Britain vs The Axis Powers : Round Three

It’s usually the sign of personally uneventful times and a stagnant mind when one is reduced to blogging about TV programmes. Indeed, such has been my week, despite some socialising, travel, painting, reading, and trying to persuade Microsoft Word to paginate “Tourist In Your Own Town” in the way that I want, rather than as desired by some anonymous 14-year old nerd in Seattle. Be that as it may, the overall result of my TV viewing has been a renewed sense of despair at the inadequacies of our once great nation – the one before Blair, Brown, Cameron and the other bloke who looks like a volleyball teacher, in fact, the one before most of their postwar predecessors.

This strong sense of failure has been mostly down to programmes about Germany, although their food – it has to be said – doesn’t film well, and provokes my latent tendencies towards vegetarianism. Rick Stein’s rather self-indulgent jaunts round his various relatives was thus a disappointment as far as I was concerned and - Beatle-fan though I am - you won’t catch me ordering the Hamburg analogue of scouse. However, that was just the start. Other programmes this week highlighted the superiority of the German car industry compared with our own – as if we needed it pointing it out – and of the rather more robust and thought-through German attitude towards work in general, looking after one’s children properly, drinking in public, Sunday observance, antisocial behaviour und so weiter, compared with poor, greedy, materialistic, drunken, loud, loutish, atheistic, defeatist, crippled by political correctness and elf and safety victim-status Britain – a nation that is becoming embarrassingly out of step with the rest of the civilised world. Or, in a single word, embarrassing.

And then there’s the Japanese, who these days are much like we used to be – quiet, reserved, thoughtful, respectful, industrious, clever, nice to have as tourists, and generally a bit peculiar – in an otaku-ish rather than a shed-o-centric way. The Channel 5 programme, which every several seconds repeatedly referred to Shinjuku as “the world’s busiest train station” for the benefit of viewers with ultra-short attention spans and no experience of railways, did - despite the moronic commentary - feature fascinating scenes of precision timing, crowd control and customer care. For reasons of libel-phobia one would not wish to make invidious comparisons with certain British train operating companies, except to say that the handful of trains that struggle to arrive at and depart from platforms 1 to 4 of St Pancras every hour should not be compared with the 25,000 a day that pass through Shinjuku – which has 30-odd platforms, and that’s not including the metro lines. No, it isn’t a fair comparison at all, except that one may allude vaguely perhaps to a certain difference in generic attitude. Then again, I’m not sure that I would want to be squeezed aboard, by professional squeezers, onto the last train of the evening, inserted into the armpits and other available orifices of suited sararimen rather worse for wear after a night out. Evidently, then, it’s not just the Brits who can’t drink sensibly, but at least the train travellers of greater Tokyo are more discreet about it, and puke quietly and apologetically over their fellow passengers rather than celebrating their inebriation as an intellectual  achievement.

Other depressing programmes of the week featured (1) a call centre in Swansea, run by a man who clearly rates David Brent as a role model and which – compared with a German factory that makes things - produces nothing at all, absolutely nichts that any normal person would want to hear about; and (2) Stephen Fry making an idiot of himself, oh holy moly, oh good heavens, in the City of London, while showing nothing of its monstrous new buildings and saying nothing anywhere near nasty enough about the whizzy bankers who work there. Both programmes had me squirming, especially as I have a high regard for (a) Swansea and its people and (b) Stephen Fry – although he should perhaps be encouraged to take things easy for a while.

But by far the most despair-inducing remark of the week was made by a correspondent on the BBC ten o’clock news on Thursday who – following the tragic death of a girl who had been cyber-bullied – commented that for many young people these days, virtual reality is reality. Thus for them there is no life beyond the gadget, beyond the screen. For someone like me who thrives on the visual environment and on the myriad activities available non-digitally, that is deeply worrying. I just hope it isn’t quite true.