About a teacher

I’ve been very lucky with teachers. Chris Brooks, who taught me about Blake and Dickens. Campbell MacKay, who taught me about Beckett and Stoppard. John O’Brien, who taught me that bizarre song, ‘The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-ling-a-ling’. (He also taught me about the Congress of Vienna and the Spanish Civil War, but it’s the song that stuck.)

All long gone, of course. And a few days ago, another joined them when I learned that Professor Peter Thomson of the University of Exeter had died. He was a devotee of Brecht and Shakespeare, a mischievous iconoclast and a very kind man. I’ve read several heartfelt tributes already, from people who knew him far more deeply than I did, and there will be many more.

The thing is, he shouldn’t by rights have been my teacher, because he was in the drama department and I was doing single honours English. But I was lucky enough in my final year to get a place on an interdisciplinary course that he ran, although “interdisciplinary” barely covers the weird, wriggly beast. It was called The Secret Lives of the Victorians and combined elements of art, history, politics and psychoanalysis, with a dose of drama thrown in for fun. We looked at some of the odder figures of 19th-century Britain, such as the secularist-turned-Theosophist Annie Besant and the Bedlam artist Richard Dadd, and pondered the sexuality of the Marquess of Queensberry. The Pre-Raphaelites also featured heavily. I have vague memories of dressing up as Oscar Wilde and doing a ventriloquist act with a Margaret Thatcher (Victorian values!) squeaky dog toy. Peter had a healthy contempt for the Gradgrindian metrics of academic assessment and at the end he gave everyone exactly the same mark.

His course reinforced my instinct that context, especially social and historical context, is vital to understanding and fully appreciating any media and in retrospect had a big impact on much of my later work (especially the Radiohead book) and, more recently, my own teaching. I’d been in touch with Peter occasionally over the years, but now I really wish I’d told him how important his teaching was to me. So, next best thing, I’m telling you instead. But without the squeaky Margaret Thatcher.

Richard Dadd, Come Unto These Yellow Sands (1842)

About Dada

Yesterday I had a spare half-hour in class after prepositions and obligations and stuff and asked the students whether we are entering a post-literate age and, if so, who or what is to blame and a charming 18-year-old Slovakian suggested that the whole thing started not with smartphones and ChatGPT but with Dada because that’s when all the typographical rules fell apart and I didn’t buy it for a moment but it was magnificent and sometimes I bloody love my job.

About the best novels

I am not in the least surprised that the Guardian’s ragebaity list of 100 best novels failed to include my own favourite, Vile Bodies. I am, however, a bit peeved that Waugh wasn’t even granted a seat alongside John Updike and Nancy Mitford and Martin Amis and Angela Carter and John le Carre in the roll call of omissions. Oh, and for the record, I bloody hate Middlemarch, which won.

Success in this world depends on knowing exactly how little effort each job is worth.

About plausibility

I just unearthed an article I wrote for Prospect in 2009, in which I argued that we were living through an age of fleeting plausibility, where cool gimmicks like CGI offered us things that might just possibly be real, and we enjoyed them on that basis, until we quickly realised they were bollocks. But that initial moment was the important bit: 

Yet this was also the decade in which we allowed ourselves to believe, for a while at least, the silliest, most implausible narratives. Or to put it more clearly, we allowed ourselves the pleasure of half-belief—which, especially when a million people are doing it with you, is one of the most deliciously satisfying human emotions. 

And now we have AI, which offers us stuff that can’t possibly be real but we believe it anyway and keep on believing it and get grumpy with people who tell us otherwise. And are we deliciously satisfied? Are we?

About speaking English

 1957:

 

2026:

About dead pop stars

The director Kevin MacDonald on Hollywood’s penchant for glossing over the murkier corners of dead celebrities’ lives, and punters’ happy acquiescence to the phenomenon:

Audiences don’t seem to care... Many of these films are pure fan service. Which is fine as far as it goes. Maybe we were all naive for believing that popular artists were worth looking at seriously, critically?

Not only are we entreated not to yuck another’s yum, we are not even allowed to yuck the yum’s creator. In the words of another genius whose private life would probably prompt cancellation or worse today (for a slightly different reason from what got him cancelled in 1895), the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. But today’s celebs, or those running their estates, don’t even want them to be talked about, beyond the blandest of platitudes. As long as the cash keeps coming.

About Magritte (or not)

In case it still needs explaining, the whole point of René Magritte’s 1929 painting La Trahison des images is that the apparently inaccurate caption in fact tells the truth. It is not a pipe. It is merely a picture of a pipe. 

Unfortunately, like most jokes, it loses its effectiveness when repeated. I haven’t yet seen the newish Belgian TV show This is Not a Murder Mystery (which includes Magritte himself as a character) but it does appear to be a murder mystery, so it’s all wrong before its starts. (Of course, they could argue that the murders aren’t real, because it’s fiction, or maybe we find out who the killer is from the beginning, Colombo-style, so there’s no mystery, but I’m not hopeful.)

And there’s no get-out clause for the Belgian football team, which has put a tweaked variant of Magritte’s zinger on their shirts, which definitely are shirts, not pictures of shirts, so that’s just wrong. Although the fact they’ve tucked the words inside the garments, so they can’t be seen during the game itself, suggests they’re well aware of the cock-up and are a bit embarrassed about the whole thing.

PS: And in vaguely similar territory, another social media platform is encouraging me to purchase this natty garment, which apparently offers one the sensation of getting shot without the mess and inconvenience and possible death stuff of, er, actually getting shot.

About April 2016: And then Prince died

After the initial shock (for those of my cohort) of Bowie falling off his perch, 2016 settled down to be just another year. There was going to be a referendum on Brexit (but the only question was how big Remain’s majority would be) and in November the Americans would catch up with the rest of the world and elect their first female president.

In retrospect, it wasn’t until April that 2016 really started to happen, that it became The Year When Famous People Died. Not that other famous people (Antonin Scalia, Umberto Eco, Tony Warren, Asa Briggs, Sylvia Anderson, et al) hadn’t died since Bowie, but it was as if we suddenly noticed the strange intensity, the feeling of “wait, not another one” when the news came in. And the thing that woke us up, that prompted the same sort of generational, communal grief that Bowie brought, was the death of Prince. As I said at the time (on Facebook, because 10 years ago Facebook was still a useful way to share pain and condolence, rather than a weaponised cesspit):

The thing is, a lot of us (by us, I mean nerds, obviously) have been imagining that the God Who Only Exists For Us When Famous People Die has been creating a heavenly supergroup, with Lemmy [who’d actually died in the last days of 2015, but retrospectively felt like part of the continuum] on bass, Maurice White on drums, Bowie on vocals, sax and oblique strategies, Victoria Wood on piano and wry Lancastrian one-liners, plus George Martin to produce and keep them all in order. But now Prince, who can do all of that, is up there, will God be sending the others back? 

And as we shared tearful memes relating to the purple imp of sexy fun, we also thought, hey, I guess this is as bad as this year can get. Oh well. 

One more thing. In January there had been a moment of dark levity in the Celebrity Big Brother house, when Angie Bowie was informed that her ex-husband had died but Tiffany Pollard (no, me neither) thought the news referred to fellow-inmate David Gest (who was asleep). Piquantly, the whole farrago got more coverage than Gest’s actual death would attract a few months later, in April. Needless to say. I didn’t find a place for him in my celestial band.