1969, when nothing could be more terrifying than foam: a screenshot of Patrick Troughton in Doctor Who: The Seeds of Death.
Those who are unlucky enough to follow me on Twitter, and foolish enough to not yet have me muted, will be aware that I’ve spent much of the last three years on a slightly silly project: watching all of Doctor Who, in order, from its debut in November 1963 to the present day. Half the fun of such a project is seeing how the show changes – in the way it looks on screen, the things like costumes and hairstyles, the stories or monsters it portrays (the earlier series are, you will be shocked to learn, not always brilliant on things like race or gender). By the time of the cancellation back in 1989, Who looks and feels like a radically different show from the stage-y black and white thing it started as, and you’ve been through several clearly different iterations to get there.
Here’s the thing, though. That cancellation was over 32 years ago: it’s longer in the past now than the start of the series was then. But the modern show doesn’t look or feel as different from the 1989 vintage as that did from the 1963 one. It doesn’t feel like the world has moved as far.
I was thinking of this, in terms of, basically, All Human Culture. Something else I’m watching at the moment is This Is Going To Hurt, an extremely loose and extremely upsetting adaptation of Adam Key’s memoir of his time as a junior doctor. That’s set in 2006, because that’s when Kay was practicing, and its period nature is clear in things like the soundtrack and a slight tiptoeing around sexuality in the workplace that I, perhaps naively, imagine might work differently now.
But if you missed that caption at the start of episode 1, you could easily assume it’s set in the present: aside from the all-pervading Nokia phones, I’m not sure there’d be anything on screen to correct you. You can easily tell when in the 20th century a TV show takes place from the costumes and hairstyles alone. You’re never going to mistake 1975 for 1958 or 1992; in those culturally busiest decades, indeed, things move even faster, you’re not going to mistake 1964 for 1968 either. But what is it that distinguishes, say, 2004 from 2019?
Part of the issue, I think, is that much of the way culture marked time was bound up with trends in music. I’m on shaky ground here, as I was only ever into guitar bands anyway and I stopped trying to keep up with them blimey was it really 15 years ago. But nonetheless, I have a definite sense that, from the ‘50s to the ‘90s, there were a series of artists and movements that were consciously expanding or ripping up what had come before.
Then something shifted, for the first time it became broadly socially acceptable to listen to the kind of music your dad had liked, and all that stopped. I’m sure there are movements and trends and so on that are invisible to me because even before I was an ageing nerd I was still a nerd, but nonetheless: they haven’t percolated through to the wider culture in the way the Beatles or Sex Pistols or NWA once did.
Something has slowed down.
It is possible I’m just wrong about this – at my age I’m not supposed to know where the cool things are happening – but it’s my substack so let’s assume that I’m not. What is it that might be behind the slowdown?
Some possible culprits:
The internet has broken everything
The biggest cultural shifts aren’t happening in music or fashion, they’re happening in social media and memes: those are a lot harder to dramatise in a way that solidifies a sense of This Is What The World Is Like This Year.
More than that, it’s made it possible for people to find their own little bubbles full of opinions and other things they like. We all spend a lot of time talking about how that’s messing up politics, but it’s also made it all but impossible for any cultural movement to attain the sort of universal reach required for it be the Voice Of a Generation.
Put it this way: do you have the faintest idea what is number 1 right now? Would it matter to you if you did?
The monoculture
Once upon a time, things would happen in American culture, then take a while to filter through to everywhere else. Now, we all know what is going on in Tahrir Square or Ferguson, Missouri this exact week, and the same artists, broadly, dominate in most western countries. Cultures can’t bounce off each other any more because we’re all wading through the same culture to begin with.
The rise of permalescence
Look, we used to have a very clear cut off between youth and adulthood, and if you were 25 you were the wrong side of the line. Watch TV interviews from the early 80s (I have done this; I did say Doctor Who had broken my brain) and people in their late 20s are dressing like 50 year olds.
Now, though, you can be 35 and still living like a student. And why shouldn’t you? You’re renting with strangers, and you’re not going to have that house in the suburbs any time soon, are you? Might as well get mashed and go out dancing.
Maybe, when you’ve got people who are basically middle aged engaging with youth culture, it can’t do what youth culture is meant to do any more.
It probably doesn’t help that the people responsible for youth culture are loaded up with debt and told they need to start paying it back right now, mind.
Maybe this isn’t a thing: maybe, as with affordable home ownership, it’s the late 20th century and the boomer experience that was actually the outlier. I’ve always assumed that the way I didn’t have a clear mental picture of the decades of the 19th century in the way I did the 20th was a combination of ignorance and distance. But maybe the post-war years were just different, a long, slow shift from Victorian values to 21st century ones, that generated a lot of heat and light while it was happening which all faded away once it was done. Maybe all I’m worrying about here is exactly that, and there’ll be another such shift in a few decades’ time when we’re all too old to care.
Or, maybe, the drugs just aren’t as good as they once were.
A NOTE: When I wrote the above, in mid-February, it was a topic thinking about for a while (there’s a debate on my pal Lance’s Facebook page dating from 10 days earlier, so I did at least have receipts)... but in one of those weird coincidences that sometimes happen with these things, about an hour after sending that week’s newsletter to my editor Jasper, I stumbled across a piece Ben Sixsmith published the day before, which covered very similar ground. What I can see of it (I think the latter part is for paying subscribers only) it’s very much worth a read.
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