Pedants' corner.

As we get our English news from Radio 4 and the Guardian and our Italian news from the Corriere della Sera we use television for entertainment rather than information. And in our case that means crime drama, ranging from gripping Scandinavian thrillers - The Bridge being the most recent -  to the lightweight Death in Paradise - Midsomer Murders with sunshine. Among them are two period dramas, Inspector George Gently set in the sixties, and chiefly notable for Martin Shaw's ludicrous attempt at a north country accent, and WPC 56 set in the fifties. Although a rather more engaging drama than Gently, last week's episode of WPC 56 contained two glaring anachronisms - and I think their presence says a lot about contemporary culture.
   First there was the repeated reference to the 'train station'. To anyone of my generation the expression sticks out like a sore thumb. I can't really remember when it replaced 'railway station', but I guess it can't have been before the early seventies. In my childhood one listened to the wireless rather than the radio, but the fact that I've never had an objection to that particular change of terminology  suggests it happened much earlier, probably in the late fifties when I was still young enough to see change as an unremarkable part of everyday life rather than as a threat to my known universe.
  The second, less glaring, error was finding a covertly gay man's  wedding ring in his pocket. In 1950s Britain men did not wear wedding rings. I first came across the practice when Ed Tonkyn got married in the mid-seventies. His wife, Uschi,  is German, and the fact that all my married male Italian contemporaries wear wedding rings suggests the custom was well established on the continent by then. However in the UK, even today, it is far from universal: my son-in-law was quite astonished when my daughter suggested they should both wear rings. He was only persuaded to do so because she claimed, erroneously, that I wore one.
   Why does all this matter? After all Shakespeare notoriously has a  clock striking three in the second act of Julius Caesar. I would suggest that was an entirely different matter: Shakespeare wrote for the public at large, and I would imagine the average Elizabethan was as ignorant of the fact that the ancient Romans didn't have clocks as I was of the fact that  horse chestnut trees only arrived in Britain in the 17th century. Accordingly, their appearance in Zinnemann's film of Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons neither spoiled my enjoyment of the film when I first saw it, in blissful ignorance of its botanical anachronism, nor subsequently when a fellow pedant pointed out the error. For I wasn't alive in the sixteenth century and accordingly couldn't feel affronted by a false depiction of an experienced reality. More importantly, for Shakespeare and Bolt the period in which their dramas took place wasn't the central issue: they were both concerned to retell profoundly important historical events which simply happened to take place when they did. The focus in both dramas was on the character of those engaged in the events.
   However, following in the footsteps of my fellow OE, Ashley Pharoah's, Life on Mars, WPC 56 foregrounds the period in which it takes place: the setting is as important as the fictional events depicted. It aims to highlight the differences between the 1950s and the present day. Unfortunately a considerable proportion of the people viewing the programme were alive during the fifties and will immediately spot the errors I referred to earlier, because they relate to the everyday life of the time, not some area of arcane knowledge.
  It would have been very easy to have avoided the mistakes by simply running the programme past some seventy year olds before broadcasting it. Just as it would be easy for Italian firms to avoid publishing unidiomatic and inept English translations of their Italian guide books, apps or webpages  by asking a native English speaker to check them before inflicting them on the English-speaking world. England isn't short of seventy year olds, or Italy of English ex-pats.
   But today we live in a world where everyone is an 'expert', tweeting his half-baked opinion or sharing it through FaceBook or some other variety of social medium. And the traditional media in a desperate attempt at 'relevance' encourage the dumbing down by trying to 'involve' their public. So articles in the on-line version of the Guardian are followed by 'comments' in which the semi-educated favour us with their mis-spelled and ungrammatical invective. Every morning Radio Three poses a pointless 'brainteaser' to which their listeners are invited to tweet their solutions. Every Sunday a listener is interviewed about why a particular piece of music appeals to him. Who, apart from his family and friends cares? I listen to Radio Three to hear music and be informed about it by experts in the field. Just as I expect anyone producing a television programme purporting to show life in the fifties to avoid obvious howlers.
  But when you can find out all you need to know about the fifties by going online and looking at Wikipedia why bother to consult a real live person? Especially as it would involve consulting the elderly, and, as we all know, anyone over forty-five is past his sell-by date in our brave new world.