And the award for awarding the most awards to an award winning award goes to …

So, have you read Bring Up The Bodies?

I have to confess, I haven’t. But then this isn’t a critique about the content of the book or the style of writing.

It’s up for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, which if it wins will give it the ‘grand slam’ of major awards alongside the ManBooker and the Costa. This is a first, apparently.

But does it justify it? How much of giving an award is actual recognition for the contribution of the author, and how much is about gaining visibility, kudos, and reputation for the awarding body itself?

Bring Up The Bodies has been whip-spun into a phenomena. Various organisations are queuing up to hurl their award upon it in the hope that their name may make the hallowed turf of the back cover. If they don’t laud it, surely there must be something wrong with their award? They must have missed something? They must simply not be intelligent enough to see what everybody else sees? Particularly after her first book in the trilogy – Wolf Hall – was similarly successful.

And that is where the bandwagonning occurs. Once the praise reaches a critical mass, you have to join in. To refuse would seem like sour grapes. In fact, many of those who do refuse come across as precocious, self-interested, snobbish prigs who see themselves as better than the masses. That or they realise they don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of their voice being heard so they aren’t even going to try. Just look at those that have criticised the other literary phenomenon: the Fifty Shades trilogy.

But is one book worthy of all these awards? Indeed, should one book be lauded to such an extent? Is the literary landscape so bland and indiverse that no other book is worthy of a glance? That this year you should only read one book, casting aside the £50 Amazon voucher as clearly nothing else is worthy of your spend? That would be disappointing, and that may be where the awarders are short-changing and disenfranchising their regardees. What use is the voice of the awarder if he is just going to say what every other awarder says.

Personally I would rather see three books win the three awards rather than one, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that one can’t win, or that it is less suited to any of the particular categorisations as to the others. But like I say, I haven’t read the book, I don’t know how appropriately it meets all of the criteria against any of the other books on the shortlists, let alone among the general publishing melee of the last year.

And that is one of the reasons why I like the Mercury Music Prize. Each of the albums selected is done so on critical – rather than commercial – merit, and it has a remit to encourage investigation of the breadth and depth of all genres, rather than a purely pop question. It does, occasionally, get criticised when the ultimate winner is not a commercial success, but I think that that is exactly as it should be.

But with any bandwagon comes a backlash. And it has started. It starts with a rumbling from the naysayers – those priggish snobs who think they are far to well-educated to enjoy the dross thrown at the masses. They murmur that, in fact, the author is above her station; she has self-aggrandised somewhere along the lines; something in the novel is incorrect, or embellished, or underrepresented. And as the murmur grows, so a new bandwagon takes shape of people who think they are better.

And then…

Crack!

There is a moment. That moment when the scales tip, the public mood reacts and changes, the rebellion becomes bigger than the initial force. With Fifty Shades, this was pretty immediate and pretty easy: the book was poorly written, clearly aimed at the lowest common denominator, allowing anyone above that lowest of the low to adopt an educated, high-minded sneer. Yes, they had bought the book, but only to see what the fuss was about, and then to go through it with a red pen making corrections. It was perfectly acceptable to own it and yet criticise it. It was probably actually their guilty pleasure, but you can’t let that get in the way of a perfect public persona: of reading the Times or a good, historical novel.

I don’t think that moment has occurred with Bring, but it very nearly did.

Hilary Mantel gave a lecture for the London Review of Books at the British Museum. This is a lecture that would have gone entirely unnoticed but for two things:

Hilary Mantel

And

The Duchess of Cambridge.

Both are the darlings of the media at the moment. One has the most lauded book in English history; the other is the modern Disney princess, being beautiful, polite, and – most importantly – pregnant. Because after all, a future Queen is surely only good to give the King an heir?

And that was what Hilary’s lecture was on – the public’s (or, more pertinently, the media’s) perception of the Duchess and her role in society. She bemoaned the way the media encased the princess in porcelain, put her on a pedestal and denied her any of the other responsibilities or duties which she undertook. The lecture made some very valid points and – if you have a good few hours to spare – is possibly worth a read.

Particularly if you are going to criticise it.

And that is where the problem and backlash occurred. Many people didn’t read it. They took quotes out of context and incorrectly applied them, attributing a criticism of the media to a criticism of the Duchess herself.

Now, I can understand how this occurred. I see three main reasons that Ms Mantel ended up handing the media the stick with which to beat her:

Firstly, the speech is so long that it will have bored most of the lazy journalists who are looking for snippets. It’s quite a pretentious, self-aggrandising speech. I see the points it is trying to make, but it does labour its way getting there. That said, when you are asked to give such a lecture, you are told that the content must flesh-out to around an hour, and that does require a lot of content. When writing these posts I often find myself getting stuck on one particular point, repeating and redefining ad nauseum, losing track of the original point and meandering so far down a nuanced tangent that my point becomes ineffective and worthless. And that’s just after 10 minutes or so.

But in the length also comes the second problem – that the message was lost amidst the content. Ms Mantel spent so long describing the problems that the media was creating that you forgot they were the creation of the media. The point got lost in the detail. It was easy to assume that, rather than describing the perception proposed by the press, she was describing actual criticisms that could be levied against the Duchess directly. And snippets, taken out of context, entirely confirmed that, whereas if you read the whole of the article, you will see that whilst 95% of it is “she is held up as …” you will see that the other 5% of the content is “and that shouldn’t be done because that is not the person that she is”.

And finally, the real problem, is the focus. The target of the criticism was the media. Is the media really going to accurately report a lecture which is highly critical of the way the media reports? No. It may have been naïve of Ms Mantel to presume so; she may not even have thought that the media would have picked up on the story; but when you are the darling of your sphere of visible influence, every comment is scrutinised, analysed, bastardised.

The punchline of the lecture was that the media misrepresents the Duchess and idolises her, building her for a fall. But against the background of the next most famous woman of the moment delivering a very long speech with excerpts which could easily be interpreted as a direct criticism of the Duchess, that punchline was far too easy to hide.

The final problem was the knock-on commentators. Initially this wasn’t a story, but more and more people decided to throw their tupenny-worth in; again bandwagonning themselves to get a bit of publicity for their own cause. Everyone has an opinion on the matter, and in order to build the situation into a story, the media sought out as many, and as high-profile, a comment as possible. Many of these comments were ill-judged, based not upon the original essay, but upon the hearsay reporting of that essay. But then the media was possibly smarting from the criticism (if they realised that it was such) and was therefore looking to mount it’s own defence by way of attack of Ms Mantel, deflecting away from any introspection (or extraspection) of its behaviour, smokescreening the original comment amongst a mass of other voices, targets, and (often irrelevant) points. If someone’s levelled a gun at you, you either get someone else to take them out, or instead you hand them a shotgun to increase the range of targets and reduce any single, direct impact.

In the meantime, the award for the most meanderingly ephemeral blog posting on non-essential comment goes to …

Making a remake

Over the weekend I watched two, perhaps surprisingly interlinked films.

One was Romeo + Juliet; the other was the Great Gatsby.

The coincidental connection was not realised at the time; however the director of Romeo + Juliet – Baz Lurhmann – is directing the remake of the Great Gatsby.

But why remake the Great Gatsby?

The reason for certain remakes is sometimes obvious. The ‘original’ adaptation of the story deviated from the novel upon which it is based; or the film itself has dated badly. Maybe it is done just to put the director’s own particular ‘translation’ on the story; or – particularly for American audiences – the original was in a foreign language and neither dubbing nor subtitles would have been suitable for the common man who goes to watch it.

For example, Ring. The original Japanese version is brilliant, however the American audience struggled with the cultural setting and the subtitles, therefore it only reached a very cult audience. So it got remade and made millions. My problem with the American version (aside from my snobbish “oh but the original is always better” attitude) is that they changed the ending. Quite critically. Quite why the director/scriptwriter though that he was entitled to do so is anyone’s guess; but it spoilt it.

Sometimes the updating is done because of improvements in the quality of film. Black and white films, or those from the grainy, earlier days of celluloid are particularly susceptible to this, though these days people are more inclined to favour ‘special edition’ restorations.

But otherwise it is the director applying their own particular take on the story – focusing on things which the original may have glossed-over, enhancing a relationship to take the story away from a pure action movie or such. Indeed, Romeo + Juliet is one of the latest remakes in a long history of adaptations of Shakespeare’s play.

But what about the Great Gatsby? Well, I wait with enhanced anticipation to see what treatment it is given. However, the novel was set in the opulence of the jazz-smothered ‘20s and the original film similarly. As such the film doesn’t really ‘date’ in the same way as if it were set in the present or the future. And, in fact, the lack of ‘high definition’ to the grain of the film actually accentuates the hazy summer that frames the events, giving it a misty-eyed reminiscence. They haven’t (or at least shouldn’t) be translating the story to a modern-day setting for the new version, replacing the jazz-oozing phonograph with a hip-hop download. The original didn’t deviate from the book to any great degree, so there is no ‘rectification’ of the ending required to put right. It isn’t as though they are filming it in 3-D to take advantage of technological developments; or that any of the original actors were so poor as to detract from the perfection of the original. The original was so good I can think of absolutely no justification behind a remake.

Maybe it is just that Baz thinks he can do something radically different, or that – having been made in 1974 – he figures it is about time to refresh it, and our memories, re-engage people back to the book. Maybe the Fitzgerald family are a bit short on cash and need the royalties, licence fees and profit share.

But, of course, it’s not just films that are remade. Whilst we in Britain are happy watching the American versions of Modern Family or the Big Bang Theory, the Americans seem unable to watch anyone else’s originals, preferring instead to remake the likes of The Office, The Killing and Queer as Folk.

One has to wonder why. Or, perhaps, why we in Britain don’t – why we are happy with American imports. We do buy in some formats, but mostly quiz or game shows, where we need to engage with the people, and which don’t cost phenomenal amounts to remake. I understand the cultural thing – that an American office is different, even simply down to the layout, let alone names of things, of people, of places, cultural references, even country-wide ‘in’ jokes. And the remakes end up going off on a tangent. Take Queer as Folk – in the UK this ran to one full series and a two-part finale. In America it ran to five series, diverging from the UK storyline after the first series.

But there are oddities. Wilfred, for example, followed the first series closely, though remade with Elijah Wood in one of the main roles. The other main role, though – that of Wilfred – was played by Jason Gadd: the Australian who played the same role in the Australian original version. Whilst researching for this I found out that they did the same with Kath & Kim.

Cost is obviously one thing. In the UK the stations get less to spend, so are therefore happy to buy-in an export rather than spend more money both acquiring the rights and then rewriting and filming. American networks generally have a lot more money to spend.

Don’t get me wrong, we export things successfully. We sent the Americans Piers Morgan, Anne Robinson and even Jeremy Kyle. Perhaps not maxing out our cultural superiority (or snobbishness) but they were adopted readily by the Americans, so it can’t be a simple xenophobia. And most of the programmes that America remakes it does so because of the popularity of the original on BBC America, and not just by ex-pats.

Not living in America I don’t know whether it is a scepticism of things foreign which drives the remakes; and whether that scepticism is held by the public thereby driving the network; or by the network not risking prime-timing it and so minimising the audience that would naturally take a risk. Which is the cause and which is the effect?

Anyhow, I wait for a Greater Gatsby.