The Times - UK (2022-01-01)

Britain’s great TV and film boom

has left the BBC behind

Weekend essay

Pages 30-31

Carol Midgley Notebook

phones have passwords, that

parking spaces don’t appear

magically, that

families don’t sit

down to a full

pancake breakfast

daily and that women

don’t wrap

themselves in a

bedsheet directly after

coitus. Much obliged.

Voucher guilt

I

realise this is a peak

first world problem

but does anyone else

feel awkward using

restaurant gift

vouchers? Obviously

they’re a lovely idea but

right now feels a bad

time to use them. The

hospitality sector has

been floored by

lockdown and Christmas no-

shows, so when you actually turn

up they must think: “Hooray. Fresh

money in the till.” Then you proffer

your plastic rectangle or phone code

and faces seem to fall. Recently in a

Gino D’Acampo restaurant our

voucher covered more than the bill.

We had to tip lavishly in cash to

assuage guilt. I know wealthy

D’Acampo hardly needs my pity but

he had it. Why don’t I feel this way

about book tokens?

Fine day for a wedding

T

oday, as others nurse

hangovers, I shall, all being

well, appear fresh-faced in a

frock to attend the wedding of our

friends’ lovely daughter. What a

result. By arranging their nuptials on

the day of sore heads and regret this

couple gave their guests a wondrous

gift — a cast-iron excuse to stay in

last night, the worst, most grasping

night of the year, saying: “Sorry, we

need to be fresh for the wedding.”

Even young people now say

January 1 is better for socialising, the

new New Year’s Eve. Except if you’re

doing Dry January, which obviously,

given the drink on tap today, I’m not.

Boots on the roof

W

e got something better than

Santa on our roof: the pitter-

patter of workmen’s boots.

Storm Arwen had been so vicious

here that at the time I could feel our

house swaying as roof tiles flew off

like skittles. Our friends’ chimney was

blown on to their car, flattening it.

Searching for an available roofer in

December our hearts sank. The holy

grail seemed easier. Plus our house is

tall. You couldn’t pay me to go up

there, though this is exactly what we

were asking of them. But, lo, three

wise men did come, hopping through

the skylight, and fixing it.

Being a pantywaist pen-pusher, I’d

never appreciated how brave and

skilful roofers are. They even said the

damage “wasn’t too bad”. More

amazing, the insurance paid up

promptly. See? Christmas miracles

do happen.

real life but this is TV. Why pay

scriptwriters for dazzling

dialogue you can’t hear? Do

artists insist visitors see their

paintings blindfolded? “Use

subtitles” comes the

frequent cry but we’ve all

seen subtitling fails, like

the weather forecaster

predicting “heavy

breasts in the west of

Scotland”. If it’s moody

realism directors want

(though I suspect it’s

awards) I have suggestions.

Stop making married

couples copulate on

cluttered kitchen

worktops when their bed is

20ft away. Remember that

in real life people end a

phone call by saying “bye”,

they don’t just hang up.

Know that morning

breath exists and couples don’t

engage in tonsil hockey 30

seconds after waking, that

A

s someone who watches
TV for a living I was
relieved, and annoyed, to
learn that the mumbling
in dramas is deliberate.
All those times you fingered a
hearing aid advert or shouted: “Beryl,
where’s the ear wax oil?” it was them
not you. Directors, it turns out, think
“mumbledom” is “realistic”. Where
once they’d tell actors “Speak up!”
they now encourage muttering,
sound technicians say, because it’s
“natural”.
Well, yes, people do mumble in

Stop your

mumbling

and get off

that worktop

The battle between good and evil is fantasy

Too often we imagine malign forces behind wrong-headedness and ask the meaningless question: which side are you on?

Comment

of human nature. Fear of the unseen

is a natural product of evolutionary

biology: self-preservation favours the

suspicious and, at its extreme,

suspiciousness leads to paranoia, of

which there’s a streak in us all.

That streak has served the world’s

faiths well: they have recruited,

rallied and prospered through the

conjuring up of unseen supernatural

forces. Like the wind which, invisible,

may be detected through visible

straws, good and evil are seen in

human actions good or bad; but

humans are to good and evil what

straws are to the wind: they are not

the wind, but agents of the wind. The

idea is immensely seductive, as St

Augustine confessed.

But it is, in the end, a great

evasion. Perhaps it is the great

evasion. It divides us, turns us

against each other. It deflects us

away from asking the difficult

questions about why people act as

they do, and towards an easier

question: which side are they on? To

what inaudible drumbeat are they

marching? Even post-Christians have

taken to talking of how we might

exorcise “our demons”.

Friends, there are no demons, no

Heaven, no Hell, no cosmic forces of

good and evil, no battle between

darkness and light. There is only us.

philosophy is a pull we all feel and to

which I wrongly succumbed during

the Brexit debate: a pull I still feel in

the fray between antivax “covidiots”

and us “good” people who don’t want

everyone to die. It’s the impulse to

imagine malign forces behind

wrong-headedness.

Natural conservatives like me are

pulled likewise by a Manichaean

account of the struggle between

Labour’s wicked (we assume)

Momentum-inclined Corbynites and

what we see as the enlightened

Blairite centre-left. We’re drawn to a

feeling that we’re in the presence of

something close to evil, an enemy

within. And, make no mistake,

listening to Angela Rayner’s

language about “Tory scum” last year

shows how the left are as guilty of

this as the right.

Manichaeism goes with the grain

Saint Augustine understood that sin is

not driven by an abstract, external force

homilies about the “triumph” of good

and the ultimate victory of the forces

of light. It breathes through the lyrics

of almost every 19th-century English

hymn — remind yourself, for

instance, of the lyrics of Onward,

Christian Soldiers. Only this week in

my Notebook I was quoting from

another hymn: “Christian dost thou

see them/ On the holy ground?/How

the troops of Midian/ Prowl and

prowl around.” The next verse starts

“Christian dost thou feel them/How

they work within... ?”

The concept of evil as an external

force which is not quite “us” but

which may get into us, drawing us to

the dark side, has interested me all

my adult life. As a student I was

struck by Aristotle’s rejection of the

idea that moral qualities can be

lodged within us like downloaded

apps. “We become brave,” he said,

“by acting bravely” — but nobody

expressed it better than Saint

Augustine 17 centuries ago,

describing (in his Confessions) the

error of his earlier thinking: “I still

thought that it is not we who sin but

some other nature that sins within us

... I preferred to excuse myself and
blame this unknown thing which was
in me but was not part of me.”
Augustine was talking here about
his youthful adherence to a Persian
religion called Manichaeism, which
(as he is making clear) Christianity
officially regards as heresy. But the
heresy is woven into the very fabric of
popular and informal Christian and
Muslim belief. Hence, as I learnt when
serving on the Broadcasting Standards
Council, the terrified interest many
ordinary churchgoers take in
Satanism. Manichees believe that the
universe is divided into darkness and
light, in perpetual warfare, and that
we must sign up to the forces of light,
forever wary of ambush.
At the root of this corrosive

I

n the last days of 2021 I finished a
sparkling little comic novel. Simon
Edge’s The End of the World is Flat
is more than playful: it’s a satire of
Swiftian ferocity, a thinly veiled
parody of a prevailing madness of
the hour, the trans debate. Edge’s
fantasy is of a PR agency which signs
a lucrative contract to use every trick
in the social media book to challenge
and eventually defeat “globularism”:
the belief that the Earth is round.
It’s scarily plausible how these
rascals try “to foist an insane idea
on an unsuspecting world”. They
almost succeed.
The story is hilarious (flat-Earth-
sceptics get branded Tergs: true-
Earth rejecting globularists) but you
can read it for yourself. My purpose
here is to discuss the only thing that
disappointed me: disappointed me as
Arthur Miller’s famous 20th-century
play about the (supposed) witches of
Salem, The Crucible, disappoints.
Both plots rely on conspiracies by
bad people. In both, the universe
inhabited by the leading characters is
peopled by some who are on the side
of good and truth, and others in
hock to evil and falsehood. The
people who are right are nice, and
those who are wrong are scoundrels.
Life is so seldom like that. The
challenge both authors duck is to
explain how nice people can
champion wrong causes, often for
good motives. It’s not as if being
wrong makes a person bad, or being
right makes them good. That has
never been my observation. There is
no cosmic force, “Good”, to which
the best people are signed up, nor

any cosmic force, “Evil”, in whose

army the worst serve. I want to warn

against both the dichotomy and the

fiction of cosmic forces as we face

the year ahead.

We shall not lack theatre in 2022.

Stormy political weather threatens

and there will be tempests to report.

Far out to sea however, even the

noisiest gale agitates only the

surface. A few fathoms below, the

deeps are quiet, seemingly still. But

there are great forces down there,

underlying currents often too gentle

to command notice. Such currents

shape history.

So upon the excuse of today’s

significant date, forgive this

columnist for discussing those deeps

rather than the surface storms.

There’s a strong current beneath

Christian and Islamic thinking that

has powered its way into modern,

secular and agnostic thinking, too. It

is the idea of “good” and “evil” not

just as adjectives to describe the

positive or negative consequences of

things we do, but as nouns, as real

things, as impulses existing

independently of us: external (in

today’s epidemiological terminology,

“viral”) forces: devils/angels which

may somehow get into us, and which

we must ward off/invite in.

Behind every red-top or middle-

market tabloid headline about the

presence of “evil” or (worse) “pure

evil” in our midst, you can discern

this thinking. You could hear it in

George W Bush’s speeches about

“terror”, the “war on terror”, waged

against the forces of darkness. You

can detect its counterpart in religious

Suspiciousness can lead

to paranoia, of which

there’s a streak in us all

Friends, there are no

demons, no Heaven,

no Hell. There’s only us

Matthew

Parris

red box

For the best analysis

and commentary on

the political landscape

thetimes.co.uk/redbox

the times | Saturday January 1 2022 23