EVERYONE'S A CRITIC

There’s an episode of ‘Frasier’ called ‘Everyone’s a Critic’. In it, Niles Crane is given an arts review column in a prestigious Seattle magazine, Frasier is jealous, and the usual hilarities of sibling rivalry kick in, with the brothers duelling verbally to be thought more influential, as Frasier attempts to use his radio presence to be thought artistically erudite. This isn’t about ‘Frasier’ though, superior though it may be to most other things on TV, even now that it’s the stuff of Comedy Central repeats and piled-up box sets. I’ve been preoccupied for a while now by the tendency of more and more people to make review-style pronouncements on almost everything – or to rely on the published pronouncements which are really just opinion as though they had been written on tablets of stone.

There are so many examples that I don’t know where to start. And doubtless anyone reading this will conclude – and comment – that I’m clearly displaying signs of extreme indecisiveness which, in turn, clearly indicate a deeply flawed personality. Not to mention mediocre writing. While the critics prepare to sink their knives into issues like these, I think I’m going to start with lunchtime.

At lunchtime, where I work, the conversation varies: on a good day it buoys me up through the afternoon exhaustion, as it’s been stimulating in its variety, hilarity and interest. On a good day we might cover everything from politics to the economy to topical television to books to films to… well you get the idea. On a bad day it makes me wish I didn’t need a lunch break, as what I call the Hysterical Re-enactment Society takes the floor, with people reliving the conflicts and tricky moments of their morning, including voice-mimicry, surely only prolonging the stress. I know they say a problem shared is a problem halved, but surely in getting this kind of stress out of your system you’re just offloading it onto someone else, who’s stuck with it and the consequent headache for the rest of the afternoon! Anyway: when the Hysterical Re-enactment isn’t happening, and the floor is clear for more normal conversation, occasionally we get onto the fraught topics of what people watch on TV, or what they read. Sometimes I’ve felt like limping away, almost wounded, because I’ve let slip the terrible confession that, over the weekend, I watched an episode of ‘X Factor’ or ‘Strictly Come Dancing’, or read something which has never been nominated for a major arts award. ‘Oh, no….’ I’m told, ‘You can’t possibly afford to dumb down like that, you know – the rest of society is dumbing down and it’s up to people like us to keep up the standards.’ One friend has been publically ridiculed for reading the Daily Mail. Another has been greeted with a stony silence after admitting to watching ‘EastEnders’. You get the idea. The hurt it causes aside – and I’m sure I let myself be far too hurt about this, in a manner which was almost certainly not intended by the people who issue sideswipes and then move on – I wonder who exactly sets these parameters of taste? They do, it seems. They. The shadowy figures of critical self-righteousness. They say what’s a good book or worthwhile TV or a ‘cultured’ film. They seem to be the critics who write in what they’ve already termed to be the ‘good’ newspapers, or who appear on the ‘Review Show’ or ‘Culture Show’ on BBC2. People like them, whose opinions are regurgitated in triumphant one-upmanship by people like us. It’s been decided that, for instance, a book which wins the Man Booker is of a higher quality than a book which wins the Costa prize, because the Costa books are meant to be entertaining and appealing, where as the Man Booker books are … serious. Worthy. Literature.

And that’s where I get stuck. Is Literature, then, something worthy which is disqualified from that defining worthiness if it’s also enjoyable? Does worthwhile television or radio have to be the kind of programme you might endure rather than enjoy, and during which you might struggle to keep your eyes open? If so: count me out. I like a bit of misery every bit as much as anyone else. I mean, I grew up as a Northern Irish Catholic and I’ve read all of Thomas Hardy: what more proof could there be of my affinity with a good bit of suffering, for its own pleasurable sake alone? But whatever I read – whatever music I listen to, films or TV I watch – I like to be entertained as well as enlightened. I love few things more than curling up with a good book or listening to music, but I won’t tolerate either for the sake of feeling intellectually confident when I tell other people about my experiences. During the recent snowbound Christmas holidays, I read a much-acclaimed novel which irritated me so much that I had to be restrained, allegedly on health-and-safety grounds (though I suspect from fears that the neighbours would think I was insane) from opening the front door and lobbing the thing into the nearest snowdrift. I’ve had just the same anger with the dreaded ‘chick lit’ on several occasions: ‘PS I Love You’ was more ‘PS It’s Rubbish’. But when I mentioned my disappointment in this novel so applauded by Them after the holidays, several colleagues looked so dejected that I felt almost guilty. The same thing happens if I miss a TV costume drama… never mind that it may be because I’ve decided to re-read the book instead, and just don’t want to see my mental image of characters or settings replaced by the imperfections of actors or location shots. What had started off as lack of enjoyment ends up being made to feel like lack of judgement, and I’m just lucky if the same person who has already ridiculed my taste in Saturday night TV isn’t there that lunchtime that I show my disappointment in the award-winning book. How relieved they’d be this week, though, to know that I’m now getting on very amicably with a collection of They-endorsed short stories!

But it’s not just to do with the things we choose to entertain ourselves. It’s to do with who we are: with what we do. I know that what I do for a living has been a disappointment to various people whose opinions I greatly value. Family members. Friends. Even people with whom I’ve come into contact through my work and who have asked, out loud, why I’m doing that job ‘in spite of how well I did academically when I was younger’. I had, it seems to be thought, the potential to do so much better. The terrible finality is in the verb tense when you reach a certain age: the teenager at school gets all the possibilities of ‘could do better’ in their school report, whereas once you’ve reached a certain level of adult ageing it all goes into the past: ‘could have done better’. Perfect tense for an imperfect life, with all the modal poignancy of lost opportunity. The judgement is hurtful, but sometimes, when things go right, I’m quite forcibly reminded that I do the job I do because I actually do love it. Like anyone else I have days when my job could easily follow the same trajectory as that acclaimed novel, into a Christmas snowdrift; enough of the time, though, it and I get on well enough together to make the arrangement worthwhile. But somehow it’s never good enough, is it? Somehow They still sit in judgement and – conveniently, resisting any need to provide more tangible advice – simply give my living a bad review. And in giving my living a bad review they’re giving it to my life too – and implicitly to me, and the dangerous thing is that in doing this They are influential enough to transmit these opinions to the people whose thoughts matter enough to me to have the power to hurt. The critical circle goes on.

And as the circle goes around, it traces more and more in its circumference. Holiday destinations. Means of transport. Places to shop. What people eat and drink. What they wear. The thread-count of their sheets or the size label on their clothes. It’s all as open to review as the first night of a West End play: ready to be deconstructed and misconstrued, represented, dissected and summed up by a million pairs of eyes. And our only defence is to do the same thing back, in our blogs and our twitterings and the words said behind our hands, or whispered on a screen in a text.

So I try to put it into words, here, in this blog. The case for the defence, ready for judgement, offered on the critical altar of They and Them, inadequate and shivering as an insecure teenager edging over to the side of a swimming pool. A blog has the ultimate possibility for critical jury service: the comment box. I lay my words bare, every week or two, on this screen. I wait for comment-alert or tweet, ready for the criticism or the compliment, but prepared most of all for the silences. The empty box. The automated tumbleweed of no new messages… no comment said as clearly as by a compromised politician. With everyone the critic wielding the knife of disapproval, I sometimes wonder why I write this blog at all. Why I make myself visible at work, at home, among a social set, opening myself to knives as prepared as on a surgeon’s table. It’s a bit like why I go to work, perhaps. Because I have to – because it’s what I do – because, despite hating it from time to time, I love it much more often.

And if all this isn’t good enough? I’ll keep trying to do just a little bit better. And in the meantime, They’ll just have to put up with it.