Present Mirth

When the roll-call of Western Culture is finally written, one of the artistic products that will be left like a pair of dragons yearningly watching the departing ark as the waters rise around it is likely to be the British TV comedy. Much as critics like to run the tattered flags of Fawlty Towers, Dad's Army, Monty Python and The Office up their flagpole, we salute them with a notably post-Imperial tristesse. Like bottle-caps in mud, their brightness is more a feature of the dismally unfunny vehicles of their era than their inherent value.

Moreover, how many people actually like the finely-crafted farce of Fawlty Towers rather than, say, the Spanish waitor being hit with a teaspoon? How many people value the the dry documentary style of The Office above David Brent's humiliating, iconic dance? The high aesthetic criteria on which critics exalt these comedies are distant from the audience laughter that has seemed to underwrite those critical opinions. And if laughter really sets the seal of greatness on comedy, then reserve a place in the Hall of Fame for You've Been Framed.

Nevertheless, it is untenable to say that comedy is of a lower form than tragedy, and if we doubt this for a second then we only have to consider how few are the great comedies, how many the great tragedies, great string quartets, great serious novels. A great humorist such as P. G. Wodehouse is a lightning-strike amid the steady downpour of serious British fiction.

Is the fault, then, in our stars or in our selves? I don't know when I last heard someone boasting about reading a comic novel or watching a sit-com. If art is the new Top Trumps, then the cards with the highest value always seem to be the ones about: a doomed love-affair; a fatal illness; and, preferably, a high-stakes historical event such as the Holocaust. I hope that people consume this moral fibre purely for health of their image when discussing them afterwards, because its nutritional value always seems to me to be negligible.

Richard Curtis's gentle comedy begins with with the modest but perceptive comment that Love, Actually, is all around. Love and comedy are indeed pervasive in our society, but the fleshless bones on which today's culture vultures seem to feed gives scant evidence of this.

Those Who Are About To Dine Salute You

It is well-established that - for a certain sort of human being - danger adds savour to any pleasure. Fear of discovery, for example, has led charm and urgency to many a sexual tryst. A love of horror stories comes with the anticipation of restless nights of creeping shadows and creaking doors. Extreme sports are made more piquant by the prospect of serious injury. Even turning on the Channel Four News involves the fear of catching the final leaden minutes of Hollyoaks.

Dinner is not free from its careful calculation of risk and reward, for every domestic chef must at some point have hovered over a bubbling pan with that one extra chili like a card player over his last hand of Blackjack. The Japanese businessman tucking into his bowl of Fugu does so in the expectation of pleasure or death, but until recently no restaurant had more perfectly epitomised this tightrope walk than The Fat Duck at Bray: reputedly one of the world's finest restaurants and lately the venue for a nasty outbreak of what appears to have been norovirus.

Now, it's worth saying straight away that going to the The Fat Duck and contracting a common vomiting bug is rather like suffering from travel sickness on a humvee drive through downtown Baghdad. Nevertheless, the media seems to think this story noteworthy, and its timing could not have been more critical for Heston Blumenthal, who ventured into the celebrity chef business at around the time that its flush went bust.

Blumenthal is, in every sense, the dernier cri of celebrity chefs. Not only is he the latest fashion, but also the final whimper, of an entertainment industry that has flogged itself like a Medieval ascetic through the good days and now falls exhausted and blooded until the next trend makes itself known. Even Blumenthal's catchphrase (the less-than-pithy "Please don't try this at home") is a desperate inversion of the labour-saving Home Economics of Delia and Nigella. Moreover, where the personal charm of those redoubtable ladies was chief part of their appeal, Heston seems to have made gaucheness his stock in trade. At one's perfect dinner party, he might be serving the food but he wouldn't get a seat at table.

And yet, such is the world and such is human nature that one cannot help feeling that norovirus may yet prove to be Blumenthal's unlikely source of salvation, because the thing that threatened to ruin his reputation is not how sick his food makes you but how good it tastes. If the choice is between snail porridge and ordinary porridge, the news that they both taste good only convinces me to go for the ordinary porridge, which has the enduring virtue of being cheap. If I am going to pay a small fortune for snail porridge, I want to run the risk that it will taste as foul as it sounds. Or at least that it will infect me with a vomiting bug.

With Heston's hugely entertaining highbrow take on Bush Tucker Trials coming to an end this week one can only wonder what fate holds in store for him next. My advice to him is to ensure that the Grim Reaper is riding pillion on his next venture.

God's Little Helpers

There can be little doubt that the brightest character in the Old Testament (the veritable Stephen Fry of Biblical characters) is Jonah. When God gave him the news that he was to be the next prophet, he saw the writing on the wall (not literally, of course, because the writing on the wall was aimed at Belshazzar) and scarpered.

The attentions of God are generally not a good thing in the Bible. First (well, duh!) there was Adam (that unpleasant business that was picked over several blogs back), and it wasn't long before Abraham was receiving instructions on how to do away with his son.

This story, the story of Abraham and Isaac, is only even slightly tolerable if you see it entirely from the human perspective. God doesn't come too well out of the Garden of Eden debacle, but here He is surely just being sadistic, to ask a father to take his son up the mountain and sacrifice him. After all, there's the omniscience thing again; God knew full well that Abraham was so incapable of independent thought that he would slavishly obey. The only point, then, in going through the entire rigmarole was in order to demonstrate (either to Abraham, to Isaac, or to us) that strict adherence to Divine instruction would probably work out alright in the end.

There we go: moral instruction inculcated and no one harmed except for a ram that thought that the worst part of its day was getting caught in a thicket until Abraham happened along with a murderous gleam in his eye.

And yet, one has to think that Isaac (who uncomplainingly allowed himself to be bound and laid on an altar by the person previously known as "Dad") would have slept less easy in his bed that night. Had psychoanalysis existed in those times, I would have though some intensive counselling and arguably a full course 0f the talking therapy might have done him some good. Abraham himself is likely have looked away evasively as Sarah caught his eye while cooking up (what my knowledge of early-era cooking only extends to describing as) a mess of potage that evening. All cannot have been well in the Abraham household for some days after, and I suspect that they were not permitted to eat the ram to assuage their collective misery, however free-range and hand-cut it might have been.

Were God inclined to justify His own ways to men, he might counter that facing the threat of sacrificing one's son is nothing compared to genuinely sacrificing one's son for the redemption of the world. Moreover, given that God's wrath extends even to an extinction event survived by only one family and a large number of breeding pairs, I don't think that I would be inclined to argue with Him.

But I would be ever so grateful if He were to pass me by next time that He was selecting a helper.

Taste The Difference

Nothing is more emblematic of the commodification of food culture than a sticker seen this very day (oh, the topicality!) on a Sainsbury's steak. Naturally, this being the hedonistic Noughties, this was not merely steak, but was Taste The Difference, 21-day matured, Rib Eye Steak, quite possibly with a photo of a presiding genius spirit of the kitchen (and, if so, it was probably Jamie Oliver) as a guarantee that this was better than every other steak sold in every other supermarket. The additional label, however, revealed the underlying paradox of this lauded piece of flesh: "Security Label: remove before placing in microwave."

That steak is now considered fair game for the criminal classes of Britain is itself fairly intriguing. Thwarted by security tags higher in the food chain of his previous desire to leg it with six bottles of Famous Grouse in his coat, William Sykes esq. has evidently shifted his attention to the 21-day matured. Like Jean Valjean with that fatal loaf of bread, Sykes has reasoned that surely Sainsbury's couldn't deny one of the undeserving poor a scrap of Taste The Difference. But no, that door has also been slammed in his face with a stern admonition to shoplift only from the Basics product line.

The fact of the security tag is less troubling, however, than the idea that people are cooking this finely-marbled, custom-aged, hand-cut, artisan-reared, free-range steak in a microwave in the first-place.

The kitchen (as we are endlessly told by aspiring couples seeking a second home in Norfolk or project managing a barn conversion in Sussex) is the heart of the modern home. The Aga Saga was once self-evidently a semi-rural tale set in the Cotswolds, but now that every home has a range cooker its descriptive value has been set at nought. The amount of marble hewn for the modern kitchen would have sufficed to face the brickwork of a small Florentine church during the sixteenth century. Lay all the breakfast bars in Britain on end and the first manned mission to Mars could be undertaken by hikers.

Yet at heart even J. S. Sainsbury is conscious that the only cooking surface really required by the modern Englishman is the cardboard one thoughtfully supplied by Dominos as an integral part of its boxes. While mother may aspire to having her husband, sons and daughters fawning upon her as she chops, peels and reduces, the reality of the matter is that they have already seen her pierce the film lid once and there's something more exciting on television. Quite possibly on the Parliament channel.

Now that the economy has collapsed and even our collective investment in Smeg and Miele cannot save our homes from depreciating more rapidly than a Ferrari on its way out of the showroom, we should at last admit that we could never really taste the difference in the first place. Home-made always came a distant second in our affections to matured, hand-cut, artisan-reared taken-away.

The So-Called "News"

Before he re-branded himself as an intellectual, Jeremy Paxman made his name by being a sneering, superannuated schoolboy who met every ministerial claim with the same drawling incredulity. No stretch of the imagination was needed to see him squeezed into an inky desk at the age of 14, scowling at the stupidity of his masters. It was all highly entertaining.

The BBC has now become so Paxmanised that no Newsnight anchor is complete without a full arsenal of withering ticks and belligerent interruptions, but recent events have revealed that this tendency has even spread to the early evening news. Reference has been heard, on several occasions, to the "so-called "Real" I.R.A."

Now I don't recollect the Beeb dubbing the unlamented forbears of this newly active organisation "the I.R. so-called "A"". The Tamil so-called "Tigers" have been little in evidence, while so-called "Islamic" fundamentalists of many an extremist hue have been allowed to pass unchallenged. Was there some concern on the part of the B.B.C. that confusion might arise in its viewers minds between the original-and-still-the-best I.R.A. and a bunch of people who like to murder policemen and soldiers? There was a notable shortage of men in black balaclavas threatening legal action for copyright infringement, but so timid have the Board of Governors become that even the thought of it possibly had them running for cover. When an organisation can be brought to its knees by the process of naming a pet cat, its days as a crusader for truth are long gone.

One would have thought, however, that of all brandings to respect, the I.R.A has the least currency. What with its swords having been beaten into ploughshares, what used to be an army has surely a more agricultural inclination these days ... it is more of a Provisional Irish Republican Land Army. This means that the name is up for grabs, and (in the brief period before they are all locked up or violently disposed of) the Real I.R.A. may as well make merry with it. It is not as though they called themselves the Real Irish Catholic Church.

Moreover, why so-called? Just think of the Gallic panache that could be lent to this organisation had the B.B.C. chosen to dub it "the soi-disant Real I.R.A.". The self-proclaimed I.R.A. would have resounded with authority and vigor, whereas by terming them "the so-called Real I.R.A." BBC correspondents merely make themselves sound more surly and sarcastic than usual. One imagines that they add a mental snigger to the end of every sentence in which they use the phrase so-called.

Given, however, that the B.B.C. has decided to editorialise, one watches the evening news with renewed hope that its new-found cynicism will be turned on other subjects in the world of current affairs. How long will it be before Nick Clegg is introduced as the "so-called "leader" of the Liberal Democrats" or Jack Straw referred to as "the secretary of State for so-called "Justice""?

Bearing in mind how little real news there is on the so-called news, though, news editors might think better of building their pile of stones so close to their own glass house.

Ampersand Another Thing ...

I was surprised, on attempting to publish the foregoing, to discover that Blogger does not permit the use of ampersands. Why, of all punctuation marks, its wrath has fallen on that lowly indicator of conjunction, demands a degree of scrutiny.

An ampersand is helpless. A figure eight with a kickstand, it only appears in public once it has a stout companion on either side of it. In fact, it is so evidently vulnerable that one is only surprised that there is no caseworker from Social Services standing idly by as it dies of neglect. (Perhaps there is ... when one's principal professional duties involving standing idly by it can be difficult to tell whether your apathy is directed at one or another of your wards, which perhaps goes to explain how Social Services can handle so many people at once.)

Not so the mighty And. Just as the grey squirrel drove out our sickly domestic variety, so And strides forth, displacing the timorous ampersand and vanquishing the mighty comma before standing fearlessly at the head of the sentence, where no And had ventured before him. And is a creature of muscle and sinew; ampersand is the debased descendent of a once-proud lineage.

Yet ampersand has much to commend it. In these days of anorexia, its pear-shaped figure is so much more healthy than the two dry sticks that form the emaciated +. M+S would never, one fears, have become such a bastion of underwear sales to the Middle Class; it was the voluptuous ampersand that gave us confidence in the robustness of its elastic. As the name of a museum, the V+A is suggestive of sensational excess rather than comforting collections of buttons and lace bobbins. Perhaps the entire banking industry lurched hideously into the red when the Alliance and Leicester elevated the cross (most commonly used, after all, as a marker for graves) above the ampersand in its corporate branding.

If it is all over for the ampersand then how many of us, I wonder, will discover our fates to have been subtly bound to that of this unassuming mark of punctuation. Given that its only purpose was to hold things together, one could hardly be surprised.

Adam Lay Ybounden

Since this is the inaugural post of this tentative blog, one's mind turns to Genesis: not in the sense of the prog gods of the distant past, but in the sense of another Edenic fall, very nearly commensurate in gravity. Few conundra are as perpetually intriguing as that of the mystery of Adam's crime and the punishment that ensued.

There is a chicken-and-egg nature to Adam's sin, since the only thing that might reasonably have been expected to hold that young turk back from profligate enjoyment of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil was ... a knowledge of good and evil. If one thinks of The Fall as an actual historical occurrence, it is a shame that no lawyers were handy to argue to Adam's case, although even the combined resources of the Legal Aid system might have struggled to face down a tyrant whose pockets were literally bottomless: an attribute that (if you think about it) is not generally desirable in pockets but which would here confer a definite advantage.

If The Fall is an actual historical fact, mankind got saddled with Original Sin on the basis of a transgression that one would not need to be omniscient to anticipate. If one has established a habit of murdering one's wives, one does not keep their corpses in a room access to which is the one thing forbidden to one's seventh wife. If one has a box full of all the ills of the world, giving it to a curious young woman with the admonition not to open must be considered a serious breach even of the most relaxed principles of health and safety. Placing in one's garden a tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is akin to bedding in a bit of Japanese Knotweed to brighten up one of its dingier corners. In fact, it was an error entirely commensurate in scale for a deity whose last action had been the creation of the universe.

But of course, Adam's fall, treated literally, was very far from unanticipated what with all the omniscience 'n' such. Adam's fall was a premeditated crime: not on Adam's part, or on Eve's, but on the part of God himself. Given that someone drinks, drives, speeds and kills, the actual killing (usually of a sweet child from a bygone age, probably playing with a dolly that will fall to the tarmac in slow motion, rather than some loathsome asbo of whom society would do well to rid itself) is not an intended consequence of the earlier stages of the crime. Nevertheless, we hold the driver responsible. Getting liquored up on the praise of angels, creating the universe and going and letting the one thing in Creation that you made in your image go and Fall is really a neglect of the fundamental responsibilities of universal creation. We do not build staircases without handrails and God should not build gardens of Eden that include a tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Next time you are blaming the Planning Office for turning down your second bathroom, you might at the same times want to reproach them for also not having been set up a few thousand (or billion) years earlier. Picture the chagrin of the newly unomnipotent God when confronted with the news that this void had been Grade Two listed and that the letting-be of Light was a strict contravention of municipal bylaws.

And surely the prevention of this Folly would have been, broadly speaking, A Good Thing. Could even Kevin McCloud at his most fervent have readily approved this profoundly unergomatic domicile? When one's metaphorical turrets, gables and wetrooms are Babi Yar, Guantanamo Bay and Auschwitz, it is tempting to wish that the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil had proven itself of a hardier stock. For, oddly enough, when it comes to Good and Evil, not knowing the difference seems to have become the ubiquitous and most unoriginal sin.