“The turn that events took had all the look of some kind of ritual assassination. The killing not of a body – the body was already dead – but of a name.” – Mark Fisher, ‘The Return of the 70’s’ from Ghosts of my Life.
The turn of events Mark Fisher was referring to in above quote were the allegations that broke in September 2012 about the late ‘former DJ and children’s entertainer’ Jimmy Savile’.
For Fisher, these allegations that accused Savile, posthumously, of serial sex abuse and pedophilia, that started ‘come up…like a build-up of effluent that could no longer be contained, first seeping, then surging out’ were a return of the 70s ‘no longer as some bittersweet nostalgia trip, but as a trauma.’
Or could we also suggest ‘as horror’?
It took almost 40 years for the 70s to be reckoned with in public discourse. Savile ‘the nations favourite grotesque’, as Fisher puts it, was not only most prolific with his abuse during this decade, but his posthumous assassination in 2012 became a symbolic reckoning with a more generalised horror that was permissible in that decade – attitudes and behaviours in wider culture that enabled the monstrous meditations of the Yorkshire Ripper, for example.
Indeed, for Fisher one of them most ‘unsettling aspects of the whole [Savile] affair’…was ‘how out in the open it all was’. That, basically ‘we all knew, or felt that we knew’.
For a culture to persist it must be able to operate it clear daylight, so long as nobody speaks its name.
It took until the early 2010s to speak of the 1970s in this way.
It’s taken until 2023 to reckon first decade of the 2000s.
I believe we live in an age of accountability, of holding people, groups and countries to account for past acts of injustice. I have previously argued it is potentially dangerous not in the justice it seeks, but because that in an society that has lost sight of a better world ahead, it becomes an endlessly unfolding end for its own ends, and creates a culture of distrust and paranoia.
Perhaps because it seems so historically bound to the advent of mass social media use, a technology that has has accelerated and intensified the way in which we receive information and engage in debate, our reckonings with the past are accelerating the past ever closer to the present, in a process of ethical flattening(?). This could explain why our reckoning with the ‘noughties’ is happening closer to the present than with that of the 70’s in 2013?
Nonetheless, it is happening right now. And as guilty as he may be, Russell Brand is most certainly the sacrificial lamb in this exorcism of a decade’s wider crimes.
Today I was speaking to a friend about the “punching-down” nature of the of the noughties comedy Little Britain, which despite not being particularly funny, even back in 2004, was very popular at the time. Little Britain was like a group of school bullies trying to recreate the humour of the 90s sketchshow The Fast Show without realising that The Fast Show’s genius was that you endeared to, or laughed with, the characters, rather than purely at them. But Little Britain was far from unique, “punching down was endemic”.
In 2011, Owen Jones’s book ‘Chav’s’, which propelled the writer and commentator to a minor celebrity role, was perhaps the first attempt at bringing the culture of the 00s to justice. Identifying what until then had been a far more normalised habit of showing contempt and disgust towards those elements of the working class who were left behind and ghettoised after Thatcherism. ‘Chav-bating’ as it became known, was daily viewing on the then popular show ‘Jeremy Kyle’.
The Russel Brand of the noughties was a sniggering endorsement of this ‘kicking downwards’ style of comedy. But it had a more mysognistic twist to it.
First off, I admit that I liked the 2010s incarnation of Brand. I liked his ‘honesty’ about his flaws, his honesty in having been ‘fucked up’. Now, it seems that he was being honest about things that even he was too scared to dig deep into the details of. But this isn’t abnormal – ‘recovery’ is a very present aspect of 2020s culture, and a lot of that is people my age recovering from a lifestlye that was broadly ‘normal for the noughties’.
And who knows what did and didn’t occur on ‘3 for the price of 1’ indie discos all across the land?
When it came to sex, the noughties was like a manifested overspill of 90s ‘lads mags’ culture. It was the coming of age of those who’s formative perceptions of sexual relations were influenced by this idea that all women wanted to appear semi-naked in the very public-facing presence of the likes of FHM, Loaded, and Nuts.
It was also the age that celebrated unbridled ‘beta male’ lairyness. ‘Indie’, the safe musical space for quiet lads growing up, had gone overground and merged with old school lad culture. And as we know it created it’s own beta-celebrity horror stories in the likes of certain indie musicians of the age now being exposed as sex offenders. But none as decade-defining as Brand himself.
The disturbing aspect in this is that as many women my age are now discussing, it was presented as just part of life.
No male looks back on that age with a purely clear conscience, as even if they didn’t do anything, they said things, expected things that enabled its normality, even those of us who saw ourselves as ‘sensitive types’, politely-feminist. And even if it wasn’t called out then, there’s always that paranoia that it will be today. Noughties comedy ‘The Inbetweeners’ has dated so badly because of being an expression of this, that it is now better seen as an historical document.
The 00s was the ghoulishly overground offspring of the 1990s, it was the ugly unleashed without the contexts of the 90s that kept it in check. It was white boy decadence, as we had one ‘last party’ as the twin towers fell and the stock markets crashed.
In my opinion, the noughties officially ended in the fall of 2012, right at the moment that the 1970s were being publicly exhumed. They ended with one of the final scenes of the BBC satire series ‘The Thick of it’
Malcolm Tucker, as an high powered head of communication in a government, faces a panel for an enquiry investigating a culture of info leaks and corruption between government and media, which Tucker was the lead actor in. Tucker, realising he’s a done man, gives in to one tirade, returning the gaze upon him to the judges and nation alike:
“You come after don’t you, because you can’t arrest a land mass, you can’t ‘cuff a country”.
“I am you, and you are me!”
You can’t arrest everybody of adult age from the noughties. You can’t arrest everybody who indulged in the daily thinly-vieled misogynist and chav-beating hatred towards Jade Goody (for example), the stress of which must surely have contributed to her young death.
Russell Brand may indeed be guilty of all the horror stories that are now oozing up from the past. But, he is also in the position of the fictional Malcolm Tucker, a big player in an age that enabled it.
“I am you, and you are me!”
John B Ledger 