What Happens to a Dystopia Deferred?

One nowadays hears a lot of talk about literary and cinematic dystopias—or, rather, a lot of talk about how one “naturally” hears a lot of talk about literary and cinematic dystopias nowadays “because we are now living in a real-life dystopia.” And far be it from me to assert that the assertion in the preceding “because” clause deserves to be contested (at least not categorically [see below]) merely because it has become a commonplace: certainly the world of the present seems to be unprecedentedly awful in a number of salient and significant respects. But I think it is necessary to draw attention to the main clause to which that “because” clause is subordinated because the prevalence of that main clause in the discursive ether suggests that the dystopian-ness of the present is to some extent a pretext for talking about literary and cinematic dystopias as relatively autonomous entities, which in turn suggests that literary and cinematic dystopias qua topics of conversation are if not exactly trendy (for of course people have been discussing them for much longer than a fashion season, or even several fashion seasons in succession) then at least lingeringly intellectually upmarket (as, say,  Westerns have long since ceased to be [not that people have stopped illustrating the present via references to Westerns but that  people now draw comparisons of specific situations to parallel situations in specific films like High Noon or The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance rather than merely saying, “It’s as if we’re all living in a Western”]), which in turn suggests that the notion of a literary or cinematic dystopia is of relatively recent coinage. And indeed, the word “dystopia” does not appear in my 1990-stroke-fifth edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, which of course does not mean that nobody had used the word “dystopia” by 1990 (for I am fairly sure I had heard it by then), but it does suggest that not many people were yet familiar with it then and that not even people who were already familiar with it then assumed that it would be sticking around for long. As I recall, back then, its antithetical distinction from utopia was habitually foregrounded and it was applied mainly or exclusively to then-quite-recent productions like Blade Runner and the novels of William Gibson. One then got the sense that the genre or mode had very recently been invented as a sort of parlor trick. One would then hear or read people saying things like, “A few years ago, because there was such a large back-catalogue of literary and cinematic utopias, or depictions of a world of the future that was perfect, certain writers and filmmakers thought it might be nice for a change to write books or make movies about dystopias, or versions of a world of the future that was as bad as could possibly be imagined.” This would seem to be “worth pointing out” inasmuch as when people liken the world of the present to a dystopia nowadays, their point of reference for a dystopia seems more often to be a book or film dating from before the early eighties than one dating from the early eighties onwards, which suggests that “dystopia” has been imposed after the fact on a great many works that were not originally styled dystopias by their authors and auteurs, much as “noir” and “film noir” came to be imposed on many works that were not originally styled noir thrillers or films noirs by theirs. The novelists, directors, screenwriters, and cinematographers who made the books and movies of the 1930s through the 1950s that we now call noir thrillers or films noirs were not collectively aiming to capture or convey some elusive yet numinous quality of noirceur; rather, they were individually (or as individual collectives consisting of their respective production teams) aiming at producing novels or films in a variety of more-or-less well-defined modes and genres—detective fictions, gangster pictures, crime stories, and the like. Similarly the novelists, directors, screenwriters, and cinematographers who made the books, movies, and television programs of the 1920s through the 1970s that we now call dystopias were not aiming to capture a numinous yet none-too-elusive quality of dystopianism, of a “worst-of-all-possible-worlds”-ness; rather, they were individually (or as individual collectives consisting of their respective production teams) aiming at producing novels, movies, and television programs in various more-or-less well-defined modes and genres—political allegory, science-fiction drama, play of the day (or week), and the like. This would seem to be “worth pointing out” because an awareness of it absolves and frees us of the tedious and by-now-binding obligation to judge these works chiefly in terms of how precisely and thoroughly they anticipate the worst attributes of the world of the present and the complementary obligation to judge the world of the present chiefly in terms of its degree of conformity to the world depicted in one of these works, such that once we have detected a certain critical mass of resemblances between that world and ours, we feel ourselves safe in concluding that we are indeed already living in the worst of all possible worlds (as opposed, per the second sentence of this essay, to a world that is merely palpably worse than the world of the recent past). Not that I am by any means saying that we should judge these works “on their own terms” to the extent that that entails sequestering them from any consideration of their predictive (note that I write predictive, not prophetic!) power, for to the contrary, I believe as ardently as the most philistine sci-fi buff (even if I am by no means any such person!) that they should be judged principally in terms of that power; but I am by every means saying that their reification as dystopias somehow seems organically inalienable from the formulization-cum-mummification of their predictive intimations, a formulization-cum-mummification that blinds us (or at least almost everyone but me) to new facets of their forecastery that tend to be brought to light by the march of time (perchance qua sun-headed bipedal being that shines on the works from different angles as it passes over them). I think in this connection of, for example, the 1976 film Network. At some point in the early 1990s (i.e., in the early phase of retroactive “dystopianization”) it became mummified as a film that “uncannily” anticipated the devolution of television journalism from a medium-cum-profession (ostensibly) dedicated to providing information into one dedicated to providing entertainment. You see, from the moment of the film’s release onwards audiences interpellated the television broadcasting executives played by Robert Duvall and Faye Dunaway as the film’s baddies and complementarily viewed these executives’ transformation of the nightly news into a forum for circus sideshow acts as the most reprehensible act-cum-event of its scenario. Consequently when the television network-news departments began airing purely “human interest”-driven programs like Dateline, and celebrity-centered legal cases like the OJ trial even occasionally engrossed the regular nightly news broadcasts, it became irresistible to assert that “we” were living in the world predicted by Network. And so Network has been known ever since as the film that predicted “our” world of “infotainment,” and it has only come to seem more “prescient” in that regard with the passage of time not only or especially because news programming has gotten continuously more “infotainment”-ridden but also and mainly because owing to the public’s perennially muddled historical memory (which is owing in turn to a combination of younger people’s lack of curiosity about the recent past and older people’s tenuous hold on their recollection of it) almost everyone remains under the perpetual misimpression that televisual news-reporting was dominated by the matter-of-fact, avuncular likes of Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley until roughly five years ago. But the film’s true or worst villain is undoubtedly not the network executives but the billionaire-industrial magnate Jennings (played by Ned Beatty) who is responsible for allowing the news anchor Howard Beale to continue to share the news show with the knife-throwers and fortune-tellers against the executives’ wishes because his gloom-and-doom message is well suited to promoting Jennings’ long-term globalist agenda despite its woefully deleterious effect on the show’s ratings. But Jennings has never attracted much if any attention from parallel-drawers because from the outset everyone assumed that the real-world people behind the purveyance of journalism were and always would be much more like Duvall’s and Dunaway’s characters than Beatty’s, that they were and always would be principally driven by the desire for high ratings and advertising revenues as reliable indices of profit. But in recent years we have seen some of the world’s most prestigious organs of news-purveyance fall into the hands of extremely wealthy people capable of operating them at a loss and perfectly happy to do so for the sake of controlling their “messaging” and thereby presenting their view of the world to the public whether the public appreciates it or not. In the light of the emergence of this decidedly sinister real-world phenomenon, the executives of Network come across almost as the film’s heroes, latter-day Garricks dispensing “harmless pleasure” to the people of America and Jennings as a latter-day Malvolio far more terrifying than comical because a master rather than a servant–or they would respectively come across thereas if the notion of Network as a prophecy of “infotainment” had not long since ossified into an indelible idée recue. And because Network remains enshrined as such a prophetic document it abets the misimpression that we still live in a media landscape dominated by “infotainment” instead of drawing our attention to the ever-more-prevalent and ever-more-pernicious phenomenon of plutocratic advocacy journalism as it has proved itself so eloquently capable of doing. Still, one can at least hope that someone else will take notice of this eloquence and the revelation it has yielded before plutocratic advocacy journalism has itself gone the way of three-network monopolized national-television news programming and been replaced by some even more sinister media-mediated phenomenon (perchance, naturally, yet another phenomenon that Network has been frantically warning us of via other motifs that we are simply too gosh-damned thick to notice). Not even the most straightforwardly monomaniacally programmatic dystopian work is intrinsically, ineluctably impervious to being forced by the hand of historical contingency to yield such treasure. Take The Handmaid’s Tale. It was devised by its author as an anti-abortion screed, and to this day it has succeeded at being interpreted exclusively as such by its fans and detractors alike. But it contains elements that, while manifestly extrinsic to its raison de s’ecrire, are amenable to being transformed into its central motifs in the right historical circumstances, and concurrently to effect the radical transformation of the book’s reception history, to cause it to be regarded as anticipating a historical phenomenon having nothing to do with “the control of women’s bodies.” I am thinking here of elements contained in the book’s eighteenth century-style opening framing episode, wherein a fictitious editor claims to have found the manuscript of the central text in the form of a compact disc-recording, a discovery that allows him (?) to establish a terminus post quem of the early 1980s for the origination of the text, as the compact disc did not begin supplanting the LP until then. (I own that it is possible, for all I know, that the editor in fact discovers the manuscript in the form of some recording medium that Attwood imagined superseding the compact disc and thereby ascertains a later terminus post quem, for as the preceding parenthetical question mark betrays, I have never read The Handmaid’s Tale and am only acquainted with the framing episode thanks to a chance audition of the opening minutes of an audio version of the book via BBC Radio 4 several years ago. In any case, as will shortly become apparent, the precise format of the medium is not germane to the point now in point.) In the light of the media conglomerates’ current-and-prospectively-ever relentless effort to move all their “legacy content” online and refusal to maintain their catalogues of that content in hard media like compact discs and DVDs, an effort-cum-refusal that is doubtless partly motivated by fiscal considerations (i.e., inasmuch as once a person has a book or movie on his library shelf he has no motivation to seek it elsewhere) but that is undoubtedly partly motivated by the susceptibility of online content to retroactive editing to suit the spirit of the times, the framing episode may soon (should it itself not be edited out of existence in the meantime) come to be highly prized as a reminder of a time when at least a smattering of documents stood a chance of escaping the censor’s virtual red pen in virtue of their stable existence outside “the cloud.”

I have spent so much time nominalizing and historicizing the dystopian canon, such as it is, because I have been impelled to do so by my acquaintance with the two works to which I intend to devote the balance of this essay—impelled, that is, both by a sense of their objective place in that canon and by the insight into that canon afforded by their emplacement therein. For the two works in question are more palpably and documentedly indebted to the two central works of the canon—Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World—than any other successors thereof of which I am aware, and yet they are so obscure that none of the dozen or so people I have mentioned them to had heard of either one of them before that mention, and until about three months ago as of this writing (Veterans Day 2024) I had not heard of the more recent of them myself. The two works are The Year of the Sex Olympics, a 1968 BBC 2 television play, and 1990, a 1977 BBC 2 television drama series. Both of them were explicitly conceived in part as “updates” or correctives to the two central-canonical works under the auspices of a media-producing organization in which both Huxley and Orwell had been involved. Hence their very existence should discourage us from regarding Brave New World and Nineteen-Eighty Four as sacrosanct texts whose prognostications are to be appraised in absence of the intermediation of historically intermediating texts as hermeneutic aids; and in positive and more general terms it should encourage us to regard the entire dystopian tradition (if it be not more pretentious even than the use of the subjunctive ‘be’ to term such a gallimaufry of mutually heterogeneous productions a tradition) as we do any other artistic tradition, as consisting of works each of which is “in a certain very real sense” not only an aesthetic artifact in its own right but also in essay in criticism on its predecessors—even if, as the subsidence of 1990 and The Year of the Sex Olympics into near-oblivion alone indicates, it is impossible to regard that tradition as a continuous stream of critical exegesis. Many a dystopian work produced in the past forty years has doubtless overlooked many an error and shortcoming in Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and also tendered a great deal of redundant criticism of them, as a consequence of ignorantly pole-vaulting over The Year of the Sex Olympics and 1990 en route to its direct engagement with the older works. This is by no means to say that either The Year of the Sex Olympics or 1990 got everything right about the future that Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four had gotten wrong, and of course even though I have yet to divulge a single attribute of the futurescape promulgated by either of them, the reader will have inferred that at least 1990 cannot but have been refuted by history on numerous counts simply in virtue of being set in a year that is by now more than a third of a century behind us. But even these errors have the power to administer a salutary corrective to our approach to dystopian works, to impel us to regard each of them in more or less the same light as we would any congeries of conjectures about the future proffered in even the most mundane setting—say, a barroom chinwag chockfull of interventions commencing “I reckon that in fifty years’ time…” rather than as a closely woven fabric of prophecies that must be proved watertight or discarded altogether (whence my above-avowed preference for “predictive” to “prophetic”). I suppose such a corrective shouldn’t be necessary, so obviously correct is the approach to any notion of or statement about futurity formed by temporally limited beings, and yet it is striking how many brilliantly prescient prognosticators (e.g., Hegel, per a preface to a ca. 1900 translation of his Phenomenology or Philosophy of history [the author may have been Bosinquet the kinsman of the illustrious cricketer]) have been laughed to scorn merely in virtue of not having been proved not only prescient but omniscient withal.  

Vis-à-vis The Year of the Sex Olympics and 1990 I find the impulse towards nominalization and deconsecration, the impulse to treat them as ill-defined clusters of utterances rather than as pristinely squared-off aesthetic artefacts, to be so strong that I am unable even to disentangle them from each other or their models for the purposes of a clean exposition. You see, the script of The Year of the Sex Olympics was written by Nigel Kneale, who also wrote the script of the first-ever visual adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the extraordinary 1954 BBC (BBC full-stop, for there was only one BBC television channel) teleplay thereof (not to mention the scripts for the BBC’s nearly-exactly-contemporaneous first Quatermass teleplays, from which Doctor Who later drew so much inspiration that Kneale not-unjustifiably regarded its devisers as plagiarists of his work), an adaptation in which the role of Winston Smith’s paramour Julia was played by Yvonne Mitchell, an actress whose final role would be that of the home secretary Kate Smith in 1990, a character that in dramaturgical terms is unquestionably that series’ closest analogue to Nineteen Eighty-Four’s principal villain, O’Brien, while possessing the surname of the novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith. I cannot think of a more impressive instance of what we might term intratextual ironically allegorical casting apart (perhaps) from the various complementarily inverse castings of the early 1980s BBC Shakespeare’s versions of the Wars of the Roses plays, whose I Henry VI features Ron Cook, the actor who will later play Richard III, in the role of a household servant , and Trevor Peacock, who will later play the leader of the peasant revolt, Jack Cade, in the role of the doomed hero of the English army, Lord Talbot (not to mention David Burke, who will play Cade’s deputy Dick the Butcher, as Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester [a title later inherited by the butcher-monarch Richard on his way to becoming the Third of that name]). (And the christening of the gracefully slender fictional home secretary as Kate is brilliantly ironic in a much broader vein—Kate Smith in real life being an American contralto singer at least as well known for her formidable obesity as for her formidable vocal prowess.) And although of the two 1990 was the more explicitly indebted to Orwell (being enigmatically or prosaically pitched from the start as “Nineteen Eighty-Four plus six” as it was by its creator Wilfred Greatorex) and the Year of the Sex Olympics with its overt emphasis on sensual hedonism may seem at first blush (and many subsequently blushes) to be more heavily indebted to Brave New World, “arguably” it alone of the two remedied Nineteen Eighty-Four’s most egregious demerit—its “undialectical” treatment of individualism as asserted through freedom of sexual choice. For the “Engsoc” party in Orwell’s novel is a party of collectivist puritans, heck-bent on repressing its members’ sex-drives qua potential catalysts not of overpopulation but of “ownthink,” of the placement of one’s own happiness ahead of that of the party. It seems never to have occurred to Orwell that full-blown sexual liberation—full-blown at least to the extent that it made no morally hierarchical distinction between intramarital and extramarital sex (for we mustn’t forget that Winston and Julia are blissfully unmarried and that the only marriage depicted in the novel, that of Mr. and Mrs. Parsons, is the very pattern of a “loveless” one)—could ever coexist with a tyrannical political system, let alone that it could ever be integrated into that system’s mechanism of tyranny. But Orwell was writing before the sexual revolution (not that this historical priority entirely absolves him of a charge of blindness or negligence, for the relaxation of sexual mores was more gradual and early-starting than received cultural history cares to admit, and “arguably” the years of Orwell’s childhood and early adulthood witnessed more radical change on the sexual front than the 1960s), whereas in 1968 that revolution was in full swing. Of course, per Philip Larkin, that revolution was signalized by an increase in sexual promiscuity among the young thanks chiefly to the invention and dissemination (!) of oral contraceptives for women. But “arguably” it was just as importantly signalized by the markedly more frank depiction of sexual activity in films and on television thanks to the abolition or more lenient application of censorship codes. For in designating sex “the last frontier” in proto-Rodenberryian fashion in his landmark 1950 study “on the changing American character,” David Riesman did not mean to signify that the majority of Americans were virgins but that for all the talk of sex onscreen and the attention to “sex appeal” in the casting and costuming of Hollywood stars, the sex act itself was never shown in films, such that Americans were still very much on their own when it came (!) to comporting themselves in the bedroom: “For the making and consumption of love, despite all the efforts of the mass media, do remain hidden from public view. If someone else has a new Cadillac, the other-directed person knows what that is, and he can duplicate the experience, more or less. But if someone else has a new lover, he cannot know what that means.” (The Lonely Crowd, p. 155). That all changed quite suddenly, “almost literally overnight,” between 1966 and 1967. (Although I should parenthetically mention that a few weeks ago thanks to my first viewing of The Bachelor Party [incidentally, a film with a screenplay by Paddy Chayevsky, the author of the screenplay of Network] I learned that silent Super-8 pornographic movies were available for home screening by the late 1950s—but presumably only through some sort of black market. [I should also mention for the benefit of those who have not seen The Bachelor Party that not a frame of any of these Super-8s is incorporated into the film, that one merely infers their contents from the comments made on them by their spectators, at whose faces the camera is pointed throughout the viewing-session.]) By the end of the latter year the cinemas pullulated with R and ex-rated features featuring full-frontal nudity and depictions of “simulated sex,” and in Britain topless women were permitted even on late-night television, and by the end of the decade even Deborah Kerr, among the chastest  of the leading ladies of cinema’s “golden age,” was doing nude scenes. From Kneale’s 1968 perspective it must have been natural if not irresistible to infer that over the ensuing very few decades explicit sexual content would spread to every foot of film released and every minute of every broadcast schedule; whence the governing conceit of his play—a world in which the traditional Olympics have been supplanted by a version of them centered on sex as a “contact sport.” Of course for all the ubiquity of conventional porn things have not yet quite come to such a grotesque and comical pass as that. And yet there can be little doubt that conventional broadcast sports have been more than lightly “pornographied.” In this connection I am thinking less of such topically obvious manifestations of such pornographication as the inclusion of transsexuals and other sexual deviants in Olympic events and ceremonies than of the invention and showcasing of entire new sports exacting a quasi-sexual kind and degree of corporeal intimacy between the participants—that sport known as “ultimate fighting” or “mixed martial arts,” for example. I was “in a certain very real sense” “present at the creation” of this phenomenon—not of the sport itself, but of its spectation’s infection, qua pornographic disease, of the Volksgeist. I was not “patient zero” of this infection because I did not then contract the disease (and hope against hope that I have not yet contracted it), but I was perhaps in the presence of a patient in the low-hundred thousands alongside several fellow non-patients who seemed to be turning into patients “in real time” right before my eyes, although nobody would have said they were because this was in 1995, when the Volksgeist had not yet been infected with the disease of habitually employing such near-nonsensical phrases as “in real time.” Anyhow, Patient 200 Thousand-Something, a fellow-English graduate student, invited perhaps a dozen other English graduate students including me, to his apartment, for an evening of spectation of an ultimate-fighting match over “on-demand” cable television. He represented the sport to us beforehand as an extremely disrespectable novelty with which he found himself unaccountably fascinated, so his engagement with it was something close to cultural slumming, but not quite the thing itself—perhaps in tone and pitch it was exactly what Hemingway’s enthusiasm for bullfighting would have been had bullfighting only just been invented when he saw his first bullfight in 1920-something. (I should mention in passing that this graduate student also professed to be a huge fan of a softcore cable-television porn offering called Emmanuelle: the Series.) I distinctly recall only one moment of the match—the moment at its conclusion when the prospective victor had his prospectively vanquished opponent prostrated in a combination full-body press and head-lock or neck-lock and the vanquished was exhibiting the telltale facial signs of being on the verge of losing consciousness, signs that then as now were scarcely distinguishable from those exhibited by someone on the verge or midst of an orgasm. At such moments, our host at that moment explained to us, the prospectively vanquished fighter could “tap out,” or feebly signal to his opponent to release his hold, and thereby both acknowledge defeat and avoid actually fainting; and the vanquished proceeded to make the required motion; this, too, reminded me of a late moment of coition, the moment  when the woman signals to the man that her climax has begun and that he is accordingly welcome to “come into his own.” I am afraid that I was so horrified by the three-part counterpoint between the physical intimacy of the interaction between the two men, the interaction’s intrinsically adversarial character, and the fact that there was “nothing personal” about their mutual antagonism (and withal probably so intoxicated by alcohol), that I could not forbear from remarking for the ears of the entire company that the whole thing reminded me of “sex without love,” whereupon the host suddenly became oddly puritanical in coldly observing to me (but also for the ears of the entire company) that as everyone (or everyone but me) knew, there was nothing more common in the world than loveless sex. “Fast-forward to 2024” and “mixed martial arts” has perhaps supplanted association football as the world’s most popular spectator sport, and “tap out” has entered the general lexicon as an idiom signifying “to concede defeat in any kind of contest, whether physical or verbal.” Doubtless the viewing of “mixed martial arts” matches expends in total as much extra-coitional libidinous energy as the more—shall we say?—manually expressive spectation of actual pornography, and doubtless its advocates defend it on the same grounds as the pornography-boosters defend that burgeoning of the consumption of that industry’s output—viz., that as long as people are expending such energy in solitude they are not spreading venereal diseases or producing unwanted pregnancies. And in The Year of the Sex Olympics it is the forestalling of such pregnancies that is the raison d’être of the eponymous games: by seducing the television-viewing masses into “watching, not doing,” the rulers of the play’s version of future-world are hoping to keep that world’s by-then-super massive population to within just barely manageable limits. And yet “in a certain very real sense” the mutual resemblance of the real and fictional porn boosters’ respective agendas is quite superficial. For the fictional porn boosters are responding to a practical problem—the problem of scarcity of food and other life-sustaining resources on an overpopulated planet, and Kneale envisaged them as having to respond to that problem because in his day received meta-apocalyptic opinion held that unless artificially suppressed, earth’s human population would continue to double at an ever-nearly doubling pace as it had been doing for at least a century-and-a-half; that having increased from roughly a billion in 1850 to roughly two billion in 1920 and thence to roughly four billion in 1960, it would have swelled to eight billion by about 1990, sixteen billion by about 2010, thirty-two billion by about 2020, and so on. The fear of such a “population bomb” has long since subsided in the face of the trend of ensuing demographic data—the human population having in fact doubled only once since 1960, having hit eight billion in about 2010. To be sure, for some time the fact that it was continuing to increase at a steadily fast rate even if not at a steadily increasing one kept the fear of overpopulation at a slow boil, but since the beginning of this century general consensus among demographers has been that the population will peak at about ten billion in 2050 and then steadily or possibly even sharply decline in response to lower fertility rates, and indeed, a certain vein of meta-apocalyptic thought feeds on fear of a “fertility crisis” and advocates for enforced coupling and minimum child-counts per family. But this vein is not today’s predominant or “hegemonic” one, the vein that motivates the porn boosters, a vein that holds that even if the human population is projected to decline on its own, that decline must be made to begin as quickly as possible simply because humankind is a species of parasites that is despoiling the earth of its natural birthright, whether by extinguishing other species of life, both flora and fauna, to make room for itself or raising the global temperature or simply cluttering up oceans and subterranean land with the non-biodegradable refuse of its picnics. Of course in Kneale’s day lots of people—by no means all of them apocalyptically minded Lefties—were greatly concerned with cleaning up the natural environment, but their concern was intrinsically philanthropic; they wished to make the world cleaner not least because they wished to make it a more habitable place for humankind.  So in anticipating the proliferation of porn-watching without anticipating the misanthropic turn the rationale for this proliferation would take, The Year of the Sex Olympics clinches the letter of one of facet of the future while completely missing the spirit thereof.  And so for all my ardent admiration of YotSO, I have infelicitously started out my discussion of it by acknowledging its commission of an “own goal,” and on account of this ardent admiration I am understandably tempted to stampede to a moment in the teleplay in which it hits the bull’s eye of both the spirit and the letter of some future-facet, but “ironically,” precisely on account of this admiration—i.e., in order to give the teleplay its full due in the long run—I am obliged to trudge over to a moment in which it appears to get both the spirit and the letter wrong. Why is this? Why, first, because despite my abovementioned nominalizing agenda at the level of genre, and despite my abovementioned implicit acknowledgment of the sub-omniscience of Hegel, I am enough of a Hegelian to be strongly inclined to regard every blind spot as a displaced seeing-spot; in other words, to suppose that where some work or document referencing some facet of the world misapprehends that facet, there is an incontrovertible reason for that misapprehension, such that the work or document could not have apprehended that facet at the precise historical moment of its origination (and this is essentially what I meant above in coupling my nominalizing agenda with my historicizing one), such that this misapprehension is actually at bottom an accurate apprehension.  (Not that I wish to discount the possibility of the timeless actuality of the erroneousness of sheer stupidity but that I do not see much of a point in evaluating an historically mediated work or document like a soccer match and I suspect that anyone who evaluates a work in such a fashion will inevitably tally more own goals than it has actually committed.) And second—well, because in this specific instance I have already alighted on a path to the redemption of the blind spot in question, and that path happens to pass through the abovementioned spirit and letter-missing moment. In point of fact it is not really a moment but a massive three-quarter-of-an-hour stretch, a stretch comprising the play’s entire second act—or, rather, while it is a moment, it is a purely formal moment, a moment consisting in the placement of the second act in relation to the first one. You see, the initial dramaturgical spark of the play, the “Achilles’ wrath” of it if you will, is the TV programmers’ discovery that the sex Olympics are not proving nearly as popular with viewers as they had anticipated or at least hoped (cf., naturally if probably unimportantly, the steady decline in television ratings for the non-sexual [if sexual-deviant-rich] Olympics in the present century), that, indeed, the masses seem to be getting rather bored with the entire spectacle of sex-spectation, and throughout the first act the lead or at least senior programmer (played by the titanic Leonard Rossiter of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and Rising Damp legend) keeps cudgeling his brain in the desperate attempt to come up with some alternative form of programming to rekindle viewerly interest (for after all, it will be not only his own but also humankind’s head on the chopping block if the masses take their eyes off their sets long enough to start coiting with each other en masse). He is at last provided with a deus ex machina (in two or more senses) when a younger colleague of his decides (for reasons I’ll eventually get to) to throw over his job and live a Paleolithic life in an actual cave with his wife and child. For after all, he reasons, the life-and-death struggle of this thoroughly modern family in such a primitive setting is bound to be interesting as drama. So why not stick a camera in the cave and broadcast the whole thing live twenty-four hours a day? Naturally such a concept is bound to seem laughably familiar, and indeed “naff” if not downright quaint, to the reader, for it is essentially identical to that of all the present century’s most popular and notorious “reality TV shows” from Big Brother to I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, and it in fact recalls certain series like MTV’s Real World that date all the way back to the early 1990s. And in point of fact the televising powers’ treatment of the neo-Paleolithic cave family’s ordeal occupies the entire plot of the second act, inevitably making that act rather anticlimactic to present-day viewers. So you see what I meant about the missing of the spirit and the letter of the future-facet: of two mass-medial phenomena that actually subsequently supervened, the reality TV show and the instantly available porn-stream, YotSO envisages the earlier-occurring and less subversive one as supervening later and being more subversive. To be sure, there are lurid dramaturgical possibilities built into the Big Brother-style menage découverte that are lacking in even the most acrobatically-cum-aerobically taxing live sex-spectacle, and YotSO exploits these possibilities by having its reality-show’s timeline culminate in a murder, a murder received with wild enthusiasm by the show’s already rapt viewers; and to be sure, even in 2024 we do not yet have mainstream multimedia programming in which unstaged homicide figures as an organic part of the format, but we did have Faces of Death way back in the 1980s, and we do now have to go out of our way to avoid phone-filmed footage of killings and deaths by accident (and indeed it must be remembered that YotSO itself was produced a mere five years after the Kennedy assassination, in whose immediate aftermath millions of television viewers saw Lee Harvey Oswald shot to death by Jack Ruby). Even so, YotSO’s central presumption about Big Brother-style menages découvertes is that they are intrinsically “edgier” than kinetic live pornography, and this presumption now rings false even to the ears of someone like the present writer who has never regularly consumed reality TV even as a so-called guilty pleasure and who can still summon up more than a modicum of horror and disgust at the very premise of Big Brother et al. And why is this? Is it because we are simply jaded about reality TV because it has been around so much longer than ubiquitous online porn? I think not, and in any case, as I have just revealed, there are at least a few of us who are not jaded by reality TV and do still find it quite off-putting; indeed, we probably find it just as off-putting now as when we first heard about it more than a quarter-century ago—we simply have always found it far less off-putting than we have (at least so far) found the notion of ubiquitous online pornography. This lingering discrepancy suggests that there was something about the phenomenon or process of consuming pornography that the makers of YotSO did not know about or did not adequately understand but that we now know all about and now fully understand. I conjecture that this something was the integrality of the act of masturbation to that phenomenon or process. Of course in conjecturing this I am emphatically not conjecturing that Kneale and co. were oblivious of the fact that people—and especially men—sometimes masturbated to pornographic images both static and kinetic; I am merely conjecturing that they were not aware of or had not adequately made present to their minds the fact that masturbation was the very raison d’être, telos, and final cause of pornography, that pornography would never have been produced in the first place (i.e., the very first place, presumably some not Neolithic but Paleolithic cave-wall antedating the celebrated one in Ardèche by several millennia) if people had not craved visual aides-se branler. I believe myself entitled to form this conjecture on the evidence of the few brief shots of the viewing audience that are furnished (via a TV producers’-eye-view of the studio-within-a-studio’s monitors) during the “Olympic” act: this audience invariably consists of a group of individuals—always a “mixed company” comprising persons of both sexes and all ages (at least all adult ages [for Kneale & co. seem to have been unwilling or unable to countenance a future degenerate enough to expose children to such “content”])— wearing decidedly urevealing neck-to-knee tunics and doing absolutely nothing but staring glumly into the camera (or rather the unseen camera-containing screens through which they are watching the Olympic coverage). Of course it will be instantly demurred that this hyper-demure presentation of the diagetic punters was presumably entirely the result of censor-imposed restrictions, and I myself presume that Kneale & co. showed much-less and far fewer “explicit” images than they would have done in the absence of those restrictions (a presumption that gains credibility from the mise-en-scène’s inclusion of the allowable ten seconds of bare breasts in a clip of the introductory titles to one of the studio-within-a-studio’s extra-Olympic programs). Even so, they could have rigorously conformed to those restrictions while presenting a radically more realistic depiction of the scene of consumption, and they could have done this by the simplest of means—viz., showing only one person staring into his screen in an empty room. And yet they did not opt to do this—although “opt” is not quite the mot juste here, as it implies that the idea occurred to them but that they then rejected it, whereas I suspect that the idea never occurred to any of them because however ardent a solitary consumer of porn any one of them or all of them may have been himself (or even, just barely conceivably, herself), not one of them had yet ever witnessed another person solitarily pleasuring himself (or herself) to pornographic images or even encountered a verbal description of someone thus pleasuring himself (or herself). And I believe I am entitled enough to form this suspicion because I can remember a time when, although already a full-grown adult, I had never witnessed such an image or encountered such a description thereof, a time, indeed, when the de-facto imagined scene of the consumption of porn was still the so-called adult cinema, a setting in which people were perforce obliged to spectate on the images in groups. Of course, even back then one suspected that many if not most of the people attending screenings in these movie houses were furtively onanising as they watched; of course even back then the louche fellow in the grimy brown overcoat was a comic stereotype—but because he was known as frequently to frequent public parks as an exhibitionist on the prowl as to frequent adult cinemas as a sedentary spectator, one could not be quite sure that he was not wearing the coat to conceal his nakedness rather than the motions of his pocketed hands; and the very fact that he felt compelled to wear that coat underscored his need for absolute covertness in the pursuit of his onanistic bliss. This obligation was imposed not merely by etiquette but by laws in every jurisdiction of the Occident, and that these laws were not merely unenforced vestigial relics of the Victorian age like the prohibition against throwing a bale of hay out of a second-story window was driven home to the entire world in the very early 1990s when Paul Reubens, a.k.a. the thitherto beloved children’s-television star Pee-Wee Herman, was arrested for openly pleasuring himself in a seat at an adult cinema in Sarasota, Florida when the present writer happened to be a resident of that city (although I was, I swear, at least two ZIP-codes away from the cinema in question at the moment of his apprehension). And of course by then completely average adults had been watching what was effectively “softcore porn” (via X and NC17-rated [and even many of the more sexually explicit R-rated] films) in mainstream movie-houses for decades while managing to keep their hands off everything but their popcorn and respective necking-partners. In short, on the plane of privity to the sensual activity of others, person-on-person sexual intercourse had not been the ultimate frontier but the penultimate frontier—the ultimate frontier being solo sexual activity. But at some point in the past fifteen years we crossed that frontier, and we have now reached some sort of analogue to the California coast (in potentially two or more senses!) thereof. By this I do not mean (at least vis-à-vis the primary pertinent sense of California coast vis-à-vis meta-onanistic frontier) that we are all now aware of the personal masturbatory habituses of our neighbors (although a substantial proportion of us doubtless now are aware thereof [NB: doubtless, not undoubtedly, a difference whose all-in-the-worldness I wish to emphasize with especial emphasis in the present context!]) but merely that we have all been disabused (and by no means self-disabused) of any notion that pornography could ever serve an extra-onanistic function or purpose, and complementarily, of any notion that masturbation is incapable of degenerating into an all-consuming vice à la heroin addiction (or perhaps, rather, “à la fentanyl addiction” in the light of fentanyl’s concurrent rise to notoriety). We have all heard about married men opting in droves for porn-assisted masturbation in lieu of coition with their wives (or even with mistresses whom we cannot even preface with “their” because they have never existed, inasmuch as these selfsame quasi-adulterers have always been content with more-than-figuratively two-dimensional women [if apparently sometimes finding virtually three-dimensional ones necessary, as the recent efflorescence of “VR” porn suggests]). We have all heard about how rates of sexual intercourse among unmarried young people are plummeting because most of them would rather masturbate to porn than ask another person out on a date (this naturally to the ghoulish elation of the above-discussed “green” anti-natalists). We have all heard of young men squandering their disposable income—along with a goodly proportion of their non-disposable income—on so-called only-fans “girlfriends,” i.e., women who for exorbitant prices allow them (and every other Tom, Harry, and Dick) to masturbate to their camera-supplied image. We have all heard of very young men—men in their early twenties at the oldest—seeking out prescriptions for Viagra because excessive masturbation has made it organically impossible for them to sustain erections. (Apropos of this item in the catalogue, I cannot forbear remarking that much as the present writer cannot yet bring himself to regard old-school reality television as quaint, he has yet to get over his horror at the  late-1990s market debut of Viagra and its sufficiently grotesque gourmandization by its original target demographic of middle-aged and elderly men.) We have all heard of very young men who have formed “no-fap” support groups dedicated to weaning themselves and each other off porn-assisted onanism, and consequently (and not lest lamentably) we have all heard and learned the meaning of the argoteme “fap.” And just why are we entitled to repine so fulsomely at our accession to an acquaintance with “fap”? Why, because in contrast to more anciently originating slang terms for masturbation such as “jacking off” and “beating your meat,” “fap” has not an adolescent ring but a childish one—nay, a downright infantile ring, and thereby underscores the apparent fact that despite its abovementioned frequentation by certain men aged enough to be married, today’s Onania is prevailingly not only “no country for old men” but also no country for young men of the traditional brash, headstrong, impulsive sort; that the young men masturbating to porn nowadays have yet to put away childish things, that their addiction to porn is less closely akin to an addiction to heroin and fentanyl than one to lollipops and soda-pop; that even if porn suddenly ceased to be available to them, these younkers would still refrain from approaching a real, living woman at a bar or nightclub because they would find even the prospect of visiting a bar or nightclub too scary and risky. One no longer—or hardly ever any longer—hears pornography euphemistically termed “adult entertainment”— this doubtless partly because it is so pervasive and “in your face”(i.e., everybody’s face up to and including the few remaining blue-nosed church ladyish types who oppose it on moral grounds), but also doubtless because nobody any longer pictures the typical pornography consumer as a person who is “mature” in any sense including the brutely biological. It is specifically this infantile character of today’s onanistic master (!)-habitus, and even more specifically this infantility’s manifestation in linguistic usage, that allows us to “pivot back” to The Year of the Sex Olympics’ first act and, as promised above, to descry therein its fundamentally sound view of the drift of the Weltgeist. For as I have not yet found occasion to mention, the most conspicuous feature of that act’s onscreen television production staff is their youngness: apart from the old-timer played by Rossiter, they all appear to be well under thirty (and at least one of their portrayers, Brian Cox, was in 1968 so well under that then legendarily “untrustworthy” age, that he has remained alive and active as a screen actor to this very day [November 29, 2024]). This facet of YotSO’s futurescape naturally recalls (and for all I know inspired) the governing conceit of 1976’s theatrically released cinematic dystopia, Logan’s Run—viz. a closed society of which every member is executed on turning thirty to keep the population absolutely stable. But although population control is part of the governing conceit of YotSO, the youngness of its dramatis personae seems to be wholly adventitious in relation to that conceit, as we are given no indication that Rossiter’s character has survived into middle age via the granting of any special exemption. Most likely the play’s hegemony of the young and marginalization of the old is simply an unmediated echo of Kneale’s personal observation of the sheer demographic overwhelmingness of the then-still-teenaged baby boomers: he saw that the tone of the age was being set by young people with unprecedented firmness and insistence, pessimistically assumed that it would go on being set by them in perpetuity, and incorporated this pessimism into the work’s load-bearing dramaturgical timber, doubtless throwing in the Rossiter character as a surrogate for himself qua beleaguered dinosaur. This is not to say that the echo is so unmediated that the Rossiter character comports himself like the father in Bye-Bye Birdie or an Archie Bunker very slightly avant la lettre, i.e., as a crotchety old curmudgeon perpetually asking “What’s the matter with kids today?” and specifically fulminating against the vices of the youth of the 1960s in the idiom of a middle-aged man of that decade; to the contrary, Kneale is sufficiently mindful of the probable empirical trajectory of history to realize that any dinosaur of the future of fifty or a hundred years hence will have formerly been a whippersnapper of the future of twenty-five or seventy-five years hence and must therefore be presented in a manner that although less disagreeable to present sensibilities than that of his younger contemporaries is still plenty off-putting thereto. And so Rossiter sports clothes in the same style as those favored by (or imposed on?) his younger colleagues—a style signalized by unisex tunics covered in paisley, one of the signature fabric-patterns of the 1960s (although because like almost all BBC color programs of its time YotSO was archived exclusively in black-and-white copies, we know that the color scheme of this paisley is specifically that garish ever-so-sixties motley of fluorescent hues known as “psychedelic” only thanks to a miraculously surviving production still or two), and although unlike these young-timers he is familiar with such old-timey hifalutin words as “vicarious” and “victorious,” his habitual idiolect is virtually indistinguishable from theirs, a super-breezy, slang-heavy version of English with grammar so obscenely simplified that it has not with much exaggeration been termed (specifically by the author of the British Film Institute page where I first learned of YotSO’s existence two decades ago) a form of baby-talk. Even the lexicon of these people’s slang is infantile: the word “jumbo”—evocative of such primal childhood experiences as visits to zoos and circuses, with their Disney-inspiring elephants and super-sized helpings of cotton candy [a.k.a. candyfloss] and popcorn—figures with especial prominence in it. And while in fine Brave New World style the TV-makers of YotSO are cheered and sedated by a soma-like drug, they deliver it to their organism not by popping pills or smoking cigarettes but by licking popsicles (a.k.a. iced lollies). In short, Kneale and his collaborators have not simply transposed the 60s counterculture into their future world; rather, not unlike like the mad scientist (specifically, I believe, a mad scientist in an installment of the abovementioned Doctor Who) who in focusing his rejuvenating ray-gun too intently on an elderly man turned him into a baby comically frolicking in the folds of his older self’s clothes, they have super-transposed it thereinto, producing a version of that subculture in which everyone and everything is even younger than in its present manifestation, for after all, for all their rebelliousness and moral immaturity, the young adults of the 60s were young adults who prided themselves on living independently (even if most of the most conspicuously tone-setting of them depended on financial assistance from their parents) and flaunted their adultness, their biological maturity, via a profusion of facial and leg hair; (perhaps not insignificantly the only originally facial-haired character in YotSO is the hired interloper in the second act, who sports a full moustache-and-beard combination from his first entrance ownwards). And their slang, although decidedly off-putting, had more in common, both in spirit and in function, with that of the prison yard than of the school playground; for it prevailingly aimed to mystify—to keep “the pigs” et al. from catching on to the illicit activities they were up to—rather than to give vent to residual childhood drives. As for their grammar, all deviations therein from that of their elders were wholly cosmetic, consisting almost entirely of occasional deliberate lapses into the grammatical elisions of so-called black English (e.g., double negatives and “I got” or “I ain’t got” instead of “I’ve got”/“I have” or “I haven’t got”/“I don’t have”). And so at least in this facet of their facture Kneale &co. have proved to be even more farsighted (by which I simply mean more perceptive, more attentive to certain social, intellectual, and moral trends [for let me repeat: I do not regard the deviser of any dystopia as genuinely prophetic]) than they seemed to me when I first watched YotSO about a decade-and-a-half ago. For today’s young to middle-aged adults, the so-called Millennials, are notoriously incapable of putting away childish things. The free hours their parents and grandparents devoted to playing tennis or football or bridge or poker or music they spend refurbishing and cataloguing collections of so-called action figures from sci-fi and “fantasy” movies they first saw when they were in their single digits, or dressing up as characters from these films. Of course for about three-quarters of a decade—from ca. 2010 to ca. 2018—young men were not unwont to flaunt facial hair, but this flauntage was almost invariably a mere epiphenomenon of their cursed indolence and lack of discipline, their cursed inability-cum-disinclination to adhere to routine even in an activity as undemanding as shaving. And “fap” is by no means the only infantile vocable in their slang lexicon; indeed, as I have pointed out elsewhere, this lexicon is almost entirely monosyllabic. And over the past few years—(sic) on “years” rather than “decades”—we (a “we” presumably barely more than royal, as while I cannot but imagine I am the only person to have noticed the phenomenon in question, I have yet to meet a single fellow-living human who acknowledges having noticed it, let alone being troubled by it) we have indeed witnessed a dramatic (or grand-guignol [for while it is grotesque enough to be cartoonish or farcical it is certainly not amusing]) deterioration of the grammar of the Anglophone youth. I am not thinking here of the hoary pseudo-solecisms whose resurfacing in the tirades of usage-curmudgeons decade after decade assures middle-of-the-road linguistic conservatives “all’s right with the world” and “the kids are alright [sic]” more assuredly than a pan-Anglospheric punctilious heeding of every prescription of the first edition of Fowler’s English Usage ever could do ([sic] on the barbarous neo-Briticism do)—split infinitives, prepositions at the ends of sentences, and the like. No: I am referring to the entire disappearance of certain grammatical forms and a consequent elision or outright erasure of meaning-bearing distinctions, a disappearance that is making it increasingly difficult for even semi-well-schooled oldsters even to comprehend the sense of the utterances of youngsters (and for them to understand each other, although they, having never been aware of the distinctions, perforce must be unaware that the absence of the distinctions is what is impeding their mutual comprehension)—the past participles of “three-slotted” irregular verbs like “go” and “run” (such that they utter such abominations as “a government-ran organization” rather than a “government-run organization,” thereby impelling oldsters, who cannot help interpreting the construction as a malformed declarative sentence rather than the noun phrase that it is meant to be, pondering whether to place “a” or “the” between “ran” and “organization”). Then there is the obliteration or evaporation of the entire sequence of tenses and moods. To a semi-well-schooled oldster of today, the quasi-question “What if the South won the Civil War?” sounds as if it has slipped out the mouth of a smartass revisionist leftist historian who is inviting us to consider the possibility that despite the North having been declared the victors of the war on paper, despite Lee having surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, and so on, the South turned out to be the real winners of the war in certain material or practical terms (e.g., inasmuch as in recent decades certain Southern states like Florida and Georgia have become economic-cum-demographic powerhouses while certain northern states like New York and Pennsylvania have been quite economically and demographically sluggish by comparison with them). But to even a very-well-schooled youngster of the present (for one of the most supine-cum-active victims-cum-committers of this solecism known to me is also one of the best-schooled known thereto, at least in certain domains of knowledge) “What if the South won the Civil War?” means what us oldsters would mean by “What if the South had won the Civil War?”—i.e., “What would the U.S. look like now in consequence of a counterfactual end to the war in which Grant had surrendered to Lee rather than vice-versa and the Confederacy had been allowed to survive as a separate polity [although of course the tense-and-mood-blind youngster would say or write “in which Grant surrendered to Lee…and the Confederacy was allowed to survive…”] (It is, incidentally, interesting to ponder whether this deterioration has “organically” arisen out of the youngsters’ imperviousness to the inculcation of the correct grammatical forms or “artificially” out of their schoolteachers’ deliberate omission to inculcate those forms on the same sort of grounds as those on which the dictionaries have started to recommend “bacteria” as a singular noun and allow “monkey” as a designation encompassing the great apes as well as the little higher primates—viz., that the unlettered masses are always right or mustn’t be made to feel stupid by those who manage to master the rules; and I do not [yet] despair of getting to the bottom of this question via judicious questioning of my not un-numerous contemporaries-cum-acquaintances with school-aged children.) So YotSO has turned out to be quite spot-on about the moral-cum-intellectual constitution of today’s young adults, those who have come of age within the past decade-and-a-half. But rather than prompting us to prostrate ourselves before Kneale &co.’s prophetic gifts or “prescience,”might this spot-on-ness instead prompt us (or at least me) to scourge our slightly younger selves (or myself) for our own cursed blindness-cum-thickheadedness, our accursed inability to read “the writing on the wall” or “the tea leaves” of the Zeitgeist-cum-Weltgeist of the 1960s-through-the-20-oughties? For in hindsight it seems downright Pollyana-ish to have supposed as we (or at least I) did that the cohorts of post-Baby Boomer youth would simply replicate the masculine refractoriness and hedonism of the Flower Power generation.  For as I have pointed out in my essay on the very-late-1990s sitcom It’s Like…You Know (and as I properly, distinctly realized only after the Its Like…You Know viewing-session that prompted the composition of the essay, a viewing-session that took place two years ago at most recent and hence long after my first viewing of YotSO), despite their open and unfeigned contempt for the données of their parents’ generation, the Flower Power younkers had assimilated many if not most of those données to such an extent that they could not but inform their behavior at a more-than-figuratively muscular resolution. They may have found Shakespeare boring but they had still read some Shakespeare and always had Hamlet’s and Ophelia’s dialogue in the back of their minds even at Woodstock; they may have found John Wayne “fascistic,” but they still knew that men were supposed to behave like John Wayne  (I read or heard somewhere or other that late in life the god-awful Abbie Hoffman of Steal This Book infamy asserted something to the effect that John Wayne’s portrayals were the most admirable in all of American cinema or that he had to admit he had always regarded John Wayne as something of a personal role-model), and so the men among them did carry themselves rather like John Wayne (and the women among them found this Waynean self-carriage alluring). Naturally it had been bound to take some time for acquaintance with these données to evaporate from the collective Jugendbewusstsein; it had been bound to wait specifically until the Flower-Power younkers had grown into middle-agedsters and begotten children and gone out of their way not to communicate the données to those bairns and these donnée-less bairns had grown into young adults and assumed their demographically allotted tone-setting place—to wait, in other words, until at least 2012, when the oldest of the so-called millennials turned thirty. And it was not as if young people had not been shedding données throughout the Anglosphere for some years before 1968, or as if this shedding had not been widely reported on: in the abovementioned Lonely Crowd, David Riesman observed that by the late 1940s, children and adolescents had begun to cease taking their parents seriously as “authority figures” and to take all their cues for cultural consumption from their “peer group.” As The Lonely Crowd was a blockbuster bestseller, at least by the standards of academic publishing, Kneale may very well have read it—or he may have simply been told off for being a “square” by his own teenaged children. In either case, Kneale was one shrewd and perceptive spectator of the Weltgeisteslauf. And as YotSO has only belatedly yielded many of its most perceptive insights into the world of the 2020s, it seems quite sensible—nay, positively exigent—to examine it more closely for insights into the possible world of the 2030s and beyond. The most obvious (at least to me) starting point for this reexamination is a reconsideration of the entire idée reçue of the scenario of the second act as Big Brother or I’m a Celebrity en avant la lettre, as nothing but an exposé of voyeurism “taken up a  notch,” or, to put it another way, a first consideration of the notion that that scenario’s naffness and naivety does not even require the redemption that I have sought for it (and, I flatter myself, won for it) because it was not at bottom inculcating a lesson that could even be taken as naff or naïve at first blush.  And I descry the germ of the possibility of such a reconsideration in the first-act-originating motivational germ that eventually gives rise to the scenario—namely, the personal discontentment of the couple who come to form the centerpiece of the Paleolithic reality show. As a consequence of a conversation in which the Leonard Rossiter character fills him in on the entire prehistory-cum-raison d’être of the modern television industry, the male half of the couple begins to question the rationality and moral probity of the way of life that he has thitherto always taken for granted as the only possible one. At that moment he is involved in a liaison with the studio’s leading female presenter (a physically fetching lass who is easily the most uncannily anachronistic figure in the entire teleplay: with her face-covering coating of metallic make-up, perpetually pert and irritated demeanor, and clipped hybrid northern and estuary accent, she resembles a 90s “party girl” à la Patsy Kensit or one of the Spice quartet far more closely than a Carnaby-Street dolly-bird), but thereafter he becomes disaffected with her and begins yearning to reestablish close relations with an earlier sweetheart who also happens to be the mother of his daughter. At no point in the past, including that of the begetting, carriage, and bearing of the child was he married to this woman (and indeed it would seem that in the diagesis of YotSO the institution of marriage no longer survives even in name). As both he and the mother were identified at an early age as “high drive”—i.e., intelligent enough to do important high-level work like producing television programs, work too time and energy-consuming to leave room for child-rearing—the child has been in the care of the State since birth, and neither of them has played any substantial part in her upbringing, although both occasionally visit her. (For this portion of his scenario, Kneale doubtless had to look no further than, and but very lightly exaggerate, the heterodox domestic situations of his colleagues in the culture industry, although the child-rearing problems attending the “two-income” trap even for married couples certainly increased dramatically in the ensuing decades, as the present writer can attest, having spent most of his afterschool hours of the late 1970s and early 1980s in some form of daycare because both his parents had fulltime daytime jobs.)  When one of his parental visits happens to coincide with one of the mother’s, she reveals to him to his horror that the girl has been identified as “low drive,” meaning that she is destined to be separated from them for good and consigned to the ranks of the idle, porn-watching masses. Consequently, for the first time, they realize that however indifferent they may have grown towards each other, they have always been united in their love for their daughter. The man begins to feel guilty about the extent to which his own neglect of his daughter’s education may have contributed to her present plight, but in attempting to apologize for this neglect all he can say is “I’ve done it all wrong” because the English language has been purged—either deliberately or thanks to the long absence of its own custodians, usage guardians like the Fowler brothers and Sir Ernest Gowers—of all terms denoting moral responsibility. (Of course, in 1968 the obsolescence of moral terminology in the actual Anglosphere was already a fait accompli, as Alasdair MacIntyre would demonstrate shortly afterward in After Virtue, a book that memorably [and perhaps significantly] opens with a dystopian science-fiction parable likening the disappearance of such terminology to the counterfactual disappearance of the lexicon of the natural sciences.) And so this reconstituted family’s move into the wild grows out of the father’s aim to “get everything right” about his child’s upbringing from now on—to live with her mother as a husband, to provide for the two of them as a husband and father, and so on. Seen in this light, the “Paleolithic” episode obviously anticipates the various “trad” and “pro-natalist” movements that have only quite recently developed in explicit reaction to the fruitless libertinage introduced by the Sexual Revolution. Accordingly, the catastrophic failure of the father’s aim in the murder of the wife and child by the planted interloper may perhaps be fruitfully read as a cautionary tale about the prospects of these movements and the dangers threatening them. Of course a reality TV program centering on a “trad” family would be bothersome enough (and presumably such a program is already being bothersome on some so-called platform, although the closest actual approaches thereto that I am already aware of are those Netflix or HBO-produced programs about unmarried Hindus and Orthodox Jews seeking to settle themselves in traditional “arranged” marriages). But we may more broadly interpret the episode as a reminder of the robustness of the post-Sexual Revolutionary meta-sexual dispensation and of the likelihood that it is not going to allow itself to be quietly supplanted by a reconstitution of a dispensation centered on marriage and procreation, that at this point there are far too many people who have far too much to lose by a return to the old ways for such a return not to be preemptively sabotaged—or at least, in a rosier scenario, for it to succeed absent some more than emotionally violent phase of inter-dispensational civil war.

This is probably as good a moment as any to move on—or back—to 1990, inasmuch as that show “speaks to our present crisis” more overtly and extensively (if not necessarily more deeply) than YotSO, and not just because it was made nearly a decade more recently. Indeed, if it had been made only three-to-four years later than it was—in 1980 and 1981 rather than in 1977 and 1978, it would doubtless seem a good deal wider of the nose than it does because it undoubtedly would have had to imagine a very different version of the future. For 1990 transparently presents itself as a response to the political and social problems of Britain of the late 1970s, Britain at the tail end of a long period of Labour hegemony and extremely unpopular Labour policies like supinity to union leaders and sky-high VAT and income taxes for people of very modest means. And the worst of the effects of these policies was by no means entirely in the “rear view mirror,” for the so-called Winter of Discontent, when rubbish piled up in the streets and bodies went unburied as a consequence of public-service sector strikes, did not even begin until November of 1978. So 1990 essentially presents a view of Britain as it might have become by the show’s eponymous year had the Conservatives not won the 1979 election: from near its very beginning it is obvious that Labour are still in charge because one of the very first scenes presents the diagetically current Home Secretary as a former coal miner. The show’s unabashed Labour-phobia has caused it to be snidely disparaged (in one of the mere three full-fledged reviews of it that I have yet managed to find) as “a Daily Mail-reader’s dystopia.” But this is hardly a fair characterization—for one thing, because Labour’s policies were deeply unpopular with Britons across the so-called political spectrum and in every walk of life (basically with everyone who could not immediately count on being a net gainer thanks to them); and for another the political agenda implicitly propounded by 1990 is not by a long chalk as radically laissez-faire-philic as Thatcherism. One sees this, for example, in its glaringly favorable presentation of two characters—a doctor and a trade-union leader. The doctor, a product and admirer of the National Health Service of ca. 1970, has recently emigrated to the U.S. in part to advise the federal government on its institution of a national healthcare system to be patterned on that earlier incarnation of the NHS (here of course the show is either twenty years off or thirty-four years off and counting depending on the extent to which one regards “Obamacare” as a proper national healthcare system). The trade union leader, a sexagenarian with deep roots in the movement, denounces its present state only very reluctantly, when he finds that the government and unions’ hand-in-glove imposition of a three-day work week is compelling workers for basic subsistence’s sake to take on side jobs that they must conceal from the government on pain of  imprisonment. (The doctor, incidentally, first gets into hot water with the government as a consequence of helping workers hold down such side jobs via the manipulation of medical paperwork.) On the whole, one gets the impression that on the level of “meat-and-potatoes” political issues the devisers of 1990 would like to roll Britain back to the 1950s at the farthest. “That said,” there is no denying that 1990 is fundamentally a polemic against then-current governmental overreach and a full-fledged tyranny projected to grow out of that overreach, a fact that cannot help giving one pause in conjunction with the fact that it was wholly produced by a governmental broadcasting organ, the BBC (for there was no farming out of production to independent companies in those days), especially given that the BBC itself, lightly “rebranded” as “British State Broadcasting,” is portrayed in it as one of the tyrants’ chief instruments of oppression. My first conclusion on reflecting on these facts was to echo inwardly the center-right critique of today’s super-woke Beeb—viz., that while they indeed showed how far the BBC had declined in the past near half-century inasmuch as such a relentlessly “nanny state”-skeptical program(me) would never be green-lighted today, until quite recently the BBC had been a bastion of fair-mindedness, that restoring it to the type of organization that would green-light such a program(me) would merely be a matter of turning the clock back to the non-counterfactual 1990 at the very farthest, of turning it back to the days when Rod Liddle had been a producer of the Today program and that conservative Christian bloke whose name escaped me (and still escapes me) had been the head of an entire division etc. But then I recalled an interview I had recently seen with the right-wing curmudgeon Kingsley Amis, an interview dating from 1975 (i.e., two years before 1990’s debut), an interview wherein he had tendered exactly the same sort of complaint about the media of that year (not only the BBC but also most of the major newspapers including the UK’s own “paper of record, ”the Times of London) that today’s center-right types level at today’s media —viz., that they were in the hands of Left-wing Oxbridge-educated neo-Bloomsburyian “elites” who were wholly out of touch with the majority of the country’s population and determined to render that majority’s opinions unutterable in polite society, to place them “outside the Overton window,” as people would say nowadays. I further recalled that while, yes, the BBC of the late 1960s had produced not only The Year of the Sex Olympics but also such an unabashed celebration of Occidental cultural achievement as Civilisation, the BBC of the early 1970s had allowed Doctor Who to fall into the hands of a producer, Barry Letts, intent on using the program(me) as a vehicle for the promulgation of “progressive” ideas, as was manifested in his assigning the Doctor a plucky female research scientist, and, later, a plucky female investigative journalist, as sidekicks, and his green-lighting (or in some cases outright authorship) of story scenarios critical of environmental pollution by large private enterprises and laudatory of hippies and transcendentally meditative Buddhists. Given that everyone involved in the approval and supervision of 1990 is presumably dead by now, there is presumably no way of confirming or refuting this conjecture (cf. my disclaimer regarding the ascertainment of the quotidian circumstances of Alban Berg’s “discovery of dialectics”), but I conject that 1990’s comparative rightward thrust is the result of a “course correction” in response to supervening political events and shifts in public opinion; that per Amis, the BBC had become decidedly left-wing by the early 1970s and that it into the mid-1970s it produced left-agenda pushing programming in defiance of the prevailingly right-wing British Volksgeist, but that by 1977 Labour’s policies were beginning to incense a substantial proportion of even the more liberally-minded minority of the Beeb’s licence fee-holders (the totality thereof, after all, more or less constituting the totality of the UK’s population, a smattering of fee-dodgers and telly-less old fogeys notwithstanding), such that if felt that if it did not wish to hear of calls to “defund the BBC” from Tory MPs stirred to emit such calls by calls emitted in turn by their constituents at fractious “surgeries,” it would have to start making more shows that while not necessarily appealing to “True-Blue” conservatives across the board at least did not pander to Loony Lefties. (One is at the moment of this writing—December 14, 2024—witnessing a similar development in a much-ballyhooed “vibe shift” in the US media, in the “run-up to” and immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s second election, as instanced by the Washington Post’s refusal to endorse a presidential candidate and the Los Angeles Times’s vow to hire some conservative columnists.) Complementarily, and to extrapolate forward from 1977, after Thatcher’s election the BBC tacked back leftward—first cautiously, with Yes, Minister, whose satirical focus on intra-departmental log-rolling at Whitehall and  Whitehall’s bowling of impeccably twisted googlies at Downing Street applied with indifferent sharpness to Tory and Labour governments alike; and then more boldly, in 1982, with the incorporation of the New Comedians (or whatever other else they were prosaically called [such schools or movements always have unmemorable nicknames that gallingly intimate that the scholars or movers were the inventors of their entire ancient artistic bailiwick’s equivalent of the first improvement on the Paleolithic wheel]) into the comediae personae of one of its flagship sitcoms, The Young Ones. And as if to prove that its non-affiliation with the British State did not make it a jot less anti-Tory, in 1987, the Beeb’s effective sole competitor, ITV, poached the most histrionic of those New Comedians, Rick Mayall, for the starring role of The New Statesman, a sit-comic satire on Margaret Thatcher’s government. And tidily enough, per the abovementioned interpellation of 1990’s point of view as a Daily Mail reader’s, back at Television House the dial had been set full back to “L” by 1990 with that year’s premiere of Keeping Up Appearances, inasmuch as that show’s heroine-cum-satiric butt, the petit-bourgeois snob-cum-xenophobe Hyacinth Bucket, has been described (in ca. 2010, by Danny Baker [generally non-partisan in his “content” but a British Labourite equivalent of a “yellow-dog Democrat” all the same]) as the Daily Mail’s ideal reader.

Before I go any further, I suppose I must address a demurral that has been hovering before my mind's eye like a passenger's summons for service before a train-porter's bodily eye ever since I mentioned that 1990 “speaks to our present crisis,” namely, "The UK has after all just come to the end of a long period of Tory rule, such that 1990 must perforce be regarded as the very antithesis of timely-ly topical (e.g., perchance 'timelessly irrelevant')." I own that answering this demurral to the satisfaction of any empirical raiser of it is probably going to be impossible (which is why I have postponed addressing it all this while), but for all that I must attempt to answer it lest I be held by the raiser to be not only politically insufferable (as I shall remain in the rosiest of cases) but also hopelessly obtuse. The most obvious and straightforward way of answering it is to say that 1990 is about the abuse of governmental power regardless of which party is in power, but that answer won’t really do because the “about” implies that the show itself is trying to convey that non-partisan message, and I have already indicated that it is trying to do no such thing because it represents its horrors as growing out of an extent Labour hegemony, and if it had really wanted to convey that power tends to be wielded with equal force by either party, it would have incorporated into its storyline an election leading to a Tory victory but to no loosening of the reins of state control, whereas it leaves Labour in charge to the very end—or, rather, up to the penultimate moment, when a popular uprising against the government’s chief organ of oppression, the Public Control Department (generally referred to within the diagesis as “the PCD” à la “the FBI” and “the CIA” [and less à la “MI5” and “MI6,” perhaps by way of underscoring the de-Briticized character of the future Britain à la Orwell’s “Airstrip One” {cf. the below-mentioned replacement of the pound sterling by the Anglodollar} and wryly establishing a parallel between such notoriously intrusive organizations and the un-Britishly-nicknamed BBC]), a bureau of the Home Office most directly anticipative of the US Department of Homeland Security in its preoccupation with internal security threats, leads us one to suppose that a dislodgment of Labour is imminent and that all will be right with the UK once it has taken place. Nor will it do to try to answer the objection by swiveling the camera, so to speak, from the show onto the very recent British political landscape and assert that the Tories under Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, and Sunak (I hope I haven’t forgotten anybody) “out-Lefted” Labour, such that 1990’s digs at Labour have come to be well-aimed at the Tories as a matter of course, because while it is certainly true that the Tories of 2010 onwards have been well to the left of the Labour of the late 1970s on many issues, particularly those associated with “social justice” or “wokeness,” it is certainly not true that the two parties have since swapped the central planks of their platforms, such that the Tories have officially become the party of the union-affiliated worker while Labour have officially become the party of big business and free enterprise (all largely wrongheaded or duplicitous talk of a concurrent swap of that kind between the Republican and Democratic parties across the Pond notwithstanding). The Tories have continued to be, in categorical distinction from Labour, the party that unabashedly champions big business and free enterprise, and its leaders, front-benchers, and back-benchers have continued in practice to favor policies that are more favorable to big business and free enterprise than those of their Labour counterparts even if they are a good deal less favorable thereto than those of the Tory party of thirty or forty years ago; and the Labour party have continued to be, in categorical distinction from the Tories, the party that unabashedly champions the labo(u)r unions, and although it may with some accuracy be said that the Tories are now (however marginally) more sympathetic to the desires of the “working class” than Labour, this is because the membership of labo(u)r unions is now prevailingly constituted by people in “middle-class” occupations like teaching and medicine-practicing rather than by people in “working-class” occupations like coal-mining and car-assembling, such that the sorts of people who by other demographic measures would have been appealable to via pro-union policies thirty or forty years ago—viz., essentially, white men without university degrees—must now be appealed to via policies vectored to other ends than upholding the rights and prerogatives of unions--e.g., upholding the rights and prerogatives of native-born Britons vis-à-vis those of immigrants.  But to the debatable extent that at least in the Anglosphere governmental interference in private life may be regarded as a hallmark or preserve of the Left, the streak of Tory governments that came to an end in 2024 were the most Leftist governments in British history; and yet at the same time, Labour’s hitherto dodging of that dubious honor (for as of this writing [December 17, 2024] the Starmer government has been sending too many “mixed signals” to allow itself to be characterized in even the most tentative terms) appears to have been merely accidental, inasmuch as in its capacity of the party of opposition from 2010 to 2024, it seems never to have opposed any Tory policy on the grounds that it was too intrusive into private life and very frequently to have opposed  Tory policies on the grounds that they were not intrusive enough thereinto. In other words, however perverse this may sound, Labour and the Tories seem to have been lately united in the conviction that interfering in people’s private lives is a good thing and a worthy end in itself. Now, to some people the fact that the Tories are at least in principle still in favor of certain classic Rightist policies like cutting governmental spending and Labour are at least in principle in favor of certain Leftist policies like expanding governmental spending  may make a great deal of difference. Indeed, I know of certain residents of Britain who at least affect to think that this difference still makes a great deal of difference, who during one of the two or three most recent Tory governments would shake their fists and shout “Damn those Tories!” whenever they heard of any spending cut, and would grumble, “We can thank those horrible miserly Tories for this” whenever they encountered some deficiency in a government provided or-mediated good or service. But the fact that for roughly a two-year stretch the Tories had made people stay at home and kept schools and pubs closed and policed Britons’ online utterances apparently meant (and still means) nothing to these people; nay, many of them  were disappointed and angry at the Tories’ relaxation of at least some of these policies. And while probably few of them would have centered their hopes for a Labour victory on a reinstatement of those policies (rather than on, say, expansion of the range of services covered by the NHS or higher pay for teachers) none of them would have withheld their vote from Labour for including a promise to reinstate them in its manifesto.

 

1990 “speaks to our present crisis” at least to the extent that it pictures a Britain in which the government has become tyrannical in ways that are uncannily similar to the ways in which the UK government and certain of its American counterparts and quasi-counterparts (i.e., the federal government and certain state governments) have actually become tyrannical, or aspired to become tyrannical, since about the mid twenty-teens. The show proleptically limns with particularly fine precision the “censorship-industrial complex” that hove into view during the event that cannot be named and the election whose year cannot be specified—a complex signalized by the close interaction between government functionaries and journalists to “craft the narrative” that will ultimately make it to the front pages of newspapers and their digital analogues. In the diagesis of the first of 1990’s two seasons, the State has taken over all but one of the newspapers even in name, and the show’s hero, Jim Kyle (played by Edward Woodward of future Breaker Morant fame and The Equalizer semi-notoriety), is a journalist at that one independent newspaper. Both he and his editor—a (for television) frank-talking, shirt-sleeved, loosened-necktied bloke straight out of The Front Page and the untitled mass of anecdotage about the Fleet Street of old—are constantly horse-trading with an agent of the PCD over the portions of a story to include in or exclude from its final printed version. If, say, Kyle aims in an article to denounce a facet of the tyranny about whose exposure the PCD is not immediately panicked, the agent will allow him to print it in exchange for providing her (for the agent is a her, Delly Lomas, played by the statuesquely beautiful Barbara Kellerman [beautifully cross-cast a year or two later as Anne Boleyn in the BBC Shakespeare’s version of Henry VIII]) with information that will allow the PCD to ramp up the implementation of a higher-priority tyrannizing project. After a certain point when the PCD decides that it has had enough of Kyle’s muckraking, it strips him of his British citizenship (British subject-hood having apparently vanished with the unexplained death of the last reigning monarch, a king, at some point in the 1980s), thereby instantly reducing him to an effective nonentity bereft of access to his money and hence to the basic necessities, a move and result that instantly recall the recent real-world “debanking” of people associated with controversial opinions and causes, notably the supporters of the Canadian truckers protesting against mandatory COVID vaccination. The PCD’s rollout of a nationwide identification card with a computer chip allowing it to track the minutest financial and work-related transactions of every citizen is a letter-perfect prolepsis of the “Digital ID” intermittently championed by every Prime Minister since Tony Blair—not to mention the IRS’s planned subjection of every financial transaction above a pitifully low threshold to an “instant audit.” A children’s book that is “in all the schools” (according to the exasperated mother of a girl enrolled in one of those schools), Mary Brave, anticipates a welter of today’s governmental and quasi-governmental “nudge strategies” with delicious succinctness. Per the just-mentioned mother, the book is “about a British girl in the 1970s who wanted to save the polar bears. She tried to get the money from rich men, but they wouldn’t cough up. So the government gave her the money, and she saved the polar bears and lived happily ever after, having married and had the standard two kids.” Here we have present-day’s “progressivism’s” peremptory stipulation of the salvation of the natural world as the most virtuous of goals, of greed and selfishness as private enterprise’s only possible motivations for shunning contribution to the attainment of that goal, and of government as both boundlessly altruistic and boundlessly equipped with the means of attaining it. And of course the framing of the entire propaganda pitch as the story of a plucky but vulnerable young woman squared off against patriarchal capitalism with nobody but the State to protect her is exactly identical to that of Life of Julia, the virtual storybook via which the Obama administration tried to pitch its hyper-interventionist (and aggressively “green”) social policies in contradistinction to the more hands-off ones of the Republicans in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election. But it is perhaps Mary Brave’s embodiment as a children’s book and promulgation via the school curriculum that is most drolly-yet-polar bear-chillingly on the nose, recalling as it does the past half-decade’s myriad didactic picture-books and so-called graphic novels intended to “nudge” children into holding the appropriate views on a myriad topics from climate change to race to sexuality. And yet again, 1990 portrays the education system of its fictional time and place with a degree of complexity that anticipates the vagaries of today’s hyper-politicized yet socially indispensable schools. Yes, the schools of 1990’s Britain are indoctrination camps, but they are not dedicated indoctrination camps, remaining as they do the only institutions via which an academically ambitious child can receive an education that is worthy of his talents and bids fair to land him a remunerative job that makes use of them. The PCD, wishing to impel the abovementioned doctor to return to Britain both because he has been spreading bad news about the current state of the country and because he is contributing to its brain-drain (a brain-drain powered by a maximum three-day work week in all occupations), accurately surmise that the most effective way of putting pressure on him is to jeopardize his daughter’s academic career as a middle-schooler, as she is a star pupil in natural science and her school is the most academically competitive one in the entire country. How many times in recent years have we not heard some parent bending the knee to governmental or quasi-governmental pressure for exactly the same reason—of a parent who is livid with outrage at the woke nonsense being foisted onto his child at school but dares not complain to the headmaster or principal because the school is among the top ten for placement of its pupils in Ivy League or Oxbridge universities after high-school graduation?

 

So as I said, 1990 is remarkably good at anticipating the ways of 2020s state tyranny. But regarding the motivations and consequences of this tyranny it is depressingly wide of the mark on a number of counts. It essentially views the UK of 1990 as a straightforward kleptocracy: for reasons I have already explained, the preponderance of the country’s wealth and political power has fallen into the hands of a kuchka of ex-trade union bosses who are determined not to let go of it, and the state micro-manages the lives of the citizenry simply as a means of impeding the flow of power and money. To be sure, there is a patina of “ideology” to the micro-managerial administrative system—the abovementioned would-be wildcat workers are termed “parasites”—but nobody seems to be taken in by the blarney on either the administering or the receiving end. Indeed, apart from the abovementioned child’s enthusiasm for Mary Brave (an enthusiasm that admittedly points to a possible future in which everyone will be taken in altogether by the blarney because everyone will have grown up accepting it as the gospel truth), I can’t think of a single scene in which a victim of the PCD’s machinations mistakes his persecution for just treatment, and apart from a few judges and disciplinary panel members who do seem sincerely to take a “this hurts me more than it hurts you” tone (but who seldom if ever make a second appearance), I can’t recall a single committed agent of the state who approaches his tyrannizing in anything other than an attitude of the sort of brutal cynicism one brings to bear on the act of swatting a stubbornly elusive fly or cockroach. On the other hand, there are plenty of scenes—notably at least half of those featuring the abovementioned Barbara Kellerman or her successor in the second season—in which an uncommitted agent of the State oozes remorse over the evil he or she is doing. And ordinary Britons are always seen to be as fiercely resentful of the PCD as Kyle is. When they comply with the State’s fiats and decrees, they do so entirely out of fear. In the aggregate, all these spirited recoilings of the “human face” from “the boot stomping on it” give one the impression that if the British people could somehow be organized, they would toss out this pack of rotters, and that with this lot out of the way Britain would instantly begin flourishing again–an impression reaffirmed, albeit only equivocally, by the abovementioned series-closing storming of the PCD headquarters [I write “albeit only equivocally” for reasons the reader will find elucidated below {specifically in in the last 3/45^th of the essay (the impossibility of making use of page references is a ghastly shortcoming of the present format)}], and the panic stricken-ness with which it is greeted by the Home Secretary, who blames all the department’s abuses on her immediate underling, Skardon (by then under arrest on her own orders after attempting to flee the country in circumstances described in the last 2/45th of the essay) and promises immediate glasnost or perestroika-like reforms. Moreover, 1990’s kleptocracy is very much a “kleptocracy within one country”: for all the proximity of its resemblance to the Soviet system of the period of the show’s production—the Soviet system of the Brezhnev era, divided between senior Party members with their country houses and imported-food deliveries and masses of apolitical proles left standing in mile-long queues for basic provisions—it does not seem to derive much if any inspiration or financial support from the U.S.S.R. (in this respect, incidentally, differing quite markedly from the Britain imagined in Kingsley Amis’s nearly exactly contemporaneous Russian Hide and Seek [1980], a Britain that quite closely resembles that of 1990 but that is the result of a Soviet invasion of the UK {and yet Amis clearly wishes it to be seen one one level as a logical continuation-cum-satirical doppelganger of Labour-dominated 1970s Britain }) and is quite pointedly shown not to have been preceded, accompanied or followed into the abyss by any Western polity. (As we have already seen, the U.S. is portrayed as a favorite destination of freedom-loving Britons; somewhat more surprisingly in these post-Brexit times, the European Union [from which Britain seems to have been expelled rather than to have seceded] likewise figures as a bastion of uncensored expression and free enterprise.)      

 

But of course today’s tyrants are not mere kleptokrats. To be sure, they do have enormous wealth and power and are jealously protective of both, but they are not motivated solely or even principally by cupidity or avarice. Rather, they seem to be principally and perhaps even mostly motivated by a combination of sadism and gnosticism-imbued paternalism  (I am using gnosticism in a loose generic [and hence lowercase] sense, a sense meaning “the belief that one possesses knowledge not readily intelligible to most people”): they are tyrannical because they like watching people squirm under the threat of violence and because they think they know what is better for their victims than their victims themselves do. And today’s ordinary Britons (and their ordinary American, Australian, Canadian, French, German, etc. counterparts) are not all plucky resenters of the tyranny; to the contrary a goodly portion of them positively embrace it because they do not regard it as tyranny but as beneficence, and they revel in the sufferings of their fellow victims partly out of sadism and partly out of paternalism by proxy, out of a sense of vicarious glory in being on the side that is both powerful and virtuous. And as the parenthesis in the immediately preceding sentences indicates, today’s tyranny is not confined to a single polity but, rather, encompasses almost all the polities in the Occident—not to mention a good many semi-Western and non-Western polities. In all frankness and good faith, I cannot think of a single historical precedent or parallel for such a massive collusion of a populace in its own oppression.  The only comparison that readily springs to mind, that of the collaboration of a proportion of the natives with their colonial masters in certain empires, really won’t do—first because it begs the question in assuming that a colonial governmental dispensation is inherently tyrannical and second because however many nations and sub-polities it may subsume, at the administrative level an empire is a single polity. Perhaps the global tyranny of the early twenty-first century—a tyranny that in all its aspects is in one way or another scientistic or concerned with safeguarding health—is genuinely unprecedented for the prosaic but perfectly serviceable reason that a critical mass of the early twenty-first century’s population is both unprecedentedly valetudinarian and unprecedentedly Whiggish regarding the achievements of science, and medical science in particular. Many and perhaps even most people nowadays seem to assume that medical science is improving so quickly and so evenly that it will soon be able to prolong human life indefinitely and that to demur however tentatively at submitting to any treatment, drug, or procedure presenting itself as a brand-new medical innovation is proof of insanity or stupidity. Not that they always believe that such a treatment, drug, or procedure will cure what ails them or will be free of serious side effects but that they do always believe something nearly as deleterious to those who fall foul of them—namely that availing oneself of the latest cure is always preferable to availing oneself of an older one or of “letting nature take her course.” Whence the hysterical revulsion to Oxy-whateveritwascalled and Ivermectin  (or however it is properly spelled) qua “horse medicine” and the hyper-enthusiasm for vaccine mandates. Whence the present left-wing attachment to “vaping,” whether of cannabis or tobacco, qua supposedly completely harmless transmission vehicle, and present left-wing revulsion from cigarettes and other traditional means of consuming nicotine. “People did things in a certain way fifty or a hundred years ago, and that way was bad; we now do things in a different way, and therefore that new way is good”: thus may be epitomized the mindset governing the current tyranny. The pervasiveness of this mindset cannot be overestimated.  Why, only the other month I heard a notoriously “based” Presbyterian pastor—a pastor who during the so-called pandemic had flouted the prohibitions on public worship to his personal detriment—thank God Himself for the discovery of penicillin qua savior of himself qua perduring biological entity. I cannot distinctly recall exactly how long ago I ingested a dose of penicillin, but it must have been most recently during my late single digits, when I was not infrequently prescribed the drug as a treatment for a case of influenza. To the best of my knowledge—knowledge acquired from admissions by no means scarcely or privately tendered by the so-called experts themselves over the course of the 1980s and 1990s—penicillin’s sole just claim to fame lies in its triumphal use as a cure for syphilis, and its efficacy against other diseases has been limited at best (and against viral infections like influenza, effectively nonexistent). In any case, if penicillin were as essential to fortification against fatal pathogens, I would not have survived more than four decades without its help. And yet in 2024 one finds a vaccine-skeptical pastor lauding penicillin as one of the chief blessings of modern life. And obviously people in droves continue to demand prescriptions for penicillin and other antibiotics from their doctors, and their doctors keep prescribing them in full consciousness of their otiosity (and often while reminding their patients of that otiosity!). Similarly, although COVID was disproportionately harmful to old people and not all that infrequently proved fatal to them, it was not as if it was the first viral respiratory infection to pose such a powerful threat to the elderly. I daresay most Occidental families have witnessed an elderly member swiftly perish in hospital after catching a cold or some other minor ailment that a younger person would have more than figuratively shrugged off, and who among us has not heard tell of oldsters who refuse to receive visits from their sniffly grandchildren for fear of succumbing to whatever germ was occasioning their sniffles? Indeed, most likely such infections have been the leading cause of death of Occidentals over the age of, say, seventy-five, for decades. Until five years ago, everyone was remarkably blasé about all of this, even though they had as much of a right to be horrified by it as by any of the other shocks to which the organism of modern man remains subject. But somehow COVID induced a society-wide panic about the organic safety of the elderly; for some reason it was thought that for their sake a vaccine for the virus had to be developed at “warp speed”; and somehow it was thought that once that vaccine was ready, they would be perfectly safe from the disease, even though the pathetically low rate of protection afforded by flu vaccines year after year should have prepared everyone for much more modest therapeutic results. Why am I dwelling on this crisis of valetudinarianism at such length? Why, simply because it is a crisis that would seem to have been in the making, or been waiting in the wings, since some years before my own birth (not a genuine “black-swan” event but a “white-swan” one mistaken for a “black-swan” one thanks to a miniscule shift in perspective or lighting), which means of course that it was already in the making or in the wings at the time of the production of 1990. At some point in the early 1960s—yes, yes, yes, perhaps “not coincidentally” more or less at the same moment as that of the beginning of the above much-discussed Sexual Revolution—the entire Western world seemed to declare, “We have at long last put the bad ‘medieval world’ of inescapable lethal disease behind us. After all, we have eradicated smallpox; we have effective vaccines for most other serious infectious diseases like polio; we know that cigarettes cause cancer and cholesterol causes heart attacks; if we all just manage to get the right injections and avoid smoking and fatty food, we might just manage to live forever.” And of course this declaration was complemented by a raft of self-satisfiedly Whiggish declarations on matters of ‘social justice’: “We have allowed women and ‘minorities’ into the workplace; we have abolished (or are about to abolish) sodomy laws; if we all just manage to quell our lingering bigotry and let the various ‘marketplaces,’ have their say, the world will be an egalitarian paradise a generation from now at the latest.” And as these declarations remained received pan-Occidental opinion in the late 1970s one would expect a show set in 1990 but made in 1977  (yes, even a show evincing a relatively conservative outlook) to imagine and represent the extent to which they were to be further along on their way to fulfillment thirteen years thence. The politically polemically shrewd move would have been somehow to depict a dozen-plus more years of Labour rule as resulting in less enlightened personal health choices à la the notoriously high rate of alcohol abuse in the last decades of the Soviet Union, or in setbacks for “minority” rights à la that selfsame Union’s incarceration of homosexuals. Instead, either perversely or gormlessly, 1990 takes great pains to give the impression that the march of progress will have continued unabated under Labour’s extended watch. At quite an early moment of the first season, Kyle makes a point of identifying another character—Delly Lomas, if I recall aright—as a “non-smoker” with apparent approval, and if I’m not mistaken, Kyle himself is not seen smoking a cigarette until several episodes into that season. Of course the sub-handful of usual twenty-first-century Whigtards (a tribe composed not only of so-called Millennials and so-called Zoomers but also of so-called Gen-Xers and so-called Boomers who not only should but probably do know better [not that the younkers get a pass for their ignorance, but that it is at least genuine ignorance]) who have watched the full run of 1990 have doubtless already flagged the fact that people are shown smoking at all in the show as a sign of the supposed unreconstructed and untrammeled tobaccophilia of the 1970s, but to the historically informed viewer it is obvious that the occasional appearance of a lighted cigarette onscreen evinces neither enthusiasm for tobacco nor ignorance of its ill effects, that the sentiment expressed thereby is, rather, something along the lines of, “Yes, we know that this habit is very bad for us, but we picked it up as teenagers and it is very hard to shake, although of course we aim to shake it completely; but at the moment, what with the government being so gosh-damned tyrannical, we are very much in a wartime situation, and just like our fellow countrypeople during the Blitz and the Battle of the Bulge, we have need of cigarettes to keep our minds focused on the battle immediately to hand; but the moment the victory treaty is signed, and well before the ink of the signatures thereto has dried, we shall be booking an appointment with an anti-tobacco addiction hypnotherapist [for hypnosis as a cure for tobacco addiction was extremely popular in those days].” On the sexual-political and racial-political front one is equally powerfully impressed by the “progressiveness” of the casting. As mentioned before, one of the immediate subordinates of the head of the PCD in the first season is a woman, and although for reasons that, like virtually every other detectable symptom of difference between Seasons One and Two (most notably a Season-Two electronic “date stamp” of February Whenever 1990; a date-stamp which, given that the events of the first season seem to unfold over the course of many months, suggests some strange sort of Shakespearean “double-time” is at work in the dramaturgy) are opaque to me, the person occupying that position in Season Two is a different character played by a different player, that character remains a female character (Lynne Blake) played by a female player (Lisa Harrow). As also mentioned before, the Home Secretary in the second season is a woman. And as not mentioned before, in the first season, another of the immediate subordinates of the head of the PCD is a black man (Henry Tasker, played by Clifton Jones). Of course, these people are all baddies, at least in overarching dramaturgical terms (for Lomas intermittently allies herself with Kyle, and her replacement, Blake, is an old flame of his to whom he clearly retains a close emotional attachment, inasmuch as in the concluding minutes of the entire show he is shown trying to save her from capture by a crowd of the very people whose anti-authoritarian cause he has been championing all along; and even Home Secretary Smith is not above [or below] cutting deals with Kyle over lunch at the “Leader’s Club” into which the House of Lords has transmogrified), but their badness is by no means an incompetent badness and if anything it is implied that they (perhaps uniquely among the maintainers of the new status quo) would not have ended up in such positions if they had not been both highly intelligent and highly conscientious in their own twisted meta-administrative way. In short, not one of them is a “diversity hire,” and while the political-cum-administrative hierarchy is represented as corrupt from top to bottom, the corruption is one of pure crony socialism—of union bosses and functionaries scratching each other’s backs and feathering each other’s nests apparently utterly irrespective of the sex or color of the beneficiary. (To be sure, there is an allusion to “reverse discrimination” at an international resolution, that of the Commonwealth, voiced by a white Australian man, a scientist incited to travel to Great Britain to join the resistance after being edged out of an academic post by a Ugandan who as a citizen of a non-majority-white former British colony enjoyed priority over him in the applicant pool, but this policy oddly seems not to be in force in the UK itself, as Tasker expresses surprise at the Aussie’s penalization by it. [Although of course one now often hears arguments in favor of absolute parity of immigrants from subcontinental and African Commonwealth countries with native Britons—and often enough hears them adduced by politicians who supported Brexit qua freer of Britain from the scourge of unchecked immigration {the substance of such arguments being of course that the citizens of such countries are less foreign than the central Europeans who dominated the immigrant population when the UK was still part of the EU.}]) An equally latitudinarian attitude toward homosexuality is evinced by the showrunners (or “the show itself,” depending on the school of hermeneutic epistemology to which one adheres) and dramatis personae, both goodies and baddies alike. The show’s most sympathetic and heroic character apart from Kyle himself, an anonymous and perpetually shadow-cowled informant appropriately nicknamed Faceless who supplies Kyle with most of his leads throughout the first season-and-a-half, is quietly but unequivocally revealed to be gay at a particularly poignant moment in his life-history. Having been ferreted out as one of the PCD’s internal auditors by the organization’s top brass, he realizes he will have to emigrate immediately on pain of perpetual imprisonment, and just before his departure he meets up with Kyle on the Thames embankment in broad daylight to disclose his face (for he has nothing more to gain from facelessness) and say his goodbyes to his longstanding investigative partner. The unprecedented intimacy of the moment prompts Kyle to confide to him the difficulties of coping with Lynne Blake as a political adversary and “love interest” simutaneously. “You know what women are like,” he concludes, but Faceless mock-ruefully rejoins, “I’m afraid I don’t,” and Kyle rejoins in turn with an embarrassed, knowing, and understanding nod, as if to say, “’Nuff said.” And at a slightly later point, apropos of the prospects of using Blake as decoy for Kyle, Smith asks, “Can we assume he is a heterosexual?” in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone, as if she would be neither surprised nor scandalized to learn that he was as queer as a three-Anglodollar note (the Anglodollar being the replacement of the pound sterling in the show’s diagesis [not, I believe, that it’s ever indicated that Anglodollars aren’t issued in units of three]). From here, this moment of implication that there is something faintly barbarous about taking a person’s sexual normality for granted, it is the easiest of transitions (!) to the HR-imposed requirement to provide “preferred pronouns” in email signatures. To be sure, at a certain moment when Skardon is told that there is blackmail material on him in the archives, he inquires, “Do you mean somebody’s discovered I was a bit [waves his hand in an effeminate manner] at university?”, but this needn’t be taken as an indication that the showrunners or the show regarded being a bit [waves his hand in an effeminate manner] as reprehensible; it must merely be taken as an indication that the show or the showrunners imagine the abovementioned Daily Mail reader of 1990 as someone still less enlightened than itself or themselves—as indeed that reader turned out still to be in the actual 1990, for in that year it was still a scandalous event for a politician to be “outed” as gay, and so-called gay marriage was still a very distant dream (or nightmare). So you get what I’m driving at, DGR: the show or showrunners picture so much of the future as an extension or improvement of what they already approve of as to cast doubt on the notion that it or they even imagine the world of 1990 as a full-blown dystopia, and complementarily so much of what it or they approved of in their real and imagined worlds has turned out to have furnished the germinative material of the dystopian aspect of our actual twenty-first century world that it is difficult (at least for the present writer) to buy into the show’s meta-dystopian polemic. Complementarily, more or less by sheer accident of 1990’s originating in the year when it did and thinking only thirteen years into the future, the world depicted by the show is prevailingly downright cozy in retaining so many features of the real world that have vanished or been greatly vitiated since the end of the micro-epoch bracketed by the years 1977 and 1990. I own that I am prejudiced in favor of that micro-epoch, and I am doubtless so prejudiced at least partly owing to personal circumstances; indeed, “arguably” nobody could be more favorably disposed to that micro-epoch, for 1977 was the year I started kindergarten and 1990 was the year I graduated from high school. Hence, the show’s imaginary timeline corresponds exactly to that of my entire formative period. I own that it is not particularly easy to say why a show like 1990 would make me feel any more nostalgic for the year 1977 than any other show or movie made in 1977 (and of course many a show and movie made then does make me quite nostalgic therefor) and that it is downright difficult to say why it would make me more nostalgic for the year 1990 than a show or movie actually made in 1990 would do—because of course the 1990 of 1990 is but some late-1970s adult’s idea of 1990, not the genuine article. Perhaps the central or chief reasons the show returns to my heart’s ear such a nostalgic echo vis-à-vis both bookending years—and indeed vis-à-vis all dozen intervening book years—is (relatively) simply that all of us back then were thinking about the middle-term future (that is to say, the future in which we expected still to be alive) along more or less exactly mutually identical and parallel lines, that we were all constantly extrapolating its phenomenal texture from that of the then-present; and that those of us who were youngest back then were both inclined to and capable of extrapolating in that way and direction with especial vigor and especially vivid results. I discover a trace of those results in my present reaction to the sight of the video intercoms that rest atop the desks of Skardon and his subordinates at the PCD. Each of these devices consists of a four or five-inch black-and-white CRT screen encased in a sphere of white plastic and flanked by a pair of circular metal controls, one atop the other. I call them intercoms because they are chiefly used for the announcement and screening of visitors, but they also serve most of the functions for which people eventually came to rely on personal computers of the Mac or IBM variety—“information retrieval” [as the Skardon-like character played by Michael Palin in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil would come to call it {and it is “worth mentioning” that despite its presumably much bigger budget and dazzling special effects, Brazil is ultimately a poor man’s 1990, inasmuch as like 1990 it promulgates a libertarian-cum-anti bureaucratic norm but unlike 1990 cannot be bothered to devote even a smidgen of energy to shaping a coherent image of its target], personal-schedule organizing (for the abovementioned “date stamp” appears on one of these devices), and the like. The working guts of these machines were most likely “sourced” from the latest-model miniature TVs on sale at Radio Shack or its UK equivalent. To the eyes of anyone born since about 1982, they doubtless look hopelessly clunky and hokey, but we who attained the age of discretion in the immediate foremath of the personal computer pictured our future interactions with artificial intelligence as being mediated by machines very like those desktop intercoms—i.e., machines capable of responding entirely to vocal commands, and it came as a bitter and lingering disappointment to us to be shackled to the clumsy typewriter keyboard and massive living-room style monitors of actual personal computers until well into the twenty-first century. Only with the advent of the so-called I-pad and its Amazonian knockoffs in about 2010 did we begin to find ourselves occasionally graced by computer technology that approximately answered to our childhood expectations thereof. Reinforcing this impression of a super-user-free electronic future is an allusion, in Kyle’s inaugural scene in the first episode, to a voice-recognizing self-operating typewriter, although we never actually see this robot as Kyle opts to dictate his news story to his conventional typewriter-wielding secretary—not out of any doughtily Ludditish aversion to the new technology in itself but because he assumes that being British-made, the only such machine available is chock-full of faulty parts. Apart from these two items, I can’t think of any fully futuristic gadgetry in the entire run of the show, although the gargantuan home video cassette recorders that prominently figure in the domestic furniture of both Kyle and Lomas exude more or less the same gemütlich aura as their real-world counterparts-cum-contemporaries, because of course in 1977 VCRs were such rarely encountered luxury appliances that they hadn’t even yet acquired that specific three-letter nickname (I recall their being referred to as VTRs in some late-1970s American program). What a comical yet exhilarating Pynchonian twist on the so-called Proustian rush I experienced on hearing Kyle’s main anti-governmental collaborator Dave Brett (played by Tony Doyle) calmly yet urgently ask him, apropos of some televised speech to be sifted for clues of PCD malfeasance, “Did you record it?”! For of course in the early-to-mid-eighties early heyday of VCRs one constantly asked or heard asked this very question in that very tone apropos of the otherwise uncapturable “Network Television Premiere” of some Hollywood blockbuster or a “very special episode” of Alf or Family Ties. I receive parallel “good vibes” from the wardrobe (as in a collection of garments, not a container of them) so elegantly exhibited by Barbara Kellerman: its predilection for long lines and so-called earth tones (both light and dark brown, olive green, and dark gray), for ample folds tapering into miserly smoothness at the wrists and waist, for long skirts and high boots, are all very much characteristic of late 70s women’s fashion, but specifically of a vein thereof that was already looking ahead into the eighties, into the sort of urbane yet sparsely populated futuristic desert landscape everybody seemed to hope to inhabit in that decade. There is no mistaking this couture for that of the late-70s woman with both feet firmly planted in the seventies—for that of Mary Tyler Moore and Suzanne Pleshette during the last seasons of their respective sitcoms, for example. (En revanche, both actresses who played the character of Romana on late-1970s Doctor Who evince the Modesgeist as forcefully as Kellerman despite having radically divergent physiques.) The men’s fashion on display is rather more of a mixed bag “vibe”-wise—both in the emotional state it induces and in the message it seems to be intended to convey. The very first man of prominence we see in the first episode, the Home Secretary, Dan Mellor (John Savident), is initially shown addressing Parliament in a necktie-free outfit whose only visible part is reminiscent of a Russian muzhik’s smock—loose, pleated, collarless, and fastened at the neck by a single conspicuous button. At the sight of that man at that moment, I thought, “This is the ‘look’ that terminally ascendant Labour have imposed on all British men—and possibly all British women; Labour have out-Mao’d Mao by making everyone dress not merely like a worker but like a peasant. I’m in for a thousand minutes bereft of a single dash of couturial flair, a single nattily turned lapel or nattily knotted necktie.” But to my simultaneous relief and perplexity, only one other character, Skardon, turned out to sport the tieless-and-smocked look. In hindsight I infer that the smock was (within the diagesis of the show) a classic avant-la-lettre attempt to “make ‘fetch’ happen”: evidently Mellor qua one of several second-top dogs in the party and would-be Prime Minister began wearing the smock in the hope that it would catch on among the party rank and file, perhaps even in the hope that he could leverage the trend into a personal political faction à la the Brownshirts (and thence represent this faction as being more sincerely committed to the cause of the working man than the rump party still clad in “bourgeois” mufti), but in the end, and indeed even in the short term, the only person to follow his example was his most abject flunky and creature; perhaps, indeed, Mellor’s lone besmockedness is meant to foreshadow his downfall and replacement by Smith, and Skardon’s retention of the smocked look even after Smith’s installation to foreshadow his overthrow in the final episode. In any event, most of the men dress more or less as men in comparable walks of life did tend to dress in late-70s Britain (at least to the extent that my acquaintance with late-70s Britain via shows like The Sandbaggers and Fawlty Towers has allowed me to form an accurate impression thereof). I have already mentioned Kyle’s shirtsleeved and loosened-necktied newspaper editor. Kyle himself, while occasionally opting for a micro-epochally appropriate prolepsis of “business casual,” favors ordinary business suits alternating between two and three pieces each. In the first season, the jackets are marred by one aesthetically off-putting feature: a windbreaker-like zipper-fastening in front in place of the usual two buttons. This is obviously meant to suggest that over the course of the next butcher’s-dozen years men’s business fashion will by sheer inertia continue to be “dumbed down” along the same lines that it was over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the “full Victorian panoply” ceded to the three-piece jacketed suit and two-piece jacketed suits became increasingly acceptable alternatives to three-piece ones. But the show-runners seem to have had second thoughts about this meta-sartorial prognosis (or, as with the confinement of the smock to Skardon, to intimate that “the times” within the diagesis were “a-changin’”), for throughout the second season, Kyle wears button-up suit jackets with flamboyantly broad and pointed lapels more redolent of Edwardian than Callaghanian Britain. To be sure, Doyle’s character is invariably tieless and most often togged out above the waist in a not-un Mao-like multi-pocketed tunic, but this super-utilitarian garb beseems his official function as an “import/export agent” obliged to spend most of his working hours outdoors at the docks. I own I don’t quite know what to make of a perennially open-collared and turtle-necked ombudsman’s court judge sympathetic to the cause of one of Kyle’s clients. Perhaps his tielessness signifies his initial allegiance to the government’s “progressive” agenda (an allegiance that would naturally have encouraged him to continue dressing like a 60s law student even after acceding to the bench), for it seems that he has only recently begun ruling in favor of “moonlighters” and members of the abovementioned body of “parasites.” En revanche, the plebbish henchmen tasked with roughing up the judge’s wife dress with the impeccably stylish hyperconservatism of early-70s Continental hitmen—navy blue or black three-button two-piece suits with full-Windsor-knotted sky-blue neckties. Perhaps in clothing these blokes thus the showrunners meant to intimate that it was possible to be a bit too tradition-minded, or that the bureaus of a full-throatedly authoritarian Labour government would “ironically” prove inviting nesting-places for the “real fascists.” In any event (a.k.a. “The bottom line is that”), I cannot recall at any point in my viewing of the show’s 16 episodes spotting an exponent of the hyper-casual habitus of logo T-shirt-and-jeans that I remember being already hegemonic among all off-the-clock males under the age of fifty back in the late 70s and that I assume had already made great inroads in Britain by then (although I own that it was probably more prevalent in the Stateside subtropical beach-bum’s haven in which I grew up). From the reference to the absence of logo T-shirts in the immediately preceding sentence it is an “easy transition” to a certain  aspect of 1990’s mise en scène (or of the visual component of its diagesis) that may very well appeal less intensely to the general run of people of my approximate Jahrgang than the others most recently cited and that indeed might very well appeal to few viewers of any age besides myself. I am referring to the at least well-nigh-total soup-to-nuts absence of “branding” from every surface that falls within the camera frame. For example, the bar where Kyle frequently confers with Brett and prospective collaborators (I suppose one must regard it as his “local” by default) is bereft of the advertisements for prominent beer brands that have festooned the walls of every English pub since at least the beginning of the twentieth century; in their place are posters displaying slogans enjoining the punters to heed or take advantage of certain government ukazes or benefits. And the supermarket where Kyle exchanges intelligence with Faceless for the penultimate time (and where, it now occurs to me, the latter is already at least furtively “faced”) contains no name-brand or even own-brand goods—just crates of unpacked produce, coolers with unlabeled bottles of milk, cuts of meat with the price per pound printed underneath, and so on. I for one (and, wie gesagt, perhaps the only one) find this absence of commercial signage quite soothing in a melancholy sort of way. Of course it is merely a knock-on effect of the “Sovietization” of Britain’s economy, but that realization is no skin off the nose of my enjoyment of it, for I have after all made no secret of my belief that I would have had quite a decent time as a citizen-cum-inhabitant of the USSR, at least during its post-“thaw” decades, and the more I reflect on the Britain of 1990 the less unappealing it seems by comparison with the USSR of Khrushchev and Brezhnev. To be sure, its “adult rehabilitation centers” are “arguably” even more brutal than Stalin’s gulags, but it is apparently easy enough to avoid being placed in one of them by simply keeping one’s head down, what with the dramaturgically most prominent victim of treatment in one of these center’s being the abovementioned sexagenarian trade union leader, who had after all categorically denounced the government on international television, something I don’t believe the likes of Andrei Sakharov at his most outspoken moments would have done. Basically, at an ocularly and viscerally arresting level, there is precious little dystopian horror in 1990’s Britain. The high point of such horror probably comes in the very opening minutes of the very first episode, when a pair of policemen are shown taking pot shots at a stray dog. Although none of the shots meet their mark, it is still a disturbing scene bespeaking a descent to the level of barbarism that causes Winston Smith to kick a severed hand off the sidewalk with scarcely a second thought. But on the whole, in quotidian texture if not in tone, the Britain of 1990 is less similar to Nineteen Eighty-Four than to that of Julian Barnes’s novel England, England, in which at the none-too-coercive prompting of a Rupert Murdoch-like billionaire, the official UK government relocates to the Isle of Wight, taking the entire industrious and tourist-friendly portion of the population thither with it and leaving mainland England inhabited entirely and thinly by cranks and yokels carrying on a primitive agrarian existence at a more than figuratively medieval pace. Of course unlike those of England, England, 1990’s rump tribe of Joe Bloggses aren’t allowed to idle along just as they please, as their sloth is carefully rationed and regimented from on high, but at the resolution of day-to-day life, the experience doesn’t seem to be much different or at all less pleasant. Indeed, we receive a few brief but significant hints that despite its unequivocally pernicious micromanagement of labor and commerce, the government has allowed the basic amenities and institutions of late-twentieth century Britain to continue flourishing (at least to the extent that they still can amid the deterioration of goods and services): for example, at one point a newspaper (I believe it is not Kyle’s but one of the government-owned rags) is spread open to reveal a classic sports-page headline centering on Arsenal football club (no, not quite so classic as, say, GALLOPING GUNNERS DIG IN SPURS, but very nearly so). So while the British hoi polloi may not be getting much in the way of bread, they still seem to be getting plenty of circuses. Not that the circuses seem to be distracting them any further from religious observance than footie and other sports distracted their actual 1970s predecessors and earlier selves therefrom, for the Anglican church is shown to be “in full vigor,” as Scrooge would say, and to have gone no further down the path of “secularization”; indeed, the Labourization of the administered world would appear to have encouraged it to retreat some distance in the other direction, to take refuge in ritual of a distinctly “High-Church” sort. I gather this from the appearance, towards (I think) the end of the first season, of an Anglican funeral complete with all the old-school fixins: a churchyard with plenty of mossy tombstones and shady oaks, a shiny dark coffin with visible wood grain, a weeping widow in her darkest Sunday finest, and a vicar in a spotless surplice reciting the familiar Book of Common Prayer liturgy for such events (“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” etc.). Of course, as the deceased was one of the regime’s opponents, the delivery of this liturgy is repeatedly interrupted by the descent of a helicopter dispatched by Skardon thitherto in the hope of sending everybody but the corpse scattering in fear of decapitation, but the officiator and mourners (one of whom is naturally Kyle) remain valiantly erect and in place to the end of the ceremony, thereby underscoring the implication that while man still proposes, God still disposes even under apparently permanent Labour hegemony. Not that the regime hasn’t attempted to co-op the Church, or that its attempts have been without success, but this success seems to have proved to be short-lived, for in an episode slightly postdating the one with the funeral (I think), Kyle’s PCD-busting researches lead him to a perhaps more-than-figuratively underground homeless-persons’ shelter run by a defrocked clergyman who formerly figured on British State Television as the Happy Vicar, a fellow who every Sunday would deliver virtual sermons exhorting his fifty-million-strong flock to submit with appropriately biologically correct sheepishness to whatever fleecing or culling operation the government was on the point of implementing. At a certain point, he tells Kyle, he stopped pretending to be happy, got downright mad, tore off his dog collar, and, reckoning that now that he had unjoined himself from his masters it was time to start trying to beat them, started up his shelter (for the stubbly rough sleepers lining its walls are all homeless on account of having fallen foul of the regime, dontcherknow). This implied super-rosy attitude to the near-term prospects of the Anglican Church and of the Christian faith in the UK more generally is probably the biggest and most optically distortive cloudy patch or fingerprint-smudge in 1990’s crystal ball or on its telescope lens, for by 1977 it was certainly clear that religious worship was on the wane in Britain and that the Church of England, far from being an impregnable bastion of ecclesial tradition, was doing much more to hasten the decline than to retard it. Of course as late as 1979, a certain C of E bishop was very publicly up in arms about the supposed (and in many senses actual) blasphemousness of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, but he was very much an outlier, like that lone cardinal who now inveighs against Pope Francis’s attempts at “wokifying and “greenwashing” Catholic doctrine. Think of Philip Larkin’s 1954 poem “Church Going,” in which he walks into a church bereft not only of a congregation but a vicar or any other C of E official (and whose very title punningly evokes ecclesial evanescence), or the unapologetically sybaritic Reverend Sonnenschein in Kingsley Amis’s 1966 novel The Green Man, or the “rationalist existentialist” priest as whom the Doctor’s arch-villain the Master poses in the 1971 Doctor Who serial The Daemons. (To be sure, the Master is a baddy, but the implied critique of his heterodoxy is shown up as a mere sop to conventional piety by the serial’s concomitant full-throated advocacy of the desacralizing trend in its presentation of the Devil as a shipwrecked space alien). By 1977 the Church of England was a peripheral camp-follower of the Zeitgeist (or perhaps Weltgeist) rather than the center or leader thereof as it had been in the Victorian era, and Britons’ Victorian-style piety (yes, yes, yes, whether High-Church “Oxford Movement-style piety or Low-Church Evangelical style piety or indeed Scottish and Northern-Irish Presbyterian-style piety) had almost entirely given up the ghost. But what had replaced that ghost in the British body politic by then? Why, the above-several-times mentioned valetudinarianism: an unshakeable belief in the meat-and-two-veg diet, cigarette-packet  health warnings, the National Health Service, etc. Hence, during the abovementioned COVID period, the Archbishop of Canterbury and his underlings in the C of E hierarchy were among the most zealous advocates of lockdowns and were certainly in no hurry to get worshipers back into the pews. And as I have already indicated that 1990 unequivocally evinces a micro-epochally appropriate degree of respect for valetudinarianism, the abovementioned cloudy patch or fingerprint-smudge must be seen as impeding clairvoyance in both directions—which is to say that in addition to betraying to us the show or show-runners’ naivety about the prospective fortunes of the Church of England it also conceals from us it or their conception of the Church of England’s proper and authentic relation to Christian faith in the traditional sense. It is tempting to assume that the emphasis on the survival of the Church bespeaks an attachment to traditional doctrine regarding both this world and the next—to assume, in other words, that the show or show-runners imagine(d) that an overthrowing of the Labour regime would precipitate a return to old-time religion along with old-time yeomanly free enterprise, but as near as I can recall, the diagesis gives us no reason to suppose that they do not envisage the Church by default as what it had effectively already become (and as which it is clung to today by the majority of the ever-dwindling remnant of its communicants): a promulgator of that milquetoast creed that its detractors call Moral Therapeutic Deism—the belief that the manner in which one lives one’s earthly life has no bearing on one’s prospects of salvation and that everyone who is a “nice person” in the most minimal, “lifestyle”-independent sense is more or less guaranteed a place in heaven. To be sure, the show has its eschaton in the final episode’s storming of PCD headquarters, but that is a decidedly “immanentized” eschaton. Should we conclude, then, that the utopia implicitly envisaged by 1990 is a utopia fit for habitation only by petit-bourgeois worldlings, that the show is indeed a “Daily Mail-reader’s dystopia” in an even more ignoble sense than the one in which it has been taken by the above-quoted critic—i.e., inasmuch as it presupposes that possession of the tawdry trappings of old-school lower-middle class British existence would slake humankind’s metaphysical yearnings, and that it is therefore a decidedly inferior aesthetic-cum-intellectual artefact to Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and The Year of the Sex Olympics (all of which, for all their respective faults, do at least evince a hankering for higher things than a cuppa and a spot of classic prime-time telly)? Not necessarily. I am emboldened to hazard this half-demurral by certain meta-metaphysical implications subtly but ineluctably emanating from the show’s dramaturgical structure. First of all, Kyle is a protagonist cut from very different cloth than John Savage, Winston Smith, and Nat Mender (the TV producer-turned stone-age paterfamilias of The Year of the Sex Olympics). He is neither a virtuous innocent, innately inimical to the dystopian society in point and permanently unassimilable to it, like Savage; nor a native of the society who initially takes its governing codes and principles for granted and only gradually comes to disbelieve in them and recoil against them, like Smith and Wender. He is a man who came of age in the older, better society, who knows exactly what is wrong with the new, bad society, and has apparently been fighting against its wrongness since its inception—and fighting it both confidently and as boldly as sound strategy admits (and occasionally even more boldly than that). In short if not in full: he is very much an action hero not unlike (and perhaps almost exactly like) the characters he played in Callan in the late sixties and earlier seventies and would go on to play in The Equalizer in the eighties (and exactly half like his characters in the feature films Wicker Man [1973] and Breaker Morant [1980], the police officer in the earlier film being as right-minded as Kyle but hopelessly clueless about the nature of the evil of the mini-society of islanders he has stumbled into; and the army officer in the later one being as worldly-wise as Kyle but more basally cynical owing to the moral funambulism exacted by the military-cum-social system in which he is functionally embedded). Most obviously the positioning of Kyle as an action-hero imparts an intrinsically Manichean essence to the dramaturgy; it ineluctably makes the show at least inter alia into a conflict between absolute good versus absolute evil, but perhaps more significantly and meritoriously (not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with Manichean dramaturgy, and in 1990’s case there seems to be something intrinsically right about it, given that almost everyone but the top dog at the locus of evil, the PCD, is shown to be partly actuated by noble motives [i.e., such that the show ends up administering a salutary fillip to the received liberal take on the rank and file of “fascist” organizations {i.e., that they attempt to absolve themselves of guilt by pleading that they are “just following orders”; whereas, for example, Delly Lomas knows she is doing evil and only half-attempts to absolve herself on the grounds that she is doing it for the sake of a higher good—viz., the care and upbringing of her daughter}]), it also imparts an aura of vitalism thereto. Although Kyle jousts against the PCD under the banner of specifically liberal Anglo-American principles like liberty of speech and conscience, he more broadly comes across as a knight errant on behalf of life itself, such that however prosaic or pedestrian his fellow-Britons’ ambitions for a post-PCD-dominated Britain may be, however much they may smack of a quiescent subsidence into a status quo ante of adjustable chronological specficity, his own seem to be vectored towards something better than the Britain of Churchill, Atlee, Eden (Anthony, not the Garden of), or Wilson–in short, towards some sort of transcendent eschaton, or, in Kantian terms, towards some sort of noumenon. Then one must consider the prima-vista inconsequential fact that in contrast to the three just-listed dystopias, 1990 is structured as a series, such that each episode not only marks a progression of the overarching plot but also a self-contained moment of engagement of our hero with his adversaries and adversity–a separate jousting match in the tournament. (I am not going to go so far as to assert that 1990 is unique among dystopias in being serially organized, for as I have already made clear I am not even sure that the dystopia is a proper literary genre; still, I can in all frankness and candor say that I can think of no television series that has ever been popularly described as a dystopia. Max Headroom may count as one at a pinch, as may a certain brief-lived late-90s or early oughties show whose title now escapes me; it took place in some sort of post-apocalyptic version of the United States in which people had to use generators to watch reruns of Zena, Warrior Princess, but I suppose whether such an inconvenience counts as dystopic depends on how highly one rates Zena (which I have never seen and so am in no position to rate). After three or four episodes, this rhythm of returning to square one over and over again induces in the viewer a feeling of Sisyphusian futility, but even Mr. Camus, the arch-promoter of Sisyphus qua poster boy for “the absurdity of existence” acknowledged that Sisyphus had the capacity to be happy, and by the end of one’s spectation of the first season the futility has long since yielded to a sort of coziness or something even nobler—something that is at least within tickling distance of a sense of transcendence, the transcendence of the recurrently quotidian so beautifully captured by Larkin in his poem “Days” (written, incidentally, just under a year before “Church Going”): “What are days for? / Days are where we live. / They come, they wake us / Time and time over. / They are to be happy in: / Where can we live but days?” Of course, one can easily overdo this sort of thing in “art,” and at its worst extreme it debouches into the god-awful never-ending superhero comic or a god-awful never-ending animated sitcom like The Simpsons. But by the same token, one might argue that there is something inherently dishonest about the dramaturgically closed literary dystopia, a dystopia in which things are getting steadily worse and the protagonist is drawing ever-closer to his doom with each turn of the page, that it ineluctably makes the world it depicts seem worse than any possible such (or such possible) world could actually be. Seriously, Volker, how hellish would Winston Smith’s life have been if his author had suffered him to continue working day after day at the Ministry of Truth indefinitely instead of forcing him to snoop around and thereby let himself in for a world of hurt? His job certainly wasn’t pleasant or edifying, but in essence it was no more mendacious than that of an advertising or marketing copywriter. And sure, the food at the Ministry’s cafeteria tasted awful, but it seems to have been filling enough to keep him well out of danger of starving to death, and I daresay the nosh at BBC’s Broadcasting House’s canteen (on which I daresay it was based) wasn’t much tastier. I suppose if one didn’t mind being regarded as an insufferable stickler, spoil-sport and all-around asshole, one might argue for tossing into the dustbin any narratively or dramaturgically organized work that presents a world in which it is practicable to maintain even a semblance of a routine over a span of many years and yet implicitly argues that such a world is a version of hell—i.e., per Robert Musil at some point in The Man Without Qualities (a novel that, incidentally, desperately yearns to present ultra-late-Habsburg Vienna as such a world qua version of heaven but is prevented from doing so by its historical anchoring on the precipice of a routine-obliterating event, the outbreak of the First World War [whence, it seems to me, its unfinishability, for the lovability of its characters is inseparable from their ensconcement in an Eric Rohmer-esque haut-bourgeois suburban Dasein]) a state of existence in which everything is bad and there is no hope of it getting any better. Naturally the set of such works includes not-only certain “what if” tales like Nineteen-Eighty Four but also a good many novels, movies, etc. that purport to depict the actual world of the past or present—e.g., Dickens’s Hard Times and the entire corpus of nineteenth-century “naturalism,” and perhaps the preponderance of mid-twentieth films in the “neo-verist” vein. (While one tends to associate neo-verism most closely with Italian directors, to my mind, the most dustbin-worthy example of the mode or genre is actually an English film, This Sporting Life.) I say this not because I regard the disamenities of such imagined-real and real-imagined places as nugatory (or, to put my mind’s money where my mind’s eye is, because I crave to relocate to all or even most of these places) but because I believe any such disamenities, however considerable or however long they must be put up with, are perforce far less “traumatic” than the disruption of any sort of routine. (By the same token, I regard any amenities, however lavish or long-available, as inadequate compensation for a Dasein that precludes the establishment of a routine or promises the disruption of any routine that has already been established, which is one of the reasons I have loathed all literary or cinematic treatments, whether satirical or adulatory, of the “lifestyles of the rich and famous” [the well-foundedness of my loathing is incidentally being underscored as of this writing via the brushfires that are obliterating some of the most upscale neighborhoods in Los Angeles], and why I am not exactly thrilled to be living comfortably enough in “hurricane alley” now.) It would doubtless have been interesting and aesthetically fruitful to watch Kyle continue his jousting at least another two seasons, to watch the tournament develop into a full-fledged career and to watch him age in the course of his pursuit of it. We might then have come to see him lamenting the torments inflicted on his organism by arthritis or lumbago more lachrymosely than the torments inflicted on others’ by the PCD. But alas, in having followed Nineteen Eighty-Four’s lead in selecting a title, the show-runners had committed themselves to a chronologically mediated timeline. They couldn’t have bally well gone on pretending it was still February 1990 on the show until it was New Year’s Eve of 1999 in the real world. And so they concluded the series after only sixteen episodes, and concluded it in the only ethical manner available to them—by providing it not with a happy ending, to be sure, but at least an equivocally hopeful one, an ending in which both the life of the hero and the history of the nation are guaranteed to continue, and to continue along lines that may just allow for a satisfactory modus vivendi at both the individual and societal level. The storming of the PCD headquarters may immediately be followed by the dawn of an epoch of pan-social comity and oblivion of past political sins as in the post-Cromwell Restoration, or it may give place to a reign of terror in which everyone even suspected of collaboration with the PCD (including Kyle himself) is imprisoned or executed. Kyle may be afforded the privilege of steering post-PCD Britain in the right direction but only at the cost of surrendering the woman he loves to the mercy of the mob; alternatively, he may be able to save the woman he loves, but only at the cost of being pilloried (or worse) as a PCD stooge. Accordingly, this conclusion affords great aesthetic satisfaction even at a purely formal level by providing the hermeneutic key to the cartoon freeze-frame montage that has served as the show’s title sequence from the very beginning: two people, a man and a woman, are seen facing away from each other at opposite walls of an otherwise empty room. With each advance of the sequence the walls grow closer together in defiance of each person’s supplicatory fist-hammering until finally the man and the woman are standing immediately back-to-back and have no choice but to turn around and look to each other for assistance. At the level of content, too, the union of this sequence with the denouement of the show is quite rich, suggesting as it does that all political problems are “downstream” of men and women’s failure to cooperate with each other. And on taking in this moral, one realizes that it has been pointillistically adumbrated over the course of the series. The first dot in the sketch is the right-off-the-bat manifestation of “chemistry” between Kyle and Lomas despite their irresolvable mutual antagonism at the level of the political struggle. Then there is the revelation, only several episodes into the first season, of Kyle’s marriage and paternity and Lomas’s single-motherhood. Until this moment, one was inclined to think that each of them was a footloose-and-fancy free singleton and that they would soon be jumping into bed with each other in both a literal and a figurative sense—that Lomas would not only become Kyle’s paramour but also jump ship from the PCD to join him in his crusade against it. But one now sees that such collaboration is impossible both morally and practically—morally because Kyle is obviously unwilling to abandon his wife and children and practically because, as mentioned before, Lomas relies on her PCD salary to support her daughter. Next, at the beginning of Season Two, we learn of Kyle’s previous full-fledged amorous involvement with Lynne Blake. As the elder of his children, his son, has been shown to be old enough to fire a rifle competently, it seems safe to infer that at least the beginning of Kyle’s liaison with Blake antedated the instauration of the present political regime by several years. Hence, in the light of his inability to bring himself to part with her at the end of the series, one cannot but conclude that he and she would have done well to marry and start a family together during that pre-dystopian epoch rather than end their liaison then and seek their respective blisses in other people and pursuits. Of course in tendering this conclusion I do not wish to say that the show or show-makers imply that the entire dystopian scenario could have been averted had Kyle and Blake taken this step: 1990 is by no means a metaphysical drama like The Prisoner in which the protagonist is living in a world that is more than figuratively of his own solitary making (even if it can sometimes seem that it is given that nearly every episode hinges on a showdown between Kyle and Skardon or the Home Secretary qua Number Two-like figure). I merely infer that the show’s dramaturgy does seem to hint, however equivocally (i.e., despite its abovementioned irenic attitude to homosexuality), via the “dysfunctional” amorous-cum-domestic situations of a few key characters, that the degeneration of the UK into dystopia was somehow facilitated or accelerated by the breakdown of traditional intersexual arrangements. This inference gains further credence from the comparably disordered life led by Skardon: while residing full-time with his mother, he keeps a pied-à-terre housing a mistress, an attractive young PCD data processor, and because his coupledom with this woman is not a marriage, when the political tables turn on the PCD in the final episode, he can neither take her with him in his flight nor take shelter with her under a shared roof and must instead solitarily ride a motorbike to obscure quarters in “a mean street back of town.” In its frank and detailed treatment of the world-maintaining function of intersexual love, 1990 outclasses every literary, cinematic, and televisual dystopia I can think of apart, perhaps, from our old friend The Year of the Sex Olympics. To be sure, in scads of dystopias from Nineteen Eighty-Four to Logan’s Run to Brazil, an amorous liaison between a man and a woman is of pivotal thematic significance, but only vis-à-vis its sentimental aspect: the regime’s refusal to let true love flourish is presented as a synecdoche for (or the ne plus ultra of) the diagetic regime’s most totalitarian atrocities, but the question whether England (autc.) would be better off in the long run if—and merely because—every Winston (aut al.) were allowed to find and keep his Julia (aut al.), regardless of the resulting couple’s viability as the starting point of a stable family and household is never posed, probably because to concern oneself with such matters at all has been preemptively intepellated as faintly totalitarian or “fascistic” in its own right, as smacking of a Five Year Plan or Augustus’s pan-imperial fining of bachelors. And in at least hinting that the restoration (or instauration, if you are more of a progressive than reactionary bent) of a humane and hopeful political-cum-social dispensation lies in the recentering of our collective attention on the propagation and fostering of the nuclear family, 1990 and The Year of the Sex Olympics may have just overshot decades of ultimately irrelevant prognostication by lesser dystopias and dropped us off exactly where we are right now, in the actual Occident of 2025, from whose perspective all the perfervid controversies of the past twenty years, if not of the past century, have come to seem like evasions of that simplest if most difficult of problems: how to enable men and women to get along well enough together to beget the next generation.         

 

THE END