The Bluestocking, vol 318: Clarkson and contempt

The late, great Hannibal Lecter

Happy Friday!

And hello in particular to new readers who have joined since I guest-edited Substack Reads.

I see there I’m described as “journalist Helen Lewis,” although I have learned my lesson about describing myself this way: I recently signed up to a car sharing service and because I put “journalist” as my occupation, I had to sign a special insurance form promising not to use the car to transport any “celebrities or performing artists”. I was like . . . what’s the lower boundary here? If it’s “people who’ve been on Question Time” I might be in trouble.

Helen

PS. You can hear me talking to David Runciman about the arguments against giving women the vote here.

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Charlie and Kaleb on their way to knock a door too loudly

Bluestocking recommends: Clarkson’s Farm, series 3 (Amazon Prime)

In this week’s Page 94, I try to convince Andy that Clarkson’s Farm is the greatest gift that the environmental movement has been given in ages. A beery, potbellied middle-aged white bloke talking about soil quality, sustainability and farming subsidies in between dicking about on various fun-looking tractors? Sign me up for a dozen! Clarkson is going to reach a huge number of people that Greta Thunberg simply can’t.

There’s also an unexpected tenderness to the programme: one of the recurring themes of this series is that Gerald, the incomprehensible dry stone waller, is having cancer treatment. He’s tough as old boots—which reminds me of the farmers I knew growing up, who thought nothing of getting up at 4am to stride across a wet field and stick their hand up a birthing sheep, then return to do another 14 hours work elsewhere. But Gerald also in his 70s, and you can sense that everyone is genuinely worried he won’t make it.

The other thing in Clarkson’s Farm that reminds me of the farming families I knew growing up is a slight wheeler-dealerness, a low-key disdain for authority, fuss and outsiders with clipboards. That aspect of the series makes me think that Clarkson and his producer Andy Wilman digested the whole of HE Bates’s The Darling Buds of May while putting together this series. Pop Larkin is always engaged in running battles with various inspectors (one of whom, Cedric, goes native after falling in love with Mariella) and clearly doesn’t pay his taxes. But you love him for his zest for life and low-key anarchy. Ditto Rooster Byron, the lead character played by Mark Rylance in the play Jerusalem, who lives in an England untouched by PAYE and planning permission.

If you want an insight into why all these English rural anarchists are so beloved, then look no further than episode 6 of Clarkson’s Farm, where beloved self-identified yokel Kaleb and perpetually pessimistic bureaucrat Charlie visit Downing Street to talk to Rishi Sunak about some farm to fork initiative that the prime minister is pretending to care about so he can be photographed with people off the telly. Kaleb can’t quite bear to wear a suit, and so appears to have had some kind of pinstripe gilet made. Bless him, he’s trying.

So they walk up Downing Street, Charlie knocks on the big black door—which notoriously opens only from the insider—and they are ushered in to Number 10. And then their microphone packs pick up the guard telling them, “Just a hint: if you knock that loud again, I’ll throw you out.”

“Sorry, we’re farmers,” says Charlie.

“I don’t care, I’m not,” comes the reply.

It is just the most completely needless piece of low-level pointless passive aggression. Power exercised simply for the sake of putting people in their place. That guy should be moved to desk duties. I bet he doesn’t talk to Rishi Sunak like that.

Imagine it’s your big day, you’re dressed up and ready to see the PM, you are of course incredibly nervous, and then some guy decides to scold you in public. And remember, this is probably someone from the same police force that decided to fit up a literal Cabinet minister. (The Andrew Mitchell story remains one of the wildest and most underreported scandals in my time covering politics.)

Anyway, if you want to know why anti-authority postures are so popular, there’s your answer. Because many people with authority exercise it anywhere from poorly, passive-aggressively and pompously . . . all the way through to arbitrarily and unjustly.

the heroes we deserve

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Quick Links

1. I had better not link to the New Yorker piece on Lucy Letby, because of contempt of court laws, but let me say that it only added to my concerns that any questions about her original trial are being suppressed by contempt of court laws covering her retrial on one of the charges.

2. “Why are we even talking about this? I don’t give a shit about weightlifting.” Very fun interview of my ex-colleague Mehdi Hasan by my ex-colleague Harry Lambert. Is he the new Christopher Hitchens? (New Statesman)

3. “Sora isn’t so much a tool to make movies as it is a slot machine that spits out footage that may or may not be of any use at all.” Ed Zitron being bearish about AI again (Where’s Your Ed At, Ghost)

4. “In creative realms, Moneyballing can create an explosion of cultural sludge, as companies chase the “surefire mediocre,” converging toward banal blockbusters, McMansion architecture, and simply replicating that which worked previously. If applied incorrectly, data analytics can lead to convergence toward bleak averages, with dreary consequences for human culture.” Brian Klaas on the tyranny of metrics (Substack).

5. “I was in my thirties when I sold High Fidelity, in my forties when I started in on An Education, and in my fifties when I began Brooklyn.” Nick Hornby has joined Substack; here he is on why it takes so long for films to get made.

6. “In recent years, [Francis Ford] Coppola’s career appears to have been tailing off – he has directed just three features since 1997 – but it seems he never let Megalopolis go. About 300 rewrites, 40 years of preparation and one winery sale later, he finally had the means to make his dream script come true: in autumn 2022, shooting commenced over several sound stages at Atlanta’s Trilith studios.” (The Guardian)

7. “The story naturally begins in doctors’ offices, where a new form of injury—‘whiplash’ —started to emerge amid the growing car culture of the 1940s and the early ’50s.” I love this kind of article: why don’t you see people on TV in neck braces any more? (The Atlantic)

8. Rachel Parris sings the Hokey Cokey to the tune of Creep, from I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue (X)

9. “A Labour insider described the organisation as ‘Morgan McSweeney’s Wagner group’, accusing it of carrying out “factional warfare” through its semi-detached relationship with the party.” The Financial Times profiles influential thinktank Labour Together. I reckon that factional warfare will explode on, ooh, Day One of a Starmer government.

10. “The late, great Hannibal Lecter, he had a friend for dinner.” Donald Trump re-enacts a film he appears to think is called Silence of The Lamb (X)

See you next time!