6 saturday review Saturday December 18 2021 | the times
The new special of The Grand Tour,
Jeremy Clarkson said, “set out... to answer
an important question: what is the matter
with the French?” A nitpicker might sug-
gest that there is an obvious place one
could go to answer this question, and it
wouldn’t be the English and Welsh coun-
tryside, which is where Carnage a Trois was
filmed. Lockdown, though, brings its own
challenges. Also, Clarkson, Richard Ham-
mond and James May have essentially
been asking “What is the matter with the
French?” for 20 years, so I suppose they’ve
learnt to do it pretty much anywhere.
You know what? I sort of loved this. Not
all of it. Not the long bit towards the end
where they drove around a racetrack for
ages, but you can fast-forward through
that. Why did it work? I suppose it’s some-
thing to do with the French being fair
game, in the sense that asking, for exam-
ple, “What’s the matter with the Somalis?”
might have felt a whiff more problematic.
But there was also the way that French cars
really are magically weird, and you will
never have seen three middle-aged men
have more fun pointing it out.
Behold, for example, Clarkson com-
plaining about a Citroën with a tape deck
installed sideways where the handbrake
ought to be, which, he explained, meant
the crumbs from your pain au chocolat fall
in and ruin your Vanessa Paradis cassette.
It wasn’t a proper Grand Tour because
they didn’t really go anywhere, and they all
seemed to forget about their special cars,
rather than driving them up rivers and
stuff. I’m not sure any of it really made
sense as a narrative, even when they inevi-
tably concluded that the French were
wonderful and their cars usually were too.
Still, it retained that essential, nagging
feeling of occasionally watching a hate
crime, and they did drop a Citroën 2CV
out of a helicopter and bung a harmless
Citroën Pluriel into a farmhouse with a
trebuchet, which you can’t fault for spec-
tacle. Although it did make me wonder
how we’d respond, en masse, if a trio of
Parisian mime artists did the same with a
Mini Clubman and an Austin Allegro.mass condemnation, or whatever — is still
chilling in comedy terms, argued another
comedian, Phil Wang (hi, Phil), who was
extensively attacked online after joking
about Nazis and Labour antisemitism on
Have I Got News for You. It is also personal-
ly devastating, argued the beauty colum-
nist Sali Hughes (mate, how are you? It’s
been weeks), who has been subjected to
whole messageboards populated by
people with a “troll boner”, for whom at-
tacking her seems to be their main, all-
consuming hobby. “When people are
being horrible you feel ashamed that you
are being kicked around like this,” she said.
All of this felt pretty spot-on to me. The
only bit I’m not 100 per cent sold on is the
core “rage” hypothesis. Are we sure it’s
rage these people feel? At the sharp end Isuppose it’s almost comforting to believe
that it is because rage at least implies some
human connection. I worry, though, that
it’s worse than that; that what looks like
rage when a thousand voices combine is,
on an individual, grain-of-sand level,
closer to dehumanising indifference. It’s
nothing. It’s a hobby. It’s kicking a carcass
down the road. The writer Kat Rosenfield
hinted at this when she spoke of social
media shame as shame with no hope of
redemption because your average assail-
ant simply isn’t invested enough in what-
ever they’re dragging you over to truly
care if you apologise or not.
Although that is where we come back to
the circle identified by Dolly Baddiel. Tell
people what you are, often enough and
loudly enough, and you’ll come to believe
it yourself, even if initially you were only
trying it out. It’s like what John Updike said
about living in public: the mask eats the
face. Which is just as true with a million
followers as it is with none at all.Web platforms
force us to present
ourselves in our most
simplified form
Hugo Rifkind on TV
What looks like online rage is
closer to indifference. It’s a hobby
T
he inherent problem
with documentaries
about social media is that
almost anybody in a
position to make one, by
definition, is having a
very different social me-
dia experience from almost everybody
else. As a celebrity with a million followers
— or even a hack with a few thousand —
your online word is powerfully different
from that of most of the world, who have
about 72, most of which are either corpo-
rate bots or that bitch Sandra from school.
And for this to change they will need to do
something truly remarkable, such as win-
ning The X Factor, or putting a cat in a bin.
The most predictable criticism, then, of
David Baddiel’s Social Media, Anger and Us
was that it was just a big long moan of the
blue ticks. Or, to put that another way, I
knew almost everybody in this. And yet,
mysteriously, wasn’t in it myself. What the
hell, David, you’re half a mile away in
Caitlin Moran’s kitchen and you don’t even
call? I’ve half a mind to tweet about it. And
not nicely.
As the title suggests, this was an investi-
gation into the link between social media
and rage. Why, Baddiel wondered, is
everybody so angry out there? What
effects does it have? As the tech guru phi-
losopher Jaron Lanier put it, people in
many different countries, from Brazil to
Poland, may feel that there are particular,
distinct reasons why their politics are
veering towards the populist, but when it’s
happening simultaneously all over the
world, it’s hard to escape the sense that
there might be something bigger going on.
The smartest thing about this very
smart documentary was the way it chose
to look at the rage rather than the raging.
I’ve seen enough interviews with actual
trolls by now, and they’re always the same:
superficially fascinating while going no-
where. Trolls rarely have anything inter-
esting to say about why they are trolls.
Why should they? They don’t consider
themselves in context, as one of thou-
sands, because which of us does? A grain of
sand does not comprehend the beach.
Instead, Baddiel put himself into an
MRI scanner and saw the extent to which
his own fight-or-flight reflexes were trig-
gered by reading tweets. He also inter-
viewed his daughter, Dolly, who bravely
spoke of her battles with anorexia. Her
point was that these battles had become
harder, by a considerable degree, thanks to
her identification online as an anorexic.
For Baddiel, this is the key to all of it. We
are complex creatures, he argues, but web
platforms force us to shed nuance and
present ourselves in our most simplified
form. (This, you’ll note, from a man whose
Twitter bio is a single word, “Jew”.) And
anger, he suggests, is the most straight-
forward way of affirming that; a means to
publicly declare who we are, by attacking
that which we are not.
Being on the wrong end of this is of
course no picnic, even if the term “can-
celled” is much misused. “Piers Morgan,”
noted the comedian Athena Kugblenu (hi,
Athena), “is harder to cancel than Amazon
Prime.” Yet the threat of cancellation — orsocial mediator
David Baddiel with the
Smithy family outside
their house, allegedly
burnt by trollsSASKIA RUSHER/WALL TO WALL/BBCDavid Baddiel: Social
Media, Anger and Us
BBC2
The Grand Tour
Presents: Carnage
a Trois
Amazon