A new format has begun showing up on our TV screens. It’s been around in some guise or another for the last couple of years, but last weekend it seemed to reach its apotheosis. I’m talking about the pornography of ‘escape’.
We’ve had the pornography of cooking, gardens and interior design. We’ve even had the pornography of property buying - how hollow that now looks. The notion of changing your life has been constant over recent years, even it’s only a question of swapping your wife for a week (and note how the show was called ‘Wife - not husband - swap’, even though it was aimed squarely at women, tapping into a sense of self loathing and inadequacy perhaps). The worst of these shows have been those trading off the body dysmorphic - too fat or too thin, super size or super skinny, make me a new a face etc. Anything to effect a change. To become someone else... someone new.
The latest of these proposes a change to your life.
‘Monty Hall’s Great Escape’ tells of a rather posh Bristolian marine biologist (for chrissake) who sublets his city flat for six months and moves to the wilds of West Scotland to live in a run-down shack by the edge of a beach. It all seems very idyllic, the sun always shines, the views are spectacular, the locals are delightful. But then they would be. Monty is something of a cash cow and is quickly handing out tenners left right and centre. He buys pigs and chickens from local vendors. He has a crew re-building the shack. He has landscape gardeners fencing off his plot of land. His only regret is that the actual owner of the ‘bothy’ (the technical term for the shack) won’t allow him to put in a window to enjoy the view. As the landlord points out, if the original tenants wanted to see the view, they would step outside.
At one point, Monty fancies purchasing a boat, so he drives into town, in his top of the range Landrover, and picks up a dirigible with trailer, no haggling involved. No wonder the locals loved him. One presume it was his own money he was using. Perhaps as BBC licence payers it was actually ours. But the reality of the situation is that Monty is living in a stone shack, with no heating, no comfy bed, no toilet or bathroom facilities, and dieting solely it seems on bacon sandwiches. I wonder how he’ll feel when the weather turns.
Anyway enough of the perma-grinning Monty. More important is what the programme is selling us; the simple life, the organic, the back to basics.
As this credit crunch escalates and jobs are being carved off by their hundreds every day, western societies, coddled since the war, are genuinely beginning to feel a sense of unease. As stories reach us of social and economic breakdown in the Ukraine, a country longing to join Europe, we begin to wonder if there is any chance of that, however small, happening here. There is already talk of a summer of unrest. Rumours of police riot-training and a stock-up on shields and tear gas abound. The usual scare-mongering perhaps, but with a government so clearly adept at obfuscating facts and lying to its populace, who knows what might be true? We watch France become angrier. The Greek youth explode. The Icelandic debacle...
Meanwhile, Obama pours 50 billion here, another 20 billion there, as companies announce losses of such astronomical proportions that at this point they don’t even register in the public’s mind and struggle to make headline news.
A billion suddenly feels like a million did six months ago.
So no wonder we feel like packing everything up and running away. Admittedly most of us are far too lazy to do anything about it. And that’s what TV execs are counting on. They know we’ll prefer to enjoy someone else doing it on our behalf. But that’s what Reality TV is all about. Watching people do things we would never have the nerve, the energy or the wherewithal to do ourselves. If they fail, so much to the good. It makes us feel better about ourselves for never getting up off the sofa in the first place.
So this return to a bucolic, simpler - ‘Cranford’-like - time, is it truly all its cracked up to be?
My experience of the countryside, and I lived there for ten years as a child, is slightly different. When I visit it now, I am often struck by the reactionary, conservative, claustrophobic, petty-minded and inward looking atmosphere that abounds once one travels ten miles away from any major city. There are good and bad people everywhere, but the advantage of a town or city, is that you can usually avoid the bad ones. In a small village they are forever in your face. Ask Madame Bovary.
Besides, if the countryside is truly so great, why do so many people migrate to the cities in the first place? Of course, it’s all about money. But once they have made their money, why don’t they move back to where they have come from? Because they remember how it was. Only people who have never lived in the country move there. They’ve watched the TV programmes. They’ve been seduced by the porn. People who have spent the early part of their lives in the countryside and left, remember the hardships, the drudgery, the unremitting slog. Those who wax lyrical about its slower pace find themselves spending most of their days talking to animals. Or worse, plants. They make jam, bake bread. But it all takes hours... and is still eaten in minutes. “It’s about the process!” I hear you holler. But how much bloody process can one person take? If it was all about ‘the process’ why do we pay bakers to bake our bread for us?
It’s a great life for the children is always thrown up as a mitigating reason. No it’s not. Children are so bored in the countryside they have to create imaginary worlds and imaginary friends. You don’t need to do that in the city. There’s enough stimuli to make such dysfunctional behaviour completely unnecessary (unless you’re a single child and completely ignored by your workaholic parents that is...). Once a child begins to realise that wandering around in his or her own private ‘zoo’ down at the bottom of the garden, is well, frankly absurd, they begin to commit small acts of vandalism, breaking things for no particular reason, killing small animals, kicking down walls. Eventually drink, drugs and sex appear on the menu. If your precious child hasn’t been fortunate enough to obtain a place at ‘Uni’, or a job with his uncle in the nearest town, life atrophies into a medicated, dunderheaded stupor as they slowly begin to replicate the meaningless lives of their Victorian forebears. They retreat into their own codes, their own language, their own way of doing things. Outsiders are something to be fleeced and then driven away. You want to integrate? Maybe in ten or twenty years. And that’s if you accept the rules, don’t rock the boat, accept the status quo... “Don’t come around here trying to change us with your fancy city ways.”
This notion that you’ll find some kind of personal salvation by turning your back on all you know and running away is a myth. And it’s damaging because it perpetuates the same aspirational capitalist crap which has brought us where we are today. Always present the consumer with something they don’t have... and convince them they need it. They don’t believe in the riches any more... the bigger house, the new car, the hundreds of pairs of shoes. They know that doesn’t work (which is largely why they’ve stopped buying). So what do we sell them now? Escape. Get simple. Knit. Grow your own! Have you any idea how much more expensive that turns out to be compared to going to your local Tescos and buying your food off the shelf? (“It’s the process!”) This new version of the countryside is being sold by people who arrive on the Friday night and are back in Notting Hill by Sunday teatime. It’s the only version they know.
Sure there are great things about small communities of like-minded souls, and fresh air and long walks will do anyone the power of good. But you can experience that anywhere. You don’t have to up-sticks and live on an island to find it. But as a recipe for change, a panacea for society’s ills, this notion of ‘escape’ is patent nonsense. And in the way porn works compared to healthy sexual relationships, it is a poor substitute for the truth.
So... get a grip. Life is all around us. We have no excuses... we’ve just got to get on with it.
He first came to my attention two years ago. I was wandering around Tate Britain marvelling at how much my taste in Art has changed as I’ve grown older. Paintings which once filled me with glee and satisfaction - the thick set morbidity of Frank Auerbach, the big cocked expanses of Franz Kline - I now passed by with nary a glance. That’s not to say I dismissed them, they simply felt like over-familiar friends whose personalities I had now exhausted... like certain songs by The Beatles you know you never have to hear again - The Fool On the Hill, Can’t Buy Me Love, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds - songs you once adored but have now been played to such an extent that never hearing them would only feel like a microscopic loss to one’s cultural life.