Based on Bernard Cornwell’s novel series, a commercial assembly line with no relation to literature, as the author happily admits, the Nineties cycle of feature-length dramas equally cannot be termed cinema. But if Sergei Bondarchuk’s great Soviet war epics War and Peace and Waterloo, in all the grand and inhumane scale of their production, reveal something intrinsic to the nature of Mother Russia, could something similar not be said of their homelier and more ramshackle British analog? With performances that seem to embrace their pantomime quality, and risible pitched battles between armies of a few dozen men apiece, the series — the most expensive drama terrestrial TV budgets could then sustain — have a charmingly amateurish air. Later British stars — Liz Hurley, Daniel Craig — and character actors such as Pete Postlethwaite and Julian Fellowes, crop up expectedly, hamming it up with glee. Never shy of veering into camp absurdity, low comedy, or of sending itself up, even as it aspires to epic grandeur, the series is stamped with a very particular type of Britishness, earnest and self-mocking in equal measure. No wonder, 30 years on, Sharpe retains its appeal.

Just as Nolan’s casting choices diverge, no doubt, from the archaic Greek imagination, so did the television hero take on a life apart from that intended by the author. Cornwell’s Sharpe, a black-haired Cockney, has now been fully subsumed by Bean’s portrayal as a gruff and hawk-like Yorkshireman — a last-minute casting decision made, at ruinous expense, due to the actor Paul McGann’s injury on set in Ukraine. But Bean became Sharpe, just as Troy’s Odysseus later bore his stamp. As Cornwell would write, Bean “really did take over Sharpe. I hear Sean’s voice when I write Sharpe,” with the author eventually tacking a Yorkshire backstory onto his Londoner hero to flatter his audience’s desires. Such is the craft of the bard who spins his tales for fame and gold. Before his first writing attempt, Cornwell stripped apart CS Forester’s Hornblower novels for the basic building blocks of plot, creating a formula that could be reliably leaned upon with the minimum of artistic exertion. Like more celebrated epic cycles, then, ITV’s Sharpe is the work of multiple authors, working within a common register. So dependable, and elastic, had the formula become that the TV series could soon diverge from the books almost entirely, as its scriptwriters appealed to their own personal muses.

For primetime TV entertainment on a low-rent commercial channel, a surprising amount of tonal experimentation could ensue from this production-line dynamic. So, the screenwriter Nigel Kneale, of Quatermass fame, would thrust Sharpe into the strange and unsuccessful horror-Western of Sharpe’s Gold, in which the hero fends off an Aztec sacrificial cult in conquistador armor; or the writer Patrick Harbinson would invent, from thin air, the Loachian social drama of Sharpe’s Justice, with its flinty Yorkshire mill-owners repressing their striking workers with foppish and callous local yeomanry. Perhaps the most artistically satisfying of the entire series, 1996’s Sharpe’s Regiment, scripted by the playwright Charles Wood, possesses an uncanny, dreamlike quality, enhanced by the flat Essex marshland landscapes that owe so much to David Lean’s Great Expectations. Its performances are so outlandishly strange, its portrayal of the harshness and class-based humiliations of the redcoat’s life so bleak, that the episode feels less like a primetime TV drama than a Sixties absurdist satire: and indeed, it comes as no surprise to learn that Wood had scripted both the 1968 anti-war satire The Charge of the Light Brigade and the BBC’s acclaimed and grueling Falklands drama Tumbledown. If the pre-Blair Nineties were, as I often think, the last gasp of postwar British society before its great transformation into today’s UK, then in Sharpe we see that lost civilization working out its concerns, almost unconsciously, through a determinedly populist medium.

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Surprisingly under-remarked by Sharpe enthusiasts is the series’ obsessive working-out of Britain’s pained relationship with Ireland, a theme returned to again and again like a tongue probing a rotting tooth. This political subplot makes sense given the unusual backstories of both Cornwell himself and the writer of the majority of its episodes, Eoghan Harris. Sharpe was born “one wet winter’s day in Belfast”, remembers Cornwell, who at the height of the Troubles “gloried in the grand title of Head of Current Affairs Television for the BBC in Northern Ireland”. It is not hard to discern the imprint of time and place on the author, birthing his hero at his desk “as the rain fell steadily beyond the window and the grey clouds hung low over that strangely beguiling city”.

It is no coincidence, surely, that the villainous Colonel Girdwood of Sharpe’s Regiment, traumatized by his experience of being “ambushed by Black Irish as a young officer” and neurotically obsessed with the “Irish filth, Irish scum” inhabiting “that cess-bog”, shares his uncommon name with the main British Army barracks in North Belfast — a location with which the younger Cornwell would have been depressingly familiar. But then, 30 years ago, Irish concerns intruded more forcefully on England than today. It comes as a shock, such is the English capacity for historical amnesia, to remember that the series’ Nineties run spanned the IRA’s renewed mainland bombing campaign from Warrington and Bishopsgate, through the Manchester and Docklands bombings, to the Good Friday Agreement that froze the conflict. Sharpe is, in its own superficially trivial way, as much a cultural artifact of that carefully forgotten era as the Cranberries’ song “Zombie”.

After all, the series takes pains to put forward a particular political conception of the relationship between the two islands. While Wellington’s army in Spain was indeed heavily composed of Irishmen, the sympathetic Irish characters who populate the series — exiled priests, Wild Geese in Spanish service, or Anglo-Irish aristocrats with dubious lilting brogues — are writerly moral choices. Anti-Irish sentiment expressed by a character is a sure sign of a ne’er-do-well; the relationship between Sharpe and his loyal Irish sidekick Sergeant Patrick Harper (played by Daragh O’Malley) is, on the other hand, the emotional core of the series. Taken together, the repeated Hibernian allusions ultimately coalesce into a particular political plea for amicable coexistence.

Harper’s name is directly lifted from a Republican friend of Cornwell’s in Belfast, whose family, the author writes, “was not fond of the British, nor did they have cause to be”. Irish rebellion is understandable, the writerly logic runs, the product of English neglect and misgovernance: nevertheless, Bean’s gruff Yorkshireman and O’Malley’s bellicose, sentimental Celt can still come together in pursuit of a common, greater good. Or, as the exiled Irish priest in Sharpe’s Sword puts it, as he reluctantly deploys his wits towards Wellington’s service, and humbles a caddish English traitor: “I’m Irish. John Bull’s a bad neighbor. But Bonaparte’s a bully and so are you.” It is a curiously 19th-century vision of Irishness, of sentimental patriotism and rebellious grumblings nevertheless tempered, in the end, by British military service and loyalty to the Crown. Such Redmondism endures today, not least in people like Andy Burnham.

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As for Sharpe, all this surely owes as much to the quixotic politics of the screenwriter Harris as to Cornwell himself. When not writing martial TV entertainments for British mass audiences, Harris was an influential and controversial staple of Irish political commentary; an activist for Sinn Féin before the 1970 split within the party, and in the IRA between its Provisional and Official/Workers Party factions. Indeed, Harris says he was once asked to join the IRA by the Republican icon Seamus Costello (who later founded the INLA), an appointment blocked by the IRA’s chief of staff Cathal Goulding. “Forget that,” Goulding apparently said. “Your job is to write pamphlets and work out the ideologue side.” While working for Ireland’s state broadcaster RTE, it has been claimed that Harris smuggled pro-Workers Party and anti-Provisionals sentiment into programming at the same time Cornwell was toiling away for the BBC across the northern border. With the violent self-certainty that characterized his turbulent career, Harris rejected Irish Republicanism’s tradition of violence as a form of “fascism” likely to precipitate Yugoslavia-like ethnic cleansing in Northern Ireland, taking up the cause of Ulster Unionists and in the process becoming “the ultimate Republican apostate”.

Writing the Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech the year after the Sharpe series ended, Harris’ popular screenwriting and his concurrent anti-Republican activism reflected two aspects of his own ideological whole. Not for him the squeamishness against military glory that characterized British liberal mores of the time. As he declared in the official ITV companion to the series, “Left liberalism was all over the British film industry at that time… Having somebody stand in front of the Union Jack and shout “‘Stand! Stand!, Stand!” would make most English-born writers deeply uneasy. I was the perfect man for the job because I have no such hang-ups. Being Irish I could wave the Union Jack and be proud of honor and courage, without feeling I had to defend myself at a Hampstead dinner party.” If Sharpe represents a certain kind of Britishness, it is one filtered through a very quixotic Irish perspective, that of the anti-Republican, patriotic Home Ruler, a stance still observable, as a current, among a very specific sub-type of Irish conservative. It is hardly an exaggeration, then, to view Sharpe as one of the final, popular works of the Anglo-Irish canon.

But, Irish ambiguities and Harris’ tangled politics aside, as ITV’s manly and populist answer to the BBC’s contemporaneous and genteel Regency costume dramas, Sharpe more overtly speaks to British audiences. Sharpe is, canonically, a working-class hero, made doubly so by his Northern accent: indeed, you do not need to be Andy Burnham to suspect that the nation would not have taken quite so readily to his intended Cockney incarnation. He is not especially patriotic, and like his literary creator has taken up his calling for purely mercenary and self-improving ends. His antagonists are more often craven and incompetent toffs than Frenchmen, who are, with the exception of the pantomime villain Ducos, almost always fundamentally decent. Indeed, having declared “I’ve done without Yorkshire more than 20 years and I don’t want it now”, Sharpe — like his creator — eventually abandons Britain for good to live abroad with his foreign wife. Much of the hero’s resentment towards authority, and to the petty meanness and restrictions of his own country, can be derived from Cornwell’s own experiences. The illegitimate child of a Canadian airman, Cornwell was adopted by an Essex family adhering to the puritanical Peculiar People sect, and escaped his childhood unhappiness in historical and martial fantasies of his own dreaming.

Here, it is not hard to discern the influence of the Commando, Victor, and Warlord comics of postwar British boyhood in Sharpe’s DNA. Pitched battles are few, fortunately for the directors’ budgets. Instead, Sharpe is sent out on missions of his own, always pulling off victories against overwhelming odds, and defeating enemies who are cads and rotters as well as strategic adversaries. Ducos, the French spymaster, endlessly polishing his spectacles while devising cruel fates for our hero, is simply the cold and sneering German commandant of British boyhood fare. Just as Orwell observed that the Edwardian Boys Own comics of imperial derring-do, which made up his own childhood reading, strove to impart Victorian public school moral codes to a less privileged readership, so do we see their last vestigial survival in Sharpe, who inhabits the moral world of The Four Feathers rather than Flashman. “While other boys were reading Wizard and Rover, I was engrossed in huge leather-bound volumes of the Boy’s Own Paper, 1890 to 1900,” Harris has remarked. “Mentally, I spent my childhood on the North West Frontier.” If, as Orwell stated, “boys’ fiction above all, the blood-and-thunder stuff which nearly every boy devours at some time or other, is sodden in the worst illusions of 1910,” then Sharpe represents the last, unbroken and unapologetic strand of the genre, a golden Edwardian summer never to meet its 1914 (or in Harris’s case, 1916).

Just as folk art, and the bardic register preserves, in fossilized form, the styles and mores of earlier times, so did Sharpe’s unashamed quest for mass popularity preserve the essence of this lost Britain. For all the class grievances that run through the series, Sharpe is a fundamentally conservative corpus of work. The great failing of his superiors, in military rank as well as social class, is not that they possess stern and self-denying moral codes: but that they fail to live up to them. Even a foppish traitor, like James Purefoy’s character in Sharpe’s Sword, can at least redeem himself with a final act of suicidal heroism. Sexual politics, too, are more conservative than the hero’s many dalliances would initially suggest. Bodices are ripped only by villains; Sharpe himself is strangely cold-blooded, the often-awkward and hesitant object of female wiles rather than a Regency rake. Betrayed by his silly and faithless wife, Sharpe’s only enduring and fully requited love throughout the series is his platonic relationship with Sergeant Harper. “As a writer, I’m much more interested in relationships between men than between men and women,” Harris would later declare. “His emotional life is with the regiment, not with the women, and he’s committing adultery every time he turns to them. This is the classical view of what a man’s role is… It’s not a fashionable view, and I make no apologies for that.”

Patrick Harper is, then, Sharpe’s Patroclus, the emotional and battlefield companion of Sean Bean’s moody warrior, sulking in his tent before the walls of Badajoz. Cornwell later reworks this martial pairing of Saxon and Gael in his Last Kingdom series, a set of novels explicitly focused on England’s state formation and the relationships between the constituent peoples of these islands, his purposeful addition to our insular civilization’s founding myths. If Nolan’s Odyssey is overshadowed by the contemporary culture war surrounding it, then Sharpe’s edges are perhaps smoothed over by relegating it to the TV nostalgia of less complicated times. Nolan reworks ancient archetypes to serve today’s American concerns, just as Sharpe, with tighter budgets for Britain’s straitened circumstances, did three decades ago for us. As formulaic as a bard’s stock phrases, conceived as popular entertainment rather than high art, there is a certain political as well as aesthetic value, beyond mere guilty pleasure, in rewatching Sharpe as the mythic hero of that lost and irrecoverable land: John Major’s Britain. The past is a foreign country, we realize, contrasting today’s ITV dross with the first wailing electric guitar notes of Sharpe’s theme tune, as boyishly stirring now as it ever was. They do things differently there.

Future Works, a co-working space at the end of the Elizabeth Line, is a disconcertingly optimistic upgrade to Wernham Hogg, the paper-merchant setting of The Office. The program today celebrates its 25th anniversary — and still plays an outsized role in the national imagination when it comes to depicting the purgatory of worklife just outside the capital. “The last time something happened around here,” says one 28-year-old product designer with the deadpan voice of Martin Freeman’s Tim, “was when someone shat on the wall outside.”

But these jaded souls, once preyed upon by the likes of David Brent, are slowly being replaced. Now Slough is rallying around the entrepreneurs and thought leaders of Future Works in their bid to become UK Town of Culture in 2028, hoping to pip rival Guildford by pioneering the “creative expression” of a very different England to the one depicted by The Office.

“I’m a networker,” says 31-year-old Varun, one of Future Work’s entrepreneurs, sitting in front of multiple screens in an eerily empty room. As he launches into a pitch for his fintech startup, there are a few stray Brentisms (his favorite film is Will Smith’s The Pursuit of Happyness) but few other signs of the former regional manager of Wernham Hogg. Unlike Brent, he is a boss first and only. He has no real desire to be a friend or entertainer, and certainly no cultural hinterland that might entail an admiration of Ian Botham or an impression of Basil Fawlty.

“Being a founder can be lonely,” Varun confesses when I give him the chance to expand on his workplace philosophy à la Brent. He’s already found himself crying in the toilets due to the stress of running a startup. That angst is appropriate: Slough, after all, doesn’t exactly inspire the more whimsical, rural turn of England’s present comic imagination, with its hits like The Detectorists and This Country. Here you can find Europe’s largest collection of data centers, plonked in the midst of a place that both tops the country’s league tables for income deprivation, and is the most ethnically diverse local authority outside London.

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Downstairs, I try to see if I can find a few Gareths, or even a long-suffering Dawn. But like the notorious brutalist roundabout from the opening credit, many of these familiarities have been replaced. “I don’t think Brent would survive here now to be honest,” says Nilesh, who works as a financial consultant. “We’ve had to make a few tough decisions around firing people because of AI. And I don’t think he’d manage that because ultimately he’s a wimp.” And then there’s the town’s diversity, he says, referencing the scene where David Brent gets two Asian warehouse workers mixed up. “There’d certainly be more of that happening.”

Could the Slough of 2026 still produce a David Brent? It’s a question of national significance, given The Office’s role in depicting a certain idea of England, one that sulks outside the M25, and which is in theory home to most of us, with our dull jobs and deferred dreams. Its geography reflects Brent’s own ambitions. As he put it, “Slough’s a big place and when I’m finished I’ve got Reading, Aldershot, Bracknell.” Yet these sudden London hinterlands are now forming the vanguard of a very different English worklife. Here you can find the ominous megastructures of the AI revolution, bearing down on co-working spaces left to run the less exotic fringes of our globalized services economy, where an anxious churn — graduates, officer workers trying to reinvent themselves, newly arrived migrants — all muddle along together.

Slough, against the grain of its once-terminal drabness, now finds itself the champion of a lackluster kind of Anglofuturism. John Betjeman and his “friendly bombs” have partly got their wish, thanks to Berkeley Homes and logistics developer SEGRO, with many of the brutalist, run-down shopping centers replaced to create a new landscape of self-contained residential complexes. From a distance, some of these plastic mausoleums can be confused for one of the town’s many data centers, which have helped create a peculiar microclimate of isolated despair on London’s far-flung borders.

The irony of Slough’s recent transformation is that The Office rose to popularity in the ebb-tide of the New Labour years, a place where David Brent was left to roam in the mire of a lost future. On the eve of the millennium, Tony Blair pronounced his government had a “thousand days to prepare for a thousand years”. A timescale evidently rushed, as the country became plastered with call centers and the pastiche futurism of “pseudo-modernism”, one that produced a different kind of desperation to the crumbling postwar social contract it was intended to upgrade. For most people, Blair’s “information superhighway” still meant being stuck in an office somewhere like Slough.

And then there was Brent himself. The shock troops of New Labour were the middle managers and the Mondeo Men, those trying to straddle the blokey relatability of the Nineties with the prying managerial togetherness of “The Third Way”. Sue Nye, a Labour apparatchik and wife of the BBC Chairman who championed the programme, thought she was watching a true-to-life documentary: a mistake perhaps brought about by her familiarity with the office of then-Chancellor Gordon Brown.

Once Wernham Hogg had taken hold in the national consciousness, it seemed to pop up everywhere. When Blair visited Slough police station after The Office’s second series, he greeted staff and modeled a drug test with Brentian panache. And so the regional manager from Slough became a sort of pathology for a nation weaned on delusions of grandeur, run by a set of politicians supposed to be delivering the future but who secretly fancied themselves as rockstars, humanitarians, and your own best friend.

Now a version of the future Blair once promised seems to have finally arrived in Slough — albeit one with less comic potential. When Vineet Vijh shows me a script of his updated version of The Office, set in Future Works and co-written to boost the Town of Culture bid, it’s clear that Slough’s attempts to find its feet in this new world have ended up slightly hysterical. And in this it certainly manages to capture the country’s own changing comedic manners, less masochistic and self-deprecating, and more in tune with a different national preoccupation: trying to broker a safe and gentle way for all the different tribes that now occupy modern Britain to get along.

The humor is derived not from everyone being “trapped”, as they were in the Slough of the 2000s, but from what happens “when everyone is free”. Unsurprisingly, there is now no place for Chris Finch, Wernham Hogg’s blokey sales rep, who does not survive the updated sitcom’s desired shift from “office culture to 150 cultures”. He is now a LinkedIn influencer. Comic set pieces revolve around the office’s diversity, both in background and occupation, with running gags involving “pitches every Friday that might change the world” and “flash mobs of dancers” frustrating the efforts of the documentarians. Curiously, despite potentially thriving in such an environment, David Brent is missing entirely.

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“There is something I like to call Schrödinger’s Slough,” says Rob Deeks, a social worker and champion of the town, as I ask him to take me on a tour to see if the new sitcom really does justice to the town. “To outsiders it is simultaneously a drab, gray and dreary place, but then also a vibrant, growing and sometimes dangerous place that no one apparently wants to live in.” When I suggest he might be touching on the broader condition of England, he takes me on a whistle-stop tour: a 10-minute drive that takes in the playing fields of Eton, a busy mosque now serving one of the first estates built to home bombed-out Londoners, and a data center that wafts the smells of cremated plastic into back gardens.

For the town’s population, Deeks suggests this environment can create a peculiar unease, a sense that they’re living in a future that doesn’t really want them. “To be honest,” he says, “I don’t think the people living here have any idea what goes on in there”, pointing to a row of semi-detached houses that back onto a data center where the majority of England’s internet traffic is processed. “Slough is full of people who have just moved here or are just trying to get by. I think this stuff gets put here because you know they’re not going to make a fuss.”

Closer to the heart of Slough, I go in search of some more familiar set pieces from The Office, spots that might spark a bit of life into the town’s new sitcom. “No one goes out anymore in Slough,” say a pair of NHS nurses, implying that there would be no one left in Chasers, the nightclub from series one, for Brent and Chris Finch to chat up. “The people who work just seem to live in their own world, and then there are now lots of people here from places where drinking is not a big part of their culture.” Where would they set a sitcom in Slough now? The two look at each other bemused. “I’m not really sure. Perhaps you can try out the high street, which still has the odd character.”

Vineet Vijh at Future Works warned me not to go to the high street. He insisted it was not representative of his aspiring Town of Culture. It certainly contains past ruins from previous efforts at regeneration. There’s a boarded-up shop, with a flowery facade that reads: “Slough Celebrates Neurodiversity”. Graffitied onto it is an argument about immigration and the odd “Allahu Akbar” in a frantic scrawl.

Much of this will soon be replaced, with Berkeley Homes having bought up the shopping center, promising a residential-cum-leisure-complex it insists will make people want to “enjoy and actually visit Slough”. By 2039, those living in its penthouse will be able to view the Future Works by the Elizabeth Line, and gaze across the M25 towards the shimmering lights of Hounslow and Heathrow.

In the meantime, I spot an unlikely pair outside the derelict shopping center, a man who looks eerily like Chris Finch, who has just lost his patience at the job center. He’s with a woman wearing a black hijab. “Oh fuck off,” he screams at her before marching off. “Don’t worry about him,” she says. He’s just having one of his moments.” And sure enough the pair are suddenly back together, conspiring as they walk briskly up the high street. This odd couple are never going to win Slough its Town of Culture prize, but they’re certainly the makings of a more fitting drama than the one set in Future Works.

ESPN, once the pinnacle of excellence in sports coverage and journalism, has transformed into a “negative attention” mill, sacrificing its reputation to pursue a business strategy of cheap clickbait, empty controversy, and the self-centered whining of delinquent children. For sports-lovers across America, that’s bad enough. But even worse is how ESPN’s decline presages a broader cultural collapse, one that’s dragged journalistic standards, civil discourse, and athletic culture into the national sewer.

When I was a kid in the late Nineties, watching ESPN was the sporting equivalent of religious experience. The network’s high broadcast quality of games and matches had no rival; the journalism was groundbreaking and reliable; the analysis was insightful. It should go without saying that a television station with the actual name of “Entertainment and Sports Programming Network” made athletic competition the center of its broadcasting cosmos.

ESPN was the brainchild of Bill Rasmussen, a sports journalist who aspired to create his own network after losing his media job with a Connecticut ice hockey team. After securing investors and sponsorships, his channel made its debut in 1979. Its climb to the top of sports broadcasting was slow and steady — yet, by the Nineties, it dominated America’s sports programming. There are plenty of reasons for this, from the right on-air talent to the novelty of cable television, yet perhaps most striking of all was ESPN’s innovative programming.

That began, of course, with live sports. Yet when ESPN wasn’t showing one of the “big four” — baseball, basketball, football, hockey — it showcased less popular games from tennis to billiards. There were also sporting documentaries, often involving “classic” games, like a dramatic comeback victory in the NBA finals or a no-hitter in baseball. Then there was NFL Films, a sports media company founded by a veteran of the Second World War, and which transformed old American football games into pure cinema. With aesthetic sophistication and theatrical voiceovers, its patented slow-motion spiral took on the feel of a history-altering event. NFL Films not only influenced sports coverage, but also Hollywood. Any Given Sunday and Remember the Titans are just two of the movies that made use of NFL Films’ epic style.

To celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2009, meanwhile, ESPN debuted its 30 for 30 series. Enlisting Barry Levinson, Spike Lee, and other A-list Hollywood film directors, the documentaries explored moments when sport interacted with politics or pop culture, such as the OJ Simpson murder trial or NBA legend Magic Johnson’s diagnosis with HIV. Entries in the series have won Emmys, Academy Awards, and the Peabody, arguably the most prestigious prize in broadcast journalism.

And if it might seem silly to present adult millionaires playing games as high art, ESPN also had a sense of humor. Sportscenter, its nightly news and highlight show, featured anchors as reputable for their wit and self-deprecating comic timing as their encyclopedic sports knowledge. Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick, two former Sportscenter hosts, had an effortless ability to turn out clever turns of phrase, memorable one-liners, and humorous nicknames. A good example of Olbermann’s trademark wit was his description of the infamous boxing match when Mike Tyson bit off a piece of Evander Holyfield’s ear. “Boxing is no longer a sport,” the presenter quipped. “It is a parody of the life of Vincent van Gogh.”

Taken together, anyway, it seemed as if ESPN would continue to advance the aesthetics and storytelling sport. Instead, 30 for 30 was the peak before the fall; a climber clawing at the apex moments before he loses his footing.

Network ratings and revenue peaked at the start of the 2010s. Competition from streaming services and alternative media led to the loss of younger viewers, who even among sports fans often don’t want to watch entire games, instead preferring highlight reels on social media. All this put immense pressure on Disney, ESPN’s parent company, to cut costs. The downsizing culminated in 2017, with mass layoffs of writers, on-air personalities, production crew members, and just about anyone else Disney deemed expendable. “It is really tricky in a cord-cutting environment to see a growth opportunity for ESPN,” one former ESPN executive told The New York Times.

From there, and pressured by the flatulent spread of fratboy sporting podcasts, ESPN began a frantic race to the bottom. The viewer who turns on the network today will need a strong stomach to endure hour after hour of loudmouths bloviating endlessly about any sports-adjacent subject that they believe will go “viral”. This leads to incessant repetition of tired debates, for instance whether Michael Jordan or LeBron James is the “greatest” basketball player of all time.

The hosts and commentators, sitting in studios with enough lighting to perform a root canal, also inject a bizarre amount of emotion into broadcasts. “Debates” often end in hysterics with former athletes and so-called “journalists” screaming over each other, their voices cracking, their veins bulging from their foreheads. The typical ESPN program, then, is an entry in the Real Housewives series: all millionaire talking heads peacocking as tough guys as they struggle to regulate their emotional responses, as if network executives are engaged in performance art to validate every feminist criticism of the psychologically dysfunctional man.

The master of this darkly stupid artform, and undisputed face of the network, is Stephen A. Smith, a veteran sports journalist who was previously suspended from the network for indignantly asking what a woman did to provoke the NFL star who assaulted her. He’s accumulated a record of monumental errors, sometimes questioning the performance of players who aren’t even on the field.

When Jason Whitlock, a former sports columnist, documented several contradictions and discrepancies in Smith’s memoir, meanwhile, the ESPN pundit replied by calling him a “fat piece of shit”. So he’s not exactly a candidate for a Pulitzer Prize. Yet despite his blunders, Smith is the highest paid personality at ESPN, earning $21 million per year to bug out his eyes and scream like a maniac.

Anyone looking for an indicator of the health of American culture would do well to consider how Smith has parlayed his boorish antics into dramatic acting jobs — landing roles on General Hospital and Law and Order — and, even more absurdly, political relevance. On his political podcast, he has interviewed sitting senators and governors. He has even toyed with a run for the presidency, recently telling friend and fellow egomaniacal nuisance, Bill Maher, that a campaign is “possible” because of his “disgust with the Democratic Party”. Nor is Smith alone: Pat McAfee, a former NFL punter and now lead host of ESPN’s college football programming, is similarly crass. Last year, to give one example, he shamefully repeated a false rumor that a University of Mississippi cheerleader had slept with her boyfriend’s father.

Meanwhile, ESPN still airs news shows and documentaries — but with lower budgets and less time. It’s clear, then, that the network is doubling down on its clickbait scream-fest strategy. Acting out a televisual example of the chicken and egg riddle, viewers are left to wonder if ESPN is merely following the example of a broader culture that has become increasingly crass, ill-informed, and histrionic. Cory Doctorow’s term “enshittification” is too broadly applied to contemporary culture. Yet there’s much truth to his claim that when platforms abandon their consumers and move to maximize profit, they inevitably become worse.

Something similar happened at ESPN. Competition and changing viewing habits were clearly beyond the network’s control. But rather than preserving its standards, and trusting the viewer’s intelligence, it instead surrendered to a world of viral rants that confuses “negative attention” with talent.

And whatever the false allure of social media, it’s clear that ESPN’s public is disappointed. The channel’s ratings are now in freefall, while the McAfee-hosted College Gameday has lost 300,000 viewers in the past year. Overall, the network’s ratings with the much-coveted 18-34 year-old demographic have dropped by 54% in less than a decade. Reporting on ESPN’s falling fortunes in the first week of November, Sports Illustrated ran a story with the headline, “ESPN and the Horrible, Rotten, No Good, Very Bad Week.”

To put it mildly, then, things aren’t going well. The devolution toward idiocy as business strategy is failing. So, how does ESPN plan to recover its losses, while securing its economic future? By surrendering even the pretense of journalistic independence.

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By David Masciotra

Over the past year, the network has announced two corporate partnerships: one with the NFL, and the other with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). The strategic relationship will enable ESPN to stream exclusive content from both enterprises on its paid subscription network, ESPN+. It will also create “growth” and enlarge profits for Disney. If viewers are leaving, advertisement revenues decrease. A business relationship with the WWE fills the gap. Yet partnering with the WWE also takes ESPN’s status as a running joke, then injects it with steroids. Daytime hosts like Smith now interrupt daytime coverage of real sports to have shouting matches about “who is the best wrestler of all time”, debating the “athletic” achievements of men who pretend to fight while pretending to be vampires and members of the British royal family.

Beyond the unintentional hilarity, there are serious ethical questions here. The WWE is a company under consistent scrutiny for claims of sexual harassment and drug use — to say nothing of its indifference toward concussions and its now-cozy relationship with Saudi Arabia. There are problems with the network’s NFL deal too. The National Football League is the leading sports power in the US. By entering into a lucrative financial agreement with the company, ESPN has surrendered its ability to report on it with any neutrality or honesty. Fox News regularly faces rightful accusations of bias in favor of the Republican Party, but ESPN’s partnership is the equivalent of Fox signing an exclusive deal with the RNC to broadcast carefully curated content on Hannity.

Compared to war, environmental disaster, and the endangerment of democracy, the stakes of professional sports are quite low. To that extent, the word “entertainment” is in ESPN’s name with good reason. Yet the decline of journalism across all fields threatens the cultivation of an informed citizenry necessary to maintain a free society. Newspapers continue to shut down, creating news deserts throughout the US; expertise competes with opinion, while opinion itself is often little more than invective. Even worse, the tentacles of the multinational corporate octopus reach into every facet of storytelling, reportage, and analysis, shadowing journalism with a bias far darker and larger than anything that derives from party partisanship. To name one particularly brazen example, CBS News recently announced that it would broadcast a series of town hall debates on “things that matter” sponsored by Bank of America. One is tempted to assume that problems with the country’s financial system won’t matter much.

The doom of journalism, whether in athletics and politics, is far from inevitable. In the world of sport, the success of The Ringer, a sports news website and media company, demonstrates that there is still an appetite for high-quality news and analysis. Emerging platforms and alternative media companies show that, like the founding of ESPN itself, healthy innovation is always a possibility. And who knows? The decline of ESPN’s rating could yet act as an invitation to some entrepreneur hoping to give viewers what ESPN once delivered — but now neglects. But it could also act as a troubling omen. If the short-form videos of TikTok continue to influence audience expectations and journalistic output, things will only get worse.

It’s not just Gino. Her co-author Dan Ariely, who is even more famous, was also accused of making up data, including in one of the same papers. The study found that people were less likely to lie about their car mileage on insurance forms if they signed an honesty pledge at the top, rather than the bottom, of the form. Although Ariely denies fabricating it himself, the mileage data on that study had been very obviously made up with a random number generator.

There is something deeply splendid, as the data sleuths who uncovered the problems noted, about all this: “We were, like, Holy shit, there are two different people independently faking data on the same paper. And it’s a paper about dishonesty.”

If we can’t trust the scientists, then who can we trust? How about reality TV? The Traitors is back again this week, and what’s fascinating about the show is that you get to see something very rare: people lying, in high-stakes situations, where you know that they’re lying. It is, I would argue, an excellent research opportunity.

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The hugely successful game show is essentially a parlor-game murder mystery: there are 25 or so people in a Scottish castle. A subset of the 25, perhaps three, are designated “traitors”; the rest are the “faithful”. The traitors must remain undetected, while, every so often, “murdering” — i.e. evicting — one of the faithful. The faithful, meanwhile, must winkle out the traitors; in daily roundtable meetings, they vote on who they think the liars are, and the person with the most votes is also evicted, whether faithful or traitor. At the end, if only faithfuls remain, they share a pot of up to £120,000; but if there are any traitors left, they take it all. Still with me?

It is compelling viewing. We, the audience, know who the traitors are, so we get to see the faithful flailing around, making weird leaps of logic and spreading unfounded suspicion around like a virus. But more interesting is how we get to see the traitors themselves — if they’re good — wearing their two faces: playing the faithful off against each other, being subtle little Machiavels, twisting words and pulling strings. Telling, basically, bare-faced lies. Honestly, sometimes it’s hard to watch.

It’s dishonesty on open display, which is surprisingly rare and surprisingly uncomfortable. It’s shocking. All the more so when you see how the excellent liars build the trust of the faithful. Perhaps our fascination with the program is because we spend so much of our lives trying to work out whether someone is being straight with us, whether we can trust that salesman or that builder or that would-be lover; it is refreshing to see someone unambiguously lying. And it gives us a chance to learn about how dishonesty manifests.

This isn’t something we can really do under research conditions — partly because it’s so difficult to get ground truth. Here’s what I mean by that. If you’re researching, say, the efficacy of a cancer screening test, you run your test on a bunch of people who either have cancer or don’t, and you see whether the test correctly identifies them. But you can only do that because you know, separately from what the test says, who really has cancer and who doesn’t. That’s ground truth. Without that, your ability to assess the accuracy of your test is severely limited.

For example, in the US, law enforcement agencies still regularly use polygraph tests – “lie detectors”, in popular parlance. The FBI and CIA use them to screen employees; local and federal police use them to interrogate suspects, although the evidence is rarely admissible in court. But there’s a problem, which is that we don’t know if they work.

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The idea is that they measure stress: heart rate, breathing rate, blood pressure, and “galvanic skin response” (that is, how well your skin conducts electricity, which is a proxy for how much you’re sweating). And, in theory, someone who’s lying is going to be more stressed than someone who is telling the truth.

There are all sorts of problems with this idea, of course, not least the fact that being interrogated by the police is probably pretty stressful, whether or not you’re lying. But one really crucial one is that we don’t really know whether lying is more stressful, because most of the time, we don’t really know who’s lying, and when we do know, the lies aren’t very stressful ones.

Real-world research into polygraph testing relies on confessions as ground truth. That is, when a suspect fails the polygraph test, they are confronted with the results. If they then confess to the crime, the polygraph is considered to have been vindicated. But there’s a problem: the polygraph’s results are used to pressure the suspect into confessing. So if they pass the test, they won’t be asked to confess; and if they fail the test, they might get pressured into confessing even if innocent. The method is “virtually guarantee[d]” to find that polygraphs work, even if they don’t, a 2008 paper said, because the test result and its verification are not independent. It’s as though the accuracy of breast cancer screening was verified by whether it convinced the patient that she had cancer, rather than whether she actually did.

The other way of assessing polygraphs is in the lab. You might get half your subjects to commit a fake crime — stealing money from a closed room, for instance. Then you polygraph the participants, and say that if they can convince the test that they’re innocent (whether they are or not), they will win some money, say £50; the idea is to create genuine motivation to beat the test. You have your ground truth then; you know who’s lying, because you told them to lie. But now it’s only £50. It’s not going to change anyone’s life. The stakes are low, so the stress is low.

So we have two opposite problems, a kind of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle of lying. Either you can have a realistic, high-stress situation but no ground truth, or you can have ground truth but no real stress.

I’ve used polygraphs as the example here, but the same problems apply to all research into how we lie. Do people behave differently when they are lying? There are lots of claims about eye contact, about voice pitch and tension, about language choice — do liars use hedging language like “to be honest” or “as far as I can remember” more?

There’s an entire field of research into “micro-expressions”, fleeting facial movements we apparently make when we’re concealing an emotion. (There’s another problem, which is that like a lot of the research in this field, when it’s not fraud, it’s mainly garbage. The guy behind the “micro-expressions” idea claimed to have discovered people he called “wizards” who could tell liars just by looking at them, but it was basically rubbish.)

This matters. People’s dishonesty has huge consequences! How many people have, for instance, trusted a builder to renovate their house and then learned that they’re a cowboy? How many people are taken in by Ponzi schemes or crypto scams? More obviously the entire legal system turns on whether or not people are telling the truth. Some more reliable way of knowing whether someone believes what they say might, for instance, be very relevant in the notoriously he-said-she-said world of sexual assault cases. Politics… well. There’s a reason why there’s a book about politics called Why Is This Lying Bastard Lying To Me?

But again, this is hard to research, because when we do that research, either we don’t know whether people are lying, or we do know they’re lying, but only about some inconsequential thing in the lab which probably isn’t that stressful to lie about. I imagine lying in court, or lying in the dispatch box, is extremely stressful.

What researchers need is some sort of situation where people are known to be lying, on camera, for high stakes: perhaps for tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds. Obviously enough, that’s where The Traitors comes in.

Imagine if the contestants were hooked up to a polygraph and asked to beat it, in the knowledge that their results would be shared with the group. You couldn’t ask for a more direct, real-world test. It would be a small sample size, sure, but you could do several tests throughout the series and over several different series. And at least it would be valid. Better a small, but good, test than a huge one that’s entirely uninformative. You could do all sorts of other tests: linguistic and facial analysis, thermal imaging to detect changes in blood flow, eye-tracking to see where people look when they lie.

Of course, the whole idea only works when the stakes are genuinely high. And that’s why it won’t work at all for the current series — a celebrity series where they’re all playing for charity money and public goodwill, which I’m worried might render the whole thing a bit silly. Does Stephen Fry or Paloma Faith really care enough about the outcome to publicly stab somebody in the back? They’d only be hamming it up in any case. Will the other contestants care enough about the backstabbing for it to really hurt, anyway? Probably not. The whole point is that it needs to be nobodies for whom the money really matters, and so they are willing to debase themselves to win it.

Learning about dishonesty — actually learning about it, properly, not doing the fake crap research that is most of what is out there — could have profound impacts. Obviously not all of them would be good; imagine what governments and corporations would do with a ministry of truth. But it’s a huge part of human life, and we don’t really understand it. So, dishonesty researchers: when you’ve finished faking the data for your current studies, please do go and ask the BBC if you can do some proper research.

It was a fitting finale for America’s first reality TV family, and a preview of our current predicament. Long before Facebook collected our data or TikTok monetized our confessions, the Louds were at the vanguard of an industry that would ultimately spawn Big Brother, the Kardashians, and a whole raft of reality TV shows obsessed with domestic spectacle.

But, more importantly, the Louds revealed a cultural transformation already underway — one where we, the public, would willingly and enthusiastically invade our own privacy, turning intimate life into public performance.

On 11 January 1973, millions of viewers gathered at 9pm: to witness a household unraveling in real time. That evening, PBS began broadcasting An American Family, a 12-hour documentary series with a difference.

The Loud family seemed ideal subjects for the experiment. William C. Loud, 51, and his wife Pat, 47, lived with their five children on a mountain drive in Santa Barbara, California. Their lifestyle embodied the American Dream that family sitcoms like The Brady Bunch had idealized: affluent, attractive, seemingly stable. Producer Craig Gilbert had chosen them from hundreds of volunteers precisely because they appeared to represent the ideal.

But Gilbert’s revolutionary vision was to disrupt the model. An American Family would get beneath the veneer and offer “a real view of middle-class life”. Unlike traditional documentaries, with scripts and a presenter controlling the story, the cameras would simply roll and capture whatever happened.

Gilbert’s 300 hours of raw footage, filmed over seven months, revealed the dirty laundry behind the facade. In one episode, Pat demanded her philandering husband leave; they went on to divorce. Their eldest son Lance, 20, was living a hedonistic lifestyle in New York’s Chelsea district, becoming the first openly gay person portrayed in a family context on American television.

The media responded swiftly and brutally. Newsweek‘s cover featured a group shot of the family with the strap line “Broken Family”. Inside, the magazine branded them “affluent zombies” whose “shopping carts overflow, but their minds are empty.” The New York Times dissected each member with surgical precision. It called Lance an “evil flower”, “camping and queening about like a pathetic court jester,” and described him as “a Goyaesque emotional dwarf.” It condemned Delilah, just 16, for never grieving “for the migrant workers, the lettuce pickers, the war dead,” and for lacking an interest in “philosophy or poetry” or any “adolescent idealism.”

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The Louds had unwittingly become harbingers of a far broader social transformation. Private life — that bourgeois creation of separate spheres, domestic sanctity, and clear boundaries between public and personal — had taken centuries to establish. The idea of privacy as “the right to be let alone” was 100 years old, immortalized in a famous 1890 Harvard Law Review article. Yet by the Seventies, this carefully constructed edifice was crumbling. The collapse of the public-private divide that would later characterize our digital age had already begun, before Mark Zuckerberg was even born.

Instead of retreating from the limelight that had so wounded them, the Louds embraced it entirely. They were among the first to become famous simply for being themselves, and the experience changed them forever. Pat Loud wrote an autobiography, prefiguring the “warts and all” memoir boom of the Nineties; Bill modeled in his bathrobe for Esquire. Delilah appeared as a “bachelorette” on The Dating Game, and all five children performed as a rock band on The Dick Cavett Show. Lance posed naked for Screw magazine.

“Television ate my family”, Lance proclaimed in the aftermath, and certainly the cameras never really turned off. When he was dying from an AIDS-related disease, filmmakers Susan and Alan Raymond dropped everything to capture his last two months in Lance Loud! A Death in an American Family. Lance wanted to be filmed one last time to show the bonds of affection that survived in his family. His dying wish was to prove to the American people that the Louds were not broken.

Pat Loud always stood by the family’s decision to take part. She pushed for greater openness in everyday life: the therapeutic mantra of the moment. “We opened the doors in a lot of houses and blew out a lot of dust,” she said. “If families are going to make it, that’s how. Not with secrets, or little slots to fit into, or a lot of propaganda from parents.”

She was articulating what had become the dominant cultural orthodoxy: that secrecy was pathological, that privacy enabled dysfunction, and that psychological health demanded full disclosure. Malcolm Bradbury’s novel The History Man, published the same year the documentary aired, satirized the spirit of the age. Its antihero, Howard Kirk, a radical sociology lecturer, sits with his lover Myra and his wife Barbara, with whom he has an open marriage. “It is called The Defeat of Privacy,” Kirk tells them of his new book. “It’s about the fact that there are no more private selves, no more private corners in society, no more private properties, no more private acts.”

These ideas went back decades. In 1950, sociologist David Riesman had prophetically announced from the pages of Time magazine that the “character” of Americans was fundamentally changing, a thesis that dominated cocktail party conversations throughout the decade.

In his bestselling follow up The Lonely Crowd, Riesman revealed how foundational sources of meaning were crumbling. Traditional authorities — church, family, and established social hierarchies — were giving way to mass education and the emerging media landscape of radio and television. Simultaneously, the economy was shifting from agriculture and industry toward services and sales, demanding fewer risk-taking entrepreneurs and more gray-suited conformists who could work and play well with others.

Riesman predicted that these forces were creating a move from “inner-directed” to “other-directed” personalities. Rather than drawing guidance from traditional authorities or cultivating rich inner lives, Americans were developing a social radar, constantly attuned to peer expectations and seeking approval from those around them. As Riesman observed: “The other-directed person wants to be loved rather than esteemed.”

Riesman, then, had anticipated the “narcissistic” self, immortalized in Christopher Lasch’s 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism, one that would become increasingly comfortable with the self-invasion of privacy and indeed actively require it: all in search of an approving audience. The ancient maxim “know yourself” became “recognize me.”

Riesman’s study was also formative for the American sociologist Todd Gitlin, one-time leader of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Teaching his Berkeley students in the Eighties, who themselves were surrounded by confessional talk-show hosts like Phil Donahue and Oprah, Gitlin found that his students struggled to understand the distinction between private and public lives. The idea of being inwardly focused made no intuitive sense to them. These students had been born into a world that was fundamentally other-directed at every level.

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But Gitlin himself had helped create this world. Throughout the Sixties, the SDS, which grew from 30,000 recorded supporters to an estimated 100,000 members across over 300 chapters, played a crucial part in the turn towards the narcissistic self: by politicizing authenticity. SDS became a core component of the counterculture movements that dominated student activism, helping to reshape how an entire generation understood the relationship between personal experience and political action.

“The time has come for a reassertion of the personal,” announced Tom Hayden in the infamous “Port Huron Statement” of 1962, the SDS’s founding manifesto. Students once believed in American values, it said, but that belief was now shattered, and they were looking “uncomfortably at the world we inherit.” The new goal would be finding meaning in a life that is “personally authentic”, an agenda that marked a highly individualistic turn for a Left politics with roots in class solidarity.

Indeed, the New Left turned away from class struggle and drew on existentialist currents to advocate for politics rooted in individual experience and personal growth. As Gitlin recalled in his memoir, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, the decade was fueled by a passion to “bring political commitment into private life, and make private values count in public.” The aim was to overcome the “treacherous” liberal schism between public postures and private evasions. This shift was influenced by popularized psychoanalytic theories of unconscious repression, developed by Sigmund Freud at the turn of the century. Later interpretations of his work, particularly by the German-born social critic Herbert Marcuse, recast psychoanalysis as a manual for liberation.

But it was a particular strain of feminists who put the boot into private life far more forcefully than any tech giant ever could. Organizations like New York Radical Women and Radical Mothers rejected the feminism of Betty Friedan. Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) had awakened millions of women to “the problem that has no name” — the stifling boredom and unfulfillment of suburban domesticity — and launched the modern women’s movement. But while Friedan sought equality through legislation and workplace reform, believing women could balance careers with traditional roles like marriage and motherhood, radical feminists wanted to change things from the inside out.

An early rule of the New York Radical Women was that members couldn’t generalize about oppression unless they first shared testimony from their own lives; political positions had to be forged in personal experience. Gatherings often began by going around the room listening to women’s day-to-day problems. These “consciousness-raising groups” spread like wildfire. In 1973, at their peak, 100,000 American women belonged to them. Their aim was to analyze society from personal experience. “Feelings are Facts” rallied one woman at a so-called abortion “speakout” in New York.

This thinking crystallized in Carol Hanisch’s influential 1970 essay “The Personal is Political”, a phrase that would shape how entire generations understood the boundary between public and private life. For centuries, the liberal tradition had maintained a clear distinction: public life was the realm of politics, economics, and civic engagement, while private life remained a sanctuary, free from public interference. But “the personal is political” obliterated this distinction.

Kate Millett, also immortalized in 1970 as Time’s “Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation”, turned her fire on the private domain. Women’s oppression couldn’t be addressed solely through public changes, she argued; it stemmed from private relations and even the language that culture reinforced. The struggle had to move away from the narrow world of chairmen and parties and expand to include “power-structured” relationships.

In the end, Millett was rejected by the movement she helped found, as it collapsed into factionalism. Yet the die had been cast: and indeed the social trends embodied in Louds have only grown in speed and scale over the intervening decades. From the late Nineties, for instance, The Real World and Survivor, later mirrored by Naked Attraction and Love Island, have dominated TV screens and then our laptops. Intimate confession and recognition of the “true” self is now a mainstay of contemporary discourse. Being “false”, or worse a hypocrite, is a deadly modern sin. Social media platforms would later accelerate and monetize these trends, of course, but they surely didn’t invent them.

All the while, our public life has incorporated things that were once reserved for the private sphere — crying, confessing to crimes, follies, and misdemeanors — while the civil discourse of politics and formal manners have fallen away. Think of Queen Elizabeth II being criticized for her lack of emotion when Princess Diana died, or Meghan and Harry broadcasting their private woes to the world. Even substantive policy debates about literally life-and-death matters like assisted suicide or abortion have become entirely about feelings: caring, being kind, or expressing anger. Personal experience trumps evidence. Cool reasoning has no place.

For their part, the private lives of public figures are scrutinized 24 hours a day. The public person, whether an artist, professional, or politician, cannot be separated from the private, and the private is deemed what truly matters. This shift extends to political combat itself. The current modus operandi, from the exposure of Trump’s locker room bragging to the recent Labour casualty Paul Ovenden, who lost his job when someone leaked old WhatsApp messages, sees the exposure of private conversations as a weapon to take down political opponents.

Today, there is little distinction between the public and private world. Intimacy floods the public realm while light shines on the private. Instead, we have embraced a narrow, impoverished conception of privacy, always a protean concept, not as protection from authority and public scrutiny, and as a sanctuary for the inner self and a shelter for intimacy — but merely as data protection.

Through it all, we blame the convenient scapegoat of the moment: the internet. But this gets the timeline wrong. By the time social media arrived, we were already living in a post-private world. The digital revolution simply gave us more efficient tools to do what we were already doing: performing our identities, seeking validation through revelation, and treating intimacy as a public commodity.

This matters, because if we misdiagnose the problem, we’ll never find the cure. All the digital detoxing and platform regulation in the world won’t restore what was lost long before the internet was ever invented. Far better, then, to face up to how we voluntarily dismantled the very idea that some things should remain hidden, that mystery and restraint might be virtues, and that not everything must be shared.

The business models of technology giants like Google and Facebook clearly violate people’s privacy, as does state surveillance. But we would be kidding ourselves if we thought that technology alone has undermined the moral status of privacy and private life. The cameras that Lance Loud invited into his hospice room were not smartphones or CCTV cameras. They were the logical endpoint of a cultural revolution that began decades earlier. And we let them in ourselves.

It would have been unsurprising if President Lyndon B. Johnson had demanded Star Trek’s immediate cancellation after it had put forward such a radical anti-imperialist ideology. Luckily, he didn’t. And so it was that, over the 939 episodes across 12 different series that followed, Star Trek’s Prime Directive allowed writers and directors to explore the political and philosophical repercussions of such a concept, primarily its reliance on a prior transition to a humanist communism.

That Star Trek depicts a communist society, without of course calling it that, is crystal clear. In a 1988 episode, the starship USS Enterprise comes across a rusting old Earth vessel containing human plutocrats who had paid large sums to be frozen and sent into space in the hope that aliens might find and cure them of whatever disease was killing them. After the crew of the Enterprise thawed and cured them, one of them, Ralph Offenhouse, a businessman, demands to contact his bankers and law firm back on Earth. Captain Jean-Luc Picard is left with no option but to break the news to him that, in the intervening three centuries, much has changed: “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things.”

Their conversation points to the reason why the Prime Directive is incompatible with the spirit of capitalism. As long as accumulation, fuelling the expansion of markets, is our society’s motivating force and ideology, imperialism is inevitable. To escape it, humanity must first eliminate scarcity of material goods – an elimination that, in the United Federation of Planets, was achieved on the back of the invention and widespread deployment of replicators: machines that convert plentiful green energy into any form of matter one desires, from food to gadgets to spaceships.

This is not exactly a novel idea. In 350BC Aristotle predicted that “if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus… chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.”

An avid Aristotelian himself, Karl Marx based his vision of a freedom-enhancing communist society on machines like Star Trek’s replicators that liberate us from non-creative, soul-crushing labour. In one of his early writings, he imagines what will follow the invention of such machines:

“I can do this today and that tomorrow, hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, look after cows in the evening, practice in theatre criticism after dinner — without having to be a hunter, fisherman, cowherd or theatre critic.”

Marx’s words resonate when we meet Captain Benjamin Sisko’s father who in the 24th century runs a Creole restaurant in New Orleans for free because money is now obsolete — he is simply motivated by how much his neighbours appreciate the cooking. They also resonate with Picard’s answer to Offenhouse who, upon hearing that he was to be sent back to an essentially communist Earth, asks glumly: “What will happen to me? There is no trace of my money. My office is gone. What will I do? How do I live? What is the challenge?” “The challenge Mr Offenhouse,” replies Picard encouragingly, “is to improve yourself, to enrich yourself. Enjoy it!” Marx would have, I am in no doubt, applauded energetically.

Joy is not a word that naturally rhymes with communism, at least the Soviet variety. But pleasure is central to Star Trek‘s version of communism, which rejects the notion that escaping the logic of accumulation requires individuals to submit to a collective. Star Trek‘s writers make this point brilliantly by contrasting the Federation, made up of creative individuals who are free to choose their projects and partners, with the Borg — a dystopian cyborg collective made up of drones linked together in a beehive-like social order that expands by assimilating every species it encounters.

Star Trek rejects collectivism while still avoiding lazy critiques. We are treated to the traumatic reintroduction of a Borg drone to humanity, who experiences debilitating withdrawal symptoms, missing desperately the collective’s voice in her head. It is a reminder of how authoritarianism can be dangerously attractive to the lonely, but also of how important it is to pay the price of personhood.

But Star Trek does not just offer a vision of a splendid future. Like any other practical manifesto, it offers a theory of change: of social evolution founded on solid historical materialist tenets.

Consider, for example, the episode where the USS Voyager is locked in the gravitational field of a strange planet on whose surface time moves much faster than within the orbiting spaceship. The starship crew realise that during each one of their minutes the backward humanoids on the planet experience 58 sunrises. Thus, the crew enjoy a bird’s eye view of that society’s evolution, as if observing it unfold on fast-forward.

What they see is a rendition of humanity’s history — how technological innovations clash with superstitions and antiquated exploitative social relations, bringing about revolutions, progress, but also wars and environmental disasters. At times, it seems as if the species under observation, like humanity, might destroy themselves. But, in a happy ending, they too manage to overcome their imperialisms and their accumulative urges to press new technologies into the service of their common good.

Some of the most interesting insights occur at the edges of the Federation where its explorers encounter, and often wage war against, other civilisations that are either at a more primitive stage of development or have created technologically advanced tyrannies.

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There, on the margin, alien species afford us opportunities for introspection, like the Bajorans who have just come out of the brutal occupation by the Cardassians, a supremacist species that ran Bajor like a penal colony complete with concentration camps and genocidal drives. In one episode a Bajoran freedom fighter identifies a former Cardassian concentration camp monster and works tirelessly to bring him in front of a Federation-Bajoran War Crimes tribunal. I can think of no other TV programme which, within 40 minutes, can better educate the young on the horrors of the Holocaust — a reminder that good science fiction is as much about the past as the future.

Orbiting Bajor there is a Federation-run space station where different species mingle to trade, a meeting point between the communist, post-money Federation and other civilisations for whom accumulation and profit remain central. In that space station, there is a sleazy bar run by one of the hyper-capitalist Ferengi who treats his workers like cattle that have lost their market value. Until his brother, who also works for him, has had enough: he calls upon his fellow workers to form a union and strike for their basic rights. For the Ferengi, neoliberalism is more than an ideology or even a secular religion — it is also a culture, a way of being. Pitching their critique of neoliberalism at its most humourful, Star Trek’s writers portray the Ferengi as humanoids incapable of differentiating themselves from Homo Economicus. Judging from the lengths the scriptwriters went to compile all 285 of The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, the Ferengi Holy Book, they must have had enormous fun. “War is good for business,” but “Peace is good for business too.”

To balance the neoliberal Ferengi brutalism with glimpses of another form of tyranny, Star Trek transports us to a non-Federation planet ruled by bureaucratic centralism. An abducted doctor is forced to work in a hospital where he discovers that medical care is dished out strictly in proportion to the patient’s social worthiness index — a number compiled by a centrally controlled computer.

Star Trek interrogates our humanity through encounters between the Federation and other species. In truly Hegelian style, the planting of alien officers inside Federation spaceships forces humans to reflect through the eyes of those with a sharply different philosophy and outlook. There are numerous examples, but the one face-off most pertinent to our own times is what follows when a supersmart android, known as Data, is introduced on USS Enterprise.

Data has no capacity to feel but nevertheless is driven by the urge to understand humans. In a bid to become one, Data carefully studies our behaviour, and our art. He becomes not only a much-appreciated member of the Enterprise crew but, also, from today’s perspective, a character that serves our thinking about AI.

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Soon after his deployment, the question of Data’s rights comes to the fore. When a Federation laboratory requests that Data agrees to be disassembled for the purposes of replication, Data refuses. When told not to worry because all his memories will be uploaded to a computer and thus retained, Data raises a subtle objection that could have come straight from Noam Chomsky’s rejection of vulgar materialism: “There is an ineffable quality to memory which I do not believe can survive your procedure,” he tells the laboratory’s chief. When the latter shrugs his shoulders and suggests that Data has no choice, Captain Picard demands that the question — of Data’s agency — be taken to court.

The trial ends with the verdict that it is not beyond reasonable doubt that the android is not sentient. Data, therefore, has the right to refuse to submit to his dismemberment. But that does not mean that Star Trek submits to panpsychism. Instead, it acknowledges that simulating sentient beings, as Chat-GPT does already, is not the same thing as being sentient. In the same historical materialist fashion in which it explores human evolution from superstition to sophistication, its writers depict the evolution of mindless mechanical systems to entities capable of consciousness like Data.

More broadly, Star Trek eschews both techno-fetishism (the idea that all engineering advances are good for humanity) and technophobia. For example, the Federation heavily regulates genetic engineering, permitting it only as a means to cure diseases but prohibiting its use for enhancing human capacities as done in eugenics. On the other hand, while cognisant of the possibility of AI going haywire, the Federation recognises AI as a new form of life — Captain Picard’s defence of Data on the trial concludes with the point that “Starfleet was founded to discover new life”— with all the rights as well as perils that new life entails.

The United Federation of Planets is no utopia. The enemy within, xenophobia, is there, dormant and ready to sully the Federation’s humanism; ready even to rescind the Prime Directive. When the starship crew return from a mission to save the Federation from the insecure and thus lethal Xindi, a mob of humans abuses the ship’s doctor in what is a pure hate crime against an alien. Soon after, a Moon-based human supremacist terrorist cell holds the rest of humanity at ransom until all aliens leave Earth. And it is not just populist speciesist extremists that the Federation must reckon with. Its own secret services, outfits such as Section 31, also pose a serious threat to its libertarian communism. And yet, as a defiant injection of hope, the Federation’s humanist communist values hold.

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The question is: despite the fun that some of us get from watching Star Trek, do its almost 1,000 episodes have anything substantial to offer today’s moribund Left in our uphill struggle to remain relevant as we negotiate a sensible path through a maze of threats? I think so. Star Trek’s main lesson for today’s Left is that we need to avoid both a conservative technophobia and the liberal techno-optimists’ failure to appreciate the importance of property rights and the political struggles surrounding them.

In 1930, in a world reeling from the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes dared to dream that, by the end of the 20th Century, technological progress would have eradicated scarcity, poverty and exploitation. In The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren he imagined a world where mankind’s “economic problem” had been solved:

“For the first time since his creation, man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

The reason history disproved Keynes was not that humanity failed to invent the necessary technologies but, rather, because the property rights over the machines became ridiculously concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority. Is it any wonder that neither science nor compound interest delivered us from scarcity, poverty, exploitation and war? Is it any wonder that, instead of Keynes’ happy commonwealth, humanity has edged closer to an early Star Trek episode in which “cloud minders” live on a suspended-on-the-clouds paradise while the rest, like troglodytes, work in a half-drugged state in underground mines?

Star Trek commits the mistakes of neither Keynes nor of the techno-optimists. Cloud capital and AI is a necessary but insufficient condition for our liberation. To make it sufficient, it will take a political revolution that shifts ownership of our snazzy machine networks away from the tiny oligarchy and turn them into a commons. At the same time, as Star Trek poignantly shows, our liberation depends on not falling into the other trap of authoritarian collectivism.

Today’s moribund Left could do far worse than to take its cue from Star Trek‘s bold embrace of a humanist anti-authoritarian communism.

In Australian indigenous societies, there remains a taboo against broadcasting footage of the dead. There are specific cultural reasons for this, but it also points to wider moral concerns. You only need to glance at celebrity, or pornography, or social media, to realise something monstrous happens when people are reduced to images, and that the Native Americans who reputedly believed cameras stole portions of the soul may have been aware of something we weren’t. Except, of course, it’s not necessarily the camera that is to blame, but rather those who profit from the images — who are rarely the subjects themselves.

This mistrust reaches its apotheosis in the disillusioned war photographer, who wrestles with the ethics of what they’re showing the world and why; those who see horror repackaged for public consumption until platitudes about “raising awareness” or “bearing witness” erode, leaving only troubling unanswerable questions of exploitation, voyeurism and theft.

Adapted from Patrick Radden Keefe’s award-winning book, Say Nothing is the latest dramatic recreation of the Northern Irish Troubles. Both book and show are centred around the abduction of Jean McConville, kidnapped and murdered by the IRA in 1972, after spuriously being accused of being an informer. Yet if the snatching itself, poignant and chilling, haunts the series from early on, it’s the voiceover that really grasps the programme’s ethos. “The thing about Irish people,” says a female voice, “we’ve been arguing over the same shite for 800 years.” It’s a cliché so squalid, so reductive of a 850-year-long colonial nightmare squeezed into a mere domestic squabble, that it perfectly encapsulates Say Nothing’s flaws.

Alienation is key. If you can make an individual, or a people, seem alien, savage, other, you can do all manner of things to them. This was a cornerstone of imperial policy and Northern Ireland, being one of its final remnants, is no exception. Catholics bore the brunt of “our wee apartheid state” as a character notes, and the resulting conflict affected every aspect of life. There are innumerable tales worth telling therein, and many voices who have longed to be heard. Say Nothing, despite appearances, is not one of those stories. It’s certainly about that place and those people but it’s immediately evident the camera’s eye is doing something else.

At its heart, in fact, this is a series very much like the Native American’s conception of the camera: it turns people into tropes, stealing their souls for entertainment and cash. Not, of course, that Say Nothing is alone here. On the contrary, the programme’s failures speak to a far wider malaise. We’re so wrapped up in contemporary worries, in our own way of seeing the universe, that we find it increasingly hard to burrow into the minds of others. So much that is claimed as “empathetic”, the boom in literary autofiction for instance, is indistinguishable from navel-gazing. So much political grandstanding is for our personal status, projected within our tribes, that when we do venture out into that vast wilderness called history, it’s all too easy for true crime to focus on perpetrators, on those strange men and women with a willingness to hurt. It doesn’t matter if the depictions condone or condemn. It’s theatre, provided you’re watching from the luxury of a safe distance. If these stories are engaging, they also do the courage and suffering of victims, who may be quiet and stoical, an unforgivable disservice.

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Say Nothing dovetails the McConville saga with the story of one of her killers: Dolours Price. It follows the girl’s move towards the “armed struggle” with the attack on the civil rights march at Burntollet Bridge, which did a fine job of proving JFK’s dictum that those “who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”. It’s well-portrayed in Say Nothing, tense and gut-wrenchingly unfair; such instances (to say nothing of internment without trial or the mass murder of protesters during Bloody Sunday and the Ballymurphy Massacre) were crucial steps in the radicalisation of a young generation.

Certain qualities ring true: the glamour of working-class Northern Irish women is recognisable, as is the perpetual appealing, if exhausting, banter of the place. The brutality of nocturnal home invasions, courtesy of the police and army, is painfully accurate and atmospheric. As are the chase scenes, the inner-city bleakness, the casual torture sessions. The general dystopian feel is both true and an indictment of the successive Labour and Tory governments who imposed it upon their own citizens. But if the programme’s portrayal of grubby terraces and casual violence is plausible, the script slips almost instantly into heavy-handed schlock. After being assaulted by Unionist thugs at Burntollet, Dolours returns home to her parents. But rather than fear for their daughter, they instead launch into a facile political tirade. “Girls,” they ask, “why did you not fight back?”

The historically empty-headed opening line, in short, is how Say Nothing means to go on, with the whole programme suffused with a thick grime of anachronism. Just consider Dolours herself, gifted with pseudo-feminist slay queen moments totally implausible in the brutal and sexist Ulster of the Seventies. As befits the patronising orthodoxies of our time, she outwits uncouth lunkheaded men at every turn, every inch the IRA girl boss. When she’s finally accepted, it’s with the same dynamics as a coach spotting a wayward brilliant kid. As Dolours herself puts it: “We wanted to be doing what the boys were doing.”

And if that says something about Price herself, who was doubtless naïve in her early days as a paramilitary, it surely reveals much more about our infantilised platitudes about the past. The projection of one world onto the other results in a grotesque misalignment: follow your dreams, Say Nothing seems to suggest, and someday you too may lead someone to an unmarked grave or blow off the limbs of innocents.

In a sense, that gentle reflection of a bloodstained reality is both Say Nothing’s blessing and its curse. The cinematography, the music, the acting, the accents — it’s all gripping, rich, entertaining. And that’s precisely the problem. The medium is the message, and all the intricacies of the Troubles are condensed and transformed to attract and sustain a Disney+ streaming audience.

While Price is framed less as Countess Markievicz and more as rifle-wielding Mary Sue, the show is also careful to include something for fans of romance. Brendan “The Dark” Hughes, a leading IRA member and one of the architects of the Bloody Friday atrocity, is introduced in a gasp-inducing, fan-fluttering glimpse you’d expect of Mr Darcy — albeit in a Belfast riot not a ballroom. There are enough flirtations and sexual tensions here to hoover up Sally Rooney fans, as is obviously the point. Similarly, while it never descends to McDonagh-levels of paddywhackery, Say Nothing occasionally flirts with it — their greenhorn version of the once very real Kevin McKee, the early depictions of Dolours as a red-headed colleen in her Aran sweater handing out civil rights leaflets, the bank robbery dressed in nuns’ habits. The fact that “the nun with the gun” image was foregrounded and dominated the publicity around the series (alongside much more menacing images of women in balaclavas) shows how the North is viewed from outside and what it’s allowed to be. The primary Stage Irish modes have always been farce or wakes, buffoonery (hence the laboured “humanising” stories here of pet dogs and spud guns) or abject morbidity. That’s your choice. There’s little of the vast shifting territory in-between, where Northern Irish people exist most of the time, even during the Troubles. What a delight, though, to know that the Troubles were sexy after all.

Despite being viscerally nonfiction, with many characters still alive and the wounds still raw, everyone in Say Nothing is reduced to a kind of sanitised fiction. This is not Emily In Par-amilitaries, exactly, but feels far less distant than it should. That’s especially true when you factor in the programme’s tone. At times, Say Nothing felt uncomfortably like an adult Derry Girls. And while that show could slip movingly from comedy into pathos, it’s much harder to move the opposite way, and the scenes played for laughs feel cheap and jarring. At one point, Dolours is asked how much explosive she’s carrying. “Not much,” she quips. “About a car bomb’s worth.”

Then there’s what Say Nothing doesn’t mention. Of course, it’s impossible to cover everything in a conflict as complex as the Troubles. Yet there are so many moments, of human drama, that are treated as mere exposition dumps or ignored entirely: Bloody Sunday is one obvious example. Even worse is how so many pivotal figures — McGuinness and Thatcher, Stakeknife and Sands — are largely conspicuous by their absence. The British authorities are presented as stiff-upper-lip parodies, with only cursory suggestions of personality or family life. The irony is had they been presented in a more humanised and less automaton form, their use of state terror and coercion would have been all the more disturbing. Their gradual vanishing from the story is telling, however, especially given the immense power and damage MI5/Special Branch increasingly wielded over the Republican movement (and how little they protected their sources), a significant factor in the push towards the peace process.

MI5’s infiltration of the upper echelons of Sinn Fein has long been a rumour on Belfast and Derry streets but remains suspiciously taboo in the media. It calls into question the intentions of the original author, an ex-Pentagon staffer and thus no stranger to the security and intelligence services. This issue should be at the heart of this story — it’s one of the chief reasons there’s no truth and reconciliation process in Northern Ireland, given the shared secrets of this dirty war. More relevantly for Say Nothing, it has had a knock-on effect leading to the seizure of the Boston Tapes (a central plot device in the series) and the resulting chilling on any journalist seeking to uncover the bitter truths of the conflict and risking ruin in the process.

Say Nothing is eager to humanise people like Price, with Dolours given ample space to self-pityingly regret her violent life. And yet there’s one key person whose voice we never truly hear: Jean McConville. “You can say anything, Dolours,” the protagonist is told, and largely she gets to. But who was that other woman, that mother, the one treated like a largely wordless widow? What was her past, her dreams? We scarcely find out, probably because they assumed they wouldn’t have been entertaining to hear, even if quietly raising 10 kids in a Belfast tower block is the very definition of feminist heroism.

It hardly helps, of course, that McConville’s relatives have been so thoughtlessly treated by the show. The programme may claim it cares about ethics: “There’s a responsibility. I think that’s the price of admission, the price of trespassing into someone else’s world, be that an American writing about people in Belfast or a guy writing about young women. You have to get it right,” Radden Keefe said. “You have to earn the right to tell that story.” However the dead woman’s son-in-law says Disney never bothered contacting the family. The abduction scene, Seamus McKendry, argues, was “poorly portrayed…it should have shown the full horror of what happened. It didn’t and it left you to guess what had happened.” Michael McConville, Jean’s son, agrees. He refuses to accept the idea that it can be played as entertainment. “The portrayal of the execution and secret burial of my mother is horrendous,” Michael has stated, “and unless you have lived through it, you will never understand just how cruel it is.”

While McConville’s children are depicted in the series, they’ve been shockingly simplified to confirm the programme’s preconceptions. First, they’re portrayed as Rockwellian scamps. Then, in later life, they’re depicted as broken mourners. Both are one-dimensional caricatures, and the camera is careful to forget them during the troubled years they survived in care. To put it differently, then, the McConvilles are denied individuality and depth, reduced instead to passive bystanders in their own lives. They are emphatically, defiantly not, but watch Say Nothing and you come away with the sense that the only characters with any real identity are Dolours Price and the other killers.

It might be tempting, at this point, to look for someone to blame: the writers or producers or even Radden Keefe himself. The truth, though, is that Say Nothing is simply a symptom of a sickness in our culture. We, the audience, are complicit too. Over recent years, there’s been a pushback against the traditional “sexy dead woman on a mortuary slab” style of crime drama: think Twin Peaks or The Fall. In their place have come superlative works such as The Five by Hallie Rubenhold, books that nobly seek to restore the dignity and voices of female murder victims.

Yet these, in turn, are increasingly overshadowed by a new boom: of “true crime”, in podcasts and literature. A number of them (Dark Downeast, In the Dark, The Red Note, Bone Valley, Hands Off My Podcast: True Crime etc) have been commended for being appropriately weighty, victim-centred and justice-seeking. They remain exceptions, and even many of the superior true crime podcasts over-use suspenseful soundtracks and gothically overwrought retellings, all the tricks of fiction essentially undermining their moral force. Others, such as My Favourite Murder and Crime Junkie, seem to wallow in the salacious, speaking of terrible things in seemingly frivolous tones and operating merch stores on the side. Instead, they do us a favour by revealing that deep down, the primary function of the true crime industry is not empathy with victims. True crime’s obsession with compassion is a self-flattering falsehood, born of cynicism and therapy-speak. Nor is this surprising. The true crime industry, after all, is just that: an industry.

At the same time, it’s one focused on the intoxicating idea of trespass, of illicitly examining the psyche of murderers. That’s clear when you consider the attention given to perpetrators, their beliefs and motivations, compared with those of victims. Similarly, the Price sisters and Brendan Hughes are given plentiful space to express themselves and justify their crimes. They could have scarcely imagined this would one day be broadcast for public pleasure.

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And what of the victims? They’re treated as nobodies, as mere ciphers in favour of murky and charismatic criminals. That unnatural distancing was needed to turn their trauma into entertainment for us, in the same way we watch horror films  for comfort. As the harrowing story of the McConville children so vividly shows, this approach nonetheless leaves behind the wreckage of trauma, soon conveniently forgotten.

There are, to be fair, more sensitive paths to tread. If, after all, a writer acknowledges that there’s an inevitable parasitic and sensationalist element to non-fiction, and refuses to fool themselves that they’re empaths burdened with haloes, they may be able to mitigate its worst effects. More to the point, there are documentary filmmakers who consult those involved, cultivate ethical relations with those who are in the know, and crucially listen, a fraught process but a necessary one to even begin conveying the truth and avoid retraumatising generations. Without this, empathy is a pretext, even an alibi, carelessness wrapped in the language of care. What is really happening is that sordid crimes are being made palatable and commercial.

In that sense, at least, Say Nothing succeeds in portraying the Troubles as they actually occurred. The truth, unstated by the show and by Northern Irish society at large, is that the Good Friday Agreement was facilitated by ignoring victims and their families. They paid the price for our peace, with killers released early or heralded as peacemakers, the atrocities of all parties filed away and forgotten. And now, all that’s left is entertainment. “It’s just a lot of theatre,” the Gerry Adams character agrees: except for those who do not have the luxury of being casual spectators. Say Nothing says many things, the most important of which it says despite itself. The moment for us to address these questions, these cruelties, has long since passed — if not the suffering. Until we face these difficult questions and realities, we will always be vulnerable to the soul-stealing that follows.

Suspended and disgraced, the host’s future already seems in doubt, especially now that several other women have accused Wallace of unseemly sexual conduct. Yet if he’s since apologised, albeit partially, what’s striking is less his vulgarity — and more the eagerness of powerful men to blame women for their own misconduct, relying on cynical class justifications as they go.

Though the scandal is only a few days old, it seems clear that Wallace has form in the crassness department. Quite apart from the “tart” innuendo, 13 other people have accused him of inappropriate behaviour, including senior BBC presenter Kirsty Wark. At one point, Wallace allegedly talked openly about his sex life. Elsewhere, he apparently took his top off in front of a female worker, saying he wanted to “give her a fashion show”.

Wallace’s conduct for other channels is also being scrutinised. During the filming of one Channel 5 series, a female co-worker claims he often made inappropriate sexual comments, including discussing spanking and domination.

These allegations aren’t exactly surprising. If true, Wallace would only be the latest male celebrity to treat female colleagues with disdain. Yet whatever the truth — and investigations have been launched — I’m most struck by his defence. “In the newspapers, I can see the complaints coming from a handful of middle-class women of a certain age, just from Celebrity MasterChef,” is how he put it on Instagram. “This isn’t right.”

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And though he’s since abandoned that line, Wallace’s apology for the apology doesn’t feel much better. “I wasn’t in a good head space when I posted it,” he said of the original video. “I’ve been under a huge amount of stress, a lot of emotion, I felt very alone, under siege, yesterday, when I posted it.”

It’s clear, at any rate, that Wallace basically sees himself not as an abuser, but as an innocent victim. He isn’t alone either. “Fuck it, someone has to say it,” intervened proud anti-feminist Brendan O’Neill. “There has been more liberal media fury over Gregg Wallace telling Kirsty Wark a dirty joke than there ever was over the years-long violation of white working-class girls by grooming gangs.”

Beyond the self-pitying tone, what unites both Wallace and O’Neill is their reference to class. Wallace, certainly, has always liked to portray himself as a man of the people, a cheeky chappy from Peckham who left school at 15. No less striking, the presenter has often played up this disreputable image. He’s freely admitted to “clumping” people: in 2013, around the same time as the infamous “tart” comment, he punched a man for allegedly touching his girlfriend.

Whatever the truth to this self-image, at any rate, Wallace’s insinuation is that posh women are victimising salt-of-the-earth men. This is classic divide and rule, and God knows Britain has enough class anxiety (and sexism) that it may convince some. “It either didn’t happen or was harmless bants,” is how one male poster put it, even as another dismissed the “old-aged women” just looking for attention.

The truth, though, is that while Wallace may wallow in his Freddie Starr shtick, it’s a style that was already going out of fashion 40 years ago. That Wallace could make lazy jokes about women as late as 2014, when he claimed MasterChef was a job that “requires” a male host, says much more about him than his accusers.

If, moreover, Wallace’s class-bound defence is part of a long tradition of male chauvinism — that women should just smile more; that they should revel in the winks and the wolf whistles — the final implication is just as insidious: that sexual harassment is either enjoyable for the women targeted, or else it simply never happened to start with. If you don’t laugh, or brush it off, you’re a prude. If you complain, you’re a ball-breaking bitch. Either way, the offending man is never to blame.

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There’s one last irony here too. Quite aside from the terrible pressure on women to force out a rictus smile whenever some dinosaur makes a nudge-nudge-wink-wink joke, transgressing a boundary and violating their self-worth, Wallace’s class defence just doesn’t work on its own terms.

Yes, a few of Wallace’s accusers are “middle class” — not, of course, that that matters. But others, young women in junior positions, certainly aren’t, especially compared to the man himself. Let me put it differently. Who, in the end, has more power: a veteran male presenter earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, or a female colleague on a zero-hours contract and no job security? Faced with these plain economic facts, that Gregg Wallace drops his aitches becomes utterly irrelevant.

To be fair, and whatever he’s finally found to have done, Wallace never tried to hide who he was. Others likely did: including the executives who tolerated his behaviour for so long. Hopefully, now, the days when sexual misconduct could be dismissed by a bit of harmless banter are coming to an end.

Until that day finally arrives, expect the usual defences to be wheeled out. But if some desperate man asks what the world is coming to, beg them to reflect on who the victims really are — regardless of how they speak or where they went to school.

We learn just how stiff in Meet the Rees-Moggs — arriving onscreen next week — as strangers shout aggressively at the infamous politician as he crosses the road or buys his daily chocolate éclair from Greggs. In return, they invariably get a polite “thank you!” and an awkward little wave. In the run-up to July’s General Election, someone writes “POSH TWAT” in marker pen on a Vote Conservative sign outside his mother’s house. With insistent amusement, Rees-Mogg jokes to his family that the culprit must be “very easy to spot”: “an angry socialist giant who has a very vulgar knowledge of language”.

The man seems absolutely determined not to take anything personally, ever. And his loyal wife Helena is equally stoic, sporting the sort of highborn expressionlessness and barely moving mouth that the lower classes can only hope to achieve with Botox. “Other careers are available,” she murmurs to two of the couple’s six children after warning them about their father’s impending election defeat, after 14 years as an MP. Later, she tells the camera resolutely: “As Churchill said, KBO.”

But just why do people detest her husband so much? In the past, protestors have thrown bottles at him. Random passers-by have told his children that their father is a “horrible person” and that “lots of people hate him”. For the second year running, he appears on The New European “shit list” — out this week — dedicated to rooting out “the sneaky, the snobbish, and the snide”. Indeed, the new TV series is predicated on the idea that Rees-Mogg is “one of the most divisive politicians in Britain”, as stated in the title sequence.

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Yet the first two programmes do nothing much to explain the animosity. Instead we get a Great British Bake Off-style portrait of an amusingly donnish oddball, complete with an arch-sounding pizzicato soundtrack in case we didn’t already get the point. In the interactions we see between Rees-Mogg and others, it’s as if half his mind is whirling away on some other thing entirely. When Jacob was first courting Helena, she tells us, she couldn’t think of much else. He, meanwhile, was gazing lovingly into his wife-to-be’s eyes and seeing her ancestor Thomas Wentworth the 1st Earl of Strafford, by far and away his favourite adviser to King Charles I.

We also get to see Catholic Jacob in his own private chapel, rhyming “Mass” with “arse” and showing off his reliquary, which includes a bit of Thomas More’s hair shirt. There’s a scene with the whole family dressed in black tie at the dinner table, three small boys included. And then there’s Jacob inadvertently giving the lie to Conservative fears about what’s bound to happen under a nanny state, as his own ever-indulgent nanny Veronica lets him off from eating his vegetables. Now ancient, she is filmed ministering to young Alfred, Anselm, and Sixtus the sixth and last — each of them approaching the Platonic form of the adorably naughty schoolboy — while the elder three Rees-Moggs are off at boarding school.

The puzzling question remains. It can’t just be all the money, the stately home, or the languid drawling that people object to, nor even the rampantly Right-wing views; such things are hardly scarce in the Tory party at large. One determined critic in the first episode says that Rees-Mogg “seems to despise people who are poorer than him”. Yet, on the contrary, all the evidence of the documentary suggests he approaches everyone, rich or poor — including, for that matter, his own wife and children — in exactly the same way. Namely: as if he is forcing himself into social interactions for the sake of some higher purpose.

Another explanation for the degree of opprobrium to such a relentlessly mild and amiable man is the perception that the whole Honourable-Member-for-the-18th-Century act is a put on. Perhaps revealing a little too clearly their own snobbishness, writers at The New European this week called Rees-Mogg a “fake aristo”. Likewise, in 2017, Polly Toynbee wrote that he was “about as authentic as that Downton Abbey shot where they left a plastic bottle on the mantlepiece”. In Nancy Mitfordesque vein, The Guardian columnist continued: “The double-breasted posh-speak, Latin tags and ludicrous names for his six children are all pastiche panache, a country house charade.”

But again, I don’t think so — or at least, not if you believe Michael Ashcroft in his admittedly sympathetic biography Jacob’s Ladder. For one, though Rees-Mogg is indeed not an aristocrat nor ever claimed to be, sexist Toynbee seems to be ignoring the clear influence of his impeccably pedigreed wife upon the family lifestyle (full name Helena Anne Beatrix Wentworth Fitzwilliam de Chair). For another, schoolfriend after schoolfriend lines up to tell Ashcroft that, as a youth, Jacob was just as fogeyish, money-obsessed, and downright strange as he is now.

Says one old pal, recalling eight-year old Jacob: “He used to sit behind me and read The Financial Times.” As an 11-year-old shareholder, young Rees-Mogg attended the Lonhro AGM, quizzing directors from the floor about their plans to buy The Observer. At Eton, he declared the dropping of the tailcoat requirement on very hot days an “unnecessary slacking of regulations”, refusing to follow the trend. And a friend recounts that, at Oxford, he “was bullied unmercifully by people who took the piss out of him because he was such an anomaly, even among his own class”.

Futilely contesting the seat of Central Fife for the Tories in the 1997 General Election, including several former coal mining towns in which unemployment was rife, Rees-Mogg was viewed as a “figure of complete ridicule” according to onlookers but remained unbowed. “I’ve worn a suit every day since I was 14,” he told The Scotsman. “I’m not about to change now.” He also told reporters, without any apparent sense of foreboding, that Veronica the nanny would be coming up North to help him campaign.

No, I think the real reason people hate Rees-Mogg is not that he is fake, but quite the opposite: he is authentic, clear-eyed and apparently unashamed about who he is and what he believes. Ironically, while “bringing your whole self to work” is something we’re all supposed to be doing these days, the example of Rees-Mogg shows us the pitfalls when someone actually does it.

Not for him, hints of apologetic embarrassment about the reactionary principles he would prefer not to hold. He is calmly candid about them, without even a defiant compensatory swagger à la Truss or Jenrick. And nor do we get the self-conscious attempts of other politicians to make themselves seem “relatable” and “human”: Keir Starmer tentatively holding a pint for a photo shoot; Ed Davey “officially stepping into Christmas mode” by jumping about like a lunatic on TikTok.

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To this, you might reasonably object that the man is now in a reality TV series, isn’t he? But even that seems true to bone-deep form. Ashcroft also relates how, aged 14, young Jacob featured in an ITV children’s programme, talking about his stocks and shares and “wearing a double-breasted camel coloured coat with a ‘Vote Maggie’ badge on it”. Or as fellow Etonian, the actor Dominic West put it:“[Jacob] has never changed… he’s a showbiz tart.”

What Rees-Mogg’s example convincingly tells us is that, at base, the high-minded demand to be authentic — to show “the real you”, to act in accordance with your “true self”, and so on — is only a covert inducement to display a particular kind of approved persona, carefully calibrated to socially acceptable mores, and then manifested with a convincing impression of sincerity and self-deprecation. The supposed value of making your inner core match your outer behaviour tends to be completely abandoned as soon as it is suspected that the core in question might be rotten. In Rees-Mogg’s case — whatever the rights and wrongs of his politics — it seems to me that the case for the prosecution of his character has yet to be proved.

Equally, for decades academics have been telling us that the distinction between “normal” and “weird” is a politically pernicious one, and in fact disrupting or “queering” social norms is good, actually. Yet they seem to get feet of clay when faced with someone prone to wearing top hats, using words like “floccinaucinihilipilification” in ordinary speech, and declaring that for religious reasons he is against abortion, even in the case of incest or rape. For what could be queerer than that these days?

Viewed in this light, perhaps what people really hate about Jacob Rees-Mogg is what people hate about eccentrics generally: that he won’t give in to pressure to conform even a little bit, as the cowardly rest of us do. All the brickbats flying his way make absolutely no difference. Angry socialist giants in Somerset might as well put away their marker pens.

The show creator, Christopher Storer, has managed to turn a show about food porn into the sort of thing that now qualifies as a “cultural phenomenon” — for a moment last season, The Bear was the most watched television series across all platforms. The Critic’s Choice, Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy award-winning dramedy stars the quintessential rat-boy Jeremy Allen White (whose fame has landed him on billboards wearing nothing but Calvin Klein underwear) as chef Carmy Berzatto, and Ayo Edebiri, whose portrayal of the earnest if overly-ambitious sous chef Sydney Adamu has propelled her to the cover of Vanity Fair.

In many ways, The Bear is a drama for the Biden era, delivering the hope that the melting pot can once again congeal its acids and bases into a piquant whole; that the Tao of gastronomy can bring us together in order to realise a collective dream. The quasi-religious transformation of Carmy’s restaurant from drug-addled sandwich shop “The Beef” to the disciplined sophistication of “The Bear” dramatises the dream of reaching America’s promised land — the place where if you contribute you can be successful, where the finance bro in the zippered vest is not the only winner, where we can all become worthy of Sydney’s idol, Duke University’s legendary basketball Coach K.

As always, the American Dream comes with its trials. The final episode of season two reached its climax with Carmy locked and raging within a walk-in fridge, which was of course a grand metaphor for the emotional isolation, thwarted ambitions and deep-seated wounds of addiction, mourning and loss that had been baked into this reluctant anti-hero. Despite a brief romance, he is unable to escape his own miasma of self-doubt, attention deficit and over-arching dysfunction.

Carmy’s refrigerated dungeon was the final brutal slapstick in a series that revels in all that is beyond the control of the most obsessive control freaks, from unforgiving profit margins to exploding toilets to the inescapable crazy of a nicotine-and-alcohol addicted mother (perfectly channelled by Jamie Lee Curtis) whose toxicity precludes her from attending the most important night of her son’s life, the grand opening of his re-vitalised restaurant in gritty Chicago. Such are the mummy issues that Carmy’s memories of lemon piccata and Christmas Eve branzino cannot resolve, and they pale alongside the haunting tragedy of his brother who, like the patron saint of foodie martyrs, Anthony Bourdain, committed suicide.

That said, there’s a lot more than psychic catastrophe being cooked up in this restaurant, at once a hot box of despair and an intoxicating land of opportunity. The Bear tells a Horatio Alger story of an emerging girl boss, Sydney, who embraces her power and authority even as Carmy collapses like a failed soufflé. If the industrial ruins that frame Lake Michigan (at which Carmy all-too-often casts his rueful gaze) loom as the omnipresent reminder of kitchen casualties — from the ghost of Bourdain to Bobby Flay’s infidelities, the rage of Gordon Ramsay, and the brutal aftermath of the sexual misconduct of Mario Batali — Sydney’s Chicago River is like Huck Finn’s Mississippi — the promised path to the frontiers of eating, where she can dare to imagine the freedoms of fusion cuisine. And while Carmy’s father remains absent and unaccounted for, Sydney’s single African-American dad embodies the post-Covid wish fulfillments of emotional and financial support, promising his daughter that she can live with him forever and follow her dreams.

The Bear, then, delivers a potent sweet and sour: irretrievable loss alongside the renaissance of American can-do — the sense that we can pick that raw chicken off the floor and serve it triumphantly, just as American chef Julia Child did in an earlier age of food media. Perhaps it will be possible to regain our long-lost optimism, and rediscover the time when the sublimities of French cuisine comprised something more than memes on TikTok.

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The show’s extraordinary popularity rests on its re-workings of such hoary depictions of democracy’s promise, and the notion that the restaurant business may be the vehicle for the redemption of working-stiff America — the place where we may once again come together in the united colours of beef bourguignon. It’s fantasy, of course. The series would have us believe that given their druthers, all those veteran grill scrubbers of Chicagoland might truly desire to become full-fledged sauciers and bouchers, don white double-breasteds and join the kitchen brigades of Chez Panisse and Noma.

All of which is to say that The Bear is not really about the food, but food as a metaphor. As Carmy pounded the steel door of the walk-in fridge in vain, only to end up slumped among the vegetables, I was reminded of a vision of the role of cuisine in American life proposed by Marx Edgeworth Lazarus, a lost figure of 19th-century American food culture, and author of the 1852 bestseller Passional Hygiene and Natural Medicine. “The science of gastrosophy,” Lazarus wrote,

will place epicurism in strict alliance with honor and the love of glory.
Of all our enjoyments, eating being the first, the last, and the most frequent pleasure of man, it ought to be the principal agent of wisdom in the future harmony …
A skillful gastrosophist, also expert in the functions of culture and medical hygiene, will be revered as an oracle of supreme wisdom.

For hundreds of years, Americans have looked to food and food culture as nothing less than redemption; not philosophy, but gastrosophy, will light the way to the city on the hill, and make this land of plenty, at long last, yield its fruit. What gastrosophical wisdom can we garner from The Bear’s obsession with scarred Hobart mixers, sadistic high-end chefs and the verité of over-soaked panzanella? The advent of seasons three and four may herald the long-awaited arrival of Passional Hygiene’s skillful gastrosophist, he who will lead us to future harmony and wisdom.

At the centre of this hope stands Carmy, a ripped and inarticulate Rocky for our time, a busted-up American male, a Christ-like figure who will sacrifice himself for his brothers and sisters and deliver us from self-inflicted wounds. “I felt like I could speak through the food,” he confesses, and it is this sort of speaking in tongues that tempts us to believe that all his searing and slicing may actually result in a miraculous feast of nouvelle loaves and fishes, not to mention a smorgasbord of second acts and 12-step-inspired apologies.

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For while Carmy’s fall from the grace of Eleven Madison Park to a sandwich shop in Chicago clearly portrays American downward mobility, it also hints at the promise of redemption. If Carmy is iconic, so is his dream of a kinder, gentler restaurant run alongside the “cousin” who isn’t really his cousin, in which the “family dinner” (that doesn’t include your family) may transcend all economic, social and ethnic bounds. It’s the post-Trump promise that in a time of crisis everyone might actually have each-other’s back, a sublime hope accompanied by the gentle choruses of Sufjan Stevens.

Unfortunately, such transformations can occur only if all that mopping of floors and scrubbing of stainless-steel pots and countertops can wash away centuries of anger and injustice. Carmy may find temporary respite for the loss of his brother in rolls of hundred-dollar bills he secreted in cans of tomato sauce, but the redemption will endure only if it leads to a level of self-sacrifice and gravitas last seen in ancient Rome — except that here the highest praise for a citizen of the kitchen is conveyed by the phrase, “you carve vegetables like a bitch”.

Thus do the pollutions and perfections of restaurant culture mirror the fate of American family and society, and illustrate the variety of traumas that have turned this country into a mélange of Dr. Phil and My Six-Hundred Pound Life. Only here, among the rice and pasta, can we believe that the hyper-kinetic Ebon Moss-Bachrach — whose portrayal of the gun-toting maître d’ Richie Jerimovich garnered a Primetime Emmy — might earnestly ask, “You feel me?”

Seasons one and two invested a great deal of time and effort working the suspense of whether or not the motley crew will pass the fire-suppression exam, a clever way to suggest both the literal and metaphorical path beyond the holocaust of social combustion. Season three promises no end to the outbursts of rage followed by anger management, the delicious juxtaposed against the undigestible, and no doubt a baker’s dozen more cringey confessionals. If the peevishness and penitence get old, there’s always those glistening closeups of T-bone steaks and lamb ragu, the glory of chopped daikon, the perfect geometry of tweezed micro-basil, and the exquisite paradox of a savoury cannoli — all of it infused by the question that boils at the centre of our post-traumatic historical moment: “Are you OK?”

Neo fights his way free of the membrane. He sits bolt upright, slime sluicing from his bald skull, and stares in horror. Facing him is an endless vista of identical pods, each containing a dreaming human, plugged by metal tubes into a simulation while their bodies are tapped for energy as living batteries.

A machine disconnects him from the tubes. A hatch opens, and Neo is flushed, screaming, into the start of his new life.

The Matrix came out in 1999. Its cultural impact is so profound it coined a whole political vocabulary: the ‘pill’, a revelation that destroys your worldview but awakens you to a new truth.

Offered a choice between a ‘blue pill’ that will deliver blissful ignorance in a comforting lie, or a ‘red pill’ that will awaken him to grim reality, Neo takes the red one. He wakes up from the simulation, to the horror of his true existence as living energy source for a world of machines.

What would have happened to Neo, had he taken the blue pill? I like to think he’d have spent the rest of his life in the world of the classic sitcom Friends, whose cast are reunited today for a much-trailed reunion.

First aired in 1994, Friends ran for a decade. It was wildly popular, with some episodes attracting 50 million or more viewers, and in 2019 was still the most watched show on Netflix. Even for my Home Counties teenage years, thousands of miles from the sitcom’s Manhattan setting, its quirky storylines became short-hand for a whole worldview.

We knew it wasn’t real. The apartments were too big, and no one could possibly have that much time to sit around drinking coffee. But we talked about what we’d do ‘if we lived in Friends world’. It was a shared imaginary, a picture of how we’d love life to be.

In Friends world, we might be free of all obligations except the ones we’d chosen. Where parents were domineering (especially Ross and Monica’s mum), social life, was opt-in. People drifted in and out of the Central Perk café, and events were driven by happenstance and whim.

And yet the bonds of this elective ‘family’ were unshakeable. Neurotic men like Ross were not exhausting fun-sponges but lovably vulnerable. Naïvete in the style of Joey or Phoebe made you not abused and exploited but charming. On-off relationships like Ross and Rachel’s were not destroyed but cemented by having a baby. You could be mean, capricious or spiteful, and it was a foible your friends loved and forgave, not something that got you ostracised.

In a nutshell, Friends world was a soft-focus picture of the adult life the baby boomers hoped they’d created for their offspring: maximally connected, but also maximally free.

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Around the time Ross and Rachel were getting amusingly married in Vegas while drunk, and The Matrix was featuring heavily in stoned conversations about the nature of reality, I was at university reading Walter J Ong. This Jesuit literary theorist argued in a seminal 1982 book, Orality and Literacy, that writing and reading are not simply a technology but radically consciousness-altering.

Literacy, Ong suggested, profoundly changes a culture. In societies that don’t use writing to store knowledge, ancestral memory is retained and relayed using song, spoken storytelling, pictures and artefacts. And this in turn, Ong pointed out, shapes the things that can be remembered.

“Try to imagine,” he suggests, “a culture where no one has ever ‘looked up’ anything.” Even the idea of objectivity, Ong argues, is inseparable from the act of writing things down so they stay unchanged over time.

Boomers David Crane and Marta Kauffman created ten series’ worth of maximal connection plus maximal freedom in Friends. But as they did so, new digital media were turning the “open” values that suffused the show — its open friendships and ambiguous love-affairs, its whimsical open-mindedness, sometimes neurotic open-heartedness — into something new. That transformation has been as profound, and perhaps as irreversible, as the shift Ong described between oral and literate cultures.

Because making the jump from a print-and-TV culture to our networked, interactive, digital one doesn’t just give us more ways of reading the same stuff. It changes if, how and what we read, and even how we think about reality itself.

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To illustrate, consider Alan Partridge, another cultural icon of 1990s Britain – and also the subject of a relatively recent nostalgia reboot. Partridge was funny in 1997 because he was stuck in a timewarp. With his brown slacks and leatherette driving gloves, he was a petit-bourgeois Eighties hold-out desperately trying to stay afloat in a world he found increasingly incomprehensible.

Today, the digital networking of culture has also homogenised us. The kind of backwater where people can exist in a timewarp, Partridge-like, is increasingly difficult to find. And when you do stumble upon one, chances are someone with a MacBook is already there, Instagramming the colourful locals and tweeting about his “digital nomad” lifestyle.

So as a 21^st-century TV host, Alan Partridge falls flat. It’s simply not plausible that someone could be as adrift from prevailing cultural currents as he is, and still have a job in TV. So instead of being deliciously cringe, what you get is a mean-spirited media-world in-joke about how embarrassed everyone would be if one of those people who’d never stand a chance in the industry actually became a TV presenter.

And with the homogenisation that has de-Partridged even our backwaters has come a sea-change in our ways of interacting, thinking, even understanding what reality is. Friends aired its last episode four months after the launch of another type of “friends”: the virtual, networked kind mapped by Facebook.

The shift from “Friends world” to “Facebook friends world” started out as a way of mapping aspects of our social worlds that were already there. To begin with, we added “friends” we actually knew. But over time, it came increasingly to stand in for those social worlds, as we’ve increasingly swapped real-life meetups for messenger groups. Now, accelerated still further by lockdowns, much of social life has withdrawn from IRL altogether for an online-only mulch of infighting and memes.

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This in turn has taken the boomers’ “open” values in strange new directions. Whereas I spent my pre-internet teens poking around in arcane subcultures, today everything is “open” – or at least, it’s online in the public domain. You’d think that would make it easier to find like-minded souls, which is true — but those friendships are opt-in, like in Friends world, which means they’re also opt-out again.

Against that backdrop, it’s nigh-on impossible to create the kind of boredom and insularity that forges teenage subcultures. Instead, less-than-model-perfect girls like I was (which is to say, nearly all girls) spend their time ‘perfecting’ selfies with Facetune for public consumption. In the process, many grow terrified of meeting people in the flesh and revealing their less-than-perfect real selves.

And this has ridden on the coat-tails of a more general withering of ‘IRL’ social life. We don’t hang out in cafes any more in the expectation of bumping into friends. It’s been rude to phone someone out of the blue since 2011. Often, we don’t make IRL friends at all: in a 2019 poll, 22% of millennials reported having no friends.

None of this is to lament the passing of the Nineties, a decade I loathed. For me personally, life is much nicer now. Nor was I even much for Friends in the Nineties. It felt too twee and feelgood for a sullen adolescent as I was, with Tipp-Ex slogans on my Doc Martens and a predilection for Nietzsche and pirate radio. I scorned its upbeat and gregarious vision, preferring the world sketched out in the subscription of Green Anarchist I devoured (wholly without irony) in my parents’ leafy commuter-belt home.

I longed to grow dreadlocks and run away from home in a caravan of crusties, or live in a tree to protest the Newbury bypass. I didn’t. But Spiral Tribe, whose open-air raves triggered legislation to ban unlicensed dance parties the year Friends launched, were close to the truth when they sang: “You might stop the party but you can’t stop the future”.

Friends was the party; it was the blue pill. And it did stop. But the future didn’t. There was a time we all believed, with Tony Blair, that ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ and that being more open — with our friendships, our emotions, our everything — was the royal road there. But it turned out that the flimsy, pastiche-laden, ironic Nineties of Tory sleaze, illegal raves, Britpop, football, and Princess Di really was as good as the End of History was ever going to get.

Now we’re through the looking glass. In this new post-literate world, along with the red pill you can have a black one, a white one, a pink, purple or even chaste pill. The only pill you can’t have is the blue one: the comfort blanket of Friends world, where “openness” never made life worse, the party never stopped, and the future never arrived.

That one is no longer available, except in obsolete formats that don’t work on modern screens.

I was there to talk about cluster bombs on The Moral Maze. Are there any moral limits on the sort of weapons one can use in a just war? Cluster bombs leave unexploded bomblets in the ground for years to come, with curious children often the casualties.

But most people at the BBC weren’t interested in this. A popular newsreader was alleged to have had dealings with at least one young person, the nature of which was still unclear. But the country — in its media and social media guise — was transfixed. The police have said they do not think any crime has been committed. The newsreader lies in a hospital bed, suffering severe distress. I wonder what the man from Kyiv thought about our moral priorities?

Perhaps this is an unfair juxtaposition. The Sun’s exposé of Huw Edwards could be seen as a legitimate expression of public-interest journalism. If the BBC’s highest paid newsreader had been acting inappropriately with people young enough to be his grandchildren, abusing his celebrity, isn’t this the sort of thing tabloid journalism exists to bring to light?

But there is another player in all of this who has come out of the last few days very badly indeed: the great British public. Notwithstanding the question of The Sun’s behaviour, we get the journalism we deserve. And there is nothing the British public enjoys more than seeing the mighty fall, especially when caught with their trousers down.

Social media is often blamed for amplifying our vices — and it does — but it also reflects back to us something of the underlying reality. We enjoy the downfall of others. We take a certain secret or not-so-secret pleasure in their suffering, dressing up our gossipy schadenfreude as moral concern. For too many of us, morality has become a pretext for cruelty. Something we relish, revelling in the prurient finger-pointing, pretending we’re part of some kind of high-minded moral crusade to root out hypocrisy. With a public like this, how can we expect the media to do anything other than spend its time sniffing about after other people’s sins?

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And which of us could withstand this sort of scrutiny? If our lives — our private lives — were written up as unsympathetically as possible, by people clever with words, intent on dialling up to the max all that we have got wrong, I suspect even the saintliest among us would look like a wrong-un. If you don’t think, “there but for the grace of God go I”, you don’t understand the terrifying power of the press.

But defend someone who has been disgraced, and the mob may turn on you too. You are an apologist for grooming or racism or whatever. “Look, he sits with sinners and tax collectors”, they said of Jesus, implying he was one too. So, best keep your head down. Or throw more stones at the guilty, thus to direct attention away from you.

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For who would take on the mob? Politicians need their votes, so are reluctant to stand against a social media cascade of mimetic hatred. Large organisations fear those weasel words of the PR advisor: “reputational risk”. And most individuals cower, powerless.

While all this poisonous dance is being played out, a man is hiding under the covers of his hospital bed, clearly unwell, surely terrified. He may well have done wrong. And of course, people do need to be held to account for this. But, as a man of faith, the hard work will be done in silence, as he confronts his maker. We used to believe that God was our judge. A God who knew all the secrets of our hearts. A God who loved us nonetheless. We don’t believe in this God anymore. We believe in Rupert Murdoch. And it’s not been a happy swap.

We young people do not do this anymore (television? sitting room?). The sodality of these collective experiences is lost to us, streaming alone in our bedroom-cells. But atomised as we are, generational mood is not completely lost to us. And over the past year, I realised we were all watching Seinfeld. It came around on the Netflix churn in late 2021, arriving like a fresh breeze across the plain of contemporary streaming. Its comic furniture was clearly old — the canned audience laughter, the answerphone messages, those airy flannel shirts tucked into belted jeans. But, in its essential pulse of irony and irreverence, it felt so fresh, so crisp. And, at a time of stultifying, hand-wringing sincerity, something as small as a nasty joke can feel like a punkish, even revolutionary act.

Seinfeld is a faulty sitcom. It doesn’t move properly; it’s missing key parts. It’s “about nothing”, goes the trite assertion. Its triumph is, therefore, one of absence, of refusal. Too incapable to act, Jerry Seinfeld plays himself: stand-up comedian, New Yorker, neat freak and mid-afternoon cereal-eater. But even as a lead he is not the wisecracking protagonist of too many American sitcoms. Instead, he and his apartment often just serve as a planetary centre for his three friends, George, Elaine and Kramer, to orbit. Between them, they exhibit all the vices of man: deceit, spite, narcissism, self-pity, sloth. “No hugging, no learning,” was the mission statement behind the show.

The emotional tenor is therefore pre-Darwinian, any possibility of human mutation, development or evolution flatly rejected. Characters only circle each other, pursued by a supporting cast of cranks, eccentrics and misfits. All motives are low; all manners undignified. Sex is a relentless yet elusive necessity to be pursued through any means, but romantic relationships are too complicated or just embarrassing to maintain. “Sex, that’s meaningless,” says Jerry. “But dinner — that’s heavy. That’s like an hour.” Girlfriends are always new; breakups always imminent. When George does get engaged, he spends the bulk of a season regretting it and trying to break it off.

Such paraphernalia of the predictable sitcom are aggressively boiled away to leave only the relentless imposition of irony: that crushing recognition of the gap between our perspective on things and their bald reality. Consequently, the world can be faced with a shrug or a cackle, too absurd and pointless to take seriously. Jerry can’t even take it seriously — often his mouth simply corpses into a leery smirk halfway through scenes.

The eyeroll, the irreverence, the irony, the stasis, the self-reference — all of this made Seinfeld into the great saga of popular postmodernism. But by the time of its finale, this was a cultural movement many lived in fear of. David Foster Wallace articulated a particularly terrified critique: television, he believed, had bred perilous levels of self-awareness into its viewing public, puncturing our sentimentality and leaving only “flatness, numbness and cynicism”. The critic James Wood agreed, identifying a literary fashion for long absurd novels full of irony, two-dimensional characters and conceptual play. He called it “hysterical realism”, and Seinfeld can be slotted into this genre, a “systems sitcom” in the vein of a Don DeLillo novel.

Between them, Wallace and Wood pointed the way toward the elevated, moralising path that culture has taken ever since. On television came Friends, immediately displacing Seinfeld as the popular chronicle of young America, and later becoming the great millennial sitcom. And, while imitating Seinfeld’s New York, group-of-mates setting, Friends is its irritating, naïve younger sibling, never escaping the frothy fountain of its opening credits. Its Manhattan is a brownstone dreamscape, where you live across the hall from your best friends, renting (where possible) from a monied family member.

And, like a particularly protracted and simplistic Austen novel, it submits tamely to the demands of romantic teleology. Essentially: hang around with your university mates for 10 seasons, and chances are you’ll end up marrying or having kids with at least one of them. Seinfeld’s singletons are achingly self-aware; the Friends friends don’t even know they’re in a TV show. They have shapely, winning flaws, not sordid neuroses. Optimistic, improving, they do silly things to cheer each other up like put turkeys on their head. They move to the suburbs to start families. There’s a lot of hugging.

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Friends was symptomatic of the mood of sincerity which has since overcast much of the culture. For the past two decades, the cultural stock exchange has been led by a boom in conveyed emotion and self-conscious virtue. We listen to heart-baring, confessional-romantic anthems. We read novels about toxic love quadrilaterals. We watch Ted Lasso conquer English football by baking biscuits. But in more recent years, even this has calcified, slipping from the pure emotional sincerity of Friends to a more overbearing preoccupation with moral sincerity.

Irony has come to be seen as a dereliction of our human and political responsibilities. In fiction, the critic Becca Rothfeld gives a name to this millennial middlebrow: “sanctimony literature”. In these books and outside them, writers and their characters exhibit an inquisitorial obsession with “goodness”. They stress over structural racism and their carbon emissions. They mull over the power imbalances of BDSM. And they are attracted by wholesome, generous, unbelievable people, whose complications come in the form of redeemable scars and wounds, not profanities or sins.

Thanks to the politicisation of everyday life, which accelerated in the late 2010s, this is now representative of an entire sanctimony culture. It demands the iterative performance of goodness across everyday life. We do it on social media, striving to display virtues personal (wealth, sociability, romantic success) and political. We willingly upload and surrender our personal lives, commodifying the very emotions that we seek to display. We buy self-care and wellness, a new marketplace which serves this desire for authentic fulfilment. We inspect artists and writers for actionable wrongdoing.

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When art and entertainment are run at such a hysterical temper, irony, detachment and withdrawal are an escape. And, therefore, so is Seinfeld, which makes no such gestures towards value or judgement. Its priorities are visible even at a structural level: for most of its run, each episode began and ended with a stand-up set by Jerry. All narrative momentum, any dramatic peril, dissolves and is then transformed into a framing device of pure humour. In this, Seinfeld is arguably the most straightforwardly comic comedy ever made. Morality is no consideration; politics are only ever an opportunity for social embarrassment. “You don’t have any black friends,” Jerry chides George, “Outside of us, you don’t have any white friends either.”

In this world of ethical grandstanding, where every word and gesture is freighted with political significance, a show about “nothing” is a little revelation. And there are other signs of this backlash. The one truly original form of digital-cultural expression, meme culture, is savagely ironic and two-dimensional, populated by wretched caricatures and vicious stereotypes designed to satirise and undermine the self-righteousness of society. Seinfeld has already become an integrated part of this universe, thoroughly pastiched through clipping and quotation, and it’s no surprise it fits so well. The style of online humour is pithy and generally dark, even existential. And there are a dozen such George lines per episode: “I’m depressed. I’m inadequate. I’ve got it all!”

If irony is back, it is a tool as well as a condition. Seinfeld came at the end of a long tail of postmodern art, which was interested in capturing and critiquing mass media. Our own transactional information age — far more intrusive and involving than even David Foster Wallace could pretend television is — has made a mockery of a generation which sought to use it sincerely, treating their personal lives with the cruelty of a reality TV show producer. The clarity of irony is its strength, burning through pretensions and leaving a behind a reality which is sometimes cold but always honest. This is the mood that is starting to circulate among Gen Z, a vibe shift still in inchoate infancy. And at the generationally-regenerative distance of 25 years, Seinfeld is part of our voice — and our rebellion.

Watching at home, transfixed to the television is my stepmother. One of Greece’s leading lawyers, she is not a woman who has much free time, or who indulges in frivolities. She is captivated.

It’s a Turkish soap — a dizi. If there is one country that has little time for Turkey and its exports, it’s Greece. But these shows, for all their absurdity and melodrama — or perhaps because of it — are a big draw. And Greece is not alone.

From the Mediterranean to the eastern bloc to Central Asia, Turkish soap operas are huge. In a 2011 survey, 78% of respondents across the Arab world reported having watched one. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve turned on a hotel TV, anywhere in the world, only to be assaulted by a barrage of emoting Turks with big hair.

Dizis (the Turkish hate calling them “soaps”) are unique: epic plotlines with seven minutes of adverts per 20 minutes of screentime, characterised by natural settings, a slow narrative pace, portentous music, and scripts dashed off week after week.

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They are also big business. Between 2020 and 2022, global demand grew by 44%. Loved across Central and Eastern Europe, including Serbia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Romania, Poland and Hungary, they also have huge followings in Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Japan and Vietnam. Turkey is now the world’s second largest exporter of TV, after the United States, with more than 650 million viewers in more than 140 countries.

And if you want impact, how’s this: in 2008, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia issued a Fatwa against channels that broadcast Noor, a dizi that centres on the lives of a husband and wife seeking to “reconcile the conflicting pressures of traditional and modern worlds”. As part of a wider attack on “depraved” TV moguls, he declared, instructively, that these sorts of programmes were a “deliberate attempt to impose an imported culture on Arab societies”.

Here is where these soaps get (for me, at any rate) interesting. They aren’t Citizen Kane, but they might well be Forrest Gump — that sweet rendering of the American Dream — which is vastly preferable if you’re interested in promulgating an idealised idea of your own society.

We forget the degree to which the global view of the United States has been and remains filtered through Hollywood — especially for the billions around the world who consume its product but will never visit the place. America may underpin the Bretton Woods order that it founded in the aftermath of the Second World War, but in much of the global popular imagination, it exists only in its movies, which project US culture to all corners of the world.

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Turkey does not have the pull of the American hegemon so it must draw on other things. First is ethnicity. In central Asia, countries such as Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have large Turkic populations: “Turkey is looked at here like a big brother,” one local told me. Then there is history. “And don’t forget,” he continued, “it founded an empire. People are proud of that. In this region, there’s a lot of goodwill toward the Turks, who are seen as a people like us who did really well. Turkey maintains this influence through its soaps, many of which are based on historical themes.”

He’s not wrong. One of the country’s biggest exports is the dizi Muhteşem Yüzyıl (Magnificent Century), which focuses on the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent during the glory days of the Ottoman Empire. In 2012, Reuters reported that Magnificent Century was watched by 200 million people in 52 countries.

Then there is the question of the language. Across the former Soviet Union, where over the past century Russian became the lingua franca at the expense of the various indigenous languages, the various peoples there are fighting what might be described as a postcolonial linguistic fightback against Moscow’s cultural imperialism. The language wars are raging.

In Azerbaijan, for example, another former Soviet state, Turkish is now threatening Russian’s former dominance. “Azerbaijani is a Turkic language,” one TV exec explained to me, “and Azerbaijanis learn it through soap operas. Terrestrial TV is in Azerbaijani; satellite carries Russian and Turkish content, the latter of which is far more influential and popular because of its soaps.” The dizi has become, in many parts of the world, the vessel through which Turkish culture and language is transmitted to local populations. As a result, newborns across the Balkans are being named after the leading characters in 1001 Nights — a dizi set in modern-day Istanbul.

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Perhaps their popularity shouldn’t come as such a surprise. Like all soaps, they deal with universal social issues, such as love across class divides, children born out of marriage and gender inequality. But their strength for their vast Muslim audiences is that they remain avowedly Islamic, albeit in a very Turkish way.

Despite President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s increasing Islamisation of society, Turkey remains pretty liberal compared to many other Arab and Middle Eastern countries. Storylines in Western shows often involve alcohol and sex, both of which are frowned upon in the Middle East. While Dizis tackle the subjects that everyone wants to watch — romantic relationships, jealousy, separations, betrayal and revenge — they do so without the sex, drugs and booze. Family-friendly viewing across the continents. Magic.

If the definition of soft power is the ability to co-opt rather than coerce, and is about shaping the preferences of others through appeal and attraction, then the dizis fit this model almost perfectly. As the American academic and diplomat Joseph Nye said about soft power: “The best propaganda is not propaganda.” He’s right. Who needs Goebbels when you’ve got Aşk-ı Memnu (Forbidden Love), a 79-part serial based on a classic romantic novel starring the immaculately coiffured heartthrob, Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ?

The Turks of course know this. Egemen Bağış, the former Minister of European Affairs, has declared that dizis are the “perfect tool for us to reflect Turkey’s image and Turkish lifestyle… Turkish series have become one of the most effective means of our soft power”. And it’s not just politicians who get it. İbrahim Şahin, Director General of Radio-Television of Turkey (TRT), articulated the central point: the model is not financial. “Maybe Turkey does not generate a high income from the series. But there is no price to transfer our culture and our social structures in the form of soft power abroad through the series.” Quite a statement from a media executive.

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It’s an understanding that goes all the way to the top. The importance of dizis is not lost on a politician as smart as Erdoğan, who is seeking re-election this weekend. Some commentators have even argued that they are key to Erdoğan’s efforts to rally his supporters, a “soft-power tool to make his policies more desirable, instead of direct imposition and propaganda”.

This can, however, be a double-edged sword. In the run up to the elections, a scandal has arisen around the splendidly-named dizi “Cranberry Sherbet” in which the devout woman Nursema, after being married off to an abusive husband by her conservative family, got thrown out of a window by him after she resisted his attempts to rape her.

The storyline has highlighted the issue of domestic violence, which has become a contentious issue in Turkey; that it centres on the type of religious female who voted Erdoğan into power is problematic for the government so close to the elections.

Erdoğan, though, always tried to exploit the popularity of the dizis and in this sense, they articulate a final, perhaps counterintuitive truism about soft power: its effects are almost always more potent at home than abroad. Earlier this year, Erdoğan declared that much could be learnt from the historical drama The Last Emperor, set during the reign of the 34th Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamit. For a man who is increasingly resembling a modern-day Sultan, it might be useful to have an electorate that includes large swathes of voters hooked on tales of a glorious strongman from the past.

If I’m right in thinking that none of these real-life horror stories has yet been adapted for the screen, then I’m surprised, because the scam, the fraud, the grift, the hoax, the long con, has become a cultural obsession. In the space of three months, Netflix alone has given us The Tinder Swindler, Inventing Anna, The Dropout, Bad Vegan, and Trust No One. False identities and weaponised charm are at the heart of the BBC dramas The Serpent and Chloe. There are hit podcasts about fiendish deception, too: Tortoise’s Sweet Bobby and the BBC’s The Missing Cryptoqueen. These stories have some of the attraction of the paranoid thriller, except that most of them are true and the victims aren’t nearly paranoid enough.

Popular culture has always magnified and marketed our fears — the Bomb, terrorism, technology out of control — and it’s not hard to see why we are currently preoccupied by deception. The 2008 crisis revealed that the global financial system was a Ponzi scheme built on the repackaging of mortgage debt, and almost nobody went to jail for it. Since then, a number of ballyhooed tech start-ups and cryptocurrencies have turned out to be built on sand. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes — the subject of The Dropout, a book, a documentary, a podcast series and the forthcoming Adam McKay movie Bad Blood — is only the most extreme example of a slick entrepreneur who exploited hype and greed to pull in vast sums of money for digital snake oil.

In the world of politics, we have seen an American president whose entire career was a series of escalating lies and a Russian president whose name has become synonymous with disinformation, while the sphere of online political commentary buzzes with unreliable narrators. We have also become more comfortable with amateur psychology. I don’t remember this much talk about sociopaths, narcissists and toxic fantasists a decade ago. I don’t remember gaslighting.

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Pulling all these strands together is the internet, whose initially exciting promise of the freedom to build a new identity online has, perhaps inevitably, led us into a Kafkaesque maze of scammers, fantasists and catfishers. We haven’t all been fooled into transferring our life savings into a fake account but we all know that it could happen because we’re constantly bombarded with fraud warnings and phishing emails. According to Which?, UK account-holders lost around £2.3bn to scams in the financial year 2020-21. So-called “romance frauds”, the cruellest of the lot, stole £100m in 2021. The prospect of being scammed isn’t an exotic possibility, like being eaten by a shark; it’s one careless click away.

Traditionally, there are three ways to tell the story of a con. In a movie like The Sting or Hustlers, the viewer is embedded with the scammers, who are usually charming rogues relieving gangsters and corporations of their ill-gotten gains. As a genre, it overlaps with the heist movie: you can applaud their chutzpah and artistry guilt-free. The new movie Operation Mincemeat, like Ben Affleck’s Argo, depicts an ornate ruse targeted at a tyrannical regime in order to save lives. Who could object to a story about scamming Hitler?

Conversely, a movie such as The Spanish Prisoner plants us in the clammy hands of the person being scammed. There is always that stomach-emptying, blood-freezing trapdoor moment when the victim finds out that their charismatic new friend’s “office” is empty and their “company” no more than a letterhead. In the third category, The Talented Mr Ripley supplies the paradoxical double pleasure of identifying with both scammer and scammed. You find yourself simultaneously rooting for both Ripley and his pursuers: catch the bastard, but not quite yet.

The fresh ingredient in the current wave of griftervision is the internet, presented here as a machine for lying. Only The Serpent is set in a different era — Charles Sobhraj murdered at least 20 tourists in southeast Asia in the Seventies — and involves crimes that would have been impossible to cover up in the age of social media updates and CCTV. Then again, you can imagine how a modern-day Sobhraj would adapt to the online age, sculpting new identities on digital platforms rather than razoring passports. That’s how Erin Doherty’s imposter Becky (aka Sasha) infiltrates Bristol’s bourgeois elite in Chloe. The show ultimately cops out by having her uncover crimes far worse than pretending to be a posh gallerist with demented dress sense — the people she is deceiving are the real rotters — but the details of her process are compelling. All the information she needs to inveigle her way into their lives (and by extension yours or mine) is freely available online.

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Like Tom Ripley, or Aubrey Plaza’s Instagram-addicted character in the black comedy Ingrid Goes West, Becky is a frustrated outsider who uses her wits to penetrate a bubble of smug privilege. Her imposture is a form of class warfare. Scam stories are misleadingly easy to savour when they target the vacuous, obnoxious rich rather than vulnerable pensioners in small towns. “Stories about blatant con-artists,” writes Jia Tolentino in her essay The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams, “allow us to have the scam both ways: we get the pleasure of seeing the scammer exposed and humiliated, but also the retrospective, vicarious thrill of watching the scammer take people for a ride.”

Tolentino awards the title of quintessential millennial scam to the Fyre festival: “the most gleefully covered disaster of 2017”. Promoter Billy McFarland, who attempted to organise a luxury festival in four months despite never having so much as attended a festival, is an appalling dolt but he was fleecing the kind of people who would consider blowing $400,000 on a VIP beach house at the behest of an Instagram influencer, so that made it funny. The Bahamian workers who got stiffed received far less attention in a story that became the Coachella of schadenfreude, the Instagram Altamont.

The story of Anna Delvey, played by Julia Garner in Inventing Anna, has a similar soak-the-rich quality. Delvey was an art-school dropout who blagged her way into the high life by posing as a German heiress. In reality, though, the victims of scams often have neither money nor power. The Missing Cryptoqueen cuts between the glamorous antics of Dr Ruja Ignatova, architect of a pyramid scheme based on the bogus cryptocurrency OneCoin, and the ordinary lives she has ruined. The series drives home the human cost of her multi-billion-dollar grift by ending on some of her victims in Uganda. The best scam narratives are as concerned with the victims as they are enthralled by the swindlers.

Money is at least a comprehensible motive for ripping a hole in somebody’s life. Sweet Bobby unravels how a successful young woman ensnared her cousin in a catfishing scam which lasted eight years and involved more than 60 fictional characters, but never why. The culprit, Simran Bhogal, seems to regard it as a consensual game, a fantasy to pass the time. She comes across as tetchy and aggrieved by the suggestion that she’s the bad guy. The successful scammer combines delusional self-belief with nihilistic contempt for the suckers, yet when they are exposed it often feels as if there is really nothing there. You rip off the mask and the face is blank.

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If the only information available about modern dating were from TV, movies and podcasts, nobody would dare do it. Catfish: The TV Show, inspired by the 2010 movie about online deception, is now in its eighth season. Simon Leviev, the villain in The Tindler Swindler, was an Israeli conman who used the money he’d tricked out of one woman to convince the next woman that he was a wealthy playboy, and so on to the tune of $10m. Like “Bobby” in Sweet Bobby and Anthony Strangis in Bad Vegan, Leviev crafted an elaborate narrative, buttressed with phoney digital evidence and dramatic twists involving pernicious foe. Strangis built an even more ambitious alternative reality around his mark, the vegan restaurateur Sarma Melngailis. “I feel close to former cult members because we understand one another,” Melngailis said recently. Theranos, OneCoin and LuLaRoe, the fashion line-cum-pyramid scheme covered in the documentary LuLaRich, have also been compared to cults. The object of the scammer is to inspire belief and silence doubts.

Such stories won’t be the last. In the most generous reading, they are useful cautionary tales, like very expensive fraud warnings, which equip us to deal with the next German heiress or Israeli diamond dealer who comes along and asks us for a bridging loan. “I want this stuff to be useful, not merely fodder for people’s creepy entertainment,” Melngailis said.

It’s a nice thought but in practice these stories often inspire victim-blaming rather than empathy. By anatomising the plot after the fact, they invite viewers both to marvel at the reality-bending audacity of these charismatic devils and fully believe that they would not have fallen for it. Why someone would maintain an eight-year relationship with a person they’d never met can seem as inexplicable as why someone would pay £160,000 to a company that they had no history with, or invest in a cryptocurrency that doesn’t work, but it happens. Being vulnerable and credulous is not a rare condition. So I worry that this kind of entertainment breeds suspicion and paranoia, but I worry more that it is justified.

The pivot point of Squid Game, the captivating South Korean miniseries that has become Netflix’s most popular series at launch, is its second episode. By now the premise has been vividly established: 456 financially desperate people have been transported to a private island to compete in a series of homicidally souped-up children’s games to win a jackpot of 45.6 billion won (£29 million). The winner takes all; the losers die.

It’s not hard to track the DNA of this death-game concept through The Hunger Games and Purge franchises, the 2000 Japanese smash Battle Royale, and the 1970s Stephen King novellas The Running Man and The Long Walk, all the way back to Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game. Usually, though, such contests are conducted by the state in a near-future dystopia. While the island resembles the micro-dystopia seen in the Sixties TV show The Prisoner — with which Squid Game shares a playground colour scheme, tone of sinister courtesy and replacement of names with numbers — the world it inhabits is present-day South Korea.

Another traditional premise that showrunner Hwang Dong-hyuk rejects is the idea that there is no escape. According to the rules, contestants are free to abandon the game and return to society if a simple majority votes to do so, which is what happens in episode two. Game over? Of course not. The show then explains how the characters’ everyday lives are so brutally, intolerably restricted that even near-certain death seems like the better option. During the vote, one character says: “Will it be any different if we leave? Life out there is hell anyway, damn it.” Another agrees: “I’d rather stay here and die trying than die out there like a dog.” Ultimately, 93% of the contestants choose to rejoin the game. The episode is called “Hell”.

These scenes of lives under hideous financial pressure are not a world away from the work of Bong Joon-ho, whose 2019 film Parasite, the most successful South Korean movie ever, won four Academy Awards. Whether he’s working in a realist mode (Mother), science fiction (Snowpiercer) or a hybrid of the two (Okja, The Host), Bong is obsessed with inequality and injustice, although his conclusions, especially when it comes to solidarity among the have-nots, are diverse and contradictory. He is not alone: Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 arthouse hit Burning also depicts the human cost of economic desperation.

Squid Game may not have the thematic complexity of Parasite but both are thrilling class-war allegories with mass appeal. (It has received the ultimate phenomenon-confirming accolade of a ridiculous moral panic about schoolchildren mimicking games which are, minus the fatalities, simply old-fashioned children’s games.) But even though inequality has recently become a common undercurrent in Hollywood movies, from Nomadland to Joker to Us, there’s no equivalently popular explicit satire in the US, which raises two questions: Why are these stories coming out of South Korea? And why are they sweeping the world?

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“Korea, on the surface, seems like a very rich and glamorous country now, with K-pop, high-speed internet and IT technology,” Bong told the Guardian last year, “but the relative wealth between rich and poor is widening. The younger generation, in particular, feels a lot of despair.”

Starting in the Sixties, South Korea experienced a hyper-accelerated version of capitalism which pulled tens of millions out of poverty. In recent decades, GDP growth has only dipped once, during the 1997-8 Asian financial crisis. But this frantic expansion also introduced an unfamiliar dog-eat-dog mentality to Korean society. “Korea achieved economic development in a short span of time, which is why competition can be more intense here than in other countries,” says Jung Ho-Yeon, who plays the sullen North Korean defector Kang Sae-byeok. The net worth of the country’s top 20% of earners is 166 times that of the bottom 20% and rising fast. The birth rate is falling because many young people feel unable to afford a family.

Hwang, who conceived Squid Game in 2008 when his own family was struggling with debt, believes that inequality in South Korea had to get worse before anyone would commission it. “Sadly, the world has changed in that direction,” he recently told Korea Times. “The series’ games that participants go crazy over align with people’s desires to hit the jackpot with things like cryptocurrency, real estate and stocks.”

South Koreans work some of the longest hours in the world but that is not always enough to stay on top of rocketing house prices, inflation and medical bills, so many workers turn to get-rich-quick schemes. South Korea is the world’s third largest market for cryptocurrencies, some of which are fraudulent. When Squid Game’s main character, the shambolic gambling addict Seong Gi-Hun, is first invited to join the game, his initial response is scepticism: “Is this some sort of new pyramid scheme?” He’s not wrong.

The other option for the so-called “dirt spoon” is debt. Squid Game incorporates a real TV news clip reporting that the GDP to household debt ratio has risen to 96.9%, but it is already out of date: by the end of 2020 that figure was 103.8%. The average debt equals 171.5% of annual disposable income, rising to 270% for millennials in their 30s. It’s no surprise that debt is the leading cause of suicide in South Korea — or that it is debt, rather than poverty, which plagues most of Squid Game’s players.

South Korea is at a stage where social pressure to succeed no longer aligns with the chances of success. Squid Game, then, is an extreme example of a common malaise: what happens when people who have been told they can thrive as long as they work hard and play by the rules discover that the game is broken and they cannot win after all?

But the show also combines this economic reality with Korea’s long tradition of satire, to which the concept of han is fundamental. Dating back to the 1910-45 Japanese occupation of Korea, the meaning of han is so fluid and contested that it is effectively untranslatable, though the scholar Suh Nam-dong gives a taste of its complexity and inadvertently captures what it’s like to watch Squid Game: “a feeling of unresolved resentment against injustices suffered, a sense of helplessness because of the overwhelming odds against one, a feeling of acute pain in one’s guts and bowels, making the whole body writhe and squirm, and an obstinate urge to take revenge and to right the wrong — all these combined.” This version of han breeds a potent satirical blend of black comedy, violence, protest and despair.

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Squid Game may not be strictly concerned with class — some players never had anything; some had it and lost it — but they have all encountered more snakes than ladders. Debt and desperation are the great levellers. Key characters symbolise different fractures in Korean society. Kang Sae-byeok speaks to the lasting trauma of a country split in half in 1945. Player 244, a corrupt pastor, represents the evangelical megachurches that sprang up in the Eighties and Nineties. Abdul Ali is an undocumented Pakistani migrant trapped by an employer who refuses to pay him. The embezzling banker Cho Sang-woo shows that even overachievers can be destroyed by their aspirations. One of the show’s many tragedies is that nobody really needs 45.6 billion won. After a certain point, the survivors could split the pot and all escape their financial abyss, but sharing the spoils is antithetical to the rules of the game.

The black-masked “Front Man”, who runs the game for its unseen creator, insists, in an episode called “A Fair World”, that it is more just than capitalism: “Everyone is equal while they play this game. Here, the players get to play a fair game under the same conditions. Those people suffered from inequality and discrimination out in the world, and we’re giving them the last chance to fight fair and win.” Even before we discover that this is complete bullshit, we see how the game breeds its own inequalities, whether by fomenting division between the players or requiring them to make choices without understanding the consequences. In the second game, players must choose one of four shapes before learning that they must carve it out of thin honeycomb with a needle. “What kind of a sick game is this?” protests one doomed player. “Why do some get an easy shape when others are stuck with difficult ones?”

Squid Game’s most hateful characters are the cold-eyed realists who understand that morality is a fatal luxury in this game. Empathy and collaboration occasionally pay dividends but the gangster Jang Deok-su finds that violence and ruthlessness are just as useful in the game as they are in real life, while the canny Sang-woo proves adept at abusing the letter of the rules. Inside and outside the game, fairness and equality of opportunity are perfomatively celebrated but not practised. There is no relief from han.

The show’s only serious blunder is the introduction of some super-rich VIPs whose cartoon villainy reminded me of a line from The Simpsons episode “Kamp Krusty”: “Gentlemen, to evil!” Hwang says that they represent “the power elite, the global CEOs” but a sustained metaphor for structural injustice does not benefit from a gilded clique of irredeemable bastards. Unlike Parasite, which is smart enough to make clear that the solution to an unjust system is not simply nicer rich people, Squid Game threatens to squander its satirical momentum.

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Fortunately, the finale is a suitable downer, confirming that the game is not just a sham but so corrupting and brutalising that victory cannot be enjoyed by anyone with a conscience. (Its bitterly ironic title, “One Lucky Day”, references a classic 1924 Korean novel about backfiring aspiration.) For all the memes and merchandising opportunities, Squid Game is so shatteringly bleak that I find it hard to agree with Jung Ho-yeon that it teaches viewers “to have faith in humanity”.

But even if you frown on its spectacular violence and relatively broad strokes, you have to acknowledge that this savage allegory for a splintering society is reaching exponentially more people than Burning, or even Parasite, and you have to ask why. For ultimately, the sense that the game is rigged is not just South Korea’s problem. Squid Game has the power to fill anyone with han.

If that intrigued you, you could sign up for one of its “Executive Success Programs” (ESPs for short), which promised to help you overcome your “limiting beliefs”, or the “Jness” scheme for “female empowerment”. The centres also don’t exist anymore and nor do the ESPs or Jness or any of Nxivm’s other vowel-light offerings; in fact, the entire organisation was wound up in 2018, because Nxivm was not after all a benign vendor of self-improvement snake oil.

Nxivm, as two new true crime documentaries explore, was a sex cult in which women were enslaved, trafficked, abused and branded. The brand was a design consisting of the letters “KR”, in tribute to Nxivm’s founder and leader Keith Raniere (or “Vanguard”, as Nxivm inductees called him). In 2019, Raniere was convicted on seven counts including sex trafficking and child pornography; he’s currently serving a life sentence.

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At what point in the Nxivm process might you have realised something wasn’t right? Perhaps in the very first session you went to, when you were made to relive some traumatic experience in front of the audience in order to achieve a supposed “breakthrough”. But maybe you would have been reassured by the celebrity endorsements (Allison Mack, the woman from the Superman show!) or the general sense of good intention.

Perhaps, it was as you were completing your first course — but then, these were very expensive and you’d wanted to get your money’s worth. (One ex-member says she spent $145,000 on classes over the years.) Or perhaps when you were invited to join the ultra-elite secret society DOS, which stood for “Dominus Obsequious Sororium” — a bastardised Latin phrase roughly meaning “master over the slave women”. The woman inviting you would be someone you looked up to in this organisation, someone you trusted, a friend.

In any case, once you were in, you would be too compromised to think of getting out, because DOS members were required to hand over “collateral”: naked pictures or exposing information. Anyway, who would you turn to? Nxivm taught its members that anyone who criticised it was a “suppressive”; if you were close to friends or family, you would be commanded to separate from them in order to resolve your “dependency issues”.

When you were set a target weight that meant only eating 500 calories a day, or punished with cold showers, or given the task of “seducing Vanguard” in order to overcome your “limiting beliefs”, it would be too late to even think about saying no. By the time you were subjected to the brand, nothing beyond this would make sense to you. The next time, you’d be the one holding it.

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The point is, Nxivm worked like a ratchet. To progress up each level of the organisation, you had to swallow more than your dignity would easily allow you to take back. And this is how every cult and every scam works (before Raniere got into the self-improvement racket, he was plying regular pyramid schemes) – by pulling on that thread in your chest where all the shame is. You obey your “master” and pay tribute to “Vanguard” (Vanguard!) because if you stop believing in it, all the humiliation and the crotch shots and the pain will be for nothing.

It’s not really possible to brainwash someone, if by brainwashing you mean to take control of their psyche wholesale and force them into actions against their will. But you can, by a process of habituating shocks, force someone to surrender their sense of self over time; to give up any relationships that would challenge the values you want them to hold; to do things, not against their will, but because they know in advance what they have to do to win approval.

Nxivm’s real genius was to use the jargon of female empowerment to guide this process. After all, what kind of woman is most likely to be attracted to the idea of being “empowered”? Ones who, by definition, don’t feel very powerful. Ones who, for whatever reason, are going to be particularly vulnerable. The cult taught a gospel of “self-victimisation” — if you felt like a victim, you could liberate yourself simply by deciding whatever had happened to you wasn’t that bad. It sounded like a way to shrug off trauma; it was, of course, a way to make women feel wholly responsible for whatever was done to them.

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If you participated in the Jness course, you would learn that the way to thrive as a woman was to accept that men are “linear and logical” while women “lack structure” and need to submit. If you went one stage further and took the “Society of Protectors” relationship training in the belief that this could help you understand men better, you’d actually be subjected to a schedule of physical and psychological humiliation: the aim, the women were told, was to show them what a male upbringing was like and teach them that they couldn’t “get away with things” because they were female. The effect, of course, was to drill women into accepting the deeply sexist belief that women are inferior and exist to serve men.

But the complicating point here is that the people who did many of the worst things in Nxivm were not men. Raniere’s second-in-command was a woman, Nancy Salzman. She pleaded guilty to offences, as did her daughter; so did Mack, the Smallville actress, who was in the layer directly below Raniere in the DOS structure. Mack recruited several female slaves of her own, including India Oxenberg, daughter of Dynasty star Catherine Oxenberg. India (whose documentary Seduced: Inside the Nxivm Cult attempts to make sense of her own experience) had another three slave women under her. The roles of victim and accomplice overlap and blur, though the power all draws up towards Raniere, whose sexual desires were paramount.

Clearly, fear is the reason most of these women collaborated, but for some of them that fear was surely mixed with a less creditable motivation: because, if you want to talk about “empowerment”, the moment you hold a cauterising iron over another woman’s skin is pretty undeniably a moment of power. Sometimes, knowing how it feels to be a victim is no guarantee of compassion for the next person to take your place — it just means you know that you really don’t want to go back there. Subjects of social media pile-ons can become fervent participants in attacks on other people. Trafficked women sometimes make highly efficient brothel madams. Being bullied is a wonderful education in how to bully.

It doesn’t take a cult to make women hurt other women, degrade other women, believe insulting things about women as a whole, take the side of men over women. Women do this kind of thing to themselves and each other all the time — in the name of religion, or politics, or sexual liberation. Give up any claim to power in your own right, and grasp at the next best thing while stamping on your sisters’ fingers. The weirdest thing about Nxivm, when you strip out all the lurid horrors, is how not-weird it looks.

Aeschylus himself may have fought, in 480BC, at the Battle of Salamis. In 472, the Athenian warrior-playwright won first prize at the City Dionysia festival for a trilogy that included The Persians. The play imagines the aftermath of Salamis at the stricken court of Xerxes, King of Kings, in the wake of the Athenian naval victory that scuppered his rash invasion of Greece. Aeschylus probably wrote other topical plays but The Persians is the only one, and the oldest of his works, to survive — and so ranks as the founding text of Western drama.

Staging current events could stir controversy in ancient Athens, as it does today. An older dramatist, Phrynichus, was fined a thousand drachmas after a work of his embarrassingly revisited a Greek defeat at Persian hands. In contrast, Aeschylus plays patriotically safe. Still, The Persians shows that reality honourably shared the Athenian scene with mythology. Documentary drama boasts roots as deep as the European stage itself.

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History began with a counterfactual

By Tom Holland

The critical quarrels of the City Dionysia have not gone away. Bring actual, near-contemporary events to stage or screen, and you risk today’s equivalents of the thousand-drachma fine — lawsuits, political and media outrage, career blight. Concoct imaginary politicians and their deeds, and a public steeped in the 24/7 melodrama of rolling news may find the made-up stories tame and lame.

Last weekend, BBC1 began to broadcast the playwright David Hare’s four-part series Roadkill: the latest of many attempts to channel the theatre of politics into effective TV narrative. Roadkill invents, rather than adapts, characters and events. It stars Hugh Laurie as Peter Laurence, a Conservative transport minister with a cheeky, populist persona (“People like me because I break the rules”).

Laurence dodges one scandal, successfully suing a newspaper for libel, only to find that his well-buried past threatens him with others. The opening scenes merge two favourite political-drama tropes: backstairs skullduggery in Westminster and Whitehall and old skeletons, whether erotic or financial, rattling in closets. Scenes set in a women’s prison serve to yoke grand affairs of state to life below the salt: a familiar swerve in Hare’s work — and, for that matter, in Shakespeare’s Histories.

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By Tanya Gold

At least since the mid-1960s, when Dennis Potter converted his own experience as a Labour candidate into two BBC plays about his alter ego “Nigel Barton”, political dramatists for television have sought to balance the competing claims of fiction and reality. Some playwrights have followed Aesychlus in his Persians vein, mining events for their plots and people — as James Graham did in Brexit: The Uncivil War, or Peter Morgan has in his monarchical saga The Crown (significantly, neither project came from the BBC). Others, from the BBC’s original Machiavellian farce House of Cards to series such as Paula Milne’s The Politician’s Wife, have skirted the minefield of docudrama and opted for fictitious scenarios. One of the best-loved corridors-of-power epics, Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing, blends hyper-realistic detail about US government with the wish-fulfilment fantasy of a liberal White House, transmitted during the presidency of George W. Bush.

Roadkill firmly eschews what James Graham calls “fact-based fiction” and largely avoids allusions that could quickly pass their sell-by date. Hare argues in his introduction to the series that “So much television drama is now based on documentary events that it is hard to remember the primary trigger for fiction is meant to be the imagination.”

Once a research-based dramatist — in plays such as Racing Demon, about the Church of England, or The Absence of War, on the Labour Party — he now assumes that too much topicality will shrink his canvas. “In Roadkill, neither Covid nor Brexit consume every politician’s waking hour,” he writes. In this light, the best political fiction unveils the core truths of personalities and processes while avoiding the messy taint of actuality, and the ruses of roman-à-clef disguise. “Mine is a parallel world to the real one,” Hare maintains, “and there is no secret passage between the two.”

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J.B. Priestley, visionary of England

By Boyd Tonkin

Here, Hare is obeying the ancient preference for the general or exemplary plot over a mere description of events that dates back to Aristotle’s Poetics. “The poet’s [i.e. creative writer’s] function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but the kind of thing that might happen,” Aristotle insists. Therefore “poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.” Roadkill opts, in Aristotle’s terms, for the universal over the particular. This represents not just a time-hallowed choice but a prudent one for a broadcaster always mistrusted by Conservative governments, and now more vulnerable than ever to hostile Tory fire.

Laurence, in common with most TV politicians, comes across as more operator than ideologue. (He announces early on that “You have to forget about Brexit,” thus letting his creator, and the series’ funder, off a nastily barbed hook.) Dramatists who invent rather than reflect events like to suppose they are stripping an ephemeral veil of policy away from the eternal pulse of pride, greed, lust and ambition throbbing beneath. Nothing in Roadkill hints that Hare will stray far from this approach.

Laurence, “a relaxed Conservative who admires progress”, makes bland statements of a vaguely free market/libertarian bent. He, the Croydon lad made good, is the story, not his principles. So far, so TV-typical. Parliamentary and political drama tends to be not anti-Tory or anti-Labour, but anti-ideology. “Universal” human passions matter more, as do the equally timeless motifs of careers that wax and wane, colleagues who flatter then betray, and triumphs that turn to ash. The post-Cold War assumption that politics turns exclusively on image, spin and showbiz put a postmodern, end-of-history twist on this downgrading of big ideas.

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By Tanya Gold

In the 21st century, however, all-consuming ideology has returned — and, with it, the need for political drama to engage with the content of beliefs as much as with the character of their upholders. Writers — such as Graham and Morgan — who do bring actuality to screen and stage are better placed to do exactly that. Morgan’s 2003 TV film of the pact between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, The Deal, set the tone for later docudramas, with its twin-track attention to principle and personality. Although far from flawless, and contentiously selective, Graham’s referendum drama did address ideas and technologies. It amounted to more than a Dominic Cummings biopic.

Tales of political strategy and subterfuge that diminish the convictions that fuel intrigue feel increasingly threadbare. For the lurching upheavals of our times have left stories of polite (or even vicious) political manoeuvrings about not-very-much looking like an antiquarian sideshow. With austerity, Brexit, Trump and now the pandemic, we may have drunk too deeply on reality’s strong wine. So Roadkill’s wrangles over privatising prisons taste like thin broth in comparison. Laurence may assert that “This is the moment we start again as a nation”. But Hare’s show has yet to explore the deeper reasons for that collective reboot.

Of course, James Graham’s “fact-based fiction” sets its own artistic and ethical challenges. He believes that audiences have a firm grasp of docudrama conventions and are seldom misled. Speaking of The Crown, which can stretch its artistic licence to the limit, Peter Morgan has argued that viewers “understand a lot of it is conjecture. Sometimes there are unavoidable accuracy blips… But I’m absolutely fastidious about there being an underlying truth.” People who choose a career in public affairs must now expect dramatists as well as journalists to compose a subjective version of their “underlying truth”. The Crown, though, makes queasy, if transfixing, viewing precisely because the royal family did not choose. “Fact-based fiction” still needs deeper thought, clearer pathways, keener criticism.

No doubt subjects of Xerxes, King of Kings, objected to Aeschylus’s portrayal too. When the playwright first put statesmen, and statecraft, on stage, the beleaguered Athenians could take nothing for granted about their identity, status or survival. Another period of flux, fear and division means that the most urgent TV drama now pivots back to real events and their makers. Should calm return, and harmony reign, then fictional suited smoothies — Roadkill-style — might satisfy us on screen again. For now, the hunger for transformed reality feels sharper than ever. In due time, I hope to watch a Covid-themed dramadoc to match the genre’s one undisputed masterpiece so far: Craig Mazin’s great miniseries Chernobyl.

’Roadkill’ continues on BBC1 on Sundays. The fourth series of ‘The Crown’ starts on Netflix on 15 November

But for me, there was one great televised competition still in play. And if in the end, inevitably, the final was not quite the match of the series, nor the defining clash of two great individual goal scorers everyone was hoping for, so what? That has never stopped the FA Cup from commanding the nation’s affection. And at least University Challenge has never had to have a rematch at Old Trafford on a rainy Tuesday night.

The greatest TV quiz show of all time is, like me, over 50 years old now. Unlike me, it has never looked fitter.

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By Simon Evans

It has been compared not only to football’s most famous knockout competition but to everything from Wimbledon to Championship Darts. On this occasion, Imperial College London vs Corpus Christi, Cambridge was more of an intellectual Sumo match. Imperial got that first crucial cerebral shove in early, slicing Paxman’s opening question off at the ankles, then holding possession in the scrum to establish first base with a solid two out of three on the supplementaries, 20-nil up all before the second roll of the dice. It was as good as over by the first time out.

In Monday night’s final, the competitors displayed nerves of steel

After Brandon spotted the presence of Iran in the name of the Nobel laureate in less time than it took for the question itself to reach my ears, Corpus Christi began to panic. They lunged at the next question inadequately equipped with a viable answer and were briefly in negative equity. Imperial now eased into a comfortable, commanding posture and were never troubled for the remainder of the match.

To be fair, when Corpus Christi did get a toe hold, Wang’s urgency on the five pointers was electric, desperately driving pitons into the increasingly sheer rock face confronting his team — only to be shouldered aside, often as not by Imperial’s captain, who was hitting his marks in this match like Jocky Wilson on EPO. All it was missing was some fans on the pitch, who thought it was all over.

Sadly, it is now.

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The guilty pleasure of daytime TV

By Gareth Roberts

All spectator sports are about watching grace and competence under pressure, and the character that reveals. University Challenge does this better than any other format, indoors or out, which is why it doesn’t need to dangle financial carrots in front of the contestants to keep them and the viewers onside.

It’s the only show I even try to watch as scheduled, and since entering lockdown has been my temporal anchor, the Pole Star by which I correct my course as we continue to oscillate around what is still quaintly known as “the week”.

I’m not alone. The show pulls in regular viewing figures in excess of three million. Not as great as its heyday in the mid-Sixties, when it delivered four times that. But in an era notorious not only for the splintered mirror, the fractured media of choice, but also for a viewing public believed to regard conspicuous displays of intelligence as vaguely offensive, three million is quite something.

And if anything University Challenge questions have got harder. Or at least, the science ones have got harder. The ones about ska and The Clash seem to have got easier. I guess it balances out.

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By Richard Askwith

I should admit at this point that I have contrived to appear on not one but two of the show’s seasonal, novelty variations. Both University Challenge – The Professionals and a Christmas series that was as close to ‘Celebrity University Challenge’ as Paxman’s perma-curled upper lip would have permitted him to utter.

On the first occasion, after getting off to a good start, the Comedians team were soundly beaten by the Ministry of Justice. They went on to be series winners so we couldn’t complain, and we all said we’d had a lovely day out: but I was quietly furious. On the second occasion, I was on representing Southampton University. We edged a win, against York, but then had to wait several days while they recorded further heats to see if we had won by enough to go through to the semi-finals.

We hadn’t. It still hurts. Every time I hear the word “woke”, the Nutcracker Suite or the poetry of W. B. Yeats, I am back there in a flash, and this time, I buzz.

There are of course other TV quizzes. Mastermind is usually the one mentioned in the same breath, and I have been lucky enough to appear on its ‘celebrity’ isotope, too. Believe me, no one is more aware of the degree to which that term has been stretched beyond its natural elasticity in order to accommodate contestants like me.

But despite the Gestapo machismo of the famous Black Chair, University Challenge is the greater test, because it’s a test of steel, of resolve, as well as of knowledge.

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By Peter Franklin

Sit in the black chair and either you can remember the answer or you can’t. You have to decide how long to wait while your brain shuffles frantically through its Rolodex before turning to you with an apologetic shrug — but by and large the viewer is watching a display of information retrieval.

Only in University Challenge do you have to brave your team mates’ wrath when you decide to open fire, not knowing if you have got the right scent. To lunge ahead of your own cohort — who might well be poised to answer correctly — and risk not merely getting the answer wrong but losing ground already hard won… this is the sadistic genius of the format.

This is why the show commands loyalty even when half the questions concern aspects of quantum mechanics so involved, most viewers wouldn’t even be able to give an answer that was meaningfully wrong.

There is a danger when things get too intellectualised that you could lose touch with the mainstream crowd. Philip Larkin wrote of modern jazz that it was too damn clever for its own good, that solos now only made sense to other musicians, and that consequently the tension had been broken between the performer and the crowd. In that context, he very likely has a point.

But not University Challenge. We are watching intellects beyond our ken, for sure, but we love to watch them swoop and soar. Where some quizzes — Hello, Bradley! What ho, Xander! — are like watching Sunday League football — shouting “Shoot! Shoot, you plonker!” at our muddy avatars on the pitch — University Challenge is like watching eight Rogers Federer, returning balls we can’t even believe they reached.

At least, it was. The series finished on Monday night. It is now Wednesday. And lockdown suddenly got real.