Marking Time

"The nights are drawing in": it’s one of those expressions we inherit from our parents. It doesn't make literal sense - nights can't actually do anything - but we know that it means nights are becoming longer at the expense of days and that clocks must be set back an hour to compensate. In my childhood this simply involved father re-setting the clock on the mantelpiece and the watch on his wrist. Later it became more complicated and involved everybody in the house fiddling with the digital displays on a host of electrical appliances. Nowadays the internet takes care of them all - except for that old VCR that we no longer use.

Whereas the re-setting of clocks is an adopted practice which has its origins in the industrialisation of society, nights have got longer ever since Earth first orbited the Sun. In any case there are benefits which, in our household, boil down to being free to watch more TV without feeling guilty. In the last ten days we have watched the first 15 episodes of Breaking Bad - and we have been to the cinema a couple of times. As a consequence I now appreciate two things in particular: one is the extent to which made-for-TV series have successfully borrowed techniques from cinematography; the other is the advantage they have in being able tease out stories and develop characters over an indefinite period of time.

But they should be careful not to squander such an advantage, given the quality of competition in the cinema. One film in particular, The Selfish Giant, is a paragon of what can be accomplished in the 90 minutes format. To say that it is a story of a few days in the lives of a couple of pre-pubescent boys from poor families in a northern British town is merely to outline the structure. That it is a powerful commentary on the social consequences of capitalism and industrialisation is closer to a description of its scope and ambition.

Coincidentally there is an exhibition at the City Gallery, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, which resonates with the film. Jeremy Deller's assemblage of art and artefacts is essentially an exploration of the impact of the Industrial Revolution on popular culture. It reminds us of the origins of our present-day circumstances but it also comments implicitly on capitalism and industrialisation.  One exhibit is a poster displaying the rules of an early cotton mill which, shockingly, is no more than a tariff of fines payable by the workers in the event that any of them should happen to disrupt, in any way, the process of making profit for the employer. And just around the corner is an old clocking-in machine, the symbol of lifetimes sold.

But is this art? Consult Grayson Perry who, in the current series of Reith lectures, is addressing this very question imaginatively, amusingly and with an open-mind. Coincidentally (again) his work The Vanity of Small Differences hangs in the next gallery. It comprises a series of large tapestries which depict social mobility and the influence of class on aesthetic tastes - further evidence of our lives having been shaped by capitalism and industrialisation.

At the end of the week I visited Blackpool, a one-time village which the mill-owners of Lancashire developed into a holiday resort for their workers - not out of altruism, mind you. They built and owned the attractions which their workers paid to enjoy; they organised their mill shut-downs consecutively so that holidays were staggered. As a holiday destination it became fabulously successful but, now that its block of captive customers has disintegrated, it looks and feels like just another post-industrial town desperate for the clock to turn back.