I’m fed up with feedback

Why should I review my new toothbrush?

Matthew Norman

In contemplating the toilet-plunger ordered this week in response to a blockage, as so cordially invited to do by Amazon, the mind flashes back to the quagmire football pitches of lateVictorian England.

On reflection, I’m not convinced that the above makes any sense. It could well be that I’ve been at the magic mushrooms, and am in the midst of a mildly hallucinogenic reverie.

If it isn’t the ’shrooms, the point may perhaps concern the touching tale of the Corinthian Casuals football team and the penalty kick.

The Casuals, the story goes, were so outraged by the unfairness of shooting unchallenged from 12 yards out that in protest they deliberately missed all penalties.

I mention this vignette from the glory days of British amateurism only because those days, hugely against the odds in a mercenary era, have returned.

We’re all of us amateurs now in the singular field of written criticism.

I write with the bitterness of snooker star Shaun ‘the Magician’ Murphy, complaining a few years ago that a young Chinese who beat him had no business being on the green baize at all since he was an amateur.

For decades, I covered a slew of disciplines (radio, TV, restaurants, movies) as a professional critic. The career was exquisitely tailored for one as unremittingly idle and mediocre as myself. Those who can do, as someone clever almost expressed it. Those who can’t skulk behind a computer screen sniping facetiously at those who can.

For occupying this very bottom rung of the showbiz ladder, the ultimate ambition being mildly to entertain a commuter for a maximum of two District Line stops, I was well-paid.

Criticism was not only lucrative back then, but easy. For the reviewer of daytime telly, for instance, it was no tougher challenge 30 years ago to ridicule Eamonn Holmes and Anthea Turner than it has lately been to mine the captivating saga of Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby for mirth and merriment.

These days, the work is both unpaid and infinitely harder. What in the name of sanity are you expected to write?

The requests come by email, from one firm or another, all the time. ‘Your opinion matters to Spotlight Oral Care,’ reads the subject line of one recent droplet among the Niagaran cascade. ‘Thank you for your recent purchase. We hope you love it as much as we do.’

Do I, though? How am I to know? And, even if I do, should I? Wouldn’t it be presumptuous at best, and at worst positively creepy, for the mere buyer of an electric toothbrush to love it as much as its creators? Isn’t that just as unnervingly weird as loving a stranger’s child as much as its parents?

You wouldn’t want to admit to that in a review. To confess to an unnatural besottedness with a toothbrush would double as a formal application to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

Still, duty calls. So for what it’s worth, while sidestepping the question of love, my opinion is this. The electric toothbrush works fine.

But that’s not going to win any prizes, is it? New Yorker magazine filmreviewer Anthony Lane might be the finest critic writing in the English language today. Even he would struggle to chisel a Pulitzer nomination out of a toothbrush.

‘Hey, M J Norman,’ goes another request, this one about drinking glasses, ‘will you please take a minute to share your experience?’

A minute indeed. It would be the work of months, or years, or a lifetime, to unravel whether, to quote one of various questions, ‘the product meets your expectations’.

On the surface, it does. One expectation was that these tumblers would hold liquid without leaking – and they do. Until the email arrived, I naïvely assumed this to be the sole expectation.

Evidently, however, given the plural, there must have been others. Did I subconsciously expect the tumblers, if rubbed in a certain way, to unleash a genie? Or to be the catalyst for a neobiblically alchemical reaction that transforms water into malt whisky? I simply do not know.

‘Hi M,’ begins another of today’s communiqués, this from Amazon, either flirting with over-familiarity or confusing me with the late Bernard Lee, or possibly Judi Dench, ‘your package has been delivered. How was your delivery?’

How was it? Well, it wasn’t The Godfather, or the tasting menu at L’Enclume in the Cumbrian town of Cartmel, or Brideshead Revisited. It wasn’t even Phillip and Holly desperately faking mutual tolerance on the sofa.

It was identical to the last 973 deliveries. Some wildly over-pressurised, minimum-wage work slave rang the doorbell, and scarpered back to his van within the 3.27 seconds before I answered the bell, charitably leaving the parcel on the doorstep as an enticement for any passing tea leaf.

As for the plunger mentioned in that faintly psychedelic first paragraph, beyond reporting that it worked as advertised, I find myself in grave need of a psychic version to clear the feedbackwriter’s block.

what was a thank-you letter?

The earliest surviving letter from Winston Churchill was a handwritten note to his mother.

In 1882, aged seven, he wrote to thank her for his gifts of ‘soldiers, flag and castle’.

The painstaking italic penmanship of the very young Churchill later gave way to the easy, flowing script of a man who dashed off handwritten thank-you letters most days of the week, as can be seen among the million items in the Churchill Papers.

Handwritten thank-you letters have made their mark in every civilisation. Persian Queen Atossa wrote the earliest surviving one in about 500 BC.

Before a national postage system and the launch of the Penny Black first stamp in 1840, the cost of receiving any letter had to be borne by the recipient, rather dimming the thoughtfulness of any thanks-giver.

By the 1860s, the penny postal system was booming. With up to 12 collections each day in Victorian London, you could

what is second-screen content?

Second-screen content is stuff you watch while simultaneously looking at your phone. According to one report by Google, three-quarters of British people – and 93 per cent of young people – now watch TV in this way.

Or should that be don’t watch TV? It’s more common to use, say, Keeping Up with the Kardashians as general room ambience, something to have on while you scroll through TikTok. Or a Premier League match as mood music while you place bets on other, more exciting matches. Nothing has our undivided attention any more.

Don’t shake your head. I bet you’ve become embroiled in the family WhatsApp as slugs mate slimily on Wild Isles. Or looked up an interesting rose varietal featured on Gardeners’ write to thank your hostess of the night before, sprinkle the note with lavender water and have her reading it, scent still fresh, by the time she sat down to midmorning coffee. Even with the invention of the typewriter in 1868, it remained infra dig until well into the 1930s to type any personal correspondence, perhaps especially a thank-you letter.

As a nation, we used to write thankyou letters for everything: a Christmas present, a dinner party the night before, or even just a thank-you for a little favour. Like the simple two-liner from Marilyn Monroe to a German swain in 1962: ‘Thank you for your champagne. It arrived, I drank it and I was gayer. Thanks again. My best, Marilyn Monroe.’ Nowadays, most people under the age of 30 wouldn’t know how to start tackling a handwritten thank-you letter. My 21-year-old daughter would, because she had a cruel and unusual mother who forced her to sit down every Boxing Day and write to thank relatives. The main rule was to ‘get over the page’. As a result, she has beautiful, huge and loopy penmanship.

In 2022, an M&S poll showed that only nine per cent now send handwritten thank-you letters, compared with 20 per cent ten years before. Email, WhatsApp, SMS and other digital methods have erased the pen. There are even apps that can now ‘hand-write’ for you.

Still, in a busy world, that same 2022 poll showed we are ever more alive to the ‘pro-social wellbeing benefits’ of gratitude. What says thank you more eloquently than the ritual of finding paper/ card/ envelope/ stamp/ pen, crafting your best copperplate, sprinkling some wit and sincerity, getting over the page, sealing it with a loving kiss and walking to the post box?

In April, when the price of a stamp went over £1, the final writing was on the wall for the posted thank-you. Still, consider the investment. £1 and a few minutes’ writing to thank someone for a gift will reap exponentially better presents from the giver in the future.

Susannah Jowitt

World, only to become lost in the thorns of Instagram. Or perhaps you cannot watch Question Time without tweeting about how annoying Fiona Bruce is.

It’s not your fault. The finest minds of a generation have worked extremely hard so that we all exist in a state of permanent distraction and are thus more susceptible to their malign moneymaking schemes.

It’s surprising just how invested many TV producers are in the idea of this multi-front assault. You’d imagine that if you were, say, Netflix, you’d want people to watch Netflix. Apparently not. ‘What the streamers want most right now is “second-screen content”, where you can be on your phone while it’s on,’ one screenwriter complained to the New Yorker recently.

She is one of thousands of Hollywood TV writers who recently went on strike in America over low pay, intolerable conditions and a general feeling of being messed around.

The so-called Golden Age of TV that produced high-quality shows such as Mad Men and Game of Thrones is over. The streamers have figured out that most viewers don’t want novelistic complexity. They want something that isn’t too hard to follow, while you’re bidding on eBay or completing a Wordle.

That’s why the streaming giants (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Disney+ etc) pay top dollar for classic 1990s shows such as Friends, Seinfeld and The Simpsons. And it explains innocuous Netflix fluff like Emily in Paris. It’s non-event TV. It’s ambient TV. It’s second-screen content.

Meanwhile, you just know some Californian money man is currently looking at those striking screenwriters and wondering, ‘Why not get AI to do the writing and be done with it?’

Richard Godwin

We used to love people talking rubbish, from Edward Lear to Monty Python. It’s time for an

absurd revival, says Piers Pottinger