Simon Reynolds had an interesting piece in the Graun the other day about why he still blogs years after blogging passed its peak. There’s a number of interesting points it raises, and I might come back to discuss those, but I want to look in particular at a blog post he highlights in the article called “Wiki-Fear“:
I call it Wiki-Fear. You know what I’m talking about. That twinge of apprehension just before clicking open a Wikipedia entry. It could be a song, an album, an artist. Something new to me – or something I’ve known for years without ever knowing much about. The trepidation comes from experience: there’s a pretty good chance you’ll learn something that’ll spoil your enjoyment. […]
Thing is, as much as you might strive to separate singer and song, follow the adage “trust the art, not the artist,” you can’t unknow these things once you’ve learned them. I sometimes forget the details (my brain these days being sieve-like when it comes to input sticking) but a tinge of uneasiness clings on. And it’s easy to refresh that knowledge – it’s just a click away.
Despite all this, it’s still irresistible to go searching on the Internet, when you’ve just listened to (or watched or read) something new and exciting, or when you’ve rediscovered an old favorite about which you never knew much simply because there was nowhere to go to find out. And often the things you find out end up enriching your enjoyment. Or they are just interesting tidbits that sit harmlessly alongside the enjoyment. But always there’s the possibility that you’ll discover something nasty.
This, alas, was timely cos that very thing happened for me a couple of days ago with the passing of Richard Franklin, beloved of Doctor Who fans as Captain Mike Yates during Jon Pertwee’s tenure… Yates was interesting cos he was one of the reasonably rare secondary characters on the show to have a proper character arc, in that he gets hypnotised to kill the Doctor in “The Green Death” and the trauma from that leads him to become part of Operation Golden Age in “Invasion of the Dinosaurs”, leading to him quitting UNIT but redeeming himself in “Planet of the Spiders”. Popular character, popular actor, and Franklin’s passing on Christmas Day aged 87 obviously made a lot of people sad; it drove me to look him up on Wiki to see what else he’d done, and I found his career encompassed quite a number of things, theatre (acting and criticism), writing, various TV roles, Big Finish audios, a Star Wars film… and politics. As part of UKIP.
In fairness to him, his political career does seem to have started with the Liberal Democrats in the early 90s, a time when I gather the LibDems were still respectable before Nick Clegg took them into their incomprehensible coalition with the Tories, but he evidently shifted right soon enough; a few years later he was standing as part of the Referendum Party, a Eurosceptic mob that helped pave the way for UKIP, for whom he stood as a candidate in 2001. After that he formed his own party, the Silent Majority Party, and, well, “Silent Majority” is a phrase that should always set a cloister bell ringing about the person using it.
So yeah, RIP Richard Franklin, but Reynolds is right, unfortunately: you can’t unknow these things, and that tinge of uneasiness is going to linger now…