A Scottish legend says cancel culture is over. Yeah right

The Herald Scotland

3 hours ago

He is not alone in his view. The comedian Ricky Gervais was getting his star on the walk of fame the other day and said something similar to Mr Millar. 'We've had a few weird years of cancel culture, people telling you what you can and can't laugh at or talk about,' he said. 'But we pushed back, and we won. I'd love to claim that it was due to my unrivalled genius, but truth be told, it's a cocktail of luck, persistence and a little bit of pushing against the tide.' So that's two big figures in popular culture telling us it's all over.
But let's take a minute shall we. For a start, it's significant who's talking here. As I say, Mr Millar sold his empire to Netflix for £25m and Mr Gervais is also someone who's not short of a bob or two. Same thing with another public figure who's spoken out against cancel culture: JK Rowling. The mob did bay for her, and some people did stop speaking to her, and there were calls for her to be ejected from Harry Potter, her own creation. But in the end, like Gervais and Millar, money is a shield and Rowling was too rich to cancel. It's a good thing that Gervais and Millar have spoken out against cancel culture, but their relative immunity to its effects perhaps makes them a little too prone to declaring that it's over before it actually is.
Because it isn't, not really. You may have seen the story about the comic Andrew Lawrence who's had shows cancelled after making a joke about the horrible incident at the Liverpool football parade. This is a sensitive area, and the joke was crass and in my view not funny. But I've been in many audiences where the comic has touched on sensitive areas and made jokes that are crass and in my view not funny, and people laughed. And if we cancel comedians for doing jokes some of us don't like, we risk ending up in a place that is, to use Mark Millar's words, safe and benign. Yes, it's awkward to defend someone like Andrew Lawrence but that's how freedom of expression works: it's awkward but important.
There are other problems with the idea that cancel culture is over. One of the most high-profile casualties of it all was the comedy writer Graham Linehan, whose career was effectively ended because of his opinions on trans issues. I spoke to Graham about what happened and the effects were absolutely real: jobs fell away, virtually no-one in the media would return his calls, and his plans for a musical version of Father Ted ended when the producers asked him to stop talking about the trans issue and he refused. What's remarkable now is that we can see his opinions were not unusual and are shared by the majority of the population and yet they ended his career and there's still no prospect of Graham working again in British comedy. So if cancel culture is over, it isn't over for Graham.
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But even if we accept the premise that cases such as Graham's are becoming rarer, or will no longer happen, that doesn't mean cancel culture is finished because its effects do not always operate openly. I was speaking to a friend of mine last week who's working on a play that's about to tour the country and he was telling me about the pressures he's been under over script, casting and production, specifically on sex, gender and race. It's clear that anything that strays from the progressive viewpoint sometimes called 'woke' is out of the question and might jeopardise the future of his project and so he finds himself self-censoring to ensure he keeps his job. It's happening in theatre, and it's happening in movies and telly too. And the result? Safe and benign.
Perhaps the phrase we should use to describe the phenomenon here is self-cancel culture although it amounts to the same thing as cancel culture because most people don't have as much money as Mr Millar or Mr Gervais or Ms Rowling and worry about losing their job, or the chances of promotion. You see it in academia too, where there have been plenty of examples of overt cancel culture, with speakers de-platformed or forced to withdraw because of protests and so forth. But equally insidious is the self-cancel culture that goes on, the self-censorship.
One of the academics I've spoken to about this, Neil Thin, honorary research fellow at Edinburgh, told me how it works. What happens in practice, he said, is that because of overt, aggressive or denunciatory attacks on individuals, people at universities start to monitor and edit their own behaviour. They see what's happened to other people and think 'I don't want that, I'll avoid that topic'. And so freedom of speech is affected and damaged. As I say: self-cancel culture.
Doctor Who (Image: PA)
It's all of this kind of stuff, plus more recent and more overt cases such as Andrew Lawrence, that make me very wary of accepting Mark Millar's argument that cancel culture is over. What may help his case a bit is that the sort of people who've toed the line are starting to struggle. I'm thinking of the recent Snow White movie, which was heavy with cancel-proof progressive messages and bombed spectacularly at the box office. Same with the recent series of Doctor Who: on message certainly but also on course for the worst viewing figures in the programme's history. And it has now, probably, been rested. Or to use a better word: cancelled.
The point is that the situation is probably a lot more uncertain than Mark Millar thinks it is. He may be right that the world is more relaxed again and we're about to see more dangerous stuff on screen and in print. But then again, someone who was working on a television drama being made in Glasgow was telling me last year about their Christmas party and how they'd been issued with a list of do's and don'ts including 'no swearing' and 'no sexual advances'. Relaxed is hardly the word I would use.
But let's end by being hopeful shall we. The cultural moments that linger in my mind aren't the cosy ones, they're the crazy ones. The moments where I've been appalled or amused (or both at the same time). The best and most exciting television, movies and books are also much more likely to emerge from a culture of freedom than they are from a culture of fear. So let's hope Mark Millar is right. Let's hope cancel culture is over and writers have indeed regained their freedom to produce edgy material. Let's hope.