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What wicked spell turned a cellist into a hip-hop DJ?
Metamorphosis is always fascinating. Whether it is a frog turning into a prince, a terrified girl turning into a tree, a god turning into a man, or merely a daytime-television makeover, it has immense power over the curious imagination. Last week, Channel 4 portrayed a quite extraordinary transformation of a shy young female cellist into a convincing down-market disc jockey, in only four weeks: metamorphosis is hardly too strong a word.
The documentary in which this strange process was revealed was called Faking It. It was one of a series in which people try to pass themselves off as something quite different from what they are. But in this case, I thought, something more interesting than faking was going on - transformation itself.
At the beginning of the story, we were presented with a clever, serious-looking girl from Manchester, with a handsome, thoughtful face. She was about as unfashionable as it is possible to be: in retrospect, I wondered whether perhaps it was that which she was faking.
Her shoes were clumpy (in the wrong way), her clothes unflattering (in the wrong way) and her hair was scraped into the sort of utilitarian bun that these days can look fashionable on a party girl who is displaying most of her midriff, plus navel ring, but which on her looked simply spinsterish.
I admired her all the more. Why should an intelligent young woman under the discipline of a demanding talent rig herself out like slaggy proletarian jail-bait and talk in incoherent monosyllables, as fashion today requires? Why should she be so conventional as to care about fashion?
Since I missed the beginning of the programme, I have no idea why this girl agreed to take part, or why she had the slightest desire to be a DJ. It seemed entirely impossible. She knew nothing about the music, had never been to a disco and her dancing style made Morris dancing look quite wild by comparison. Still, she was game.
And with the help of three very odd Pygmalions - a couple of tough-looking blonde DJs and a distinguished voice coach - and some very intensive training, she succeeded. She completely fooled a panel of top male DJs at a real gig in a real club. She was - apparently - entirely convincing to those who understand the finer points of house and garage.
Not only could she do and say all the things that real DJs do, but this reserved and articulate girl was now also jumping up and down like a thoroughly modern ninny, squealing, giggling and gasping, tossing her loosened hair, "shaking her booty" with something almost like abandon and gabbing about "Eye-beether" and people "dancing their tits off", in the mixture of vulgarity and inarticulacy that is the prevailing youth idiom of today.
She had even learnt, with careful coaching, the essential art of how to be rude and chew gum in shops, both at the same time. What was touching was that she was having fun. Suddenly she could dance, a little. Suddenly she looked really pretty. It wasn't just that she and her quaint team had successfully fooled everybody. It seemed that she had been truly transformed, and she was delighted.
How sad it was. And how deeply irritating. The patronising subtext throughout this film was that a middle-class girl of high culture would do far better to loosen up and make like a working-class girl of low culture. That, somehow, is where it is really at. She seemed to have come to think so herself. Maybe so. But it is irritating to see that both assumed and celebrated.
She, or at least the programme in gently sending her up, seemed to express a very common shame of, or contempt for, middle-class culture: at the same time, it managed to encapsulate the entire history of the revolution in sensibility in this country of the past 50 years into a mere 30 days. From modesty, reserve and sexual repression, we hurtled to immodesty, unreserve and gross sexual display, accompanied by hideously loud, mind-numbing noise; it was like watching the National Theatre of Brent performing the entire Decline and Fall of the British Middle Classes in only 40 minutes.
Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll are fun, especially if you are young. But the painful truth is that sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll will not earn you a place as first cello in a serious Manchester orchestra. (I don't suppose Faking It will be asking a DJ to learn to pass for a classical cellist in only 30 days, for instance.)
On the contrary, they will probably stop you, even if you don't get tinnitus from the astonishing noise of today's gigs. The culture of instant gratification looks cool (sometimes) and feels good, but it has a heavy price; deferred gratification has a high price, too, in self-restraint, but it has greater, and different, rewards. This is what separates high culture from low culture, the aspiring middle classes from the unaspiring rest.
Today, there seems to be ever more pressure on our sons and our daughters to disown high culture - even the phrase would shock them - and to aspire downwards, to turn into something they are not. I think this is especially true of the more thoughtful among them, who are troubled by the marginality of middle-class values.
Talking "mockney" for a year or two, before reverting to type, is not a thorough-going metamorphosis, any more than is a short stint as a DJ; it may be that downward aspiration is simply a brief middle-class rite of passage. Maybe the cellist will tie back her hair before long, and change back into what she was - but perhaps not. This is a contemporary story with a moral but without an ending.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, April 21, 2001 | Comments (0)
The ranks of Bridget Joneses are nothing to laugh about
A sense of humour, like presentable underwear, is something one would not like to be caught without. One would not even like to be suspected of the lack of it. So it is a risky business, at the height of the Bridget Jones boom, to say I don't find Bridget Jones and her diaries in the least funny.
But I don't. I am sick of her. She and Harry Potter are a dreadful bore. The romantic stories of how Helen Fielding and J. K. Rowling have become rich and famous - and, I notice, exceedingly glamorous - make wonderful and uplifting reading, but their hero and heroine depress me deeply. Why does everyone else love them? Have I missed something? Bridget Jones is just the kind of ghastly neurotic bore I pray my daughter will not grow up to be.
I don't mean the Bridget Jones of the delightful escapist movie, which I have just seen and loved. I mean the quite different kind of woman I imagined from reading the now famous diary, during the time when it appeared weekly in these pages. Actually I can't say I really read much of the diary, because it never raised the slightest smile in me and I lost interest. But Bridget Jones did very successfully conjure up a complex and very sad contemporary phenomenon - the superfluous woman.
"Superfluous women" was a cruel expression that emerged after the First World War to refer to all those unfortunate women who could not find a husband, because so many men had been killed. Today the phrase has a quite different meaning; so many men today are casualties, or rather deserters, in the sex wars.
There is a certain amount of Schadenfreude about this in my household, at least among one or two of the men in my family. I don't share this feeling, but I do understand it. For quite a long period in our adult lifetime, a great many young women thought exclusively about the wrongs done to them by men and the rights due to them from men, but in the process some lost sight of certain important perspectives.
The harsh truth is that a man needs an incentive to choose a woman, and to stay with her. In fact, he probably needs a very powerful incentive, since the natural inclinations of the old Adam are to keep moving on. If, after centuries of abuse and injustice, a woman actually wants a man to stay with her, she needs to think hard about providing some such powerful incentives.
It has been my impression, ever since I was a teenager, that women have not, generally speaking, thought very much about such incentivisation (I am not counting worrying about one's weight or one's clothes). Indeed, to do so at all has been considered hard-nosed and excessively cynical. This is the love-me-for-myself-alone school of thought, which has always seemed to me strangely optimistic. Unconditional love and loyalty, surely, come only from one's mother and father, if at all.
When I was very young, it seemed to me that women could probably do perfectly well without men, if necessary. Without permanent men, I mean. Feminists said so. Germaine Greer herself said so. And the feminist heroines of the past had often been spinsters.
In reality, and in many cases rather inexplicably, most women don't seem to be prepared to do without a masculine mate. Equally, some of the earlier feminists tried - and this was one of the few things they got entirely right - to debunk romanticism. The Mills & Boon view of relations between men and women has probably done even more harm than organised religion. But most women aren't prepared to do without the ideal of high romance either. Even the strong-minded Jane Austen could not, in the event, do without that.
So there are now quite a lot of superfluous thirtysomething women, washed up on the banks of time's ever-flowing stream, which is indeed bearing all its sons away - away from them and towards someone younger, more fertile and more accommodating.
I don't want to seem to be unsympathetic. On the contrary, I think it is almost impossible for women to reconcile the demands of men's natures with their own instincts and their own ambitions. But there are quite a few men who are distinctly unsympathetic - they of the Schadenfreude tendency.
"What on earth are women for?" one of them asked me in an argument this week. "Apart from sex? What has a fading, work-obsessed, sub-fertile neurotic thirtysomething got to offer the sort of man she's looking for? Especially when she'd probably dump him and remove his children and half his assets anyway?" The two very young women who were listening were shocked and offended, but they were also without an answer.
One might, of course, ask what men are for. Women did, and came up with a similarly unflattering answer. There was the famous feminist remark that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
And the result of asking such questions, in such an aggressive way, was perhaps, in part, the anger and Schadenfreude - and worse still, the indifference - that some men feel towards women today. Hence the deserters in the sex wars, and hence the new brigade of superfluous women. It is all too true to be funny.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, April 14, 2001 | Comments (0)
I'm not proud: if my party needs me, I'll become an MP
Boris does it. Sion does it. Paul does it. Why can't I do it? Stand for Parliament, I mean. Half the Comment section of this newspaper is heading for the House of Commons, and I am beginning to feel rather left out. I've slightly hankered after becoming an MP for years, sometimes quite seriously. Quite a few readers have very flatteringly suggested it - at least I think they were meaning to be polite.
But there have been a few obvious problems in my way; for one thing I've always assumed it would be rather too time-consuming, especially for someone with young children at home, as I do, and who is reluctant to breast-feed in public. And I have yet to become a British subject, although I am trying - it's no good trying to get a British passport in a hurry these days. But, above all, I have always thought it must be rather difficult to get oneself adopted by a constituency.
Now, suddenly, all that has changed. It's not going to be difficult any more, not for us women. Reports emerged on Wednesday that the Conservative Party, in a desperate spirit of modernity, is going to impose women candidates on the party. It seems unlikely that anyone could seriously imagine this will make the Tories more popular, but anything is possible.
It seems that Tory selection boards will be forced to include women on their shortlists of candidates. Moreover, William Hague is under pressure to stop opposing quotas for women and ethnic minorities. Some important people in the party, if you can believe it, actually support a Labour plan to amend the law in favour of positive discrimination.
So it's going to be easy-peasy now. I could probably have Boris's seat, if I wanted it, or Paul's. Or better yet, the safe seat where I live, currently occupied by
Michael Portillo. I don't suppose I could take over Sion's, as it belongs to the wrong party, though I don't think the Blairites are very fussy, and a huge number of Blair babes have dropped out, so they're embarrassingly short of women. However, although I did, in a fit of anger, say here last week that I might think about throwing in my lot with Labour, I couldn't do it. Not possibly. I will die a Conservative, even if they don't give me Kensington and Chelsea.
It might seem rather hard on all these brilliant boys that they should have to give up their prospective seats to me, after all the hard work and all the hard thinking they have done. But someone has got to pay for the fact that women have had a raw deal for centuries, and that I have been knocked out of the political running for 15 years by my children, and why not one of them?
Move over, Michael. Beat it, Boris. Push off, Paul. You know it's only fair. And it will be good for the party. Patriotic, in fact. Mother of Parliaments - not Father of Parliaments, by the way - here I come. My party needs me - perhaps I'd better join it.
Positive discrimination is something that I've always been very much against - in the past. It is unjust, demeaning and counter-productive. It is profoundly un-Conservative. I've also, I admit, been against journalists being members of political parties, let alone representing them in Parliament. It's the two masters thing. But hey! This is politics. Let's lighten up a little. I'm not proud. If there's any affirmative action coming my way, I may disapprove of it, but I shall certainly take advantage of it. There's nothing wrong with having things both ways - I am a woman, after all.
However, I find the Tory modernists' idea of a woman rather at odds with my own. Apparently they want to end the reign of the Tory "Turk" - is this a covert reference to the brilliant Boris Johnson and his exotic Turkish ancestry? - and usher in a "more gentle breed".
What gentler breed? I don't want to go to Westminster to be sugar and spice. I want to go to the Commons to rant and rave. I want to campaign on the savage indignation ticket. There are so many damn things wrong. And it takes real aggression to stand up to the bamboozlements of bureaucracy, civil servants and cronyism.
Why should these fools imagine that women must always be gentle? Some of the most ferocious, and most admirable, people I've known have been women, starting with Margaret Thatcher. The Blair babes, by contrast, have turned out to be pathetically gentle and therefore useless - except when fighting the breast-feeding corner - and are quite rightly facing a shamingly massive cull.
My only real reservation is that women get things only when they are no longer worth having. Women being freely allowed into something is usually an unmistakable sign of institutional decline. That is the way it has been with the Church of England, with mountaineering, men's clubs, MI5 or even the Armed Forces. These are institutions whose glory days are over, whose power is fading fast; therefore men are no longer so hell-bent on keeping them for themselves.
So it is with the House of Commons. It has no real power any more, thanks not least to the present Prime Minister. So why not let the girls have a go? It is all rather sad and demeaning. But this is no moment for nostalgia, no moment for false female pride. I am ready, and waiting for a call from Central Office.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, April 07, 2001 | Comments (0)
