ALL RIGHT, it’s true. It did seem a little excessive for the TV news bulletins to lead with the death of Ronnie Barker rather than the swimsuit stage of the Tory beauty contest. But any readers under the age of 26 who wondered why the rest of us were so emotional were missing the point. The passing of every great comic performer is the end of an era. Tommy Cooper’s demise prompted its share of lamentation over the decline and fall of old-fashioned variety. And no doubt, in years to come, we shall read epic column inches on why the world will never see the likes of Sir Ronnie Wisecrack, the last surviving star of Celebrity Squares. So long as there is such a thing as a middle-aged journalist, there will always be a good excuse to wear a black armband and wax lyrical about the golden age of the Glasgow Empire. In the case of Ronnie Barker, though, many of us were also mourning the slow, as yet unfinished passing of a tradition. He was by no means the last survivor, yet his long run of peaktime successes made him the emblem of a vanishing mainstream culture.
Those were the days, we shall tell our children, when 15 or 20 million of us sat down at an appointed hour to share a communal experience in a virtual-reality music hall. It was a period when many of us marked out our weeks, not with church festivals or family anniversaries but with the listings of the Radio Times. Christmas Day was not deemed to have truly arrived until Ernie Wise introduced the play what he had just written. My American friends, used to their nightly fixes of cable TV, never believe me when I tell them that, in the Seventies, we could expect to see a new Benny Hill Show barely half a dozen times a year. But it’s true. And it was a big, big event.
Those mass rituals have not all vanished just yet. The spectacle of Live8 still managed to draw the generations together, even if half the audience only wanted to hear Sir Paul McCartney and the other half was curious to see if Pete Doherty would fall off the stage. At football grounds around the country supporters now join in a pre-match chorus of Is This the Way to Amarillo? complete with Peter Kay impersonations. One of Barker’s greatest fans, Kay is one of the few contemporary comics who can begin to match the old man’s broad-based appeal. But even with Kay, you have the bitter-sweet sensation of watching a terrific comedian deliver a pastiche of times past. He does it brilliantly, but it is still like watching a clever nephew doing a turn with his mum’s glittery jacket and a toilet roll tube for a microphone.
This sounds painfully fogeyish, doesn’t it? Actually, there is talent out there: Barker was in his mid-forties when he made Porridge; how old was Steve Coogan when Alan Partridge first checked into his Travel Tavern? What has changed is the machinery that delivers talent to the public. Most comedy today is at the mercy of niche marketing experts who know exactly how to tap into one particular demographic — 18-24 year olds, say — but seem not to know or care about reaching any further. You can see why they do it, of course, because it works, up to a point. Little Britain became the flavour of the month despite only having only about three and a half jokes — which is one more than The League of Gentlemen. (The Office, I reckon, has five, in between the pauses, but I’m aware I’m very much in the minority.)
A similar trend has come to dominate pop music. Target a segment of the audience with enough single-mindedness, and there is really no need to cultivate anyone else. Quality drops accordingly; Top of the Pops ends up being shunted off to a dark corner. I’ve spent the past 25 years wondering, for instance, what happened to what we used to call soul music. Motown wasn’t to every aficionado’s taste but the label produced inspired music that appealed across races and age groups. Hip hop, in contrast, because it has direct access to the spending power of white boys in the suburbs, doesn’t need to bother with quality control. Get Coca-Cola and Nike on board with the sponsorship and you never have to write a melody again. Hollywood has learnt the same lesson, which is why so many people now add up the cost of a babysitter and decide to stay at home with a DVD.
Still, it would be pointless to wallow in gloom. Ever-changing technology means the old sense of community was doomed in any case. In the Stone Age, newspapers probably crowed that two hundred million people worldwide watched the previous night’s full moon. The days when a third of the country would want to watch The Two Ronnies are gone for good.
Perhaps salvation lies in a new and more sophisticated mass of markets, in which we all become interactive participants rather than passive consumers. Hollywood executives, who invest millions of dollars in advertising, are waking up to the possibility of DIY film-making and the notion of releasing movies via blog (see www.blowingsmokethemovie.com for a glimpse of the future). None of this is a guarantee of quality. We might just end up with nothing to watch except 24-hour programmes of Abi Titmuss talking to Jonathan Ross. Yet if it does come to that, someone, somewhere will still be selling old editions of Porridge on DVD, playable in all galaxies.
But a sense of community happens in many different ways. Cliched to say if something is lost, then somethis else is gained, but....
Tooling around the internet, reading little snapshots of life in London or Los Alamos or Tokyo or Calcutta, it seems, well, so very connected. Tenuous, fragile, real and connected. I mean, I miss Johnny Carson and there was something to the ritual of sitting down for half-an hour of news before dinner, but still, is mass culture the only way to have an identity as a group?
Posted by: MD | Saturday, October 08, 2005 at 06:38 PM