1.18 And the Whimper Is...
Back in prep school, the Existentialist Club once named me “Most Likely To Be”
In 1972 John Berger won the Booker Prize for his novel G. He opened his acceptance speech by saying
“Since you have awarded me this prize, you may like to know, briefly, what it means to me. The competitiveness of prizes I find distasteful. And in the case of this prize the publication of the shortlist, the deliberately publicised suspense, the speculation of the writers concerned as though they were horses, the whole emphasis on winners and losers is false and out of place in the context of literature.”
When Frasier is nominated for A “SEABEES” award for Seattle radio broadcasting over two decades later, he responds by saying “YES! YES! WE GOT THE NOMINATION!!!” Frasier Crane and John Berger represent two ends of the spectrum of plaudits. While, for Berger, the baubles are merely a capitalist corruption of the importance of the literary process, for Crane they represent another step up the ladder of social status, a ladder he has spent his life trying to climb. While one retains a sort of critical nobility, the other degrades himself for the cheapest satisfactions. I suppose midway between Frasier Crane and John Berger lies the homespun wisdom of Marty, ex-cop and plain speaker. When Frasier and Roz consider greasing the wheels of the judges and buying little gifts by way of thanks and, shall we say,”encouragement”, he responds by saying
Look, I may not know anything about show business, but when you start sending out gifts to people who can do something for you, that's called bribery… if I had to give somebody a gift to get an award, it's not worth having. Might as well just go on down to the trophy store and buy one yourself.
John Berger did know something about show business; the stars may not be glamorous as Hollywood, but the literary world has its own system of starmaking and studios, and of prizes and bestseller charts. When accepting the award for the Booker Prize, probably the UK’s most prestigious award for fiction, he used it as an opportunity to launch an excoriating attack on the Prize’s sponsor, Booker McDonnell, who had built their fortune on indentured labour and exploitation in the Caribbean sugar industry. Berger said he wanted “to turn this prize against itself”, by using half of the prize money to fund a new work on the lives of European migrants, and by giving the other half to the Black Panther movement, to begin undoing the work of the sponsors. It wasn’t charity nor philanthropy, he said, nor guilt, but part of the same political and creative project, reshaping the subjectivity of westerners who had dehumanised themselves by their role in colonialism. “The issue,” he said, “is between me and the culture which has formed me”.
We can contrast Berger’s speech in a facile way to Frasier’s seemingly selfish response. But I think that’s too easy. The accolade isn’t just about status, about gloating; perhaps it’s also about recognition. When Frasier was originally broadcast, radio in the United States was going through something of a revolution in both form and political content. Traditionally, radio stations in the United States had broadcast on longwave AM frequencies. As technology and broadcasting infrastructure developed, radio stations, which were dominated by music programming, moved towards FM, which allowed for stereo broadcasting. As a result, by the 1980s FM stations now outnumbered AM, leaving bandwidth free on AM which broadcasters began to fill with a new format, at that point almost still experimental: talk radio. Frasier’s station, KACL 780, is one of those stations, filled with various talk presenters covering everything from religion to restaurant reviews and, of course, its prime time afternoon therapy phone-in.
The long-term legacy of the switch towards talk radio on AM helped fuel a boom in the political right in America. Long shows needed free form, charismatic and angry content. Both shock jocks and conservative commentators thrived on pumping out huge amounts of material. Right-wing radio “personalities” like Rush Limbaugh pioneered their style on this new format, in Limbaugh’s case at AM station KFBK in Sacramento, and were aided by the repeal of the FCC’s ‘fairness doctrine’, which demanded a balance of views of controversial subjects, under Reagan in 1987. They were also aided by new syndication efforts, allowing shock jocks like Howard Stern to reach a much wider audience than their home station’s transmitter could broadcast. By 1998, right in the middle of Frasier’s run, there were 4,793 AM stations and 5,662 FM stations in the United States. Just as social media has totally reshaped the way culture is produced by changing the technology in which it is disseminated, so the parameters of what radio sounded like, politically, culturally, the very form of the programming was shaped as much by the technical dimensions of the industry, by the need to produce a market, and by legislation, as by any creative decision to innovate in a certain direction. Understanding how the material and economic influences the cultural, and how the cultural can resist and push back, was at the core of much of John Berger’s writings.
Within such a profligate marketplace, stripped of regulations and pumping out increasingly aggressive and ignorant broadcasting, what does success look like? Is it any wonder that a canny producer like Roz, knowing the new marketplace and the material pressures that ratings would have on her career, invests so much in the acclaim of her industry peers. And what would it mean for a new broadcaster, attempting to increase the reach of his psychological advice, to be making a difference? The man, let’s remember, has risked everything in moving back to Seattle, starting a new life, and now, in his first year of broadcasting, has been nominated for an award by the city’s prestigious annual broadcast awards. In such circumstances, couldn’t Frasier’s excitement at nomination, and his desire to win, not so much as arrogance and social climbing, but as validation of his gamble, his desire to build himself a new life?
Check out my non-Frasier writing at utopian drivel.