Benign Neglect

Through my work, I've read, listened to or skimmed through at speed a large number of business books and self-improvement guides. Whether they are citing Eastern spirituality, referencing fashionable management sages or quoting Yogi Berra to prove they have a sense of humour, there is a unifying thread: a belief in activism. Reform yourself, reform your management style, reform your company. Apparently the key to success in human affairs is relentless action. What they never propose is a forgotten approach to life’s challenges: benign neglect.

Yet if flares, shoulder pads and leggings can rise from the dead, we could give enlightened neglect a whirl. Our struggling Coalition government might benefit from this old-fashioned, indifferent approach to statecraft; it would most likely save money too. So why in certain cases, is the right course to do less and care less?

The law of unintended consequences

Our governments pass a lot of laws, what they rarely do is ask themselves the counterfactual: could this legislation make things worse? Like most of us, ministers and civil servants fall into the fallacy of thinking that a positive intention guarantees a positive outcome. When you believe that wanting to do good automatically results in you doing good, you run the risk of massive overconfidence and confusing beliefs with real world outcomes. As husbands buying gifts for their wives on Valentine's Day will attest, thinking and hoping she might like the lingerie you selected is just that...wishful thinking. 

I will offer a simple case study to illustrate this issue: bats. Bats are protected by a host of laws. It is a criminal offence to “intentionally disturb a group of bats in its nest” or to damage or destroy a bat roosting place (even if bats are not roosting there at the time). Stern stuff. You might imagine that these draconian protections are helping the little flappers to flourish; sadly most bat species remain on the endangered list.

Thanks to these comprehensive legal protections, bats become a problem if you are, for example, a property developer looking to renovate or demolish an old building. Should you find bats or even just an empty bat nest, all activity should cease. An ecological consultant must provide an assessment before you can proceed with your venture.

You may have borrowed £100,000s to develop the site, with construction workers on the payroll and everything has to grind to a halt because of a bat nest. It could be weeks or months before work could resume, by which time you might have gone bankrupt when your cash runs out and the bank recalls the loan. 

This assumes you comply with the law and notify the authorities. Or… maybe… just maybe…you could destroy the nest and the bats, when no one is looking. There are likely to be a few more Fliedermaus im Himmel.

So the legislation to protect bats almost certainly makes them more likely to be harmed than before; a little bit of neglect might have done better by the bats than concerned and dedicated action.

Concentrated Benefits, Dispersed Costs

The main function of government is to take money from certain groups of people and organisations and give these funds to others. Often these sets overlap, so the government will take tax off the low paid only to give them funds back via housing benefit. Unfortunately, like an eccentric relative, who gives one grandson £1,000 in cash each Christmas and the other a £1 Boots Token that expired in1992, government often does not distribute its largesse with any discernible logic. Governments and ministers do not set out to be wasteful or perverse, but they are hamstrung by a defining feature of politics: concentrated benefits, dispersed costs.

I am going to use a fictional example to demonstrate the point, as you may already consider me a bat murder advocate and I don’t want to lose you entirely. Imagine pressure group existed, called G.P.C.A.W.L.H.D.F.T. whose catchy acronym stands for “Ginger People Called Alice Who are Left-Handed Deserve Free Taxis”. They know the name needs work, but they are very effective at lobbying government. The Minister for Transport is persuaded by their clever PR campaign to pass legislation, mandating that all left handed women called Alice with ginger hair were entitled to a free taxi service to wherever they want in perpetuity. By pure coincidence the minister’s daughter was a leftie red-head, whose first name rhymes malice.

Whatever the minister’s motives, he gets the bill passed. There are heated debates about whether phonetic spellings of Alys as opposed to Alice are valid for the travel subsidy or strawberry blond counts as red hair. But following a government inquiry, legislation tightened up all loopholes and all Alices (phonetic or otherwise) with red hair (not strawberry blond) who were left-handed (or ambidextrous) are delighted to receive free taxis.

The cost to the British state is a mere £500 million a year, even though some Alices insist on driving back and forth from Scotland just because they can. Regular, non-Alice taxpayers like you and I might grumble about the unfairness of this taxi subsidy, yet it only costs us each an additional £16 a year in tax. In other words, one cab-ride less for ourselves, which is hard to get enraged about.

Then a new Transport of Minister comes into post and she is appalled by this daft and partisan subsidy, especially when her predecessor’s child was a beneficiary. She moves to cut the free taxis and all hell breaks loose.

G.P.C.A.W.L.H.D.F.T. (remember that catchy name) mobilise their lobbying resources once more. There are tearful, emotional protests outside the Department for Transport by red-heads distraught at these cuts to much need services. Newspapers run articles by a left-handed writer, first name Alice,  who can no longer afford to visit her ailing grandmother now her taxi service is under threat. The colour picture by her column shows lustrous red locks. Our poor minister doesn’t know what hit her;  turns out it was eggs hurled by furious Alices.

So after she’s been hit with the fifth egg in one day by a screaming Alice and facing investigation by the Commission for Racial Enquiry about possible ginger bigotry, the minister backs down and leaves the subsidised travel service as it is.

G.P.C.A.W.L.H.D.F.T. claims victory; the rest of us moan about politicians being spineless and then continue trawling through the Mail Online crack bar.

Now if the Minister of Transport had practiced a little bit of benign neglect when lobbied by G.P.C.A.W.L.H.D.F.T, we would not be saddled with another spending commitment that is impossible to remove.

Imperfect Knowledge

The third reason why benign neglect should be a legitimate policy response is in that in many instances, ministers and civil servants base their policy responses on studies or data sets that are for too inconclusive or contradictory to justify such faith. Let's go back to the real world now; relax no bats are harmed in the following paragraphs. 

In the early 1980s, government dietary advice changed, telling us that saturated fat was dangerous. The secret to healthy living was apparently cutting out fat, counting calories and eating five portions a day of fruit and vegetables (of which up to 3 could be fruit juice). Now given that adults today eat 600 calories less on average than they did in the 1980s, children do roughly the same amount of exercise and many of us followed this advice, often guzzling several smoothies a day, you might wonder why the obesity rate is 40% and climbing.

It turns out that much of the diet advice of the last thirty years has been worse than useless, it has been actively harmful. Fat was never the villain, if it were you would have to explain how the Innuit make to old age on a diet of 80% seal blubber or for indeed how any of us made it through the ice age.

This blog is too limited to go into great detail, but suffice to say sugar is the cause of the obesity epidemic and its most toxic form is fructose. When fructose is delivered in a liquid, fibre-free form such as a fruit smoothie, it is worse for you than a can of Coke and has much the same effect on your liver as a shot of whiskey (unless you’ve just done intensive exercise and are glycogen depleted). 

Without getting too melodramatic, if benign neglect had been applied to the dietary advice in the early 1980s, we would all be a lot thinner, happier and healthier than we currently are. When you consider too that benign neglect of the processed food lobby might have prevented high fructose corn syrup being introduced into everything in packets, doing nothing at all would have saved lives.

There you go, there powerful and compelling arguments why doing nothing is sometimes a noble and virtuous course of action.Vive la indifference!

Now if only we could persuade our politicians to take longer holidays, who knows how quickly things might improve.

TV vs Film

I will blame the infrequency of my blogs in recent months on work commitments. By work, I do not mean the vulgar necessity of exchanging one's waking hours for money (if only there were a way to trade slumber time for cash...hey, I can but dream). In this instance, ‘work’ refers to my gruelling schedule of watching quality scripted television series. There simply are not enough hours in the day, even if you try watching two series at once. And yes it can be done: large screen for your main series, iPad for the secondary. Result: headaches, eyestrain and a fusion between plots where in my mind, ‘Breaking Bad’ elided with ‘Borgen’ to create a compelling, if confusing, narrative of a female chemistry teacher balancing the demands of Danish coalition politics and large scale methamphetamine production.

So why am I telling you about my TV viewing habits? What has struck me in the last year is how many superb TV series I've seen and how few decent feature films. This leads to a more general puzzle: why are modern films so bad and contemporary TV series so good? And tellingly, I doubt anyone would disagree with the premise of that question unless they worked for a major film studio promoting their summer bilgebuster.

Now maybe you are a huge fan of the Iron Man franchise and believe that these movies, based on a children's comic in which a billionaire playboy puts on a special suit that allows him to fly and fire lasers from his hands, represents the peak of dramatic achievement. Or perhaps you really believe the decision to make three films of The Hobbit was an artistic choice. If you do, seek professional help. No, stay with me and I'll see if I can persuade you of the errors of your ways.

Tempting though it is to start reeling off a long list of superb TV series, followed by a string of underwhelming films, this does not get to the heart of the disparity between these two genres. For simplicity's sake, let's focus on American films and TV, which are both commercial enterprises. Bringing the BBC into a debate about media in any form becomes a separate article or even a book; no one really knows why the BBC does what it does, including its senior management. Pondering its machinations is much like debating the weather in the UK, a never-ending yet ultimately pointless exercise. So for sanity's sake, we’ll stay in the U.S.A.

There are three powerful drivers, I would say, for the surge in standards in scripted, long form TV and the corresponding collapse in feature film quality, which started up to twenty years ago and intensified in the past decade:

1. CGI (computer generated imagery)

A modern blockbuster film is usually saturated with CGI from start to finish, whereas even the most effects-heavy TV series such as ‘Battlestar Galactica’ or ‘Game of Thrones’ have a high percentage of scenes without any significant CGI. Blockbuster film-makers can conjure any number of monsters, robots, explosions, catastrophes and variations of digital mayhem into existence to excite and terrify audiences. But like addicts who need increasing doses of the same fix, audiences are less and less impressed, so film-makers pile more CGI on top of more CGI until films are nothing but extended effects sequences, interspersed with irrelevant padding. Characters, dialogue and even plot are filler before the shooting and explosions, the equivalent of the air-conditioning engineer in an adult movie arriving at the blonde starlet’s house to explain he must service her equipment.

Even the most high budget HBO series cannot pursue the same strategy, so CGI is used for specific sequences that can't be done with props, prosthetics or actors. The effects are at the service of the story, whereas in many films, the CGI is the story. A modern 3D cinema experience is closer to a theme-park ride than actually watching a film.

Unfortunately for the cinema-goer who isn't a thirteen year old boy obsessed with watching robots and superheroes throwing things at one another and blowing up buildings, film-makers have forgotten Hitchcock's lesson in ‘Psycho’. There is nothing scarier than a young woman trapped in a house with a madman with a knife. Or they could watch Spielgberg's ‘Duel’ to remember that you can create a thrilling sequence with one car and one truck, no computers.

There are of course exceptions. ‘Skyfall’ was in many ways a traditional film, with the final showdown being a back-to-basics confrontation that had Dame Judy firing a pistol. The only weak part of an otherwise brilliant film was, in my opinion, the silly underground sequence where Bond was attacked by a CGI tube train. That cursed CGI again. Nonetheless, one ‘Skyfall’ does not make a summer of quality film-making.

2. Long termism and short termism

Both TV networks and film studios are, when you strip away the fluff, businesses that must turn a profit regularly to survive. So why do the same business imperatives produce such differing content and why has the balance in quality shifted so sharply away from film to scripted TV?

I do not believe any movie producer or studio head deliberately sets out to make bad films; it is more that a quality script or brilliant story makes less difference to the financial success of a blockbuster than ever before. Mark Kermode goes into this phenomenon in detail in his excellent book, ‘The Good, The Bad and the Multiplex’. Big films rarely fail financially as they are released simultaneously, with a huge marketing blitz. Even if they are dire, there’s no chance for word of mouth to spread. And with Hollywood making more of its money overseas, sophisticated films may actually do worse than basic, Michael Bay bilge. Think McDonalds film-making. Think of the merchandising. Within six months to a year, it’s all over, no matter how long it took to make. That’s a short-term financial fix.

TV series, conversely, have to play the long game. Their makers can live with low audience figures and weak box set sales if they believe the series will build its audience over time. Both ‘Mad Men’ and ‘The Wire’ were slow burners, that could have been axed part way, yet the end results are not only creative triumphs but in the end, good for business. When you are locked into runs of ten or twenty-two episodes, word of mouth is crucial. Programme makers need good reviews and positive feedback. They have to look after their audiences and they have to repeat the trick with every episode.

This difference in life-cycle, where a scripted series may last in some cases for eight to ten years, means quality is essential in TV. In films it’s an optional extra.

3. The HBO mindset

Lack of CGI and an eye for box set sales do not tell the whole story. HBO has changed television and now many other networks have followed its lead. They started making programmes that would never be broadcast on any TV network, whether private or public and it all started with a series called ‘Oz.’

As an insomniac TV addict in the days before iPlayer and hard disk recorders, I trawled a lot of late night television. There were always hidden gems lurking in the schedule from midnight onwards, whether it was a weird Czech art house film with lots of nudity or a 1970s sci-fi classic, and I could add another film to my VHS collection. What I rarely did was record TV programmes, apart from the likes of ‘GBH’; there simply weren’t as many great shows around apart from that now-dying breed, the funny UK sitcom.

Then one evening, I watched an episode of ‘Oz’, shown on C4 in the middle of the night, and was stunned by what played out on screen. Set in a high security prison, ‘Oz’ went for the jugular and never let go. Its characters included neo-Nazi gang leaders, mobsters, drug dealers, a drunk driver who had killed a child and prison warders playing God. A conventional broadcast series might have avoided topics like racial violence and sex in prison, including male rape; in ‘Oz’ there were no limits. To cap it all, the action was narrated by a paralysed black actor in the role of the Shakespearean chorus. This was HBO’s first foray into long form scripted TV and I had never seen anything like it.

After ‘Oz’ came ‘The Sopranos’ and much more. Where HBO trail-blazed, other networks followed with show concepts that would have been unthinkable before. HBO’s model as a subscription service meant it did not need to worry about the outrage a show such as ‘Oz’ would have prompted on a normal network. Nor would the BBC or even C4 have dared make anything so extreme; there would be questions in Parliament about their public charters. At last, programme-makers could break free of chilling effect of the 'moral majority', who never were the majority and whose morals did not extend to respecting other people's right to make up their own minds. Witness the absurd media circus following Chris Morris's 'Brass Eye' special on chid abuse, where politicians and commentators lined up to denounce something they had not watched. 

This outpouring of creativity unleashed by the HBO approach has reversed the old calculus, instead of fearing complexity, taboo subjects, morally ambiguous characters and challenging plotlines, TV has embraced them. Major film studios, however, continue to run scared of any form of risk taking, including original screenplays. Nearly all big budget releases are either adaptations of comics, best-selling novels or reboots of existing film franchises, that were themselves based on comics e.g. Batman, Spiderman and now Superman. Most big budget films present a narrow, socially regressive world view which right wing shock jocks could happily endorse: women need protection by strong men, billionaire philanthropists are better  than state spending, the government is conspiring against its citizens and society's saviours are freedom fighters not bound by legal conventions. For a supposedly liberal place, the subtext of most films reads like the manifesto for the militia movement. 

When Stephen Soderbergh tried to finance a film about Liberace, with Michael Douglas and Matt Damon attached to the project, he was told the project was 'too gay' for mainstream audiences. HBO then produced it as a TV movie, which is now on general release in cinemas. This is the perfect embodiment of the HBO mindset: creative risk-taking is actually better business than playing it safe. 

So I suppose we should all be grateful that we do live in a Golden Age of TV, whilst searching in vain for a film that isn’t targeted at teenagers with ADD.