The Breathtaking Impermanence Of Things
Monday, June 9, 2014
On Cultural Background Noise And Saucepans To The Face
I hadn't thought about Rik Mayall in years. Part of that's cultural relevance and part of it's living in a country where he was a cult figure as opposed to a well-known comic. In a way, that made waking up this morning to the news of his passing even more of a shock. It's a sad reminder of the impact a man had on your formative years that comes in the form of his demise.
I've seen The Young Ones, of course, but I was five years old when the final episode aired. Mayall's presence in my life was far more a product of his later work, particularly Bottom, which was so woven into the fabric of my teenage experience that I can still quote it now, well over a decade after I last watched an episode.
This was the early nineties, of course. Four TV channels, no internet. I'd park myself on the couch and watch it when it was on or take my chances with the timer on the VHS recorder, a risky endeavor at the best of times. When it was over, the half an hour per week that was all you got back when TV seemed absurdly rationed compared to what we watch now, I'd go to bed, ready to share and re-enact my favorite scenes with my friends the following day.
That feels like a very long time ago, but I keep being reminded of it lately. It's twenty years since a very important time in my life; anniversaries are near-constant, grimly punctuated with the inescapable reality of mortality as another familiar figure passes on.
I was discussing with a friend the other day how it felt as though my childhood memories, especially pre-puberty, seemed attached to disasters, that I tend to remember things in context of when they happened in relation to cataclysmic events, to Lockerbie or Zeebrugge or The Challenger. I've been thinking about that a lot recently, and it's occurred to me that what's changed - for me, at least - is the idea of constant cultural background noise in the form of TV and radio, two mediums that have undergone drastic change in the last two decades.
When David Frost died last year, I was saddened because I was an admirer of his work, and as somebody deeply fascinated by a certain period in US history, his interviews with Nixon (and the story around them) are one of the most interesting pieces of journalism I've ever encountered. But I also knew David Frost as one of the background voices of my childhood, on TV-AM when I was getting ready for school five days a week for what must have been nearly ten years. I wasn't terribly interested in what he had to say back then, of course, but hearing his voice now takes me back to that time and place so completely that his passing carries a deeper sadness, a loss of not only the man, but of the feelings he provoked, a piece of a childhood growing ever more distant.
There's a larger essay here, I suspect, a tale of the cheerfully Orwellian nature of always-on TV and radio as opposed to the limitless choice we now have, which - somewhat perversely - serves to narrow the breadth of what we're exposed to. But the reason I sat down to write this was that Rik Mayall is dead, I remember him fondly, and I'm sad.
RIP Rik, and if there's a heaven, I bet St. Peter won't be expecting a saucepan to the face.
posted at 1:14 PM
---------------------------------
