High culture is easy to hate with a passion. Keats wrote ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’! That’s basically ‘Poem to a Pot’. The language may be beautiful, but he is gazing for hours, misty-eyed, at what is, at best, a fairly pleasant piece of ceramics. I wanted to write on low culture. Think Bridget Jones, with Colin Firth stumbling over his cut-glass consonants, spilling clipped RP all over Bridget’s Christmas jumper. Eddie Redmayne’s pallid sad-face scoring the lead role in the Harry Potter spin-off , Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Preternaturally nasal-voiced Milky Bar Kid Owen Wilson yet again playing the loveable doofus. Benedict Cumberbatch being the next in a long line of British actors to rub themselves over the Marvel franchise, purring about how rich they are going to be. Michael Fassbender swanning about somewhere, shoving award nominations in the pocket of his 10-to-the-dozen grey sharp suit. James McAvoy and Daniel Radcliffe patting each other on the back about the new Frankenstein film and sparking yet another wave of ‘celebrity bromance’ journalism. One of the Hemsworth brothers wearing a period costume somewhere sunny and raking in £12 billion at the box office. I could go on…but are you even noticing what links them all?
Here is something that needs to be said about the drudgery of culture. White straight cis middle-class male actors are boring. They are not evil, or wrong, or even bad at acting – in fact, I suspect a lot of them were manufactured in a lab especially to perform a Really-Quite-Original-And-Modern Hamlet at the RSC, four stars, The Telegraph. The whole concept is just a little overdone, like The X Factor or ‘quirky’ girls in sitcoms or jokes about Ed Miliband being awkward. We get it now! If you get a man who has been to a school with a polo team, put him in a nice shiny pair of brogues, and stick him on the Graham Norton sofa, you’ve got four Oscar nominations and the lead in a BBC drama before you can say ‘privilege’. ‘And he put on an “I’m a feminist” t-shirt for Emma Watson! What a lovely guy!’
I don’t feel qualified to get on my high horse regarding privilege as I type this in my nice suburban house sitting on my Cath Kidston bedspread whilst my university-educated mother brings me a cup of Earl Grey. And as a student writing an article for an Oxford student paper about better representation of gender, class, race and sexuality in mainstream media, I’m obviously also not against re-hashing old ideas. It’s just that sometimes politics override common sense. Benedict Cumberbatch saying ‘coloured’ or Eddie Redmayne playing a transwoman may or may not be proof that Harrow and Eton can’t teach you everything. The actors I’ve used as examples might have worked their way from rags to riches for their role. I mean, the Hemsworths are Australian – who knows how the class system works there. I imagine with happy ignorance that it has something to do with how many kangaroos live on your beach. But white, straight, cis, predominately middle class men are getting samey now.
This breed is literally everywhere. They love Donnie Darko, rhapsodise about the genius of The Beatles, and adore their mums. They can discuss the pros and cons of diff erent types of whiskey for longer than you would think possible. They hate the comedian Miranda Hart and love Alan Partridge. They are obviously movie anoraks, so this means making fun of The Holiday but taking the Batman films very seriously indeed. They can’t see Nicki Minaj without commenting on how her tits are fake, whilst not seeing that that isn’t the point. Again, there is nothing inherently wrong here. I like Radiohead as much as the next person, occasionally an art-house film isn’t completely awful, and Minaj did perform for an Angolan dictator, I guess. But our screens are crowded with people who you just know have the same cultural references, revere the same artists, and share the same very specifi c idea of what constitutes ‘good’ culture.
Just as some complain about synth-pop nursery rhymes dominating the charts and seeing yet another reality talent show on TV might provoke a sense of ennui, a certain type of person dominating our TV screens and cinemas is a legitimate cultural moan. We might have Idris Elba as Luther, a black Hermione and Orange is The New Black bringing diversity to our Netflix accounts. But where is our BME Doctor Who, our trans superhero in the next Marvel blockbuster, our female lead franchise on the same level as James Bond? All I’m asking is for it not to be run-of-the-mill, unremarkable, and unnoticed when a prime-time chat show doesn’t have a single person who isn’t that Holy Quintet of Male Straight White Middle-Class and Cis. We should be doing the one thing that consumers of culture have a right to do and tend to enjoy; saying, “Well, this is tedious.”
