Friday 7th December, 2003 – Dumbing Down

Of all the buzzwords that have plopped out of the fundament of the lazy, crisis-obsessed media over the past few years – ‘road rage’, ‘sexed up’, ‘name and shame’ – my least favourite has to be ‘dumbing down’. A brilliantly nebulous, catch-all phrase it has been applied to television, the education system, society in general, and even the media itself. What it really means no-one knows. But any man or woman on the street could reel of dozens of examples of ‘dumbing down’ – the rise of reality TV, the decline of ‘real rock’, easier A-Levels, brainless summer blockbusters, chick-lit etc etc.

The underlying, fogeyish logic to the idea of ‘dumbing down’ is that there was once a shimmering Golden Age of popular culture, where children skipped to school, keeping one eye on the pavement and one on a pocket-sized volume of Proust, before diligently sitting through a day of common-sense, three-Rs teaching, and heading home to an evening of healthy dinner-table chat, and perhaps some time to play hula-hoop before bed.

The alternative version might be that the ‘golden age’ involved scurvy-addled youngsters skipping off to a hard day at the coal-face, before returning home for a hearty dinner of spam and soda bread, consumed in silence under the reproachful gaze of their emotionally distant father, before being soundly thrashed for an hour before bed.

Both hopeless exaggerations, and neither one any more realistic than the other. Every generation thinks that they are in terminal decline, and that things aren’t what they used to be. Every generation (so far) has been proven wrong.

But. Every now and then, I have a Clarkson-esque moment, where I can feel myself teetering on the edge of a this-country-has-gone-to-the-dogs meltdown. And at these times, I find the term ‘dumbing down’ rising in my throat, and consciously have to swallow it back down, afraid that once I utter it in anger, the floodgates will open, and I will turn into a Classic Rock-loving, chinos-wearing, grumpy young man.

These moments have become more and more regular of late. Maybe this is what being in your (gulp) late 20s is all about. The slowly dawning realisation of what a miserable old fart you are soon to become. The thing that gets me most riled, and has me searching most desperately for a way not to say ‘dumbing down’ is the apparent necessity now for news coverage (both TV and papers) to be accompanied by some kind of illustrative computer-generated graphic, for those readers / viewers who find the concepts being discussed to mind-blowing to comprehend without some visual aid.

Yesterday, ITV news was reporting on the trial of Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr. They explained how the burnt clothes of the two murdered schoolgirls were found in a school storage building. In order to illustrate this, they showed a computer-generated picture of a storage building, over which zipped a list of bullet points: BURNT; HIDDEN; CLEANED; TRIAL.

My favourite recent example of needless illustrations came in The Sun. A few months ago, a number of British soldiers were arrested and accused of mistreating Iraqi prisoners of war. There were even allegations of sexual abuse after a clueless soldier took photos of the episode to be developed at Boots. All the papers carried reasonably detailed descriptions of the contents of these photos – an Iraqi prisoner being forced apparently to fellate a soldier, two Iraqis being made to fake sex for the camera, an Iraqi tied up naked and attached to a forklift truck. Only The Sun felt the need to produce a computer-generated approximation of ‘what these photos may have looked like’. How devoid of imagination are these people? How shameless to twist a serious story for the titillation of their peanut-brained readers.

Any suggestions on a way that this can be contextualised without use of the phrase ‘dumbing down’ are welcomed.