What The Hades?

Passage to Pluto

By Hugh Walters


5...

I recently attempted to do an on-line CBT/mindfulness stress-reduction course.

Apparently, it is possible to relieve stress by imagining that your anxieties are an orange and letting the orange gently float away into a relaxing sunset. You have to imagine the texture of the orange and the colour of the fruit-bowl and what kind of relaxing beach the sun is setting over.

I assume that this works for some people or the therapists wouldn’t keep selling it.

The main thing I discovered from the course was that I didn’t have a visual imagination.

Come to think of it, I must have known that already. So the main thing I discovered from the course is that some people do have one.

I definitely know what oranges look like. If I appeared in a court and was asked to describe one orange in particular, I could state some solid facts about it. “There was a blue spot near the stalk, your honour. I thought that was odd at the time.”

But forming a mental picture of the orange and holding it before my mind’s eye: and then adding the tree, the sunset, the yellow bird and the tallyman tallying his bananas entirely eluded me? The best I could achieve was brief mental orange shaped snapshots amid the encroaching darkness.

Is this normal? Is this common? Is there a three letter abbreviation that I can apply for?

For the record, I found that breathing in through my nose to the count of six and then slowly blowing the seeds off an imaginary dandelion made me as calm as I am ever likely to be.

I suppose that this disability—or perhaps it is a superpower—affects the way I read and the kinds of books I enjoy. It might explain why I find “difficult” books like the Silmarillion relatively approachable, and approachable books like Conan the Freebooter relatively difficult.

It would also explain why I like fiction where someone has taken the trouble to actually draw the pictures he wants me to see, instead of leaving me to do all the hard work for myself, or “comics” as we used to call them.

I have talked before about book-memes on Facebook: I have even insinuated that the "Reading is Brilliant" threads are often implicitly anti-literate. You tell me that books are magical devices that carry me away to places I have never been where I will meet people who are more real to me than my friends and family. I am apt to reply “Are they bollocks!” I tell you that Tolkien’s archaic prose and Salman Rushdie’s oblique metaphors are the exact things which make them both in their different ways great writers. I fully understand why you want to reply that I have taken all the fun out of reading. Across such a chasm, no bridge can be constructed. If you enjoy being physically present in Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory, experiencing all the smells and textures and sounds of dissected corpses and arcane machinery, you don’t want to hear Mr Pedant telling you to pay attention to the actual words Mrs Shelley used to describe it. Or, indeed, pointing out that she didn’t.

I blame school teachers. For everything. Many people of my shape and demeanour are unable to quite shake the belief that football is primarily an excuse for big kids to kick little kids in the shins and a pretext for repressed adults to look at teenagers in states of undress.We don’t quite literally believe it, but we feel in our guts that it must be true. And some people enjoyed Eng. Lit. almost as much as I enjoyed PE. It must as strange to them that I would pay money to watch actors performing Shakespeare as it is to me that they would pay money to watch other people doing a kick about on a field.

It's a prejudice. But not everyone realises it's a prejudice. Some people think that “I had to sing boring hymns at infant school” is a theological position.

Miles Kington said that the trouble with O Level French was that O Level French is not the language that French people actually speak. I think that school PE did sometimes involve the playing of a game that was in some respects quite similar to the one that football fans enjoy. But school English was largely detached from anything the normal theatre-goer or the normal novel-reader would engage in voluntarily. I don’t know what the normal poetry reader does. Is there even such a beast? Or is poetry written by the sorts of people who write poetry for the benefit of the sorts of people who publish and review poetry books? You can fill a medium sized coffee shop with people who want to hear actual vernacular performance poems, but that wouldn’t be caught dead between the covers of a school anthology.

Now, obviously, speaking for myself, I like thinking about books. I like writing about books. I like reading books about books (“criticism”). I even like reading books about books about books (“critical theory”). Whether we are talking Demons of the Punjab or a Passage to India, I have no truck at all with people who say “You ought not to think about this: you ought to just allow it to wash over you.” ("It's just a TV show! Just a piece of entertainment! The whale is just a whale and he said her hair was red because red is the colour her hair actually was!") But I think it is a really bad idea to think about a book before you have read it, or instead of reading it. I think it is an error to suppose that Dickens wrote David Copperfield mainly to give students raw material for their essays. (A surprising number of people believe that the main reason God wrote the Bible was to give Vicars something to preach sermons about.) I think that your first, second and third reaction to Waiting For Godot ought to be “What a strange, puzzling, fascinating, peculiar play.” I think that it is okay to whistle a catchy tune without wanting to find out what makes a tune catchy. He who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.

But perhaps we are simply talking about people with, and people without, visual imaginations? If the majority of people genuinely can think of an orange when they are told to think of an orange, then presumably, when someone speaks of horses they really do think that they see them, pounding their hoofs in the receiving earth. And if you are in that majority, then the person who tells you to count up how many I-ams Shakespeare put into each of his pentameters and find out what "puissance" means is missing the whole point of the play. You aren’t being taught to play football better: you are being told that you oughtn't to have been "playing" it at all. 

I am not a formalist. I am not claiming that the only things you can definitely say about oranges is that they have three syllables and don’t rhyme with anything. I have just read the latest Knausgaard, The School of Night, which would, incidentally, be an excellent jumping on point for anyone who hasn’t read any Knausgaard and would like to find out what all the fuss is about. It is nominally the fourth volume in his excruciating Morning Star metaverse. I think if I use the search function in my Kindle it may turn out that the main character, Kristin Hadeland, is the John Doe who the agnostic Church of Norway clergywoman buried in volume one. But it stands very independently as a novel; about a student at a prestigious photography school whose art is not appreciated by his contemporaries, who makes a possibly unwise agreement with a mysterious figure, while, incidentally, helping out with a fringe production of Doctor Faustus. He becomes extremely famous and successful but finds that some extremely reckless things done as a young man come back to haunt him in middle age.

It’s a story.

And certainly, I wasn’t “just reading the words”. If you were “just reading the words” of Knausgaard you would go insane. It isn’t true (pace Private Eye) that he ruthlessly chronicles every character’s bowel movements: it is true that if someone is going to have a cup of coffee, there is a serious danger that we will learn about how the granules gradually dissolve in the cup and the milk swirls around in a swirly milky pattern. Which is why the publishers were rather spot on to use the epithet “addictive” to describe the book.

Besides, a hand-held vacuum cleaner was a very useful thing when we left crumbs in places where a big vacuum cleaner was impractical, on the kitchen worktop for instance, or we might make just a small mess somewhere, perhaps we’d spill thirty or forty grains of rice onto the floor when we tipped the bag, and who would go to the cupboard to get the big vacuum cleaner then, which had to be lifted and carried, plugged in and switched on? No, it was much easier to turn to the small one that sat so snugly in the hand and was always at the ready. I lived in the age of hand-held vacuum cleaners, but it didn’t mean I had to bow down to them, just as Giordano Bruno in his day had felt unobliged to bow down to the Catholic Church.

It took only about ten pages to go from “Who is this awful man and why do I care about his awful life?" to peeping out from behind a metaphorical sofa thinking “oh god please don’t you aren’t really going to steal a dead cat from the vet oh…” or indeed screaming “stop agonising go to the police and admit that you failed to report an accident you bloody fool”. In the final section it becomes very clear that a very bad thing indeed is about to happen, and the blow by blow description of the trivial minutiae which are occurring while it is pointedly failing to do so become almost physically painful. I certainly wouldn't want to attempt a GCSE "compare-and-contrast-two-minor-characters" essay about it. I cared far too much about the actual story and wanted far too badly to know what happened next. Did I feel that I was temporarily in Norway? That Kristen was someone I had actually met? Did I feel that my mind was full or oranges, oranger and more orangey than anything I had ever oranged before?

Did I bollocks.

4...

There is, you may be surprised to learn, a point to this.

As you know, we have been engaged for several years in a critical re-reading of the works of Hugh Walters, who was my favourite science fiction writer when I was at primary school. The latest volume is called Passage to Pluto. It is exactly the same as all the others. 

While re-reading the book, I am fairly sure that I had a visual flashback to the pictures I made in my head when I first read the story, I think in the summer of 1972. At the end of the book, three astronauts are saved at the last possible moment from Certain Death by their erstwhile comrade Chris Godfrey. During the rescue, young common northern engineer Tony Hale does something very reckless and dangerous in the engine room. As I read this passage, I distinctly saw the two characters in my head: Tony crawling around the engine room, Chris at the helm of the rescue ship. I could distinctly see their faces. And I observed (can you observe yourself having a memory of a mental construct?) that I was picturing Tony as Stephen (Peter Vaughan) from the Tomorrow People, and that, by a process of elimination, Chris was being played by Nicholas Young, (John), from the same series. 

We have established that I was reading Walters’ books and watching the first run of the TV show, at exactly the same time. I don’t know if some after-the-fact firing of synapses hyperlinked the two aesthetic experiences in retrospect, or if Kid-Andrew was consciously “casting” the characters during his primal reading. Roger Price’s teenaged mutant heroes were at least two-dimensional, where Hugh Walters’ cast are basically cardboard cutouts, so it would make sense to have used the TV show to add a bit of reality to the books. 

Was I remembering stuff I had seen on the telly as a substitute for what the writer failed to describe? Did the spaceships look as if they were made by the BBC visual effects department, tin foil and wires an all? I think they might have done. Did my lack of a mind’s eye force me to lean on stuff I had seen on TV as a ready made source of imagery? Or was mental-picture building something I unlearned through watching too much TV, not a neurological faculty which I happen to have been born without?

I think these are excellent questions. What happens when we read a book. Just how do our brains transmute words into emotions? Do some people really experience reading as hallucination, or is this just a rhetorical exaggeration? Was I exaggerating when I talked about the orange? 

It’s all very interesting. Which is just as well, because Passage to Pluto really isn’t.

3...

Hugh Walters’ books are ostensibly rip-roaring adventures about Man’s first tentative steps into Space. But that’s a cover story. From the first volume, what he has really been engaged in has been a theological debate. Can you continue to believe that there is a friend for little children above the bright blue sky when you’ve been as far as Mars and found no sign of Him? Can one person be a man of action, a man of science and also a man of faith? Does the presence or absence of a deity make a difference to the way a human faces Certain Death?

In the previous volume (First Contact?) Walters’ offered an elegant solution to the problem. God literally exists: but He is simply the most highly evolved being in the Universe. Angels are extraterrestrials who occasionally look in on Planet Earth to see that we are evolving correctly. This information is so mind-boggling that in the final chapters of the book, our protagonists’ memories have to be erased.

A lessor theologian might have rested his case at this point. But Walters continues the dialectical process. Passage to Pluto is a riposte to First Contact. The new proposition is “God exists: but the being who exists is not God.”

It is clear that the author's attention is focussed on this question. I don’t think that even the youngest reader could have missed the fact that Passage to Pluto is Hugh Walters by numbers, a reversion to the formula established in Blast Off At Woomera. It’s the kind of plot he could have written in his sleep, and possibly did. Our heroes prepare for launch (page 1-42); they are blasted into space (page 43) there is a Terrible Disaster (page 72) a daring rescue is attempted (page 90); and at the last possible second they are saved (page 120).

Everything comes into focus on page 53. Our hero, Chris Godfrey (now a grounded deputy-director of the space programme) learns that his friends have no way of getting back from Pluto. There is no hope and this time they are quite definitely going to die. 

“Oh God, what shall I do?” Chris prayed, desperately.

And then the idea came.

"And then the idea came." The subject isn’t broached again until the very last page of the novel. The long shot has paid off and the day has beens saved and everyone is safely back on earth. Funny Whiskers, the retired RAF pilot, asks if they are going to “have a wonderful celebration”.

The four young men who had returned safely from the most incredible adventure the world had ever known looked at each other uncomfortably. Chris spoke for all of them. “That can come after” he said “but first we are going to give thanks to God for our safe return".

How does Walters want us to read this? My first thought was that Chris’s mind was not, after all, wiped at the end of the last book: that he (the viewpoint character since the first volume) is aware that the stories now take place in a theistic universe. He has acquired the capacity to invoke the deity at moments of crisis. He is become Neo in the Matrix, a kind of Space Buddha: or at any rate a very Anglican Lensman.  It is astonishingly easy to accidentally add a T to his name while typing this kind of article.

But in fact, I think that Walters intends to refute the message of the last book. Granted the existence of extraterrestrials, one race must by definition be more evolved than all the others; and since we are all agreed that evolution means improvement and that improvement implies moral advancement, the most evolved being in the universe must be morally superior to all the others. So we might as well give the most-evolved and most-moral being in the universe the name “God”. But The Most Highly Evolved Being would hardly be the sort of thing you could pray to, and certainly not the kind of being who would care if you went to Mass at the beginning of your mission, or sung hymns of praise in the camp chapel after you came on. The God of religion has nothing to do with the “God” our heroes encountered on Uranus. Proof denies faith and without faith I am nothing. The Most Evolved Being could not have saved the lives of Chris's friends. The Church of England God has apparently done so. Which may be why Whiskers, who originally proposed the M.E.B theory, wants to have a party rather than a church service.

The third possibility is that I am reading slightly too much into this; that Walters has completely forgotten what he wrote in the previous volume; and chucked a couple of Sunday School references in because that’s the kind of thing you expect to find in vaguely improving children’s fiction. But it's much more fun to pretend that isn't the case. 

2...

So: our heroes are blasted to Pluto, partly because it is the only planet they have never visited and partly because the boffins have discovered a mysterious new Planet X out beyond its orbit. The boffins have also invented a new, atomic powered, near light-speed space-ship which can get our heroes to Pluto and back in weeks rather than years. They still have to be put into cryogenic sleep to prevent their being squished by the acceleration. (I am not entirely sure that would work.) The ship is called Pluto One, but there is a back-up ship called Pluto Two. No-one has ever seen a Disney movie.

Chris, the hero of the first thirteen volumes, has stepped back from his role as an astronaut in order to become second in command of the space programme. His friend Morrey has been promoted to boss-astronaut. making him responsible for all the agonising and soul-searching when Certain Death is on the horizon. Chris is, of course, very sad that he is not going into space with his friends. (Did I mention there was a back-up spaceship?) He is also very sad during the training, the launch, and while his friends are on their two week journey. (Did I mention that there was a back-up spaceship?) And of course, when disaster strikes, he is very sad indeed that is not there either to help out or to perish alongside his friends. (Did I mention that there was a back-up spaceship?)

When the Famous Three arrive on Pluto, they discover there has been a Very Bad Accident and they have lost all their fuel. We never find out what the Very Bad Accident was: probably, I don’t know, some sort of meteor strike. (The chances of this are “unimaginably remote...yet it had happened”.) I suppose by this point we know the formula as well as the author and are happy to fast-forward to the Certain Death part of the story. Although the ship is powered by nukes, it uses chemical fuel to turn around and navigate an earthward course. And they can’t escape from the gravitational pull of Planet X (which is a massively dense asteroid, or just possibly a massively dense alien construct). So the crew are faced with an agonising choice between eating three worms or running three times round the playground in the nude, sorry, dying slowly from asphyxiation or quickly by crashing the ship into Pluto.

Did I mention that there was a back up space ship and that Chris was very sad that he couldn’t go into space with his three comrades?

And so, in the final pages, readers are subjected to this kind of thing:

Chris let out an involuntary groan as his body took the full force of the chemical motor’s thrust. ….But it didn’t matter. No matter what his suffering, Chris was determined to do his utmost. He was prepared to go beyond the limit of human endurance in his desperate bid.

And this:

Caution must be thrown to the winds. He would risk ALL in the effort to save his friends.

And this:

Twenty-four thousand miles an hour. Gosh! that would take some slowing down.

And in case we haven’t got the point, this:

It was all or bust! He was going to catch up with Pluto One or die in the attempt.

Meanwhile, back on the the main ship, emotions run understandably high

A flood of admiration and gratitude flowed over the three astronauts. Chris was attempting the impossible in order to save them. Who but Chris could do such a thing?

And, indeed, on earth, where they don’t quite know what is going on:

Sir Billy and the others were staggered at the fate that must have befallen the four young men. ….. Feelings of utter despair spread among the scores of tired men and women in the control room…

It’s all quite exhausting.

1...

The book shows every sign of being unplanned and unrevised. While Chris is risking all to save his friends, we are told, out of the blue, that in between meeting God on Uranus and being blasted to Pluto, our heroes developed an interest in motor racing, and became more than decent amateur drivers: and that the nerve and reflexes needed when going round tight bends in a fact car is quite a lot like the nerve and reflexes needed when accelerating a space ship to save your friends from Certain Death.

It seemed that the amateur racing driver had pulled off another incredible feat by flinging his ship along at breakneck speed, and then applying the brakes at the last split second.

Very probably. But surely this should have come at the beginning of the story, not at the very end? Walters should surely have started the book with Chris dramatically winning the Isle of Mann TT race, leaving the readers asking “I wonder what this has to do with the rest of the story?” Then, in the last pages, when we’ve mostly forgotten the opening, he could have revealed that amateur racing stands you in good stead when you need to push a space ship beyond its operational limits, and we would all have said “Aha!” 

But he doesn’t do that.

Again; after the Daring Rescue, Tony (the naughty, northern, chocolate stealing one) crawls into the engine room to do a certain thing, and is berated by the others for his recklessness. What he has in fact done is set the abandoned ship to crash into Planet X, which results in the destruction of the asteroid. Chris is quite cross and says that they will discuss it in his office when they get back to school. But it turns out a few pages later that, er, Planet X was not only going to mess up the orbit of Pluto (did I mention it had super-strong gravity?) but also of Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter and eventually Earth, so the young scallywag's mischievousness has in fact saved civilisation as we know it. Fair enough. But why didn’t the boffins mention that Civilisation was imperilled? Because it only occurred to the writer at the last minute, that’s why.

In the opening chapters, the crew are very worried about the fact that, what with Einstein and relativity and everything, after four weeks of zooming through space at an appreciable percentage of light-speed, they will be twelve hours out of sync with the people they left behind on earth. There is some speculation about what effect this will have on them. They were, if you remember, quite worried about missing birthdays when they were first put in cryogenic sleep.

The eventual resolution to this philosophical dilemma is, er, nothing.

“What’s happened to the time-slip?” asked Morrey. “I don’t feel any different.” It was true, they had forgotten about this mysterious effect of space travel. “Our time should be twelve hours different from yours,” Tony exclaimed, “but it’s the same.”

Possibly this is a set up for something that will become important in the next volume. Or, possibly, it isn't.

Finally, he have to go through the obligatory Death Row Drama on the Definitely Doomed Ship. This time around the astronauts and the ground crew engage in a more than usually morbid game of suicidal astro chicken. The crew of Pluto One don’t want Chris to sacrifice himself in a futile rescue attempt: so they consider scuppering the ship to make such a gesture pointless. But Chris guesses that that is what they are going to do because it is what he would do if the positions were reversed, so he says he’ll embark on the suicide mission even if they commit suicide first.

“By the way, you fellows,” Whiskers said, “Chris tells me that he’s coming to join you even if it’s only to pick up the pieces.”

And Walters’ writing becomes borderline hysterical:

The argument between the astronauts went on for some time. An outsider would never have guessed from the calm, detached way in which they were discussing the problem that these three young men were trying to decide the manner and timing of their own deaths….

But this position was different. What they had to face was not a sudden catastrophe that would destroy them before they even knew it, but the knowledge that their lives would end in fifteen or sixteen days’ time! With a little help from their computer, they should be able to calculate the precise moment. As leader of the doomed trio, Morrey was determined to set an example. If anyone did crack up—and who could blame him?—he must not be the one.

They play long-distance chess with Whiskers to take their minds off the inevitable, because of course they do. 

0....

With the exploration of Pluto, there are no new worlds to conquer. Despite having established last time around that interstellar travel is possible via a network of divine gravity beams, Walters isn’t prepared to send our heroes outside the solar system. So you might imagine that we have just tackled the final volume.

But in fact, the series is going to go off in a slightly new direction. And the next volume will offer yet another perspective on the God question.

If you find this kind of thing interesting, please consider supporting my Patreon

My reviews of previous books in the series may be found here.

 And now it's precisely 20:27!

 It's nearly 2026!

Away In a Culture War

In England, complaining about the Post Office’s commemorative stamps is almost as important a Christmas tradition as the sending of cards. This year’s stamps seem particularly innocuous: slightly abstracted illustrations of the traditional nativity story characters. 

Nowadays we have Big Stamps and Small Stamps to go on Big Letters and Small Letters: so the big second class is an angel and the small second class is Mary and Joseph; the first class stamps have Mary and the Baby Jesus and the shepherds, respectively, on them. The Wise Men get a £3.40 stamp to themselves. That’s the flat rate for sending cards air-mail anywhere in the world, apparently. It’s all a bit irrelevant because everyone uses Amazon and Moon-Pig.

I think the pictures are intended to suggest a kind of collage: Mary’s robe is a single, two-dimensional block of patterned fabric or paper. Mary and Joseph are riding a donkey; one of the three shepherds is bringing a lamb as a gift; and there are specifically three wise men, who seem to be wearing crowns. Those details owe more to Victorian carols than to the actual gospels, but then so does the whole popular nativity tradition. All of the pictures have a starry, starry background, and there is one big yonder star for we three kings to follow. Mary and the Baby have halos.

So far, so nice. But all eleven figures have dark skins. And Mary is wearing some sort of head-covering. So naturally the usual suspects have crawled out of the woodwork to say that the stamps are anti-white propaganda, the most Muslim Christmas stamps ever, and to chant about the halo looking like a crescent moon. Which it does, a bit, if you squint.

Well: Bethlehem was in modern Palestine and Nazareth was in modern Israel. The Maguses came “from the East”, which would be modern Iraq, and the idea that they were Persians or Babylonians fits the story pretty well. None of these people were white Europeans. Unless you are going with the legendary Wee Three Kings: then I suppose there is a quite well established tradition that one was European, one was Asian and one was African. That probably represents the idea that the rulers of the whole world came to pay their respects to Jesus.

But I don’t think the Post Office’s artist was shooting for historical accuracy: the clothes certainly aren’t based on first century garb. I think—at any rate, I hope—that he drew them that way specifically in order to annoy the sorts of people who are, in fact, annoyed that he drew them in that way. We are living at a time when a resurgent Christian Nationalist sect is systematically othering brown-skinned people, and celebrating a shield-bearing crusader Christ. So of course every piece of artwork, every carol service and every nativity play should make the point—be it ever so subtly—that in the story, Jesus was not one of us: he was one of them.

Yes: Christians have always localised the story. Art galleries are full of paintings of renaissance noble women giving birth in rather clean fifteenth century sheds. The Mystery Plays showed Caesar ordering the whole world to attend a census—even if they live as far away as Barnsley or Rotherham! Whisper it softly: African churches sometimes imagine African Jesuses, and black children sometimes hang their stockings out for a Black Santa. In any other year, a white baby would have been quite unobjectionable. 

But if you are living in 1930s Germany, it is incumbent on you to make the point that, as a matter of historical fact, Mary and Joseph were Jewish.

*

Roderick Spode’s Christmas-themed rally is, in the grand scheme of things, merely absurd. A thousand black-shorts singing Away in a Manger at an open air carol service should scarcely register as a news item. Every city in England has a thousand-seater cathedral and every one of those cathedrals will be standing room only for multiple iterations of Christmas carols during the festive period. It is all very well to want to demonstrate your commitment to faith and homeland, or, indeed, to be a shining beacon of light against the fading of our cultural identity. It is slightly odd to do so by doing exactly what nearly everyone up and down the country was going to be doing in any case.

But I found some of the discussion around the non-event rather interesting.

If you were a very devout vegetarian, you might, I suppose, refuse to acknowledge the distinction between chicken, pork, and beef and refer to them all as “meat”. Or, indeed, “dead animals”. But it might prove problematic to fry beef in Col Sanders eleven spices, or to make a chicken wellington. Words usually mean things, and definitions usually include some things and exclude others.

In 1979, the Monty Python team released a highly successful mind-virus which causes carriers to believe that all disagreements about religion or politics are intrinsically ridiculous. It wouldn’t be funny if there wasn't some truth in it. In any political movement or church or fandom there really will sometimes be bitter disagreements about matters which seem trivial to anyone outside the cult. Or in some cases, matters which are really genuinely trivial. But as a result of the mind virus, whenever anyone asserts a point of principle on any subject, there will invariably be a wiseacre on hand to mutter “popular front of Judea” as if that terminated the discussion.

If we ask whether or not Spode is "really" a "Christian" are we indulging in that kind of sectarian hair-splitting? We have, I think, a perfect right to be skeptical about any sudden conversion. The man in the pew, and indeed in the pulpit, could be forgiven for asking if the man who has knelt down with a thousand other people in a crowded football stadium (while Cliff Richard is belting out Blessed Assurance with a Pentecostal choir) had in any meaningful sense "turned to Jesus". Billy Graham himself used to play down claims that so-many-thousands of people had been “saved” at one of his evangelistic meetings. They came forward, he would say: only God knows if they were saved. 

But in this case there is a more specific skepticism because of a perceived mis-match between Spode’s new-found faith and his political beliefs. Someone suggested that he was “about as Christlike as a traffic cone full of angry wasps.”

Possibly. But if the criteria for genuine conversion is Christosimilitude then I should say we are looking at roughly two thousand years of false conversions, with Spode falling only slightly shorter than everyone else. All the popular candidates for "Christlikeness"—Mother Theresa, say, or Saint Francis, or Desmond Tutu, or John Paul the Second—have their detractors. The Catholic Church maintains a list of around ten thousand people who it thinks quite definitely went to heaven, but there are some odd people on it. Actually having existed has not always been an essential criteria for canonisation. 

Our good friend CS Lewis was once asked if there was such a thing as a non-practicing Christian. He said yes, in fact nearly all Christians were non-practicing. The only person who ever practiced Christianity perfectly was Jesus himself. Lewis's definition of “practice” was quite specific: 

“It means that every single act and feeling, every experience, whether pleasant or unpleasant, must be referred to God. It means looking at everything… and saying ‘How would He wish me to deal with this?’”

Which is a pretty high bar to clear.

A nice sounding Anglican clergyman (a part time comedian and former Satanist, apparently) wrote in the Guardian that:

"Jesus was very clear that none of us is in a position to judge each other, so I’m generally loth to pronounce anyone 'not a real Christian'".

Which is very charitable of him. But he goes on to say that “care for the most vulnerable in society” has always been the core Christian value, and that Spode’s followers might have an issue with (for example) the passages in Exodus which exhort Jews to be nice to foreigners and immigrants because they were foreigners and immigrants in Egypt. Perfectly good point, that. But it does rather make it sound as if Christianity is a social movement and that there is a suspicion that Spode is not fully on board with the programme. The headline to the opinion column, presumably added by a sub, stated that there is no sense in which someone like Spode could be considered a genuine Christian. None. 

The same paper carried an extended essay by an American, Bill McKibben, bewailing the way in which, in his country, the far-Right has co-opted Christianity.

According to this essay, in the 1950s and 1960s the overwhelming majority of American Christians believed in a broadly liberal Jesus. As the decades wore on, a re-branded fundamentalism which conflated Christianity with a narrow range of conservative causes came to dominate the protestant church, to the point where opposing abortion and homosexuality had become almost the whole of the faith.

At the end of the 1950s, he writes:

“a cool 52% of Americans were part of the so-called mainline denominations: Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians and the like. That meant most of the nation subscribed at least nominally to a religious life marked by a kind of polite civic normality and a somewhat progressive reading of the Bible….”

The mainline Jesus was “a baby born to homeless parents in a garage”:

“The baby grows up in humble circumstances, a working carpenter; his message is about love for others, especially for the poor—and not a sentimental love, but a concrete one, expressed by feeding and sheltering. Christ’s response to violence is to turn the other cheek—not as an act of passive acceptance, but as a way to educate the attacker; his crime policy is that if someone steals your coat you should give him your sweater too.” 

"Not as an act of passive acceptance" is an interpretation of the text, incidentally: not what it literally says. Jesus's parents were "homeless" in so far as they were not in their home town and couldn't find a hotel: they weren't destitute. 

McKibben seems to take it for granted that sweater-sharing and cheek-turning would naturally be expected to get a person crucified. I don't buy this. It is a good joke to say that Jesus was nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, but it doesn't make much historical sense. Bart Ehrman has written that any convincing reconstruction of Jesus has to be able to answer the question "Why did he get the death penalty?" I don't think "For being nice" is a plausible answer. 

McKibben goes on to say that it is “entirely fine” to believe in a Jesus-story shorn of its supernatural elements: it's all about the message. Any talk of "resurrection" seems to be a round-about way of saying that the preaching wasn't forgotten when the preacher died:  

“This person’s message is sufficiently subversive that he is eventually put to death by the reigning imperial power, but that execution is powerless to quell his spirit or his message, which then spreads across a growing community of followers who try to behave as he had.”

It was Jesus' message—not any faith the he had literally come back to life—that the Church preserved: it was Jesus behaviour that they sought to emulate. When workin' folk are out on strike, that's where you'll find Joe Hill. 

“The idea that personal salvation—as opposed to concern for others—was at the heart of Christianity always bordered on the heretical…”

Really? Did mainline Methodists and Lutherans in the 1950s really believe that Wesley and Luther—not to mention St John and St Paul—were borderline heretics? I find it hard to believe that this could literally have been the case. A hymn-book full of far away green hills and rugged old crosses says differently. 

But let’s take him at his word. For the first half of the 20th century, the American church had substantially abandoned the New Testament’s divine saviour in favour of a humble rabbi. America may have been colonised by puritan extremists, but its civil system was created by skeptical deists. Didn’t Thomas Jefferson go through the Bible and tear out all the religious bits? So perhaps the proposition isn't as absurd as all that.

If the liberal consensus only arrived at their ethical Jesus by denouncing the Christ of the New Testament, then the evangelicals have done nothing worse than restore the church's historic faith. They have literally put the Christ back into Christianity. But their restored Christ is a macho culture warrior with a gun in one hand and a spanking paddle in the other.

How should we understand this? Should we say "In the 21st century, a large cohort of Americans rejected the purely ethical Jesus and restored the theological Christ: and it just so happened that most of them were hard-line political conservatives?" 

Or are we obliged to say that "the Christ of Christianity and the ideology of the far-Right go together like a horse and carriage?"

Plenty of anti-theists would gleefully go along with the second option. Once you overwrite the humble rabbi with God’s supernatural offspring, you have already committed yourself to a whole complex of authoritarian and patriarchal ideas. If you replace the jobbing carpenter with a divine world-saviour, you have opened the door to some very unhealthy ideas about divine retribution. Have you ever seen Passion of the Christ? In a church which preaches that version of the Atonement, James Dobson and John Smyth are features rather than bugs.

CS Lewis, again, argued rather cogently that you couldn’t and shouldn’t have a “Christian” political party—let alone a “Christian” government—because Christians don’t necessarily agree about all the nitty-gritty bread-and-butter political questions. What would be desirable would be a strong Christian presence in all the parties. 

He thinks that you could perfectly well have a sincere Christian fascist and an equally sincere Christian communist—or at any rate, sincere Christians prepared to make common cause with the British Union of Fascists and equally sincere Christians willing to ally with the British Communist Party. The hypothetical Christian fascist might think that humans were so sinful that they need to be governed by a theocratic dictatorship. The hypothetical Christian communist might believe Jesus was primarily a social reformer and that the church departed at a very early stage from his teachings. That is, the Christian fascist misapplied and exaggerated doctrines which Lewis thought were sound; but the Christian communist worked from premises that Lewis utterly rejected.

So, it seems we have a consensus. All parties are agreed that if you believe in the Christ of theology, you are more or less bound to be a conservative; and that if you are a liberal, you are more or less bound to believe in a non-theological Jesus. Your only options are to embrace the Republican Christ, or else assert that since Saul of Tarsus tripped over his shoelace on the way to Damascus, there have been hardly any True Christians. 

In order to test my hypothesis, I turned to an online magazine called Christian Today. I think it would be fair to describe this publication as a bit on the socially conservative side. A representative sample runs thus: 

“The judgement of God has finally come upon the United Kingdom. Quietly. Silently. Like a thief in the night. It came in the form of an irrational, emotive and Godless parliament who this week voted to permit the killing of babies in the womb up until birth, and has now introduced the National Suicide Service, with its vote to permit assisted suicide. God has given us what we voted for.”

The magazine tries to navigate a "both sides" critique of Spode and his opponents. A sub-headline directs our attention to the parable of the mote and the beam. Aren't both sides, the far-Right and the anti-fascist, guilty of co-opting the Christian message to their political beliefs? Aren't both sides equally prone to demonise their opponents? When the liberals speak of Spode as if he was some kind of anti-Christ, aren't they guilty of the very same divisiveness they accuse him of? 

The essay acknowledges that there are valid criticisms of the Unite the Kingdom rally: that it illegitimately shoe-horns politics into Christmas. But they note that an anti-fascist counter meeting depicted Mary and Joseph in a refugee boat. Surely that is also political? And therefore just as bad? The Left should not demonise the Right over what is, after all, a mere difference of political opinion. (This approach does not, of course, apply to questions about assisted dying and legalised abortion: it is perfectly okay to demonise people who disagree with you about that.)

But the Left are far more culpable than the Right in this regard. The Right may have introduced politics into religion; but the Left have replaced religion with politics. The established church has been reduced to a party political mouthpiece: 

"It used to be said that the Church of England was the Tory party at prayer. Now it seems more accurate to describe it as the Green/Labour/Progressive party at politics."

Well: when people said that the Church was the Tory party at prayer, I think they meant that Conservatives generally worshipped at their parish church, where Labour voters were more likely to attend one of the non-conformist denominations. The Labour party owed more to Methodism than to Marx. No-one, I think, ever claimed that the Church of England consistently supported Conservative party policy.

The Guardian writer said directly that there was a consensus in liberal churches that a gospel of salvation was heretical. The Christian Today article accuses church leaders of being unable to tell their flock "what God says about salvation", preferring instead to claim divine authority for their personal beliefs about "the EU, immigration, climate change and Donald Trump!" 

The Guardian writer said that Christmas is about "a baby born to homeless parents in a garage”. Which rather reminds one of Geraldine Granger telling the good folk of Dibley that the Christmas story was about a baby born in a stable ("the poorest of the poor") who "says things that are so astonishing that millions of people are still living their lives by them today." So Christian Today is being perfectly fair when it hauls liberals over the coals for reducing the meaning of Christmas to "let's all be nice to each other because a cute baby was born to a teenage mum and became a refugee."

So perhaps Christmas does belong to the Conservative Christ much more than to the liberal Jesus. The baby in the Nativity story is not a humble carpenter with some new-age theories about love. Like Harry Potter and Anakin Skywalker, he's the Chosen One. As a baby, he is celebrated by a whole army of supernatural beings. As a young child he is venerated by all the Kings of the world. The Right can validly claim that by abolishing the liberal Jesus, they have put the Christ back in Christmas.  

The Christian Today essay ends with another attempt to be even-handed—offering prayers for both the Right and the Left, the Spodests and the liberal Church Leaders. But the writer 

“prays that Christ will really be exalted in [the Unite the Kingdom] carol service in London on Saturday” 

adding that 

“I suspect that I would be more likely to hear the actual gospel of Christ at the rally on Saturday, than I will in some churches on Sunday.” 

Whereas he prays that the Left 

“will stop using their own personal Jesus for their own personal politics and instead come to know and proclaim the Christ who really is there.”

Is this where we are? The Far-Right have the wrong politics, but the correct Jesus? The Liberals have only politics; they don't have Jesus at all? It sounds depressingly like the English Civil War, in which one side was Romantic But Wrong, and the other side were Rotten But Right. 

*

In the 1980s, a rumour occasionally went round campus that the GaySoc had decreed that on such-and-such a day; homosexual students would identify themselves by wearing blue jeans to lectures and straight students by wearing something else. I don’t suppose it was actually true: but it was quite a clever thought experiment. Everybody wore blue jeans all the time. So the question was "If I wear my Levis tomorrow, will everyone assume I am gay? And if they do, does that matter, particularly?"

If everyone agreed that wearing red baseball caps represented my support for Roderick Spode then I would not wear a red base ball cap ever again. Not that I was planning to do so in any case. If I watch the new TV show about the kid with the magic wand, it will be widely taken as signifying my assent to the proposition that my trans friends shouldn’t be allowed to go to the lavatory. So I won't: although I probably wouldn't have done anyway. 

I accept that we may have to cede the Union Jack to the far-Right. I will be quite sad if Christmas goes the same way: but I expect that it will. The more people tell me that I must say Happy Christmas and that saying Happy Christmas signifies my opposition to the Woke war on Christmas, the more inclined I am to say Season’s Greetings or Happy Holidays. 

This year, it is one rather ludicrous man saying that we should all get together and sing Away in a Manger in order to assert our national identity and resist cultural erosion. Next year, the thought may creep into actual churches. Five years down the line, there may be general agreement that singing Away in a Manger is what we do to stick it to the brown folk. In which case, all us non-fascists will have to stop singing it. Which would be a shame. But we managed without the song from the first year of the Christian era through to, I think, the one thousand eight hundred and seventy eighth. Go back to the eighteenth century, and you'd find people struggling through December the twenty-fifth without Silent Night, turkey, Santa Claus or the Muppet Christmas Carol. I think we’ll cope.

But what happens when Spodist converts start to attend ordinary services? What is the Rev. to do? 

Perhaps he will say “We welcome everyone—money-lenders, pedophiles, Nazis, people who saw Monty Python's, Life of Brian….” and continue preaching whatever message he was going to preach in any case. In which case I suppose the Spodists would say that the Vicar, like the Archbishop of Canterbury, the King and the Pope were Woke. Liberals may be reluctant to say that people who don't agree with them are Not True Christians; the Right have no such compunctions. 

So what is Rev. to do? Stick to his pacifist guns, watch the Christian Nationalists drift away and lament his pews returning to their previous bum-free status?

Or experience a sudden revelation that the core of Jesus message was always white-ethno-nationalist-anti-Islamiscism?

In 2015, it would not have been possible to imagine a British Conservative leader using the language that Badenoch does—and completely impossible to imagine a Labour leader talking like Starmer. Who knows where the Overton stained glass window might be in 2030?

I take it for granted that, by then, either Spode or someone more extreme will have kissed King Charles's ring. And the church, like the schools and the museums, will have to choose between bending the knee to the Party or being disestablished or abolished. 

At which point, carol services will be the least of our worries

Happy New Year.


Please consider making my new very happy by joining my Patreon.

NOTE: Trigger Happy

One of the 2,400 comments under the Daily Mail's piece about Julian Clary sometimes telling blue jokes is a helpful comment by "Gadgetman".

Not funny anymore due to the depressing woke leftist brigade.

Well, quite.

Triggers are wonderful things...

 I know this will look like a set up, but I honestly didn't plan it.

Several hon. members "Oh yes you did!"

Self: "Oh no I didn't!"

In yesterday's screed, I briefly mentioned the Palladium's Christmas pantomime, Sleeping Beauty. I noted that the show's website mentioned that it "contained innuendo". 

Different people have different opinions about smutty jokes. Kenneth Williams said that if he was given a script to read and found that it contained a double entendre, he whipped it out. The other day at the Sea Shanty session, a lady asked me for a song that contained a lot of innuendo. So I gave her one. It was an old music-hall number about a farmer purchasing a male hen from the market. I thought long and hard before singing it. 

Self: "So, what happened to my career as a serious cultural commentator?"

Several hon. members: "It's behind you!"

I positively like pantomime, in small doses. The annual pie-in-the-face routine. The shoe-horning of that year's pop songs and some forgotten music hall number into a plot borrowed from Grimm or the Arabian Nights. The moment when the right hand side of the auditorium has to try and sing louder than the left hand side of the auditorium. The assurance that we are the best Friday night audience they've had all week. The haunted house routine during which Snow White or Cinderella is followed around the stage by ghosties and ghoulies. ("I don't want to be caught by the ghosties" "Well, I don't want to be caught by the....") 

The last few pantos I've seen in Bristol and Bath actually contained very few over-the-kids-heads dirty jokes. Dick Whittington contained one, count it, one joke about the principle boy's first name. (Another character was interrupted while singing a Christmas song. "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire; Jack Frost nipping at my..." "Dick!") What I did notice was a lot of very child-friendly scatological humour (poo jokes) which have of course become much more acceptable in mainstream juvenile fiction, what with Captain Underpants and all that. ("I was banned from Bristol swimming baths for having a wee in the pool." "Oh, that's a bit harsh, we've all done that...." "Yes, but not from the top diving board.") 

But the Palladium show starred Julian Clary, self-described "renowned homosexual"; he of the "fisting Norman Lamont" remark ("talk about a red box"). So perhaps the smut-o-meter went further into the blue than it would have done in the Westuv England. Catherine Tate's material isn't always one hundred per cent clean, either.

But if we are to believe the Daily Mail, and why shouldn't we, it didn't go down terribly well with the audience. 

Fans WALK OUT of Catherine Tate's smutfest panto!

Metro concurs: 

Families walk out of Catherine Tate panto after branding it a smutfest. 

Both stories seem to be substantially based on TripAdviser quotes: the majority of which are less bothered about the rudery and more concerned that it wasn't very funny. None of the quotes point to a specific incident of anyone walking out, although it is mentioned that on one night there was, shockingly, no standing ovation. Neither paper can point to any risque joke in particular, but the blurb on the show's website leaves us in no doubt as to the likely tone of the evening: 

"The West End’s biggest Christmas show....with that age-old fairytale message: whilst one small prick can be deadly, at The London Palladium you’re promised the happiest of endings."

I believe that last year Julian Clary entered the stage on board a full sized fire-engine and immediately made a remark about his "hose". 

But it does genuinely seem that some of the families involved may have purchased the very expensive tickets without quite realising what kind of a show it was. The Metro piece notes that "The modern retelling of the classic fairytale is shown at family-friendly times of 2:30pm and 7:30pm at the theatre" where the Daily Mail says that "Customers expected a family-friendly affair given the show times of 2.30pm and 7.30pm". 

Metro cites a disgruntled customer saying "‘Sadly I didn’t realise this was an ‘adult style’ panto."

Didn't you? Well, in that case, I can see how you might be perturbed. 

What a pity no-one thought to issue a trigger warning. 

The Wonderful Thing About Triggers

CONTENT WARNING: May contain the Daily Mail.

Is it a good idea to inform punters about the contents of a movie or a play before they buy a ticket for it?

Maybe. Maybe not. It certainly can't do any harm. Some people really, really, don’t like to see a man with no clothes on; so putting up a little notice that says “This exhibition includes some paintings of men with no clothes on” seems like simple good manners. Of course, you can smirk slightly if the notice is outside an exhibition entitled Classic Renaissance Nudes. We used to smirk when we found that a product called Just Nuts had a sticker on it saying “May contain nuts”. But I reckon it’s the sort of silliness society can probably survive. Someone might go and see Equus honestly thinking it was a play about horse racing. Someone else might have seen the trailer for Pillion and thought it was mostly about motorcycles. Not everyone knew that the opening scene of the National Theatre’s Frankenstein would include parts of Benedict Cumberbatch which were not normally on public display.

You might think that it would be a better world if no-one was bothered about the unclothed human body. And members of the naturist community might well say “Yeah? Well maybe I am offended by all the people in Baywatch wearing unnecessary swimming costumes?” But I think there’s a pretty wide consensus about what people are and aren’t bothered by. You might point out that the screenplay of this week’s movie included the word “cunt”; you probably wouldn’t mention that it contained the word “nasturtium”. It’s not a hard one to navigate, and in no sensible world would it become a politicising issue.

So, in November, the Daily Mail printed a headline which ran “Theatre blasted as woke after ‘slapping trigger warning on musical Jesus Christ Superstar because it depicts the crucifixion’”.

Well, people going to see Jesus Christ Superstar must logically fall into one of two groups:

Group One: People who already know what happens in the show.

Group Two: People who don’t already know what happens in the show.

Group Two might contain foreigners, Martians and friends of Prof. Richard Dawkins, who are completely unfamiliar with the Easter story. Don’t laugh, necessarily. When I saw the show in Bristol last year, I overheard some people in the interval who were unclear about who “the baddies” were. ("Er…The Jews, actually.") And some people on the way out were expressing disappointment at the down-beat ending. Knowledge of the story can’t be taken for granted any more. I myself saw Mahabharata without having the faintest idea what the Bhagavad Gita was. 

But Group Two might also contain an awful lot of people who did know the basic story, but who didn’t know that Superstar focuses entirely on the lead-up to Jesus’ death; and people who did know that it was basically a rocked up passion play, but didn’t realise that this particular production depicts the flogging and execution of Jesus in moderately graphic detail. And among that sub-group, there are presumably some people who are perfectly fine with watching fictionalised violence, and other people who are very bothered by it indeed. Conceivably, there could be refugees or ex-servicemen who have first hand experience of torture. There might well be abuse-survivors more generally. But there are also bound to be people who are just squicked out by fake blood and would prefer to spend their evening watching something else. Yes, theatre is meant to be shocking and unsettling, but tickets cost between £82 and £395 and Wicked is on next door.

The web-page for the Palladium includes a side-bar containing boilerplate information about access, age restrictions, and what happens if one of the celebrity cast is indisposed. Shockingly, a drop-down under “Content Warning” says that the show “Contains flashing lights and visual effects, pyrotechnics, theatrical smoke and haze, some violence, imitation blood, and an onstage depiction of the crucifixion.” This appears to be standard operating procedure for the London theatre: the sidebar for the panto (Sleeping Beauty) mentions that “parental discretion is advised due to innuendo”. This makes someone called Gerald furious: he thinks that if you warn theatre-goers that a musical contains violence, the next step will be to warn them that it contains catchy tunes. 

I think that from now on I may refer to this as Gerald's Fallacy: that if you can think of a stupid thing which is not being done, it follows that the sensible thing which is being done shouldn't be. But suppose you actually did put a small notice saying "Warning: May Contain Catchy Tunes" by the box office. Who, precisely, does Gerald suppose might be harmed?

If I were a director, I might possibly be annoyed by a content warning which said something like “Contains scenes in which the butler turns out to have dunnit.” This is a point on which good men can legitimately differ. Some people think that there is, or should be, no such thing as spoiler warnings. If knowing Luke’s dad was a toboggan ruins the movie, then the movie wasn’t worth seeing in the first place. Others say that the only point in going to the theatre or the movies is to discover how the story ends, so if the title of the piece is The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford or The Life and Most Piteous Death of King Richard the Second then the story is ruined before it starts. I believe I said at the time that the BBFC’s certificate at the beginning of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Frye telegraphed a significant “reveal” by stating that “suicide depiction” was one of the reasons for giving the movie a 12 Cert. It might be part of the director's plan to suddenly introduce a graphic axe murder into what appeared to be a harmless little “cosy crime” story. He might legitimately be cross if someone put up a sign saying "Warning: Contains unexpected axe murder." But someone else might think that the director had absolutely no business freaking out the paying customer in the name of artistic integrity. 

Jesus Christ Superstar is not setting out to shock anyone. The whole reason Gerald is furious is that he takes it for granted that anyone seeing the show must already knows that it contain nuts. So who does he think is being harmed? In Scenario One, every one knows what is in the musical so the warning is gratuitous: no harm done. In Scenario Two, some people don’t know what’s in the musical, but aren’t particularly bothered by it; so, again, no harm done. But in Scenario Three, some people didn’t know and do mind; and make an informed decision to spend their money elsewhere. In what possible world is this insane or staggering or infuriating or even, god help us, woke?

Over the last twelve months, the Daily Mail has published at least fifty stories in which “woke trigger warnings” are “slapped” on a wide variety of artistic works. The stories all follow roughly the same format:

"ITV is flooded with complaints after slapping 'woke' trigger warning on beloved 1970s sitcom"

"Tommy Cooper ITV compilation is hit with woke trigger warning over 'adult humour and outdated attitudes'"

"Doctor Who episode from 1969 is slapped with trigger warning amid complaints from readers show has gone 'woke'"

If you can be bothered to follow up the references, a rather less hysterical situation emerges. 

The ITV streaming service utilises a system of parental guidance. If a programme isn’t entirely innocuous, it puts a little G for Guidance by the listing, and a three or four word comment so Mum and Dad can decide if it’s appropriate for their offspring to watch it. Love Actually contains “very strong language and scenes of a sexual nature”; the Batman prequel Pennyworth contains “strong language, drugs and scenes of graphic violence”; but the old musical Grease (“the latest in a series of shows and movies to be slapped with a woke trigger warning”) has “mild language and teenaged misbehaviour”. It is in this context that The Best Of Tommy Cooper is said to have “Outdated attitudes”. 

This last guidance note has “sparked outrage from free speech campaigners and fans of the legendary comedian alike”. 

Has it? Has it really? 

Every movie or DVD released in the UK is given a rating by the British Board of Film Classification: only the most inoffensively harmless get a U. The majority of the classic era of Doctor Who is rated “U” (“infrequent very mild violence") or PG (“mild violence, threat”). The sacrilegious Russel T Davies colourisations are given slightly more in depth commentaries, presumably because they count as “new” movies. In the colourised Daleks—which has been rated “PG”—we are told that “a man punches another man but the blow is un-detailed” and that “a man dangles precariously from a rope in a sequence of sustained suspense”. (I would have written “remorseless tedium”.) The intention is clearly to reassure parents that while Doctor Who is a little bit more scary than, say, Peppa Pig (“no material likely to offend or harm”) it’s basically pretty tame and wholesome.

And this is clearly the context in which a warning has been "slapped" on the War Games. It is entirely clear that remarks about characters being “killed with fantastical weapons” and “questioned using fantastical interrogation machines” are there to reassure parents that although Doctor Who is a little bit violent, the violence is all in a harmless fantasy context. The BBFC point out that characters are “threatened with execution by firing squad” and that an American Civil War soldier uses a racist term (“boy”) in order to explain—if you want an explanation—why Doctor Who has got a PG cert (like Zootopia and Matilda) as opposed to a U (like Bluey and Tellytubbies).

The Daily Mail's language implies that these comedies and movies and stage plays have been singled out for special condemnation; that they have been slapped or hit by or handed or issued with a warning or reprimand: where in fact pretty much everything now comes with a brief description attached to it. And the rubrics are described as “Content Warning” or “Content Advice” or “Parental Guidance”. Trigger Warning is the Daily Mail’s own description.

The sidebar for the Royal Opera’s 2025 production of Puccini’s Tosca stated that it contained “depictions of executions, violence, blood, gore, murder, sexual assault, implied torture and suicide”. Rita Skeeter’s Quick-Notes-Quill transmogrifies this into “It carries eight trigger warnings relating to murder, sexual assault and torture. So far, so woke.”

The Mail's piece continues: “But now comes a trigger warning with a difference: for the venue is now alerting its audiences to – horror of horrors – the curtain-up bell.”

Up to a point, Lord Rothermore. On the Royal Opera House’s website, there is a menu called Your Visit, and on that menu there is an item called Accessibility. On the Accessibility page, there is information about an Access Scheme, Relaxed Performances, Audio Descriptions and Touch Tours for the visually impaired; wheelchair accessible toilets and step-free access. And towards the bottom of the page, you will indeed find the following:

“The Royal Opera House is a large building with many floors, lifts, escalators, corridors and open spaces….

….Lighting and sounds also vary depending on where you are in the building, with public areas being brightly lit and noisy, while the areas around the stages are dimly lit.

A handheld bell is rung by Front of House staff to signal guests to take their seats before a performance. The bell is loud and can be startling. The bell is rung approximately ten minutes before the show starts and at each interval.”

How could any sensible person object to this innocuous piece of small print? 

And how could anyone infer that there is an ulterior, left-wing (“woke”) motive behind it?

I toyed with the possibility that what was being objected to is the whole idea of "accessibility" in general, as opposed to the bell warning in particular. Is it possible that what lay behind the complaint was a wider scepticism about the whole idea of illness and disability? Does the writer of the article believe that most disabled people are not really ill; or that even if they are, the able-bodied community has no business trying to make their lives easier? The article certainly complains about West End theatre's "deference to those of sensitive disposition". The warning about the bell is specifically said to be "crazy": earlier this year the deputy Prime Minister in waiting, Richard Tice, said (in remarks which he later withdrew and apologised for) that allowing children to wear ear-protectors at school was "insane" and that the supposed over-diagnoses of special educational needs was "mad" and "an insane situation". The Tosca story carries a quote from "Free Speech Union founder" Lord Young. This is our old friend Toby Young who complained in 2018 that the word "inclusion" was a “ghastly, politically correct word” that implied “wheelchair ramps, the complete works of Alice Walker in the school library (though no Mark Twain) and a Special Educational Needs Department that can cope with everything from dyslexia to Münchausen syndrome by proxy.” 

So: is the point here that people with so-called medical conditions make a very great fuss about stairs and flashing lights and loud noises, and that the British way is to just stiffen your lips and suck it up? 

I also briefly speculated that the obsession with content warnings derived from the belief that everything not forbidden should be compulsory and anything that is not compulsory ought to be forbidden. The ITV guidance notes seem to acknowledge that Grease is a little bit rude and Love Actually is very rude indeed; and that there is a parental judgement call to be made about when kids are old enough to deal with them. But the conservative right often have a problem with shades of grey. 

As recently as the 1980s, it was the reactionary right, not the politically correct left, who objected to rude words, dirty pictures, and simulated violence. And they didn’t just want to avert their own eyes from it: they didn't want anyone else to look at it either. A content warning saying “Contains graphic depictions of anal rape” might have been a perfectly sensible notice to put by the box office for Romans in Britain: but that would not have satisfied Mrs Mary Whitehouse — she wanted the play closed down, and the producer jailed for a criminal offence. Channel 4 did, indeed, warn viewers that Tony Harrison’s poem contained a lot of very bad words, but the same Mrs Mary Whitehouse was not satisfied with this: she thought that it should not have been transmitted in the first place.

So perhaps the point is that warning us that Tommy Cooper occasionally made mildly racist jokes; and that Life of Brian contains a brief bit of full-frontal nudity, acknowledges the possibility that some people might be okay with nude scenes; and that other people might not be okay with racism. Perhaps the thinking is that violent or sexually explicit operas ought to be banned outright (because no decent person could possibly want to see them) but racist and sexist ones should be shown without comment (because no decent person could possibly object to them). Everything is clean, except a small number of dirty things which should be banned. This would be consistent with a newspaper that portrays and England in which a decent majority is permanently under siege from a destructive mob of Others. (cf Ben Goodacre's joke about the paper's ontological project to divide all substances into the ones which cause cancer and the ones which prevent it.)

But I don't even think that this is really what is going on. 

I think that we are looking at a fairly considered and politically motivated language game. I think that conservatives have been working fairly hard and fairly consistently for a number of years to give the phrase “trigger warning” a negative connotation. (They have successfully done the sane same thing with expressions like "woke", “political correctness” and “cancel culture”.) It's a pretty straight forward technique: invent a category; assert that nearly everything falls into that category; and then start wringing your hands because things in that category are so widespread.

At one time, “trigger” had a fairly clear meaning. (So, I think, did “woke”: “political correctness” was only ever a catch-all for things social conservatives disagreed with.) Someone who had undergone a trauma could suffer a severe adverse reaction to something which reminded him of the original traumatic event. It was, therefore, a good idea to warn people in advance if a dramatic work is going to feature gunshots, for example, or references to rape or child abuse. 

So: the first move is to establish that "trigger warnings", in this primary sense, are Bad Things. Gerald’s fallacy will come in handy: since it would obviously be silly to issue a trigger warning for Dumbo in case someone in the audience had once collided with a flying elephant; it follows that it would be silly to mention in advance that Prima Facie contains a very detailed description of a serious sexual assault. 

I think that this is what lies behind the use of the word "woke" in this context. The word is not being used in the original sense of "aware of structural prejudice", nor even as a pejorative term for "left wing". I think it is pretty clearly being used to mean "weak" or even "effeminate". It will be remembered that when the people of Bristol started to say that the city’s involvement in the slave trade was nothing to be very proud of, the most common response among the Daily Mail’s commentariat was the single word “pathetic”. 

Soldiers coming back from the Second World War weren’t given trigger-warnings for their PTSD, after all: they were expected to suck it up. Soldiers suffering from PTSD in the First World War were put up against a wall and shot; and it never did them any harm.

Having debunked the word in its original, legitimate sense, widen the usage, so that practically everything is a trigger warning. All movies have BFFC classification; everything on the TV streaming services have parental advisories; nearly all the London theatre websites publish information about the content of their shows. But if you say so often enough, all these innocuous bits of text can be regarded as "Trigger Warnings"--and therefore Very Bad Things. 

Now we have established that practically everything is a trigger warning, we can move on to the final stage: bombard the world with essays asking why-oh-why trigger warnings are suddenly everywhere. You might just as well proclaim that any woman owning a cat is a witch, and then throw your hands up in horror about the witchcraft epidemic. Play your cards right, and even the serious newspapers will start asking where these trigger warnings came from and what they say about modern society and when there is going to be a public enquiry and if there should be a law against it—when in fact literally nothing has happened.

And this has three excellent side-effects:

1: It means you don’t have to make accommodations for people who may literally and reasonably require actual warnings about actual triggers. If it is ludicrous to provide the information that a passion play depicts crucifixion, then it follows that it would be ridiculous to state in advance that a war film contains a graphic depiction of a napalm attack. 

2: It furthers the idea that young people are weak and that society mollycoddles them. But some people genuinely are freaked out by a five minute representation of a man being whipped; or a person being tied to a chair and shot; or of blood, albeit theatrical blood, in any context. Well, they shouldn’t. They should grin and bear it. Ban avocado lattes and bring back national service! 

3: Most importantly, it furthers belief in your conspiracy theory about how the Gnomes of Zurich or the Bavarian Illuminati are secretly controlling western civilisation. If everything is a trigger warning and all trigger warnings are woke, then it is easy to prove from first principles that the Woke Mob—which is to say the Cultural Marxists, which is probably to say the Jews--secretly control everything. 

And that we need a powerful Man of the People to set us free...

One last point. I cannot prove this: but I am pretty sure that I will be and indeed am being proved right. Whatever the Right accuses the Left of doing is the thing the Right are planning to do themselves. If Daily Mail thinks that the Left are being comically over-sensitive about sex in the media, then you can be sure that the Right is planning a puritanical backlash. If the Right say that the Left are attacking free speech in the theatre, then you can be pretty sure that they'll be reopening the Lord Chamberlain's office as soon as they get back into power. Howls about free speech presage book-burnings and state imposed censorship. 

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The Princess Bride

Thought you might want to read this one again. For some reason. 

Arts Diary: The Princess Bride

Arts Diary: Pillion

Arts Diary: Pillion:  Everyman

Arts Diary: Wicked For Good

Arts Diary: Wicked For Good:  Everyman

Arts Diary: Eternity

Arts Diary: Eternity:  Everyman

The Bringer of Dreams

First Contact?

by Hugh Walters

The latest instalment of my occasional series looking back on a series of science fiction novels you almost definitely read if you were at school in the 1970s. 

This volume raises some weightier than usual questions, and I respectfully suggested the long-than-usual essay may be of interest to people who don't remember the Chris Godfrey series.

I: Current Puns

II: The Road Less Travelled

III: Close Encounters of the Third Kind

IV: Life, the Universe, and Everything

V: Who Mourns for Adonis?

VI: The Most Tremendous Tale of All

VII: The Chief End of Man

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My reviews of previous books in the series may be found here.

VII: The Chief End of Man

Previous Section 

What on Earth or Uranus does Hugh Walters think he is doing?

I don’t think the God-talk can be written off as window dressing or plot machinery. You could write a perfectly good story about benevolent aliens without recourse to theology. First Contact? might work better if the Alien was an ambassador from a secular Galactic Federation, as opposed to the emissary of God Almighty. But Walters takes quite a lot of trouble to go through the religious arguments at a pace nine-year-olds will be able to keep up with. I think that the Supreme Being interests him in a way that fast than light tachyon gravity networks really don’t.

Could he be pushing back against Star Trek? The BBC's first run of the original series had come to an end in 1971. Gene Roddenbury’s humanist message was that you should always reject any being with theological pretensions. It is a far, far better thing to die in an atomic war or a plague than to acknowledge that Apollo has some claim over you. Perhaps this is why Chris Godfrey’s American friend makes the reckless decision to nuke the site from orbit? It’s exactly what James T Kirk would have done.

You can see why an Anglican writer of boys’ space-adventures might want to tell the kids that science and religion are not in conflict. But is Walters seeking to inject some spirituality into science — to say that the feelings we feel when we think of Jesus and the Angels could equally well be directed towards Aliens and flying saucers? Or is he trying to drag religion down to science’s level — by saying that all those Bible stories and Norse sagas have perfectly rational explanations?

The great attraction of Von Daniken is that he gives us permission to believe that the Bible is literally true. Ezekiel really did see a wheel in a wheel, way up in the middle of the air. A sweet chariot really did come for to carry Elijah home. But it does this at the cost of removing their specifically religious significance. The chariots of fire are really only very advanced aircraft. Angels' halos are really only space helmets. When Von Daniken asks “Was God an astronaut?” he means “Was God merely an astronaut?”

And that is the problem that Hugh Walters thinks he has solved. Advanced extraterrestrials are by definition closer to God than humans. God is the most advancedist extraterrestrial of all. If the Uranus Alien is literally an emissary of the Supreme Being, then he is as near to being an actual Angel as makes no difference. Moses and Gabriel were under-cover agents of the Supreme Being. So, presumably, was Gautama. It wouldn’t be difficult to fit J.C into the picture: maybe he’s literally the Supreme Being’s son. Or the Supreme Being travelling incognito.

Joyful all ye nations rise, God and Science reconciled.

Rev Beckwith’s God (in the Doctor Who book) is a deist demiurge whose job is to explain the complexity of the universe. Walters sees, correctly, that science has made an explanatory God redundant. In principle, you can understand how the universe works without recourse to a supernatural creator. But he also sees that a purely scientific world-view throws out the teleological star-baby with the explanatory bath-water. His Supreme Being doesn’t tell us how the Universe works, but what it is for: its purpose and objective. Rev Beckwith’s God is a moral force: he’s there to reassure us that the goodies will always beat the baddies in Episode Six. Walters’ Supreme Being is only indirectly moral. He certainly wants humans to be wise and sensible because if they blow themselves up they will stop evolving. But the Supreme Being doesn't specially want us to be good. The objective of evolution is to evolve. Walters' religion is the worship of progress per se. Walters stated several times that he wrote science fiction “to inspire the young people of today to be the scientists and technicians of tomorrow.” And it seems that this is the meaning of life: the whole purpose for which the universe was invented.

If Chris had not met the Alien, might he have decided that space-exploration was pointless and the human race might as well stagnate? After his memory was wiped, did he feel the urge to drop out of UNEXA and go and live in an arts-and-crafts commune? Walters’ has created a truly Anglican Supreme Being. He is the God Who Makes No Difference; the God who enjoins you to carry on doing exactly what you would have been doing in any case.