Ouch.

If I wanted to be completely abrasive, I could just have written a Facebook status saying, “You should really stop obsessing about what I wrote on Facebook and find something else to do,” which is essentially me giving the finger to those I have most clearly upset. But no, I am typing a blog, using so much of my incredibly limited spare time (I have lots of spare time), labouring over my keyboard like an exhausted Victorian factory worker (because typing requires equal manpower to making steel) to produce the finest explanation man has ever known – it will make the King James Bible look like a children’s book.

I read the news a lot, either out of interest or my futile attempts to be with the times. It’s sort of my daily routine. I check the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, maybe see how far I can get through The Times website without having to pay for it, and then I see what’s trending on Twitter. So when you see the same subject appear over and over again, to be talked about in a way that seems over-the-top for a television programme, it starts to grate. If one of my favourite comedies were talked in a kind of fashion that mimics the end of the world nearly every week, it would be marvellous. And then you do some pretty elementary mental arithmetic, showing that the maximum potential audience is quite low due to the fact that the 5 in 6 of those who don’t have Sky and those who don’t subscribe to Netflix won’t watch it, believing either that it’s not worth switching to watch it or that the TV licence is quite enough each year to pay for television. It’s a minority programme, for which I personally believed that the promotion it was given was slightly unjustified. Considering the way that everyone went silent when Mad Men was taken off the BBC, and I liked Mad Men for its accuracy of the attitudes and events of the increasingly turbulent 1960s and the way that it influenced the direction of the show, it annoyed me.

The type of promotion it was given, I felt, was that akin to the release of a revolutionary new document which would have answered every question that philosophers and scientists have been asking since time immemorial. What the programme seemed to me was a bit of visual fiction, like most television programmes, no different to Sherlock, no different to Luther or any other drama made in the UK or the US.  I don’t know if it’s because American network television is becoming increasingly sanitised thanks to the boob incident by Janet Jackson, but it seems that there are some who seem to deduce the quality of a television programme solely on how much a cable network gives the FCC the two fingers. I’m not one for extreme violence, and the episodes that I watched had a lot of it, such as the beginning of one when one meth-riddled dealer punched his sidekick to death in a junkyard. If that is revolutionary, five-star television, we all need enlightening. Things are “revolutionary” when something becomes markedly different to the previous status quo. That is why we have the French and the American Revolutions and the revolutions that took place in Eastern Europe at the fall of the Berlin Wall: a huge change from a previous situation. In my opinion, what is revolutionary on television is our increased awareness of foreign-language television. The showing and success of The Killing, Borgen, The Bridge, Spiral, Inspector Montalbano and The Returned in the UK, a country intimidated by mainland European culture thanks to a half-inferiority complex, half-mild xenophobia, is revolutionary. And what is more, that these are shown to a much wider potential audience, as BBC Four, unlike Sky, is free, means that their impact will be much more felt, even if they appear at the moment to be undetectable tremors.

Of course, the elephant in the room is sneering. My status was sneering because I believed a certain contingent of the audience to be fools, fools because the show was the greatest thing since sliced bread, fools because they were the kind who thought literature can’t get any better than American teen literature – indeed, there is an increasing blur between teen and adult literature – fools, because they think that a hamburger with wasabi instead of mustard is cutting-edge cuisine. But my argument is that their sneering is made worse by the fact that they sneer at those who are barely above them in social status. You would probably find that their interests would largely match. And yet, they laugh at people with slick jaws, with southern drawls and drink sugary sweet ice tea, gently mocking them. There is a Colbert Report about a small town in Kentucky holding a gay pride parade in respect of their mayor, the town’s hairdresser, who is gay. The voiceover is satirical, mimicking the Republicans who worry so much in vain about a fall in traditional values. But the audience weren’t laughing at the voice but the whole southern stereotypes. They howled; I was disgusted. On the other hand, sneering is not that bad. Indeed, it is human. Dickens sneered relentlessly at the middle classes, mocking their unrefined tastes, just as I did regarding that certain contingent of their audience. It doesn’t mean that I’ll become one of the most famous writers in the English language, but everyone is capable of it, even the son of someone who ended up in debtors’ prison.

I hope I managed, at least half-heartedly, to clear some things up. But I should probably finish by saying that most of the world’s greatest cultural contributions are made in hardship. The Italian Renaissance was the by-product of ruthless rulers like the Borgias and the Medicis. Tolstoy wrote under the authoritarian tsardom in 19th century Russia. The best in French literature was from the Second Empire, as was the reconstruction of Paris, which produced some of the most amazing cityscape. The Moscow Metro and its opulent decoration was the brainchild of Stalin. The 1970s produced a plethora of stunning music and film when the western world was in industrial and political strife. And all I can say is that so far, as the squeeze on living standards continues, and as various political scandals continue to be leaked into the public eye, where we increasingly live in fear of the dying out of the middle-class, is that I am generally disappointed. I am so disappointed. And all of what we are producing culturally overall is not good enough, and you should know that.