Crikey, is that the time?

I’ve been blogging here for more than four years, and I think the flame’s spluttering a little. Part of this is for the best of reasons; in work terms, things have been going exceedingly well for me in recent months, to the extent that 2009 was the first year in a long time that I haven’t been forced to do any work I didn’t find at least vaguely interesting or fulfilling. In 2005, the blog served as an outlet for the ideas I was having; now, it seems more like a place where I can tell you about the other places where those ideas are being expressed, which isn’t nearly so interesting. (Talking of which, do check out History of Now: the Story of the Noughties on BBC2, starting next Tuesday.)

Moreover, the best bit about blogging has always been the community, the conversation, and that’s become decidedly quieter lately. Fewer comments are appearing here, about which I can’t complain, as I’ve been leaving fewer smartarseries in the boxes of others. Also, the past year has seen many splendid bloggers – Patroclus, both Annies, Valerie, LC, among others – either cut back their activity, or move away from proper old diary-type blogging, or hang up their bloots entirely. I don’t know if I’m quite ready to join them, but I’m getting to the stage where I feel more of an obligation to blog, rather than a pleasure in blogging, and that’s the wrong way round: “We run tings, dem nuh run we,” as someone, possibly Peter Tosh, or maybe Brian Sewell, once said. And the smell of leaving is heavy in the air. David Tennant, Terry Wogan, Oprah and, most importantly, Malcolm from Spooks have decided to hop off their respective conveyor belts, so I’d be in good company if I ambled into the digital sunset.

That said, I’m not pressing the delete button just yet. Maybe I’ll have a change of heart, and everything will be back to the way it was in about 2006, when I could knock out vast screeds about Baudrillard and Rob Bryden without even breaking into a sweat. I’ll probably pop up here occasionally with a one-liner, even if nobody’s around to read it. A bit like Teletext. Oh no, that’s gone as well.

GUILDENSTERN: Our names shouted in a certain dawn... a message... a summons... There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said – no. But somehow we missed it.

(He looks around and sees that he’s alone.)

Rosen–? Guil–?

(He gathers himself.)

Well, we’ll know better next time. Now you see me, now you –

(And disappears.)

All the news that's fit to remember

Further book pluggery in the guise of cultural chinnery-strokery: the dénouement of the BBC’s sort-of-interactive review of the decade.

New York state of mind

Tied in with the Noughties tome, I ponder the news stories of the past decade for the BBC. The temptation to ignore 9/11 entirely, and plump for the return of Davros was immense.

Too much too young

I am becoming increasingly fond of The Word magazine, and not just because they’ve mentioned my Noughties book for the third time in two issues. I suppose it’s because their prejudices gel with mine, not least in their overview of the bests and worsts of the past decade: The Wire, Twitter, winning the Ashes, BBC4, Heston Blumenthal, Brian Blessed on HIGNFY in the first camp; reality TV, The Da Vinci Code and Ugg boots in the latter.

But then we reach their Top 10 books of the last 10 years (I like to console myself with the notion that my tome was hovering somewhere around 11 or 12), and Christopher Bray’s take on Austerity Britain: 1945-1951, by David Kynaston, which is lauded as a “gloriously open-armed account of the era in which Word readers’ parents were setting up home.”

Except that my parents got married in 1966. Does this mean I’m 15 years too young to read The Word?

This is pop

A quick piece I wrote about the pop/celeb culture of the past decade for the Australian women’s magazine Madison. You need to scroll down before you get to my bit. Incidentally, they removed my stuff about The Truman Show and replaced it with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Their gaff, their rules, I suppose.

And talking of films, when I think of Madison, this is what comes to mind:

That was then, this is then as well

I just posted this at the Noughties blog, but I’ve allowed it to come out of its box and run around for a bit, since it doesn’t have school tomorrow or anything. It’s by Patrick West at Spiked, discussing the extent to which the current decade will be defined by its nostalgia for previous decades:

No wonder Philip K Dick’s stories have become so popularised in cinematic form - in the guise of Minority Report (2002) and A Scanner Darkly (2008), which are both paranoid paeans to the past, and to the future. And no wonder Danny Dyer’s fake cockneyism has become popularised in a time when we all long for the ‘good old days’ when West Ham, Millwall and Chelsea fans could kick the shit out of each other. No wonder the backward-looking Life On Mars was a success. Even Dr Who has a decidedly retro feel about it. Yesterday and Dave and various Discovery and History channels have become successful avenues, and with good reason. The Noughties has been an epoch of endless re-remembering.