Good taste is no longer defined by the upper class, but are we ready for the shock of the new U and non-U?
Years ago there used to be a dispute about the sex of some Eastern Bloc shotputters, leading to a scientific and ethical debate about what separates a man from a woman. Nowadays, of course, we would be able to determine the athlete’s sex in an instant with the simple question: “Here is a 50in flatscreen TV, would you like it for your living room?”
I am a man and would like such a TV. My wife is not a man and would not.
I have rejected her suggestion that I achieve the big-screen experience at a fraction of the price by just sitting nearer the telly. I said that that wouldn’t give me the flatscreen effect. She told me to close one eye. She was adamant: there will be no big TV in her home – it is bad taste.
How could Dolby Pro-Logic sound, dynamic picture control and, for the attention-span-challenged, the ability to watch two channels at once, ever be said to be bad taste, I argued? There’s no need to miss out on the football while you watch Schindler’s List.
“Peter Jones off Dragons’ Den has a large TV,” my wife said, as if that cleared up the argument. So? She then pointed out that his is concealed behind a painting that disappears at the click of a remote control. And that he has got his own coat of arms. Then I began thinking of those pillars outside his house that you see at the start of Dragons’ Den. In the end, I agreed, we’d stick with the portable in the kitchen.
Our conversation did get me thinking, though, about what exactly it means to be tasteful as we face 2008.
Years ago the division between the tasteful and the tasteless was characterised as between U and nonU – that is upper class and not upper class. However, the upper class are no longer the arbiters of taste.
This is, perhaps, a pity. Having had money for longer than the rest of us, they are in a better position to determine quality from tat. It’s why the Queen drives an old Land Rover, rather than a new Ferrari.
U and non-U originally concerned categories of language – the posh U types saying “sofa”, “scent” and “die”, the fearful non-U plebs saying “settee”, “perfume” and “pass away”. There are equivalents today. Is your house “spacious” or is it an honest “big”? Does your child have a buggy or a proper British pushchair? Do you like things or are you loving them?
Now our obsession is with looking fashionable, not posh. For instance, using the bone-chilling word “guys” for mixed groups of people – or adopting other faddish modes of expression – is more about an attempt to live up to some idea of being trendily informal than the wish to identify with the upper class. But you’re British, it’s not you.
It is the first error of bad taste to try to portray yourself as something you’re not. This is at the heart of our disdain for arrivistes – that they’re misrepresenting themselves. The other arriviste error of taste, at least as far as the established middle class is concerned, is of course greed. Having a 50in TV, a fleet of sports cars, or upping the bling just because you can are simply modern manifestations of a vice that has been with us since at least the Roman empire. What is new is how widespread this has become.
Greed for possessions was impossible for most people a couple of generations ago because consumer goods were much more expensive in relation to wages.
We can all splash out now. David Bland, category manager for large-screen TVs at Currys, says that one key reason people are buying bigger TVs is “a little bit of ego, saying look what I’ve got”.
The trouble is that items bought to give you prestige inevitably end up making you look ridiculous, from the conspicuous designer label, to the stupidly expensive car, to the enormous yacht.
The second category of tastelessness is that of convenience. This is nowhere more marked than in the world of e-mail.
For example, :-( makes the writer to abandon the challenge of language in favour of an Orwellian reduction of human feeling to a “one size fits all” symbol. Happy, elated, delighted or just pleased with that? No matter, just say you’re :-). That’s OK if you’re under 9 years of age, but you should grow out of it by the time you’ve reached double figures.
The very convenience of e-mail should mean we are even more on our guard for abuses. I once received a communication ending “Hugs” from a woman at a planning office. I’d like to believe she was being sarcastic, but she wasn’t. The hideous sugar-coating she used for her private e-mails had leaked into those of her professional life. It’s part of a modern incontinence of informality in which we hug business colleagues who we’ve known for a week, kiss people we’ve just met, and swear in front of strangers. Stop it now. It’s tasteless.
Contemplation of this horror leads us to the third category of tastelessness – that of the incongruous. To return to my example of the giant TV. When you consider that, according to Currys, 23 per cent are bought by the over 55s, then these modernist slabs are being jemmied into living rooms full of chintz and china. Still, you can see and hear the TV easily, so that’s OK, isn’t it?
Another word for this phenomenon is “grotesque”. That’s what a lot of our purchases, even our bodies, are becoming. Our cars have ballooned, our garages doubled, our houses have been extended, our muscles bulked up, our breasts inflated and our lips beestung. At the end of that we’ve had our teeth bleached bunny-rabbit white and hopped onto a sunbed. Is this new Texan-style sensibility necessarily bad taste, though? Definitions of good taste are notoriously difficult. It could be argued that the whole idea of good taste is in bad taste. Why do we need to be prescriptive? Isn’t that pretentious, divisive and arrogant? Well, yes, but it’s quite good fun.
Accordingly, I have come up with my own, modern categories in an attempt to update U and non-U.
I was tempted to call my new categories “them” and “us”. Instead, and with impeccable taste, I will be simpler. Items, attitudes and activities will be forced into only two camps: “yes” and “no”. Don’t blame me, that’s how life works.
There are, of course, items that don’t easily fall into either bracket.
“Silk” paint for wood, for instance. I have to admit, it looks better than gloss. But it’s called “silk”, and knowing that will ruin it for me. So it’s a “no”. But not very “no”, as, for instance, the Carlsberg DraughtMaster, which allows you to pull your own pints in your living room in a way undreamt of since the Seventies. That is appalling taste. I want one, but it’s terribly tasteless.
And this is the thing, when it comes down to it. It’s OK for things to be bad taste, good fun even, as long as you know they’re in bad taste – just as Peter Jones and I do.
