Two peeves (from a comment on a friend's LJ)

[fpb]

1) Is it only my impression that Moffat and RTD only know how to write heroes who look exactly like public schoolboys from the seventies? I guess it's right for a modern incarnation of Sherlock Holmes, who was an Oxford man after all, and a Victorian one; but both Sherlock and the Eleventh Doctor look exactly like people I might have met at King's Canterbury in 1977 or so, just a few years older. I am not a pusher of diversity for its own sake, but I find their similarities a bit troubling.
2) Much more important is the drift of the heroic image away from a man in his thirties-forties towards a teen-ager. The heroes of the past tended to be men of some experience and with a past, projecting the image of a young father even when convention did not allow them to be (like Pat Ryan in TERRY AND THE PIRATES or even Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, they would have wards or nephews); today the general idea is to cast someone barely old enough to vote as the hero. I don't mean just Harry Potter or Artemis Fowl, where the fantasy element is at least obvious. To me, the most blatant and disturbing instance has been the rejuvenation of Superman. Superman is your dad, the dad we always wanted to have; he is the person who looks over you, who makes sure you are safe, who gets the kitten out of the tree - the reason you feel safe in your bed at night. The fifties Superman was clearly a man in his forties; Wayne Boring's had a recognizable receding hairline. But since the seventies he has been getting younger and younger. Dean Cain's Superman, in particular, looked like he'd just got out of high school; and it's not a coincidence that since then TV has focused on Superboy. To me, this is positively unsettling, as if one watched one's parents devolving into adolescents - like a real-life version of Buffy's Band Candy episode.

Comments

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

Thank you - that explains how the muddle arose. I thought that you were making two separate points - under-fourteen choir school and over-fourteen public schools - because most of my choir school contemporaries went on to public schools.
I lived in Canterbury for only about three months - (some years before you were at Kings), had little to do with the cathedral, and foolishly assumed that Kings was analogous to Christ Church and Westminster etc

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Would you not describe Westminster as a public school?

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

Not until now. I'd previously have supposed it to be a choir school - but, as with Canterbury, I might be mistaken. As I said, my contemporaries at Christ Church and Westminster (and Magdalen and St Michael's) left those schools at 14 or so and went on to Rugby or Harrow or Stowe. In the 1950s, I suppose that some might have gone into the second or third year of a grammar school, but those I knew tended to get music scholarships at public schools (which led to my assumption that choir schools aren't public schools).

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Nah, you have it wrong re:Westminster - several of my friends & my ex attended, and it most decidely is a public school; highest Oxbrige acceptance of any school in the UK; the only oddity, understandable because it's in central London, is that boarders are only one fourth of the intake. (Same with Godolphin & Latymer & with St Paul's for the same reasons.)

... just looked it up; est. 1179, refounded 1560; one of the nine schools in the Public Schools Act of 1868 (Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Merchant Taylors' School, Rugby, Shrewsbury, St Paul's, Westminster, Winchester.)

[ooxc.livejournal.com]

What I have wrong seems to be a typing error - I should have typed Westminster Abbey - duh!