A Week in Books
Boyd Tonkin
Published: 23 December 2005
How pleasant to relax beside a roaring radiator and recall the cultural peaks of the past 12 months. We marvelled at the genius of Bob Dylan and George Best. Doctor Who held millions of viewers in thrall. Earnest parents introduced their youngsters, sometimes not without a qualm, to the moralising fables of C S Lewis.
McCartney and Lennon often hit the headlines, stealing attention from the fragile Labour government. Discerning movie-goers enjoyed a tense John le Carré adaptation, while Alan Bennett delighted with his deadpan wit. Next summer, we can look forward to a riveting soccer showdown with the Germans. Yes, 1966 promises to be a very good year indeed.
For ages now, commentators have puzzled over the Groundhog Day tendency of popular culture - especially in Britain - to repeat itself on an endless loop. Even to point it out again risks adding a new twist to this tale. Yet the retreads, revivals and survivals of 2005 have broken all records for number and noise.
Culture-biz insiders have a glib rationale to hand. Major institutions, from TV companies to publishers, remain in the iron grip of Sixties or Seventies Man, they argue. Kill off this bed-blocking generation of taste-makers, and nostalgia really won't be what it used to be.
Surely, the roots of this cult of mass-market ancestor-worship lie much deeper. After all, younger enthusiasts now inherit the canon of modern pop culture without the slightest blush. This year - to pick just one example - the rock critic John Harris wrote an incisive study of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. That album came out fully 32 years ago. What vanishingly small chance would there have been that some cutting-edge music writer back in 1973 might have thought it remotely worthwhile to publish a monograph on a pop landmark of similar antiquity, however significant - say Duke Ellington's great suite Black, Brown and Beige?
Something decisive, and irreversible, seems to have happened with the advent of global youth culture. Its technology changes constantly, making the archival storage of once-transient material ever easier and cheaper. But, in an era of Western peace and lasting (if cyclical) prosperity, the most successful stars and styles now ascend into a Valhalla of eternal fame or - at worst - perpetual comebacks. Welcome to the frozen landscape of PermaPop, where the preserved mammoths roam free, venerated as gods by every younger, frailer creature.
Swift and low-cost digital access to the PermaPop archive underpins this era. The BFI has just released a new series of smartly-written illustrated essays on "TV Classics" - a term that would, until 20 years ago, have made little aesthetic sense. Until much more recently, it would have made no practical sense either, as these books rest on an assumption that current fans or future buffs will be able to re-view and consult the relevant programmes at will.
Even in the VHS epoch, that would have been a far-fetched proposition. Now, DVD and cyberspace together serve as guarantors of permanence. The first quartet of "TV Classics" consists of Kim Newman's Doctor Who, Michael Eaton's Our Friends in the North, Anne Billson's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Ben Walters's The Office (£12 each). The last two choices do anticipate the verdict of posterity just a little, though it seems unlikely either series will lose its current cachet.
Anne Billson notes that Buffy, the genre-busting heroine, has quickly taken up "her rightful place in the pantheon of pop culture". And so she should. All the same, that very pantheon - endlessly revamped, endlessly revisited - now threatens to keep us bound in mental manacles that bind tighter than the old canon of literature, art or music ever did. No one even wants to escape them.
Is it merely coincidence that both Buffy and Doctor Who deal in different ways with the lords of time and space - with the sort of beings who can erase the passage of the years and wipe out all distance and absence? Aided by the infinite archives of a digital age, PermaPop offers us a dream of immortality. Yet every vampire tale agrees that deathlessness is a terrible curse.
As is limitless memory. In Borges's truly classic story "Funes, the Memorious", the afflicted hero remembers everything, and so lives in a hell of exact repetition: "To think is to forget a difference, to generalise, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details." PermaPop wants us all to be like Funes. So, for a change, let's make 2006 a year to forget.
