If you could get past the insane suggestion that the Modern Review was the first publication in the history of the world to ‘take popular culture seriously’, the BBC4 doc ‘When Toby Met Julie’ did provide, possibly unwittingly, some insight into How British Middle-to-High Culture Works amid what was essentially one of those five ‘The Dirt on Kate Moss’ docs, only without actual famous or glamorous people.
In the mid ’70s, Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwan, James Fenton and other Oxbridge graduates, writing in the New Review, with the backing of Ian Hamilton, took aim at the Hampstead cosiness of the preceding literary generation.
CUT TO: the late ’80s. Toby Young, and his band of courageous Oxbridge graduates, writing in the Modern Review, with the backing of Peter York, took aim at the cosiness of the preceding literary generation. And who might they be? Amis, Hitchens, et al… Nothing really changes here. The show almost let in a note of criticism from Jon Savage, who seemed entirely OTM in pointing out that having a Cambridge professor of music reviewing Jesus Jones (or whatever) was hardly the class-boundary-demolishing power-move being marketed. It doesn’t bode mega-well for tomorrow’s history of der NME, which *something tells me* won’t quite meet the standards of ILM.
PS I have a blog now, in which I will take aim at Peter Bradshaw from time to time.