--
I remember, with a clarity my memory reserves only for my teenage years, Daniel Johnson coming into school with a Smiths t-shirt on under his regulation school shirt.
Dan and I were friends, but as with most of the friendships I have forged in life, the friendship began with us each thinking that the other was a total wanker.
My first memory of Dan was of the single luminous mitten he took to wearing in partial homage, I think, to Wham!
Quite a brave move for a heterosexual male in a school where it didn't take much for someone to come and give your head a bang.
Dan's t-shirt was my first experience of The Smiths. I can't remember which of their record sleeves it depicted but I remember being intrigued and intimidated by it.
Who were The Smiths?
Why did a band with such a drab name seem so enticing, so provocative?
Dan wasn't the only Smiths admirer.
Mandy and Emma obsessed over them, too.
There was a coven of them. They were all my friends, but as soon as the conversation turned to Morrissey [as it inevitably did] I was no longer part of the gang. I didn't speak their language. I could have joined in if they had been talking about the Beatles, or Bob Dylan, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Mike Oldfield, Howard Jones, Dire Straits or John Williams. But they were young, cool and sexy people? Why would they talk about the fusty dad music that I listened to.
I didn't want to join their gang. To do so would have meant unseating my pride. I can imagine the embarrassment, even now, if I had turned up at school, after all of them had professed their love for The Smiths, in a Smiths t-shirt.
I would have been copying them.
It was less embarrassing to admit that I liked U2.
And I'm blushing, inside and out, as I type that.
So I tend to react to something that other people tell me is amazing with a jealous cynicism. I'm jealous of them for finding it first and cynical as to its qualities despite the overwhelming evidence.
It was a good three or four years before I could buy a Smiths record. I did it secretly and I hid it [Hatful of Hollow] at the back of my record collection. I was terrified that someone might find out that I was copying *them*.
It doesn't make any sense to me, now.
I can't fathom it at all. I would hope that I have grown out of such irrational, pride-fuelled fickleness.
But I haven't.
Over the last 12 months, or so, a similar thing has happened with 'The Wire'.
I read one of Charlie Brooker's many columns eulogising this unattractively-titled cable TV show from the States and a part of me decided, there and then, that despite my respect for Charlie and his well-written, brilliantly cynical and seemingly honest opinions, I wasn't going to dance to this particular beat just because he was the DJ.
Besides, I was a fan of Lost. There is only room in the compartments that make up my life for singular and monogamous obsessions. I remember apologising to all of my Star Wars figures because I enjoyed Superman so much. I was 7.
I have spent so long cutting my nose off that my face has started to inflate of its own accord in a vain attempt to protect all of the rest of my doughy features.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I stumbled across a blog in the Guardian's 'Comment Is Free' section that finally convinced me to try The Wire.
The blog wasn't praising the series. It was a cack-handed attempt at being contrary to its brilliance just for the sake of it.
Some of us, me included, aspire to individuality and being 'different' more than we aspire to being right, or to broadening our minds and appreciating how other human beings interpret the world around them. That was partially my problem with The Smiths.
"They're miserable. He can't sing!" I would say while Rusholme Ruffians span around the common room. All the while the small part of me that isn't a reactionary idiot was trying to scream over my ego's hubbub,
"But this is ace! You'd love it! Get down off your high fucking horse!"
This blog [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/jul/24/whyohwire ] managed to rile -- seemingly -- everyone who had seen the series in the UK. The piece itself was an evocation of the childish way that I react to the bandwagons, large or small, that pass through. I was embarrassed reading it... more specifically I was embarrassed reading the comments that followed it. Hundreds of them. Some from fellow writers. All of whom screamed out that the writer couldn't be more wrong .
Of course it is vital that our culture's sacred cows are there to be shot at. Or, if that is a dangerous and too provocative mixed metaphor, it is vital that our culture's sacred cows are there to have their udders pinched. Some people glory in decking the V's at the consensus. Ann Matthews, vocalist and guitarist with Ectogram, is very happy to proclaim that The Beatles are shit and over-rated. Being reactionary like that, but also being able to hold up a body of work that owes nothing to The Beatles, but that is still utterly compelling and all the more original for not bowing a non-mop-topped head to the Fab Four, is the way to attack consensus.
The writer of the Guardian blog hadn't even seen more than a very small handful of episodes.
Which would be a legitimate basis upon which to criticise any other show on television.
But not The Wire.
The Wire's brilliance is in its whole, not in its individual episodes.
Criticising it on the basis of having seen 3 episodes it like critiquing a sunflower on the basis of the first couple of inches of stem above the soil.
I know this now.
Anyway. I read every comment underneath that blog and they sold the series to me.
I have never seen such passion and loyalty to a television programme.
Most bands wouldn't be able to generate this kind of loyalty amongst their fanbase.
Something about this program had to be special. Really special. Special enough for me to stop hacking away at that massive conk on the front of my face.
£17 and a couple of days later I understood why.
There is a general acceptance within the broadcast media that you have to compromise to secure an audience. Anything truly honest / brave would be commercial suicide. The Wire [I have seen the first 3 seasons now] is the most compelling evidence I have ever seen against that prevailing attitude.
It is honest, captivating, human and succeeds in that magic trick that only the best television can pull off: it gives the viewer an insight into a sprawling, alien world but manages to show how all of the different aspects of that world connect together.
Series 2 is the finest drama, from any art-form, that I have ever experienced.
The series has changed my mindset completely. And not just about race, drugs, education, justice, or any of the other threads that are woven throughout the series.
It has changed my mindset about what I want to do.
I'm not sure I can go back to myth after this. I think, for example, that Lost will be a hat shop full of hollow after The Wire.
And I have finally recognised that fickleness within me. I'm going to try and be more honest to myself, try and find the eye in the storm of bullshit.
It's 'only' television.
But it has changed the way I'm looking at the world, both inside and out.
How powerful is that?
©Adam Walton
2010
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