A hung parliament: bad for politics, but cultural gold
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Version 0 of 1. We may be on the edge of political chaos. The prospect of a hung parliament and weeks of negotiation to launch another coalition or minority government confronts Britain with a harsh truth. The age of national confidence and strong governments – of left, right or centre – is over. We are back in the ungovernable quagmire that was Britain in the 1970s. But will it really be so bad? In the 1970s, Britain seemed almost ungovernable. Neither Labour or the Conservatives could get the country working. And while Scotland is now threatening to dismantle the British Isles peacefully, in the 70s Northern Ireland was suffering a real war in which people were dying. Yet one of the lessons of Britain in the 1970s is that a political dark age can be a cultural golden age. The disillusion, bitterness and anger of Britain’s failed decade gave birth to brilliant, memorable works of art. The 70s proved that cynicism and alienation are cultural gold. I’ve been preparing myself for the stagnant, pessimistic, divided Britain that seems likely to follow this election by reading Malcolm Bradbury’s compelling 1975 novel The History Man. In this black comedy, sociology lecturer Howard Kirk – one of the great fictional monsters of modern British literature – creates chaos around him so he can exploit it. Kirk is a radical-chic pop intellectual who feeds on the confusions and divisions of a society miserably waking up from the death of huge hopes. The same rich melancholy also nurtures the morbid beauty of Ian McEwan’s short stories in his unmatched 1975 collection First Love, Last Rites. Of course this acidic artistic energy was not confined to “high” culture. In the early 1970s David Bowie was articulating the malaise in songs like Life on Mars. A sense that Britain was paralysed and going nowhere even spilled over into TV sitcoms like Whatever happened to the Likely Lads? and of course, Fawlty Towers. In a definitive episode of Fawlty Towers, an American visitor to the dismal Torquay hotel, despairing that he can’t get a Waldorf Salad (“I’m afraid we’ve run out of waldorfs,” explains Basil Fawlty) launches into a diatribe on the crumminess of the hotel and, by extension, Britain. That same image of wretched food in shoddy hotels and cafes is used by John le Carré to symbolise national decline in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy when George Smiley eats at a terrible motorway caff. Nothing worked; even the food was shit. In his vivid history of this era, Seasons in the Sun, Dominic Sandbrook cites sitcoms for their satires on Britain in crisis – but he misses the paradox that all this great culture fed off the very disillusion of the age. It was an artistically magnificent epoch. Failure is funny; national failure much more so. As kids we laughed at the comedy without worrying about its dark side. In punk the darkness was impossible to ignore. The Sex Pistols, the Clash – it all kicked off in the 1970s, and rock critics are still crying for that lost golden age of anger. But what if it came back? This could be the beginning of a great experiment. If we resurrect the political sickness of the 70s we may revive its music, too. And its art. Gilbert and George created the visual equivalent of punk in works like Red Morning Trouble (1977). But already, David Hockney had nailed the sadness of the 70s in his lyrical masterpiece Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy. David Cameron has said his favourite album is Pink Floyd’s 1973 Dark Side of the Moon. Will he be listening to it on a 70s hi-fi next weekend as he wallows in electoral failure? No one told him when to run, he missed the starting gun. Meanwhile, Ed Miliband may be already doing the deals he swore he wouldn’t. Welcome to the age of disillision. Ed, we’re like two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl, year after year. Wish you were here. |