A Descent Into Madness

I've been going to the cinema quite a lot recently, which is partly a post-lockdown splurge and partly the coincidence of the London Film Festival, so I thought I'd regale you with my observations on two very different films with a common link. No, not Timothée Chalamet in The French Dispatch and Dune, though I'm sure there's a piece to be written about Wes Anderson and Denis Villeneuve's different approaches to fantasy. The two films are Robert Egger's monochrome The Lighthouse, which came out in 2019 but which I only got round to seeing at the Wimbledon Film Club this week, and Pablo Larrain's colourful Spencer, which premiered at the London Film Festival and is on general release from today. What links them is a descent into madness: the one in an extreme form that evokes Greek tragedy at its most prophetic and bloody, and the other in a more symbolic manner, centred on the slipperiness of personal identity, whose literary touchstone is Shakespeare rather than Sophocles (despite the ready-made parallel of Antigone, a princess condemned to a living tomb).

The Lighthouse is a two-hander that has obvious echoes of the dramatic form, from Beckett and Pinter to Steptoe & Son. Willem Dafoe plays the veteran lighthouse keeper (or "wickie") Thomas Wake, while Robert Pattinson plays Ephraim Winslow, the tyro with an obscure past (he turns out to be another man altogether, Thomas Howard, who has assumed the identity of a dead colleague). Brought together for the first time, they must spend a month on a remote island lighthouse, somewhere off the coast of New England in the late nineteenth century. On the day before their relief, after a grumpy co-existence marked by very different views on the apprentice keeper's character and work-rate, they are trapped by a fierce storm, which the superstitious old-timer thinks was brought about by the younger man's killing of an annoying one-eyed gull. With their supplies exhausted or spoiled and only strong drink for solace, they slowly, and then quickly, descend into madness. 

In terms of cinema, it's The Birds meets a low-budget Apocalypse Now, though you can also find visual references to everything from L'Atalante to Oh! Mister Porter and any number of classic Westerns. It's a supremely referential work, though this perhaps leads to excess in the screenplay, written by Eggers and his brother Max. The film could have been shorter than its 110 minutes. The largely voiceless scenes featuring other actors, notably the mermaid and the recollection of the actual Ephraim Winslow, whose identity Thomas Howard has taken after the former's accidental (but preventable) death, felt like off-stage references expanded in the translation to a more expansive medium. The debate over whether the film could best be described as a horror or a psychological thriller really relates to its length. If cut down to nearer an hour, and with less show (and blood) to augment the tell, it would have been closer to the tradition of the BBC's A Ghost Story at Christmas. Expanded, its padding tends towards the Hitchcockian, even in its conscious nods to George Cukor's Gaslight.

The literary references are extensive: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Moby Dick and Greek legend are perhaps the most obvious. Indirectly, the evocation of Coppola's masterpiece, which famously featured a shot of Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance and James Frazer's The Golden Bough on Colonel Kurtz's bedside table, points to a mysticism that marries Christianity and pagan ritual. There is confession ("spilling the beans"), thrice-times denial and blood sacrifice. The central motif is the theft of fire, in the form of the lantern, which Thomas Wake jealously guards. Winslow spies the old fella disrobing before it at night in an ecstatic, sexualised communion that reminded me of Danny Boyle's 2007 film Sunshine. The final scene sees the Promethean Winslow on a rock having his liver plucked out by a bird. Wake is both Triton and Proteus (the sons of Poseidon), the former explicit in one of his thundering speeches, the latter implicit in Winslow's suspicion of the older man's honesty and clichéd mannerisms. 

But Howard/Winslow is also protean and one of the features of the film is how Robert Pattinson seems to look at different times like a callow youth and at others like a hard-bitten veteran. This is less the actor's mercurial skill than the director's determination to unmoor the characters and make them seem more plastic and unreliable. In this vein Willem Dafoe revisits some of the madness of his Vincent Van Gogh (2018's At Eternity's Gate), while at other times he looks, and acts, like a miniature version of Charlton Heston's Moses from The Ten Commandments. Weaker actors would have buckled under the strain of a story that is often silly - the ripe language, the petty squabbles, the wanking and farting - but expected to carry a huge symbolic freight. The gap could have led to unintentional bathos but it's a mark of the film-maker's skill and that of the actors that it largely maintains the tension between the two, even indulging in some moments of outright comedy, such as the argument over the quality of Wake's cooking, which justifies the comparison to Steptoe & Son. 

Cuisine is also central to Spencer, an imagined tale of Christmas at Sandringham in 1991 with all the trimmings. The date places the events shortly before the publication of Andrew Morton's book on the Princess of Wales, which revealed the sham of her marriage, her and Charles's affairs and her suicidal thoughts. Diana, convincingly played by Kristen Stewart, teeters on the edge of a breakdown in the face of the Windsors' coldness and dedication to suffocating habit in food, clothing and blood sports. In the first scene at table she hallucinates eating her own pearls (if you're going to have an eating disorder, make it classy). She is deferentially menaced by a fictional embodiment of the royal establishment, played by Timothy Spall, who bangs on about service while regaling her with a bloody tale of a tour of duty in Northern Ireland, the one intrusion of reality that feels tonally uncertain in a film that is otherwise a clever ghost story in which Diana Spencer haunts the royals ahead of her own death. The subject of the film is identity. The princess is cast in the role of the Prince of Denmark, with a hint that "not to be" is her fate. Given that she's also the ghost, there's an obscure (and perhaps accidental) parallel here to Stephen Dedalus's theory about Hamlet in James Joyce's Ulysses.

In contrast, her husband, who is more usually associated with the tortured prince by our fawning media, is best summarised in the words of Nigel Molesworth as "utterly wet and a weed". In a difficult role, Jack Farthing manages to communicate both the man's fussy irritation and abiding immaturity through an economy of mannerisms and speech. The rest of the Royal Family are eminently forgettable, which is probably the most realistic feature of the film. To provide dramatic foils worthy of this heightened Diana, the screenplay invents not only Spall's menacing factotum but a sympathetic chef and a dresser, played by Sean Harris and Sally Hawkins, who personify elements of the fictional Diana's character (self-care and self-love) and are also representative of the people's otherwise mute chorus (the one scene that involves actual civilians, absent the press, sees them open-mouthed at her appearance in a roadside café as she seeks directions). 

The key scene between Diana and Charles, in which he lectures her about the need to divide oneself into public and private personas, features a snooker table and some passive-aggressive ball rolling. This is one of many clichéd tropes in a film that is perfectly happy to indulge them in spades: long corridors, candlelit dinners (both of which echo Stanley Kubrick), rocking horses and a midnight raid on a room-sized fridge. What holds all this together is a magnetic performance by Stewart and a Diana who is much more unpredictable than she was in real life - summed up by arguably one of the finest masturbation jokes ever commited to the big screen. Though the real-life princess was a fashion icon, the film goes beyond mere dressing-up to employ clothes as a motif of both the uncertainty of identity and the constraints of formality (every outfit has been planned in advance, there is no spontaneity). Early in the film she takes a scarecrow's battered and torn jacket, convinced it belonged to her father when they lived nearby, as a souvenir of her life as a Spencer.

What the two films share, beyond cooking and wanking, is the suspicion that an invented or adopted persona is a first step towards madness, which is obviously an in-joke for people who work with actors. Thomas Howard, pretending to be Ephraim Winslow, never makes it off the rock but Diana Spencer, trapped in the public character of the Princess of Wales, manages to escape temporarily, with her sons singing along in her open-top car, to an afternoon of obscurity and fast-food in London. Of course we all know that this is a temporary reprieve and that tragedy awaits. The other link between the films is that Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart became screen superstars together in the adaptations of the Twilight vampire novels. They have moved on to more substantial fare since, but both remain attracted to the roles of troubled characters with uncertain identities. If there is a moral to these two tales, apart from avoid lighthouses and Prince Charles, it is that you must make your own character or have it made for you.

The Great Hunger

In a recent New York Times article, Keenan Malik made the claim that "The accusation of cultural appropriation is a secular version of the charge of blasphemy." This might appear a little over the top, but it is a common view among the ex-left-now-militant-liberal commentariat that the concern over cultural appropriation is "a new, weird, destructive form of political correctness" and that its critics are essentially regressive mystagogues betraying the Enlightenment values we hold dear. More revealingly, Malik also frames the issue in terms of property rights and licensing: "In minority communities, the gatekeepers are usually self-appointed guardians whose power rests on their ability to define what is acceptable and what is beyond the bounds. They appropriate for themselves the authority to license certain forms of cultural engagement, and in doing so, entrench their power". His decisive argument against cultural appropriation gone mad is a counterfactual in which Elvis Presley was "prevented from appropriating so-called [sic] black music", presumably by the self-appointed dullards of the Delta Blues appellation d'origine contrôlé association.

Among the "gatekeepers" there is also a tendency to address the subject in terms of cultural production, even if the focus is on exploitation and expropriation. Maisha Z Johnson describes it as "a particular power dynamic in which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group." This doesn't just reflect contemporary inequities but reaches back into the past and revives old iniquities in a mocking way (think of Queen Victoria and family wearing Highland dress that had been outlawed a hundred years earlier). Though Johnson gets to the heart of the matter - it's a power dynamic, which is why high-profile cases involving thoughtless celebrities are significant - she still frames culture in terms of rights, which raises the question of who the rights-bearers are. For example, she correctly notes that appropriation "lets some people get rewarded for things the creators never got credit for", but are the creators specific individuals, a particular socio-economic group or an entire people going back generations? Once you introduce rights that are anything less than universal, you introduce qualifications.

That can be counterproductive. For example, when you criticise a white woman for wearing a Native American headdress you are recreating the reservation system within the field of culture. You also have the problem of distinguishing between appropriation and export. Few would harangue Bolivian women for wearing bowler hats, presumably because the hats were designed as commodities open to universal purchase rather than as expressions of distinct identity, even though the latter is what they have become in Bolivia. What matters, as Johnson made clear, is the relative power, hence a rich white woman adopting the full ensemble of a cholita would be considered exploitative. Cultural appropriation is therefore less about the indigenous nature of a cultural product and more about its context as a commodity. Societies that appropriate are also societies that have commoditised their own cultural capital to the point of pastiche (i.e. postmodernism). An example of a culture that celebrates its own superficiality, appropriates the cultures of others without the slightest guilt, and has commoditised itself on an industrial scale for consumption by others is Japan. But this, like its polite xenophobia and self-absorption, is a sign of Japan's cultural strength, not weakness.

One country that can consider itself to be an expert in cultural appropriation is Ireland, not least because it built a modern culture on the appropriation of its own, mythical past and did so in the adopted language of its conquerors, producing a rich cultural inventory that has since been commoditised for international export. In this context, artists of Irish heritage born or raised in Britain occupy an interesting position, being the most hybrid versions of what is ultimately a self-consciously hybrid culture in which the echoes of the classical world and the affinity with Europe (notably France) are always partly attempts to avoid the crushing weight of Shakespeare and John Bull's island. If the play-writing and film-making Martin and John Michael McDonagh (In Bruges, The Guard, Calvary) are the leading contemporary lights of this Hiberno-British tradition, Jez Butterworth (who also has Irish parentage) makes a good case for inclusion in their company with his play, The Ferryman, which is currently on at the Gielgud Theatre in London (plot spoilers to follow). The production, starring Paddy Considine as Quinn and Laura Donnelly as Caitlin, is excellent and deserves the plaudits it has received as a piece of theatre, however it has clearly touched some nerves among Irish critics, essentially over the charge of cultural appropriation: namely, that this is an English playwright using Irish tropes without native understanding and thus legitimacy.

The action, set in a farmhouse kitchen in County Armagh, plays out against the wider drama of the last few weeks of the 1981 hunger strike. This coincides with late summer and the seasonal arrival of the Corcoran boys from Derry to help with the harvest. The play centres on Quinn Carney, a former IRA man and now farmer who lives with an extended family of aunts and uncles (essentially personifications of Irish history and culture) and his wife, Mary, and 7 children (essentially a Greek chorus). The body of his brother Seamus, who was "disappeared" years ago by the IRA for an assumed act of treachery, has been discovered in a peat bog south of the border in Louth (the border is also between the living and the dead, hence the title's reference to Charon, who ferried souls to the underworld in Greek mythology). Seamus's widow Caitlin and son Oisin were taken in by Quinn and Mary and now form part of the family, to the point that Quinn and Caitlin's relationship is ambiguous. The IRA commander Muldoon wants Quinn to exonerate the organisation "at this politically-sensitive time" and first sends the local priest, Father Horrigan, to intercede, before arriving himself. Under pressure from Caitlin, who has known of the IRA's culpability all along, Quinn agrees, though in the expectation that they will be left alone. In fact, Muldoon wants Caitlin to move to Derry, essentially as a hostage against Quinn's compliance. So far, so canonical.

Sean O'Hagan was disturbed by the "paddywhackery" of the play's many clichés - the ready recourse to drink, the mad dancing, the prolific swearing -  seeing this as representative of a patronising English sensibility. There's certainly "stage Irish" aplenty: the embittered spinster, the weak priest, the hard men. Patrick Lonergan was more generous, seeing "an English dramatist in very careful dialogue with Irish theatre, and our culture more broadly", though he was dismayed by the predictability of some of the tropes. In part this reflects different backgrounds: O'Hagan is a Northerner with a pedantic concern for accuracy while Lonergan is a Southerner with a professional interest in cultural cross-fertilisation. O'Hagan was sniffy about what he saw as touches of Tarantino and the cinematic McDonaghs in the denouement. Personally, I thought the inspiration for the third act was Sergio Leone, an influence Butterworth appears to share with that other leading English dramatist of his generation, Shane Meadows (who has also done fine work with Paddy Considine). Lonergan, an academic expert on Irish drama, was more impressed with the playwright's skill in constructing a compelling story out of building blocks that could easily have collapsed into parody.

Butterworth has built the play on traditional Irish lines, but that means evoking Greek tragedy in its narrative arc as much as Shaw's witty repartee and O'Casey's demotic raillery. This is audacious in its lack of subtlety but its absolute seriousness, like Butterworth's evocation of Shakespeare in his earlier Jerusalem, makes it work. The sheer profusion of Irish references is exhausting. There are nods to W B Yeats, Brian Friel (notably Dancing at Lughnasa) and Seamus Heaney, among others, though the overriding influence may well be James Joyce (who speaks most clearly through the Virgil-quoting Uncle Pat) and the question of how you can both honour and escape the past. One of the structural threads of the play is music, which is both an Irish cliché in itself (fortunately, no fiddle appears) and yet an example of Butterworth's wit, showing how each generation is trapped in its own era: Maggie Far-Away's ballads; Quinn's sterile Beatles vs Stones vs Led Zeppellin debate with Caitlin; the youngster's Teenage Kicks (O'Hagan, a former NME writer, worries that The Undertones's great 1978 hit was already history in 1981 and even manages an otiose reference to Siouxsie and the Banshees).

The emotional heart of the play is hunger and the fear of sating it, specifically Caitlin and Quinn's suppressed love. This is seen as destructive: Quinn's wife Mary is semi-bed-ridden by a mysterious virus that will only clear when Caitlin moves out. There is a clear parallel in the hunger of republicanism, represented not only by Aunt Pat (the hunger of 1916) and Muldoon (the hunger of 1981) but by the recalled memory of Quinn's own political hunger in the 70s. We also hear of raw sexual hunger - Maggie's reverie about her youthful lust - and see the hunger of the younger children for stories and of the adolescents for recognition and status. Had Butterworth called the play The Great Hunger it might have been seen as too literal by English critics less familiar with Patrick Kavanagh's famous poem about rural "continence and caution". Irish critics might also have bridled at the ironic tone of the adjective if seen as a commentary on the death of Bobby Sands and the other nine (to be fair, Butterworth might also have considered it too close to Hunger, Steve McQueen's film about the 1981 protest).

Though only a supporting character, Tom Kettle (whose name is another reference to Joyce), is the symbolic pivot of the play (he is, arguably, the ferryman), though he also provides a comic analogue to Quinn in his unrequited love for Caitlin. He is an Englishman of obscure origins, supposedly a teenage foundling discovered by Quinn's father down by the river thirty years ago and taken in as a farm labourer. Soft in the head and preserving a perfect London accent despite not having left the area in all that time, Poor Tom is clearly a figure of the faerie world, but one that combines the tropes of Irish and English drama. He has an ability to tame animals (he captures an errant goose, intended for the harvest meal), his pockets are full of windfalls and rabbits, and he wears both the beard of a vegetation deity and a coat trailing the earth's dirt. Apart from Margaret Thatcher's disembodied voice on the radio, denying political status to the hunger strikers, Kettle is the sole representative of England. At the harvest meal, he recites Walter Raleigh's poem The Silent Lover. This is a hint at his love for Caitlin, but it also connects us to Ireland's role as the foundation of the British Empire in Tudor times, and thus links the play to both Spenser's Faerie Queen and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (a key reference in Jerusalem).

It is ironic that an Englishman in a work set in Ireland should represent nature and continuity rather than an invading and disruptive modernity. It's as if the Englishman Haines in Joyce's Ulysses, a condescending prig come to study the native culture, had lost his marbles and turned feral. Kettle is also the deus ex machina who triggers the climax, like a less reclusive Boo Radley. Oisin, mad with rage at his father's death and what he suspects is his mother's betrayal, is misdirected towards the "greater enemy" by the boastful Shane Corcoran, who seeks Muldoon's favour and has already been compromised by providing low-level assistance to the Provos in Derry that earned him the big man's digital watch and a punishment victim's silver crucifix. Oisin threatens Tom Kettle loudly, though perhaps with no real intention of doing him harm. Kettle, who cannot abide noise, seeks to quieten him and in so doing wrings his neck like a goose. Though this is barely credible as an of act self-defence, the family do not recoil from him. Instead he steps back from the action, his semi-divine job done. Quinn, realising that Caitlin's grief will now drive her away, fatally slashes Muldoon's throat, shoots one of the henchmen - using the pistol that has been kept by Aunt Pat in memory of her brother who died at the GPO in 1916 - and tells the remaining goon to return to Derry and warn off the rest of the IRA.

Tom Kettle points to what I think is the real subject of the play - cultural appropriation - and his anomaly feeds the uncertain Irish critical response to it. One way of reading the clichés is that they are an ironic comment by a British playwright who sees their absurdity yet also appreciates their power as part of a dramatic canon that stretches back through Synge via Shakespeare to Aeschylus. Just as Butterworth's Jerusalem was part of the tradition of city-reared writers trying to connect with a more "truthful" but estranged rural heritage (ironically through a boastful liar), so The Ferryman can be read as part of the tradition of the Irish diaspora and its ambivalence towards "oirishry" and the charge of being "plastic paddies". The wider point is that no culture is wholly closed to the world so no cultural product is exclusively native. Likewise, no culture can be precisely defined, despite the attempts of institutional arbiters and curators, so there are no fixed boundaries or property rights. This might seem like grounds to dismiss the concerns of cultural appropriation and back the market free-for-all of militant liberals like Malik, but it's actually a plea for the value of true cultural intercourse over mere exchange. In The Ferryman, the characters are motivated by their relations with each other, not by their relations with things. Ultimately, the Bushmills whiskey, the Colt pistol and the Timex watch are just props.

All Your Pop are Belong to Us

The chief interest of Dominic Sandbrook's Let Us Entertain You is in determining who he means by those first and second persons plural. It gradually becomes clear that "us" means the aspirational middle class, while "you" is a patriotic, deferential mass that hankers after a cheerful conservativism. This is a rummage through the cultural second-hand shop that marginalises working class autonomy and the pretensions of intellectuals. It is relentlessly middlebrow, mildly xenophobic, and obsessed with big houses and private education. Give him a Union Jack waistcoat and Sandbrook would make an excellent John Bull, or perhaps a Toby jug. In the spirit of the series, the following sneer is based on only the first two episodes and I have carefully selected the most amusing tropes and misrepresentations for best effect.

The thesis of the Daily Mail's resident social historian is "that our modern cultural success is rooted in the experience of the Victorian period". To illustrate this, we start with Tony Iommi quitting a Birmingham metal-bashing factory, after losing a couple of finger-ends, to help invent Heavy Metal with Black Sabbath. The new music's roots apparently lay in the "forges and foundries of our industrial past", rather than the Mississippi Delta. This autochthonous creation myth neatly sidestepped the debate over the Americanisation of British popular culture and is the first (but not the last) occasion on which Sandbrook passes up the obvious cue to introduce George Orwell. In the circumstances, it is no surprise that the influence of Django Reinhardt on Iommi (working class lad impressed by continental Jazz) is not mentioned.

Sandbrook's theme is the continuity of social values beneath the change in material forms, from Matthew Boulton and James Watt to Elton John and Grand Theft Auto. Equating the two eras in terms of creativity and entrepreneurialism allows the cultural economy to be presented as inventive, rather than parasitical, and the industrial revolution to be eulogised without reference to its social costs. The serial structure of this conventional narrative - we used to make steam engines, now we make music - also downplays the longstanding commoditisation of class, from the Gothic Revival to Queen Victoria's Jubilee mugs. Sandbrook sees this continuity as self-evidently a good thing rather than the persistence of unequal social relations and the resilience of ideology.

J Arthur Rank is presented as a bridge between the old and the new: an industrialist who treated British cinema as an industry, British history as a commodity, and Britishness as a brand (though Sandbrook fails to note his contribution to the demotic as a euphemism for masturbation). The reaction to the conservatism of Rank's films, namely the social realism of British cinema and theatre in the late 50s and early 60s, is blithely ignored, presumably because of its problematic focus on working-class aspiration and its criticism of conservative values after Suez. Despite the supposed emphasis on Victorian roots, the lasting legacy of music hall in British culture isn't mentioned. There is no Joan Littlewood, no Shelagh Delaney.

In fact, there are no women outside royalty. This is a great man history in which Sandbrook praises white, middle-class "entrepreneurs", such as Brian Epstein, Chris Blackwell, Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Charles Saatchi. Their commercial nous is elided with creativity, suggesting that culture should be thought of largely in terms of units shifted. Epstein's genius is dressing the Beatles in tailored suits and wangling OBEs for their contribution to exports; the continuity between the exploitation of sugar and reggae in Blackwell's family history is delicately passed over; Saatchi is praised for creating a market for modern art - the creativity of money; while tales of Lloyd-Webber's first night anxiety fail to elicit sympathy when you remember his recent role in voting for tax credit cuts.

In the second episode, Sandbrook uses a 1960s drug-bust at Keith Richards' Sussex manor to ram home his continuity message: rebel buys posh house at earliest opportunity. This vignette of the louche and the conventional, like Chipping Norton avant la lettre, reveals Sandbrook's fascination with property, which he proceeds to indulge in a tour that takes in Castle Howard (the "star" of Brideshead Revisited) and Highclere (the set for Downton Abbey). This is a view of history that reduces the subtlety of class identifiers to mere possessions. For example, Sandbrook's celebration of the" aristocratic" James Bond confuses Ian Fleming's festishisation of commodities with status. He fails to appreciate that Fleming, as the scion of a banking family, was looked down on by landowning aristos who preferred shabby-chic to an obsession with tailoring and cocktails.

The tour of stately homes allows Sandbrook to transport us back to Edwardian times and imply that gracious living reflected right moral values. TH White's The Sword in the Stone is held up as evidence of a persistent popular appetite for these values into the 20th century, including a sympathy with the travails of monarchy (The King's Speech gets an airing). This reading ignores White's pacifism and misrepresents his ecological concerns (Camelot has echoes of the League of Nations, Wart is repeatedly metamorphosed into animals who find man's cruelty baffling). White's romantic conservativism is closer to Jeremy Corbyn than Boris Johnson. Merlin and Arthur's embodiment of the elderly tutor/young student trope is used to establish a link to the present in the form of Dumbledore and Harry Potter. In fact, White's themes of might versus right and family dysfunction find a better echo in Obi Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker. Star Wars is excluded because it isn't British and because it doesn't feature an impressive rural pile.

The visit to Hogwarts allows Sandbrook to delve back even further in time to the Victorian roots of public schools. Rugby, Eton, Harrow et al are held up as inculcators of right values. Their historic role in moulding the administrators of empire is finessed with the comic interlude of Harry Flashman: a variation on the now-traditional "absent-minded" defence of exploitation. The public school system's role in moulding the social attitudes that undermined British industry during the interwar years isn't mentioned, nor its baleful influence on postwar grammar schools and today's free schools. Again, Sandbrook misses the obvious cue: Orwell's experience as an ex-public schoolboy enforcing the systemic cruelty of empire in Burma, and his experience of the social and economic waste inflicted on the industrial towns of the North in the 1930s.

In the book that accompanies and expands on the TV series, The Great British Dream Factory, Sandbrook finally engages Orwell, but only to criticise the Old Etonian's antipathy to the schooldays stories of Frank Richards. Despite his modern appropriation by neoliberals and neocons, Orwell remains problematic for the right, both because of his unpicking of the ideology of class and his distaste for Americanisation. Where he can't wholly ignore a subject, Sandbrook belittles it: postwar satire is written off as ineffective, other than in undermining respect for politicians (he ignores pre-Victorian levels of contempt); Punk is dismissed as merely "aesthetic" (i.e. by insisting on its lack of significance, which elsewhere is held up as a virtue for pop commodities, he admits its unsettling force); and the Jam's Eton Rifles is misread as showing a secret admiration for Etonians (it's actually about working class cynicism at middle class posturing).

According to Sandbrook, the period from the death of Princess Diana to the Queen's Diamond Jubilee shows royalty's ability to absorb and appropriate popular culture, which glosses over the near-terminal impact of the former event on the institution. The popularity of Elton John's Candle in the Wind is held to prove this resilience, rather than anything as banal as the British public's mawkish rubber-necking. This not only ignores the significance of a eulogy to an American icon being repurposed for a British one, but means Sandbrook fails to note the title comes from TH White's fourth book in The Once and Future King series, where it reflects the fragility of peace. In its way, the song is a perfect emblem of Sandbrook's cultural history: sentimental and superficial, in denial about the adoption of American social mores, and unwilling to accept the diversity and contradictions of British society.

The Scottish Play

Whichever way the vote on Scottish independence goes, the margin of victory will probably be small. This means either a democratic mandate or a moral obligation to change the status quo. "Do nothing" is the one outcome that now seems unlikely. Given that a victorious yes campaign would inevitably compromise on a lot of specifics, actual independence would perhaps not be that much different to devo max in the short-term, beyond the symbolism of flags and names, and in the event of a no victory, devo max would probably evolve into de facto independence in the long-term. Indeed, considering the major concessions floated by Gordon Brown and others this week, we may find pressure for Scottish independence building rapidly in a disgruntled England and Wales if the Scots themselves get cold feet.

The focus of the political and media caste on the implications of independence for British party leaders, Westminster elections and the EU indicates that the no camp (with some exceptions) remains more interested in London today than Edinburgh tomorrow. This is interpreted as English condescension by the yes campaign, but it would be more accurate to see it as the unthinking metropolitan bias of neoliberal hegemony. David Cameron's fleeting visit this week was to the Scottish Widows office in Edinburgh: an enclave of the City of London in an otherwise hostile environment. I doubt we'll see George Osborne, in hard hat and high-vis jacket, visiting Clydeside any time soon.

On both the left and right, Scotland is treated as an off-stage development, hence the degree to which the media debate is progressed by "noises off" such as opinion polls, the crude blackmail of business leaders (the only thing keeping us here is the goodwill of London) and the usual background hum of leaks and spin (it's Cameron's fault, it's Miliband's fault). In Scotland, the debate is taking place in the street, church halls and pubs, rather than being mediated by TV, which is probably why the late surge in support for independence, despite the best efforts of "project fear", has caught many by surprise. This very act of empowerment and engagement is likely to boost turnout, and may well boost the optimistic yes vote as a taster of self-determination. Just as the decision to not provide a devo max option on the ballot paper now looks like the unionists' first error of judgement, the lack of serious debate in England and Wales about the ramifications of independence (leaving the field to narcissistic "love bombing" by slebs) looks like having the unintended consequence of convincing the Scots that they should be the masters of their own fate.

Talking of unintended consequences, I recently saw King Charles III, the play that imagines constitutional turmoil following the queen's death (available only in London at present, if you're reading this "in the wings", so to speak). The Shakespearian influence extends from the blank verse to the plot, with knowing references to Macbeth and King Lear. The agonising and witless new king refuses royal assent to a bill on press regulation and dissolves Parliament on a point of misguided principle. The monarchy is saved from abolition only by persuading him to abdicate in favour of the more compliant (and scheming) William and Mary - sorry, Kate. The echoes of 1688 are rather loud. Though the play is funny, up-to-the-minute and dramatically (if not politically) convincing, it ignores Scotland (as it does Wales, Cornwall and all the other areas where the royals own land). I felt all it lacked was a flunkey wandering onstage to announce, Hamlet-like, "George Robertson and Annabel Goldie are dead".

This metropolitan bias has led to some illogical thinking. Consider the following from John Aziz: "Scotland has no real leverage to negotiate favourable terms other than the result of the referendum and a few vague gestures about Britain's currency being underpinned by North Sea oil. The UK is the one with the army, the NATO and EU memberships and the nuclear submarines. Alex Salmond can hand-wave and pontificate as much as he likes, but he will have to accept independence on terms dictated to him by Westminster. His desired formal currency union, off the table. British military bases including Trident in Scotland, irremovable from it." This combines economism's trivialisation of democracy (a vote does not constitute leverage), childish petulance (that's my ball, army and nuclear subs), and a startling failure to appreciate that the short-term immovability of Faslane and Coulport provides the Scots with major leverage in any negotiations (they're holding our nuclear subs hostage and demanding a currency union in exchange!)

The sudden lurch this week into emotionalism has also produced some top-grade nonsense, particularly among Tories. According to the Spectator, "The Prime Minister should not need speech-writers to extol the merits of Britain. He can just consider our history: in 1707 England was a hive of religious intolerance while impoverished Scotland was beset with feudal warfare. Within decades Great Britain had become the first industrial nation and led the world in scientific discovery". Though 1688 and 1701 enshrined anti-Catholic bias in law, this actually represented the last knockings of religious intolerance as the wellspring of politics (compare and contrast with 100 years prior); and while Scotland was certainly impoverished, due to economic depression and a run of famines in the 1690s, it was not beset by "feudal warfare" (this is just anti-Jacobite propaganda) so much as a stultifying aristocracy of absentee landlords. Finally, though the Scots were major contributors to scientific and technological advances, both before and after 1707, this was not decisive in producing the industrial revolution. Correlation is not causation.

One Conservative thinker who has better understood the risks that separation entails is Peter Oborne, who notes that the role of the monarch will inevitably be up for debate. The current silence of the Queen (on her hols at Balmoral, natch) is not just formal neutrality, but circumspection over the constitutional opportunities that Scottish independence would create. Though the monarchy would probably survive, there will surely be pressure to abolish the House of Lords. Scottish peers would have to quit Westminster, and I doubt an independent Scotland would create an unelected Scottish Lords, so why not boot the lot out? There would also be a resurgent clamour to adopt a constitution, or at least pass an updated Bill of Rights, which would provide a field day for Europhobes as well as civil libertarians.

To date the English and Welsh left have largely focused on an independent Scotland's role as a pathfinder for greater regional devolution, the abandonment of nuclear weapons, and the refoundation of the welfare state. Much of this is gestural - like admiring Scandinavian social democracy. More pessimistically, some fear that independence will guarantee Tory governments in perpetuity. This is nonsense. Labour would have secured outright majorities in the general elections of 1997, 2001 and even 2005 (despite Iraq) without the bloc of Scottish MPs. What few seem to be thinking of is the constitutional opportunities that the result will give rise to, whichever way Scotland votes. Typically, Londoners get it, noting that the Great Wen will benefit whatever the outcome, and that ultimately independence may be a pragmatic strategy for the capital itself.