Celebrated Elizabethans in the television age - The Shadow of a Nation: The Changing Face of Britain - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Feb, 2004 by Michael Karwowski

The Shadow of a Nation: The Changing Face of Britain. Nick Clarke. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. [pounds sterling]20.00. 277 pages. ISBN 0-297-60770-7.

Nick Clarke, voted Radio Broadcaster of the Year in 2000, presents BBC Radio Four's lunchtime news programme, The World at One. This is his second book and follows a best-selling biography of Alistair Cooke, another doyen of BBC Radio. Mr Clarke distrusts the glaring lights of television, blaming them for helping to destroy what he sees as 'the solid reality of everyday existence' of the pre-TV age and replacing it with the less substantial shadow-world of television celebrity. According to this book, television is a kind of killer shark which is slowly swallowing up all our most cherished institutions: family, royalty, Church, law, professions and politics. It is supported in its nefarious activities by a popular press acting as piranhas voraciously feeding on the shreds that remain.

The author expounds his theory through six potted biographies of celebrities of the Second Elizabethan Age, a conscious echo of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. His profiles consist of two agents of the media metamorphosis: the 'Television Man', David Frost, and the 'Merchant of Dreams', Charles Saatchi; two victims: the late Princess Margaret, the Queen's younger sister, and the trade union leader, Arthur Scargill; and two cookery writers, Elizabeth David and Delia Smith.

The Shadow of a Nation is most successful in its portraits of the agents of change. Charles Saatchi, the son of wealthy Iraqi immigrants, by all accounts a feckless youth who collected Superman comics, jukeboxes and sports cars, founded an advertising agency with his brother Maurice which came to dominate the global culture of commercial persuasion. It helped Margaret Thatcher to win a landslide election victory in 1979 with its poster campaign, notably one bearing the caption 'Labour Isn't Working' which showed a queue of purportedly unemployed people snaking away into the distance. Ironically, the queue actually consisted of members of the Young Conservatives. In his spare time, Saatchi collected modern art, commissioning Damien Hirst's shark in formaldehyde for [pounds sterling]50,000, snapping up Tracey Emin's unmade bed in 1999 for [pounds sterling]150,000, and paying a cool [pounds sterling]1 million for Hirst's Hymn sculpture, based on a plastic anatomical figure on sale for just under [pounds sterling]15 in toy shops everywhere.

Saatchi's proteges, the 'Young British Artists', became the Art Establishment when they were first taken up by Tony Blair's New Labour Party as part of 'Cool Britannia' and then enshrined in the Saatchi Gallery, housed in the former Greater London Council headquarters. Throughout, Saatchi rode the rising media tide like a consummate surfer, creating an air of Garboesque mystery by rarely giving interviews but putting his money where his mouth wasn't.

David Frost came to prominence in 1962 in the first television satire programme, the BBC's That Was The Week That Was. One of its creators, Christopher Booker, editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye, characterised his impact as: 'Everything to do with television brought out the hidden shallows in Frost: he had a gift for television'. According to Nick Clarke, this gift was to recreate the world as a universal dreamworld in which everyone was treated as equals, an equality based on their role as bit players on the 'box' in the corner of the living room. Frost followed up his initial success with a series of TV chat shows on both sides of the Atlantic which became the criterion of celebrity and, hence, public reality, before his global triumph with the Nixon Interviews. These achieved the biggest audience for factual programming in American TV history, as well as being sold to seventy different countries.

By this time, television was the defining expression of the modern age. The TV cook, Delia Smith, became the nation's darling by realising its power, Elizabeth David an interesting footnote by sticking to the written word. Princess Margaret, on the other hand, together with Arthur Scargill, whose 1984 miners' strike split the nation in a modern equivalent of the Civil Wars, were both drowned by their cavalier disregard of its popular imperatives. This is where The Shadow of a Nation is at its least convincing. For, just as David Frost always maintained that so much of authority is a confidence trick and acted accordingly, so are television and the popular press the greatest beneficiaries of that dictum. Those so-called 'solid realities' of the pre-television age which 'crumbled' so quickly and so completely under the media onslaught would not have done so were that not the case.