ANOTHER VOICE

A temporary bad smell on the media scene

AUBERON WAUGH

Someone called Peter Bowman, media research director of WCRS (whatever that may be), has commented on the Henley Centre's findings that higher income fami- lies were deserting television in their mil- lions, driven away by the trash being shown on all channels. The middle classes do not tell the truth when it comes to television, he said:

The worst thing you can do is ask the middle class how much television they [sic] are watching. Given their innate snobbery, obvi- ously they're not going to say they watch TV.

Are we to suppose the lower classes are more truthful? Truthfulness was not, his- torically, considered a particular character- istic of the cultural underclass which now rejoices in television, and for which so many television programmes are designed.

`It is impudent and exorbitant to demand truth from the lower classes,' wrote Evelyn Waugh in his Irregular Notes for July 1961 (Diaries p.784). One wonders from what vantage point this P. Bowman considers himself free to denounce the 'innate snob- bery' of the entire middle class. Plainly he is a very superior person. Does he speak as an old aristocrat, like Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, or as an upwardly mobile eli- tist, like that great class warrior Andrew Neil? The greatest question he fails to answer, however, is why the innately snob- bish middle class should be ashamed to admit it watches television.

So far as watching television is con- cerned, I can do no more than aver (whether I am believed or not) that, out- side the particular circumstances of a health farm, I very seldom watch it for more than half an hour a week. Possibly I am discouraged from watching it by some element of snobbery, or social disdain for the people who appear on it, although I would explain my reaction more in terms of ordinary disdain for the facile and meretri- cious entertainment on offer.

But it would be idle to deny that watch- ing television stimulates what Bryan Apple- yard has identified as the Great Loathing which Britons of every degree feel for each other nowadays. According to him, it derives from a national self-loathing which itself springs from the perception of our inexorable decline as a nation: 'It is not just that things are done so badly that makes them so poignantly awful,' he explains, 'it is that we once did them well.' He believes it has been growing for 30 years until we have now reached the point where everybody hates everybody else. This self-hatred, with the wailing and the loathing which accom- pany it, has become our chief unifying fac- tor as a nation.

It is an attractive theory but it does not quite explain our contempt for what televi- sion has to offer. This is for the good rea- son that at least half the rubbish shown on television appears to come from America, which should enable it to sidestep our class animosities and feelings of national despair. In fact, I believe that most of us find this imported rubbish even more painful than the autochthonous variety.

The obvious explanation for the general hatred which accompanies our descent into the mass entertainment culture of the post- socialist era is that we have lost a social order — call it principle of degree or class system, if you must — which no other nation had to the same extent. It was the system under which our national genius best flourished. Shakespeare may have put it into the mouth of Ulysses the Greek, but it is an essentially English perception:

Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark! what discord follows; each thing meets In mere oppugnancy.

It is not the oppugnancy which should alarm Englishmen, although there is plenty of evidence of that, from the activities of the hunt saboteurs and ramblers to the recent riots in Lincoln where a corner shop was burned down because people thought the shopkeeper was 'posh' and 'stuck up'. The saddest aspect to the collapse of our social order is contained within the medi- ocrity, ignorance and conceit of what has taken its place.

Perhaps it was by accident that sub-edi- tors on the Scotsman chose 'With the Accent on Mediocrity' as the headline for an article by Andrew Neil extolling the virtues of his own class. That was certainly not the point he wished to make.

`If the traditional British elite has made a great success of running my country . . . then maybe it would be a club worth join- ing,' he concludes rather grandly. 'But our British Establishment has presided over economic decline and bequeathed a culture of mediocrity. Why join a bunch of losers?'

I am not sure how well this sentiment sits with the information from his triumphalist litany: 'Since 1964, not one prime minister has come from public school.' If he is at all honest with himself, Neil must know that it is precisely the arrival of his own people (whom he insists on identifying, against all the evidence, as `meritocrats) on the scene which has heralded our catastrophic decline.

`Companies and institutions that contin- ue to employ upper-class twits are unlikely to survive and prosper,' he continues in his relentless way. Were they ever likely to prosper? The tragedy of our mass enter- tainment culture is that companies employ- ing lower-class twerps can and do prosper.

The main burden of Neil's song concerns his accent (`I have always found it an advantage in London not to have an English accent . . . It has helped me make a few bob in broadcasting, too'), which he identifies as 'educated Scottish' and his refusal to join the Establishment 'country weekends in cold, inhospitable piles, with indifferent food, second-rate minds and the killing of defenceless animals for fun'.

No doubt as he sits among the first-rate minds of his clubs, the Royal Automobile and Tramps, or Pants Down, or whatever, he congratulates himself on all those coun- try weekend invitations he has turned down. It is his refusal to join Brooks's, he believes, which explains the vulgar abuse regularly flung at him by 'the Sunday Tele- graph/Spectator snobocracy'.

I think he is only partly right. He might have been considered a trifle farouche for Brooks's or the Academy, but he could cer- tainly have been elected to the Groucho, the Garrick or the Reform, if he had applied in time. What interests me is the description of his accent as 'educated Scot- tish'. Perhaps it is the same voice that my own great-great-grandfather, Revd Alexan- der Waugh DD (1754-1827), brought down from Melrose to the Wells Street Congre- gational Church, Marble Arch, in 1782, although one rather hopes not, of course. The great difference between them is that whereas Dr Waugh married an heiress and begat six sons and four daughters, many of whose descendants continue to grace the English scene, Neil has married no one and begotten (or so we must fervently hope) no one. When he is gone, England will resume the noiseless tenor of her way. He does not represent a social order in collapse so much as a temporary bad smell on the media scene.