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Monthly column on arts and mediaGrumbling appendagesA few years back I made my first (and so far only, though I'm open to offers) visit to San Francisco. I immediately fell in love with the city, so reminiscent of Merseyside where I grew up and now dotted with grey-haired men with pony tails who haven't quite grasped that the 60s are over. The ghosts of numerous guitars peopled a landscape I knew from documentaries, and when I stood inside the City Lights bookshop, why, it was as if Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were about to walk in at any moment. There was a bit of that nostalgia in BBC2's mini-series 'Grumpy Old Men', though it was a shock to find that their definition of 'old man' was one aged 35-54. This, 'the group that thought the world was going to get better - only it got worse', was judged to be the age group that grumbled more than its parents and more than its children. A strange feeling, to see a TV programme about old men and realise they're all younger than oneself. But not by very much, I hasten to add. Quiet menThe programme presented a group of professional media people such as Sir Bob Geldof, Will Self, John Peel, Arthur Smith, Rick Wakeman, Sir Bob Geldof and John Sessions, and, with a rather good linking voice-over by Geoffrey Palmer, collected their views on topics ranging from politics to Starbucks coffee. Palmer commented: 'Grumpy old men are a hitherto silent majority ƒ But they are no longer suffering in silence!' Well, as we know, it wasn't a good month for quiet men, even if they'd belatedly decided to turn up the volume. It would be churlish to grumble at this programme, so I will. It was pleasantly mindless entertainment, though the warning about strong language turned out to be an alert that gratuitous and offensive F-words were going to be used throughout, presumably to add a bit more zap. It was a kind of ageing Room 101 without the spark of a gifted interviewer. Palmer's voice-over would have made an entertaining column in the old Punch, but the contributions from the team settled into a predictable rant on subjects that included yoga, cosmetic surgery, phone boxes, IKEA, parking spaces and the leaflets that get stuffed in newspapers. The trouble is that it was simply a litany of dyspepsia: nobody really offered any prescription for a better way of doing things. The spectacle of an old man effing and blinding as sheer entertainment was done as well as it could be by TV's Victor Meldrew, and I'm not sure it was worth repeating the experiment (I'm not even sure if it's worth endlessly repeating Victor Meldrew, for that matter). WisdomWhat was lacking, and what the title might have entitled one to expect, was some gesture towards the wisdom of old age. It wasn't long before one realised that the things being grumbled about were not the angers of age but the things most sensible people get angry about anyway. Occasional insights happened - 'We used to sing, "Hope I die before I get old" - but we didn't. Far from it.' Some of the speakers made good points. But none of it added up to the promise of the programme makers: a sparkling team of first-rate intellects in a cutting-edge satirical documentary. Few addressed the real issue: the hopes and idealism of youth, and why it all went wrong. Indeed, most of the speakers were prosperous people who looked in remarkably good shape: 'old age' had been very kind to them (except in the case of John Sessions, who has clearly been very unkind to old age). If you want wisdom of the mature variety, you find it much more on radio, where this month you had John Peel, whose regular kindly, affectionate and self-mocking programmes say more about mature experience than the whole BBC2 series managed in four episodes; and Tony Benn, whose reading of his diaries once again gave weekday mornings a thoughtful and perceptive start. It's meaty reflections like these that offer a challenge to evangelicals, to get in there and join in the discussion: grumpy old TV men are too easy a target. Mind you, it's a hiding to nothing anyway. Give a grumpy old man a public platform to spout about anything and everything he feels like grumbling about? No responsible media would do such a thing. Certainly not a venerable paper like Evangelicals Now. Kathryn LindskoogChristian literature suffered a sad loss in October with the death of Kathryn Lindskoog, lecturer, editor and the author of several books about C.S. Lewis. Her views (suggesting that some posthumously published 'Lewis' titles might have been forged) were controversial: she defended them with grace, scholarship and enormous vitality. In later years she was almost totally paralysed by MS but remained a potent voice to the end. I visited her two years ago in Los Angeles and left reflecting that I would rather meet one of her critics in a dark alley than attempt to defend a weak argument against a bed-bound Kathryn. A truly remarkable, much-loved person, who will be greatly missed. David Porter© Evangelicals Now - December 2003 |