Will Self says...

09/07/2009

News should be reassuringly expensive

Every six months or so I do a small act at Express Excess, a cabaret the poet Paul Lyalls runs at the Enterprise Pub in Chalk Farm. I enjoy the evening for several reasons: growing up in East Finchley, Camden, seemed the acme of all that was hip and happening.

In my teens, I used to come in on the Northern Line to see bands play at the Roundhouse, and it was here that the bombshell of punk was burst on me. The gig was advertised as “Three Generations of Punk” that featured The Troggs, The Flaming Groovies and The Damned.

I couldn’t believe the fans of the latter, all of them in wraparound shades and grease-spiked hair, pogoing away like Duracell bunnies on amphetamine.

As I reeled home I realised I had seen the future – and it was death to hippies. I also used to go to Camden Lock Market, which circa 1977 consisted of an empty lot full of trestle tables flogging bric-a-brac and a couple of cafes that did unspeakable things with mung beans.

So, there are these sentimental associations, and there’s also Express Excess itself which is laid-back, featuring gentle comedic turns, performance poets and the occasional ukulele-strummer.

I like to do more or less complete improv on the night, and am abetted in this by my friend Matthew D’Abaitua, the novelist and camper manqué.

We work out the bare lineaments of a dialogue, and then just go for it.

Usually Matthew pretends to be the editor of the London Free, a giveaway rag that’s unsurpassed in its tawdriness, cheapness and willingness to publish celebrity crotch shots and narcotic trivia.

As for me, I simply turn up the contrast knob on my own warped vision of myself – and let rip. People seem to like what we do, at least, they laugh. However, the other evening we fatally misjudged things, and almost ended up dying on stage.

We both thought it would be amusing, given the Evening Standard’s relaunch, if we made none too gentle fun of its billboard advertising campaign, which has featured first a series of apologies – Sorry for Losing Touch; Sorry for Being Negative – and then a number of “promises”, such as We Promise to Listen.

I styled myself as a Russian oligarch called Ledov (modelled on the Standard’s new owner, ex-KGB man Alexander Lebedev) and Matt interviewed me as to my views on London and its sole newspaper.

After a few minutes of the audience tittering bemusedly at our antics, an uncomfortable realisation began to dawn on me: these young folk couldn’t give a toss about who owned the Standard – or indeed any other newspaper or media organisation. I’m older than Matt, but both of us are journalists who came of age during the Wapping strike, when Rupert Murdoch, having bought The Times, broke the print unions.

Moreover, both of us belong to a pre-internet generation for whom media control is one of the most salient facts of the political landscape.

Our audience, on the other hand, had no such scruple (or at least, that’s my hunch).

For them, news is a kind of manna shed by the heavenly screen, while opinion is merely the margarine spread on this unleavened daily bread.

Who the god or gods responsible for disseminating this stuff are is of very little interest to the majority – because, after all, if you don’t like/believe what one website is putting out, you can simply click to the next.

Needless to say, I think this is a very blinkered view indeed. If the only price point acceptable to news consumers is zero, then they will get the news they deserve: the kind of blatant propagandising put out by Murdoch, Ted Turner et al. Ha-bloody-ha!

This makes it all the more heartening that you’re reading this copy of The Big Issue, with its reassuringly-expensive cover price, and complete editorial independence.