Some good things from 2020? Yes – there are some
Viola Davis as Ma Rainey (© TNS via ZUMA Wire)
One of the most interesting cultural highlights of 2020 has been the explosion of books on 20th century philosophy. Among the best have been Wolfram Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians: The Invention of Modern Thought, 1919-1929, about four great German-speaking thinkers Benjamin, Cassirer, Wittgenstein and Heidegger; The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle by David Edmonds; and Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers by Cheryl Misak.
There has also been the emergence of a fascinating new genre: family memoirs which reveal the secret stories of how parents who survived the Holocaust, including Ariana Neumann’s When Time Stopped, Simon May’s How to be a Refugee and Martha Leigh’s Invisible Ink (both out in January) and, from a different perspective, The Ratline by Philippe Sands.
On a very different note, there are a new group of comics on the block, including The Pin (on Twitter, Audible, Radio 4 and in the West End with their much-acclaimed show, The Comeback Play), American comedienne Sarah Cooper with her amazing Trump lip sync on TikTok, Kieran Hodgson’s one-man version of The Crown, which has gone viral on Twitter, and Michael Spicer’s political adviser in the room next door. What’s striking is how original they are, doing something new with Trump and Zoom culture. The other thing that’s striking is how they have left mainstream TV comedy in their wake. Social media has led the way in 2020.
The BBC’s Play for Today season, celebrating its 50th anniversary, was introduced by John Wyver’s superb documentary, and accompanied by a British Film Institute blu-ray boxset and season of screenings. It was a reminder of some brilliant single dramas from the 1970s, including Country by Trevor Griffiths, Alan Bleasdale’s The Black Stuff and Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party.
The National Theatre put on a season of their best recent productions – NT Live – on YouTube to remind viewers of the joys of live theatre. The range was thrilling, but perhaps most striking was the number of powerful female performances: Rattigan’s Deep Blue Sea with Helen McCrory, Gillian Anderson in Streetcar, Sally Cookson’s Jane Eyre, Simon Godwin’s thrilling Twelfth Night with Tamsin Greg as Malvolia and Phoebe Fox as Olivia.
In the year of BLM it was a terrific year for Black actors from Hamilton on Disney, Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, plays like Small Island (based on Andrea Levy’s novel) and Les Blancs in the NT Live series, Viola Davis in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Lucian Msamati ‘s superb performances as Salieri in Amadeus and in Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads.
Some of our best-known British and American journalists resigned because of the rise of “woke” intolerance: Suzanne Moore from The Guardian, Bari Weiss from The New York Times and Andrew Sullivan from New York magazine. At the same time, the BBC got into a tangle about whether to ban old TV comedies because of alleged racism, especially the cardinal sin of “blacking up”.
On a more positive note, publishers have continued to translate leading central and east European writers. Pushkin Press have led the way with new translations of Stefan Zweig, Gabriele Tergit and Joseph Roth, Penguin translated Mihail Sebastian’s Women and New York Review of Books brought out a new edition of Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk.
It has been a bad year for mainstream news coverage, especially the BBC. 2020 saw the launch of a potential new rival, Times Radio, which turned out to be a damp squib –the Times without its best writers, and the announcement of GBTV. Perhaps the greater threat to traditional journalism will come from new online magazines, including Unherd, TheArticle, The Browser and Tortoise.
Finally, 2020 has been the year of the expert and the triumph of medical science. In a big year for politics, with the US presidential election, Brexit, the fall of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, the winners have not been the political journalists, but the doctors and scientists: the discoverers of new vaccines and new household names like Anthony Fauci, Professor Chris Witty, Sir Patrick Vallance, Sir Mark Wolpert and Sir Jeremy Farrar. All the media talk has been of populism, unreason and the new authoritarianism. But 2020 will be remembered for one of the great scientific breakthroughs of the post-war period and the triumph of reason. At the end of a hard year this is truly something to be grateful for.
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