When it comes to infallibility, the papacy used to have things pretty much sewn up. These days it faces some stiff competition. Making ex cathedra pronouncements, and being pontifical, has become something of a national speciality, commanding its own branch of celebrity and its own fanatical audience.
Whereas churches may be emptying faster than you can say “naughty step”, we find time to listen devoutly, and genuflect where appropriate, in front of Jamie Oliver on food, Alan Titchmarsh on gardening, Trinny and Susannah on dresses, Jo Frost, aka Supernanny, on parenting, Gina Ford on tiny babies, Gillian McKeith on diet, and so on — not forgetting, of course, Carole Caplin on Cherie Blair.
We apparently now need direction in every area of our lives. We are helpless without it. There is nothing we can trust ourselves with, not even the most fundamental and primitive things such as eating, having sex or raising a child.
It’s weird, what’s happened. It used to be that if you liked food and cooking you liked cookery books. You read them for recipes and for information, or because they were well written and made you drool. Now we are invited to read them solely for lifestyle reasons. People who hate cooking have bookshelves groaning with “must-have” cookbooks. Such people don’t pick up Nigella Lawson’s books because her recipes are brilliant (which they are) but because a sizeable majority want to be Nigella.
In a speech yesterday at the Royal College of Art the sociology professor Frank Furedi said that the collapse in traditional authority figures had not resulted in a less deferential and more questioning society but rather in one enslaved to therapists and “hustlers”. “It’s so sad when you see grown-up people, people of my age, on television needing someone to take them shopping for clothes,” he said last week. “There is this myth that we live at the end of an age of deference, but we are entirely subservient to unacknowledged forms of authority.”
Speaking about Oliver, “lauded for saving our children” at a television awards ceremony last week, Furedi added: “Tony Blair pops up to say he is a great man and a dinner lady says he should be made a saint. Then the Queen is shown giving him an MBE. This is a sort of modern-day coronation of an ordinary guy, the sort you might bump into in the pub, and he has become the fount of wisdom and the model of moral rectitude.”
Furedi is right, though I think he picked the wrong targets — Oliver can do no wrong in my book, and I am devoted to Trinny and Susannah. As the author of a book subtitled How to Shop I have no difficulty at all with the notion of offering advice, nor with the idea that looking rubbish is depressing and looking better isn’t. But some of our lifestyle gurus go much further than merely offering tips and advice: information has been replaced with prescription.
Our interests used to be called hobbies. You liked gardening or DIY or buying clothes or cooking. You watched Fanny Craddock or Percy Thrower on the television — entertaining eccentrics who offered suggestions. But now that the culture has become so secularised and obsessed with the notion of the “inner self” we appear to believe that we can get in touch with the good, pure, wholesome person inside us via wooden decking or the right V-neck jersey and, worse, that we can only find the decking through the auspices of a decking guru.
I am particularly disturbed by the childcare gurus. Being bossy about the disgustingness of battery chickens or the importance of a well-fitting bra is one thing; making sweeping and generalised pronouncements about bringing up babies and children quite another.
I heard a really horrifying story from a friend this week: a friend of hers, the first-time mother of a month-old baby, had purchased Ford’s The Contented Little Baby Book, a volume that advocates “controlled crying” in order to force babies to sleep through the night. She was using the Ford method on this baby who, pathetically, was waking up because he was four weeks old and hungry. But his cries were ignored, until my distraught friend pointed out that Ford’s method — which she herself makes clear — is not designed for newborns.
Ford, who is childless, gets terribly cross every time I write something derogatory about her methods, which I am not alone in considering unkind and brutal to the point of savagery. But she’ll have to do some controlled crying of her own, I’m afraid, because her book is the perfect example of what I am talking about: parents setting aside all their instincts, the strongest instinct of all being to rush to the aid of your sobbing child, because somebody else tells you to.
When did we lose all our self-confidence? Why are we so anxious about doing things the wrong way when we’ve muddled through perfectly happily for centuries? People have always liked guidebooks, which is absolutely fine and comes from a commendable urge to be practical and informed. But now advice has turned into a branch of metaphysics: eat the McKeith way, dress like Trinny, plant whatever shrub some random gardener recommends, and you’ll be a better, wholer, person.
Well, you won’t. You’ll down a lot of wheatgrass, have nicer clothes, create a pretty border, but none of these things will make you a more evolved human being. And slavishly following the advice of someone telegenic means that we have come to reject any advice we might have to offer ourselves: what we used to call “instinct”. We’re like lemmings, except these days we’d probably pause cautiously by the cliff-edge and wait for instructions to jump.
- The Archers has put on quarter of a million listeners since its storylines became so saucy. Figures released last week showed that the “Who’s the Daddy?” love-triangle plot — Emma Grundy had it off with her husband’s brother on her hen night, then got married and has now left trusty Will for loutish Ed, with the former demanding a paternity test — had record audiences.
Fans of the series, including John Mortimer, have said that this foray into soap opera territory represents a terrible dumbing down, but like the thousands of listeners whose Sunday mornings are ruled by The Archers Omnibus, I’d have to disagree. It’s always been good, but now it’s brilliant. Besides, since it remains a peculiar truth that life in the countryside is actually far more mouvementé than it is in big cities, The Archers wins out on verisimilitude too.
