So, there I am, watching the final installment of David Dimbleby’s formerly excellent series, Seven Ages of Britain, a look at the country’s history through artefacts – machines, paintings, sculpture, packaging, transport, treasure, jewelry etc. Reasonable concept for a show, and well handled by Dimbleby in bluff, enthusiastic, “chap with the spotted cravat nursing a pink gin in the saloon bar” mode.
The series being fronted by a TV wallah rather than a pukkah historian has attracted criticism, but, given that academics tend to be even more conventional and blinkered than ordinary coves, I don’t see this as a problem: Dimbleby might have taken a standard line on most things, but at least he displays a genuine love for his country’s history, and evidently isn’t out to show us how jolly clever he is. (My only objection to previous episodes was the presenter’s painful attempts at chatting to ordinary folk: he reminds one of royalty asking garden party guests if they’ve had far to travel – a man of the people, he isn’t.)
But, leaving aside his inability to ask a question that elicits an interesting reply, he’s been doing a good job. Today’s episode, however, is a real shocker. On the whole, I think I’d even have preferred Simon Schama prancing about distractingly, sounding, as always, as if he’s giving us the low-down on a particularly bitchy bust-up in a 1950s gay bar: “My dear! She was livid!”
We whiz through the invention of radio and the introduction of the Baby Austin, and are swiftly embroiled in the Second World War, where, of course, it’s Henry Moore down in the tube station at midnight sketching sleeping Londoners. Just for a change. Then it’s on to Francis Bacon and his 1944 “Crucifixion” triptych, all bared teeth and weird animal shapes and blindfolds – you know the one - and David tells us how Bacon was showing just how awful the world was then, what with the war and all, and how his “message” is still relevant to the current world, where things are still a bit dodgy, apparently.
Look, Dave, if the British public couldn’t come to their own conclusions about the true nature of war from actually having lived through one, I’m not sure how Bacon’s nasty, depressing “ooh, what am I like!” daubs are supposed to have helped. Goya’s representations of war must have horrified an audience most of whom had never seen torture or murder or representations thereof: but no one in Britain in 1944 was in that prelapsarian state. Bacon might as well have entitled this work “The World’s Worst Hangover” or “What My Bum Feels Like After A Night’s Hard Pounding” – at least it would have represented a genuine response to personal experience.
Now it’s 1947, and the NHS has been created. I can’t quite remember the exact nature of the causal connection, but apparently all that crowding together in the Tube during air raids had shown the ruling classes that us commoners people are just full of togetherness and caring (when we’re not busy killing and bombing and torturing each other)… or something. Anyway, an economist called Beveridge invented surgeons and “operations” (I think I’ve got this right) and suddenly millions of decent, ordinary Britons were no longer being abandoned to die on the streets with nothing more than a cup of tea and Woodbine to ease their suffering.
And then we get a sequence of Barbara Hepworth’s sketches of these new surgical teams at work (because a relative had, like, you know, been saved by an operation - bless!) and there’s Dimbles getting medically togged up and interviewing a surgeon as he prepares to section a liver (all you bloody need, I imagine, when you’re about to start mucking about with some poor sod’s vital organs – especially in this age of medical malpractice suits). DD starts banging on about the Hepworth sketches (which treated the medics with religious awe) and asks if the impression they give, that a medical team has to work together, is, in fact, correct. Distracted, and obviously wishing he was sectioning Dimbleby’s liver, the surgeon tells us “I couldn’t do my job if it weren’t for other people.” Glad he cleared that one up.
Then it was swiftly on to the 1950s, where everything was horribly dull and black and white and short back and sides and everyone was conforming away like robots and teenagers were already middle-aged (cue video of the young Dimbleby jigging about embarrassedly). Of course, all of this tedium was swept aside by a wave of life-affirming 1960s colour and noise (Lulu miming to “Shout” and Twiggy gyrating glumly) and everything was all right with the world – drugs and endless rumpy-pumpy and rebellion and floral shirts.
Then, after a quick glimpse of a Hockney bum (not his own), it’s on to Gilbert and George showing their private parts (of which they seem inordinately proud) before Dimbleby turns up at their house and asks them what this modern art stuff is all about. They want, they explain helpfully, “to confront ordinary people with our work – to say yes or no”. (That’ll be a “no” from me, chaps.) I last until one of these coprophilc charlatans starts telling us that artists used to be slaves of the church or of toffs, but now, of course… but I have to go and make a cup of tea, before the TV gets totaled.
Yes, the effect of religious and aristocratic patronage on Western art was certainly ruinous, forcing the world to make do with tenth-raters like Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci and Titian and Velasquez and Van Dyck and Gainsborough and the rest of that shower. If only they’d been allowed to express themselves! Now, thank, God, we live in an age where artists only have to rely on patronage from the state and Russian oligarchs and former advertising executives, so we get - yes, you guessed it - Gilbert and George proudly showing us their little danglers and incorporating their own faeces into a series of searing (smearing?) masterpieces. (“I preferred their early turds,” you can almost hear the critics opine.) What a relief! (as it were): no more Last Suppers or Sistine Chapel ceilings or Las Meninas or The Morning Walks.
Then, having, thank God, missed Anish Kapoor and Tracy Emin (more private parts, no doubt), I’m back in time to hear that towering genius Damien Hirst explaining how he spent twelve million smackeroos on diamonds to encrust a skull (now, that’s deep!) that eventually sold for a cool £50m, and then we have this heir to Rembrandt and Raphael working with Dimbleby to create “Spin Art” by dribbling paint onto a large butterfly shape on a spinning platter – this activity reminds Damien of something he used to do at school (probably masturbation). And we end with Hirst telling us that the meaning of the kindergarten crap they’ve just produced is “we’re here for a good time, not a long time”. And we used to rate Ernst Gombrich as a significant thinker!
F.R. Leavis once speculated that C.P. Snow’s novels were created by feeding chapter headings into a computer called “Charlie” and waiting for the results. I’m pretty certain some similar mechanism was used to create this big, fat, gobbling turkey of a programme. Does anyone in television realize that there are ways of interpreting the 20th Century other than the orthodoxy created in the 1960s? Andrew Marr gave us practically the same mindless, off-the-shelf rot in his recent History of Modern Britain, so I’m guessing both shows used the same software.
Henry Moore’s drawings of civilians sheltering from bombardment are good – but not that good. Francis Bacon is worth re-evaluating – downwards. Hepworth’s sketches of surgical teams are fine – but no more than that. The Fifties produced some terrific theatre, fine novels and great films: it was also an era of low crime, shared values, common courtesy and generally decorous behaviour. Not everyone who lived through that decade hated it. Just because all men wore ties didn’t mean they were mindlessly conformist: donning the more brightly-coloured uniforms of the 1960s didn’t automatically signify the wearer’s free-spirited originality.
Art, especially in a Godless age, can be about giving humanity a sense of a transcendent reality, of a realm of timeless beauty, of the potential within us for love and courage and wisdom, of what we might aspire to become. This has nothing whatever to do with fakery or a lack of authenticity or originality. The fakes are the conmen and women who use tawdry little student-level tricks to shock and “confront” their audience – in effect, the Arts Establishment, which is permanently randy for controversy: exposing the world’s manifold horrors or what our artists seems to view as the unrelentingly sordid reality of our everyday lives is about as courageous and provocative and original as wearing an FCUK T-shirt.
For God’s sake, grow up, you grubby little twerps!
And, Dimbles - the chap in the saloon bar really should know better than to be taken in by this bilge.
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