A decade of achievement in the arts

Dec 31 2009 By Terry Grimley

Arts Editor Terry Grimley looks back at the noughties.

It’s hard to believe that a decade has passed since the Blair millennium was rung in with a maladroit spectacle on the Thames and the Queen being coerced into linking arms to sing Auld Lang Syne.

A decade which stumbled in with a blaze of over-confidence is now slinking out in an atmosphere of anxiety and dread. The noughties have spanned the transition from Cool Britannia to cold comfort, from a new Festival of Britain to a new Austerity Britain.

How much sadder and wiser we are now than we were then.

The big-head financial institutions which drove New Labour’s hubris have been brought to their knees, only to get up again with the aid of taxpayers’ money to resume paying themselves huge bonuses.

Regular TV images of the latest sad processions through the main street of Wootton Bassett mean that – probably to a greater extent than at any time since 1945 – we see ourselves as a nation at war.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. But the old wisdom that even the most seemingly secure and confident politicians are ultimately hostages to events was rarely more dramatically affirmed than by those of September 11, 2001.

You might imagine that such traumatic times would be conducive to sombre reflection and seriousness of mind, but in fact no-one could accuse the culture of the noughties of not being trivial enough.

The other day I heard it described as “the decade of reality television”, and that is difficult to disagree with. You might even call it the decade of Simon Cowell.

The brave new era of deregulated television trumpeted in the Thatcher years has emerged in its full glory of multi-choice, identikit reality shows which might well convince a newly-arrived Martian that cooking and domestic make-overs are a neurotic national obsession. A thought I have frequently had about television in the 21st century is this. Years ago, in the golden age when we complacently took it for granted that British TV was the best in the world, a meeting of executives to discuss new ideas for programmes might have rejected some on the grounds that they were too reminiscent of things that had been done before.

At some point, these criteria have been put into reverse, so that new programmes are now required to replicate tried-and-tested successes as closely as possible. The oddest example I have seen so far is a cut-price version of Channel 4’s Grand Designs with a presenter who reproduced the mannerisms of its presenter, Kevin McLeod.

So watching television since the millennium has often seemed like experiencing deja-vu all over again.

Along with the cooking and the makeovers have come the car-crash television of Big Brother and the talent shows which, beneath the audience hysteria and the instant celebrity fodder, have fundamentally been about retreading material inherited from more innocent, more talented times.

Figures published in the last few weeks show that we are watching more and more of this stuff.

Shows like The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing have brought a resurgence of so-called “big tent” television in which climactic moments become shared national experiences.

It was previously thought that the multiplicity of channels and competition from the internet meant that the days when chip shops did no business during Hancock’s Half Hour would never be seen again.

Throughout the decade, the popular obsession with celebrity continued unabated through several layers of self-parody.

Andy Warhol’s 1960’s prediction that “in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” came to seem uncannily prescient, as fame became increasingly divorced from discernible talent or achievement.

Arguably the most representative celebrity career of the decade was not Simon Cowell’s, but that of the late Jade Goody, whose ticket to fame was the mind-boggling ignorance she revealed as a contestant in Big Brother.

As one commentator put it in 2007: “It was Jade Goody’s belief that East Anglia is a foreign country that set her on the path to becoming the 25th most influential person in the world (in Heat magazine’s eyes at least), not to mention £8 million richer.”

Plenty of evidence, then, for those who despair of popular culture. And yet there are exceptions to prove the rule.

One of the best examples produced in Britain was the comedy TV series The Office, which subverted the clichés of reality television itself with extraordinary subtlety to paint a hilarious and excruciating picture of typically low-key, monotonous working lives. But 30 years ago it would have seemed inconceivable that American television would be setting the pace for innovative TV drama with series like The Sopranos, Lost and The Wire.

If the noughties was the decade of reality TV, it was also the decade of the internet. In the space of ten years the world has put itself online to an extent that would have been literally inconceivable at the turn of the century.

It has put more information at our fingertips than most of us could possibly want or deal with (I’m thinking, for instance, of an obscure Birmingham rock band which broke up in the mid-1970s and now has a MySpace page).

The linking-up of such esoteric data should give comfort to those depressed by the thought of the world being steamrollered by a dumbed-down monoculture. Minority audiences gain critical mass when they are joined-up internationally at the click of a mouse.

And internet communities can influence events in the “real” world – witness the initial online momentum of the Arctic Monkeys, the calling to account via Twitter of Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir’s homophobic column on the death of Stephen Gately, or the successful Facebook campaign to block The X Factor’s route to this year’s Christmas number one.

So if culture as a whole was global and overbearingly dumbed-down, where did “the arts” fit in?

Initially it seemed they would play a crowning role in New Labour’s New Jerusalem, housed in a glittering array of shiny new cultural palaces funded by the National Lottery.

But the conjunction of culture and lottery money ended in tears as well as triumphs, as demonstrated recently by the long drawn-out catastrophe of West Bromwich’s The Public.

Hurried in by the doomed Major government in a last-minute attempt to win some popularity, the lottery achieved some great things. But it might have been far more effective if it had made its debut in less politically fevered times.