Maybe – but having a few comedians who make their living “on the edge” by generic insults seems more acceptable than the act of being directly rude and disrespectful to an individual on live TV.
The Primark scenario above seems a good example.
(Boyle did start going way over the boundaries after a few years though)
Last edited 1 year ago by Ian Barton
Rob Britton
1 year ago
If there was extreme cruelty back in the nineties then the pendulum has now completely swung the other way to extreme “decency” – which is even nastier!
Hmm, you normally make more interesting points than just agreeing with the name calling of your opponents. And however annoying (and worse) people on the identitarian Left are, the word ‘fascist’ ceases to have any meaning at all if everyone calls their political opponents by the same name. No, her politics are not fascist and she was freely elected.
The term ‘leftard’ came into use only a few years ago, so it is difficult to see how anyone could ‘always have thought so’.
As Douglas Murray says in a different context, we seem not even to be able to recall the ‘cultural’ day before yesterday. Which was my main take away from the article; in a few years, what was accepted in popular culture has completely changed.
It’s not ‘be kind’, it’s ‘BE KIND !!! OR ELSE !!! ‘
Katy Hibbert
1 year ago
it was shocking that in the 2004 elections to the European Parliament the incumbent government could attract the support of just 8.5% of the electorate.
That’s because the European so-called “Parliament” was nothing of the kind – just a talking-shop of stuffed shirts rubber-stamping the will of the Franco-German racket. I’m no fan of “reality” TV, but voting in the Big Brother contest made more sense.
AC Harper
1 year ago
You can argue that societies go through the convulsions of a fin-de-siècle every few generations, when materialism, rationalism, positivism, bourgeois society, and liberal democracy are overtaken by emotionalism, irrationalism, subjectivism, vitalism, pessimism, and the desire for all encompassing solutions.
Blair perhaps picked up on the early symptoms of this social change and surfed it as long as he could. He was ‘a man of his time’.
The backwash of this wave of change is with us today.
Russell Hamilton
1 year ago
This series really is a bit of a pile on! The subtitle of this article: “The British rediscovered their nasty side under Blair” isn’t fair. Think of punk rock music – it was pretty nasty long before Blair. I think we need to look earlier and deeper to find the roots of the mocking, negative, nihilistic & nasty vein that has become so prominent in popular culture. Was it such a big leap from Alf Garnett to Sid Vicious?
Not so much a big leap as a significant one. Alf Garnett at least believed in something, however flawed. The punks were nihilists, and nihilism is a universal acid, like Dawkins variety atheism — it destroys everything it touches, including itself.
Dostoyevsky’s chief talent is his ability to anatomise nihilist twattishness, in my opinion.
Adam 0
1 year ago
I’ve been saying almost exactly this for years! When I was a kid, we all grew up watching the massively popular “Tarrant on TV”. Chris Tarrant would serve up a selection of funny or bizarre clips from game shows and adverts around the world.
In a pre-internet era, the format invited viewers to disapprove of how sexually liberated the immoral Europeans were and laugh at the naff and tasteless TV from South America. However, by far the most popular clips came from cruel and bizarre Japanese gameshows.
They always involved painful and prolonged humiliation of those taking part. This was so far removed from British culture and TV at the time, it completely shocked viewers. My how we laughed at those uncivilised foreigners! Can you believe the things they put on TV…? The shared sense of moral superiority was palpable.
Fast forward a decade or so and just look where we ended up! Desperate Z list celebs being forced to eat Kangaroo s*****m on National TV. Debasing themselves for the tenuous chance of a career relaunch. TV suddenly went from uplifting, something that entertained and educated. To something cruel, immoral and debasing. It most certainly has not ended. Here we remain, suck in a world of shows like Naked Attraction and Love Island.
As Plato taught, a proper up-bringing is impossible in the absence of a morally adequate cultural environment. Why are we surprised that social media so quickly degenerated into a poisonous cess pit of cyber bullying and revenge porn?
As for Tony Blair, whilst he may not be directly responsible for any of the above. He certainly helped poison the well. The deregulation of gambling, 24-hour drinking, an explosion of high interest credit, loose monetary policy and unlimited migration, leading directly to ballooning house prices. Its notable that manufacturing in the UK declined faster under New Labour, than Margret Thatcher and John Major combined. If one were deliberately intent on creating a violent, demoralised, impoverished underclass. It’s hard to think of a more effective policy prescription.
Lewis Clark
1 year ago
I agree with Alwyn that the atmosphere in this country seemed to change as we moved from the nonsense nineties to the nasty noughties.
This was the time that was supposed to be the prime of my life (being in my early twenties, and being a freshly minted graduated). But there is no way in hell that I’d want to return to that era.
I sensed this myself, not only in the time of popular culture, but through the evidence I saw through my own eyes in our town centres. My perception is that, more and more, they became places where useful things for the community were disappearing (mundane things, like grocery shops and post offices) were being replaced with things like strip clubs and betting shops – places where sleaze, exploitation and dodgy behaviour are encouraged. There also seemed to be an explosion in mass drunkenness and violence late at night in our towns (but this has always existed in the UK, to be fair (cf. Hogarth’s Gin Lane).
How much of this can be traced directly back to the actions of the Blair government is debatable. But some things that they did could well have contributed to this. Like the de-regulation of the gambling industry – which itself is a close second to the Iraq War as the most morally reprehensible thing that Blair and Co got involved in.
And of course, there was their policy of cheap credit, ‘hands off’ financial regulation and costing up to the super rich. This went much wider than New Labour and the UK, of course, but it finished up with the financial crisis.
I now look back at the noughties like it was watching a diamante encrusted Humvee, crashing and exploding in a giant fireball in slow motion.
Except somehow, only the innocent bystanders were killed and the people at the wheel somehow escaped unharmed.
Whilst not a fan of Mr Blair’s legacy, I do think that it is unfair to blame him for all this; the nastiness in popular entertainment began decades before Mr Blair, just look at some of the films that came out in the 70s. I realise that when one looks at the films etc. from the 70s they seem quite tame, this probably because many of us, if not most, have become so coursened over the last 40 or 50 years that we are no longer shocked by what was shocking then. I don’t think that this is a great leap forward in tolerance, I think that it’s deeply saddening; which makes me seem like a censorious pearl-clutcher, I know, but I wish that I had never been exposed to such nastiness. Of course, one might say that no-one forced me to watch, but one doesn’t want to be a “disgusted, of Tumbridge Wells” when in one’s teens and twenties, although I don’t care now, and I will confess to having walked out of a couple of films in the 1970s.
Those who have been through combat where they have seen friends blown apart, men scream with pain and their bodies rot in front of them: survived death camps,torture chambers, Japanese POW camps, want cleanliness, order and beauty in their lives.
A Grandfather volunteered for the RFC in WW1 after he had been gassed in the trenches. He told me of the risks, when their aeroplanes were outgunned by the Germans. Iasked him why he volunteered. He replied ” A bath. I wanted to die clean “.
A reason who so many people are coarse and crude is because they consider it is being tough and have street cred. The days when middle and upper class men had been taught to box ( especially bare knuckle pre 1860s) and played rugby, so could look after themselves if attacked, are long gone. Arthur Bryant in his history books states how boys and men from all classes were taught to box bare knuckle which included throws, fight with cudgels and sword pre 1860s. Boxing, rope climbing and gymnastics were the mainstay of boys PT classes up to 1939 in all schools. If one is secure in the knowledge that one can give a good account of onself in a fight, a boy or man does to have to be cride or coarse on order to fit in with those who are vulgar.
Ferrusian Gambit
1 year ago
“By the time he got into power in May 1997, though, it was all pretty much over and done with” – that’s not my memory. It lasted a year or two longer than that, albeit increasingly faded and “naff”. In reality the anticlimax of 2000 was the big change, and the year itself was the year that was a premonition and preparation for everything that came later, from reality TV, to terrorists plotting, to US electoral madness and the start of obvious, clear financial speculation and of course Putin’s arrival to power.
Last edited 1 year ago by Ferrusian Gambit
Jimmy Snuka
1 year ago
Pretty easy to flip this and say Britain became nicer as things like racism and hooliganism declined in the 90s.
Historiclly Britain has always had a low murder rate compared to other countries, Prof S Pinker has shown some data on this . The countryside has generally been fairly free of murder. The growth of the squalid slums from about 1800 to 1860 caused massive problems. Bradford, perhaps had the worst slum: population went from 6000 1800 to 120,000 in 1850.From 1860s to 1960s murder rate declined and the squalid conditions of Britain greatly improved. By 1960 one could avoid violence largely by avoiding the docks and rough parts of town. Crowd violence in football crowds increased from late 1960s but there was none in those attending rugby league matches or ruby union matches in South Wales.
Glasgow was infamous for razor gangs where cut throat razors were used to scar victims but there were few murders: compare with London and those who have died from being stabbed by knives.
The murder of mostly black poorly educated males from the underclass, largely in their teens and twenties which is gang related by those of a similar background, is largely ignored by middle and upper middle class writers. For example has Unherd commissioned any writers with streecred to investigate these murders? What we have today is a situation where proximity to commissioning editors appears to determine newsworthyness not seriousnes of a problem. Does Britain produce any budding writers such as Orwell who are prepared to live in rough areas and report on the conditions ?
Amos Sullivan
1 year ago
Britian is dying from its embrace of liberalism. They are nothing now but a petrie dish of sick twisted deviates.
SIMON WOLF
1 year ago
The nastiness started with Spitting Image in the 1980’s
Or even earlier in the early 60’s with ‘That was the Week that Was’.
Michael Webb
1 year ago
Expedition Robinson was preceeded by a South African TV series called The Survivors back in 1980 which by nearly 2 decades is, was and always will be the first reality TV series. I state this not to in any way extole the virtues of reality TV – almost certainly the lowest form of “entertainment”, but to set the record straight.
Christopher Barclay
1 year ago
No one who had gone to football matches in the 70s and 80s would have been shocked by what was mentioned in this article: the racism, the sexism, the mocking of Northerners for their poverty.
Nick Nahlous
1 year ago
I thought the article was going to be about the covert operation in Kosovo, the Iraq War and destruction of Libya.
Am I the only one who thinks Frankie Boyle was himself part of the problem?
Maybe – but having a few comedians who make their living “on the edge” by generic insults seems more acceptable than the act of being directly rude and disrespectful to an individual on live TV.
The Primark scenario above seems a good example.
(Boyle did start going way over the boundaries after a few years though)
If there was extreme cruelty back in the nineties then the pendulum has now completely swung the other way to extreme “decency” – which is even nastier!
Never trust anyone who says “be kind”. They’re a Fascist leftard, like Jacinda “Fangs” Ardern.
I have always thought so
100% correct.
Hmm, you normally make more interesting points than just agreeing with the name calling of your opponents. And however annoying (and worse) people on the identitarian Left are, the word ‘fascist’ ceases to have any meaning at all if everyone calls their political opponents by the same name. No, her politics are not fascist and she was freely elected.
The term ‘leftard’ came into use only a few years ago, so it is difficult to see how anyone could ‘always have thought so’.
As Douglas Murray says in a different context, we seem not even to be able to recall the ‘cultural’ day before yesterday. Which was my main take away from the article; in a few years, what was accepted in popular culture has completely changed.
It’s not ‘be kind’, it’s ‘BE KIND !!! OR ELSE !!! ‘
That’s because the European so-called “Parliament” was nothing of the kind – just a talking-shop of stuffed shirts rubber-stamping the will of the Franco-German racket. I’m no fan of “reality” TV, but voting in the Big Brother contest made more sense.
You can argue that societies go through the convulsions of a fin-de-siècle every few generations, when materialism, rationalism, positivism, bourgeois society, and liberal democracy are overtaken by emotionalism, irrationalism, subjectivism, vitalism, pessimism, and the desire for all encompassing solutions.
Blair perhaps picked up on the early symptoms of this social change and surfed it as long as he could. He was ‘a man of his time’.
The backwash of this wave of change is with us today.
This series really is a bit of a pile on! The subtitle of this article: “The British rediscovered their nasty side under Blair” isn’t fair. Think of punk rock music – it was pretty nasty long before Blair. I think we need to look earlier and deeper to find the roots of the mocking, negative, nihilistic & nasty vein that has become so prominent in popular culture. Was it such a big leap from Alf Garnett to Sid Vicious?
Not so much a big leap as a significant one. Alf Garnett at least believed in something, however flawed. The punks were nihilists, and nihilism is a universal acid, like Dawkins variety atheism — it destroys everything it touches, including itself.
Some of the music was good though.
Dostoyevsky’s chief talent is his ability to anatomise nihilist twattishness, in my opinion.
I’ve been saying almost exactly this for years! When I was a kid, we all grew up watching the massively popular “Tarrant on TV”. Chris Tarrant would serve up a selection of funny or bizarre clips from game shows and adverts around the world.
In a pre-internet era, the format invited viewers to disapprove of how sexually liberated the immoral Europeans were and laugh at the naff and tasteless TV from South America. However, by far the most popular clips came from cruel and bizarre Japanese gameshows.
They always involved painful and prolonged humiliation of those taking part. This was so far removed from British culture and TV at the time, it completely shocked viewers. My how we laughed at those uncivilised foreigners! Can you believe the things they put on TV…? The shared sense of moral superiority was palpable.
Fast forward a decade or so and just look where we ended up! Desperate Z list celebs being forced to eat Kangaroo s*****m on National TV. Debasing themselves for the tenuous chance of a career relaunch. TV suddenly went from uplifting, something that entertained and educated. To something cruel, immoral and debasing. It most certainly has not ended. Here we remain, suck in a world of shows like Naked Attraction and Love Island.
As Plato taught, a proper up-bringing is impossible in the absence of a morally adequate cultural environment. Why are we surprised that social media so quickly degenerated into a poisonous cess pit of cyber bullying and revenge porn?
As for Tony Blair, whilst he may not be directly responsible for any of the above. He certainly helped poison the well. The deregulation of gambling, 24-hour drinking, an explosion of high interest credit, loose monetary policy and unlimited migration, leading directly to ballooning house prices. Its notable that manufacturing in the UK declined faster under New Labour, than Margret Thatcher and John Major combined. If one were deliberately intent on creating a violent, demoralised, impoverished underclass. It’s hard to think of a more effective policy prescription.
I agree with Alwyn that the atmosphere in this country seemed to change as we moved from the nonsense nineties to the nasty noughties.
This was the time that was supposed to be the prime of my life (being in my early twenties, and being a freshly minted graduated). But there is no way in hell that I’d want to return to that era.
I sensed this myself, not only in the time of popular culture, but through the evidence I saw through my own eyes in our town centres. My perception is that, more and more, they became places where useful things for the community were disappearing (mundane things, like grocery shops and post offices) were being replaced with things like strip clubs and betting shops – places where sleaze, exploitation and dodgy behaviour are encouraged. There also seemed to be an explosion in mass drunkenness and violence late at night in our towns (but this has always existed in the UK, to be fair (cf. Hogarth’s Gin Lane).
How much of this can be traced directly back to the actions of the Blair government is debatable. But some things that they did could well have contributed to this. Like the de-regulation of the gambling industry – which itself is a close second to the Iraq War as the most morally reprehensible thing that Blair and Co got involved in.
And of course, there was their policy of cheap credit, ‘hands off’ financial regulation and costing up to the super rich. This went much wider than New Labour and the UK, of course, but it finished up with the financial crisis.
I now look back at the noughties like it was watching a diamante encrusted Humvee, crashing and exploding in a giant fireball in slow motion.
Except somehow, only the innocent bystanders were killed and the people at the wheel somehow escaped unharmed.
Nasty Noughties— very good!
Whilst not a fan of Mr Blair’s legacy, I do think that it is unfair to blame him for all this; the nastiness in popular entertainment began decades before Mr Blair, just look at some of the films that came out in the 70s. I realise that when one looks at the films etc. from the 70s they seem quite tame, this probably because many of us, if not most, have become so coursened over the last 40 or 50 years that we are no longer shocked by what was shocking then. I don’t think that this is a great leap forward in tolerance, I think that it’s deeply saddening; which makes me seem like a censorious pearl-clutcher, I know, but I wish that I had never been exposed to such nastiness. Of course, one might say that no-one forced me to watch, but one doesn’t want to be a “disgusted, of Tumbridge Wells” when in one’s teens and twenties, although I don’t care now, and I will confess to having walked out of a couple of films in the 1970s.
Not the “Life of Brian “ I trust?
Absolutely not. By the way you made some comment here about the loss of the comments’ archive, and this comment seems to have disappeared – spooky?
Yes I noticed that, and your reply as well. Perhaps even veiled criticism is now verboten?
Those who have been through combat where they have seen friends blown apart, men scream with pain and their bodies rot in front of them: survived death camps,torture chambers, Japanese POW camps, want cleanliness, order and beauty in their lives.
A Grandfather volunteered for the RFC in WW1 after he had been gassed in the trenches. He told me of the risks, when their aeroplanes were outgunned by the Germans. Iasked him why he volunteered. He replied ” A bath. I wanted to die clean “.
A reason who so many people are coarse and crude is because they consider it is being tough and have street cred. The days when middle and upper class men had been taught to box ( especially bare knuckle pre 1860s) and played rugby, so could look after themselves if attacked, are long gone. Arthur Bryant in his history books states how boys and men from all classes were taught to box bare knuckle which included throws, fight with cudgels and sword pre 1860s. Boxing, rope climbing and gymnastics were the mainstay of boys PT classes up to 1939 in all schools. If one is secure in the knowledge that one can give a good account of onself in a fight, a boy or man does to have to be cride or coarse on order to fit in with those who are vulgar.
“By the time he got into power in May 1997, though, it was all pretty much over and done with” – that’s not my memory. It lasted a year or two longer than that, albeit increasingly faded and “naff”. In reality the anticlimax of 2000 was the big change, and the year itself was the year that was a premonition and preparation for everything that came later, from reality TV, to terrorists plotting, to US electoral madness and the start of obvious, clear financial speculation and of course Putin’s arrival to power.
Pretty easy to flip this and say Britain became nicer as things like racism and hooliganism declined in the 90s.
Historiclly Britain has always had a low murder rate compared to other countries, Prof S Pinker has shown some data on this . The countryside has generally been fairly free of murder. The growth of the squalid slums from about 1800 to 1860 caused massive problems. Bradford, perhaps had the worst slum: population went from 6000 1800 to 120,000 in 1850.From 1860s to 1960s murder rate declined and the squalid conditions of Britain greatly improved. By 1960 one could avoid violence largely by avoiding the docks and rough parts of town. Crowd violence in football crowds increased from late 1960s but there was none in those attending rugby league matches or ruby union matches in South Wales.
Glasgow was infamous for razor gangs where cut throat razors were used to scar victims but there were few murders: compare with London and those who have died from being stabbed by knives.
The murder of mostly black poorly educated males from the underclass, largely in their teens and twenties which is gang related by those of a similar background, is largely ignored by middle and upper middle class writers. For example has Unherd commissioned any writers with streecred to investigate these murders? What we have today is a situation where proximity to commissioning editors appears to determine newsworthyness not seriousnes of a problem. Does Britain produce any budding writers such as Orwell who are prepared to live in rough areas and report on the conditions ?
Britian is dying from its embrace of liberalism. They are nothing now but a petrie dish of sick twisted deviates.
The nastiness started with Spitting Image in the 1980’s
Or even earlier in the early 60’s with ‘That was the Week that Was’.
Expedition Robinson was preceeded by a South African TV series called The Survivors back in 1980 which by nearly 2 decades is, was and always will be the first reality TV series. I state this not to in any way extole the virtues of reality TV – almost certainly the lowest form of “entertainment”, but to set the record straight.
No one who had gone to football matches in the 70s and 80s would have been shocked by what was mentioned in this article: the racism, the sexism, the mocking of Northerners for their poverty.
I thought the article was going to be about the covert operation in Kosovo, the Iraq War and destruction of Libya.