Nostalgia for a culture of alcoholism

Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction

Ithink it was the brilliant documentary maker Jon Ronson who said that in his early career in journalism, he had an advantage over most of the other people he worked with, due to the fact that he was not an alcoholic.

Indeed, as I look back on my own early career in journalism, and on a lot of other early careers and late careers in the media in general, I am in awe at how our noble craft functioned at all. Such were the fantastic levels of alcoholism and other addictions which were prevalent, it does not seem feasible that anything got done. And yet things did get done somehow. Indeed, during the recent reports of the troubles of RTE, my mind kept going back to ancient times, when it seemed to me that that organisation in general was a lot more alcoholic than it is now — and I mean that in a good way.

It is a very strange form of nostalgia which strikes me sometimes, in which I imagine a time when places like RTE and the BBC, and, of course, most of the newspapers of the world, were floating on rivers of drink and occasionally reaching their destination — a destination which was occasionally a better place than the one in which we find all the good people of today.

Not that I am in any way advocating the revival of the culture of alcoholism in order to ignite the best energies of the old media, as we strive to answer the challenges of the internet. Granted, it might make more sense than some of the stuff that’s been tried, but that’s not where I’m going with this.

Instead, I am trying to draw attention to the attractions of a dissolute lifestyle, fleeting though they are, because if we try to pretend that it was all terrible all the time, we haven’t the slightest hope of understanding it, let alone of defeating it.

For a start, nobody would have done it if it was all terrible all the time. But a lot of people were doing it, and maybe this was how it worked — maybe there is a critical mass of addiction which, if attained, makes everyone feel quite normal after all.

Maybe if everyone is an alcoholic, then nobody’s an alcoholic — until someone like Jon Ronson comes along, and everyone sees he’s doing things better.

And yet, I am always intrigued by the culture of those olden days, because there is no doubt that a place like RTE or the BBC or any organ of the print media tended to attract a slightly more, shall we say, idiosyncratic kind of person during the Age of Alcoholism than it does now.

Creative people, as we know, are deeply vulnerable to addiction. Their sensitivity and their curiosity make them naturally more inclined towards ‘experimentation’ with things that aren’t really experimental at all. The experiments have all been done, my friend, and the results are well known and they’re never much good.

But still, creative people will tend to have this weakness, and thus the great drinking houses of broadcasting and newspapers were most alluring to them. With the knock-on effect that such places were perhaps more enjoyable then — lunch really could go on for 14 hours, without anyone passing any remarks. And maybe at some stage someone might come up with an idea for a TV or radio programme that would run for 50 years — at which point they would feel no need to have any other ideas for the rest of their lives, but who cares?

Sure, I may be nostalgic for something that didn’t really exist, which is the case with most forms of nostalgia anyway.

But something was lost when the media as a whole checked itself into rehab, just as something of incalculable value was gained by it too.

Then again, there’s this thing I have noticed about us humans, at any phase of our evolution: at any point when we think we have it all figured, turns out that we don’t.

“If we try to pretend it was all terrible all the time, we haven’t a hope of understanding it”