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EuropeJonathan Freedland: In this recession, we want comfort culture to go with our comfort food
Man cannot live by bread alone - he also needs some shepherd's pie and a dollop of rice pudding. That, at least, is the word from Tesco, reporting an extraordinary surge in sales of comfort food. As we feel the first chill of the recession, and as American economists declare that the downturn in the United States began a full year ago, making the current slump already longer than the average recession since the second world war, the supermarket chain has noticed a run on its cosiest products.Sales of lamb hotpot are up 615% on this time last year, while beef casserole and dumplings have leapt by 279%. Deep-filled pies are selling at more than double the usual rate, as is cheesecake. Hot cakes are selling like hot cakes. Could that be down to the wintry weather rather than the frozen economy? No. Tesco saw the boom in reassuring ready meals and cosy grub during the period from May to October. This isn't about staying warm, says the store, along with other retailers who've noticed a similar pattern on their shelves. It's about Britons cheering themselves up, padding their tummies as they tighten their belts. And notice the dishes in demand: traditional British fare, as if we're fleeing scary global economic forces, seeking refuge in the familiar smells of mum's kitchen and school dinners.So much for what we're putting into our stomachs as the economy plunges downward, with most forecasters expecting the thud to come once the fleeting lift of Christmas is over. What will happen to our other appetites, those located not in our mouths but between our ears? What is the brainfood we'll be seeking out as times get tougher? Put simply, what's likely to be the culture of this recession?Not so different from the food, as it happens. While Waitrose reports an 80% increase in sales of loaf cakes, ITV is cheering a rise in the television equivalent: viewing figures for I'm A Celebrity are up on last year. The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing are doing a roaring trade too. And what has just become Britain's fastest-ever selling DVD? Mamma Mia!.Think of it as comfort culture to accompany the comfort food. We want to be eased through the freeze, and Ant and Dec can be relied on to do that just as effectively as a slice of steak and kidney pie.Of course, this habit has a long history. Cinema audiences developed the desire to be transported into mindless escapism, watching Busby Berkeley's synchronised swimmers make pretty shapes in the depths of the Great Depression. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made their top-hatted and ballgowned debut in 1933, the same year unemployment in the US hit 25%. If today's audiences are blocking out all thoughts of the credit crunch in favour of watching Meryl Streep play the Dancing Queen on a sun-kissed Greek island where the skies are permanently blue, they are doing no more than honouring a tradition started by their grandparents. But it's not all mindless. Brucie and Cheryl Cole are far from the only cultural providers experiencing a boom during the bust. In a declining newspaper market, the Financial Times and the Guardian both saw their sales rise as the financial crisis hit. (The number crunchers on the Guardian's website have seen big increases - led by serious news, with massive leaps in interest in business stories.) Richard Reeves, director of the thinktank Demos, says he has spotted three different people reading JK Galbraith's The Great Crash on his morning train to work. "People want more entertainment," he says, "but they also want more enlightenment."It seems we either want to escape the current turmoil or understand it. The latter might not always mean digesting dense economic tracts. Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National Theatre, has noticed the spectacular response the musical Billy Elliot has just received on Broadway. A tale of declining industry, hardship and the threat of joblessness, "It acknowledges pain, individual achievement in overcoming that pain and collective solidarity in the face of it," Hytner told me yesterday, suggesting that Billy Elliot had come at just the right moment for New York theatregoers. He has no plans to stage either a feelgood musical at the National - there will be no "sugar rush of escapism" - or an instant play about the recession. That kind of second-guessing of the audience never works, he says.Still, artworks that offer neither escapism nor explanation might struggle in the great freeze. There will surely be a diminished appetite for miserable stories that don't even offer the consolation of enhanced understanding of the upheaval. I'm told there were an unusually high number of empty seats at the Oxford Playhouse when the touring production of Liberty, set in the France of 1793, arrived this autumn. Apparently people weren't in the mood to spend an evening contemplating Robespierre's Terror. (Users of guardian.co.uk were similarly reluctant to wallow in the details of the Baby P case.)Two big movies were released last week: Four Christmases, a light comedy with Reese Witherspoon, went straight to number one. Trailing behind it was The Changeling, Angelina Jolie's grim tale of a mother's search for a missing child. Similarly, it will be fascinating to see if the publishing subgenre known as "misery lit" continues to enjoy its past dominance of the bestsellers list. Right now, the hardback non-fiction top 10 is entirely made up of the comfort food of celebrity biography, topped by Dawn French's Dear Fatty - surely the literary equivalent of a sticky toffee pudding.There are other clues to the cultural future besides the twin paths marked escape or understand. Price is one. Just as local pizzerias are holding up while posh restaurants expect to struggle, so culture that comes cheap has better prospects for survival. Sky subscriptions and DVD sales are so far weathering the recession. When you're counting the pennies, a ready meal and a film on the telly suddenly looks like a good bet.Paradoxically, that could tilt the landscape towards high culture. If government subsidies get cut, many in the arts predict it will be smaller, grassroots projects that feel the knife: they're easier to slice than the heavy-hitting opera companies and art galleries. And while commercial theatre might take a pounding, the major subsidised institutions will still be left standing. But what if things get really severe? Reading could make a comeback, predicts John Carey, former Merton Professor of English at Oxford. In the 1930s, he says, some of the poorest turned to books for diversion. "Reading is astoundingly cheap," he says. "Libraries must be the cheapest form of entertainment possible." Classics were especially popular: they were inexpensive and available. "Social histories of the time are full of references to Dickens," says Carey.Still, the biggest cultural impact of the recession may be unseen for decades to come. Hytner notes that the great plays of the depression era - by Arthur Miller or Clifford Odets - came years later. It is the children of the slump, those witnessing their parents losing their jobs or businesses, who we should be watching. The seed of their future work is being planted right now. freedland@guardian.co.ukRecessionUS economic growth and recessionCredit crunchTescoSupermarketsRetail industryguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Published: Wed, 03 Dec 2008 00:07:39 GMT - Source: Guardian.Co.Uk - Read the articleEntertainmentChristmas blues
Reese Witherspoon 'too busy to shop'
Published: Fri, 28 Nov 2008 12:31:30 GMT - Source: News.Bbc.Co.Uk - Read the articleEuropeAsk Hadley: Hadley Freeman on slaggging off celebrities' outfits and 'credit crunch fashion'
What is the point of all those websites and magazines out there that seem to exist purely to slag off celebrities' outfits? And don't give me that "bringing them down to our level" nonsense.Laurence Driver, by emailLaurence, I wouldn't dream of it. Courtney Cox's daily outfits, anything sported by Rosanna Arquette, well-honed thoughts on Helena Bonham Carter's wardrobe: is this not what journalism was invented for? Certainly, large swathes of the internet - gofugyourself.com, pretty much the entirety of dailymail.co.uk - is dependent on the sturdy bones of celebrity mockery. But this skeleton looks decidedly ridden with osteoporosis if one inspects the reasons for its existence too closely. I have never subscribed to the belief that one talks about celebrity fashion or celebrities in general because it makes anyone feel better or worse: we talk about them because they're there and they are as much a part of popular culture as art, film, music or food. How we talk about them is very much a reflection of the era. When everyone was feeling all mopey and poor in the 30s and 40s, celebrities were treated as the rare bit of glamour in an otherwise depressing existence and therefore venerated and discussed accordingly. However, the irony is that celebrity became so idolised that everyone wanted - and felt they deserved - a piece of that action, regardless of talent. Thus we have somehow gone from Carole Lombard to Kerry Katona. It's not exactly what Darwin would call progress, one suspects. Nonetheless, this quasi-progression is reflected in how we talk about celebrities now which is, in the main, jealously. Oh my God, look at Nicole Kidman's grey hair! Not so hot are you now, Mrs Pensioner? Then there is also the fact that most celebrities nowadays do dress and act like great fools, partly because they earn so much that it would turn anyone a bit Howard Hughes-ish, and partly because anyone who wants to be a celebrity in the first place is obviously a bit of a div. Now, some have levelled the accusation that journalists are having their cake and eating it, too, in this regard: talking about celebrities (thereby attracting the masses' attention) but then sneering at them (thus looking as if they're above such concerns). Fiddlesticks, my friends, fiddlesticks. Celebrities and fashion and, most of all, celebrity fashion (seeing as neither seems able to exist without the other) is just part of life in the western hemisphere these days and it's inevitable that most people talk about it. To affect high-minded ignorance or lack of interest suggests that one doth protest too much.As to why so many websites and magazines criticise celebrity fashion, I'd argue that they are still massively outnumbered by those who slaveringly adore it, spreading the belief that if Reese Witherspoon wears it, It Must Be Good. The sneery ones merely seem so numerous because they are funnier and therefore more memorable - you see? There's no need to be randomly cruel about celebrities, but equally I'm pleased that only the very silly still think that everything they do is great. Plus, I strongly suspect that this is the bridge generation - the one in between the era that adored celebrities and the one that will most certainly not. Some might argue that the constant photos of a clearly ill Amy Winehouse or a "worryingly thin" Madonna are little more than repulsive intrusions. I say that if just two little girls are put off aspiring for fame by one photo of Winehouse, it has served a purpose. And if anyone says this is the immature self-defensive blather of someone who doesn't have a proper job, I say this to you: nyahhhhhh. I keep seeing articles in fashion magazines purporting to discuss "credit crunch fashion". A contradiction in terms, surely?Carolyn Jones, by emailOh, aren't fashion magazines adorable? I love it when they try to come over all current affairs-y, making sweet reference to something they saw on the News at 10. Of course, they are going to have to take the current financial apocalypse into account somehow: even the most blinkered Hoxton magazine editor cannot but see the inherent ridiculousness in bigging up some £17,898 handmade dress by Giles in a month when the London Evening Standard keeps publishing letters from people who claim to be living without heat. It's always interesting to see what these people consider to be sufficiently crunchy. If you work for US Harper's Bazaar, it's a $575 pair of Ralph Lauren gloves; if it's Take a Break, it's something you nicked from your dead nan. Of course, the most crunchy fashion is vintage - your own, that is - which is crunchy in two ways, being both free and probably encrusted with God knows what seeing as you haven't washed it in five years. My goodness, Dove deodorant residue does form a solid shield after a few months, doesn't it? Crunch crunch crunch.? Post questions to Ask Hadley, The Guardian, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3ER. ask.hadley@guardian.co.uk.CelebrityFashionWomenguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Published: Mon, 24 Nov 2008 00:04:08 GMT - Source: Guardian.Co.Uk - Read the article
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