mine is no lofty pseudo-intellectual stance. I just can’t be doing with blood, guts and fornication in high-definition close-up by way of entertainment. I’d better come clean and reveal I’ve never seen Coronation St, EastEnders or Emmerdale either, but I’m addicted to The Archers, despite deploring the fact that it’s going the way of all soaps.

Once an everyday story of country folk in a mythical middle England village, it’s now developing plotlines involving drugs, domestic violence, financial chicanery, attempted murder and same-sex surrogate parenthood. What dear old Dan and Doris would make of it doesn’t bear thinking about – though, reassuringly, the Ambridge Flower and Produce Show survives. As for ‘reality’ television series, (the most exploitative and revelatory formula ever conceived) what possesses so-called celebrities to parade their humiliating shortcomings and betray their character flaws in cringe-making detail before the nation’s most savage critics, the unforgiving public?

So many of the highest-rating television series are purely adversarial in aspect. The Bake Off candidate who fails to rise to the occasion is deflated faster than a chocolate soufflé. Take the tears-and-snotters saturated ‘X Factor’ or ‘The Voice’, where trembling contestants, often with a heartrending back-story rather than talent, plead their case before a hanging jury whose verdict is usually nasty, brutish and short. Even sainted ‘Strictly’ is sheer gladiatorial combat thinly disguised with sequins.

Sadly, it’s the brutal swiftness of dispatch that appeals to the primitive within us. The concept of ‘survival of the fittest’ is still hardwired in our historic DNA. [DISCLAIMER: For the purposes of research, I’ve watched each of the aforementioned programmes just ONCE, with the exception of ‘Strictly’, on which I’m now hooked, I think Aston got a raw deal.]

My culpable lack of knowledge of whole swathes of popular culture leaves me at a distinct disadvantage with anyone born after 1980. Handed a pile of ‘Hello’ magazines or any of its more sensational stablemates, I’m at a loss to recognise most of those pictured. Who are these botoxed and filler-faced ‘celebrities’ indistinguishable one from another in their palatial homes with their most recent partner (also unknown), winsome children, inexhaustible wardrobes and gilded lifestyles? Here is X’s shoe closet. It’s a whole room. Here’s the ‘study’, crammed with state of the art gadgetry, but rarely any books. What purpose do these people serve, save to illustrate vulgar excess and engender envy – though some of their interior décor is incontrovertible proof that money can’t buy taste. Invariably the phrase, “We live very simply” crops up, as does a confessional paragraph or two on the subject’s struggle with depression, gynaecological or addiction difficulties or inability to sustain relationships. Many are people of no discernible talent, merely famous for being famous, briefly fashionable, prominent or notorious before sliding down the social alphabet into the well-deserved oblivion of Z-list celebrity.

The cycle of life rolls inexorably on. Everything changes, yet the pattern remains ever the same. The generation gap is as wide today as it was between my parents and me, their parents and them. The familiar old bones of contention are gnawed afresh – mature wisdom versus juvenile foolhardiness, parental sacrifice versus youthful ingratitude, timely warnings versus selective deafness. The recent rapid thaw in the moral climate, the role models they adopt and the values they espouse make my generation fear for the future of our young. My parents thought the lyrics of Sixties pop songs morally corrupting and the singers a tone-deaf shower of godless misfits. No different really from the panic in the breasts of their parents when their daughters shortened their skirts and cut their hair and their sons took to jazz and American crooners.

My grown-up sister, deeply disapproving of my nascent teenage musical tastes, inadvertently found herself on a morning flight with a pop group just beginning to make a name for themselves, returning after a Belfast gig. “I thought you might appreciate this,” she said, handing me a folded slip of paper. I opened it to the scrawled signature, ‘Mick Jagger’. I was ecstatic. “What were they like?” I asked. “What were the Rolling Stones like?” “None too clean,” she retorted.