Oh You Pretty Things

It is a very long time since I actually went out and bought a brand new television.  So long, in fact, that:

• The last television I inherited from a friend still had a back on it;
• I only belatedly realised that the local shopping centre no longer contained any electrical stores, all of which have decamped to far flung retail parks;
• The sheer extent of techo-porn out there cannot be underestimated.

 Over several weeks, alternating between indecision and despair, I wasted the better part of far too many evenings comparing spec and pricing and availability of one model after another across a range of websites of varying degrees of poor functionality.  A Not the Nine O’Clock News sketch came very much to mind.   It was only when another week off work loomed, meaning that I might be able to avoid taking a special day off to sit on grim home-delivery watch, that I gritted my teeth and girded my loins and gave up my credit card details.

“I come bearing goodies”, said the delivery man, who, remarkably enough, turned up on the day that he was supposed to, at more or less the time that he was supposed to, with the correct items.  This was a good start.  And it only took several sweary hours of different permutations of cables and connectors and menu options before I had everything – TV, Virgin Box, DVD recorder, Amplifier and speakers – set up and talking properly to each other.

A television is almost, but not quite, a necessity (I have spent more-or-less happy periods of my life TV-less, going a year once on a radio-only diet): a wonderful invention spoilt by shysters and dumb-downers.  I have tried to future proof myself as much as possible within a sensible budget so as (hopefully) not to have to get involved in the grizzly business of buying another one for a few years.   For all of the rubbish that’s on there (and I long ago scaled my TV ‘package’ back to the minimum to avoid paying for another 100 channels of rubbish) there are still just enough gems to justify the expense, though I feel increasingly akin to a tosher if I simply sit down and start browsing in a “Now then, let’s see what’s on t’box” mode. 

 

More often than not the TV is used for watching films or for the occasional bout with a box set, the latest of which, that was sitting, still cellophane-wrapped, on the shelf, was the fourth season of Mad Men.

As a test case for the new TV, Mad Men probably couldn’t be bettered, what with the styles and the sets and the all-too-perfectly framed scenes in the bars and offices and suburbs of sixties New York.  And that ‘look’ and ‘feel’ of the show can be very addictive, leading to “just one more” back-to-backing of three or four episodes into the wee small hours.  Just as Waugh conceded that Brideshead Revisited was " infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, for rhetorical and ornamental language", a long session of Mad Men amounts to a binge of the indulgence and incorrectness of an America that was both better and worse than the America of today.  It’s only when you begin to really consider the plotlines and the situations that the characters get themselves into that the cracks begin to appear.

First and foremost is the terribly creaky back-story of Don Draper’s false identity.  It has always felt unnecessarily ill-judged and awkward.   Then there are the nods towards the Neanderthal sexual, social and racial mores of the day.  They feel just like that – nods – that are never properly explored or played out.  As Daniel Mendelsoh has put it in his admirable dissection of the show, “Mad Men keeps telling you what to think instead of letting you think for yourself.”

For all of that, Mad Men beats the hell out of anything being produced on British TV, most especially the recent, laughable, fifties-set The Hour.  I spoke to someone recently about modern British and American novels and just as there is still a vitality and sense of space in America, lacking in Britain, that leads authors such as Franzen to man-up and go into bat for the Great American Novel, there is a comparable level of ambition in American TV, even if it comes off half-cocked, like Mad Men, that the BBC simply isn’t capable, isn’t hard-wired, to even attempt. 

Amsterdam

“You’re the only person I know that’s been to Amsterdam without smoking dope.”

Yes, well.  It’s probably only by dint of circumstance that this holds true.  For whatever reason – lack of money, reservations about some members of the touring party, or other commitments – I never joined any of the occasional boisterous expeditions to Debauchery Central that took place through my twenties, one of which, that I’m particularly pleased to have missed, ended up in a holding cell at Harwich Docks from which escape was only achieved by strict adherence to the quickly constructed defence of “everybody deny everything” – which in itself is a pretty good album title.  But Amsterdam is one of those places that everyone naturally assumes that you’ve been to and looks at you rather oddly if you haven’t so, with a few days leave arranged, and no other calls upon my time, I finally got around to visiting the Venice of the North.

A word on coffee shops.  I might have been tempted to indulge if I hadn’t gone solo.  But wandering about on my own I had neither the desire nor the inclination to get myself stoned in the company of the Euro-dope-bores.  There were plenty of them in evidence, young for the most part but leavened with a rancid crust of fucking old fools, and I could just see myself getting dazedly trapped with them for a whole afternoon and evening of my bare 48 hours in-country.  Besides, dope is so effectively decriminalised and available now that if I did determine to get battered I would much prefer to do it in the comfort of my own home with no risk of Pink Floyd or The Doors entering into the equation, thank you very much.

A word too about Naughty Ladies.   It rained almost constantly for all of the time that I was in Amsterdam.  Sometimes heavily, sometimes lightly, sometimes torrentially. There was a lot of rain. My exposure (probably the wrong word under the circumstances) to the joyless charms of the red light district and the ladies beckoning from beyond the glass came at a point when Noah would’ve been thinking about battening down the hatches.  For my part I was rather more concerned with getting my umbrella out of my bag and cursing at its recalcitrant mechanism than I was with the, no doubt, heavenly delights on offer and the shiver that ran right through me was much less to do with sexual anticipation than it was with the raindrop that had unerringly found its way down the back of my neck.  I made my excuses to no one in particular and left, heading off to drink another witte beer, dry off a little, and establish which particular canal I was going to walk along next.

From the highs of low culture to Low Countries high culture. The Rijksmuseum is undergoing an extensive renovation and while this is going on the finest works of their collection have been gathered all together in one annex.  I should like to take this opportunity to commend this approach to all other major museums in the world.  I’ve visited the Louvre and if I never ever go back there again it will be too soon and I’ve become footsore and art-weary trudging around a dozen other lesser edifices.  Being able to see every picture that I went there to see in a leisurely uncrowded hour and a half between late breakfast and early lunch doth not a philistine make.

It was pure coincidence that I had recently read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell.   Set in the Dutch East India Company (VOC) enclave in Nagasaki harbour, it provided me with some context for the pictures of the fleets, the portraits of various VOC worthies and the items of trade booty in the Rijksmuseum.  As a book, I found it to be a rare page turner, vivid and entirely credible in its portrayal of that mysterious closed off society of 18^th century Japan though the more fantastical elements of the plot were unconvincing.  There was a quieter, better, novel here that got subsumed by over-ambition.  I note, too, that several women have, rightly, said that it made them feel rather queasy.

More rain.  The Van Gogh museum which, again, was a model of how museums should be – uncrowded enough to be able to walk around and simply absorb and enjoy.  More witte beer. 

 

On my final morning, before taking the train back out to Schiphol, I ventured a little further out from the city centre.  I had made a conscious effort to avoid the Anne Frank Museum, partly on account of the queues and partly on account of Third Reich Fatigue, but the Museum of the Dutch Resistance  was well worth a visit.  There were the expected portrayals of round-ups, hostage-taking and deportations as well as ingenious devices, hidden compartments etc. etc.  but what was most interesting (to me, at any rate) was a temporary exhibition on how the Dutch resistance was funded.

It’s rather a trite observation, but after seeing all of the sobering evidence of bravery and sacrifice and the betrayals and repression, one could not help but wonder, firstly, how Britons would have behaved under such circumstances and, secondly, how, or if, we in our society today could weather such a storm.