What they really wanted me to do was a cultural review of the year, where I identify in a knowledgeable and somewhat august fashion the salient and crucial artistic highpoints of 2003 in opera, ballet, theatre, fine art and film, etc. Trouble is, I’m less a bona-fide culture vulture than a superannuated media whore who is, most usually, too drunk or distrait to sit in some theatre seat for three hours while the most appalling luvvies bark or flounce or gesticulate at me. For example, I will so NOT go to the opera, you know? I cannot imagine a more mind-numbingly ossified, pompous, pretentious and plain dumb “art form”. Although these days theatre — and particularly the lowbrow hell that is musical theatre — runs it a close second. On the plus side, I know some extraordinarily attractive women who wish to be taken to the ballet for your benefit — but the trouble is their boyfriends always seem to be lurking around when the press showings come up.
Plus for the privilege of having them lolling decorously on my arm all evening they usually demand a meal at The Ivy or Sketch as well, which is frankly pushing it a bit. So in short, I, uh, haven’t actually seen that much culture. I’m aware that in a culture critic that’s a big drawback.
I asked some friends to help, people who go out to see stuff all the time, but they refused on a point of principle. You accepted the post of culture critic, they said, a job for which you have no aptitude, inclination or ability. It’s like making Geoff Hoon Defence Secretary, they all argued. You made your bloody bed, they muttered a little sniffily, before settling the babysitter and the kids in front of a Harry Potter video and heading off to the latest exhibition of post-C eausescu Romanian shopping baskets at Tate Modern or the Mogadishu Modern Dance and Mime Company’s vigorously lesbian performance of The Caucasian Chalk Circle at the radical new Linda Bellos Theatre in Upper Norwood.
So I’m just, like, you know, whatever? Books? OK, I can do you books. And music. And, up to a point, film. I can even swing the pretence that I’m au fait with the latest exhibitions, so long as you don’t get too pedantic about the grammar of my criticism.
But choosing a best book is easy — even in a pretty good year, as this undoubtedly was. The biennial national sport of humiliating Martin Amis (let’s put him on the long list for the Booker but make sure everybody knows that it’s by the skin of his teeth and then we’ll bin him nearer the date) has never been more inappropriate: Yellow Dog was a wonderful novel, with the finest piece of comic writing I’ve read (the chapter entitled “Cora Susan”) in the last ten years or so. Plus, rather marvellously, it was actually ABOUT something; it tried to tell us a truth, rather than being that witless procession of he-did-this-then-he-did-that-then-she-did-this-then-it-ended which tends to constitute the modern English novel. Amis never wins the Booker. He didn’t win the Booker in 1995 for the superb London Fields. The winner that year was The Bone People: still think you got that right, guys? The truth is, Amis and Ballard are light years ahead of the pack.
Elsewhere, Peter Bradshaw’s Dr Sweet and his Daughter and, indeed, the eventual winner of the Man Booker Prize, D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little, had grit behind the wit, and some beautiful writing. In nonfiction, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar and James Knox’s biography Robert Byron captivated me so much that I tried very hard, in the tail end of the year, to become an amalgam of the two great men. The shagging and the consumptive illness is going fine, but I’m still struggling with collectivisation, frankly.
Worst books of the year? Almost anything nominated as “best book of the year” in such magazines as The Spectator, except for James Delingpole’s excellent Thinly Disguised Autobiography — plus, of course, the terrifyingly dull Brick Lane by Monica Ali.
I saw some films, too, but not that many. Like everybody else I seem to be in the grip of a visual infantilism: Finding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean are, I suppose, dunderheaded entertainment at best — but one would rather pay to see them than the tortuous Mystic River, for example, which was every bit as stolid and wooden as its director, Mr Clint Eastwood.
But a warning: one can take infantilism too far. You would surely have to be a foetus to enjoy any of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Or spermatozoa, maybe. Orcs, goblins and trolls are fine in literature until about the time of the Venerable Bede, whereupon, reasonably, you begin to feel that they are outstaying their welcome. One critic on a rival (broadsheet!) newspaper commented that he didn’t know how he could face Christmas next year knowing that there was to be no further instalment of Tolkien’s fatuous guff. Listen, mate: let Christ into your heart. Sing a few carols. Have a mince pie. Watch Morecambe and Wise. And get a grip.
The pop CD of the year was the Raveonettes’ Chain Gang of Love, except that they should expect legal action from the the Jesus and Mary Chain for the most blatant and brazen plagiarism since Primal Scream decided they’d be mid-period Rolling Stones in round about 1993.
But then, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of plagiarism in rock music. And despite Tom Robinson’s elegant and impassioned protestations on these pages, Amy Winehouse deserves a runner-up’s medal for the beautiful Frank. She’s cool, she’s clever, she’s young, she’s British — what else do you want? Reissue of the year was Neil Young’s On the Beach. Young is, notoriously, an atrocious judge of his own material, which may explain why he opposed this album being transferred from vinyl for so long. But On the Beach is maybe even better than his Tonight’s the Night, which puts it not far short of the best rock album yet made.
As for the low points, the mere mention of the wretched, whining Coldplay had me reaching for my revolver. And one would hope that some hideous catastrophe is waiting around the corner for the Darkness, too. Pop finally ate itself in about 1989; we don’t need to be reminded of the fact every few minutes.
As for exhibitions, I saw too few to be a reliable judge. Plus I have, incontestably, crap taste. For example, the best exhibition I’ve ever seen was several years ago at the Imperial War Museum and focused, largely, on Falangist art. If I’d seen it in 1936 I’d have been on Franco’s side in the civil war, it was so good. So take with a pinch of salt my recommendation for 1920s: the Decade that Changed London, still on show at the Museum of London.
Best TV programme: Wife Swap, if only for the bewildered and then appalled expression on that “posh” woman’s face when a hideous, self-righteous cow from Rochdale revealed that her bone-idle family earned more in state benefits each year than the “posh” woman did from working every hour that God sends.
And radio programme of the year was, of course, the Today programme. You know why that is. It should be evident to anybody with even the faintest scintilla of scepticism about our Government. I was worried, recently, that the BBC was getting timorous about holding the Government to account: I was wrong. The disgraceful behaviour of Margaret Hodge — and the BBC’s resolution in the face of her attacks — makes this fact abundantly clear.
Today has got better since I left it: and that’s a truly horrible thing to admit.
