With Hilarious Consequences

I wondered why Blackadder was trending today, and learned that the original team are planning a fifth series of the hit comedy. Like most people I think it’s a bad idea, and indeed from the report it seems this wasn’t much more than a boozy lunch in Soho House. It may well come to nothing.

I belong to the last generation of Blackadder bores – people who grew up with four terrestrial channels, with scheduled catchphrase comedy shows that I would absorb and then bellow the catchphrases in school the next morning and then at the office. There are plenty of ageing comedy geeks like us out there and I assure you that we have bored colleagues almost to the point of physical violence by repeatedly going through routines from Blackadder, Fast Show, Red Dwarf and dozens of other classic shows. I think that cheap streaming services and multichannel sets have killed this variant of the comedy geek forever (although Ricky Gervais satirised it very well in the character of David Brent, a sitcom star who annoys his colleagues by bellowing ancient sitcom lines at every opportunity).

Michael Gove, when he was Education Secretary, had a go at the last series because he said it gives a too pessimistic view of World War One: ‘The conflict has, for many, been seen through the fictional prism of dramas such as Oh! What a Lovely War, The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder, as a misbegotten shambles – a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite.’ I’ve never studied the Great War at all, so I can’t comment on the slanders perpetuated – so Gove says – on the reputation of Field-Marshal Haig: although I have read enough history to know that the Blackadder view of the nineteenth century imperial wars was a bit simplistic, to put it kindly. (And Blackadder took a shot at the great pacifist war poets, too: ‘War’s an horrid thing/So I sing sing sing/Ding-a-ling-a-ling…’)

It also seems to have been popular with actual soldiers, as well. Richard Holmes, in Dusty Warriors, his book about the Iraq war, includes an account of the show’s impact on military humour:

With Y Company being older, longer serving and therefore the most cynical, part of the battle group humour was particularly fatalistic. The natural choice obviously is Blackadder, of particular significance as the soldier sees himself hard done by by the sardonic Blackadder. His less than proficient peers are the witless Baldrick, and the dash and doubtful-do of Lt George is perfect for ridiculing the commissioned officers. The main protagonists of this were Cpl Chris Mulrine and Sergeant Clint Eastwood (fire controller turned water engineer). Chris would slope around crying ‘Deny everything, Baldrick’ or ‘Don’t forget your stick, Lieutenant’ at the most inopportune moments, and on special occasions (usually on the eve of one of the big ops) he could be found muttering to himself ‘Fine body of men… about to become fine bodies of men’ and ‘Ice cream in Berlin in fifteen days, or ice cold in No Man’s Land in fifteen seconds.’ His timing and application of quotes were carried out with understated style and panache.

We have wandered a little way off the trail. It is not in the scope of a half-hour show to give every nuance and shade of a complex international conflict. What the show does do, very well, is bring history home. I remember watching ‘Goodbyeeeee’ with my family, when it first aired. It took us completely by surprise, the first three series were historical romps with silly endings – and now, the fire, the smoke, and then, the field of roses. Blackadder is part of the lost kingdom of communal TV, and you don’t have to be Paul Morley or Dominic Sandbrook to realise that past that era, the show can’t possibly have the impact it once had.

I also query the premise of the potential new series. The Blackadder family has always stayed close to power and, though the politics and HR of a university no doubt provide opportunities for all sorts of cunning plans, I don’t see that the old rogue Edmund would settle for a lectureship at a college market town. Richard Curtis is quoted as saying that ‘The thing about Blackadder, it was a young man’s show criticising older people, saying how stupid those in authority were. So I did once think, ‘If we ever did anything again, it should be Blackadder as a teacher in a university, about how much we hate young people.’ It would be a shame to see the dynasty end in six episodes of weak lashed together jokes about student protest and safe spaces.

That’s my take on it, anyway. Now, if you’ll excuse me, a lorryload of paperclips has just arrived.

Bad Guy In Your MFA

The campus novel isn’t an easy thing to write, particularly a campus crime novel, and I think only Donna Tartt, in The Secret History, has really ever pulled it off. Elif Batuman’s last book was a little too diffuse for me, John Niven’s Straight White Male is more about fame and success, although I can recommend Julie Schumacher‘s profound epistolary comedy, Dear Committee Members. Apart from that, I don’t know why, the citadel of ideas doesn’t lend itself well at all to the literary novel, let alone genre fiction. (‘The Research Excellence Framework Murders’, anyone?) Until now. Jo Baker’s The Body Lies is a fantastic noir mystery of modern academia.

Part of her success is in the realism. A young novelist lands a job teaching creative writing at a university in North Lancs. The new start isn’t. The narrator ends up overloaded with work due to staffing gaps. Everyone in the department is rushed off their feet and close to burnout. What’s inside the academy’s gates isn’t so lustrous. Baker draws a compelling picture of higher education taken over by the HR industry and turned into yet another process driven target culture environment. If you wondered why lecturers and support staff walked out last year, The Body Lies will enlighten you.

Baker’s skill extends to her deft pen-portraits of the students, even gives you a sense of their work as individuals. There are the careerists and the hobbyists and the half-crazy (‘Around forty per cent of our creative writing students have declared mental health issues, and those are just the ones that choose to let us know’, an admin officer says) there’s glimpses of wonder and talent.

Here Baker digs out another level to her story. Her student Steven is writing a police procedural that begins with the discovery of a dead woman – ‘Posters of her smiling face were on every parish notice board and stuck in every shop window’ – and another student objects. Nicholas is a more experimental writer and complains that ‘I don’t know this woman. She could be anybody. Literally, Any Body. Sure, Girl Guides and yeah whatever the background bullshit we’re given, but she has no agency, she’s not a character, she’s a device.’ Part of the complexity of this book is that Baker uses exactly the same thing in her brief prologue – ‘the young woman curled there, her skin blue-white, dark hair tumbled over her face.’

Nicholas says what many readers think about police procedurals – why do we never get a chance to know the victims before they die? But his own writing isn’t much better, a plotless rush of self absorbed non sequiturs. Nicholas – never Nick – is recovering from a bereavement, comes from a dysfunctional family and seems vulnerable. He is admired and well liked. Is he just another lost soul who thinks creative writing will fix whatever is wrong with him? Or is there something creepier there? Our narrator fears the latter – particularly when she starts turning up in his excerpts. ‘I’ll only write what happened,’ Nicholas says in class. ‘I’ll only write the truth.’

The atmospherics of this novel are something else. The narrator’s problems don’t end at work. She has a marriage that’s falling apart, a young son to take care of and she fled London following a nasty street assault. I’ve not named her as I think the late reveal of her name is significant, but the protagonist is so sympathetic, you have never wanted so much for things to work out for someone. You feel the paradox of being busy and surrounded by people and still lonely, and as the story darkens, feel her sense of danger and being watched: the enemy seems to inhabit the sky. And Baker has the compulsive readability of Fiona Barton or Sarah Pinborough or Robert Galbraith.

It’s also one hell of a book about narration itself. I forget who said that ‘The villain never thinks of himself as the villain, he thinks of himself as the hero of another movie’ but it remains true. There are potential friends in the protagonist’s new Lancashire town. But there are no heroes in The Body Lies because the narrator has to learn to be her own hero and write her own story – all the men in her life have an agenda of some kind, and consider her potential grist to feed their own personal narratives. The problem of entitlement shades into the process of creation.

The protagonist reflects on Nicholas’s ‘innocent arrogance; he was shooting for immortal transcendence, with no idea of how difficult it is to achieve even mediocrity.’ I don’t know if Jo Baker will be immortal, but in The Body Lies she has shot a long way past the mediocre.

Wellness Among the Ruins

Looking at the papers in the cafe this morning, my roving satirical eye caught this piece by Dan Button, of the New Economics Foundation, in which he argues that the government should prioritise well being over GDP.

Yet last week, New Zealand broke new ground by eschewing GDP in favour of wellbeing as a guiding indicator when setting budgets and assessing government policy. Bids to the Treasury for money from now on will not only need a cost-benefit analysis, but an assessment of their wellbeing impact. Decisions about spending will be made on the basis of a project’s contribution to the wellbeing of the population, measured through four dimensions: human capital; social capital; natural capital; and financial and physical capital. It follows the Welsh government’s innovative Well-being of Future Generations Act, which places a legal requirement on public bodies in Wales to think about the long-term social, cultural, environmental and economic wellbeing impact of their decisions.

These are radical steps in the right direction that the UK should learn from by adopting a broader range of indicators when deciding how to spend money. Government departments should have a legal duty to routinely assess new policy for its impact on a broader range of criteria, including wellbeing. If improving quality of life is not the point of government policy, then what is?

The concept of wellbeing seems a bit overused and dated at the moment. It brings to mind Gwyneth Paltrow and her alt health company GOOP, which apparently advises women, in the pursuit of wellness and sexual health, to insert jade eggs into an intimate orifice. I am sure this is not what Dan Button means when he says that ‘departments should have a legal duty to routinely assess new policy for its impact on a broader range of criteria, including wellbeing.’ But even in the more prosaic political sphere, we’ve been here before.

In late 2010 prime minister David Cameron wanted to ‘make happiness the new GDP.’ This is how the Guardian reported it at the time:

He is sticking to a policy commitment he made before the economic crash when growth figures were still rosy. He said: ‘It’s time we admitted that there’s more to life than money and it’s time we focused not just on GDP but on GWB – general wellbeing.’

Speaking at the Google Zeitgeist Europe conference, he added: ‘Wellbeing can’t be measured by money or traded in markets. It’s about the beauty of our surroundings, the quality of our culture and, above all, the strength of our relationships. Improving our society’s sense of wellbeing is, I believe, the central political challenge of our times.’

We know the rest of this story – as Button says, ‘most of the population saw their living standards stagnate or fall, and austerity measures picked up pace.’ But Button goes on to claim that: ‘An economy with wellbeing at its heart would make it much harder to make such claims, and harder to enforce a policy such as austerity again.’

This seems unlikely. A focus on general wellbeing is usually a excuse for failures on real economics. In 2016 the Leave campaign and numerous Brexit commentators told us that leaving the EU would mean exciting new trade deals and money for the NHS. Now, with industry walking away and no signs of austerity letting up, these same commentators tell us to forget about the numbers, the point of the project is about restoring national pride and intangible British values. (Boring old Remainers, banging on about people’s jobs!)

Of course British values are real, and important. My argument is only that in quitting the antibiotics of GDP we could end up having to insert into ourselves the jade eggs of national sovereignty.

What is wellbeing? Button makes many good points but can’t seem to define it, and for a good reason, because wellbeing is subjective. It would be a hell of a thing for the state to decide what constitutes wellbeing and happiness, particularly as we British have become rather judgemental about how others enjoy themselves. We drink too much, smoke too much, watch reality TV. The difficulty is that government isn’t set up to foster subjective human emotions, it can only provide the resources, time and space for people to foster wellbeing in themselves and their communities and pursue their own happiness.

I’m reminded of Rachel Clarke‘s medical memoir Your Life in My Hands. Though I don’t have my copy to hand, one passage stayed with me. Dr Clarke wrote about working impossible shifts in UK hospitals and every now and again being sent internal mail offering yoga sessions and other wellness activities that the doctors could enjoy during lunch breaks.

We work through lunch break, said Clarke. We don’t have time for this.

Meanwhile, workloads soared and clinicians regularly burned out from stress. Next to nothing was done.

For all Dan Button’s good intentions, I suspect that any attempt to incorporate ‘wellness’ into the heart of British government would end in some scaled-up version of the pointless mailshots Dr Clarke describes, while the rest of the country firefights. It’s about time the state quit its emotionalist thinking and concentrated on keeping the lights on. To paraphrase P J O’Rourke: what we need is less wellness, more lunch.

Song of the Outpost

The classic recent TV series are Western genre shows. Breaking Bad, The Wire, Sons of Anarchy are basically Westerns. (Vince Gilligan drew on the same Sergio Leone movies as did Stephen King for his Dark Tower epic.) And the classic show that’s actually a Western isn’t a Western. Deadwood is not about Western type themes – confrontation, masculinity, pride, solitude and anger (although it is about these things too) it’s about relationships between people and how societies grow.

Take the gold in the black hills that brought everybody to Deadwood. People get killed over claims and counter claims. Fortune seekers rushed to the Dakotas in 1876, just as they rushed to California in ’49, and later to the Klondike in 1890. History is full of these periodic migrations and stampedes. They continue today. In the 2010s, people returned to the Dakotas for the oil and the fracking boom. I can’t recommend enough journalist Maya Rao’s Great American Outposts, in which she chronicles the searchers and drifters who gravitated to North Dakota for oil money driving rigs and hauling water. People from all over America rushed for black gold, many leaving behind criminal records, bad credit histories and child-support claims. Rao’s subjects are not all dissimilar to the ‘hoopleheads’ Al Swearengen used to serve in his Gem Saloon.

The gold itself is valueless. As the Patrician says in The Colour of Magic, if you gave everyone a bag of gold the result would not be that ‘we’d all be rich’. The gold would depreciate in value, because its value rests on scarcity. Smart operators like Al Swearengen and Cy Tolliver, the second wave of Deadwood settlers, they know that you can make a better living selling booze and sex to prospectors, than from spending hours in a creek panning for precious metals. It is not the metal but the perception of the metal and how perception itself can be mined for coin. In his book of the series, showrunner David Milch says that ‘Something in us that is specifically human has the capacity to endow a symbol with a special meaning.’

Swearengen is the lynchpin of the show – the camp evolves under his wary gaze from the balcony of the Gem. Al is a brutal cutthroat, and an exploiter of women, but he faces outwards and cares about the future of the camp. He takes an active part in the bewildering politics of accession and annexation that characterised the US in the 1870s. He hosts town meetings at the Gem, at which he serves cans of peaches, just as Gustavo Fring offered platters of sandwiches in sitdowns with cartel bosses he despised. (Milch writes: ‘And in the electrical force field created within that meeting, the presence of the peaches has significance as a gesture.’) With his fierce intelligence and grandiloquent, corrosive speech, Al runs rings around commissioners and politicians, dodging murder warrants and turning potential enemies.

But things are changing. Retired sheriff Seth Bullock goes back to the badge, and his duties go from cleaning up murders to sorting out the kind of petty property disputes that neighbourhood policing teams would recognise today. The lovable A. W. Merrick sets up his newspaper. Alma Garrett quits laudanum and founds a local bank. There are weddings, and funerals. Taboos are created and enforced. The brothel becomes a schoolhouse, and then a theatre. Telegraphs go up (and in the movie, railroads and telephone lines). There are elections locally, then regionally. And as the camp develops into a town, Swearengen faces more formidable enemies as well as his own weakness and mortality.

Milch also writes of ‘complicated manipulations and distortions of money produced by people who understood there were realities at the level of the symbol that you could fuck with.’ In season two geologist Francis Wolcott arrives and begins spreading rumours, depreciating the value of the claims so that he can buy up the claims at cost price on behalf of his employer: gold tycoon George Hearst, the boy the earth spoke to. There is a fine scene where Wolcott writes to Hearst about the growing operation, and his narration of the letter is spoken over a montage of workers driven hard at the goldmine, then stripped and frisked for stolen metals. Wolcott is a wretch and a killer, but he is just a harbinger of his even more sinister boss. When Hearst sacks Wolcott over his murders of several sex workers, Wolcott hangs himself; without Hearst he is nothing, a weak degenerate who even old man Charlie Utter can take in a fight.

David Milch describes Hearst as ‘the monstrous abstraction of the symbol made flesh.’ Hearst tells us frequently how much he hates the camp, and is obviously happiest prospecting alone in the field. In Milch’s world that’s not meant to say anything good about his character. Hearst represents the third wave of corporatism and commodity fetishism. He kills miners who try to unionise. While Al consults, Hearst only gives orders. Elections ‘ratify my will, or I neuter them,’ he says. Season three becomes a lengthy Mexican standoff between Hearst and the rest of the town. Deadwood’s resistance fears attacking him because to do so might destroy the camp. As Al says: ‘And as to us and him, if blood’s what it finally comes to, one hundred years from now the forest is what they’ll find here. Dewy morning’s lost its appeal for me. I prefer to wake indoors.’

Wake indoors, and face outwards. Milch has said in interviews that a lot of the thinking on Deadwood came from his time in AA where survival meant giving up the I for the we, and in going through the motions until they became natural. That becomes the show’s story – a lie, or illusion, agreed upon. People have to compromise their personal selves to get along, and the we isn’t always kind. Seth Bullock is in an arranged marriage to his late brother’s wife: he begins an affair with Alma Garrett, a New Yorker widowed between the murder of her husband Brom Garrett and her later platonic marriage to the noble old prospector William Ellsworth. She and Bullock are soulmates, but must sacrifice their love to the greater stability of the town. Alma says of Ellsworth, in one of the show’s more heartbreaking lines: ‘He is a good man. And he whom I love is here as well.’

It’s about the making of a community, and not the nostalgia authoritarian state of which today’s communitarians dream. It’s a we made up of hundreds, thousands of dancing Is, hoopleheads, prospectors and fools. When Bullock first stands for election, he is overwhelmed by the hustings and forgets whatever rhetoric of justice he had planned and instead simply says: ‘I’m glad we’re in the camp, even on the sorriest of days.’ And I think, watching the show and the movie, that this is how we all felt – it was over too soon, but all the same, we were glad to be in the camp. The Deadwood movie is as good as the series and gives us one last look at the legendary outpost, I recommend watching it with a bottle of rotgut to hand – and perhaps a can of peaches.