As you point out, there has been a vast regression in public consciousness – all the way back to a childish cartoonish quasi-supernatural outlook. My favourite – and I’m sure it will tickle John! – is the one about how Theodor Adorno wrote the lyrics to the Beatles!
This Teddy/Fab Four fixation fascinates me, partly for its charming quaintness, but also because it encapsulates this public regression perfectly. And this is because, to truly gain some insight into how such a bizarre concept came about, you have to try to think your way back to that conjunction of the 50s and 60s when the enviable American economic boom of the former – with Elvis Presley as the central image of America’s cultural ascent – gave way to that “British Invasion” of the latter in which, according to US ideology, these agents from the “dark commie East” were infecting the purity of this “Land of the Free”.
(One curiosity is that Elvis once apparently wrote a letter to Richard Nixon offering his services as a spy to report back on those commies – amongst whom I’m sure he numbered the Liverpool lads.)
But all of this should surely impress as an anachronistic irrelevance ... and yet I have encountered a resurgence of such fables.
Until I watched this podcast, I hadn’t realised how much so many recent TV programmes relied on surveillance equipment as a vital part of the plot – and this equipment always being presented as beneficial. The one I am currently watching – “Eric” (with Benedict Cumberbatch) – is set in the 80s i.e. before the surveillance technology had reached anything like its current advanced state. And yet there is still a policeman making extensive use of public video tapes which, according to this programme, seems to have been ubiquitous to a degree that is surely revisionist.
There was even “Invitation to a Murder” set in the 1930s in which there was a bank of screens with cameras set up to watch the residents in their rooms. With 30s technology?
As you point out, there has been a vast regression in public consciousness – all the way back to a childish cartoonish quasi-supernatural outlook. My favourite – and I’m sure it will tickle John! – is the one about how Theodor Adorno wrote the lyrics to the Beatles!
This Teddy/Fab Four fixation fascinates me, partly for its charming quaintness, but also because it encapsulates this public regression perfectly. And this is because, to truly gain some insight into how such a bizarre concept came about, you have to try to think your way back to that conjunction of the 50s and 60s when the enviable American economic boom of the former – with Elvis Presley as the central image of America’s cultural ascent – gave way to that “British Invasion” of the latter in which, according to US ideology, these agents from the “dark commie East” were infecting the purity of this “Land of the Free”.
(One curiosity is that Elvis once apparently wrote a letter to Richard Nixon offering his services as a spy to report back on those commies – amongst whom I’m sure he numbered the Liverpool lads.)
But all of this should surely impress as an anachronistic irrelevance ... and yet I have encountered a resurgence of such fables.
Until I watched this podcast, I hadn’t realised how much so many recent TV programmes relied on surveillance equipment as a vital part of the plot – and this equipment always being presented as beneficial. The one I am currently watching – “Eric” (with Benedict Cumberbatch) – is set in the 80s i.e. before the surveillance technology had reached anything like its current advanced state. And yet there is still a policeman making extensive use of public video tapes which, according to this programme, seems to have been ubiquitous to a degree that is surely revisionist.
There was even “Invitation to a Murder” set in the 1930s in which there was a bank of screens with cameras set up to watch the residents in their rooms. With 30s technology?