Are we, as a people, now utterly pathetic? Anton Buxley investigates.
Recently we here in Britain celebrated the literary canon of the entire of history by having a phone-in vote to decide which bit of it was the best. The joke, apparently, is on every author who came lower than fifth, and so apparently does not fulfil the requirements of literature displayed so perfectly in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (the fifth best book ever conceived? It�s not the fifth best Harry Potter ever conceived).
The top twenty, which included such towering authorial giants as Dickens, Orwell and Milne, was a truly worthy slogging ground, but in the end it was Tolkien�s Lord of the Rings which topped the chart, throwing aside such adversaries as Harper Lee and Jane Austen, as well as (further down the list) Thomas Hardy and Stephen King, to truly claim its place as the single best piece of writing in all of history, ever.
Except not really, for of course the joke was not actually on any writer or any novel. It was on the gullible losers who actually rang up or went online to vote, little realising that they were contributing in their own tiny ways to the greatest experiment in human fickleness ever conceived. Because of course, a study like this cannot possibly have been even for a second intended as a serious evaluation of fiction. For that, you would need an electorate who had oh, say, read all the books, for example. Or any of the books. Or the book they voted for. Or an electorate who understood that great literature is about context, and who hence understood fully the context of all the books and their implications for the society in which they were written.
But the implications for nearly all the winners were huge box office smash hits. Because of the top five books, only one (Philip Pullman�s Dark Materials trilogy, and why is it by the way that these three books, like Lord of the Rings, are counted as one volume in the study whereas the Potter books are each taken individually?) is not backed by a substantial movie or television franchise (the Hitch-Hiker�s Guide, a book which tops the list deservedly to my mind, was a very bad TV show in the early 80s but achieved fame as a radio play).
No, this was a study in pop culture, and a remarkably good one. Of the Top twenty, an enormous five books were more than sixty years old. Only one of these, Pride and Prejudice, which has recently been, aha, �reinterpreted for the screen� starring Colin Firth, made the top five, three of which were written in the last twenty years.
But in another way this study is remarkably futile, because it proved, albeit in a new and wonderful way, what we knew already � that people are fickle, narrow-minded and impressionable, and know nothing whatsoever about literature. If you ever doubted that, take a look at the videos which the BBC made in which famous B-List celebrities attempt to persuade you to vote for the book of their choice. Not only do they assume you know nothing of the book they describe, but in several cases they didn�t know much more themselves, and certainly none of them that I saw made a credible pretence of entering into any of the numerous debates which surrounded several of the shortlisted titles, or indeed saying anything interesting about them at all, other than the start of the story and how it had effected their lives personally � something about which no-one should care.
But people do. By the end of the process, they could just as easily have been voting for the celebrities as for the books � and they probably were, because as we�ve already established, they are that impressionable. But if they weren�t meant to be voting for the celebrities � if literature was the true heart of this debate � then why were the celebrities there?
No, we can at least be reassured by the fact that, horrific though this all is, there is someone at the BBC behind the scenes who knows that it�s all an enormous fucking joke. The same cannot necessarily be said of Fame Academy, the BBC�s answer to (or rip-off of) Pop Idol, which recently concluded months of ripping the piss out of the British public by leaving us with yet another signed teenage artiste about whose personal life we know a great deal. Her released material could well be good � I haven�t heard it � but it could also not be good. The process by which it came to be released certainly wasn�t.
But again, people are receptive to this sort of bullshit. The only reason for this that I can think of is that TV Advertising and Reality Television are the final bump at the end of our fall from grace � that modern society has made people apathetic to all except the strongest and least subtle emotional stimuli, that with their food, health and education for the large part secured, the citizens of Britain can more readily focus on that which is not at all important � a luxury which has been denied most populations until very recently. The very existence of these things proves that the human animal, once its base desires are satisfied, is not a pleasant creature, delighting in schadenfreude broadcasts of people they shouldn�t care about doing things they shouldn�t care about and then rushing out afterwards to by the life-affirming products that were mentioned in the commercials.
But be fair � they need them. Without them, modern life is a hopeless spiral of self-inadequacy. The products inject a tiny bit of enthusiasm into what is an otherwise drab and scary way of life. Fair enough. But do they have to do it in my face? There must be a way for the masses to hear about the new Braun hair curler without it reaching my ears in the middle of a perfectly good episode of Law & Order. Because, quite simply, however nice people are, the masses are jackasses. Look at the Big Read, or its predecessor, the Greatest Briton (Winston Churchill? Princess Di?), Fame Academy, Big Brother, Survivor, Pop Idol, The Salon, The Osbournes, Wife Swap, I�m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, The Real World, or Bargain Hunt if you find this hard to believe.
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