Force Midgeure

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1. The Lyndhurstian Episteme

It was a strong enough conceit: a television show in which ex-Ultravox frontman and Band Aid sidekick, Midge Ure, reports from areas stricken by extreme weather, social unrest and natural disasters. There’d be live links from erupting volcanoes, hurried sprints from gunfire and flood-terrored paddling down steep ravines. Wherever catastrophe struck, there’d be Midge, asking the questions that everyone else was too afraid to ask: ‘Do you think this is a message from God? What did you think to pack? Is this the windiest it’s ever been?’ It was thought that the emotional turmoil of fleeing for one’s life would transform the answers to such questions from the banal to the sublime, and that—as the original pitch document states on nearly every single page—‘the searing truth of the human condition would rise up and reveal itself in atavistic form’.

Ure’s primary objective in each episode was ‘to send disaster, down the tellypipe, screaming into the mind of the nation’; or as the conclusion to the document’s ‘Funding Issues’ section phrases it: ‘It should be as if the diminutive Scot has roared up on all fours, thrust out his pelvis, and barked the word “Nightmare!” into children’s dreams.’ To modern ears, of course, such ideas sound abhorrent—barbaric, even. But it’s important to remember the context in which these sentences were first committed to paper.

**

The year 2016 was a troubling time for the television industry in the United Kingdom. The 2015 Christmas special of I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! had ended spectacularly badly, and the choking to death of Strictly Come Dancing’s Brendan Cole during the final Bush Tucker Trial had cast something of a pall over the festive listings. A competitor to the end—and egged on in no small part by a furiously bug-guzzling Dave Benson Phillips—Cole had tried to eat his dessicated horse penis in one gulp. Looking back at the tapes, it’s clear after just a few seconds that Cole is in real trouble: his normal dancerly poise replaced by an arrhythmic leg-flinging which, according to Declan Donnelly at least, ‘lacked finesse’. Soundtracked by the metronomic bug-hunger of DBP—‘Crunch!’—Cole finally fell to his knees—‘Crunch!’—throat like a long frog—‘Crunch!’—and slowly expired on the forest floor.

The next day’s headlines were deemed by many to be in rather poor taste, with The Sun plumping for ‘Brendan and the Black Samba’, The Mirror offering up ‘Cole Cha-Cha-Chokes on Cock’, and the MailOnline opting for the unusually pithy ‘“King of the Jungle” Dave Benson Phillips “Gets His Own Back” on I’m a Celebrity! rival, Brendan Cole, After Strictly Star CHOKES TO DEATH on HORSE P**** Live On ITV1 (Video)’. Bruce Forsyth was also said to be ‘disgusted’ by the Daily Star’s headline ‘Didn’t He Chew Well?!’

In spite of the bitterly cold weather, mourners flooded the gates of the Coles’ Buckinghamshire home with flowers and cards; and there was even a ‘24-hour Dance Tribute’ in the offing—until, that is, the event’s principal advocate, Louie Spence, was laid low with what’s described in his medical records as a ‘badly snapped back’. Celebrity tributes for Cole poured in from the likes of Eamonn Holmes (‘What?’), Gary Rhodes (‘Christ!’) and Handy Andy (‘He died as he lived.’); and even Katie Hopkins took the time out to appear on Sky News to say ‘I’m glad the convict’s dead.’

Yet despite this public anguish, private interest in the footage of Cole’s ‘Dick-sphyxiation!’ (The Sunday Times) continued to grow, and soon enough the internet was awash with what many early adopting Redditors were calling ‘The new “One Pound Fish”’. In the space of just a few days, a censored YouTube video of the incident garnered over 70 million views, and completely unexpurgated clips were doing similar or better business on LiveLeak. On Twitter, the hashtag ‘#ColeCock’ was number one in the UK for seven days, with many in the know suggesting that it would have been longer still were it not for (false) reports concerning Nelson Mandela’s January 1 resurrection. And on Facebook more than 1,000 groups were established with the sole purpose of watching, sharing and discussing Cole’s demise.

As 2016 began, therefore, there was a certain luridity at work in the public consciousness: a suppressed, macabre vibration, a rustle in the bushes. Or as noted social historian Reginald Peall phrases it in his now seminal text, The Untied Kingdom (2020): ‘In early 2016, there was something of an elephant in the room, and that elephant was caught watching a snuff film, and had a suspicious bulge in its enormous white pants.’ (32)

Some of the country’s foremost intellectuals tried, of course, to discern the reasons behind this unusual social malady, but none was wholly successful. Gustave Herrera’s widely circulated treatise, ‘Enough’s e-snuff: Halting moral decline in early 21st-century Britain’ (2016), argued cogently for a reading along social estrangement lines, suggesting that in a country so at war with itself over issues of class, welfare and race, a shareable clip of gratuitous horror had become ‘the one great leveller, a social panacea’ (2); Shaun Chapman made the case in ‘WWJD?’ (2016) that a lack of regular churchgoing was to blame, noting that ‘even Herod the Great and Judas Iscariot would wince at the debasement’ (12); and celebrated racist and cartographer Marco Raccuia took aim at immigration, telling anyone that would listen that ‘there was none of this prior to the Empire Windrush’.

For most, though, in truth, Cole’s expiration caused only ripples of concern. This was, after all, a country grown tired of outrage: Mary Bale had been and gone; Shilpa Shetty, likewise; and perhaps had the rest of Q1 passed without incident, then #ColeCock, too, might have slowly ebbed away. But it just wasn’t to be. In the five weeks following Cole’s ignominious end on IACGMOOH!, British television underwent a series of calamities unparalleled in broadcast history. Peter Sissons described it—yelling through his letterbox—as ‘a fucking shitstorm’.

First it was loveable greengrocer Gregg Wallace who fell to the hex, slipping on a stray blob of John Torode’s aioli and accidently deep-frying his arm up to the elbow. The aioli was intended as a punchy accompaniment to a plate of peixinhos da horta, a traditional Portuguese dish that Torode had ‘spiced up’ for one of the early rounds of Celebrity MasterChef. The dish was almost ready, in fact, when Wallace leaned in for a closer whiff and saw his hand yawp off anglewise towards the bubbling Lincat 400. Unable to undo his forward momentum, Wallace dinked his hip on the corner of the workbench, spun one-eighty, and then tipped ever-so-slowly backwards. Indeed, the grocer’s rearward motion was so slight as to be almost imperceptible. As Will Self later noted in his widely acclaimed Tableaux (2021):

“This was a moment of fierce intensity, yet perfect stillness, a moment fraught with le venir, yet inescapably now, a hotly gravid moment: taut, puissant. This was Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans writ large, a (non)experience of the absolute other: part (t)error, part love; the awe-ful majesty and vitality of a secular daemon; the rigid, blank wonder of it all. This was the numinous, the grin of God, drawing ‘out to light the shadow of death’ (Job 12:22).” (34)

Wallace’s eventual collapse was arguably less artful, however—coming as it did, all at once. It’s not for nothing that the incident was frequently discussed alongside Paulo Coehlo’s evocative image of dam failure in By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994), where the author writes—metaphorically, on the potency of love—that ‘if you allow a tiny crack to form through which only a trickle of water can pass, that trickle will quickly bring down the whole structure, and soon no one will be able to control the force of the current.’ (31) On Newsnight, Mark Kermode went so far as to label Wallace’s fall as ‘uniquely Coelhoean’, although he was called a ‘protuberant ragdoll’ by Germaine Greer for having done so; and elsewhere amongst the commentariat there was talk of the Ruhr Valley, the Koshi Barrage and of Eric Coates. And it’s not difficult to see why: Wallace went in a heartbeat from serenity to explosion, falling with such ferocity that he had neither the time nor the wherewithal to prevent catastrophe. For the sake of propriety, the grisly specifics of the incident are omitted here, but it’s worth noting that the resulting scream was loud enough to disrupt proceedings in nearby Clerkenwell and Shoreditch County Court, where a man in his 50s was being tried for ‘troubling ducks’ in Wenlock Basin.

Exactly how footage of the incident reached the internet has never fully come to light, although many still suspect Michel Roux Jr. of having had a hand in proceedings. According to some reports, one of the show’s Assistant Directors had racked up enormous gambling debts to the two-star Michelin chef, with a game of Roux’s own design called ‘Where’s the egg?’ allegedly to blame. Following Roux’s fractious departure from the BBC in 2014, he’d apparently used this debt as leverage to continue to influence decision making at the highest level, and had successfully blackmailed the unnamed AD into stealing and distributing the digital files. (YouTube ‘truther’ Dylan Avery has even gone so far as to suggest that Roux was responsible for the ‘suspiciously late’ addition of aioli to the show’s menu.)

Tittle-tattle aside, though, once made public, the video portraying the grocer’s oily mishap went viral in an instant, and this time with far less of the public handwringing that had accompanied the #ColeCock phenomenon. Even the related hashtags speak to the public’s growing blitheness, in fact, with Twitter suddenly awash with tweets tagged #oilbetthathurt, #friedgregg and #aioliwannabewithyou (the latter of these a result of a series of YouTube remixes of the event set to Dusty Springfield’s 1964 hit). Some surmised at the time that this change in the public’s attitude was due largely to the fact that, unlike Brendan Cole, Wallace hadn’t actually perished as a result of his injuries—even if he had been left ‘perma-slinged’ (as the Daily Express phrased it) like Count Duckula’s slow-to-heal chicken-nurse, Nanny. But such theories were scotched when just three days following the #friedgregg debacle, Nicholas Lyndhurst was fatally sucked into a jet engine and society went into rapturous meltdown.

For the majority of scholars assessing the sociomoral shifts of early 21st-century Britain, the ‘Lyndhurst Affair’ (as it has since come to be known) is regarded as ineluctably climacteric. Indeed, Ben Crumpler suggests in Lyndhurst & After (2018) that it is ‘our duty to regard post-2016 morality in chiefly Lyndhurstian terms’ (344), going on to note that a failure to do so is ‘not only culturally myopic, but also ethically unscrupulous in the extreme’ (346). The conclusion to Crumpler’s lengthy monograph is especially emphatic on this point, in fact, and is often cited because of this as the ne plus ultra of proto-Lyndhurstian ethico-social onto-epistemology. As Crumpler writes:

“Were Michel Foucault still alive and writing today, then I think we would find a hastily written addendum or two in the latest, revised edition of The Order of Things (1966). Since if it is true, as Foucault notes, that ‘[i]n any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed silently or invested in a practice’ (168), then surely we are, now, bearing witness to the thunderous upheavals of the Lyndhurstian episteme. Children born a decade hence will have neither the knowledge nor even the possibility of knowledge of what came ere: their very being will be Lyndhurstian. Foucault’s ‘philosophical laugh’, that silent laugh—that wordless, stifled laugh that comes from thinking ‘without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking’ (342–3)—will be seen (which is to say: not seen) within a mode of reflection that seeks, impossibly, to contemplate beyond itself by way of itself. To think in non-Lyndhurstian terms is already fantastically difficult; very soon, it shall be hopelessness itself.” (734)

The reaction to Lyndhurst’s demise was nothing short of extraordinary. The story dominated the news for weeks, and as with Wallace’s downfall, there was a barely concealed, febrile delight at the heart of the rolling coverage. Indeed, it is probably truer to say that if with Wallace we found a nation beginning to wrestle with its newfound fixation, with Lyndhurst we saw a nation unabashedly flaunting its deviance, like an inveterate public masturbator with hours to live. This idée fixe manifested everywhere, and before long the grisly image of Lyndhurst being ground into mauve soup was so widely circulated that it started to function like some kind of Jungian kollektives Unbewusstes, a subliminal archetype of horrortainment that steadily remodelled the neurotransmitting pathways of the national psyche.

Even those appalled by the public’s reaction to Wallace’s misadventure found themselves seduced by this newer, more nauseating demise. People spoke of nothing else. It was an event that brought together estranged families, ameliorated inner-city gang violence, and reduced Prime Minister’s Questions to what Andrew Marr described as ‘tedious millpond politics’. Lyndhurst came to be seen in time as a vehicle for kinship, a cultural Lichtung in which human relatedness was unconcealed. Former Archbishop Rowan Williams saw the event as ‘a deus ex machina for our troubled times’; Aled Jones thought it likely that Lyndhurst was ‘actually Jesus himself’ (Songs of Praise).

Here, though, we run the risk of romanticising what was, in truth, a time straining under the weight of its own contradictions. Peace broke out in the unlikeliest of places, yes, but it was a peace brokered in unspeakable barbarity, a sacrificial peace—a זָבַח—that fed on what seemed so naturally opposed to it. Nicholas Lyndhurst, star of Only Fools and Horses and Goodnight Sweetheart, had overnight become the blended vessel for a nation’s hopes. But at what cost?

The suspicious circumstances surrounding the litany of celebrity deaths that occured in the days following Lyndhurst’s passing speaks, in part at least, to such a cost—especially in daytime television terms. Lyndhurst had barely begun to dry, after all, by the time that Bargain Hunt’s Tim Wonnacott was found, suffocated, inside an Edwardian grandfather clock, that Nick Knowles was ‘Drowned in emulsion by masked gang!’ (The FT), and that Michaela Strachan was ‘hauled to horizon by eagles’ (Springwatch) during the filming of an episode of Countryfile. Criminality was suspected in each and every case, but such was the public’s Dionysiac bliss that any criminal investigation into, say, the brand of glue used to seal shut Wonnacott’s clock-coffin, or the location of Strachan’s final resting place, felt unpatriotic and traitorous—perhaps even criminal itself.

Such were the ethico-judicial implications of the Lyndhurstian episteme: that which was previously deemed unlawful was now lauded as a social analeptic, a just means in service of a worthy end. In the May 2016 edition of the Cambridge Law Journal, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, the then Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, described this malady as a shift ‘from jurisprudence to jurisprurience’ (432), and bemoaned especially the fact that ‘large sectors of law enforcement [were] equally rapt by this mass hysteria’ (444). The chances, therefore, of an inquisitive constable choosing to follow the milky-white prints encircling Knowles were exceptionally low. It just wasn’t in the public interest.

By now, though, celebrities up and down the alphabet were rightly terrified, with many cancelling public engagements and avoiding television and film studios. Those with the means retreated to CCTV-monitored boltholes and fortified estates, others locked themselves into panic rooms and stockpiled navy beans and vodka. Previously trusted PAs and aides were dispensed with, and only immediate family were granted arms-length access. It was during this time that Fern Britton reportedly chose to pay £250 a week to live in the High Security Unit of HMP Belmarsh (The Guardian). Phillip Schofield, meanwhile, took it upon himself to ‘brown up, claim Native American ancestry and relocate to Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico’ (Slate).

Indeed, such was the paranoia within the once benighted beau monde that it led to a new entry in the DSM-6: a psychological disorder known as ‘celebrity paranoiac hysteria’. Carol Barnes’ groundbreaking PhD research on the condition was, in 2019, the most cited academic work in Great Britain, and she was even invited on to The One Show to discuss her work, where she was grilled relentlessly by a frightened holographic projection of Lucy Siegle.

Barnes’ principle case study, however, was not Fern Britton, nor even Phillip Schofield, but rather the curious and grisly case of former newsreader Natasha Kaplinsky, whose emaciated body was discovered on Glaisdale Moor, Yorkshire, at 5 a.m. on Tuesday March 14, 2016. The circumstances surrounding Kaplinsky’s death remained opaque for several weeks, largely because no evidence for foul play could be determined at the scene—even when foul play seemed, frankly, inevitable, given the prevailing atmosphere. It later transpired that Kaplinsky, spooked by a suspicious 3am telephone call from an unknown number, had packed a bag and made good her escape, travelling in disguise from London to Middlesbrough by train, and then finally taking up residence in the Arncliffe Arms, a remote village pub in the heart of the Yorkshire Moors. This all took place around the time of Wonnacott’s passing, and Kaplinsky’s plan, according to her diaries, was to lie low for a few weeks in what she supposed was a safer, less metropolitan area. The landlord of the pub appeared not to recognise her, and the locals were ‘too busy playing shove ha’penny’ (Barnes 41) to take too much notice of the new arrival—despite the newcomer’s broad Teesside accent, designed, apparently, to throw potential assassins off the scent.

Before long though, Kaplinsky’s diaries reveal a growing paranoia, catalysed in part by the pickling of Alexander Armstrong in a nearby Darlington printworks. Over the course of just a few entries, Kaplinsky goes from bland ruminations on the quality of the pub’s toilets (‘adequate’) to monomaniacal ramblings about the short-order cook, who had, apparently, ‘had the temerity to ‘ask [her] to dance’. Kaplinsky writes:

“11.30 p.m. He must know—that dishrag! He’s seen me on Strictly. Either that or I my accent’s slipping (unlikely). What’s planned? Something awful. Something poetic. I’ll be flown to a war-torn region, killed, and then reported upon. I’ll be thrown from Big Ben at 9 o’clock. I’ll be shot by Nicholas Witchell. ‘Would you like to dance?’ Would I like to dance? I’ll kill him. I’ll fucking kill him. And Witchell. I can feel them closing in, slipping the noose, little by little, inch by inch, step by step. Vultures and jackals. Hyenas!”

Following this diatribe, Kaplinsky went quiet, and in fact details concerning her movements from this point onwards grow hazy. From CCTV footage, we know that she left the Arncliffe Arms at 12.32 a.m. on Saturday March 11, and we know, too, that she headed approximately south-west towards Rosedale Abbey, where reports of a ‘panic-stricken and heavily bearded woman’ came in from a local milkman. Between then and her discovery on March 14, though, nothing is known. The leading theory from York and North East Yorkshire Police is that Kaplinsky spent the next few days in foaming hysteria, scurrying from nook to cranny in an effort to escape her spectral attackers. Hastily scratched graffiti reading ‘Fuck Witchell’ and ‘Cook this!’ lend weight to such a supposition, as do one or two poorly constructed bivouacs in the outbuildings of a local farm hostel. What we do know for sure, however, is that Kaplinsky’s body was discovered the following Tuesday, and that she was ‘stretched thin through fatigue’ (The Scotsman)—or ‘strawberry bootlaced’ (ToonAttic), depending on your media diet.

Here, then, we encounter a celebrity death of quite a different order, and one which marks yet another turning point in the hectic first few months of 2016. Kaplinsky was not the victim of a ghastly accident (as was the case with Cole, Wallace and, most notably, Lyndhurst); and nor was she subject to a criminal conspiracy fuelled by collective sexual compulsion (viz. Wonnacott, Knowles, Strachan, Armstrong, et al); rather, she was what might be termed ‘cultural collateral damage’, a corpse marked by the toxic and burgeoning social simpatico of the Lyndhurstian epoch.