John Prescott on the Channel 4 news tonight referring to what was being posted on “the Twittering” made him seem really out-of-touch. There was a time when this kind of casual unfamiliarity with popular culture was an insouciant flag that one’s mind was on more important things, that one did not concern oneself with trivia—a schtick that Brian Sewell plays (more consciously than a lot of people realise) to this day.
I don’t think that this really works anymore. You just end up looking old-farty rather than insouciant, like a desperate old uncle trying to show that you are still down with the kids but just getting it wrong. There seem to have been three stages in this process:
- A time when politicians and similar public figures were expected not to engage with popular culture at all—where it would have been seen as bizarre to expect that they would.
- A time where they were increasingly expected to have some engagement but didn’t really, and so wheeled out some press-officer verbiage about who their favourite band or Eastenders star is—sometimes excruciatingly off-the-mark (like one of our admissions officers talking about “Florence and the Rage Against the Machine” playing at the university summer ball).
- A time now when they genuinely do engage with popular culture, and it would seem weird not to.