Two staples of British TV culture returned this Xmas, Wallace and Grommit and Outnumbered.
And before I start, I really enjoy both of them. I used to love Wallace and Grommit as a child, with it’s dry humour, that manages to remain humorous whatever age you are. Whilst Outnumbered felt very comforting to watch around the time of the late noughties and early 2010s when the financial crisis presented a concerning near-future ahead.
I’m always half-inspecting things. Sometimes I wish I didn’t, sometimes I won’t watch things because I won’t be able to passively consume, and I’ll be left overly-wired in the evening. This will now be a life-long side effect from reading a lot of digestible culture theory that itself now feels lagging behind, out of breath, when the pace is set to a Tik Tok tempo.
So, what I am about to say isn’t a criticism of what seems to me best described as ‘eerie comfort culture’, because something is conspicuously absent, and intends for it to be absent, as it knows we want to imagine a world without it.
Yes, Wallace and Grommit is an animation – and all animations want to do with reality what reality cannot do with itself. But it’s also deeply familiar, conjuring a dream-scape of what could have been made of a north from the past if that past had trauma-lessley joined onto the present tense.
This take has nothing to do with migration, the changing face of British cities in terms of skin colour, multiculturalism, etc – that would be a silly suggestion. Because for me, Wallace and Grommit is perhaps the archetypal presentation of a North where the trauma of Thatcherism never happened.
The writer Carl Neville wrote a book called Classless, which was largely a critique of Danny Boyle’s films as films that conveyed the New Labour illusion writ-large – that there was no more class struggle, no more social history anymore, that’d we’d kind of plateaued and life would be comfortable for all, except for life’s normal up and downs, a world that just looked like everyone had a family like that off Outnumbered.
Again, this is not a slating. This is an awareness that popular television often comforts us by showing us a world as we feel it should look, rather than how it does look.
Outnumbered, all though rooted in a present, with many contemporary references, still resembles the fantasy that Wallace and Grommit portrays. One where, through life and death, through illness, through human aches and pains, is still one where we can all grow old with the confidence and independence of self-actualised adults. An idea of middle class life that remains rooted in a future that 1997 dreamt of.
And Wallace and Grommit and Outnumbered were soothing plasters for a country where things really do not feel too great.
A country where millennials and their ageing parents (to name just two generations) can indulge in the idea that the dream-scape of New Labour Britain 3rd way future actually worked for all.
A north that felt truly at ease with it’s industrial past without relying on nostalgia, because the old and new had fused into a Modernity that actually worked, and gave us all a sense of northern citizenship.
And a Uk that had flowed seamlessly through social democracy to the internet age, without the pain of Thatcherism, and consequently austerity and Brexit.
This is all so rose-tinted, and flawed by blindspots about succesful transitions from lost futures to alternative Nows. But perhaps lost futures, alternative Nows are our current collective fantasy?
John B Ledger 