ABSTRACT
This isn’t really the kind of book to lend itself to a neat ‘Conclusion’ (which is why I’ve opted for a more modish ‘Postscript’). I had considered the option of surveying the remaining ‘traces’ of this ‘low heritage’. Certainly, one could point to the success of David Sullivan’s Daily Sport and Sunday Sport as an enduring ‘pornification’ of everyday life as tabloid readers are recast as ‘punters’ to be sold telephone sex lines, softcore videos and the magazines Sullivan claims he no longer owns. Equally, one might cite an isolated example of low comic cinema like Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown’s U.F.O. The Movie (Tony Dow, 1993) – with its tale of the sexist comedian kidnapped by feminist aliens, it was as though Zeta One had exerted a cinematic influence in a parallel universe. But it’s easier to be confident about demarcations of the ‘low’ at a historical distance. At the time of writing, everyone from Smash Hits to The Guardian seems agreed on the trash-pop magnificence of The Spice Girls – I love them, too, admittedly, but this looks alarmingly like a critical consensus (or an uncritical one). To disagree runs the risk of seeming grey, dull and humourless. Meanwhile, it’s the ‘middlebrow’ – arguably always the real set of ‘easy’ pleasures, in Bourdieu’s terms – which has been recast as the low, the indefensible: ‘Blander than popular culture and even less hip than high art, the middlebrow is favoured by all of those people who find Celine and Cilla too fast for their blood’ (Charlotte Raven, ‘The Soft Centre’, The Observer: Life, 21 January 1996: 12). If you really wanted to find the populist cutting edge now, you might try writing about Heartbeat, Andrew Lloyd Webber or Wet Wet Wet. Perhaps John Carey might give it a go in his next book; perhaps The Daily Mail already has done.
