Henry arrives a little early for his meeting and it seems that Justin Hamo is running a little late, so he sits down in the windy reception area and picks up a copy of the day’s Guardian. He reads a story about vaginal gel as other visitors arrive, report to the reception desk, and hurry on to the lifts. Unsummoned, waiting in the lobby, he looks about him with a half-smile, to indicate that something quite other than the life of the lobby is occupying his mind, and that the little he does take in he finds gently amusing. Then, tiring of the strain of smiling to himself, he closes his eyes and lets it be seen that he has chosen this chair in this lobby as an opportunity to catch up on the sleep he so desperately needs. No doubt he’s just flown in from LA, or more fashionably, Mumbai.
“If you’d like to go up now, Henry.”
The receptionist issues this message from her distant desk, not troubling to rise. She has never seen Henry before in her life, but they’re on first-name terms.
He shares the lift with a young PA who is carrying a lunch order. The lift fills with the aroma of miso soup.
There’s someone new to him in Justin’s outer office, but she too is on first-name terms.
“Go on in, Henry. Sorry you’ve had to wait.”
In fact the wait is not yet over. Justin is on the phone. He smiles to Henry, waves for him to take a seat, without pausing in his conversation.
“Right,” he says. “Right. I’m not arguing with that. Listen, the June numbers are spectacular.”
Justin is maybe thirty years old, he wears his hair shaved very short, which emphasizes his dark bushy eyebrows and his dark piercing eyes. He plays with a pencil as he talks, rotating it end to end, tapping it on the glass desktop.
“Look, if it was up to me I’d strip the show daily from here to eternity.”
Justin is a powerful figure in the world of factual programming. Not the ultimate arbiter of what gets made and what doesn’t, but his support is critical. When Henry’s last series aired, Justin was a young assistant whose function seemed to be to act excited about whatever project was in hand. Now he has risen to the glass-topped desk.
His call ends. He bounds up to shake Henry’s hand.
“Henry! Great that you’re here. This job is insane. You know who that was? Midge Smith, who produces Come Dine With Me. Which by the way is now a global megahit and making us very happy. We don’t want Midge to know just how happy because we have a renegotiation coming up and we don’t want to give away the store.”
Henry has no idea why Justin is confiding to him what appears to be extremely sensitive information, but this is how it goes in the media world. The presumption of intimacy softens and illumines every encounter.
“So how’s Aidan?”
Aidan Massey, historian and media star, until recently Henry’s onscreen presenter and business partner. They are now moving on, as they say, developing new opportunities independently. Henry has not so far chosen to make this public.
“Still as thrilled to be Aidan as ever,” he says.
He and Justin share a grin, bonding over the tribal hatred among production staff for onscreen presenters.
“You should meet Simon Cowell,” he says. “Talk about the court of the Sun King.”
“You’re taking me out of my comfort zone there.”
Justin shoots his cuff, checks his watch.
“So talk to me.”
Henry has his proposal on paper. He takes a slim file from his satchel and lays it on the desk. This is no more than a nod to the decencies. The real presentation will be verbal, and of that probably the first five minutes are all that count. Television, like the movies, now starts with the pitch.
“I’m not going to pretend this is Come Dine With Me,” he begins. “What I’m offering you will never give you high numbers. But Channel 4 needs more than numbers. You need to be seen to be setting the intellectual agenda. You need to be the market leader in the world of ideas. Am I right?”
“You are right,” says Justin.
He leans back in his chair and watches Henry closely, as if he supposes Henry is about to perform a conjuring trick.
“You want to capture the zeitgeist,” says Henry. “You want to be the first to say what everyone’s thinking but no one’s put into words. And you know what that is?” He speaks slowly, emphasizing each word. This is his headline. “I. Don’t. Get. Modern. Art.”
“Okay-ay,” says Justin, narrowing his eyes, zeroing in on his prey.
“I. Don’t. Get. Modern. Music.”
“What modern music?”
“John Cage. Harrison Birtwhistle.”
“Oh, Jesus. No one gets that stuff.”
“So how come they’re supposed to be the best? What are we missing? Are we stupid? How come the advanced stuff in every art form is either really hard to understand, or really unpleasant? What happened to beauty? What happened to melody? What happened to delight?”
“Okay-ay,” says Justin again, not committing himself to any form of agreement. This is as Henry has anticipated.
“I’m making three simple points,” Henry says. He holds up one finger. “That’s number one. We’ve lost confidence in our ability to make artistic judgments. We just don’t know any more. Of course, we don’t want to be caught out not liking the next great genius, just because we don’t get it. We don’t want to be like those simpletons who didn’t get Beethoven, or Van Gogh. So we keep our mouths shut and wait to be told what we like. Because all on our own, we just don’t know any more. So that’s number one.”
“Number one,” says Justin. He too raises one finger, to show he’s keeping up.
“Number two. Why has this happened? Why have we, art’s audience, art’s customers, art’s consumers, lost confidence in our own judgment? Because something happened in the early years of the twentieth century. A war broke out. Not the Great War. This was an art war, and the first shot was fired in November 1913. The composer Arnold Schoenberg performed his latest work before a packed audience of the Viennese bourgeoisie in the great hall, the Musikverein. Vienna was the music capital of the world. They loved his work. They rose to give him an ovation. And what did he do? He turned his back on them.”
“Turned his back on them?” says Justin.
“Schoenberg believed that true art could not be popular. ‘If it’s art, it’s not for all, and if it’s for all, it’s not art.’ For me this single moment represents the start of the war between the artist and his audience. From now on the artist seeks to alienate his audience. Why? Because only by offending or shocking the bourgeoisie does the artist know he is being true to art. Any other path is artistic prostitution. The bourgeoisie seeks comfort. Art must make them uncomfortable. The bourgeoisie wishes to celebrate their way of life. Art must tell them that their way of life is shameful. Theodor Adorno, one of the greatest theorists of this new philosophy, declared that the job of the composer was to write music that would repel, shock, and be the vehicle for unmitigated cruelty.”
“Theodor Adorno,” says Justin, nodding.
Henry deploys his fingers once more.
“So number one: we, the audience for art, have lost confidence in our judgment. Unsurprisingly, because number two: artists no longer want to please us. They want us to be bewildered, offended and ashamed. So now we come to number three. Why hasn’t the audience for art gone away? If art is designed to upset us, why do we run after it, and admire it, and buy it? Because—and this is the key to my whole argument—because art is no longer a deliverer of delight, as it once was. It is now a deliverer of status.”
“Status,” says Justin. “Didn’t Alain de Botton do something about that?”
“Yes. But his whole approach was quite different. Actually, I’ve tried this idea on Alain and he’s right behind it.”
“Alain thinks you’re onto something?”
“Absolutely. He gets it.”
This seems to make a difference to Justin. His scrupulously nonjudgmental pose is being replaced with a marginally raised level of animation.
“Our taste in art has become central to our self-image.” Henry presses on. “There is intense competition in the image wars. For the uneducated, a designer label does the job. For the smart set, it’s art. We feel compelled to demonstrate by our taste in art that we are in the vanguard. We are not middlebrow. We are not mass market. So when the artists produce works that confuse or disgust the mass market, we embrace them. We love them. We hurry to admire works we neither understand nor enjoy because in doing so we separate ourselves from the middlebrow masses. At the same time we show, or appear to show, that we know something other people don’t know. In 1918 Malevich painted White on White, which is one white square on top of another white square. If I stand before it in MoMA and announce that I’m profoundly moved, the person standing next to me, feeling nothing at all, concludes he must be a fool. In the same way, if I go to a performance of Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata, and jump to my feet at the end with a loud bravo, those who found the music tedious and unpleasant will feel like fools. So in this way I can use my taste in art to raise my status. To set myself above others.”
“Okay,” says Justin, raising a hand. “Wait a bit. Let me see if I have this right. All modern art is bollocks, and we only pretend to like it to show off.”
“There’s good among the bad, of course. My point is that we no longer know how to tell the difference, nor do we need to know how to tell the difference.”
“But you, Henry Broad, you alone know?”
“That’s not my point, Justin. My point is that art has become defined by its ability to drive away the mainstream audience.”
“Except for Tate Modern, which is a giant success. It’s always packed.”
“Of course! That’s the joke! The more artists strive to offend the bourgeoisie, the more the bourgeoisie run to embrace them. Why? Because the bourgeoisie—that’s you and me, by the way —we understand the game. We don’t want to be philistines. We want to be in the vanguard. So off we go to gaze at the giantist sculptures of Anish Kapoor or Richard Serra, and we gawp at them and tell ourselves this is art, because the priesthood has so ordained.”
“The priesthood? Did we meet them already?”
“The curators, the collectors, the reviewers. The gatekeepers of the art industry. Nick Serota. Charles Saatchi, though he’s past his sell-by date now. Larry Gagosian.”
“Larry Gagosian?”
“He’s a dealer in New York. Look, Justin, the names don’t matter. The point is the audience has lost confidence and no longer exercises any judgment. A self-perpetuating industry elite decrees who’s making art worthy of our attention. The art colleges then churn out artists who emulate that brief. Do you follow the Turner Prize? It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic.”
Justin averts his gaze, as if Henry has accidentally unzipped his flies. Knocking the Turner Prize puts you in dodgy company.
“Isn’t this all in danger of being a tad old-fartish, Henry?”
“Of course! You’re experiencing the nervous sensation of the contemporary intellectual who doesn’t want to be caught admiring the wrong stuff.”
“Or who wants to stay open to new experiences.”
“Come on, Justin. Fess up. We all have guilty pleasures. Is it Constable? Is it Tammy Wynette?”
“I liked Mamma Mia.”
“Only because it’s camp.”
“Okay. Okay.” He pulls his chair up to his desk and makes a note. Getting down to business. “Tell me about format.”
“Three times sixty minutes.”
“Who’s the presenter? Alain de Botton? Aidan Massey?”
“No, this isn’t Aidan’s thing at all.” Henry wants to say, It’s my thing. I’ve thought this up all by myself. I’ll be the voice and the face.
“You know what?” Justin now has a faraway look on his face. He’s slipped into creative mode. “If we go for this, we have to deal with the old-fart thing head on. What this needs is a really cool young presenter.”
“Or no presenter.”
Justin doesn’t even hear him.
“I’m thinking—can you guess who I’m thinking?”
Henry is entirely unable to guess.
“I’m thinking Russell Brand.”
“Russell Brand?”
“He’s a comedian. A movie star. A contrarian. He’s totally irresistible on camera. And he’s an Essex boy. Oh, and he’s a big David Lynch fan. I heard him talking about Transcendental Meditation.”
“Oh, well then. He’s perfect for the job.”
Henry’s sarcasm passes unnoticed.
“What do you say? He might just go for it.”
“I don’t think so,” says Henry. “I’m trying to construct a serious argument here.”
“Capture the zeitgeist, you said. That’s Russell Brand.”
“Seriously, Justin. Seriously. No.”
Justin looks disappointed. He frowns. He puts down his pencil and pushes back his chair.
“Let’s cut to the chase here, Henry,” he says. “How old are you? Fifty-something?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Put yourself in my chair. I go into the Channel meeting and I say I want to do a bunch of programs by a middle-aged guy nobody’s ever heard of saying he doesn’t get modern art. How well do you think that’s going to go down?”
“It’s a new idea. I know that. No one’s going to get it until it’s out there. That’s the risk you take.”
“New ideas come from a new generation.”
“What?”
“I’m just telling you how it is, Henry.”
“Say that again. I can’t believe I heard you properly.”
Justin starts tapping his pencil again.
“Bring me the full package, Henry. I need a name.”
“Did you just tell me that only young people can have new ideas?”
“The concept could have legs. It’s a stirrer, I can see that. Have the old farts been right all along? But if we’re going to get away with it we need the right front man to take the heat. A young Brian Sewell. Maybe gay, maybe Asian. A Gok Wan of the arts. Who’s the guy who’s just done that Modern Masters series? Alastair Sooke. Is he gay?”
Henry watches Justin’s hands as they rise and fall and slice the air before him, and a chill hopelessness seeps into his soul. Suddenly it all seems to him to be a farce. What possessed him to think he could sell a television essay on the arts on the basis of nothing but its originality, relevance and intellectual value? For a while, in the privacy of his study at home, he had persuaded himself that his thesis had enough shock value to force its way into the schedules. Now he sees it as Justin Hamo sees it, as a “stirrer,” a piece of mischief, not to be taken seriously.
So what have I got to lose?
“My proposal is that I present it myself, Justin. For the no-doubt unheard-of reason that all the ideas are in fact mine.”
“You want your moment in the sun, Henry. Don’t we all? But you know that’s not how it works.”
Henry shakes his head and says no more.
“I like your idea, Henry.”
“But you’re not buying it.”
“Bring me the right face and I’ll offer it. Hey, you’re a pro. You’ve made more hours of heritage television than anyone still in the business.”
“Heritage television.”
“I’m not the enemy, Henry. I’m not a jerk. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get anything funded these days? You’ve lived through the golden age. You know that. What’s the biggest audience you ever got?”
“Just over five million. For the first episode of The Victorians.”
“Five million! We’d die for that now! Come Dine With Me sometimes gets close to two, and that’s one of our bankers. You’ve lived in heroic times, Henry. When gods walked the earth. We who come after have to make do with crawling through shit.”
So that’s it. Not a yes and not a no. Except if it smells like a no and stings like a no and fills you with a no-like despair, then it’s most likely a no.
Going back down in the lift, gazing at his own reflection in the bronze-tinted mirror, Henry sees an old man who’s too tired to fight it any more.
I’m fifty-four. I’m having the best ideas I’ve ever had. After thirty years of letting others take the credit, I’m ready for my close-up. The Norma Desmond of heritage television.
He sees his own bitter smile in the mirror. Then the doors open and he’s out into the glare of the glass and aluminum lobby. It’s alive with the chatter of children, except they’re not children. They’re boys and girls barely older than Jack and Carrie. As he passes between them they don’t even register his existence. This is who works in television now.
He pushes through the glass doors and crosses the glass bridge onto the street. Why are modern buildings made of so much glass? The message is one of transparency and openness. And it’s true, you can see all the way in. But that doesn’t mean there’s anything worth seeing. This is a classic category error, surely. To make something visible is not to make it significant.
He stands on Horseferry Road, briefly unsure which way to turn. Not so far here from Buckingham Palace, where he’ll be with Laura on Thursday. An honor, apparently, but for what? For his contribution to heritage television.
He turns right and makes his unhurried way toward Victoria. No rush, after all. The future stretches empty before him. Maybe find a café to stop for a coffee and a pastry. A pain-au-raisin or a maple pecan plait. Of all the pastries ever made, how is it that these two alone are to be found everywhere? Why not palmiers, millefeuilles, macaroons? Why is everything becoming the same? Why in an age of unfettered capitalism is there so little choice?
Suddenly he recalls how he told Justin that Alain de Botton approved his idea, and he feels a cold dread. The simple truth is that Henry only met Alain de Botton when he queued up to get his book signed at the Charleston Literary Festival. In the very short time he felt able to hold up the others behind him in the queue he tried out a truncated version of his idea. Alain de Botton listened politely and said, “That’s rather interesting.” Then there was another book to sign.
Justin’s bound to meet Alain at some launch party or première. Those sorts of people are always meeting each other. Justin will say he’s been hearing Henry Broad’s new idea, as endorsed by Alain, and Alain will say, “Henry who?”
Walking down Artillery Row he sees at the far end of the glass-fronted buildings of Howick Place, above a brown-glass raised walkway, the pink-and-white striped Italianate tower of Westminster Cathedral. It looks lost, out of time, bewildered by the world in which it finds itself.
The darkness comes rolling down the London street toward him, a slow billowing cloud that he can no longer escape. The dread is upon him, and he sees it now, and knows its name. It is regret. He breathes its poison now, and feels it entering his body and taking possession of him. So many missed opportunities, so many wrong choices. His life lies behind him like a lost battle, hummocked with the bodies of the dead. So much hope, so much effort, so much illusion, and all amounting to nothing much. While the passion still burns bright you can look forward, you can say, The best is still to come. But when the light dies you turn and look back and you say, Is this all? Then the dark cloud closes about you, and you surrender. You lay down your arms. You are the prisoner of regret.
There’s no escape, and no remedy. The clock won’t turn back. Nobody gets their time again. This is the cruelty of regret, it lives in the past, but it corrodes the present and makes a mockery of the future.
A little hysterical, perhaps? An over-reaction?
But the plain truth is you can’t fight it forever. You get tired. You get old. You want to go home, sit in an armchair with a glass of wine, read the paper. You want to slip into a waking sleep, and not have to care about any of it any more.