Category: Perspective

By Sam Pesez

Let’s be clear from the offset on how faith, in a religious sense, is conventionally defined. It is a strong belief in the doctrines of a religion based on spiritual conviction rather than proof, or – alternatively phrased – a complete trust or confidence in someone or something. Throughout this article, I will stray away from this conventional definition as I seek to redefine faith as not being limited simply to a conviction, trust, or a belief: however difficult to pinpoint, it is so much more. I endeavour to show that the problem of the objectivity or subjectivity of faith is one which must be wrestled with precisely because faith is something far greater than a belief: it is something innate and all-consuming. To address these poles of the argument, definitions of objectivity orbit around phrases like “freedom from bias”, “impartiality”, or “independent from the mind”. On the other hand, subjectivism is rooted in the notion that knowledge is merely based on one’s own perspective or experience – that there is no single or external truth and that the only thing that we can be sure of is our own cognition. This framework is a necessary arena in which to play out the rest of our debate.  

The reconciliation of faith and subjectivism is a matter which troubles me almost daily. As a person of faith who believes in God, was raised in a Catholic household, still goes to church weekly, and prays often, the idea of subjectivism is something which I find a frequently unavoidable stumbling block. I am often sat thinking that to have faith – particularly a religious faith – one should view it as objective. One cannot have faith if they do not see it as objective; I see both ideas as inseparable. Because if I were to have a faith but not see it as objective then it would cease to be a faith in itself: I would not  “believe” in “it” enough. The faith would be reduced to an idea, a thought, a predisposition to a way of thinking, or a philosophy of life personal to oneself. This would neglect the fact that faith is a relationship. I have faith in my friends to be there when I am going through hard times. Everyone’s faith, regardless of what it is, is something which is lived: it is alive, not just a way of living. I would not be able to hold my faith if I did not sincerely think that what I am believing in is objective.  

Yet this is where I find the obstacle. I remember that I am 1 of over 7 billion people in the world who also have their own faith, whether it be Jewish, Sikh, Muslim, Buddhist,  Hindu, spiritual, agnostic, or even atheist. Each of these 7 billion-plus people in the world are all equally convinced that their faith is the right one and is the objectively correct “faith”. This leads me to ask the question of who is right. And I can say with quite a lot of certainty that, if you were to pose this question to each person on this planet, the vast majority of them would reply with their own sense of utter justification, “I am right”. This leads me to a second question. How can faith be objective if each individual of a multitude of different faiths believes that they are right? Can everyone’s individual faith be true but faith still be objective? These are questions which I do not know the answer to; though I still find myself accepting that whilst I truly believe that my faith is correct, everyone is entitled to their own faith. I do this in the humility that I do not believe they are right but also simultaneously accept that they believe that I am not right. Admittedly, it is paradoxical. 

If we were to apply the same thought process to any other belief, such as a political view, there would be no issue with this because everyone is entitled to their own point of view on some things. It is perfectly acceptable for a right-wing activist to think they are correct as it is for left-wing activists to think they are also correct. But like 1+1=2 is seen as objective, I sincerely believe that faith requires a higher threshold of certainty – one must be sure beyond all reasonable doubt. One person’s faith on this planet must be the objectively right faith. But whose is it? I believe that mine is. But so will a Muslim, or an atheist, or a Jew, or a Hindu, or a Sikh, and the list goes on. This does not solve the problem because we will be stuck in this unending cyclical loop of never knowing who is truly right. And then we may never know until we die, but then what does that solve? 

To tackle this problem of faith and subjectivism we need to dig down further into what we mean when we are talking about objectivism and subjectivism. I do this bearing in mind the eventuality that we will have to suspend both concepts of subjectivism and objectivism by the end of this article, as they will become too constraining. We may be led to having to accept other concepts such as universal acceptability or individuality.  One’s automatic response to the definition of objectivity would be that faith therefore cannot be objective because one would assume that faith is intrinsically linked to the mind, to bias, to a way of thinking. However, I am inclined to disagree with this point of view because, as I discussed earlier, I believe that a faith ceases to be a faith if it is reduced to a philosophy of life. Faith is something which goes beyond our material existence on this planet. Even the atheist, who may deny the existence of the soul or the supernatural, would have to accept that when thinking of faith we are dealing with something beyond the mind or our day-to-day cognition.  

Faith is something which nestles at the core but is simultaneously not part of us. It is something which we do not have control over for we cannot force ourselves into believing something or choose to believe something which we fundamentally do not and cannot physically or mentally accept. Why do some people have a religious faith and some do not? Why do some people convert to a religious faith but others do not? I would argue that if faith were to be part of the mind, everyone of shared faith would have to think the same way about everything: they should vote for the same political parties, eat the same food, have the same routine, have the same likes, dislikes, and desires. Yet this is not the case. Even in groups of faith there are significant divisions. In Christianity there are Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, and Evangelicals. In Islam there are Sunni and Shia. The list goes on. This leads me to the idea of individuality – the idea that faith is so unique and personal to the individual. As a Catholic, despite having the same intrinsic beliefs as other Catholics, such as in the existence of God or Jesus’  resurrection, I would not be surprised nor troubled by the fact that other fellow Catholics might have different visions of who God is or different philosophies of life.  

Isn’t this just subjectivism, I hear you ask? On this I would have to strongly disagree with you because anyone with a religious faith, or without one, would strongly refute its subjectivity because for the individual the faith is grounded in an external and objective truth. I could personally list off a multitude of reasons, experiences, facts, external and objective truths to defend my faith. Faith for the individual is anything but subjective.  

It is at this point that I would like to introduce an idea which can reconcile subjectivism, objectivism, individualism and universality when it comes to faith. It is the metaphor of faith as a moon. Faith is the moon which orbits the earth and to which each individual has access to if they so wish to if they were to just look up at the sky on a clear evening.  Like the moon, which each individual will see at a different angle, shade, orientation or colour based on where they are standing on the earth at a given moment (and based on their individual perspective, eyesight or state-of-mind) we may consider faith.  

I truly believe that each of us sees a sliver of our moon. Like faith, some will sometimes see more of it, some will sometimes see more clearly but some will sometimes not even bother to look up (or will only see the dark side of the moon). This reconciles objectivism with subjectivism because whilst faith (the moon) is objectively present and an external, object truth, the angle of the moon or what we perceive of the moon at any given moment is subjective to the individual. No individual is or must be right or wrong about the side of the moon they see or their faith. They are simply seeing a different part of the moon to others. The same analogy can be extended to groups of people, who are looking at the moon through the same lens of their telescope. Without delving too deeply into the metaphor, it is scientifically known that the moon itself does not produce its own source of light but reflects the light of the sun onto us. The same can be said about our moon-like faiths; we see merely a reflection of something greater, and far too complex for us to look at directly. Our temporal beings can only interpret what we see from our own perspectives. Further questioning is required to understand the true nature and source of the light which reflects onto our moon like faiths. However, there is an element of peace, acceptance, truth, and accuracy in this analogy because when it comes to faith it is not about who is better or who is right but about your own faith: or rather, how you are positioned. 

Without descending too far into relativism, faith is influenced enormously on the  country or culture we live in. Christianity has become predominantly a Western religion. Islam is an Arabic religion. Hinduism is a South-East Asian religion. Everyone’s faith is grounded in their culture, country, language, and way of life which gives nuance and application to their lives. Each faith has its own cultural nuances, practices and traditions which are entrenched in its place and culture. It is as if the same book were to be translated in different languages. Sometimes when books are translated words,  phrases, or analogies may be lost in translation – particularly if it has been translated back and forth over millennia. Ultimately, we are reading the same book and looking up at the same moon.  

Forgive me if this is a cop out. But I believe that debates over subjectivism and objectivism or who is right and wrong are fruitless and unnecessary. All they do is sow division when none is needed. I have a monotheistic faith in the Christian God and in Jesus as do millions of other Christians who share my faith and see the same part of the moon as I do. This does not take away from the fact that there are billions of other people in millions of different groups who see a different side of the moon. My faith is true and right but so is theirs and this does not and should not take anything away from each other’s faith. Nor should this detract from the notion that we are all entitled to convince and testimony to others to see the moon from our own perspective. Nor should this stop us exploring other sides of the moon to see if there is a side of the moon which we believe is more accurate or representative. Faith is such a deeply personal and all-consuming thing, and I would encourage everyone to dig deeper to explore their own faith and be more open-minded regardless of which religious faith, or lack of, they land on.

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

‘I have a horrible feeling that I’m a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist.’ – FLEABAG.

“Where’d you just go?” – HOT PRIEST. At the heart of Fleabag’s awkward sex scenes, off-hand quips, and family rifts lies this most important question: “Where” is Fleabag going? Often described as a ‘tour-de-force’, the fever and frenzy of Fleabag lies in the show’s refusal ever to stop. Fleabag narrates her own life whilst the action around her continues, rapidly focusing in and out of these two spaces, hanging between the balance of the two. But this constant momentum never falters or halts, seemingly in perpetual pursuit of whichever destination Fleabag is aiming for, regardless of the chaos surrounding the tracks. The confessions of Fleabag still echo – confessions we have taken to be ‘honest’, ‘feminist’ windows of clarity about ourselves, about womanhood under the strain of the 21st century. But, what if Fleabag never tried to “go” to us in these moments of fourth-wall fragmentation? What if we were not just spectators, but Fleabag’s new best friend, or Fleabag’s psyche? Fleabag doesn’t define our role, our role is irrelevant; our connection to Fleabag is the destination. 

Bertold Brecht redefined the role of the audience under his pioneering theory of ‘epic theatre’ isolating the audience and manipulating the tether between audience and actor. There is no set power. No set control. In one scene the audience is held by a leash only to be holding the leash over the actors the next. The audience’s perception and jolting of the stage allows for art to be transformed, making it “not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it”. Fleabag’s first televised word is “you”;  Fleabag effortlessly seizes you, hurtling you along with her. I have yet to find someone who wants her to let go, who finds her immediate intensity overwhelming. The connection we create with her by becoming “you” is non-confrontational and seemingly natural.  We are “you”. But who is “you”? “You” is deictic and cannot exist outside of the context Fleabag has placed it in, thus redefining the audience, not as spectators of her so much, but also spectators of ourselves and how we draw these connections with others. “You” is a role waiting to be filled, reflecting Fleabag’s loneliness, but also the show’s examination of connections. We are an undefined role to her. We don’t exist to her outside the ramblings of her mind. We aren’t her confidants. We aren’t her attempt of rationalising her behaviour through finding a common, shared experience of “you”. We are the glance she gives in the mirror, the raised eyebrows we give when eye contact flits to another. We are figments of her perception and an example of the very extremes of connections. 

“I am obsessed with audiences,” confesses Waller-Bridge in her introduction to the play’s script. The audience isn’t trying to be won, bought, or rationalised by Fleabag – our connection with her exists out of a compulsion to distract and input. The original play reads like the fumbling mind palace of post-embarrassment realisation, provoked by flashing a loan manager. Whilst there is no explicit direction to suggest this, the play is split into thirds: meeting the manager, acting as a descent into Fleabag’s mind with the manager just being a voice we hear and process; Fleabag’s inner monologue where time seems to stop as we enter her hysteria; resuming and returning to the manager and the blur between monologue and naturalism. The middle part, which is the main part, is a dialogue with herself where she is frantically self-criticising and searching for the right answer, getting lost in her memories along the way, where she distracts herself from the situation at hand with macabre intrusions. 

My attempt at watching Fleabag aged 16 threw me into a spiral of over-analysis. Who was I meant to be connecting with during the dialogue? Where is Fleabag going and where do I break? My countless rewatches of the show couldn’t answer it. With every run I found myself addressing different people and changing the levels of connection I held with the audience, loosening the leash on a line before clinging onto it for dear life the next.  There is no clear consistency; you, Fleabag, must decide what information is going to directly connect to the front row.  Waller-Bridge wrote a script that rigorously demands you to perceive yourself through connection. The play cannot function without the understanding of it. The realisation is she is not speaking to us, but herself, addressing us as a distraction from the mess and trying to realise which response to her life will make the best connection in order to move forward. In the same way that we can’t make eye contact when stressed, feel the need to fiddle when anxious, or fidget when bored, Fleabag speaks as a way to distract herself.  Her mind is boiling over, and we are her thought process and intrusive comments, before choosing to turn the heat off or scream. We are the distraction taking her out of the constant momentum of her life, allowing her to live in her head and her body. We are both being taught by Brechtian whispers about our connections and are being used, obsessionally, by Waller-Bridge’s hunger for extreme connectivity.

“I’m not obsessed with sex. I just can’t stop thinking about it” confesses Fleabag, almost immediately after showing us a racy night of anal sex whilst meeting us for the first time. If Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s intention for Fleabag to explore “power, control, people trying to hold everything together”,  is to be realised, this is achieved through Fleabag’s connection with us, and with sex.  

FLEABAG -I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like. What to hate. What to rage about. What to listen to. What band to like. What to buy tickets for. What to joke about. What not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in. Who to vote for and who to love and how to…tell them. I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far, I think I’ve been getting it wrong.

Her confession epitomises the experience of operating in extremes. Clinging on to sex, people, whatever, obsessively, acts as a way to find a calling. An honest distraction, a pause, in her life. The sex is complicated, hot, raw, confusing, tender, and tangled much like her connection with us.  The hunt for sex is often seen as a game, a mission. Take Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress. “Let us sport as we may” for the victory of pleasure. Pleasure that is won through an art of persuasion and flirting,  a series of steps and follies to achieve, a game we’ve knowingly played for millennia. For Fleabag, sex is the final destination, acting as her “someone to tell me” when she has no one.

 Fleabag operates in extremes; extreme honesty, extreme connection, the extremes of sex. Fleabag goes from sex as a constant distraction, to celibacy.  After a night that left me a confusion of anger, grief, loneliness and fear, I took the same vow, albeit brief. Abstinence, however, cannot miraculously solve everything, and once sex enters your life, it is difficult to get it to leave; that part of yourself grows into a nagging obsession but in a new unrecognisable form of relationship. Celibacy acts as a stopgap for this higher calling Fleabag craves, as it comes with its own rules, regulations, and restraints. A primal direction, like intrusive thinking to the point of dissociation or mindless shagging, to keep you in line. But, for Fleabag, as for me, this change is still a distraction. She repeatedly turns to us, gushing over “his [HP’s] arms” on the way to a Quaker meeting. We are her distraction, her loophole, so that she can explore a new connection, whilst retaining the habits of old connections. We aren’t the connection with a being outside of herself that can “tell [her] how to live her life”, as we are part of her life.

Despite the distraction of sex, Fleabag continues to talk to us during it. The connection is stifled, unable to reach its full potential causing her to connect elsewhere. When Fleabag finally has sex with Hot Priest she doesn’t want to be distracted. She doesn’t want us, actively pushing us away, shutting the door on us as if we’ve walked in. A new, full connection has been formed. One that she wants to wholly cherish and not leave. One she wants to be completely present for. Slowly,  we see her cutaways become less frequent during scenes featuring the two of them. She is letting us go, she is not letting her perception and the intrusions of her mind limit her. The connection with us is re-evaluated towards the end of series two, and we see her relationship and use of us change. She isn’t moving on from hijacking us into being her therapist, because we never were that to her, she is choosing to be present, to make lasting connections, and to stop making the most lasting connection and presence in her life the way she responds to life outside of herself.  The context of her “you” has changed; we still exist to observe her, but we are no longer invited into the inner sanctum of her mind. To escape the distraction of self-dependence. To teach us to live presently. To “shape” the way we perceive ourselves and our love. 

Image from the National Theatre 2019 production poster at Wyndham’s Theatre, London

Edward Bayliss

You are neither here nor there,

A hurry through which known and strange things pass

As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

(“Postscript”, Seamus Heaney)

Excuse my crude misuse of the English language, but to see something’s beforeness, duringness, and afterness in the space of a few seconds is beautiful. To have its shape, its colour, and its detail, all at the mercy of distance and speed is beautiful. Some things are better seen fleetingly, in a moment, in a movement. 

Here in “Postscript”, Heaney celebrates the pleasures of driving, or more particularly, the pleasures that the car windows afford. He feels the welcome impact of ‘big soft buffetings’ that ‘come at the car sideways’. These buffetings are images of objects seen through the vehicle windows, shifting and turning as the car sweeps along the Flaggy Shore of County Clare. I say images, because what Heaney sees are different representations of the object, and never the simple fact of the object itself. 

Heaney is ‘neither here nor there’, almost as though he is driving at night. It feels exciting but also dreamy and unreal. Things are ‘known and strange’; we might imagine salt, rain, and grass in the air, playing against each other in an eddy of aromas. And, what about depth of view? It seems silly to say, but a hedgerow immediately beside the road (in the foreground, if you like) appears as a blurred flash of green and grey, pleasingly anonymous to us. Something further away, say a house nearer the horizon, moves more slowly on its conveyor belt, is seized more easily by our sight. First, we see its red brick, grey slate gable for a second, then its East facing façade comes into view – maybe it has round windows, or a gutter hanging loose from last night’s wind. Last, we see a packed dirt path moving from its porch into a well tilled field – the sum of all these parts painting a greater and more intriguing picture, a picture that shifts and surprises. 

It’s at the overlap of craft and chance that the ‘heart is caught off guard and blown open’. You have the constant and intelligent movement of you and the car treading tarmac in a regular rhythm – one that we’re all too familiar with. Your feet press at the pedals, while your fingers snatch at indicator arms and gear shifts. Then we look to the outside, to this assemblage of images which grow and shrink, dancing in curious patterns; all dependent on their place on the plain. This is the ‘chance’ or the coincidental, with the former being the ‘craft’. Fantastically, this seems to me to hold a mirror to Heaney’s poetic method. In an essay for The Guardian, Heaney once said:

‘I think the process is a kind of somnambulist encounter between masculine will and feminine clusters of image and emotion.’

This masculine will is both metaphorically and literally the ‘vehicle’ on which the feminine clusters of image (shifting objects on our plain of vision) ride. And this car isn’t the futurist Marinetti’s ‘roaring motor-car which seems to run on machine-gun fire… hurled along earth’s orbit’; it’s existence is more dependent. It doesn’t attack Heaney’s countryside; it absorbs it, just as you do.  

Your eyes never land squarely on an object as its edges aren’t fully there – they tilt and blur as you move past them. The form of a tree might fold into dozens of different shapes in a constantly altering state of animation. Its limbs bend and contort and cut the sky at changing angles. This is a stunning quality that is so often overlooked, and one that can only be seen in so small a span of time. 

Better than staring at a dead end object ad infinitum, I think. 

Too often we stare too long and too hard at things – let’s watch pictures play on their plains. That’s why it’s ‘useless to think you’ll park and capture it more thoroughly’. So, let the scenes outside the car window wobble on your palm, if only for a second, and we might then enjoy a fuller and brighter picture from the passenger seat. 

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

“Many things might be regarded as the hallmarks of this competition, but the eagerness to embrace change isn’t one of them” – Jeremy Paxman, 2020.

“University Challenge. With your host” … “Bamber Gascoigne” interrupts my father, tea in hand, settling down for some Monday night armchair quizzing. For my father, the host will always be Bamber, whereas I am part of the newly inaugurated Amol generation. We, like thousands of other families, groups of students, and housemates, up and down the country, see each era of University Challenge as part of the Monday night ambience – consistently transmitting throughout the school year, consistently baffling us, and consistently challenging the random pockets of seemingly useless information we have stored away. But how does one graduate from the sofa to the lightbox adorned desk?

The team from Durham University is representing an institution famed for its cobblestone streets, a beautiful array of colleges, and the worst nightclub in Europe. Its recent academics include Joe Ancell, historian, flautist, Greek dictionary, and expert climber; Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini, Elvet Riverside’s noisiest shoe wearer, anti-Dickens advocate, and fashion secretary; Jake Roberts, their captain with a profound ability to store away information on both Dutch masters and long dead physicists; Luke Nash, our physical incarnation of Merlin Bird ID, and enthusiastic social sec; and James Gowers, football trivia coach come step-in Paxman, and reserve player.

 “How many do you reckon you can get?” James asks his grandmother, setting up the competition UC emits into living rooms, each viewer tempted by the allure of the small intellectual victories a correct starter buzz can provide, and “watching to be impressed”, as James reveals, by the spectacle of intelligence and reflexes on display. For a show that has cemented itself in pop culture history for having 14 letter Greek words as answers, being gifted a round that fits your unique knowledge-scape seems almost miraculous – spurring your viewership forward. Post-UC Twitter, a place that has become both coveted and feared by us as our broadcast date draws ever nearer, feeds this excitement, no matter how high or low your score. One thing UC has taught us is to be content with your knowledge and take pride in it. Until a recent shift, the consensus of the show was something, as Luke put, where students in “dodgy fashion and unironed shirts” battled for academic valour with highly classical questions and antiquated answers. Now, however, the academic valour is something to play with, enjoy, and laugh about. Correct answers may not be derived from the most lucid stream of consciousness, you may be reeling the answer in from a vault of facts originated through 1am doom scrolling and not from a sophisticated book, however, “does it really matter where knowledge comes from?”, mulls Jake, “if your answer is still right?” When we, from Jake’s living room during Monday evenings in deep January, buzzed in with a correct answer, we still got to experience that pride and satisfaction that we’ve felt for years watching the show, even with our filming date looming above us. Knowing that your answer to a question derived from an offhand comment from a lecturer, or that the composer of the music round bonus came to you from a Wes Anderson soundtrack, you realise it doesn’t matter at all where knowledge is gathered as any knowledge is celebrated here.

Quizzing prowess is often celebrated in this country with jackpot prizes, rounds of pints, scampi fries, and bragging rights. “It’s quite easy to get yourself involved” according to James. After all, who doesn’t love a pub quiz? The arguments over a sticky pub table over the right answers are “fundamentally intertwined with British pub culture”, says Luke. Mates, UC inclined or simply up for some fun, gather together for some knowledge-based rivalry. The Old Elm Tree became our pre-UC watching haunt, suggested by Luke due to its boast of hosting a challenging pub quiz that confuses both students and professors. For the rest of my team University Challenge wasn’t a graduation from South London pub quizzes, but the next step in their quizzing journeys. Luke and Joe had both been part of competitive quizzing teams at school and met James and Jake at Durham Quizbowl. Imported from America, Quizbowl is a place where the questions are cryptic, varied, and rapidly fired at contestants. Universities face off at large-scale tournaments that attract hundreds of quizzing students, who can be recognised from a UK quizzing leaderboard, featuring alongside Chasers from ITV’s The Chase. “Sport-like quizzing”, as Jake put it, seemed to me like UC on steroids, a far abstraction from the pub quizzes I was familiar with. However, my first visit to Durham’s Quizbowl practice as part of my preparation for the show was a warm welcome into the quiz-world that UC, in part, has helped cultivate. 

When telling people about my imminent airing I’m often eagerly asked “did you win?” and “what do you win?”. Whilst a BBC contract guards the answer to the first question, the latter is nothing, which is often met with confusion. UC offers simply bragging rights, your lightbox nameplate, and a trophy for your institution. Whilst the quiz being televised for the scrutiny of the nation, or your university being reigning champions at the time of filming, does set some lofty expectations, the stakes themselves aren’t high; it’s all for some light entertainment and a good story at the end of it. Quizbowl echoes this friendly form of quizzing, even when the questions are harder than UC ones (difficult to imagine, I know). We laughed over clues that were painfully directed at American players and were nonsense to us, we poked fun at the absurdity of some of the bonus round categories, and we traded tips on how to learn more random points. During filming Jake and Luke recognised many of our competitors, both in the greenroom and on the airing series, from Quizbowl – showcasing the breath of this community, both in knowledge and location. As a nation we love quizzing, and from pubs, schoolrooms, studios, and unoccupied seminar rooms, we know how to have fun with it – something the Amol era of UC has nurtured.

“You are people of ignorance too” responds Paxman to a slightly bemused, slightly terrified team of KCL’s brightest. Paxman approached the “smart ass” teams he was presented with with the contempt of a Victorian schoolmaster. Unapologetic. Scathing. Formidable. The Paxo era is noted for its presenter’s brazen approach. Being fans of the show, we were unsurprised to hear he would be stepping down, yet looking back, we were all at a loss for who would take his place. No one would be like Paxman. But, the show didn’t need another Paxman. During his later series, more and more questions began to reflect the more diverse university courses on offer, like animation or game design, allowing more students to be included in the game than before, keeping UC in the quizzing zeitgeist.  “Paxman’s snobbery was part of the appeal” confesses Luke. But, “Amol was definitely more welcoming” admits Luke, with Jake adding that “he didn’t have to be so friendly during filming…”.  The show is still fiercely mind boggling, but what we came to realise as our anki-decks piled up by the thousands, is that it is just fun and games – especially when the history of house music round briefly became memed and remixed. Amol asks about mascots and adds in quips about his own favourite musicians and philosophers during filming. Off-camera he talks about his lunch and jokes around with us. The days of stuffy Oxbridge teams in St.Michaels jumpers gifted by their grandmother’s Christmases ago are firmly behind, instead, one could even describe the new UC look as cool, with contestants and presenter alike having as much fun as possible when faced with difficult questions, 5 different cameras, and Roger Tilling’s voice booming around the studio.

***

I signed up for University Challenge, partly, as a joke. During my rather structureless gap-year, University Challenge’s consistent Monday night slot became a weekly marker and something I looked forward to returning to after work. My good friend Olivia had started English Literature at Oxford, and I received an enviable text, ‘Just did the University Challenge application test, I got 11…’. I never anticipated that my desire to send a similar text back, and to laugh about our lacklustre performances of academic rigour, would lead to me texting her ‘I MADE THE TEAM????’. We found out we made the team in the last week before Christmas, each nursing various stages of hangovers and being unable to contain the excitement. “UC kind of felt distant, [something] that just happened on TV, and that other people did” recalls Joe, my fellow Fresher on the team; it had never occurred to us that this is something that people actually applied to do. But now we, being newly inaugurated university students, could be challenged, and so we applied for the written test. Our first challenge would be to find these testing sites. “I couldn’t actually find my way to Mary’s and bumped into Jake who was also a bit lost” admits Ancell. This would become a theme of ours as our team would learn to navigate Manchester train stations, the maze of Media City, and the eternal corridors of the studios whilst all being a bit lost and clouded by the excitement and fear of the questioning that would come.

The “distance” of UC kept us in a perpetual state of amazement. Post-dinner revision slots  in the tucked away desks in St. John’s library, I would look out at the dark Durham sky, depressed with the blues of January, and catch my reflection. An array of flashcards in front of me, of which our collective pile of cards and Ankis reached 8000 –  “is this really happening to me? Am I now a person who is on a show like this?” I still can’t believe it, and neither can the rest of us realise “how the hell”, as Luke put it, got to this point. I probably won’t until I see myself on the TV; the same TV that has projected all those “distant” UC students and stars on a Monday night, will soon bare my face too, and maybe that will make it less distant. The Media City Holiday Inn, our refuge during filming, echoed this distant, start-struck bewilderment down its corporate corridors. We couldn’t believe that Amol Rajan and Roger Tilling (an actual man not just a voice) were eating breakfast on the table across the room. The evening before in the bar we scouted out other suspiciously studenty groups of 5 that appeared, a sort of celebrity gracing the air, as we realised these people were here, taking time off uni for a reason that had to be kept secret, now part of the same club as us.

Before filming you aren’t told who you’re playing, you have a time and that’s it. The team you just brought a drink with could very well be the team who thrash you the next day for millions of people to watch. This “distance” between you and the people of University Challenge never really leaves, even when Amol is joking with you behind your respective desks during a filming break, or when you buzz in and hear your name, or when the iconic theme tune blares through the studio to count the cameras in; you can’t help but laugh with complete amazement.

Keeping the team a secret has been “almost impossible” admits Luke. Seeing five students tapping a table in the SU cafe and blurting out answers to questions read from a brain-sized book probably did look slightly suspicious. For once we weren’t allowed to give the correct answers, having to hastily reply “quiz” when people would ask how we all knew each other when we bumped into each other in Jimmies, or were asked by friends at the Trevelyan College pub quiz. 8 months since filming we can now share our starters for 10 with you on Monday the 7^th of October, BBC 2, 8:30pm. For now, it’s goodnight from the Series 31 Durham Team, goodnight, and goodnight from me too, goodnight.

By Chloe Stiens

The Last Dinner Party, in the months leading up to the release of their debut album, Prelude to Ecstasy, seemingly appeared from nowhere. Their hit song, Nothing Matters, suddenly reached 16th on the UK singles charts, while videos from their gigs proliferated on Tiktok. In consequence, everyone from Tiktok reviewers to respected music critics have attempted to account for their rapid rise to success, looking everywhere but at the music itself.

Like breakout act Wet Leg (also fronted by women) they have been labelled ‘industry plants’ by internet critics, an allegation that mainstream news outlets have done little to disprove. Critics have pointed to how The Last Dinner Party got a major record deal (Island Records) before releasing a song as evidence. This is true; the band did not release music independently to be scouted by an A&R representative trawling Spotify playlists or trending Tiktok sounds. Rather, they performed. The band, made up of Abigail Morris (lead vocals), Lizzie Mayland (guitar, vocals), Emily Roberts (lead guitar, mandolin, flute), Georgia Davies (bass), and Aurora Nischevi (keyboards, vocals), refined their sound and image by performing throughout 2022, so that by the time they entered the studio, they were, in effect, fully formed and clear in their artistic intention. This contrasts to the almost-overnight success of other Gen Z stars like Pink Pantheress, who went viral on tiktok making music at home. That is not to say that Pink Pantheress does not deserve her success; however, The Last Dinner Party’s success is not only down to their talent and good luck, but also their hard work.

That is not to say that the band is not lucky. Morris’ parents sent her to Bedales, a private school. Although Morris undoubtedly benefited from this education and the in-school musical opportunities it afforded her, its relevance on her musical output ends there. We cannot allow her musical talent to be entirely attributed to privilege, as if her academic education somehow gave her the unique voice and the commanding stage-presence she is known for. Certain reviewers have used Prelude to Ecstasy’s sonic grandeur as evidence of an inescapable privilege, suggesting that the album-opener ‘Prelude to Ecstasy’ conjures up Saltburn-esque images of wealth and decadence, aligning the band with the over-privileged Catton family while ignoring what the band have actually cited as their intention and influences. The Last Dinner Party have said that they wanted to create something ‘gothic and romantic’ (Rolling Stone). They are a Gen Z band; they aimed for a decadent ‘aesthetic’ as suggested by their name, one informed by the 19th-century literature both Morris and Davies study at university, or at least by the 21st Century impression of it. This baroque fantasy is evident in their lyrics, costumes, and the maximalist and classically-influenced production of the album. Perhaps Emerald Fennel wanted to recreate a similar ‘aesthetic’. However, the implication that Morris’ private school education is responsible for the creative direction of Prelude to Ecstasy is unfair. That said, I acknowledge that perhaps critics are more concerned about the success and number of privately-educated musicians in comparison to their state-educated counterparts. But the answer is not to damn any musician who was lucky enough to benefit from a musical education, but rather to defend music education from further cuts. In 2022, 179 independent schools enrolled students for A-level music, compared to just 69 secondary comprehensives (classical-music.uk), while children from well-off families are more likely to benefit from private instrumental lessons. Thus, the underfunding of the arts is creating a two-tier society in which music is only available to children whose parents can afford it. If we want the ratio of privately-educated to state-educated musicians to balance out, we must do more to make sure all children have the same musical opportunities.

However, there is more than a hint of sexism in the consistent attention paid to Morris’ upbringing and in the attribution of the ‘industry plant’ label, both of which imply that The Last Dinner Party’s success is due to factors other than the quality of their music. Their male counterparts are not undermined in this way; take, for example, King Krule, who attended the BRIT school. The BRIT school is a state school, but students there benefit from the industry connections that are so essential to getting your music heard. Or, Bakar, who attended a boarding school in Surrey. Neither of these London Indie stars have had their schools placed before their talent in terms of their success. Moreover, critics point to class-based privilege in music while ignoring the difficulty of being a woman or non-binary person in rock. Mayland, Roberts, and Davies, (guitar and bass guitar) have all become rock guitarists in a world that, when they were children, almost completely aimed the instrument at men. In the early 2000s, girls were pushed towards other, usually classical, instruments by the complete lack of non-male rock guitarists in the media. Even Roberts initially started learning classical guitar, which she did not take to (she credits her later ‘acoustic’ guitar teacher as ‘the reason I’m still playing guitar’) (guitar.com). Not much seems to have changed; St. Vincent (Annie Clark), ranked 26th by Rolling Stone in their list of ‘250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time’, is still not a household name. If girls do play guitar, they are often pushed into the solo ‘singer-songwriter’ bracket as opposed to lead guitarist. To have a band in which neither the lead guitarist, rhythm guitarist, nor bassist is a man is extremely rare. Rarer still, to be taken seriously as a rock band without a male member, and as band singing about feminist themes when 43% of the British public (and 52% of Gen Z) say ‘we have gone so far in promoting women’s equality that we are discriminating against men’ (Kings College London). If critics are going to point out class-based privilege, it is only fair to also draw attention gender-based discrimination too.

So, instead of dismissing The Last Dinner Party as privileged industry plants, let’s pay attention to their music. If we want to uncover what has made them who they are, let’s look to Nischevi and Roberts’ musical backgrounds of classical and jazz, and Morris’ and Davies’ literary inspiration. They cite Kate Bush, Queen, Florence and the Machine, and David Bowie as influences. They met at university in London, and became friends attending gig at the celebrated venue ‘the Windmill’ in Brixton. They are extremely talented, clear in their vision, and have worked hard to produce an album so good that their critics are forced to fling labels at them instead of finding fault with the music itself.

Image Credit: DORK

By Cosmo Adair

To idealise: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart. (Martin Amis)

There’s a mobile-game called New Star Soccer in which you’re a ludicrously gifted footballer – the sort for whom ninety goals-a-season constitutes a meagre return. As well as the more obvious gameplay (football), you encounter a sequence of in-game choices. Should you cheat on your girlfriend? Or go to the casino with your teammates? Or buy a sports car? You face all the no-win quandaries of a thick and morally bereft noughties footballer. 

Tough as being an adulterous spendthrift with a celestial right foot might be, it’s light work compared to dealing with the press. For post match interviews, several boxes appear on the screen, containing trivial if absurdly meaningless quotes. The boxes flash quickly in a sequence. In spite of how sheerly unmemorable the phrases are, you have to remember the order before tapping it into the phone. It comes out with, say, ‘Over the moon, y’know, great feet for the big lad, um, game of two halves,’ after which the press will be delighted. But if you mix up ‘y’know’ and ‘um’, for instance, then the Fourth Estate will come for your head. It’s deliberately comic, whilst not unrepresentative of most football-speak, the language in which a person with as quick and sybaritic a lifestyle as Kyle Walker comes across as impossibly dull. Not all the dullness is in the tone; in fact, most of it’s in the language. Football-speak is cliché, whether that’s the monotone reflections of the above, or else the cringe-makingly brilliant commentarial flights of Peter Drury which, for all their purported originality, still brim with cliché. Football-speak is inseparable from cliché. I think that is why we are so fond of it. 

I had planned to write this in the snottier voice of one who abhors the debased language with which the mobs discuss their footy-ball. But after the most basic preliminary research, I encountered that ‘Football Clichés’ are a well-trodden topic of discussion. There is a book, a blog, a podcast, and even an article in The Guardian—all by the same man, Adam Hurrey, a writer at The Athletic. 

In his book Football Clichés, Hurrey finds them endearing. They have ‘unhelpfully negative connotations,’ given ‘[they imply] a lack of original thought, of stifling stereotype.’ He acknowledges that football-speak can be guilty of this at times. But, ‘For 150 years, it’s been somebody’s job to relay what happens within the ninety minutes of a match and, as that coverage now reaches saturation points, a reliable formula for succinct description of the sport has become vital.’ So, they become a cipher through which fans, players, managers and commentators can speak. According to Hurrey’s helpful definitions, ‘The ball is in the net’ means it’s ‘Not strictly a miss, but if ‘the ball is in the net’ there’s a fair chance the goal has, in fact, been disallowed.’ Or else, a ‘Host of opportunities’: ‘Hosts tend to be fairly undesirable collections of missed opportunities or absentees from the first team.’ Hackneyed phrases are instead condensed, efficacious means of communication.

But Martin Amis makes the opposite point. More generally, clichés are ‘dead words’; they lack ‘freshness, energy and reverberation of voice.’ A cliché undermines our capacity for sincere thought and feeling. This is true. If you doubt me, you need only call to mind ‘Take Back Control,’ ‘Get Brexit Done,’ or ‘Make America Great Again,’ which testify to the hypnotic effects of sterile language. Those phrases attest to how, in losing freshness, cliché becomes ‘herd writing, herd thinking and herd feeling’. Hurrey says something similar; only, he gives it a positive spin. In football, clichés act as a ‘leveller—enabling conversation between those relative novices who believe the problem with Arsenal is that they try and walk the ball in and those who feel it’s a little more complicated than that.’ In a sense, then, it’s a kind of esperanto—a simplistic, classless language with which the herd can low.

If you’re unsure of how to use ‘the herd instinct’ in a sentence, the Cambridge Dictionary gives the example of ‘In large crowds, such as at a football match, the herd instinct often kicks in.’ Cliché is the language of the herd and, for better or for worse, football is a herd sport (playing it, watching it, talking about it). The worst moments of following football are bound up with the herd (mid-morning drunkenness, beating-up the French or anyone for that matter), but so too are the positive ones. In the subjugation of self to the crowd, in the Dionysian loss of identity, you become a part of an intoxicatingly cohesive, classless whole, which doesn’t care who you are but rather who you support. 

Reviewing a book on Hooliganism in the 80s, Amis described how its author ‘wrote the book because he liked it, too. He liked the crowd, and the power, and the loss of self.’ To succumb to a crowd, you must shed the uniqueness of your language and your personality, which cliché enables you to do. So, whilst clichés are no less crass when they’re referring to football, they’re somehow less immediately negative. The herd, in football, is more ambivalent—neither good nor bad. Cliché is the same. To idealise: football is cliché. 

By Ida Bridgeman

I saw the first signs of spring one week, snow drops had opened. In the quiet of the early morning, glowing sky, and the river running strong with February rain, I walked past them on the banks – had they opened earlier? Had I not noticed? Some glimmer of hope and joy sparked inside of me, not that I wasn’t joyous before I saw them, but in that way your heart skips when you notice some small details of the beauty of the world. A Moldovan legend recalls a battle between Lady Spring and Winter Witch; Lady Spring pricked her finger and the snow beneath it melted and created a gentle snowdrop flower. This announced her reign over the world. People don’t plant snow drops in the way a rose garden is cultivated and shown off for the brightest colours, this is an unexpected and unprepared beauty. There are, of course, other flowers that bloom in winter but these are sturdy, and shrub like and dull the senses as we huddle down the path turning our face from wind and rain. These white drops form out of the scruff of a woodland floor and on road sides, they placed themselves into my sight at exactly the time they felt like it, prompted by some unknown feeling in the air that it was time for an introduction to spring.   

 It’s easy not to notice something has been absent until it appears again, a year after they were last here, so quiet and delicate aside the rushing of the river. The symbolism is blatant – new beginnings, hope, rebirth, perhaps the intricacy of creation and the delicacy of life. Plants have all sorts of funny meanings. Rosemary is for remembrance, buttercups can read your likes and dislikes and OH, the roses on Valentines. When did flowers become a symbol of love? Is it depressing that they die or a reminder of the fleeting nature of the everyday and the necessity to take in the colours and the scent whilst they are there? As for love, we look back to Greek mythology where the Goddess Aphrodite’s beauty was so great that red roses sprang up wherever she walked and became a symbol of love and desire, given in romantic gestures. 14 February involves less Greek Goddesses and more hopeful gents, on every turn of a Durham street, bouquet in hand ready to profess their admiration to their current sweetheart – same one as last year? Does it matter? Sorry, I’m not a sceptic of the validity of valentine’s love, I am merely pointing out the inevitability that each year, whilst the snow drops appearance is joyously unpredictable, the market square Tesco’s flower delivery on 13^th Feb is reassuringly inevitable. Much like Xanthe’s ‘three different types of cookie dough spread’ found on one shelf before pancake day. (‘A MODERN DAY LENT’, published Feb 22)  

There’s this desire in our human psyche to know, name and order everything. When I was young, my mother spent much of her gardening time returning to the house to quiz us on the colourful, sneeze inducing (ironic that a love of flowers is accompanied by hay fever) blossoms and buds. When we went away to school and university this game moved online until my brother discovered the ‘Picture This’ plant identifier app and the integrity of the quiz was at a loss. We were then expected to insert the appropriate ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ and ‘how lovely’ at pictures of colourful plants. I hope we can still appreciate them as much without knowing the Latin conjugations of a tulip.  

 I’ve spent summers days happiest filling my hair with flowers and sliding one through a button hole of anyone around me that will stay still for a patient second, whilst Van Gogh painted his Irises in the Saint- Rémy psychiatric hospital as an outlet, his way to avoid going mad. I think what gets me about February’s first snow drops is their delicacy. In most folk narratives their appearance has strong notions of death, the white petals like a corpse’s shroud, their drooping head sombre. They grow close to the ground, where the dead sleep, and they thrive in quite graveyards. Yet in the story of Persephone, the goddess of both underworld and of vegetation, she carries snowdrops to earth when she is allowed from Hades in spring. The flowers may have an appearance that nods towards death, but they bring the first signs of life to a wintry earth, a spark of warmth and excitement, a feeling somewhat like love itself, on that February morning.

By the time I am publishing this, however, time has moved on, as it so inevitably does in this fleeting space; no matter what moment, or which season you prefer, none can last long. The snow drops are passing, the door has been opened for the bluebells and daffodils, the real flowers of spring that grace Easter time in their bright yellow glory. That small moment of joy at Persephone’s bringing of spring has dissipated now, overtaken by other beauties in the world. I am sure I shall find the first snow drops in some other place, at another time next year, I hope.

By Xanthe de Wesselow

Expanding from its roots in ancient Pagan rituals, Lent has evolved into a sacred period within the Christian tradition. Manifesting itself as a 40 day period, it now serves as an engagement in special spiritual preparation of prayer, penance and abstinence in anticipation of Easter. Although modern interpretations are often associated with restrictive trends and fad dieting, such as the removal of any form of refined sugar (otherwise known as joy) from our lives, the Lenten season was traditionally a more rigorous religious observance characterised by a strict fast, broken only with a simple meal devoid of meat, eggs, dairy, and alcohol after sunset, accompanied by deep introspection and prayer.

Historically, it was therefore a necessary custom to deplete all existing supplies of rich, fatty products such as butter, milk, sugar, and eggs the day prior to Lent, hence Shrove Tuesday’s worldwide nickname ‘Pancake Day’. Ash Wednesday then arrives after sufficient ‘shriving’, or presenting oneself to a priest for confession, marking a significant tradition in preparation for the Lenten season. However, in today’s money, Shrove Tuesday has been overshadowed by commercial interests, as supermarkets and societal pressures now lead us to believe it should be a profitable day of excessive spending and materialistic home decorations that can be religiously documented on social media. The once meaningful observance has transformed into a commercialised phenomenon, where the true essence of the tradition, such as the allegories behind each ingredient, is often lost amidst the consumerism.

The irony reaches new heights as your local Tesco will fool you into stocking up on three different types of cookie-based spread one day, only to be bombarded by endorsements from a plethora of wellness influencers and Instagram gut health gurus the next, promoting kimchi and kombucha as essential Lenten ‘healthy habits’. Paradoxically, lest us forget the Easter eggs that have dominated the shelves since as early as January 2^nd, blurring the lines between seasonal observances and consumerist indulgence. It’s no wonder any form of New Year’s Resolution crumbles by the time Blue Monday arrives, yet another marketing ploy to capitalise on the wellness industry (but have you tried meditation?). Such is the absurdity of our commercialised culture, where tradition and spirituality often take a backseat to profit-driven agendas.

Lent, in its contemporary guise, appears like a slap in the face and a mocking reminder following as if to say, ‘your will power didn’t last very long then… fancy another go?’. This time, however, we are taunted by the tiny glimpse of promised bait dangling 39 days away, symbolised by mini-egg-infused delicacies and gold foil-wrapped bunnies. There is no denying it is bizarre. How, in two thousand years, has society transformed a period of quiet reflection into a trendy, competitive game of social media one-upmanship; a strategic rivalry of who’s giving up what? Even better if you are taking up something and actually sticking to it. I mean who does that?

So, in our body image, diet obsessed culture, we have come to see Lent as a period perfect for purging ourselves of something we think we can’t live without for just long enough. Then, when we’ve counted down the days and proved our virtuosity and self-will, we can reason with our inner voice to return to our pre-Lent addictions and maybe even binge them. The chocolate bars, coffee, alcohol, scroll holes and internet shopping can return once more, and even better, we feel justified to do it all in abundance because ‘you deserve it, you’ve abstained the whole of Lent!’. First, of course, there’s the chance to baske in the glory of virtual applause, as your Lenten sacrifice repeatedly merits itself under meticulously curated hashtags. It’s a vicious cycle of self-deprivation followed by indulgence, all punctuated by the invisible reward of a distant validation, a far cry from the 40 days Lent was intended to be. Nothing says spiritual enlightenment nor religious observance like an Instagram diary of temporary abstinence…

In our digital age, it has become increasingly fashionable to not only give up something for the Lenten season but also to take up new practices, many of which feed into the continually booming health and wellness industry. From committing to ‘40 sea swims’ or ‘40 days of yoga’, these endeavours are extensions to the popular New Year’s Resolutions that saturate social media each January. Whether we find ourselves embracing ice baths or daily stretching routines, we unwittingly become swept up in the Lenten frenzy, as it seems the most important aspect of these trends is to tell everyone you’re doing it (otherwise what’s the point?). Ultimately, the essence of Lent has been overshadowed by the need to showcase any such endeavour. Our younger selves might have often joked about giving up Lent for Lent. Now, I think we need to give up talking and digitally broadcasting about Lent. Perhaps then, the season would be one of growth and reflection should we want to participate, rather than a form of superficial self-validation.

Are we missing the point altogether? The Christian Church offers us almsgiving, prayer and fasting as the three pillars to focus on during Lent. In layman’s terms, we’re advised to give charity, thanks and abstain from food and drink for the 40 days that Jesus spent fasting in the desert and enduring temptation by Satan. Yet, here we are in 2024 taking a more self-absorbed approach than ever. We’ve moved so far away from personal reflection and spiritual growth that Lent is now more a spectacle of performative piety. Forget the sacrificial chocolate bar or glass of wine, it seems the public declarations and digital validation are what has become of this annual Christian practice.

By Cosmo Adair

James Marriott is a columnist and podcast reviewer for The Times.

The interview began with the ping of a notification: James Marriott has joined your meeting. Zooming, as we were, I can only write a head-and-shoulders portrait of James, framed by the glistening shelves of the Times’s bookroom. He wore a salmon pink shirt and a pair of large wide-framed glasses, which donnishly slipped down his nose as his conversation grew more energetic. His hair was half-messy, fine, placing him somewhere between the respectable columnist and the abstracted poet. But how to render someone’s physical presence when you’re interviewing them online? So, as I watched the recording and copied out the transcript, I scribbled brief, italicised stage-directions: As I ask this, he leans forward, rubs his eyes to tease out a thought, and then jolts up and bursts into enthusiastic speech. That captures all the reader needs to know: the charming, if unexpected, engagement and enthusiasm of a renowned writer speaking to a provincial, student magazine. 

Marriott grew up just outside of Newcastle, where ‘I really didn’t want to grow up … It felt like I should have been born down south, and that it had been a cosmic mistake that landed me there.’ He spent his time reading voraciously (‘novels, poetry, all that kind of stuff,’ including ‘a lot of Dickens novels’ and ‘a lot of Iris Murdoch’) and listening to formative rants from his Nihilist father, who spoke ‘about how human beings are all just collections of atoms and that we live in this materialist universe where love was just a chemical … That’s not, you know, the most optimistic way to be brought up.’ And so he passed his schooldays, pacing about the playground as he recited Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” (‘I was, unfortunately, pretentious’), and dreamed of moving south for university—his sights set firmly on Oxford, and having watched the Granada adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, ‘I’d convinced myself it was going to be, you know, befriending aristocrats and discussing poetry over port and driving around in vintage cars.’ On arrival, however, he was ‘hideously disappointed that people were normal’—in spite of which, he was resolute in enjoying it since if he didn’t ‘it would have destroyed the entire purpose of my teenage years.’ 

After Oxford, he hoped to ingratiate himself with Literary London since ‘at the time, it seemed like the most glamorous thing to write a book review for a national publication.’ But this took time. For three years, he worked in an antiquarian bookshop where he would ‘[sit] in monkish silence,’ cataloguing books.  During this period, he sent out poems and article proposals to newspapers and magazines until The Times took him on. Still there, he is a columnist, podcast reviewer, occasional feature writer, and a regular guest on Times Radio’s flagship podcast, Matt Chorley’s “Politics Without The Boring Bits.” His interview with Calvin Robinson (‘So you wouldn’t say that Enoch Powell was a racist, I ask, my incredulity doubtless signalling to him that I am a woke liberal of the most mindlessly ovine disposition’) and his feature “How I fell in love with Serge Gainsbourg (‘To anybody who has ever regretted being born on the pallid and puritanical side of the Channel, he offers an exotic vision of what might have been: semi-permanent drunkenness, a bohemian contempt for all shirt buttons above the navel, a career of chaotic offence-giving rewarded with public adulation’) cry out expectantly for an anthology of his writings. 

I’ve often found that what makes his columns distinctive is his tone. He has an excellent grasp of the ‘contemporary moment,’ all the while seeming rather uncharmed by it. He’s ‘a bit of a technophobe … sceptical that TikTok is particularly good for anybody and for people’s intellectual lives,’ and he worries about the ‘dumbing down of culture and people, and being passively accepted.’ Therefore, his columns can seem pessimistic—but isn’t that just the age? ‘The cultural atmosphere is pretty gloomy, and I know people have always thought this, but when you think Trump in America, the Environment, AI, massive tech companies, Biden losing his marbles, the Housing Crisis—it’s kind of reasonable to be gloomy.’ 

Fitzgerald once wrote that ‘the test of a first-rate intelligence … [is to] be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.’ I think that Marriott passes this test. He might not match the intensity of Fitzgerald’s clash of embittered cynicism and wilful optimism, but he shows a persistent attention to both sides of an argument: ‘I think that whatever you’re writing, you can accept that for any opinion which can be expressed in the space of a thousand words, there’s an opposite opinion that’s equally true and can also be expressed in a thousand words.’ 

Talking about AI, he shows this: ‘My original take was that I think the crucial thing will be that people do care about the fact that something comes from another human being. We have these strong intuitions about art and literature coming from human beings, and the whole point of art is to connect us with human beings.’ His interview with John Gray—whom Marriott paraphrases as arguing ‘disaster looms, AI’s going to replace everyone’s jobs, we’re all screwed’—led him to a more despairing position. That was eased by a conversation with someone who had read his article who said that ‘there’s this kind of mindless optimism about what the technology’s capable of.’ Now, he thinks that ‘we shouldn’t extrapolate infinite potential from something that can just write plausible sentences.’ 

Despite his concerns ‘about how natural text will be to people’s experience in the future,’ he remains a passionate advocate of literature and the literary. Last year, he found himself in the somewhat absurd position of being criticised by The Bookseller for arguing that some books are better than others. ‘The thing is, I find it really hard to believe that many people do actually believe that all books are the same. I think that’s also just not true either.’ This leads to the “Culture Wars” and the recent tendency to value a literary work according to its political message as opposed to its aesthetic triumphs. But this isn’t new: ‘In the 30s there was an awful lot of incredibly pious and tedious stuff written about, like, the importance of the voices of the workers and the voices of the working class … and it’s really fascinating, as well, if you go back to 19th century Russia, there was so much stuff about, was Turgenev a Liberal, or what exactly was he? Was such-and-such a Socialist? … I guess the kind of unifying theme of those moments is that those are societies which were undergoing dramatic social and political change.’ In any case, the freedom of expression—whatever the climate—is one of his most deeply held values: ‘I think that whether or not you’re on Salman Rushdie’s side is historically a pretty good test of whether you’re a serious person or not.’ 

But the anxiety and self-criticism of a “Culture War” can benefit a society. ‘It is easily forgotten that the intellectual history of the West is much more turbulent than we remember,’ and that the narratives we often study of a ‘West [that] has been unruffled and triumphalist in its progress’ simply isn’t true. He discusses Isaiah Berlin’s “Three Critics of the Enlightenment,” a book which discusses Giambattista Vico, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Johann Georg Hamann, all of whom cast doubt on the Enlightenment’s relentless progressive march. ‘From the very beginning, [they were] furious and righteous critics of all the Enlighten—, of the self-confidence of the Enlightenment, about Western Civilisation, the superiority of Western Civilisation and I think it’s—I mean, Herder, especially, can at times sound like he’s writing now [and] tweeting. [Herder says] how it’s ridiculous to think that Western Civilisation is superior to any other civilisations [since] all civilisations are fitted to this particular people and this particular place.’ Therefore, ‘doubt and self-criticism have always been in our culture.’ And whilst it’s ‘really annoying to live through it when it erupts as viciously as it does now … Perhaps it’s reassuring to think that this may just be a part of our culture in a liberal society. You know, we’re not in a Totalitarian state, we can’t impose one viewpoint on everyone. Everything will be furiously criticised because that’s what happens when you have free speech and liberal values.’ 

There are many on the hard right who view this doubt and self-criticism as a sign of decadence. But people have been saying this for what seems like forever—with both Gibbon in the 18th century, and Spengler in the 20th, trying to link cultural decadence with the ‘decline and fall’ of political or imperial orders. But Marriott takes a much more nuanced view, considering it to be endemic in the cultural lifecycle: ‘I do think that society does go through periods of cultural efflorescences, of brilliant innovation, followed by decadence, followed by renewal, and I think that we are all living in the aftermath of the sixties, which was one of the kind of extraordinary cultural moments in all of history.’ Referencing Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society—which argues that culture hasn’t developed since the 60s, since ‘you can still go and see the Rolling Stones, follow the same superheroes’—Marriott then ponders whether the “Culture Wars” are simply ‘a part of us throwing off that inheritance and making something new.’

As I shut my laptop and shuffled down to Greggs for lunch, I thought of how I had come away with a renewed sense of Marriott and his ideas. I found he wasn’t as much of a pessimist as he self-deprecatingly claims to be. He’s more of a sceptic, perhaps: what he distrusts, I think, is the notion that any political or cultural viewpoint is wholly correct, and that if there has ever been such a woolly thing called ‘Truth’, it can only be found in the interaction of opposites, in conversation, and—perhaps, most of all—in reading.

By Maisie Jennings

#THEFUTUREISNOW is the hashtag encapsulating this year’s theme for DUCFS – ‘The Age of Inception’, and in its 41st year of running, it’s clear that the show continues to blaze a constantly apexing upward trajectory. This year’s campaign also marked the conception of the DUCFS Thread magazine, and DUCFS Launchpad, an independently funded outreach platform focused on developing creative opportunities across communities in the North East. Creatively and charitably, DUCFS emphasises new beginnings, as well as inciting lasting change into the future. In many ways, there is a multiplicity to the theme of ‘inception’ that concerns the show; it implies a futuristic creative vision, but also a direct engagement with expanding the growth and potential of what is already Europe’s largest student fundraiser. 

Molly Mihell, Vice-President and Creative Director, discusses the forward-looking ethos of DUCFS: ‘I’ve always been interested in looking ahead, in imagining where humanity may go and how innovation may continue to evolve, and I wanted to portray this exciting openness, breadth of possibility and process of constantly changing, developing, through DUCFS 2024’. I think this is a vision particularly resonant in the creative direction and production of walk releases and other promotional material – innovative graphics, dynamic video editing, and sleek visuals centre the creative potential of technology in a way that feels futuristic, elevated, and modern. As always, the amount of work and dedication that bring these shoots to life is astonishing – in having such a cohesive vision, the fashion and creative teams truly succeed in realising this fresh, futuristic take on this year’s campaign. 

Most importantly, DUCFS raises a phenomenal amount of money for charity. Last year, the show, and everybody involved, raised a staggering £221,000 for Rainbow Trust – a charity providing emotional support to families with a seriously ill child. This year, DUCFS is fundraising for CALM (Campaigning Against Living Miserably). CALM is an organisation that campaigns to open conversations about mental health, provide support for people who are struggling, and unite the UK in the fight against suicide. It’s a cause with poignant, heartfelt relevance as suicide becomes the leading cause of death in young people, and DUCFS aims to raise enough money to fund two extra phone lines on CALM’s suicide helpline. The efforts made by models and exec to fundraise for this life-saving cause in the lead up to the show have been phenomenal. There have been marathons, sponsored silences, 24 hour podcasts, and plunges into the freezing water of the North Sea – just to list a few of the brilliant ways the individuals of DUCFS fundraise. Dan Xiberras, one of the show’s 50 models, circumnavigated Palace Green for 24 hours – a massive testament to the enthusiasm and commitment to charitable causes that DUCFS fosters. 

In looking towards, and in many ways, inciting a bigger, brighter future, DUCFS continues to pioneer student fundraising and creativity. If you have managed to secure a ticket, I’m certain that there is, indeed, lots to look forward to.