Revelations

Warning: tech-talk ahead. If you're not someone who owns a printer, or has any interest in printing digital stuff, you should probably follow the diversion sign, and rejoin the blogway one post ahead. See you there: surf carefully.

So, it is no exaggeration to say that one of the great photo-related revelations of my life, up there with the day in the 1970s when I first peered through a friend's Olympus OM-1 SLR – "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken" – was the day in the late 1990s when I first ran a sheet of Epson photo paper through my brand new A4 Epson printer, a little print of a colour negative I had scanned with an Epson flatbed scanner (as you can tell, I was and still am a fan of Epson "peripherals"). As a first test, I'd put a sheet of plain paper through the printer, and was disappointed with the result: pale colours, with no contrast or real black, and badly "cockled" paper. But the result with a sheet of actual photo paper was stunning; I really could not believe how good it was.

People talk of the thrill of first seeing an image come up in a tray of developer, but – for me at any rate – that experience paled into comparative insignificance. Years of righteous struggle in the darkroom had never delivered anything as good, as easily, or as quickly as this, especially in colour. And all in broad daylight! I may actually have done a little dance of pure delight, at least internally. Woo-hoo!

Now, I know a lot of self-styled "photographers" never print their work these days. I suppose if you're only ever going to share work online that makes sense. But, to me, this is like a "musician" who never plays in public or with other musicians. I don't care how good they are: they're not really a musician, they're someone whose hobby is playing around with a musical instrument. It's an old-fashioned view, I know, but I still hold to the idea that the end product of "photography" is a print you can hold or hang on a wall. Which is why our house is full of boxes of prints, most of which will never be held by anyone other than me, or hung on anyone else's wall. Yes, I'm an idiot. So what's new? Besides, check out Richard Misrach's shelves of boxes; true, he does live in a warehouse... [1]

If I say so myself, over the decades I've become quite a skilled printer, able to make an attractive image on a piece of paper that closely resembles or even improves upon what appears on my screen. Getting that printing pipeline right – from camera to computer to printer – takes a lot of time, a lot of ink, and an awful lot of paper. Although nothing like the eternal Sisyphean cycle of torment, expense, and frustration that is the analogue darkroom. Which is why it's the guilty secret of so many of today's born-again film evangelists that, actually, they scan their negatives in order to print them digitally... But who can blame them? To quote Richard Misrach:

Digital has also allowed me to revisit earlier work and bring my analog negatives into the twenty-first century. By scanning my negatives, I can work on a scale and with printing options that were previously unimaginable.
On Landscape and Meaning, p.120

You can say that again, Mr. Misrach. I don't mean to mock anyone who chooses to work with a wholly "analogue" wet chemical process – even some cumbersome, time-consuming, toxic relic of days gone by like wet-plate or platinum printing – but these are surely the equivalent of an enthusiasm for tinkering with vintage cars or flint-knapping. You're making pictures, FFS! Why make it such an ordeal for yourself? Although it's true that this nostalgia for old artisanal imaging methods (and, worse, a fear of and prejudice against new ones) permeates the art world: if you're curious why I think this might be, see my posts Original Print and Original Print 2. 

The point I want to make here, though, is that ever since the day of that first revelation – woo-hoo! – I have made my prints on "proper" photo-quality papers. That is, papers coated with a surface optimised for top-quality inkjet printing, whether glossy, matt, heavyweight, Japanese washi-style, whatever: I've tried most of them over the years. They all have their qualities and advantages, although I've developed a prejudice against the very heavy "fine art" papers that resemble a stiff watercolour paper: they're ridiculously expensive, and behind the glass of a frame any tactile benefit of weight and texture is completely lost. As it happens, for most printing purposes I have settled on the papers sold by Marrutt, who offer a good range of surfaces and sizes (including custom sizes) at a very reasonable price: of these, their Archival Matt is my usual day-to-day choice.

But, in one of those accidents that lead to discoveries, I was experimenting recently with laying out patterns of multiple small images on the front and back of a sheet for folding and cutting into small booklets (what printers call "imposition"). Rather than waste any expensive double-sided photo-quality paper, I was using sheets from a 500-sheet pack of A4 "HP Everyday" plain paper, the stuff I use for printing letters, train tickets, etc., which has no special coating, and is a light 75 gsm in weight. In other words, pretty much the same sort of paper that gave me that disappointing, pre-revelation result.

Except that, this time, the printed results were excellent. Not stunning – the blacks were not deep black, and there was a very slight lack of contrast overall – but perfectly acceptable, on a par with what you'd expect to see reproduced in a book, say. Crucially, the result was exactly the same on both sides (did I say double-sided papers are expensive?), and "cockling" was minimal and quickly vanished. I was amazed – another revelation! – and actually quite excited by the prospect of printing some small folded items on what is, by any standards, dirt-cheap plain paper.

Now, I have yet to take this any further, and there are several important variables at work. For example, my current printer (Epson, obvs) is a pigment-ink printer, whereas that earlier model was a dye-ink printer. These very different inks may simply behave differently on plain papers. Also, it's possible that the HP paper is coated or in some other way prepared to give better results with inkjet printers, now that most people are using one at home for general-purpose printing. However, this particular paper seems not to be available in sizes larger than A4, so some exploration of the alternatives will be necessary. Sheets of A2 size would be ideal, though I'd settle for A3.

No prizes for guessing which is which

(the bigger print is on a glossy photo-paper which has caught some reflection)

Talking of prints, I was taking a look online at what had made it into this year's Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and was pleasantly surprised to see that photography is present in a much bigger way than in previous years. There are 194 items listed, 11% of the total show, and in the main it's good stuff, including quite a few items by names from the A-list of "art" photography – Helen Sear, Garry Fabian Miller, Stephen Gill, Terri Weifenbach, and Anna Fox, for example – or by names I recognise from recent books and exhibitions that got my attention, like Mandy Barker or Katja Liebmann.

I may be wrong, but something seems to have changed at the RA. In earlier years I don't recall seeing any photographs at all by "name" photographers, other than those by all-purpose multimedia artists like Cornelia Parker; it feels almost as if they had been invited to submit something. After all, they surely can't have been submitting work for years, only to be rejected, until – finally! – a judging panel had a taste for photography? Or perhaps these are artists who have all, by some synchronistic coincidence, been entered by the galleries that represent them, on the grounds that some exposure at the RA wouldn't hurt? (Unlike their prices... Ouch!) Whatever, it's good to see, and I might even enter something myself next year, despite my resolve – exactly one year ago – to stop wasting time and money on open exhibitions.

The prospects of success are always slim, of course, especially when the competition can be as stiff as this:

WTF? Entered, selected, badly framed, hung, and sold, at £2,200... The mind truly boggles. It's hard to decide whether this means there's hope for us all, or no hope at all... I will never understand this contemporary taste for the cack-handed.

Meanwhile, back here at ground level on planet Earth it occurs to me that people who are struggling with their printing might be interested in a few suggestions on how to get that camera-computer-printer pipeline straightened out. It's basic stuff, but sometimes it's the basics that need sorting out.

Bear in mind that I'm a cheapskate with an aversion to expensive kit. My screen, for example, is an HP 2011x that no "serious" photographer would contemplate using, my Windows 10 desktop computer is approaching its tenth birthday, and I use Photo Ninja for raw conversion and Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 for editing, both of which will no doubt stop working once I am finally forced to upgrade to Windows 11 later this year. I don't solve problems by throwing money at them, at least where photography is concerned.

So FWIW here we go:

• Invest in a screen calibration device: I have a Spyder5pro made by Datacolor but, as they say on the BBC, other devices are available.
• Use it. Even if only once a year, to check for changes in your screen's colour temperature.
• Colour management is a complex area, but I find that letting the printer control it (using its default sRGB setting) rather than the imaging software works best.
• You shouldn't print at less than 300 dpi, but I don't usually resample a file down to 300 dpi when reducing an image in size for printing. This may be mere superstition, but printing at a higher dpi seems preferable to throwing data away.
• I find a quick and reliable way to get a print that is close to the screen image is this (most imaging software will have similar settings somewhere):
• Lighten shadows +11%
• Darken highlights +2%
• Increase midtone contrast +10%
• Increase overall brightness between +12 and +20 (depending on how dark the image is)
• Increase colour saturation +20
• No need to save a version of your file when adjusted for printing like this (it will look horrible anyway): just find the equivalent adjustments for your kit combo and use them whenever you make a first test print. The results will not be perfect, but should be a lot better if your prints until now have generally been too dark with a glum feel to them.

Of course, if you have a similar or, even better, a radically different regime in operation that works for you, I'd be interested to hear about it in the comments. I'm always ready for the next revelation!

Surely some revelation is at hand...

1. Fellow fans of Justified who followed that link may be amused by Misrach's more than passing resemblance, these days, to Wynn Duffy (played by actor Jere Burns). Never watched Justified? Recommended, especially if you enjoy Walton Goggins. Although as I seem to be unable to convince anyone that Bodkin is the best thing currently on Netflix, what do I know?

Dappled Things

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                Praise him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins... Does anyone really read him any more, I wonder? Beyond those few famous anthology pieces, I mean, and even then beyond the superficial attraction of a few vivid turns of phrase? It's the sort of sugar-high stuff that can turn on the teenage poetry palate, but you quickly tire of verbal chocolate sauce and sprinkles over everything, and then notice the underlying religiosity, like the wooden stick inside the ice lolly: it holds the whole thing together, but is inedible and all but useless to all but a few oddball enthusiasts.  Although... I do wonder where doctors get those horrible "tongue depressors"? [1]

In Britain we've had a run of several weeks of uninterrupted blazing sunshine – three official "heat waves", no less – which is nice for those who like that kind of thing, but – like chocolate sauce and sprinkles – you can find yourself having too much of a good thing quite quickly, especially those of us of a northern European constitution. The unusual strength of the dappled shadows, though, were a visual turn-on for me as I plodded along in the 32° C heat; it was disconcertingly like being transported to southern Europe. So, having decided to post a little gallery of sun-dappled roadside attractions taken with my phone, the Hopkins poem "Pied Beauty" sprang to mind.

Looking for a text of the poem to copy, I landed on the Poetry Foundation website, and ended up reading the detailed but uncredited biography of Hopkins there. I was astonished at my ignorance of the background and life-story of a poet I thought I knew reasonably well. It seems he came from one of those over-achieving Victorian hothouse families that seemed to throw out prodigies in every direction. For example – and setting aside the brother who "became a world-famous expert on archaic and colloquial Chinese", or the uncle who "moved to Hawaii, where he learned Hawaiian and helped establish an Anglican bishopric in Honolulu" – I had no idea that his father Manley Hopkins was also a published poet, or that three of Gerard's brothers were artists and illustrators, often working in that finely-observed, realistic style that enlivened the pages of  magazines like Punch with their bafflingly unfunny cartoons. [2]

Sympathy

Mamma (to Cook) — "And Mrs. Stubbs, the cream with the apple-tart yesterday ought to have been whipped."

Ethel (who has a grateful remembrance of the dish in question). "Oh, Mummy dear! 'Ought to have been whipped!' I thought it was particularly good!"

Everard Hopkins, from The Project Gutenberg eBook of Punch, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892

Huh? Oh, right, "whipped" as in "whipped"... Hilarious. Anyway... They were quite some family. Although it seems Gerard's conversion to Catholicism (a fashionable rebellion at Oxford at the time) and subsequent career as a Jesuit priest (not so fashionable) made him into the family black sheep and something of an outcast. I suppose the equivalent today would be the son of some well-to-do and well-connected Hampstead-liberal family deciding to join Reform. Or, of course, to become a Jesuit priest.

But enough of this Victoriana: if you're interested, follow the link and read it for yourself. And if you've got a brilliant new caption for Everard's cartoon, don't keep it to yourself. Bear in mind, though, that unlike the original it has to be funny.

So here are some pied and dappled things:

1. True, we did use to make a prototype frisbee by interlacing them into something that resembled a ninja throwing star, or the "lock" of a traditional longsword dance. Like military plans, though, they rarely survived first contact with the enemy.

2. Although, stripped of their original verbose captions, those perfectly-captured expressions, body language, and social nuances do make excellent raw material for caption competitions. My best attempt: But, mother, it's not fair: when will I be old enough to indulge in Mrs. Kipling's exceedingly good hash brownies?

Am I An Oak Tree Yet?

In another shameless act of heat-induced idleness, I'm now reposting a piece from 2015, in which I consider the possibility of identifying as an oak tree in the future. Here it is, as usual lightly edited and revised:

Oak Trees

An oak tree

In a previous post (Over My Head) I was talking about the importance of allusion and making "inter-textual" references in writing and culture-talk, and how this is becoming more difficult in a world where talking across cultures, rather than simply within them, has become the norm; a world where my cultural bedrock ("A little dab'll do ya!" – Brylcreem! ) is your baffled recourse to Google. Without a reliable stock of similes and metaphors drawn from everyday life and shared experience – sporting, culinary or whatever – we're forced either to fall back on a plain-vanilla language – sorry! I mean "a bland, lowest-common-denominator language" – or to adopt the high-flown language of philosophy, precise in its meaning but incomprehensible to the uninitiated.

Weirdly, it seems that the art-speak of the visual arts has taken that second, philosophical route, but mostly without having done the necessary preliminary homework. Artists have never been famous for their studiousness, after all. Neither were they notoriously chatty about their processes and intentions in the past, often preferring to remain silent, or to mutter a few inarticulate sentences about liking to play with paint an' that, and to leave all that interpretation palaver to the critics. In comparison, today's artists can be quite the pocket philosopher, always ready with a verbose account of what they've been up to and, crucially, why.

In particular, in contemporary art-speak the idea of "reference" – whether to art history, traditions of discourse, politics, or even science – has floated free, detached by the liberal application of that universal solvent, Kwik Po-Mo™ (available in all good art schools). As an artist, it seems you can pretty much choose (or declare) what your reference points are, and what they signify, like a programmer declaring variables. I don't think this is what is meant by a "floating chain of signifiers", but what do I know? You hardly ever read an artist's descriptive statement of their "practice", now, without being told quite explicitly how this or that gesture, mark, or aesthetic choice "references" this or that important issue, from complex philosophical debates and cutting-edge scientific theories to controversial matters of race, gender, and politics. Why? Because I say so! How? In the way I say! Read the bloody manual statement!

This is not just the case in conceptual art, although it's clearly conceptual art that has set this tendency going. If you've never done so, it's worth considering Michael Craig-Martin's influential work, An Oak Tree, from 1973. Go on, have a read. I'll still be here (or ... will I?).

All done? Intriguing, no? Also, infuriating. As Arte Johnson's character used to say in Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, "Ve-e-ry interesting ...  But also stoopid!" I'm not sure why and when artists decided their role was primarily to be enactors of head-hurting philosophical conundrums, but it's never been a good look. Philosophers generally make pretty terrible paintings, too. You can't blame such brilliantly multi-talented people for wanting to escape from their boxes, I suppose, but the day a conceptual plumber turns up at my house to fix a dripping tap carrying nothing but a six-pack of beer – no, really, these are my tools – is the day I decide I am, after all, an oak tree.

May I ask you for a reference?

It's as if the decay of an understood, shared framework of reference has created an anxiety about being misunderstood – I'm just a soul whose intentions are good! – which in turn has created a control-freakish insistence on being understood in the right way; that is, my way. Not so much Derrida as Lewis Carroll, then:

"I don't know what you mean by 'glory,' " Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't—till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!' "
"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument'," Alice objected.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."
Through the Looking-Glass

Hmm, I'd forgotten about that reference to hegemony slipped in at the end there. Nice one, Humpty.

In the end, so much contemporary art seems to aspire to do little more than illustrate the artist's statement, to colour in an already completed verbal outline. That detailed declaration of intent, after all, is so often the very thing that might win you a commission in the first place. In a world of competitive tendering, the safest strategy is "do what you document; document what you do", which will be a familiar nostrum to anyone who has had to grapple with the demands of modern corporate managerialism – health and safety statements, job descriptions, best-practice manuals, and all. Though it does seem a long way from art, somehow. By their statements shall ye know them. [1]

What is also remarkable, however, is the parallel process by which artists have come to regard all fields of human endeavour as raw material badly in need of re-interpretation. There can hardly be a museum, learned society, or scientific establishment that has not hosted an "artist in residence" in recent times. I suppose it's not impossible that a potter or a sculptor might have a useful contribution to make in biological taxonomy or advanced physics, though it must always be a bit of a long shot. The claimed symbiotic, synergetic benefits of such arrangements always seem more than a little one way, unless of course the lab was simply looking for something to brighten up the reception area.

Not so long ago, someone (it's not clear who) said that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture"; the absurdity of the comparison was, presumably, taken to be self-evident. Well, not any more. Hmm, "dancing about architecture"... You're already half-way to a decent submission for, let's say, artist-in-residence at RIBA. The rest, obviously, will depend entirely on the quality of the accompanying statement, and whether it ticks all the right boxes. Please pay particular attention to the boxes marked "community involvement", "inclusivity", and "value for money". That you can dance a bit (or paint, or photograph, or write, or whatever other arty thing it is that you do), well, we can take that bit for granted, can't we? [2]

If you say so...

1. A good example of an allusion that may go unrecognised, today, even in the "Christian heritage" world. It refers to Matthew 7:15-20, part of the Sermon on the Mount. You know, in the New Testament? In the Bible? Look it up! You don't have one? Jesus...

2. Actually, no, it seems we can't, at least where painting is concerned. The recent outbreak of fashionable cack-handedness with a brush has successfully blurred the distinction between those who can and those who really can't paint, at least as traditionally conceived. I suppose it does take away one of those pesky elitist barriers to a career in art... Probably not something you'd want to try in the sciences or even architecture, though? Although, on second thoughts, why should my innumeracy prevent me from having a prominent career in theoretical physics if that's what I want to do? It's naked numerism!

Count No Account

In the spirit of "inform, educate, and entertain" (as well as in the interests of labour-saving in this hot weather) I bring you a post I originally published in 2012. Mike Johnston at his TOP blog showed what is said to be the last photograph of Custer before his death at the Little Bighorn, which put me in mind of a very similar photo of count Charles DeRudio. Who? Read on...

Count No Account

Over the summer I read the much-praised biography of poet Edward Thomas by Matthew Hollis, Now All Roads Lead to France. To be honest, I find biographies heavy going, and this was no exception. The true facts of most lives are dull: given a choice, "print the legend" is always my preference. Thomas was clearly an unhappy man and, by modern lights, an irresponsible husband and parent; it is not particularly edifying or entertaining to read about his narcissistic self-tormenting. Having followed his endless dithering about whether or not to enlist at the outbreak of WW1, it came as no surprise to learn that he found a sort of happiness within the disciplines of army life, once he had actually joined up.

More often than not, the true facts of "famous" lives have a series of narrow near misses with legend.  For example, I learned the extraordinary fact that both Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen were at the Artists Rifles' Hare Hall training camp, Gidea Park, in 1915, and that Thomas may well have instructed Owen in map-reading, but it seems neither realised or recognised that the other was also a poet. So close!

I have always enjoyed the fact that the Artists Rifles existed. As a military unit, it has a certain Terry Pratchett-esque improbability about it. But for a jaw-dropping fact, how about this: according to Hollis, among its grizzled veterans the Artists Rifles can boast Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. No kidding. Can you even begin to imagine? It gives a whole new dimension to Ernest Thesiger's alleged response, when asked about his military service in France during WW1: "Oh, my dear! The noise! And the people!"

I was curious about this – I really couldn't imagine Swinburne snapping to attention with a smart salute – so did a little research. I read that the Artists Rifles was one of several volunteer regiments set up around 1859, in the alarm following "the Orsini Affair". This was not the first time I had seen a reference to Orsini, but had never bothered to follow it up before. You could spend your life following up such things (though there are worse ways of spending a life). It turns out that in 1858/59 there was a genuine fear that France might invade Britain, following the attempted assassination of Napoleon III by one Felice Orsini, an Italian nationalist who, it seemed, had the backing of English radicals, and had thrown bombs at the Emperor more-or-less stamped "Made in Birmingham". Curiously, Swinburne was "rusticated" as an undergraduate from Oxford University for publicly supporting Orsini's action.

All interesting enough, but it gets better. Sometimes historical fact and legendary truth successfully avoid that narrow near miss and collide head on, scattering bits of myth, legend and fact in all directions. The Orsini Plot and its aftermath is one such mash-up.

For example, Orsini was sent on a secret mission to Hungary in 1854 by Mazzini (oh, look it up) but got arrested and imprisoned in Mantua. He escaped by using a saw to cut through the bars on the cell window, then climbed out, 100 feet above ground, and slid down using a rope he had made of bedsheets. Passing himself off as a friendly peasant, he then managed to get past the Austrian guards.  Are you kidding me? Is it possible Orsini was the inventor of the old "bedsheet rope" trope? Swiftly followed by the old "fool the guards with a cheery wave" routine? History does not record whether the saw was smuggled in to Orsini using a cake.

This is history as operetta, long-forgotten works with titles like "Zeppo and Floriana", set in a world that has now vanished and faded from (British) consciousness – 1848 and all that, Mazzini, Garibaldi, the Austrians and the French as Evil Empire – and which only remains as forgotten names on pigeon-spattered statues in European city squares. Believe it or not, Napoleon III was actually on his way to see Rossini's William Tell at the Paris Opera when Orsini's assassination attempt was made.

But there's more. One of Orsini's accomplices was count Carlo Camillo di Rudio, an aristocratic Italian nationalist and military man. I could spin this tale out, but here's the thing in a nutshell:  after the assassination attempt, di Rudio was arrested and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. However, he escaped from Devil's Island and made his way, via British Guiana and London, to America, becoming Charles De Rudio on the way. There he fought for the Union in the Civil War, becoming a 2nd Lieutenant in the 2nd US Colored Infantry. After the War he became an officer in the regular US Army, and was eventually appointed to the 7th Cavalry. In 1876 he participated in and survived – yes – the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Apparently, he was known to his fellow 7th Cavalry officers as "Count No Account" because of his habit of telling what they took to be tall tales.

As they say, you couldn't make it up, could you? Odd, isn't it, how – in the course of a single man's life – a Ruritanian operetta about Italian unification becomes a tense assassination drama, then an escape thriller, then a Civil War epic with a "buffalo soldiers" twist, finally followed by a minor part in Custer's Last Stand. If nothing else, it means the use of the William Tell overture as the theme for the Lone Ranger finally makes perfect sense.

Why no-one has ever made a movie telling the story of di Rudio's extraordinary life is a mystery. It would have to be called Count No-Account, of course. But perhaps it just mixes up too many genres to pitch. There is a English-language biography, however, which I suspect is self-published:  Alien Horseman: an Italian Shavetail with Custer, by J.C. Ladenheim.

Somehow, I doubt anyone will ever to want to make a blockbuster movie about Edward Thomas, though: some anthology-classic poems and a friendship with Robert Frost are no substitute for serial derring-do with bombs and knotted bedsheets, and close encounters with Custer and Crazy Horse.

Charles "Count No Account" DeRudio

Household Cleaning Products

Boiling hankies on the stove! Ah, memories...

I've been tinkering with this post for a while, but was never quite ready to publish it, for the obvious reason that it offers some thoughts on a subject – the cynical and performative "inclusivity" of advertising media – which is hard to address without coming across as some sort of bigot. "Idiot" I can accept; "bigot" not. I have my pride.

I finally decided not to be such a wimp when a satirical BBC radio show (Dead Ringers, which deploys a roster of talented "voice" actors to impersonate and pillory prominent figures in public life) recently gave a throwaway remark to their appallingly convincing "Nigel Farage", that went something like, "Right, I'm off to count the mixed-race couples in the TV adverts, bye!" Clearly, the writers had made the same disconcerting observation as me, and chosen to disown and exorcise it by giving the line to their vocal sock-puppet.

Now, there are few better ways to trigger suspicion or outright hostility than to start a sentence with the words "I'm not a racist, but...". But it's the simple truth that, like pretty much anyone brought up in an exclusively white, working-class environment between the 1940s and the 1970s, I was instilled with a full suit of venerable prejudices; default settings that I may never entirely reconfigure. Certainly, all the way through school I knew and enjoyed the company of many unthinking and even out-and-out racists, and had no "Black, Asian, and minority ethnic" (BAME) friends at all: not through choice or discrimination, but because there simply weren't any around to be had. True, journalist Gary Younge and F1 crash-dummy Lewis Hamilton were both born in my home town of Stevenage in later years, but their families were still an exception even then, and – who knows? – perhaps their experience of mindless racism might even have been one push factor behind their success in life.

So I accept that, despite my best intentions, I may still have some questionable prejudices. You say you don't? I wonder how true that really is. Most of us do, whatever our ethnicity. Unless you are some kind of saint, daily life is negotiated by easy-to-read, shorthand signifiers, of which skin colour, dress, body language, and speech are the major, broad-brush components. Let's say you're Black or Asian and on your own in an unfamiliar part of town: you're just not going to cross the road to ask directions from a bunch of white boys hanging out on a corner, with or without cropped hair and heavy boots. This is a useful prejudice. They might be gay Christians having an impromptu prayer meeting, but why take the risk? No: racism, properly speaking, is not this sort of everyday caution or even the instinctive mistrust of those who are "other", but the systematic discrimination against and prejudicially negative characterisation of one ethnic "community" by another; usually the majority community, but essentially whichever ethnic group holds the levers of power.

Obviously, the grasp on those levers of power is pretty feeble at the shittier end of the social spectrum; where, say, the indigenous white working class rubs up against large immigrant populations, and is consequently defended all the more fiercely. "White privilege" is a difficult concept to grasp, when you're third-generation unemployed and living in sub-standard accommodation in some town or village long abandoned by industry and conveniently forgotten by politics. By the same token, to maintain the belief that some crop-haired loser's pallor makes him inherently superior to the son of a Punjabi pharmacist – I'm thinking of the sometime head-boy of Winchester College, graduate of Oxford and Stanford universities, who happens to be our former Prime Minister (and is married to the wealthiest woman in Britain, FFS, also Asian) – is delusional. Or "racist", as we rightly say.

OK, at this point I have to step carefully around the "I'm not racist, but..." landmine I have chosen to lay in my own path. Of course, I may already have clumsily stepped right on it: I know that for some high-minded folk, even to address the issue of ethnicity is in itself a form of racism. Races are a construct and therefore don't exist: bingo! Problem solved... Please don't go on about it. But that is wishful thinking of the sort that wants to believe that by closing your eyes a problem has disappeared.

So, here's my first cautious step: According to the 2021 Census, these are the broad-brush figures for ethnicity in England:

"White" ethnic groups: 81.0% (45.8 million)
"Asian, or Asian British" ethnic groups: 9.6% (5.4 million)
"Black, Black British, Caribbean or African": 4.2% (2.4 million)
"Mixed or Multiple ethnic groups": 3.0% (1.7 million)
"Other ethnic groups": 2.2% (1.2 million)

These proportions will be experienced very differently, of course, depending on whether you live in Leicester or Leominster, Hampstead or Hackney. But, in principle, wherever you happen to live, no fair-minded person ought to have a problem with minority communities agitating for cultural space and greater representation, especially where these do not correspond to their presence in the wider community. Nor should they discourage or obstruct the aspirations of members of those minorities, even if this might result in a presence in public life greater than mere proportionality. Sadly, though, fair-mindedness is not an evenly-distributed virtue, and "diversity" interventions and even legislation are therefore a necessary social safety-valve.

Another cautious step: It is troubling, however, how easily a diversity agenda can mutate into something less benign and quasi-religious, which regards "whiteness" as an essentially sinful condition, in need of continual expiation. Repent, ye colonisers! Cast aside your white privilege! Which is not entirely undeserved in Britain, obviously: those few whose ancestors profited grotesquely from the proceeds of slavery and empire have reason to feel more than a little guilt. [1] But bear in mind that the rest of us, the vast majority, have our own historic grievances with those same people, too. Just one of which is precisely that they persuaded us to believe the mad idea that whiteness – and British whiteness in particular – endows a certain inherent "racial" superiority.

If any of what I have written so far has, in your view, blown up in my face, then you might as well stop reading. It's only going to get worse. Just saying.

It is unfortunate – to put it no stronger – that there are some in positions of influence who see economic advantage in ostensibly appearing to act, unasked, on behalf of ethnic minorities. Such as, for example, the casting and "creative" types – quite likely white, well-paid, and privileged – who are employed within the advertising industry. It can't only be the writers on Dead Ringers and numerate racists who have noticed quite how often the people in advertisements on British TV – whether for banks, deodorants, frozen chips, or whatever else someone wants to sell us – are now being portrayed by ethnic minority actors.

Some nights this can be pretty much every advert in the break, a spectacle guaranteed to bring many simmering white couch potatoes to boiling point. I suppose this might just be a classic example of everyone having had the same bright idea independently, with the unfortunate result of creating five minutes of end-to-end diversity overkill. Or, if you wanted to get a bit woo-woo about it, you could say this is a symbolic expiation of our sins, past and present, enacted on the altars of personal hygiene products and car insurance.

Now, if this were a genuine effort to rebalance representation, to give work to an underemployed cohort of actors, or even just to solicit the business of minority customers then it would be unexceptionable, even praiseworthy. It could also simply be the over-enthusiastic application of the current trend for race-blind casting in film, theatre, and even those popular TV "historical" serial dramas, in which it seems – bizarrely, given current controversies over how the money to build those grand houses was actually made – that a sprinkling of painfully-posh Black aristocrats is now de rigueur. Hey, it could have happened! (um, no it couldn't).

But I'm not buying it, so to speak. Why have advertisers, of all people, latched onto inclusivity (and not just of ethnicity) in such a big way? When so many adverts for banks or brands show us attractive ethnic minority actors pretending to be happy, prosperous staff, customers, and typical consuming families, I think we 100% organic, fair-trade sceptics (new! improved!) are entitled to ask: who, really, is being targeted by these ads?

Could the intention really be to encourage more minority families – 20% of the population at best, quite a few of whom are living in poverty [2] – to take advantage of HSBC's competitive interest rates, to buy a more stylish sofa, or invest in luxury skin-care products? Or perhaps it genuinely troubles the CEOs of these companies that too many of their surveyed customers are ticking the "White British" box? Or might the subversive intention be to "nudge" the attitudes of White British viewers, while at the same time doing the serious business of encouraging them to buy more takeaway meals? Want to show you're not a bigot? Buy our multiculturally-endorsed pizza!

I think the only sensible answer is Yeah, right... to all of the above. [3]

It's surely pretty transparent that what they're really chasing is the custom of young consumers with money to spend and who it is believed (no doubt backed up by intensive focus-group research) will feel attracted to whichever companies or brands can best parade their "woke" credentials, however fake, however inappropriate. See also: green, rainbow, and body-positivity washing. Advertisers are true equal-opportunity opportunists when it comes to exploiting "diversity".

Which, I suppose, is fair enough: that's what adverts are for, after all, isn't it? They're in the business of shifting product, and persuading you to change your loyalty from Brand X to Brand Y, not reconfiguring the social architecture. Although it's clear that many advertising "creatives" seem to imagine the latter to be a significant part of their mission. Perhaps they feel a bit of nudging and even some in-your-face finger-wagging will redeem an occupation which amounts to dreaming up ways of drumming up business for the multinationals, supermarkets, and prime brands that can afford their services. Or, more likely, that a clever bit of "white saviour" hand-waving will win them industry awards.

I admit that this may appear to be a trivial thing to be going on about, possibly even a bit Racist-Lite in itself, and hardly worth mentioning in a world on fire; but it is small sparks like this that ignite larger conflagrations. I suppose my concern is that this virtue-signalling pile-on – intended to appeal to customers from a young, free-spending demographic, a generation for whom inclusivity and diversity are watchwords – is actually equally likely to "nudge" the prejudices of another, very different demographic, but in precisely the wrong direction. I mean, of course, those White British couch potatoes who watch considerably more TV than you, I, or those coveted young consumers do, and who may well find themselves irritably totting up the ethnic imbalance in the advert breaks every night.

You may well say that you don't care about such people, their ill-informed opinions, or their poisonous prejudices: let them stew in their own juice. But I suggest that you probably should care, as these are the potential voters for Farage's Reform Party. Let's be honest: party activists will have to hold their noses at election time and go all out for their support, and without them the Labour vote in so-called "Red Wall" seats in particular is going to be a pretty anaemic showing.

I don't want to overstate this, but: wouldn't it be ironic, in a tragic sort of way, if what is essentially just a current "me-too" fashion for the inclusion of all sorts of inclusivity in advertising is actually having a negative impact in the real world? What if it is acting as an unintended stimulus for the politics of prejudice, anger, and resentment, and if it turns out – of all things! – that slick, well-meaning adverts for household-cleaning products have, even if only in a small, subliminal way, helped Reform to win or at the very least to disrupt the voting pattern in crucial seats at the next general election?

A big "what if?", I know, and this may all be utterly wrong-headed, of course; the fevered constructions of some sleep-deprived midsummer nights and too much TV. Besides, going by their current capacity for self-sabotage, it's clear that both Labour and the Tories are quite capable of achieving electoral meltdown without any assistance from the advertising profession. Absolutely nothing could be done about it, anyway. No broadcasting regulations are being broken, or even slightly bent.

Although... Both parties are so spooked by Reform nipping at their heels – and, looking across both the Atlantic and the Channel, it's not hard to see why – that I wouldn't be surprised if proposals for vote-catching legislation to monitor "disproportionate diversity" on TV are already forming in the devious minds of various political-strategy wonks. Taking a lead from Trump's innovative way with nomenclature, they could call it the "I'm Not A Racist, But..." Bill. I am joking, of course, but we'll see, won't we? To politicians, legislation is the tool that comes to hand and so, like the man with a hammer, to them everything looks like a legislatable nail.

Meanwhile, I need to go shopping, and we're running out of kitchen surface spray... Shall I stick with the perfectly OK "own brand" product we've been using, or maybe it's time to try that one with all the TV adverts?  I feel strangely drawn...

In 1962, just one brown face in a sea of pasty white (including mine)...

But things have clearly changed:

"British Formula 1 driver, Lewis Hamilton, surprised children from his former primary school when he unveiled himself as the mystery go-karting driver at a local track. He was joined by BBC Sport Formula 1 co-commentator David Coulthard at Peartree Spring Infant and Junior Schools, for a film as part of the BBC live coverage of the British Grand Prix at Silverstone."

Not sure I'm so keen on the new Star Wars-style school uniform, though...

image: BBC

1. There is currently a classic running feud on the letters page of the TLS about the distinction between South Sea Annuities and South Sea Securities: which of them was or was not linked to profits from slavery, and therefore whether the Church of England should or should not be paying reparations. It seems experts differ...

2. The breakdown of poverty by ethnicity is complex: see the Rowntree Foundation's analysis.

3. Which, for non-native speakers, is ironic double-speak, meaning "Of course not, don't be ridiculous..." You're welcome!