Not as bad as it looks
Michael Vestey
THE SHADOW OF A NATION by Nick Clarke
Weidenfeld & Nicolson. £20. pp. 258, ISBN 0297607707
Have we as a nation lost our sense of belonging anywhere, as Nick Clarke suggests in this lively social history of the past 50 years? Anyone over 50 knows how society has changed, sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better. It is true that many of the old certainties have been swept away: religious faith, the stability of marriage and the consequent effect on young people, the awesome price of property in the south of England and the insecurity of employment, to name a few. But does this illustrate that the nation has become more shadowy and less substantial as a result?
Clarke clearly thinks so and such a generalisation can only be right up to a point. He believes television has had a major role to play in this, establishing a primacy in our national life. For it to do this, of course, it needs willing audiences, many of whom have chosen to stay in and watch it rather than do other things that families used to do. It is not a drug, it is a preference though not one I share. Clarke has loosely modelled his book on Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians and devotes chapters to people he sees as embodying his thesis: Princess Margaret as a fairy princess in her youth; the adman Charles Saatchi, 'tempting us with unwanted wares': Elizabeth David and Delia Smith, 'imaginary cooks': Arthur Scargill, 'a colossus of industrial might before being cast down by his own ambition', and David Frost, television man par excellence.
These people, the author believes, represent the shallowness of what we have become, pursuing delusions and passing them onto us through the ubiquity of television. Although they all knew how to exploit the media, largely successfully with the exception of Princess Margaret, it wasn't just the media that elevated them into prominence; reading their stories in this book it seemed to me they worked pretty hard at it themselves. In Saatchi's case he promoted himself in advertising and created his valuable but preposterous contemporary art collection which exerted an astonishing power over that particular market.
Scargill, like Saatchi, 'is a myth-maker' as Clarke says; he loved appearing on television as he tried to use his miners to change the nature of government in Britain. Fortunately, he failed in the end. Frost, as Frankie Howerd once observed, 'started by attacking the Establishment, and ended up owning it'. Elizabeth David was by no means a television celebrity. Delia Smith used it to sell her books. Were they peddling cooking fantasies? Yes and no. When David's books came out in the 1950s post-war rationing had made many of the ingredients impossible to find, but thereafter her influence improved food eaten by the middle classes; Smith presumably has done the same for the wider range of people who follow her advice.
Clarke has a certain nostalgia for the old certainties and a distaste for modern television culture; the urge for many to feel 'real' by appearing on television, as he himself did before presenting the World at One on Radio Four. He doesn't mention mass immigration or the overweening power of the European Union in his list of the factors that might have helped undermine any loss of identity. We might live in a more rootless society, but people prepared to join in can always find community activities across the country and I think that perhaps he exaggerates his case, interesting and readable though it is.
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