Did Tim Berners-Lee Trip Over his Own Feet?

Tim Berners-Lee is back in the news again. As in the past, it would appear that the combination of his reputation as “inventor of the Internet” (whatever that means) and his knighthood have led him to believe that he can pontificate about anything. Apparently it has only recently come to his attention that, if you create a medium through which anyone can say anything to anyone else, then everyone will. In other words it would appear that Berners-Lee has not yet grasped that phenomena such as fake news and hate speech are the inevitable products of what the Internet is and, for that matter, what Berners-Lee claims he wants it to be.

Back in November of 2013, this site took Berners-Lee to task on the basis of an article summary on the BBC News Web site that quoted him as saying that the “democratic nature” of the Internet was being threatened by a “growing tide of surveillance and censorship.” Apparently, it took him over two years to realize that, where information is concerned, an unregulated democracy has, by its very nature, tended to produce excess noise to the detriment of the signal in was intended to produce. If one wants to filter out the noise, then one must look for it (surveillance) and then design a filter for it (censorship). Before trying to unpack Berners-Lee’s failure to grasp this fundamental reality, it is worth recalling his own origins, as well as those of the Internet.

The important thing to remember is that Berners-Lee is a computer scientist whose skills led to his working as an independent contractor for CERN, a European research agency specializing in the challenging domain of particle physics. It subsequently became the home of the Large Hadron Collider, the primary instrument involved in the discovery of the so-called “God particle,” known more accurately as the “Higgs boson.” CERN is a perfect example of people with a wide diversity of cultural backgrounds coming together to work on shared problems. In that context it is easy to imagine Berners-Lee recognizing that communicating through a computer network could enable an even larger population to share their work and their results. He went about designing and implementing an infrastructure to enable that kind of world-wide sharing; and the result was the World Wide Web.

Berners-Lee then became an evangelist for making the Web available to as many people as possible. The result tends to reflect the joke about the Statue of Liberty in the Beyond the Fringe “Home Thoughts from Abroad” routine:

After they put up the Statue, some idealistic Johnny decided to put the words “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” on the base. Well … people did!

Berners-Lee’s mindset never seemed to recognize that his evangelism would attract more than scientists or that the Web would be used for anything other than doing more science. Even the pre-Internet Usenet had more common sense, thanks to which those responsible for regulating discussion groups came down like a ton of bricks on the very first effort to advertise through spamming.

According to a BBC News story that appeared over this past weekend, Berners-Lee finally seems to have recognized that an unregulated Web is not good for much of anything, particularly his dearly beloved science. For example, he would like to see regulation of “unethical” (those quote marks come from the BBC, not me) political advertising. Unfortunately, he thinks this can be done by putting “a fair level of data control back in the hands of the people,” failing to recognize that “the people” are the ones putting the data he abhors into the system in the first place.

Fortunately, there is at least one government out there with a more realistic model of regulation, and it will be interesting to see if they can put it into practice. In an article that showed up in today’s The New York Times, Melissa Eddy and Mark Scott reported that Heiko Maas, Minister of Justice and Consumer Protection in Germany, is proposing that the technology companies responsible for maintaining social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, be fined for the presence of content that would constitute hate speech or fake news. In other words the only way you are going to get people to fix a problem is to penalize them for failure to do so, and whopping fines can make for a very effective penalty.

I applaud Maas’ effort, and I wish him well. However, whether we like it or not, this kind of regulation is likely to turn into a losing game of Whac-A-Mole. Shutting down one source can easily lead to another popping up, and probably more than one of them. The fact is that just trying to figure out how hate speech can propagate may be a major research problem. It is one thing for an extremist to find a sympathetic blog and then tell all of his friends about it, but what about the process of discovery itself?

Someone I know rather well tripped over this problem the other day. She was trying to track down information about Jews in Eastern Europe prior to the Holocaust. She typed a search query into Google and discovered a relevant Wikipedia page as the highest-ranked result. On the other hand the second-highest ranked result turned out to be an anti-Semitic blog being maintained on a Wordpress platform. In other words the Google search result was not only unreliable for her needs, it was also disturbingly offensive. Thus, regulating the content itself is definitely a step in the right direction; but, if we are really interested in regulating sources of hate speech or fake news, we have to think about not only those sources but also the ways in which they show up in search results.

Now we are in territory that, as some of Berners-Lee’s professors may have said on more than one occasion, is “beyond the scope of this course!”

Bicoastal Blowback

Elizabeth Drew's latest dispatch for NYR Daily on the current election follies is entitled "Down Goes Trump." She leads with the assertion that, as far as Donald Trump was concerned, the whole electoral process was "another tool for promoting himself," taking his own reality TV show to the next level, so to speak. If that is the case, then it may well be that "real reality" is thwarting his objective. This morning the ABC7 News Web site has a story about Trump's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame having been vandalized. A photograph is included, and the job seems to have been thorough. (The article also mentioned an artist who had built a little wall around Trump's star; but brute force seems to have trumped, so to speak, subtlety!) Even better in my book, however, is the following sentence from Drew's article:

His opulent new five-star hotel in Washington that he’s showed off in campaign events has rooms going begging even at heavily discounted rates, and tenants in two of his residences on New York’s Upper West Side have signed petitions asking that his name be removed from their buildings.

A star on Hollywood Boulevard is little more than symbolism. Blowback on the East Coast seems to be much more a matter of substance!

Remembering Stan Freberg

I was glad to see The New York Times run such an extensive obituary by Douglas Martin for Stan Freberg, who died yesterday at the age of 88. Back when I worked at the MIT campus radio station, Freberg was our patron saint. We could only run advertising on our AM band, which was restricted to the campus; but we had a policy of running any commercial created by Freberg at no charge. (This was when he was led a major campaign for Salada Tea featuring the misfortunes of the Kringleman Koffee Company.) The bottom line was that Freberg only cared about those smart enough to get his jokes, which may explain why his fans included Albert Einstein and David Mamet. Even Mad Men cited one of his lines, but I fear that few of us remain who can inject Freberg quotes into conversational discourse.

Does the Internet Undermine Utilitarianism?

Tim Parks' NYRBlog post about the Charlie Hebdo affair, "The Limits of Satire," basically tries to analyze the situation from a utilitarian point of view. In other words he is more interested in the usefulness of satire than in questions of freedom of speech (or, for that matter, hate speech) that have occupied the mass media ever sense the attack on the Charlie Hebdo office. He argues that the utilitarian objective of satire is "to produce an enlightened perspective on events, not to start riots." While I do not question this position, I feel it overlooks the extent to which it has been undermined by the Internet. When Jonathan Swift wrote his "Modest Proposal" essay in 1729 (the case study behind Parks' analysis), he could reasonably assume that his readers would be members of an "enlightened" class of Englishmen, rather than either the starving Irish or a coven of insane gourmet chefs. American satirists, such as Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, and Bill Maher, probably also take for granted that most of their regular viewers are similarly "enlightened" and thoughtful, looking for something other than having their opinions reinforced by Fox. The problem is that, thanks to the Internet's capacity for mass distribution of content to sites about which we know little if anything, such content is now encountered by less "enlightened" audiences; and, more often than not, the consequences are not good.

Parks gave another telling example. After it appeared, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses was just another book, enjoyed by many readers and respected by many others. Then it got on the Booker shortlist, and the newspaper India Today decided that it was now worthy of attention. They ran an interview with Rushdie, after which a large swath of South Asian readers learned that the characters included prostitutes named after Muhammad's wives. That was the one small step that led to Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa, putting the author's life at risk.

I take the Rushdie story as a case study in pre-Internet mass communication. Charlie Hebdo, on the other hand, is a post-Internet story. Whatever benefits satire may provide for "enlightened" discussion, we can no longer assume that it is read only by those those respect such an enlightened stance.

The Many Faces of Martyrdom

Last Friday I felt it necessary to recognize BBC World Service Radio as one of the few sources willing to acknowledge the complex relationship between free speech and hate speech. In the wake of all of the demonstrations that took place over the weekend (including here in my home town of San Francisco), I have to say that the cool voice of BBC reason seems to have taken a permanent back seat to righteous indignation. However, I use that adjective "righteous" precisely for its religious connotations.

Several sources have now shown an interview with one of the Charlie Hebdo casualties in which he said explicitly that he would not be surprised if he ended up dying as a consequence of his determination to exercise free speech in the cause of biting satire. Had such words been uttered by a Muslim fundamentalist, we would dismiss it as a fanatical embrace of martyrdom; but is Charlie Hebdo any the less fanatical just because it is a secular publication that, for all intents and purposes, lives by the creed that nothing is sacred, whether it involves religious, governmental, or any other establishments? The amount of blood spilled as a consequence of the exercise of free speech by Charlie Hebdo is relatively small in comparison with the lives lost on 9/11, but both incidents seem to share a paralysis of reason on the part of those determined to write analysis in the wake of the catastrophic turn of events. Actually, when one takes into account the many dimensions of mindlessness induced by not only the Internet but also a mass media industry dominated more by consumerism than by any drive to inform, it would be fair to say that paralysis set in a long time ago. It just takes mass tragedies to bring it into the foreground, where, as in Jean-Paul Sartre's play The Flies, we have our official rites of mourning before going back to business (perhaps that should be capitalized) as usual.

Covering the Events in Paris

While listening to this morning's NEWSHOUR broadcast on BBC World Service Radio, I was glad to see that commentary on the attack on Charlie Hebdo and its aftermath finally seemed to have stuck a balance of opinion, regarding the complex relationship between free speech and hate speech; pundits take note.

"Multiplicity of Satire"

Writing about Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe, Virgil Thomson said that the "secret of operetta is multiplicity of satire." When I read this I thought immediately of Galavant on Sunday night. For all of its silliness, the satirical stiletto of the script was capable of jabbing effectively in any number of directions. As used to be the case the the Zucker brothers, Galavant could pick its targets from all over the map of popular culture and deal a fatal (or near-fatal) blow to each of them. Will they be able to keep it up in their next round of two half-hour episodes?

Stupid Readers

BBC News has posted an article about Facebook deciding to attach the label "[Satire]" to satirical news articles to avoid readers mistaking them for actual news stories. I realize that I may be mistaken, but I have decided to accept this as a genuine article, rather than a satirical one. My first reaction was to recall Orson Welles' radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, in which "news broadcasts" that were part of his dramatic conception were mistakenly taken for the real thing (even though the drama was preceded with a brief announcement about the technique). In other words, if people cannot accept something as fake after being told explicitly, "This is a fake," will a "[Satire]" label actually do any good? The bottom line is that people read selectively (when they read at all); and they believe what they want to believe, even when it involves misinterpreting (if not downright distorting) what they have read. While this may be taken as grist for Nicholas Carr's mill with his argument that Google is making us stupid, the fact is that people were reading the printed medium just as uncritically as they now do when they are reading from a computer screen. Let's not blame the Internet for a change and think more about why we now have an educational system that is so ineffective!

The Power of the Comic

Apparently, John Oliver has succeeded where cooler heads have failed to prevail. In a thirteen-minute monologue, he managed to reduce the debate over Net Neutrality to plain language that did not require extensive legal background for understanding; and he made it funny. To add insult to injury, he concluded his sketch by providing the URL through which all American citizens could make their opinions about Net Neutrality known to the FCC. According to a CNET report by Joan E. Solsman, this seemed to be sufficient to bring that comment-collection site to a crashing halt due to overload. This seems to make sense considering that, according to TV by the Numbers, the initial broadcast had about a million viewers; and, as of the release of Solsman's article, the number of YouTube views of the routine was "approaching the 700,000 mark."

There is a bit of life imitating art here. Oliver's basic argument was that Comcast was going to use the power of its abundant purse to increase the purse's capacity while undermining the welfare of the general public (which gets more and more dependent on Internet connectivity by the day). His campaign to flood the FCC comments site was reminiscent of the I'm-mad-as-hell-and-I'm-not-gonna-take-it-any-more scene from Network, probably with even larger numbers. Will it make a difference? We all remember Network's jaundiced answer to that question. We also know that the FCC is being run by a guy who used to work for Comcast. We may reasonably assume that both Houses of Congress are more beholden to Comcast than to the electors who put those representatives in their seats. So it may come down to whether or not the White House is in a position to stand up for all of us on the mad-as-hell side of the fence. Enquiring minds want to know!

Hollywood and the Future of Work

Mick LaSalle makes some important observations about The Internship. He seems to be one of the few critics to have approach the film as something other than a self-serving advertisement for Google. I am not sure I agree with where he takes his reasoning, but I think his conclusion is worth considering:

If you were to believe "The Internship," all you need to thrive in today's economy is gumption and a willingness to travel across the country to work for free. Just think, with a little luck, you might be one of the 5 percent to get a permanent job from out of the intern pool! As for the other 95 percent, why think about them? They're not exactly going to be part of any happy ending. 

Was a movie like this ever made during any previous bad economy? The Great Depression equivalent might be the story of a pair of unemployed guys competing against hundreds to go work on Henry Ford's assembly line. But no, such a movie was never made - and could not exist - because in no previous America would turning yourself into a cog in somebody else's machine be considered an achievement worthy of celebration. 

And in no previous America would it be considered a victory if 95 percent of your fellows were still left on the street. Rather, the Great Depression cinema made heroes of gangsters, con men and fast-talking individualists - guys who chose survival by not fitting in. 

Still, hardly anyone will look at "The Internship" in such bleak terms. It's meant to be fun, and it almost is. But if you do feel a little queasy when you think about it later, the reason is simple: The movie just assumes, as a matter of course, that people are totally defeated, without energy or hope - and then it asks you to feel OK about that.

My primary point has to do with that "hardly anyone" phrase in the final paragraph. This will ultimately depend on who actually bothers to go see the movie. I suspect it will go down as fun for Google fanboys, both those comfortably ensconced in the Googleplex and those aspiring to get there.

However, I have to wonder if this was really the audience that Vince Vaughan and his production team have in mind. That would be those men and women who find themselves displaced from the world of work within which they had made their plans for the future. These people could care less about whether the economy is "good" or "bad," because they have lost all belief in the myth that improvement in the economy will lead to improved conditions for both finding work and the nature of the workplace that provides it. Those people will look at this movie and realize just how far things have fallen. They will probably also recognize that, in spite of that hopeless descent, that brief flurry of indignation known as the Occupy Movement has now given way to apathy and despair.

This movie can be approached as a cautionary tale about the destruction of the middle class. David Simon told that story previously and in greater detail in The Wire. The Internship delivers the message in a more easily digested message; but, to build on that metaphor, it is also more likely to make anyone in the middle class barf in disgust.

Stephen Colbert Strikes Again, This Time at Eric Schmidt

Eric Schmidt can be such a bully with his shoot-from-the-hip assertions that there seem to be very few willing to call him out to his face over the speciousness of many (if not most) of his claims. Thus far the leading counterexample seems to have been Peter Thiel, who, as an investor, has a power-of-purse that may actually trump Schmidt's power-of-position at Google. Even Ken Auletta, whose command of facts tends to be stronger than that of the people he interviews, has had to maintain the reporter's skill of treating Schimdt with kid gloves.

Stephen Colbert, on the other hand, never heard of kid gloves. Furthermore, he parades a fictitious persona that would have nothing to do with kid gloves, even if he knew what they were. It was thus amusing to read Chris Matyszczyk's Technically Incorrect blog post for CNET News about Colbert being invited as a guest at Google, where he was interviewed on stage by Schmidt. Colbert himself is a master interviewer. As his encounter with Geoff Nunberg demonstrated, he is even good at dealing with those who try to best him at his own game.

Therefore, it should not have surprised anyone that Colbert could be as deft an interviewee as he was an interviewer for his own audiences. Matyszczyk chose to dwell on Colbert professing total ignorance of Google Play while flogging his new book. What it amusing is that Matyszczyk never came down on decided whether or not Colbert was yanking Schimdt's chain, perhaps because even Matyszczyk feels he has to be careful about what he says about Schmidt. In my own mind, however, there is no question at all about Colbert's tactics. Colbert knows enough about audiences to recognize that, more often than not, speaking truth to power is merely tedious, while making power look like a fool has all the impact in the world. (Colbert must have loved The Tin Drum when he was in his formative youth.) More power to him.

Literature Gone Wild

Christopher Ricks is playing all sorts of games in his review of Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth for The New York Review (probably to give the reader some impression of what McEwan is doing). In the course of his exploits, however, he lands on one gem of a sentence that is so delightful that "sharing with the group" was my immediate reaction:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Oxford University's effortless superiority to Cambridge is nowhere clearer than in the pathetic inability of Cambridge spies to remain undetected.

Things Haven't Changed!

Those agonizing over the current state of politics in our country might take comfort (or despair) in A History of New York, which Washington Irving published under the pen name of Diedrich Knickerbocker in 1809. He describes a party system in which membership is determined by whether one smokes a short pipe or a long one. He discusses the nature of partisanship as follows:

Whatever was proposed by Short Pipe was opposed by the whole tribe of Long Pipes, who, like true partisans, deemed it their first duty to effect the downfall of their rivals, their second, to elevate themselves, and their third, to consult the public good; though many left the consideration out of question altogether.

Presumably Irving's own reading experiences included Jonathan Swift. After all in Gulliver's Travels, party membership in Lilliput was determined by whether one broke an egg at the big end or the little one; and the idea of public representation by elected officials was not much different from that of Irving's description!

Happy Birthday, Mel Brooks!

Today is Mel Brooks' 86th birthday. I find it interesting that the London Telegraph should give more attention to this event than, say, The New York Times. Nevertheless, Emily Bootle's survey did not really catch many of the high point for me. (She also seems to have missed out on the fact that the "French Mistake" scene from Blazing Saddles was originally intended to be a big song-and-dance routine based on "The Varsity Drag," with the obvious visual pun being heavily emphasized. Apparently, this was too much for the suits, which is really saying something given that they did not seem to object to the farting-around-the-campfire scene!)

Still, if the Telegraph wants to play the most-memorable-moments game, I have to put in my own entry. It comes from Spaceballs and is based on the scene in which Colonel Sandurz and Lord Dark Helmet are watching themselves on a monitor showing the video release of the movie in which they are performing. Things start to go off the rails when the Colonel suggests that they fast-forward the video. What ensues is as a discussion of tense worthy of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. This culminates in the following exchange:

When will now be then?

Soon! 

 The delivery of those lines always leaves me rolling on the floor.

Happy Towel Day!

Today is Towel Day, instituted in 2001 to commemorate the death of Douglas Adams from a heart attack when he was only 49 years old. This is likely to be meaningless to those unacquainted with the five books in the Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy (not a misprint but representative of Adams’ distinctive brand of humor). What surprised me, however, was that I did not first learn about it through the blastr blog of the SyFy channel. No, it took a report from the London Telegraph reproducing a tweet from Stephen Fry reminding all of the significance of the date. The story went on to document recognition of that significance from England, Brazil, Belgium (highly significant, that one, for those who know the books) and Italy … nothing from the United States. Don’t panic, however; just celebrate in any way you see fit, preferably with a well-mixed G&T.

A Few Thoughts on How to Remember Maurice Sendak

My guess is that I am still on the ascending curve of what is likely to be an onslaught of obituary and memorial pieces written in response to the news of the death of Maurice Sendak. I wonder, however, whether anything I have yet to read will rise to the level of John Williams’ post to the ArtsBeat blog of The New York Times this morning. Most important was how few of the words in this post were Williams’ own. Mostly, he let Sendak do the talking with two notable exceptions.

One was a quote from Ursula Nordstrom, Sendak’s editor at Harper & Row:

You may not be Tolstoy, but Tolstoy wasn’t Sendak, either. You have a vast and beautiful genius.

The other was the decision to include links to both parts of his interview with Stephen Colbert (in Colbert’s Colbert Report persona). I have no idea how much of this was cooked up in advance. However, Colbert fed him a wonderful assortment of thoroughly clueless lines; and Sendak replied with an unabashed openness that we almost never encounter in more “formal” author interviews. (Also, unlike Geoffrey Nunberg, Sendak never tried to upstage Colbert at his own game. He just played by Colbert Report rules, and played very well.)

Others may wish to remember Sendak for his “vast and beautiful genius;” I prefer to remember the particularly irreverent ways in which he could harness that genius.

My Most Memorable Muppet Moment

Since today’s London Telegraph decided to compile an image gallery of the Muppets with their most famous co-stars, I figured this was a good time to exercise my own memory.  I have to say that, while I was never one of his most rabid fans, the Muppet Show broadcast I remember most featured Jean-Pierre Rampal as guest.  While he was a good sport in Pied Piper costume in a bit where he saves the Muppet rats from a plague of children, the highlight of the show had to be his accompanying Miss Piggy (along with Rowlf the Dog on piano) in a performance of Henry Bishop’s “Lo, Hear the Gentle Lark” with Piggy in her best Florence Foster Jenkins form.  This can still be enjoyed on YouTube, and it is three minutes of time that deserves to be remembered forever.

Snob Appeal versus Slob Appeal

Mad Magazine was at its funniest when it rebelled outrageously against the mind-numbing culture of conformity that made the Fifties such a ghastly decade for anyone with the slightest spark of creativity.  This was also the decade when consumerism began to take over our whole system of national values, as if buying everything in sight was our primary weapon against Communism.  There are even those who believe that the collapse of the Soviet Union began while Mikhail Gorbachev was visiting the United States on the day that Ronald Reagan showed him a shopping mall.

One of the great weapons of consumerism during the Fifties was “snob appeal.”  This was predicated on the idea that, whatever your adjusted gross income was, you could look like you belonged in a more elevated social stratum.  Mad retaliated with a hysterically funny piece on “slob appeal.”  Nothing justifies satire more than its emergence in the “real world.”  This morning BBC News released a story to remind us that snob appeal is still with us and will go to great lengths to battle that slob appeal that began as a figment of Mad writers’ imaginations.

The paragon of snob appeal in question is Abercrombie and Fitch.  (Could one ask for a better representative?)  The “opposition” is represented by Jersey Shore, particularly in the form of the character Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino.  Apparently Sorrentino has a taste for Abercrombie and Fitch threads;  and, as a result, the company has issued a statement to the effect that it has offered him “a substantial payment” to wear another brand.  Here is an excerpt from that statement:

We are deeply concerned that Mr Sorrentino's association with our brand could cause significant damage to our image.

We understand that the show is for entertainment purposes, but believe this association is contrary to the aspirational nature of our brand, and may be distressing to many of our fans.

Bette Midler used to have a line referring to those who cannot take a joke (which I cannot reproduce in the interests of good taste).  Presumably, that comment never registered with Abercrombie and Fitch, perhaps because their investor materials describes their brand as “the essence of privilege and casual luxury.”  Tell that to the folks who look for their label when going through the racks at Goodwill.

All About the Borgias

I have no doubt that Ingrid Rowland knows more about the entire Borgia dynasty than the assembled wisdom of everyone who contributed to the current Borgias series on Showtime.  So I was not surprised that she should use a post to NYRBlog to skewer just about every aspect of the Showtime production.  I was even pleased to see that she shared my reaction to the anachronistic selections of music, although she turned to Carlo Gesualdo for her example, while I felt that the injection of George Frideric Handel was even more ludicrous.  On the other hand I found that I could make lemonade out of this particular lemon, writing about Harmonia Mundi’s Dinastia Borja project on my national site for Examiner.com.

In the grand scheme of things, however, Rowland’s piece reminded me of some of those old Saturday morning cartoons about some poor guy being bothered by a fly and ultimately dispatching it with a howitzer.  Having endured The Tudors, historical accuracy was the last thing I expected from The Borgias.  However The Tudors was deadly serious to the point of tedium, almost as if it wanted to be a 21st-century reincarnation of 19th-century bel canto opera.  From the very beginning The Borgias had a sense a humor;  and, if Neil Jordan was more interested in honoring the legacy of Mel Brooks than all the volumes of Renaissance studies, then he deserves credit, because, whatever faults the series may have, tedium is definitely not one of them.

In this context even the musical anachronisms may be part of the formula.  Perhaps the most important lesson from Jordi Savall’s Harmonia Mundi project is that there was not much distance between music heard in formal settings (such as the celebration of a new Pope) and music heard in the public streets.  Jordan has taken a similarly pedestrian approach to all of his characters;  not only the members of the Borgia family but also all the “nobles” (scare quotes out of respect to Aristotle) who figured in their family saga.  As a result the whole thing plays out as a situation comedy, perhaps with a nod to the knowledgeability of The Simpsons, rather than “historical drama;”  and that is the essence of Aristotelian comedy, no mean feat for anyone working in contemporary theater, even when it is the theater of the small screen.

Satire is the Best Revenge

I suppose I should begin by confessing that I was never particularly interested in Upstairs, Downstairs.  I am sure it was a great asset for Public Television back when they were still committed to running programs of substance, instead of the current lowest-common-denominator nostalgic fluff.  However, my tastes tended more towards John Galsworthy and Anthony Trollope;  and the video documents of staged performances were already taking a fair chunk of my time.

My wife, on the other hand, was hooked on that series;  and that meant that she really wanted see Downton Abbey.  Since she was traveling when it aired here, I saved all the episodes on our VTR;  and we covered the entirety in relatively short order after she returned.  I thought it had a few interesting sharp edges;  but, on the whole, I found it a bit too slick and occasionally self-indulgent.  I almost felt that it had been driven by a marketing plan rather than a narrative one.

I am therefore happy to report that, at least on the other side of the pond, the British are going to give this contrivance a bit of come-uppance.  Here is how the plan was reported in today’s Telegraph:

The American actress Kim Cattrall, best known for playing Samantha in Sex and the City, will join forces with Comic Relief veterans Joanna Lumley, Jennifer Saunders, Victoria Wood for the spoof.

Harry Enfield, Tim Vine, Dale Winton, Simon Callow will also take part in the irreverent take on the popular drama about life above and below stairs in the Edwardian era.

Victoria Wood plays “Mrs Crawler” and Joanna Lumley the housekeeper figure. The sketch will apparently reveal how much of a flirt Lady Mary really is, and whether Thomas the dastardly second footman is as catty off camera as he is on it.

The photograph accompanying this story is definitely worth viewing, particularly to see Kim Cattrall in “full character.”  My only regret is that we shall probably not get to see this production over here.