Last night, as I was pushing Tom in his stroller, I felt just a glimpse of some hope for the future. I found my brain was considering some projects that I’ll be working on in the New Year in a positive way. So I guess this series of blogs, which has always been a bit of a magical working, an attempt to change one’s own mind, is doing its job. It’s an attempt to talk directly to the audience, and that always makes me feel better. Comedians often say they started telling jokes in order to get the playground on their side. While that aim is something I never managed at the time, I recognise the emotion. I like to feel I’m entertaining an audience because, at its simplest, only then am I certain they’re not going to attack me. (Yes, it is ironic that I find myself working in comics.)
Firstly, today, yet another creator is doing something like a Twelve Blogs! Marvel editor Jordan White is doing Twelve Days of Christmas Songs on his ukulele.
The last time I saw Jordan he was leading the crowd at a Marvel convention panel in a rendition of the X-Men animated series theme. Excellent work.
Today I’d like to talk about a newfound enthusiasm of mine: Strictly Come Dancing. (I always think that title needs so much unpicking that it’s one of those things that indicates that British pop culture is every bit as opaque to an outsider as Japanese pop culture. ‘You see, there was this show called Come Dancing, the title of which was a reasonably demotic phrase in the 1950s, which had the start of the title of a movie from 1992 that made ballroom dancing briefly fashionable bolted on to it…’ It’s a similar construction to ‘so there are these South African mammals who are for the purposes of the advert Russian who are promoting a website that is not actually the one they’re meant to be promoting, based on a not-quite-pun that only semi-works if you’re an English speaker. No, you’re really just going to have to take our word for it’. There are reasons that two islands such as Britain and Japan, on either side of a mainland, produce similarly deeply-packed and rich cultural references, but that’s a different essay.) Caroline and I started watching Strictly and The Great British Bake-Off this year in a sort-of-deliberate way. We started making a point of watching the TV news at the same time. We don’t want Tom to grow up not getting the references made by other kids in the playground, and we wanted to be able to talk to parishoners and my aged Mum about something other than the weather. Speaking for myself, I’ve always felt caught on the edge between mainstream culture and geek culture (where Doctor Who lives) and I’ve been feeling rather more positive towards the mainstream lately. (I hate the hissing geek reaction to One Direction or Twilight or anything the mainstream loves except Doctor Who, as if we’re still persecuted outsiders, as if we hadn’t won.) Going between convention and local pub, and feeling affection for both, I found I had to adopt a different mental stance in each. If I didn’t have my correct head on (and there’s Worzel Gummidge’s huge contribution to the British cultural lexicon), I’d end up frustrated that the pub crowd didn’t talk more about ‘important things’ and that the con crowd were always being so bloody rude to each other.
Phew, only a geek like me would feel the need to explain why he’s watching one of the most popular TV shows in Britain.
At any rate, I expected to rather suffer through it. But it turned out there was only one thing I didn’t like: poor old Bruce Forsyth, whose timing I’d always admired, but who now has lost it so badly, and is harming his reputation every time he appears. He still gets good family audience material, but he can’t land it, and then strains to get the reaction he seeks. He could opt not to tell jokes and just be kind and avuncular, and then he’d be wonderful again, because we don’t seek precision for kindness. It doesn’t help that Tess Daly is an extraordinarily competent presenter, who can surf an improv moment with aplomb, or that Claudia Winkleman can do that and add a dash of absurd distance, making fun of what’s on her autocue with the camp that could and perhaps should be at the heart of the show.
What I love about Strictly is that it would like to be a pure Reithian contest: we’ve got experts teaching amateurs how to do something really difficult, and the best one wins a prize. Unfortunately, what gets in the way of that, and something I suspect would annoy me if this particular season hadn’t gone the way it has, is the will of the audience.
The audience don’t want the best dancer to win. They want the celebrity they most like to win, and they really don’t care much about how well they dance. This year, I gather, has been better in that the four best dancers are the four finalists. Which is brilliant. But for a while there I thought that (nice enough) chap from The Hairy Bikers was going to go all the way. (We got to a point where John Barrowman, on Zoe Ball’s sparky companion show It Takes Two told him off in absentia, saying it’d be a crime if he got through at the expense of someone who was actually good.) The mechanism is that the public votes for someone, rather than against anyone, which is great, and the two lowest placed compete against each other, with the judges choosing between them. So, ideally, charm can only get you so far, and that’s how it’s worked this time round. Maybe in future it should be the bottom three that get in range of actual judgment.
One of the most telling indices of how mainstream culture has departed from the Reithian comes in the form of the audience reaction to Craig Revel Horwood, one of the four judges. Sure, to some extent he’s a panto villain, but one gets the feeling that he only grudgingly plays up to that. He simply tells the truth about the errors he’s seen, and reserves his ten out of ten rating for a performance that’s perfect. It’s telling that now there are four good dancers left he’s full of praise. But the audience boos his opinions. It’s as if we’ve become so battered as a culture that we’ll stand up for anyone who’s being criticised at any time, whether or not they’ve opted to take part in an actual contest with winners and losers. The detail of his observations is always material the contestants can work with. I think he, and all those like him, whose honest critique is what I prefer from my own bosses, should be cheered. (Hmm, perhaps I still have my suspicions about the mainstream after all.)
Not that I dislike the other judges. Len Goodman’s insistence on authentic dance steps and Bruno Tonioli’s continual impression of Kenny Everett’s Cupid character are most welcome. (Seriously, watch him with that in mind, when he grabs Len’s hand and launches himself out of his seat, his legs doubtless tangled in a knot of rubber.) I feel the best dancer remaining is Natalie Gumede, closely followed by Abbey Clancy (who I put a bet on at 7/1), but, and this shows I’m just as susceptible to mainstream madness as anyone else, I’ve been voting for Sophie Ellis-Bextor, whose work I’ve always loved. If Susanna Reid, the most popular with the audience, wins, I think it’ll be a shame, but at least, in terms of quality, she’s in the ball park. The audience like her because she’s the worst, because she’s obviously trying so hard.
It’s actually, now I come to think of it, the way we try to praise Tom: for effort rather than results. Perhaps I’ve still got a lot to learn from my encounter with the mainstream. The writing of these pieces, just talking to you lot, is still doing me a world of good. Tomorrow we’ll have another author guest telling us what their characters are getting up to at Christmas. Until then, cheerio, and keep dancing.
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