In Praise of Sitcoms

(A few years ago, I wrote this article for the short-lived Irish Catholic magazine Leaven.)

One of the last shared experiences I had with my father, who died in May 2019, was watching the American situation comedy Frasier together. For more than a year, we watched three or more episodes most nights. We went through all eleven seasons several times.

Is this an unworthy activity to have as my last shared experience with my father, before his final illness? I suppose it would sound better if it was fishing, or building a model town together, or having long conversations about the eternal verities. A shared immersion in a particular piece of pop culture seems ignobly passive and consumerist.

And yet, I have very happy memories of this last phase in my relationship with my father. I wouldn't wish it to have been different. It deepened a conviction that I'd felt already; that the situation comedy, far from being a trashy and disposable genre by nature, can be a powerful vehicle for exploring the human condition and modern society.

I'm here talking about situation comedies which are, more or less, realistic. I'm not talking about surreal sitcoms such as The Young Ones, or fantastical sitcoms such as the science fiction comedy Red Dwarf. I mean sitcoms which concentrate on the daily lives of fairly ordinary people; shows such as Frasier, Cheers, Only Fools and Horses, Friends, and so on.

One great difference between the sitcom and other forms of fiction--such as the novel, the drama, or cinema-- is its episodic nature. Movies are one of the great loves of my life, but they do have this limitation: that, for the most part, they are confined to the great crises and dramas of human life. This represents a very small fraction of the whole. Most of life is lived on the plains, not in the peaks or the abysses.

The situation comedy can occupy itself with events that play a big part on human life, but that are rarely seen (except in passing) in movies and novels; sick days, traffic jams, a trip to the dentist, a pub debate, swimming lessons. One famous episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, a seventies British sitcom following two friends who live in the North of England, has them doing their utmost to avoid learning the result of a big soccer game, to the extent of hiding in a church and finding themselves in an uncharacteristic discussion of God and eternity. Another episode I think of in this regard is "The One with All the Thanksgivings", a Friends episode in which the characters are reminiscing about their worst Thanksgiving experiences, which we see in flashbacks. I find this episode quite profoundly evocative of life's journey-- holiday memories are something we are all familiar with, and they are generally freighted with bittersweetness and significance.

Television dramas which are lauded as great rarely represents ordinary life. I haven't actually seen many of the recent shows hailed as masterpieces, such as Breaking Bad or The Sopranos. But, from what I know of them, they tend to concentrate on extraordinary people in extraordinary situations. Although it's true that all good fiction speaks to the universality of the human condition in some way, the great strength of the sitcom is that it elevates ordinary suburban life as something interesting, something meaningful, something full of possibilities. It enchants ordinary life.

Another strength of the sitcom is that, in a strange way, it emphasizes the dignity of the individual. Each of the characters tends to pass through the full spectrum of human emotions and vicissitudes; each has their moments of humiliation, their moments of triumph, their phases and fads, their infatuations and disillusionments. Seeing them fall flat on their faces allows is to laugh at our own failures and idiocies, and takes the sting out of them. Seeing them get up again encourages us. Life, the sitcom reassures us, is episodic.

The sitcom tends to be a window into social and cultural history, in a way that entertainments which aim to be more enduring, and to appeal to international markets, do not. There are frequent references to current TV shows, popular songs, political controversies, advertising slogans, and so on. One example of this is a discussion about the discovery of North Sea Oil, in the British seventies sitcom Porridge. Another example is a passing mention of a pub shove-ha'penny tables in the British eighties sitcom Ever Decreasing Circles.

Finally, the sitcom is a sentimental genre. Sentimentality has a bad reputation in our time, but it is after all the glue which holds ordinary life together. We are sentimental about family, friends, colleagues, neighbours, pets; those we deal with most often. The sitcom tends to view its characters as we view those we deal with every day; exasperating, pompous, fickle, touchy, ridiculous, and, ultimately, loveable. At the end of the episode, equilibrium returns, friends and family are reconciled, and the world goes along on its old and reliable way. I particularly like, in this regard, this piece of dialogue from Only Fools and Horses, in which the wheeler-dealer brothers have a falling-out:

Del: Alright Rodney, alright, why don’t you do that small thing. You decide where you go, what you do and with whom you do it, because I’m finished with you– I’ve washed me hands of you– as far as I’m concerned you don’t exist, right? And Rodney?

Rodney: What?

Del: Been raining, them roads’ll be treacherous. Drive carefully.

All in all, I don't regret spending much of my last months with my father watching Frasier.

Fr. Walter Macken RIP

I was saddened recently to hear of the death of Fr. Walter Macken, whose life is recalled here in the Garvan Hill blog. It's an interesting slice of social history as well as a fitting tribute.

Fr. Macken was a priest of Opus Dei. I'm not involved with Opus Dei myself, but I've been invited on two occasions to give short talks in their student residence in the city centre. On one of those occasions, Fr. Macken was there, and I found him very kind and courteous. 

I also live in a parish run by Opus Dei. That's how I heard about Fr. Macken's death. (I'm always grateful the parish offers Mass at 7:30 a.m. on weekdays and 9 p.m. on Sundays.)

Fr. Macken was the son of Walter Macken, an Irish novelist who died in 1967. I was an avid reader of his novels in my teens. I didn't just read them once, but (in three instances) several times over. He's perhaps most celebrated for his trilogy of Irish historical novels, but I didn't like those much. I much preferred his novels about ordinary people. My favourite was I Am Alone, a novel that was actually banned in Ireland (I've only learned that now).

I Am Alone follows the experiences of Pat, an Irish emigrant in London...are you yawning just from that description? Actually, it wasn't boring at all, nor was it worthy or whingy. It describes Pat's efforts to find a job in London, his experience lodging with a landlord who's a religious fanatic, his work as a labourer on a building site (and how difficult he finds it), his hopeless love for a beautiful woman who he finally realizes is shallow and selfish, and his eventual marriage to a woman who is not beautiful but is much more worthy of his affections. He also becomes friends with a man who turns out to be involved with the IRA (the pre-Troubles version). I forget what happens to the friend, but Pat does not approve of his activities. The book ends with the birth of his child, who arrives safely after a nerve-wracking labour sequence.

I returned to the book again and again because of Macken's ability to describe the flow of consciousness. Not in a gimmicky Joycean way, but in a very realistic and observational way. For instance, when Pat gets off the boat and takes a train through England, he's taken aback to see how green the fields are, then wonders if he expected them to be red. There's another passage which describes a visit to a pool hall, in the early days of his marriage, when he knows he should be going home to his wife, but he can't help staying for another game, and another... The atmosphere of the pool hall is brilliantly captured, as well as the particular frame of mind of lingering somewhere when you know you should be somewhere else.

Above all, I loved I Am Alone because it took as its subject ordinary life-- it's a very "low concept" novel. It caught the texture of ordinary life brilliantly, which is something I greatly prize in writers.

I also loved his novel The Bogman, about a local poet and songwriter in a loveless marriage. Some of the little poems included in the book are excellent. I also liked (though to a lesser extent) Quench the Moon, the story of a would-be writer and poet enduring poverty and other trials.

I wasn't at all surprised to hear that Walter Macken's son became a priest. His novels are not pious at all, but religion and the clergy are presented in a sympathetic and very human way. (I particularly remember, in I Am Alone, a scene in which Pat unsuccessfully tries to persuade his wife-to-be to become a Catholic. She's insistent she wants to remain Church of England. When he points out to her that she doesn't even go to church, she says: "It doesn't matter. I was born Church of England and I'm going to die Church of England." Pat admits to himself that he rather admires her for this. I think it's probably an accurate description of an ordinary Church of England member at that time, and for some decades after.)

Like J.P. Donleavy or some other writers, he seems to belong to a particular phase of my life, and I can't really imagine revisiting him. But he fed my imagination in his youth, and I'm saddened to hear of his son's passing.

The Right to Exist

I've been reading Pope Leo's new encyclical. I was very struck by this line: "Indeed, the promotion of the common good can never be separated from respect for the right of peoples to exist, to preserve their own identity and to contribute their unique qualities to the family of nations."

This is literally all I am asserting when I call myself a nationalist-- this and nothing else.

The question is, how is this to be preserved? It seems to me (and, I think it fair to say, to millions of others) that social and cultural forces are at play today which threaten this very right. But I haven't heard any recommendations from the Vatican on what to do about this.

I suspect (perhaps unfairly) that the Holy Father was not thinking of Western or developed nations when he wrote this. But it certainly applies to them, too.

Pope Francis said similar things in his own writings, arguing for "the globalization of the polyhedron" rather than "the globalization of the sphere". But how is this to be achieved?

Tolkien is Now a Doctor of the Church!

Well, not quite, but it's quite remarkable that Pope Leo has quoted Gandalf in his first encyclical, which is about artificial intelligence.

I haven't read the encyclical yet, though I've read a few analyses of it. But here's the quotation:

The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” Tolkien's mother would be very proud!

Having It Both Ways

I came across this book cover today. Doesn't it illustrate the contradiction of identity politics, and of the politicization of the arts and humanities?

Dull People Hype Silence Because They Have Nothing to Say

I don't actually believe this. Well, not entirely.

But it's an expression of my irritation at the whole cult of silence. To love silence makes you deep; to love discussion, animation, and activity makes you shallow. Supposedly.

Apparently (at least people always say this), silence is undervalued in the modern world, despite all the bookshop shelves groaning under the weight of books on mindfulness, contemplative prayer, and introvert pride. (I'm an introvert. I'm not in the slightest bit proud of it.)

Celebrated arty films such as Solaris (the 2002 remake) or the aptly-named Into Great Silence (a bunch of Carthusians monks going about their day) are full of long moody shots and minutes on end without any dialogue. Trippy! Profound! Uncompromising!

When I get especially irritated at the cult of silence, I think of pointing out one place that is very silent indeed. Well, you've probably guessed it. The graveyard.

Of course, all this won't do. The Bible (and doubtless all wisdom literature) is full of injunctions to silence. So I should probably just shut up myself.

Should Tradition be Causative?

As regular readers will know, I'm very interested in tradition. OK, I'm obsessed by tradition.

Today I found myself mulling over the phrase "in the tradition of...". What does it mean, exactly?

For instance, there's often talk about Kingston-upon-Hull's tradition of poetry. Philip Larkin is the big name, along with Andrew Marvell. There's also Stevie Smith and a good few others. Anyway, a surprising number of celebrated poets are associated with Hull.

But is this really a tradition? Or is it just a coincidence? Or can a coincidence be a tradition?

Conversely, I remember someone pointing out how the Harry Potter books (and films) are very much in the tradition of Enid Blyton. But this does seem to be a tradition in a more causative sense. Rowling was a huge fan of Enid Blyton in her girlhood.

More importantly, perhaps, is anybody exercised by such questions other than me?