Ever since the EU referendum result I have been thinking of a remark by Emile Durkheim. He said that suicide is not an act in which someone cuts their ties with society, but one in which they communicate the fact that they have already done so. Could it be that, if it actually happens, Brexit will be less a messy break-up between people who know one another well than the whimpering end of an already lukewarm attachment? The leavers’ ignorance about how the EU works did suggest something other than the detailed spite of divorce cases—more the brooding resentment of those who want to shut the world out.
Economically and legally, of course, the idea of a lack of connection is absurd: EU regulations, as the Brexiteers constantly point out, apply to all companies even if their business is entirely domestic. Durkheim’s remark keeps coming back to me not because of economics, but because of culture. At first glance, that sounds equally implausible; surely, in making people more mobile, the European Union has opened them to the culture of their neighbours? More British people than ever have a sense of what everyday life in Spain, or Italy, or France, or Germany is like; British supermarkets are stuffed with affordable goods from all over Europe the quality of which dwarfs anything available in the 1970s; Italian and French restaurants flourish, Scandinavian noir is on BBC4, and books about European affairs sell well. Nevertheless, over the last four decades I have watched the UK drift away culturally from the European continent, partly because of domestic cultural policy, partly because Europe itself has been unable to articulate a coherent and attractive cultural vision to match its political and economic ambition, and partly because social media has undermined the idea of a national conversation.
In the 1970s, when I was growing up, the conduit for that conversation was television and radio. If you believe the twenty-somethings who appear on It Was Alright on the Night, the 1970s was mostly Love Thy Neighbor, The Black and White Minstrels, The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, and girls in hot pants, with assorted paedophiles (not very far) in the background. They forget—because they are too young to remember—that the BBC (and even ITV in its better moments) then provided more meaningful content than it does today with its multiple channels and ‘online presence’, and that a significant, memorable portion of it, broadcast as Britain entered the EEC, conveyed a sense of the cultural connections between Britain and the continent.
*** One of my earliest TV memories, from the late sixties and early seventies, was of dark, mysterious and vaguely surreal dramatisations of European fairly tales, clearly imported (The Fast Show once did a skit based on an East German version of one of the stories, The Singing Ringing Tree, which must have been lost on anyone not of their generation); there were no subtitles but nor were the actors’ lines dubbed; instead, the story was read over the action by someone called Gabriel Woolf. His voice was so lovely and rounded and perfectly English without being at all posh that the Europeanness of his name wasn’t apparent to me, until Young Scientist of the Year came along, with the heavily-accented Heinz Wolff, a German professor with a bald pate, wild hair at the sides, and a bow tie. He was part of a discernibly European cultural presence at the BBC throughout the 1970s, mostly on radio.
"There was even a four-hour dramatization from French TV of the life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for goodness’ sake"I was too young to appreciate the intense Hans Keller on Radio 3, but alongside its dramatisations of classic English novels BBC TV gave us War and Peace (filmed partly in Yugoslavia), Crime and Punishment (Russia), I, Claudius (ancient Rome), Cousin Bette, Madame Bovary and Therese Racquin (France). There was a long–running series “Russia: Language and People” on Sundays and Peter Barkworth in Stoppard’s Professional Foul. Ian Bannen in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy visited Czechoslovakia, and the thirteen episodes of Colditz (about British POWs and their German captors) and sixty (!) of Secret Army (French resistance) presented the European dimension of World War II with incomparable maturity. Herbert Marcuse discussed the Frankfurt School on a sofa with Bryan Magee, and for a period on Saturday nights on BBC2, Film International exposed us teenagers to an uncompromising diet of Bunuel, Fassbinder, Godard, Herzog, Truffaut, and the rest of “European Art House Cinema”. There was even a four-hour dramatization from French TV of the life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for goodness’ sake.
To be sure, we blokes stayed up until our parents had gone to bed in the (entirely reasonable) hope of some full-frontal nudity (imagine the BBC showing Walerian Borowczyk’s The Story of a Sin today), but the effect was to do what all culture is supposed to: to take us to another, more interesting place. If it was hard for the children of coalminers, who made up three-quarters of my fellow school pupils, to meet these efforts by the BBC halfway, it was partly because to the careers advisors at a North Nottinghamshire comprehensive in the late 1970s, broadening one’s horizons meant not ending up down the pit: the standard ambition was some sort of technical qualification for the boys, nursing for the girls, with some of us possibly going to university. Any university. How we gawped at the German exchange visitors with their height, health and leather jackets and their air of being several years older than us.
For those who could see what the BBC was trying to do, though—and there were more than you might think—there was no conflict between the heights of European culture and Fred Truman’s Indoor League, University Challenge and Scooby Doo, just as Hans Keller himself combined detailed commentaries on Schubert with being a mate of Spurs’ Danny Blanchflower and writing about football. The only question that mattered was not the currently fashionable “do I recognise myself in this?” (though people did recognise themselves in Ken Loach’s Kes and the Price of Coal), but “is it any good?” When Channel 4 started in 1982, I was at university, and they began with roughly the same attitude that was maintained for a while at the BBC: European intellectuals (Koakowski, Kristeva, George Steiner) featured prominently on the late night discussion show Voices, our long Sunday afternoons were filled with major European films (everything by Tarkovsky), and there always seemed to be a season of Beckett plays. I don’t recall seeing what Alexei Sayle once called “award-winning Polish cartoons about plasticine men being chased by office blocks”—but I’m willing to bet they were on somewhere. There was a sense that European culture mattered, and that it didn’t matter if you didn’t understand everything, or anything at all, in fact.
Without this atmosphere—this sense that there was a slice of the public sphere, and not just a separate cultural niche, dedicated to Europe—I would never have found my way to the novels of Gunter Grass, Milan Kundera, Javier Marias, or Robert Musil, or to Edgar Reitz’s Heimat. I would never have been inclined to go and live in Germany and Poland and Turkey. Some say that the Brits who live in Madrid and Paris and Warsaw are, unlike those who went to Germany in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet out of necessity, the people of nowhere, and oppose them to the people of somewhere. That is obscurantist nonsense. The whole point of that European education was not to put people into perpetual motion but to offer them a bigger house to live in; not a mansion necessarily, but at least more than the bungalow that we all, as teenagers living on provincial British housing estates where anything other than the pub and bingo seemed a long way away, felt we were stuck in.
The European high culture on TV in my formative years wasn’t just something whose existence we needed to know about, it suggested a different sensibility, not an object looked at but a way of looking. In the late eighties and early nineties, when the Berlin wall fell and the continent’s major political division—with the notable exception of the tragedy of Yugoslavia—was overcome, it began to disappear, and today it is virtually absent. BBC language services no longer offer French or German, Polish or Czech. To be sure, there are forays into European art history, classical civilisations are given to us by Mary Beard and Bethany Hughes, and there is always European warfare to talk about—but for the great European films of the 50s, 60s and 70s you have to buy the DVDs or go online. TV executives have concluded, based on no evidence at all, that even the BBC4 audience don’t like films with subtitles. TV series from traditionally Eurosceptic Scandinavian countries, yes—films, no, not even from there. As Jeremy Paxman said, live on air, of Ingmar Bergman when the great man died in 2007: “he wasn’t exactly box office, was he?”
"Now there is the staggering insularity of Downton Abbey, Strictly Come Dancing, and cookery programmes"The last vestige of 1970s European culture as mode of sensibility is Gogol or Kafka on Drama on 3. The more recent glossy adaptations of War And Peace and Crime and Punishment were not a patch on the Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt versions of my youth; for the rest, there is the staggering insularity of Downton Abbey, Strictly Come Dancing, and cookery programmes, along with remakes of Poldark, Porridge, and now, God help us all, The Generation Game.
*** You may say that mine is an elitist nostalgia for my own version of childhood and youth, a hymn of praise to a European culture that grew out of a white and pretty racist continent and which, when seen in global terms, is as provincial as our small towns. You may also observe that the BBC’s efforts were not very successful: only 44 per cent of the 50-65 age group voted to remain, and that while that was much higher than the figure for the over-65s, the under-30s, deprived of these cultural delights and brought up on a meagre diet of Harry Potter and Hollywood, ignorant of much of what gave me my means of making sense of the world, voted overwhelmingly to do so. Remember, though, that these children of New Labour have not known a world before the EU, and their openness to Europe is all of a piece with an openness to the world, acquired partly by growing up in a more multicultural society than I did, partly by belonging to a social media generation that gets its culture not from the BBC or newspapers but from wherever it will; even if the BBC offered them what it offered me, rather than Strictly Come Dancing or The Great British Bake Off, and news bulletins that treat their audience as though they are either nine years old and dim or ninety and deaf, their range of reference is greater. Europe is no more interesting or important to them than South America or China, India or Africa, but if they are the better for it, I can’t quite separate their attitude from Digby Jones and Daniel Hannan’s “there’s a big wide world out there.”
A year after the EU referendum, therein, perhaps, lies the problem for those of us who want to stop Brexit. The younger generation knows full well that they stand to lose most, but potentially lack either the anti-European passion of the older generation, dreaming of The British Empire and the Dambusters, or the pro-European passion of that half of my generation that voted to remain: we who found it easy to reject the Empire and the Commonwealth as uninteresting, not even worth the scorn of the post-colonial studies thirty-somethings. The big demonstration in London on a sunny Saturday 25 March this year, designed to show of support for the European ideal in its original form, as a solution to the problem of war, was testament to that: how middle-aged and middle-class it was, and how lacking in black and Asian participants. Most of the younger marchers were not from the UK at all, but non-UK EU citizens resident here.
No, if you want passion from my younger compatriots, you have to stick them in front of Jeremy Corbyn, a man whose idea of the hinterland that Denis Healey said all politicians need is jam-making and cycling holidays back in the GDR. One wants to say that they will wake up when they find out what he really thinks about Europe, but I’m not holding my breath. If that is so, then, squeezed between their indifference to Europe and the older generation’s hatred of it, between Corbyn’s vision of Cuba without the weather and Singapore without the housing, us passionate Europeans have a job on. One thing that will sustain me is the voices of Gabriel Woolf and Heinz Wolff, the very English and the very German one, singing and ringing out their own ode to joy, the joy of stories, of science, of the imagination. They are still with us, but because I can’t quite hear either of them saying it, I’ll say it for them: stop Brexit, stop Brexit forever.
