You need more than maths and a nifty title to decode modern life
Great titles work miracles. Nobody would remember F. Scott Fitzgerald or rush to see remakes of his masterpiece, the Great Gatsby, if he’d stuck with his original plan to call it trimalchio In West egg.
Some titles become part of language, encapsulating complex concepts, like Catch-22 or Nineteen eighty-Four. But until his publisher talked him out of it, George Orwell wanted to call his final novel the Last Man In europe — and Joseph Heller was writing about something called Catch-11, until he realised readers would confuse it with the Frank Sinatra movie Ocean’s eleven.
If Oxford maths professor Marcus du Sautoy had called his documentary on problem- solving with computers something like the History Of Digital algorithms With Some Interesting examples, it would never have been commissioned.
But he devised a title that promised illicit insights into surviving a bewildering century, with The Secret Rules Of Modern Living (BBC4).
For viewers of a certain vintage, whose moral compass was set before the internet age, this promised to be invaluable television. We could all do with a peek at that Secret rulebook.
Perhaps the professor would explain why it is considered good form these days, when someone you don’t know says something you find mildly offensive, to hunt them down on social media and bombard them with gross abuse and death threats, until their lives are ruined.
Maybe he would help us understand why it’s now wicked and sexist to call a young woman a ‘girl’, but trendy and not sexist at all to fling the word ‘mother******’ around.
and there must be a reason, which the professor could elucidate, why it’s so popular to coat your arteries with 3,000 calories of lard in a fastfood restaurant, but if you light up one cigarette you’ll be beaten to a pulp by fatties screaming about their precious lungs.
None of this, unfortunately, counted as Modern Life to the prof, who was chiefly interested in the computer programs that power search engines and sort university offers.
as he chuntered about euclidean geometry, IBM ‘bubble-sorting’ and the Pagerank software behind Google (now valued at a baffling £295 billion) one fact about real life did emerge: apparently, couples who marry after meeting online have the most stable relationships.
It’s hard to believe this could be anything to do with maths, though, no matter how ingenious the algorithms. Surely it’s more likely that people who seek out true love online are the ones most serious about making a lasting marriage.
But the professor wasn’t interested in human beings. this was strictly about numbers and the patterns they made — and most of us find that dull fare, however enthusiastic the presenter.
there was one brief human moment. Scientist Patrick Prosser explained that a $1 million prize was up for grabs, to anyone who discovered an algorithm to crack the so-called travelling Salesman problem, drawing the most efficient routes on maps. ‘If one of my students solved it,’ Patrick confided, ‘I would kill him and claim the prize.’ then he added cynically, ‘But I think my students are safe.’
rules for one aspect of modern living were available from Boy Meets Girl (BBC2), which has given up all pretence at being a sitcom. It’s simply an instruction manual on what to say, think and feel about sex changes. the conversations between lovebirds Leo and Judy and their parents are excruciatingly twee. this episode centred on a father-andson chat that was so cringeworthy, it could make a plank of wood curl up in embarrassment.
this ought to be a story about a love overpowering transgender prejudice and a 15-year age gap. But i t never begins t o be believable, because there is no spark between Harry Hepple and rebecca root as Leo and Judy.
When they’re on screen, there’s all t he f i zz of bored work colleagues in the office canteen. and when they kiss, it’s like two dish-mops bumping together.
Maybe our Oxford prof could devise an algorithm to compute sexual attraction. there’s a fortune to be made there.