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 Sunday
THE GREAT ICON CON (contd)
I started to watch The Culture Show last night – partly just to see through to the grim end their “Greatest Living Icon, British (G.L.I.B.) quest; but I had to turn the sound down before long because it was aggravating me SO much.
I'm sure it's not actually Laura Levene's fault, cos she's just reading a script written by some clueless coked-up trustafarian 21 year old whose parents dinner party with someone in the BBC hierarchy (“handbags have always been ICONIC!” indeed); but this new jokey jokey ‘don't worry we'll make culture silly and un threatening and flirty for you’ tone is REALLY starting to get my iconic faux-Rauschenberg goat. I'm sure who ever is behind it thinks it's ever so "market penetrative" – ‘We want to get that part of the A/B female demographic that wouldn’t normally interact with a multi strand culture mode...’ - but it's really just a different, and MORE patronising, form of Reith-ism. As in: Come here little plebs, and drink at the culture trough. It has items on POP STARS and HANDBAGS – so you won’t be frightened by all the strange words like “symphony” and “ literature” … BAH!
And if I hadn’t already turned it down I would have when that ridiculous 'defend your icon' face off began. So, this is it, is it: Morrissey, David Attenborough and Paul MacCartney. H Jesus fucking Christ. Kate Bush, Kate Moss and Vivienne Westwood all relegated to nowhere land for THIS? Somewhere there is some WANKER with a complete set of MOJO and 'Q' magazines - who has complete DVD sets of all his favourite COMEDIES (he can 'do' the Ricky Gervais dance from The Office) and he has a mate who got him tickets for that recent Noel Gallagher acoustic set and it was "blindin', yeah, he's still got it, yuh," and HE BLOCK VOTED here, didn’t he?
Macca, Attenborough and Mozzer: ‘culture’ as cocoa and slippers.
Exciting icons of the … 60s, 70s and 80s respectively.
The difference between the last series of TCS and this one is staggering.
The last series was pretty OK, above average intelligent on things like architecture and classical music and even a couple of nods in a vaguely 'WIRE' type direction. (It had a great piece on Terry Riley, for instance.) But now some trendy dolt of a producer has obviously been brought in to get the "young" "Saturday night" "demographic" (curse that word/notion) and so therefore only does items on stuff that is already in that demo's "comfort zone" ...as, last night: Rickey Gervais, handbags, Faithless. This is 'culture' as in ‘gun culture’ or 'ladette culture' or 'mall culture' ... i.e. the same grimly dumbed-down pass-notes version of "semiology" that is prevalent all over media land. (And thus why ‘icon’ is everywhere like crab grass. It makes you sound like you know what you’re talking about, without having to do anything more than name a couple of 70s footballers and a porn star or two. I.e., nothing you couldn’t have done watching TV, really.)
Last night's adult-panto and handbag pieces had already been done in The Guardian (and the Gervais/Pilkington thing was just an advert for their Guardian podcast) - which, is there anything more desperate than being later on the scene than the Guardian? (It’s like the researcher was off sick so they just picked up that day’s Grauniad.)
The same thing has happened with G2 since the redesign - there seems to be some kind of INCH PANIC, that means text is split up into smaller and smaller Q&A or boxed off or IDIOTS GUIDE TO type sections and at least FOUR gossipy "personality" COLUMNS every day which will spit weary sarcastic venom at how vapid and trivial it is that all the other newspapers have been covering Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan and Britney ... whilst, of course, also covering Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan and Britney.
The handbag piece (by the egregious Zina Bendybus-Wimoweh) was perhaps the pits. Not because I think fashion doesn’t deserve decent coverage - I think it NEEDS more and better coverage. But this wasn’t it. This was desperation, on a story that is already weeks if not months old. And what IS it doing here? Something to do with "remit" or "demographic". Get in Laura Levene - as opposed to an older, more specialised presenter with a background in, well, arts and culture. Set the programme in a COCKTAIL BAR. (Don’t ask WHY: just do it.) And switch from doing intelligent pieces on slightly more marginal or 'difficult' areas to ... handbags and "icons".
I have to say, I think this ridiculous "Greatest Living Icon" thing has been the most pointless waste of BBC time and resources I've seen for a long time. It seems to concretize the trendified fear-of-thinking attitude at work here, involving an apparently 'democratic' 'viewer participation’ element, that, under a microscope is revealed to be mere sub-focus-group salad dressing. And that is essentially MEANINGLESS. 'Greatest Living Icon.' Meaning what? What do Morrissey, Paul MacCartney and David Attenborough have in common, anyway? (Apart from all being, when you get down to it, part of a comfort-inducing past rather than any unpredictable or frightening or mystifying future?) Nothing. It's not about 'culture', and about taking viewers to new places in culture - it's about COMFINESS. About staying in and pandering to a perceived demographic's COMFORT ZONE. Icon is a real New Labour style weasel word - that can mean everything/anything in any context whilst at base, really, meaning NOTHING WHATSOEVER. Certainly nothing that might "offend" or confuse one perceived "demographic" group or other.
Although a stray comment from Laura Levene (I think, I had the sound half down by this exasperated point) was the only indication here that maybe they were a bit unsettled at TCS by JUST how conservative their viewers choice was – the top 3 “living” icons all white, all male, all middle aged or older. Which means that either there is an even bigger disjunction between who they WISH was watching the show and the age of the people who really ARE; or their supposedly trendy Observer Music Monthly-reading cocktail-drinking "demographic" are as hidebound and blinkered as some old Punch-reading Home Counties ex-Colonial from the 1920s...
I suppose any popular "icon" has to be inoffenseive to some extent if it's going to appeal 'across the board, demographic wise'. But Macca is only really here because Lennon is dead (and he's getting some strange twisted sympathy vote as against the misogynistic tabloid's favourite Female Hate Figure of the moment); and a few years ago, Morrissey was KAPUT wasn't he, a joke figure rather than an icon.
And David Attenborough - well, it's like voting for your Gran, really, isn’t it?
I mean – no offence, he makes great progs n’all, but in what sense is it ‘culture’ in the sense that Schoenberg or Scorsese or Pat Califia, say, are? It’s more ‘culture’ in the sense of red phone boxes and World Cup 66 and … well, Morrissey’s quiff and Macca’s thumb. It’s got nothing to do with culture as inroad or departure, and everything to do with HOLDING ON to some kind of passing and un-difficult Britishness. And I’m not necessarily knocking either Attenborough or anyone’s notion of comforting Britishness – it’s just all such a lumpy doughy hodge-podge and always will be if you stick to EMPTY inoffensive terms like ‘Icon’ which don’t mean anything to anyone when it comes down to it.
It is SO quiescent. It's like DONT EVER UPSET ANYONE EVER. And so the Qs that Levene asks guests - she might as well still be on a Saturday morning The Chart Show. Faithless unplugged? WHY? For god's sake WHY? Because they are so obscure and need the coverage? Because their new record isn’t a live album greatest hits sets - it's a strange new daring departure? No - because IT WON’T OFFEND ANYONE. A little bit dance, a little bit multicultural, a little bit real musicians playing real music ... Christ, it's worse - more contained, more fearful, more limited - than The Old Grey Whistle Test ever was. It REALLY is.
Just keep on filling the space, and never, never ever, ever, even think of asking the question of any subject, "but is this really worth doing?" and "if so, why?"
posted by Ian 12/03/2006 07:01:00 AM
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THE PILL BOX 
