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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America [11]

        For two or three generations, the default cultural consensus has been that it is better to be nice than to be nasty. Which must be really uncomfortable if you are one of the nasty people. Imagine living in a world where every children’s book has a message that kindness is good; that you can do anything if you try, and you shouldn’t pick on people who are different from you, when, with every fibre of your being, you believe that kindness is a sign of weakness, that most people are inferior beta zombies who will never amount to anything however much they try and should damn well accept it, and that it is your absolute patriotic duty to be horrible to people who are different.

        Years ago I laughed at an evangelical book that said that the Smurfs were Satanic because one of them was a magician; and that My Little Pony was Satanic because there were pastel coloured unicorns in the book of Daniel; and that the Care Bears were Satanic because the message was that you should do your best to be nice when actually there is no point in trying to be nice without the blood and grace of the lawd jee-zus. [1]

The political Right must feel that way about the entirety of western popular culture.

What must it be like, truthfully feel attacked or threatened because Norman Osborne, who is a white man in the comic, is a black man in the new Spider-Man cartoon? What must it be like to turn on a new Star Wars show and honestly feel that the fourteen year old Ravi Cabot-Conyers is, by his very existence, part of a plot against America? To describe a live action version of a cartoon version of a Grimms’ Fairy Tale as “the wokest movie ever made”? And to honestly believe that these are not isolated incidences of racially sensitive casting, but part of an orchestrated anti-Caucasian conspiracy. To feel in short that the whole world is against you?

I guess, like being a Black person or a gay person for most of the twentieth century. I adore classic Doctor Who: but for almost the whole of the original run, the BBC were operating an anti-diversity, anti-inclusivity, anti-equality programme. They didn’t call it that; there were no boxes to tick, but it never occurred to them that there was any other way of doing things.

I think that there is a very real possibility that the boot will soon be on the other foot. Diversity, Equality and Inclusiveness will be swept away. In its place, there will be Uniformity, Inequality and Exclusivity. When the next Doctor Who is a white male, many of us will think that this is the result of a political agenda, even a conspiracy.

And this time, it will be true.

People sometimes ask “why are there no anti-woke movies?” in the same way that they sometimes ask “why are there no right-wing comedians?”; and the answer is the same in both cases. It is very hard to tell a funny joke that says “Isn’t the President doing a great job! Aren’t policemen brilliant! I was on the bus the other day and there was no nutter sitting next to me!” I suppose a very rich comedian might get up in front of a very rich audience and say “Isn’t it funny that poor people are poor?” but it doesn’t strike me as an obvious comic vein to mine.

“Why was the oil company that wanted to pull down the Muppets’ theatre portrayed as the bad guy?” “Why was Dickens biased against Scrooge?” I think that in most stories at most times the good guy will be empathic, polite and not-a-Nazi because that is almost exactly what we mean by good.

I am not going to take an unholy oath that if Disney adopt a UIE agenda then I will boycott the company in perpetuity. If Steve Rogers is replaced by “Captain America, Muslim Basher” (who fights Captain Sharia and his nefarious plot to make the streets of New York flow with curry) then the question of a boycott won’t arise.

I am not boycotting Twitter; I just don’t read it any more because there is nothing on it worth reading. I won’t necessarily type “Not my Captain America”, but he won’t be.

I am not, and never have been, an anarchist. I like rules; I like structure. I am the sort of person who is inclined to ask “Why is no-one in charge here?” about a work-place. On the other hand, I am opposed to nearly all forms of punishment, and one possible definition of anarchism is “without coercion”.

There is a theory that when the first Christians talked about the Kingdom, they didn’t mean a place in the sky where they would eat pie when they died, nor a future state of this world when the righteous (the really genuinely righteous) were in charge. The Kingdom was themselves, how they were living, as well as they could, right here, right now. “The Kingdom of God is spread out over the earth and people don’t see it” as Jesus almost certainly didn’t say.

There is a romantic idea that the best thing you can do to make the world beautiful is to live a beautiful life right here, right now. Which is much easier if you are Oscar Wilde and much harder if you are a London chimney sweep. And much, much easier if you are a middle class blogger in Bristol than a child in a hospital in Gaza.

I sometimes think that if I were younger, I would, simply drop out. Although when I was younger, I didn’t, so I probably wouldn’t. Unless hanging out in a bedsit in Tooting Bec counts as dropping out. But maybe I can drop out conceptually.

I will reduce my reliance on the Internet. In particular I will back up my online writing to physical media. I will look at putting my words into physical books. At the very least, I can see myself as having provided a testimony of what went wrong in the last days of our civilisation for the people at the beginning of the next one.

“How will you turn the things you wrote on the internet into books, Andrew?”

Using a print-on-demand company that I found on the internet.

“But there’s a hole in my bucket, dear Andrew, dear Andrew.”

I will at any rate diversify the online platforms on which my work appears, so that if Google falls, there will be alternative streams.

I will look for outlets and sources of culture at a grass roots, community level. I went to a workshop about storytelling and was said to show promise, but haven’t taken it further. I have started to sing songs at folk-sessions, rarely in key, but other people clap, sometimes without irony. I once said frivolously, that the real sequels to Star Wars were the ones that were played out on my bedroom floor when I was twelve or on college gaming tables when I was twenty four: I ought to start living that.

I don’t care to belong to any church that would accept me as a member. I am too pagan for the Christians but too Christian for the pagans. But still.

I will be nice to people.

I will do my best to understand diversity and difference and what is appropriate and inappropriate and in general try not to be a complete bastard.

I will look for physical analogues for the Internet which I can retreat to if idea space is occupied by MUKGA and UID. There would be something very post-apocalyptic if I ended up giving photocopied fanzines to strangers in coffee shops.

In the very short term, this means publishing my writing in books and pseudo-books like this one. In the medium term it means obtaining a better laser printer. [2] In the long term, is there any argument for obtaining an old fashioned manual typewriter? If we are reduced to writing longhand with a quill pen, then I am well and truly fucked.

“But, Andrew, you will still be hopelessly compromised, and so will all the things you love: and your focus on culture and idea space is going to seem very trivial when the bombs actually start falling, or when the jackboots actually start arresting people.”

Remember those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War?

But I think that is where I am.

I haven’t said any of the things I wanted to say but putting this down has been therapeutic. I shouldn’t think more than seventeen people will read this to the end. Probably the same seventeen people who got to the end of Dave Sim’s Torah commentaries.

I am going to mostly stop reading the news. Oh boy. Ignore Trump and Badenoch and Farage. I don’t need to know that Starmer wants to make Trump an honorary member of the Royal Family.

I am going to concentrate on Not Being a Nazi to the best of my ability until the world ends.

I am going back to my happy place. My next project will take me back to my beloved 1978 season of Doctor Who; the one after that will involve the Marvel Comics of 1966. [3] And in the day-to-day there are pubs where people sings songs and small theatres where people do Shakespeare plays and some people have even said I am quite good at my day job.

Trump is a cancer. It is sometimes a good choice to learn to live as well as you can with cancer, than to perform surgery that probably will not cure it and will certainly ruin whatever time you have left.

Keep calm and carry on.

Live as much like a Narnian as you can.

Stay loyal to the dream.

Be excellent to each other.

Have respect for those around you and try not to be a dick.

Keep hoping machine running.

[1]  Turmoil in the Toybox was a very silly book: but a lot of people read my satires and agreed that nothing has a subtext, or that cute things don’t have subtexts, which wasn’t the main take-away point.

[2]   Will the free speech absolutists allow me to own a laser printer? I believe the former Soviet Union banned Gestneters.

[3]    Having said that is what I am going to do, I can almost guarantee that I will do something else. Did I mention that there may be a three letter abbreviation for this kind of thing?

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America [10]

What am I going to do?

There is Inflation and Unemployment; and there is noticing that the price of eggs has gone up and hearing that your Uncle Albert has been laid off. There is reading about war and walking down the street and seeing piles of rubble which used to be your neighbour’s houses. There is reading about the Pandemic and discovering that the streets are empty, everyone is wearing masks, and you have a tickling at the back of your throat.

I was at a folk gig, of course, listening to the wonderful Chris Wood in the lovely Wardrobe venue. There were only half a dozen people there; and the manager was explaining, ruefully, that the venue was going to have to close, and the singer was saying that he was well-known enough to weather the storm, but some younger singers might not be. That was the point at which I realised that Covid was a real thing, not just something that you read about in the papers.

There was enough warning that I could do a little bit of preparation. Make sure that I had some masks and some testing kits, and go to Asda and buy too much pasta and too many cans of tuna and too much toilet paper in case there was a shortage [1]

We had an English teacher who told us more or less in so many words that we didn’t need to worry too much about our exams, because almost certainly there would be nuclear war before the 1980s were out. I think he talked about constructing a bomb shelter in his garden. But there was an assumption, I think, that if there were a nuclear war, someone would be in charge: there would be police to set up standpipes in the street and vans bringing supplies and Captain Mainwaring to tell us to make sure our windows were blacked out. And there are the Preppers, obviously, the survivalists, with cellars full of condensed milk and baked beans and assault rifles. But for them it is a hobby, a fantasy, like dressing up as a wizard and thumping your friends with rubber swords.

There are a lot of lunatics in the world at present, and several of them have nuclear arsenals. I don’t think there is much danger of a Threads-style holocaust with everyone firing all their missiles at everybody else and a few survivors eating cockroaches in the ruins of Lords Cricket Ground. There is some chance of a small mushroom cloud in Chernivtsi or Rafah. There will be pictures of Ukrainains or Palestinians being reduced to Hiroshima shadows, candle-lit vigils outside churches and letters to the Times deploring it in the strongest possible terms. But I don’t think that buying a sixteen pack of bog-roll will have much effect one way or the other.

ALEC GUINESS VOICE: “That’s your uncle talking.”

When I was twelve, if I could have had one single wish, it would have been to read every Marvel Comic book, including the ones that came out before I was born; and also to watch every episodes of Doctor Who, including the black and white ones, from the beginning, and to watch Star Wars every day if I wanted to. I didn’t envisage magic or time travel: a readers pass to the BBC archives and the Marvel vault would have done the trick. [2]

When I was a little older, I would have added “To go to see a Shakespeare play or a Wagner opera every night” to my list.

Twice a week someone writes an article about what the Internet has taken away from us, and how wonderful it would be if we didn’t have mobile phones. “Oh, the wifi went down one night and there was beautiful silence and conversation and we all started to play charades, darling!”

“Why don’t you play charades when the wifi is not down?”

Because we don’t want to. [3]

I find the people who pull out their phones the moment there is a lull in the conversation incredibly irritating. I get so annoyed that I pull out my phone and post something amusing about them on Twitter. I am distracted by the people who text in cinemas or at gigs: not by the light or the noise, particularly. I am distracted by the mere fact of other people being distracted even if they are not distracting me. [4]

But people who get out their phones during the good bit of a film, or when I am coming to the punchline of a joke they have only heard three or four times before are the same people who used to pull paperback books out of their pockets on movie night; whose face was always obscured by the Times or the Daily Mirror; who wouldn’t make eye-contact with me at breakfast because they were more interested in the ingredients on the orange juice carton. And there were kids who used to get hit with the big stick for fidgeting and not paying attention at school; and ladies who wouldn’t go anywhere, including theatres and prayer meetings, without their knitting, and men who knew very well that smoking was incredibly bad for them but needed something to do with their hands.

And people have always liked pictures of ladies with no clothes on and cute kittens: what do you think tabloid newspapers were for? [5]

Phones don’t irritate people; people irritate people.

I can remember the days when everyone had to carry a little book around with them wherever they went. And when they wanted to pay for something costing more than a few pounds, they would take the note book out, write in it, tear a page out, hand it to the cashier, who would write a number on the back of it, and put it in the till.

I recall a columnist in the Daily Mail saying that if we valued civilization we had at all costs to preserve these “cheque-books”. Writing a cheque created a little pause for breath in the hustle and bustle of daily life. It meant that the person you bought your wine from saw your handwriting. It meant that the cultured could show off their smart leather “cheque-book-holder” and their smart silver “fountain-pen”. And it discouraged impulse spending by reminding you of what things cost.

None of which is untrue. But once the technology existed, we all started using plastic debit cards instead, because they were more convenient. Shout “cash is king” until the cows come home, but I haven’t seen a £5 note since before Christmas.

Douglas Adams said that when a new media is invented, people cling to accidental features of the obsolete media: people like to have articles that they are never going to read; people like the smell of books.

I like to write; and I like to read; and I like to think. I am very much aware that if I got a phone call from the Guardian tomorrow asking me to write five hundred words on what a Star Wars enthusiast thinks about Donald Trump I would spend 48 hours failing to start it; stay up until 6AM and send it off three minutes before the deadline, having failed to say what I wanted to say, and only noticing after publication that I had written “I do think Donald Trump is a nice man” instead of “I do not think Donald Trump is a nice man.” And I’ve never had the confidence to write pitches or go for auditions. Heck, if someone says “Well, it’s quite good, but we don’t like the middle paragraph” I would probably crawl into a small dark room and not come out for a fortnight. [6]  

So fanzines and self-publication have always been a precise fit to who I want to be. Cut out the middle-man, get your words down and put them in the hands of a reader. Rattling off documents on a word processor and photocopying them and selling them to anyone who will read them for 50p or a free beer.

So the Internet was a gift to me. I could throw my words into space and see if anyone caught them, without any nasty editor or vulgar paycheck to get in the way. I hate to think how much time I spent writing commentary and throwing it into UseNet in the olden days. (Who remembers Drax? Pierre Savois? The Rev’d Steve Winter?)

On the other hand, the existence of a disposable media of this kind creates fluency, hitches your typing fingers to your interior monologue, gives you permission to write the worst first draft in human history: I wouldn’t be doing this today if rec.arts.drwho had never existed.

Usenet was my Hamburg and my Cavern. Twitter was fun until it wasn’t. Threads was like Twitter used to be for about six months and then became like Twitter is now.

For a disturbing number of years, I have published my writing on Blogger. I have promoted my writing on Twitter and Facebook. I have made a pitifully small amount of money from Lulu, and a quite decent side income from Patreon. I have read comics and books on Kindle and the Marvel App. My Work In Progress could never have happened without the Internet Archive.

What will I do if the whole of the Internet becomes indistinguishable from Twitter?

If any of my friends read this, I know well enough what they would say. [7]  They would say “Well, if it annoys you so much Andrew, there is a very simple solution: just stop reading social media.”

They have a point. If Facebook is a racist sewer I don’t have to stick my nose in it. Some people announced rather forcibly that they were flouncing off Twitter and deleting their Twitter accounts when the Dark Lord’s Apprentice bought it for the price of a large glacial island in the North Atlantic. I have simply found that the Twitter which actually used to be quite good fun has simply gone away and is never coming back. But for, eegad, twenty years, and much more if you go back to Usenet, Soshal Meejah has been what I use to get my stuff out there. Would you be reading this now if you hadn’t found me on Google, or Facebook, or Twitter?

But if Google and Facebook and Twitter join the Muskocracy, in what way does Online Andrew, the real Andrew, me, continue to even exist? 

[1]  There was a shortage, but only because everybody else was stocking up as well.

[2]  What I remember most about the legendary Longleat Twentieth Anniversary festival is squeezing into a tent and watching old stories that I had read about but never dated to hope I would see. I think that is still the only time I have watched Dalek Invasion of Earth right the way through.


[3] Why did folk music come to an end? Because the “folk” were offered a choice, and chose the Music Hall and the gramophone instead.


[4] There is probably a three letter abbreviation for that condition.


[5] I don’t think there is anything intrinsically wicked about photos of cute kittens, provided the kitten has given informed consent.


[6]  There is probably a three letter abbreviation for that condition as well.


[7]  None of my friends will in fact read this. My friends will say “Why would we read you going on and on about your pet subjects when we can hear you doing it in the pub.” In fact, the Andrew who types and the Andrew who speaks are two quite different Andrews; and the one who exists in Cyberspace is the authentic one.

[To be concluded]

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