The seriousness or otherwise of the subject matter is often irrelevent to the question of whether a book is any good. F Scott Fitzgerald wrote a great and beautiful novel which mainly involved shallow people going to parties in a rich guy's house. By contrast, all sorts of terrible books are published every month about men slaughtering people for no reason - a serious matter which, in itself, does not make the author worthy of serious consideration.
Advocates of dumbing down should note the wonderfully perverse fact that 'University Challenge' and 'Mastermind' were watched by millions who could hardly even understand the questions, let alone ejaculate the answers. Maybe they just liked to watch smart people sweating.
I just wonder what has been the effect on the human soul of nearly a century in which we have regarded sex on screen as generally better than the sex we actually have, the sex which is, in fact, much better than anything we have seen in the movies, becuase it's sex, after all, and in the movies, it isn't.
Inarticulate wretches have been behind most of the major advances in civilization. If Vincent Van Gogh had been able to get on with his neighbours, then he might have become an excellent painter-decorator, and received a big turn out at his funeral, and that would be that. But the genes wouldn't let him.
The Pope, if nothing else, should be a Catholic. If he were to announce that women would make great priests, except it's a pity that more of them aren't gay, because of the greater compassion they could bring to the task, it might endear him to liberal Catholic commentators , but it would make him something other than a Catholic, in the true sense.
Liverpool's grand opera also gave us some light comedy - on hearing the news that the house of goalkeeper Pepe Reina was burgled, and his Porsche stolen, while he was heroically saving penalties at Anfield, fans took a typically witty line: police were said to be interviewing a man from the West London area, a certain Frank Lampard, whose whereabouts on Tuesday between 7.45pm and 10.15pm are unknown. Indeed.
Sven's actual results on the park were not quite good enough to make him a hero, and not quite bad enough to get him the sack, so he left the gentlemen of the press with something of a void. And they abhor a void. Soon the discovery that Sven was in fact a hammer-man of legendary proportions filled the void, until the media came to realise that Sven was that rare thing, a man whose astonishing success with women somehow didn't make him more interesting.
With the advent of 24-hour Sky News, the News Flash has been greatly devalued. Time was, when something unimaginably horrendous had to happen before it was deemed worthy of a News Flash. At least one, preferably two, and ideally all four horsemen of the apocalypse would have to be involved.
If there is only 24 hours to save the universe why are you talking to us?
