How Nasty Were the Noughties?

The allegations of rape and sexual assault against Russell Brand — which he strongly denies — have led people to look back through his long, often obnoxious career and his history of unpleasant behaviour towards women: gloating about having sex with Andrew Sachs’ granddaughter, asking Vanessa Feltz if he could have sex with her and her teenage kids et cetera.

I think we should be careful here. If he’s guilty, this behaviour is certainly telling. But there’s still a major qualitative difference between this sneering boorishness and the criminal accusations he faces. There are a lot of boors who are rapists but there are a lot of boors who are just boors.

Still, the memory of these gruesome episodes has inspired broader condemnation of the kind of noughties culture Brand came up in. “The noughties,” one author writes:

Pete Doherty. Russell Brand. Heat magazine. Loaded dropping any remaining pretence of irony. Chris Moyles. The Weakest Link. Nuts and Zoo. Big Brother. Channel 4 generally. E4 generally. Ricky Gervais generally. “Ironic” racism. Witless pranks.

A lot of the implicit scorn is deserved. Hell, I wrote a book that was largely concerned with the sort of tabloid prurience, hypocritical moralism and mindless celebrity culture that you had to wade through if you were young at the time. (It’s called Noughties and it’s on sale here.)

In some ways, Britain in the noughties was a limp imitation of the US in the nineties. Jeremy Kyle was a sort of bargain-basement Jerry Springer. Chris Moyles was a kind of flea market Howard Stern. Tony Blair himself was a somewhat Clintonian figure, even if he turned out to be far more dangerous. Landfill indie was at least a more British phenomenon — raking through the bones of 80s post punk and 90s Britpop. It would be far easier to critique modern puritanism if it hadn’t been such a vacuous age. Popular culture presented a sort of gurning hedonism that stumbled towards the financial crash without a particular reason to exist.

But are we really so well-placed to judge? People talk about “lads mags” as if men leering over women’s breasts is such a shocking relic of a more medieval time when wall-to-wall rape fantasies and fauxcest porn attract tens of millions of browsers every day. Loaded sounds quite innocent in comparison.

Besides, frankly — and I’m referencing the entire discourse here rather than one’s bloke’s tweet — any account of noughties misogyny that leaves out the systematic rape of hundreds of northern teenagers, and the blithe indifference of the establishment, isn’t worth the pixels it’s published in.

Young people enjoy more hedonistic and nihilistic entertainment nowadays than they did in the noughties. We just don’t talk about it much. Living in such a fragmented culture insulates us from people who, in some spheres, are fantastically famous. Pete Doherty was a shambling narcissist who stepped over a dead man’s body while fleeing the building that the bloke had mysteriously fallen from, for example, but some of the musical icons of Gen Z enjoy gloating about the deaths of young murder victims. You don’t have to wring your hands about it (wringing hands is generally a waste of time). But it makes smug presentism hard to sustain.

I suspect a lot of the bashing of the noughties is coming from people who are quite embarrassed about the jokes they used to tell. Nothing necessarily wrong with that. I think landfill indie was largely shit but I enjoyed “Same Jeans” in 2007. Still, I suspect that the self-righteous stridency of the cockwomble can reflect a certain guilty overcompensation.

Besides, there is plenty of nastiness nowadays. We just work harder to frame our nastiness as virtue. This went on in the noughties as well. In 2002, people had a lot of fun shouting at Jade Goody for being an idiot on Big Brother 3. In 2007, people had a lot of fun screaming at Jade Goody for being a bully on Celebrity Big Brother 5. Turning a dim 25-year-old from a miserable background into a figure of national infamy served no purpose except to make a lot of people feel good about themselves by slagging off someone else.

Makes ourselves feel good by slagging off other people is a national sport these days. Find it déclassé to harass celebrities over their sex lives? No problem! Harass them because they were mildly problematic. Realising that it was a bit cheap for Jeremy Kyle to hector random people over their drug habits and affairs? No problem! Hector random people for saying things you dislike. You can still be nasty! Just sublimate it into a performance of political virtue and you’ll be fine.

It’s easy to say, I know, but the answer to the oafish provocations of the noughties wasn’t frantic moralism but creative and incisive provocations. The answer to its braying herd mentality wasn’t moblike censoriousness.

Come to that, the answer to landfill indie wasn’t poptimism. But I’m getting a bit old to say things like that. After all, I remember the fucking noughties.