The unspeakably tragic incineration of Grenfell Tower and the deaths of so many men, women and children precipitated any number of news items concentrated on the proliferation of similar high-rise housing-units during recent decades. This catastrophe opened our eyes and our minds to the thinking of post-war town planners and architects eager, it would seem, to substitute pleasing aesthetics for the brutalism of a Brave New World devoid of soul, elegance and greenery. Most of us can picture a typical ‘artist’s impression’ of a New Town or housing estate from those times so we’ll readily recall the token saplings sketched-in to suggest a bright, new future living hand-in-hand with Nature. Concrete jungle? No, no, no, not at all. The far-sighted, go-ahead pioneers moving into these exquisite, fully-appointed apartments would experience a luxury life-style just minutes from shops, leafy avenues, schools and a main-line railway station (Kings Cross just 25 minutes!)
Such projects – and there were many – exemplified a philosophy among those who determined how many of us lived and still live, and deliberately stuck two fingers up to the true designers of the past. Whether or not there was overt, conscious politicization at play here I am loathe to venture and probably under-qualified to discuss, but the cheap and ugly, simplistic school of thought which blessed us with monstrosities like Paternoster Square, the Lloyds Building, The Shard, the South Bank’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, Grenfell Tower and thousands more bleak and unimaginative structures throughout the country, reflect an effort to fundamentally alter a nation’s view of itself. It was American architect, Louis Sullivan, who espoused ‘function before form’, helping spawn an ugly – if functional – world-wide rash of bland accommodation and office blocks. While there can be no material proof, this phenomenon has unquestionably determined how large sections of the population feels about itself: insignificant; unimportant; rudderless; unambitious and lacking in spirit. It can do nothing else. The wise and wealthy live in the Cotswolds.
The same dystopian mind-set has, for many years, influenced the art world to the once-unimaginable point where Tracy Emin’s ‘Unmade Bed’ and Damien Hirst’s pickled cow (form before function, admittedly) are revered by the influential trend-setters and are valued in the hundreds of thousands if not the millions; and have you listened recently to what they pump out on Radio 1? Far from being a healthy, youthful back-lash against the previous generation’s pop-fodder, it is the ‘musical’ manifestation of an age where elegance, beauty, education and CLASS have been demoted in favour of less cerebral considerations. I need not describe it; we’ve all recoiled on receiving an earful of Bad Ass Gangster Rap or Moscoman.
What has this to do with us anglers? Well it seems to me that fishing, too, has been callously dragged-in by soul-less profiteers to the same utilitarian world created by those who seek to smash convention, and I think they know it. Even a money-motivated fisherman will be aware of, say, carp-fishing’s glorious history, its pioneers and the values they held, but to hell with that…let’s dig a lake, fill it with thousands and thousands of fish and let the punters compete for a cash prize. And they do!
Many match fishermen now flock annually to extract animals from perfectly circular, featureless holes in the ground; no logs, no bushes, no snags, no reed-beds…just a giant water-filled bowl. These contests represent quite perfectly the totalitarian thinking that now permeates society and seeks to eradicate individualism and personal flair. Having researched the extent and locations of similar fishing-puddles in England and Wales it is clear to me that the influence of the Brutalists has got a good grip even within the world of angling. There are commercial fisheries fashioned as parallel ‘canals’ specifically dug to facilitate pole-fishing in the far margin; holiday venues with uniform huts and chalets lining dead-straight banks, each with its own, standard fishing platform and waters where prizes are awarded for the capture of Old One Eye; match-men bagging-up on identical ‘F-1’s: Function before Form.
Again, I think these ‘fishery’ owners – and those who fish their creations – are aware of their sacrilege but I don’t for one moment suggest they are consciously part of a political conspiracy to drag fishing down to one, low standard for the masses! I’m equally sure they don’t feel “insignificant; unimportant; rudderless; unambitious and lacking in spirit‘, but I do suspect they have allowed themselves to be sucked-in by what I see as the current doctrine of mediocrity: the devaluing and desecration of what was always considered unassailably good, right and proper. I DO believe they have lost something.
For most of my life, anglers were complaining about the lack of fishing programmes on TV then, if memory serves correctly, we got The Golden Maggot followed by one or two other unsatisfactory representations of our hobby: the Great Fishing Race, was it? Mercifully, and like manna from heaven, we and the general non-angling public were blessed (no less) with A Passion for Angling, possibly the best portrayal of angling-life we have ever seen on our screens. Filmed by Hugh Miles and featuring Chris Yates and Bob James, we were taken into another, timeless world where nothing else mattered; a place where you could smell the boggy margins and the water-mint from your armchair in suburbia. ‘Passion’ captured it all, to the point where there was little else to say about the pure joy of freedom, fun and fishing. Jeremy Wade, too, has done his considerable bit to widen peoples’ perception of what fishing is all about.
More recently, however, we’ve had a run of Chav-Culture programmes clearly promoting a brutally distorted view of angling to the less thoughtful among us: what was the idea of teaming-up with a former ‘glamour’ model, Mr Macey? And what’s with the back-to-front baseball caps, the shouting and the mock fights? Well, it’s an attempt to ‘sex-up’ fishing; to create and appeal to a new market. This isn’t cynicism here; time and money simply aren’t pumped into a television production with no profit-motive. As with the infamous ‘Pile of Bricks’ and Emin’s ‘My Tent’ these portrayals of angling pander to the base instincts at a time when the world badly needs a large shot of ‘quality’…an appreciation of musical composition, the written word, genuine artwork and well-designed buildings – why do I happen upon The Life Story of Michelangelo or The Building of the Taj Mahal only on BBC 2 and at 3 in the morning? Shouldn’t these be on CBBC with an appropriate spin for youngsters?
To summarize: I do not believe or even seriously think there might be some sinister, Marxist scheme at play within the world of fishing; neither do I think there has ever been an official political plan to dehumanize us through hideous architecture, worthless ‘art’ and tuneless ‘music’. These products are the results of individual political mind-sets determined to make their marks purely through being different, anti-establishment, revolutionary and, with money to be made by those with the means of convincing us all of their worth, we are unwittingly drawn-in to their way of thinking and they are only too willing to be exploited by the auctioneers. Sotheby’s will laud the artistic merit of a sixteen-foot alabaster turd; Radio 1 will hype-up the talents of talentless gangster-rappers and the architectural trend-setters will (or did) sell us the dream of ‘function before form’. A distant but appreciable by-product of this non-culture is, I believe, the new commercial fisheries.
I am optimistic though. Have a look at these and let me know which version of fishing you prefer. Both bring enormous pleasure to people but I know which style I prefer.
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