I have just been introduced to the online diary of writer Lawrence Miles. He was born in the same year as me, is a writer of Doctor Who novels (which I've considered doing), and is also… er… and was born in Middlesex, where I am currently resident. Anyway, his diary makes fantastic reading. Surely this is the kind of thing for which the Internet was made – an intelligent person rambling on about whatever comes into his head without any interfering editors. It's like Notes From Underground all over again.
Anyway, the last post on the diary says:
This journal won't be here much longer. Please take this opportunity to copy the best bits, paste them into a Word file with a possible view to using them as sig-files one day, then store it in your "unused porn that seemed much more interesting eight months ago" folder and see how long it stays there before you forget what the file called "beast.doc" is and have to open it just to make sure it's not what it sounds like.
That was dated August the 27th, so it's possible he's forgotten to demolish it, depending on what he meant by "much longer". Perhaps it will come down tomorrow. I'm going to take his advice, in a way, by cutting and pasting my favourite part (so far) from the journal into this blog entry. I would like to encourage others to do the same. Anyway, my favourite part of Lawrence Miles' online diary so far:
On Growing Up Stupid
Today: why am I clever?
No, another question first. When did contestants on University Challenge stop “reading” and start “studying”? There was a time when the use of the word “reading” was as much a part of the programme’s catchphrase-arsenal as “starter for ten” and “no conferring”. Every contestant would, from behind the twin safety-barriers of the studio desk and his own spectacles, introduce himself according to the formula “Martin Spatula from Northampton, reading microbiology” / “Tony Nabisco from Aberdeen, reading anthropology” / “Blackie Lawless from Wolverhampton, reading particle physics”. But now they’re studying these subjects rather than reading them, and if this is the case, then it can only mean that there’s been a conscious decision by the programme-makers to change the formula. Why? Presumably it isn’t because BBC producers have a problem with reading, or because they’re worried that it might subconsciously prod people to switch off the television and pick up a book instead, or because they don’t want members of the Open University to feel self-conscious. And yet…
…and yet even when I was a child, the word “reading” seemed peculiar, in this context. I never heard anyone in the real world use it that way, although admittedly, I didn’t know many university graduates when I was eight. These days, producers tend to have a problem with words which seem awkward, obscure, or just too elaborate for the lowest rung of the audience. This isn’t confined to television, either: I once had an editor who always made me replace the words “in retrospect” with the words “with hindsight”, apparently on the grounds that he thought “retrospect” might be too confusing for some of the readers. Is this the reason for the University Challenge change, I wonder? Did somebody look at the format of the programme and worry that the unexpected use of a verb might disturb viewers enough to make them switch channels? It sounds unlikely, especially since anyone who has trouble with unexpected verbs isn’t likely to be watching University Challenge in the first place, but television is known for the amount of pointless meddling that goes on there.
This presents us with another great bugbear of early-twenty-first-century Britain, somewhere just down the list from “Chavs” and “Americans” (the two natural enemies of the modern nation, one internal and one external). I speak, of course, of “dumbing down”. This is an argument that’s usually presented in terms of either class or out-and-out elitism, as if it’s a clash between Oxbridge-educated Old Boys who spend their days memorising poems in Latin and people whose idea of education is the ability to know when to say “bank”.
But I don’t think I know anyone over the age of thirty who doesn’t believe, either rationally or instinctively, that people are intrinsically stupider than they used to be. Why is this? True, most teachers will tell you that the education system went to pieces after the 1970s, but this doesn’t ring true as an all-round explanation. I don’t seem to be stupid, at least not in any sense but the social one, and yet I can say in all honesty that school never taught me a bleeding thing. So I’m amused by the current “anti-poverty” advertisement which insists that as well as food and healthcare, ‘every child has the right to go to school’. To me, school means bigotry, ignorance, terror, repression, savagery, and teachers whose idea of moral training seems to owe more to Jim Davidson than Mahatma Gandhi, so this is one of the many “rights” in our culture which I feel we could probably do without.
Then where did I get my smarts from, if indeed I can be said to have them? From my family? It seems doubtful: none of them ever tried to teach me anything at all, apart from my Stalinist granddad, and he was such a nuisance that I generally ignored anything he said. From reading, then? The usual assumption is that anyone literate must have learned everything they know from books, but I was never a big reader, and I used paperbacks to build castles more often than I tried looking inside them. From playing with Lego, possibly…? It sounds fatuous, but it did give me a keen sense of object-manipulation, and construction toys do have a proven effect on the minds of the young. And yet I didn’t spend that much time playing with Lego. Which leaves… television?
Yes. I did watch a huge amount of television. I’d certainly say that most of the “hard” knowledge I have about the world – knowledge of things and people and places, knowledge made up of solid facts rather than odd experiences – has come from television, not from the written word. Today, this sounds like the admission of someone with the intellectual faculties of either a footballer’s wife or a Dancing on Ice contestant, but the truth is… I think I’m part of the last generation in Britain which could realistically claim that TV makes you smarter. Before the 1980s, the BBC genuinely believed itself to be a public service, rather than just using the phrase “public service” as an excuse to draw in the licence fee. The gulf between BBC TV and the commercial channels was wider then, and I was brought up in a household that barely ever watched ITV. In those days, television was supposed to teach you things, it was supposed to take you places you’d never heard of and make you ask questions about the world. In effect, I’m the embodiment of BBC Man: middle-class and literate, but with no university background and educated almost entirely by my own sense of curiosity. This used to be seen as a kind of ideal, and perhaps the thing which bothers me most about the modern media is the knowledge that if I’d been born twenty-five years later, then I almost certainly would have grown up stupid. I, Claudius was no more historically accurate than a Mel Gibson movie, yet thousands of people felt compelled to find out more about ancient Rome after it was broadcast. The programmes Johnny Ball made for children’s television were basically just science lessons with jokes and big props that occasionally went “zzzoom” or “woop” or “ka-bang”, yet we went straight home after school and watched this stuff of our own free will. Is there any populist programme now, on any channel, that even considers the notion of “finding out”? Even documentary series like Horizon come across as soundbite versions of the subject matter, rather than trying to get the viewers genuinely involved.
(Actually, the only modern programme I can think of which ostensibly tries to rouse the intellectual curiosity of the audience is Q.I., despite the offensive host and the rule which seems to demand that one panellist per week will be utterly unbearable. There’s a risk of repeating myself here, so I’ll simply say that in a programme that’s meant to be about strange and interesting facts, repeatedly hiring Jo Brand to sit on the panel and shout ‘who cares?’ is like hiring someone to stand behind the chair on Mastermind and make farting noises whenever the contestant tries to answer a question.)
I said, just a few days ago, that marketing has done more damage to our culture than anything else in the Western world. What they call “dumbing down” is part of the same process: a universal blanding-out, a system of removing all the awkward, unexpected details in order to get the widest possible audience response. But generation by generation, this just makes the audience stupider. You end up clever if there are things in your environment that make you want to find out how the world works. You end up stupid if you’ve got no reason to even ask questions. Remove the interesting crinkles, take away the awkward spiky bits, and… yes, you probably do get a better audience appreciation index. You also get a society full of dullards.
I don’t know whether they really did change University Challenge because they thought “reading” might confuse the audience. But the point remains that intelligence has got nothing to do with how much you know, and everything to do with your ability to contextualise. When someone tells you they’re reading microbiology, you instinctively know that “reading” means “studying”, because nothing else would make sense in that context. Changing it seems like an admission that the viewers might not be able to work it out for themselves. So if the two words essentially mean the same thing in this context, then why should I think “reading” is preferable…? Quite simply because it does come across as a bit odd, because the curious, almost-archaic sound of it made the English language seem slightly more interesting, even if it didn’t exactly liven up the programme. Now things are slightly less interesting, which is what “dumbing down” really means.
Justin Isis writes:
Favorite, again, is probably:””Another important difference between the American and European versions of “lizard conspiracy” is their treatment of religion. While David Icke is happy to interpret the Bible as a source of carefully-coded arcane wisdom, American believers are inclined to treat it as if it’s literally true, and hold that the serpent in the Garden of Eden was the first Earthly manifestation of a palpable non-human menace. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Europeans are more interested in history than in Old Testament mythology, and some have even made an effort to trace the reptile bloodline all the way back to the Roman Emperors. Giant carnivorous lizards might actually have made BBC2’s Rome worth watching, although a more promising project would have been Icke, Claudius, in which Derek Jacobi turns out to have that stutter because there’s a live guineau-pig stuck in his throat.”The part where he starts wondering about the ‘color of Thursday’ is also well worth reading. I instinctively knew what he meant (for me Thursday is a swampy green color), so I guess I’m a ‘non-reader’ in his terminology.His novels are also worth picking up. Along with Daniel O’Mahony, he’s probably the Doctor Who novel author who I’d consider to be worth taking seriously as a writer even if you don’t give a shit about Doctor Who. Wouldn’t be out of the question to say he probably influenced my writing style when I was a teenager. Start with ‘Dead Romance’ (doesn’t really require any background knowledge of Doctor Who), then try ‘Alien Bodies’.
I’ve been reading more, rather irresponsibly, and might be late for work..Anyway, I also like this bit:97. Breakfast at Tiffany’s also features a scene in which Audrey Hepburn climbs into George Peppard’s bedroom through an open window, and Peppard looks confused and rather annoyed. If Audrey Hepburn climbed through my bedroom window, then I’d consider it the best thing that’s ever happened in the history of time. Although it’s not the kind of wish I’d make with a Monkey’s Paw, because it’d probably send me Audrey Hepburn as she is now, and she’d keep coming even if I chopped her to bits with an axe.
And there’s more:92. Some of this may sound elitist, but it makes a lot more sense if you see people as complex, crinkly-edged individuals rather than as members of bland demographic groups. As we’ve already seen, this is something that bothers me a lot, not only because the use of demographic targeting has made such a mess of our society but because most of today’s dramatists and comedy writers make exactly the same mistake. To illustrate what I’m talking about… a while ago, I found myself sitting in a train compartment opposite two hormonally-active teenage boys in baseball caps, both inclined to speak in faux-Californian and use words like ‘extreme’. They spent a good twenty minutes talking about the things you’d expect hormonally-active teenage boys to talk about, like skateboards and the kind of grunt-heavy rock bands which might best be summed up by the word “skanky”. Then they suddenly launched into a conversation about Alfred Hitchcock. It transpired that they were both looking forward to watching a video of Rope when they got home – not one of Hitchcock’s most obvious works, by any means – and they agreed that the film was undeniably the work of a master craftsmen. This said, they started talking like hormonally-active teenage boys again.93. The most important thing to note here isn’t that this came as a surprise (although it did), but that according to modern television, such a thing is impossible: you either have teenage boys who wear baseball caps and grunt a lot, or you have obsessive film-geeks who make token references to old movies in every other sentence, but not both at once. At best, you might get a sketch-artist like Catherine Tate or the reanimated corpse of Harry Enfield to do a “funny” character who talks like an ignorant adolescent but then says educated things in a “funny” way. Stereotypes have always been the fall-back of the piss-poor TV writer, yet in an age when demographic boundaries are more rigidly-patrolled than ever, complex characters simply aren’t permitted in a script… and as a knock-on effect, they’re less likely to exist in the next generation of the actual population. So when I suggest that only people with an understanding of film history should be able to complain about film, this doesn’t mean university-educated nerds with degrees in media studies. It actually means real people, although real people are rapidly becoming an endangered species.
And even more. I’ll probably have to save a beast file as instructed, after all:161. Returning to the sci-fi coalface: today I posted the “anthropology” essay on-line. I’d like to think that it’s quite interesting and intelligent, but reading it again on the internet, I see that I’ve misspelled “Cylons” (the robot Muslim-substitutes from Battlestar Galactica) as “Cyclons”. I’m loath to waste time correcting it, and yet… I can take it as read that if I don’t, then sci-fi fans will use it as the prime argument against me for the rest of my life, as in ‘ha-ha-haah, what does he know, he thinks the Cylons are called “Cyclons”‘. Fucking subhuman vermin that they are.162. You may detect a certain dislike of sci-fi fans, in both this journal and in everything else I’ve written, ever. There’s a reason for this. As you may have gathered, I have a problem with things which are supposed to do a job, but don’t. Sci-fi fans like to believe they’re at the cutting-edge of human thought, whereas in fact they’re the most retarded, reactionary wastes of cell-tissue you could ever hope to ignore. I realised this in my early twenties, after some years of believing that science fiction was My Sort of Thing (because I couldn’t have guessed that “speculative fiction” would come to mean Smallville rather than William Burroughs), so I’ve never quite recovered from the hideous sense of betrayal.
I feel like my existence is being made redundant, or already has been made redundant:http://www.gallifreyone.com/interview.php?id=miles“Looking at TV and literature right now, I think the idea is that we’re supposed to be ashamed of liking anything that goes beyond normal, everyday professionalism. We’re supposed to feel that we’re sad wankers for wanting to get away from the kind of stuff that grinds our lives down to nothing, but as far as I’m concerned if you’ve got a story about Character X ripping out Beelzebub’s heart with a pick-axe and saving the universe then it’s a story worth telling, whereas if you’ve got a story about Character Y going to work every morning and bravely doing the filing then you can frankly piss off. And somehow we’ve reached the stage where the only drama programmes that get made at all, on British TV anyway, are about twentysomething law students sharing a flat and arguing about the Hackenschmacher case as if anybody really gives a toss. For a while we at least had stuff like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but now even Buffy’s gone down that ‘soap opera is good, fantasy is incidental’ path and started slagging off anyone who’s got a vaguely alternative kind of lifestyle. And while I’m in mid-rant I’d also like to question the long-term effects of children’s movies like Toy Story and Monsters Inc, which seem to be designed to turn things that used to be astonishing and remarkable into things that are crass and ordinary. In Toy Story, all the toys magically come alive and then… hold bureaucratic meetings about paint erosion. In Monsters Inc, it turns out that monsters aren’t actually strange and fabulous beasts but bored clerical staff who spend most of the day hanging around the water-cooler at Monster Head Office. These films aren’t made with children in mind, they’re made by ‘professional’ adults who want to feel good about their own petty lives, and as a result the next generation’s being primed for clerical work from birth. I think the word I’m looking for here is ‘evil’. I get the feeling some of the younger readers and writers… possibly the ones who were still children in the ’80s and don’t know any better… is that Anji’s some kind of aspirational character, that people like her are successful, go-get-’em professionals and that we should all want to be that way. Whereas as far as I’m concerned, people like her are scum and should have their throats slit. I loathe her. If it weren’t for the existence of Bonnie Langford then I’d say that she was the worst companion imaginable, she represents everything I find sick and ugly and pointless and pathetic about the modern media, and at the end of the day these people are the vermin who’ve destroyed our culture. There was a time when we were proud to do things that were new and interesting and eccentric, the whole point of Doctor Who as a TV programme was that it was the victory of the fantastic over the mundane, and yet now all of a sudden we’re being asked to side with the mundane and being told that you’re ‘naïve’ and ‘unprofessional’ if you don’t. The day I start being ‘professional’ is the day you’ve got permission to murder me in my bed. So I think we’re starting to forget the point, overall. To actually look for that kind of life, where you’re stuck in an office job and acting like it’s a great heroic victory… it’s a kind of living death, I think. To be so badly messed up that you can’t even imagine anything better. Although I know nobody’s going to agree with that, because apart from anything else there’s this idiotic ’80s revival thing going on at the moment, so anyone who really remembers how bloody dire things were during the Yuppie Era gets laughed at for being some kind of tree-hugging idealist. But the ’80s were bleeding awful, and the last thing we need is a comeback. Obviously Anji doesn’t do much in Adventuress, largely because I didn’t want to go anywhere near her. I did toy with the idea of a scene in which she has the words I AM HUMAN FILTH PLEASE KILL ME permanently tattooed on her forehead, but I didn’t think I could get away with it. Is somebody going to stop me talking now, or what?”Let me re-quote one phrase from the above quoted portion of that interview:”The day I start being ‘professional’ is the day you’ve got permission to murder me in my bed.”I think this guy is my new hero.
Justin Isis writes:
“My thinking was that BBC Worldwide would have the rights to merchandize thousands of old BBC programmes from the ’70s and ’80s, so what I wanted to do was go through the archives looking for all these old TV characters… most of them from sitcoms… and put them on Earth with the Doctor. There’s this big concentration camp where the authorities put strays from other realities, so the Doctor finds herself couped up with all these fallen heroes from the BBC’s past, and sharing a cell with Fletcher out of Porridge. The climax of the story was meant to be an assault on the Enemy’s base, in which the Doctor and Captain Mainwaring out of Dad’s Army lead a suicidal light-brigade assault across the final battlefield. Oh, and that was the other thing I was going to do. You know how in these war stories, one of the main characters is always a traitor working for the enemy army? In THE WAR, the traitor was going to be Mrs. Slocum’s Pussy. Because it’s a purely conceptual entity, it only exists in her head, and it turns out to be a Shift working for the Enemy. Like in ALIEN BODIES.”Miles should join Chomu.
How do we get his e-mail address?
At least the guys in ‘office Space’ tried to stick it to the man. I’m watching on TV now. Makes middle management look like morons,and well, they are. They’re, play the fence-lick ass-cowards.
Yes, perhaps I should point out that, despite what I said, I don’t think I could simply replace my own opinions with those of Lawrence Miles. But it’s a close thing.