General knowledge
In my gap year on a local paper, I was sent to meet an 80-year-old woman who had ‘performed with Gertie Gitana!’.
Who? The Edwardian music hall was long dead. But, at 18, I at least knew enough – eg Marie Lloyd’s ‘A little of what you fancy does you good’ – to get by in an interview.
Scroll to 1994. Walking towards the house of Tom Courtenay in Putney, I came across Ed, the 20-year-old son of friends. ‘I’m off to see Tom Courtenay!’ I boasted, thinking he’d be impressed: he must have seen the film of Billy Liar, at least.
‘Who’s he?’ Ed asked.
‘Good grief – Tom Courtenay was the … Ken Branagh of his day!’ I said, naming the actor of 1994.
‘Who’s Ken Branagh?’
But these are vignettes of the past, when oldies could openly scorn deficient knowledge in the young. Why couldn’t they be more like our younger selves, finding out and mentally retaining nuggets of general knowledge?
Now everyone carries global information in their pockets, retrievable in a trice. Gertie Gitana? Tap tap! She’s on YouTube, singing Nellie Dean – and people have lost any notion of discovering stuff and remembering it.
Francis Wheen, reviewing John Preston’s book on Robert Maxwell in the Spectator, mentioned a podcast series about the Maxwells. The blurb began, ‘Everyone has heard of Ghislaine Maxwell. But there’s a shadowy figure who hangs above her who you likely don’t know: her father, media tycoon Robert Maxwell.’ Blimey, wrote Wheen. How could such an outsize figure be forgotten – in a mere 30 years?
When John Preston first proposed his book about Jeremy Thorpe, A Very English Scandal, to his publishers six years ago, Viking took a straw poll in the office: who remembered Thorpe? Nobody did. So now even publishers forget.
Little divides the generations more than reference points from the recent past that once united us all.
Valerie Grove
