THERE IS a great deal to ponder in 2011. It is a decade since the attacks of 9/11. John F Kennedy was inaugurated 50 years ago. Nirvana's seminal album Nevermindreaches its 20th birthday. Hang on. Where's the groaning reissue of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home? Research reveals that the best film in that science fiction series has attained its quarter century.
There’s more. Martin McGuinness, Fine Gael’s favourite reformed guerrilla, has been commenting on the upcoming centenaries of both the 1912 Ulster Covenant and the 1916 Easter Rising. Unless I’m making this up, McGuinness, if elected, plans to dye the Liffey orange for the former event.
Such is the current enthusiasm for anniversary porn that periodicals often indulge in a class of cultural gazumping. Enthusiasts for the works of Charles Dickens could be forgiven for wondering why the Guardian has already begun celebrating the great man’s bicentennial. The happy event does not, after all, arrive until next year. Well, you don’t want to be the last broadsheet to launch Fagin pencil sharpeners and Mr Gradgrind lunch boxes.
Are you already coming down with nostalgia fatigue? Get used to it, buddy. We are about to drift into a veritable swamp of date-related celebrations. The initial worrying whispers emerged earlier this year when newspapers noted it was 50 years since the Beatles first played at the Cavern Club. To paraphrase Philip Larkin on sex, the 1960s properly began in 1963 – "Between the end of the Chatterleyban/ And the Beatles' first LP". No period stimulates the reminiscence receptors more vigorously than that supposedly Arcadian decade. Expect the avalanches of documentaries – keep your calendar free, Will Self – to begin in about 15 months' time.
It would be mean spirited to deny that many of the social changes wrought during that period were profoundly desirable. Without the hard work of selfless heroes such as Mary Quant and Terence Conran, we would, as I understand it, still all be wearing cloth caps and gabardine raincoats. Wooden football rattles would seem like unimaginably entertaining diversions. Our Bakelite radios would hum with the crazy sounds of Perry Como and Mantovani. Nobody wants that.
But the reverence for the 1960s is faintly nauseating. The era was supposed to usher in suspicion of authority and intolerance of “the establishment”. What happened, of course, was that the supposed rebels rapidly formed their own hairy class of establishment.
Lord help any contemporary wiseacre who says anything disrespectful about Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan (not that I would dare). A Greatest Generation stalks the streets bemoaning the lost opportunities of the golden dawn.
At any rate, whatever the virtues of that era, nothing is going to deter the media army – in which this writer serves proudly – from launching a massed assault over the next decade. It should be impossible to predict the television schedules from a distance of nine years, but if BBC2 doesn’t offer us a Jimi Hendrix evening on September 18th, 2020 then I’ll eat my own Stratocaster. (You surely don’t need to be told the guitarist died on that day in 1970.)
Fifty years of Sergeant Pepper.Fifty years of the Velvet Underground and Nico. Fifty years of the Doors's annoying first LP. And they're all coming your way in 2017 alone.
The orgy of remembrance has become so hysterical that media watchers now find themselves recalling the earlier celebrations with some affection. I wasn't alive for the assassination of John F Kennedy. But memories of the 25th anniversary still stir the blood. Ah, they don't make documentaries like that any more. The 10th anniversary of the 10th anniversary of Nevermindwas nowhere near as enjoyable as the real thing. Back in 2001, you got nice long features in Rolling Stoneand cover art you could actually hold and smell. Now, it's all digital downloads and ethereal online gibberish.
What the heck is going on? Until the middle part of the last century, such anniversaries tended to pass by with only the mildest of kerfuffles. As recently as the 1970s, you could get through a magazine without locating any conspicuous references to some event that happened a certain number of decades ago.
The zip and zing of the digital age appears to have worn away our belief in the value of the contemporary. This is no age of amnesia. To seem properly worthwhile, a book, play, record or world event must reach a significant birthday.
The craze may not last. Nothing more effectively turns you against gin than getting vomity drunk on several buckets of that fragrant spirit. The glut of 1960s anniversaries might just kill the remembrance industry stone dead.
Until then, savour the celebrations coming our way on December 14th. It’s the 100th anniversary of Roald Amundsen reaching the South Pole, you know.