TOM UTLEY: The photo that taught me life's most valuable lesson: Try to be cool and you'll end up looking ridiculous
Somewhere there exists a snap of me, taken on a school trip to Greece in the late 1960s when I was 15 years old.
In the fashion of the time, my hair is almost shoulder-length, and parted in the middle. I’m wearing a pair of duck‑egg blue, flared trousers and a pink, flowery shirt, bought for me in Carnaby Street.
If I ever lay my hands on that photograph, which I fear may have found its way into an album belonging to one of my siblings, I shall certainly destroy it.
My trouble was I was trying to look cool, so as to fit in with my schoolmates on the trip. I realise now, at this distance of more than half a century, that I succeeded only in looking ridiculous.
But then, of course, nothing dates faster than fashion. Indeed, it’s a lesson that most of us learn as the years roll by: if we want to pass the test of time, we should dare to be uncool — and avoid anything that smacks of a trend.
If we want to pass the test of time, we should dare to be uncool and avoid trends, a point Ken Bruce made when he attributed the decline in BBC Radio 2's audience since his departure to the station's 'urge to think of itself as being cool'
This week, the great Ken Bruce made much the same point, when he attributed the sharp decline in BBC Radio 2’s audience since his departure in 2023 (the figures for January to March this year were 1.23 million lower than a year ago) to the station’s urge to ‘think of itself as being cool’.
Radio 2, he said, should stop trying to appeal to the under-30s, and leave that job to Radio 1. Instead, it should concentrate on the over-35s, who tend to be more comfortable with themselves and ‘don’t mind being uncool’.
‘Whenever Radio 2 started to think of itself as being cool, I always said stop, stop, stop, stop,’ he told listeners to a podcast, Beyond The Title. ‘That’s the worst thing we could do.’
Ken has taken the same philosophy with him to the station’s commercial rival, Greatest Hits Radio, where he resists the current mania for Taylor Swift by refusing to play her records until ‘she writes something that isn’t about her ex-boyfriends’.
What’s more, his stand appears to have done his new employers no harm at all. For while Radio 2 has haemorrhaged listeners, Greatest Hits Radio has gained 2.5 million new ones since Ken joined the station last April.
But radio stations and other media are far from the only institutions that might be wise to resist the urge to be cool.
Think of the dear old Church of England, with its legions of trendy vicars — staple comic figures of our time — trying desperately to make their services relevant to the modern age, by preaching sermons about housing policy and silencing the organ in favour of electric guitars.
Yet the more its clergy have abandoned the sublime old texts and the beloved hymns with which so many of us grew up, the more its congregations have thinned out.
I fear the Roman Catholic faith, in which I was brought up (though I lapsed long ago), is going the same way. There is even talk that the Pope may ban the beautiful Latin Mass, to which the walls of its churches have echoed through the ages, uniting its flock worldwide and implanting in some of us a deep love of the ancient language.
In the name of modernity and ‘accessibility’, many Catholic parishes have long since replaced it with clunking translations into the local vernacular. But don’t ask me why anyone thinks it should be outlawed completely. I find the proposal utterly baffling.
So annoyed is my co-religionist Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg — never a dedicated follower of fashion himself! — that he’s taken radical steps to ensure his young have the benefit of the time-honoured rite.
A lover of tradition, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg said his wife Helena took their four eldest children to Florence for their confirmations to guarantee a Latin ceremony
He tells us in this week’s Spectator that in the last week of the election, his wife Helena took their four eldest children to Florence for their confirmations, so that he could be sure the ceremony would be performed in Latin!
But then isn’t there something so defiantly uncool about Sir Jacob that you could almost describe him as cool?
I feel the same about the tennis at Wimbledon. Where other Grand Slam events fall in with the times, allowing players to wear all sorts of garish kit, Wimbledon still insists they should wear white — a policy it has enforced since the first championship in 1877.
Yet ask any professional player which of the four Grand Slam trophies he or she would most like to win, and I’ll bet you nine out of ten of them will say Wimbledon. Now, I call that pretty cool.
Indeed, the older I get, the more I shudder when I hear a broadcaster, a priest, a sportsman or a politician tell us his mission is to ‘modernise’ a time-honoured institution.
As for the word ‘change’, Sir Keir Starmer’s favourite mantra during the election campaign, I can’t hear the word uttered without remembering a favourite quote, often attributed to the great Tory Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury: ‘Change? Change? Aren’t things bad enough as they are?’
Well, we have yet to discover precisely what changes Sir Keir had in mind — a point on which he has been deliberately vague up to now. All I can say, from the little we know, is that the omens are not good.
Take his proposal to ‘modernise’ the Lords. By this, he seems to mean chucking out all the over-80s, no matter how valuable their contributions or rich their experience may be. Then he hopes to scrap it altogether, replacing it with some unspecified body, whose effectiveness and independence as a revising chamber we can only guess at.
My guess is that it’ll be even worse than what we’ve got.
Then there’s his plan to give schoolchildren the vote at 16, in the hope of sucking up to the young. Clearly, he calculates that since most of them don’t pay taxes or understand the first thing about business, the great majority are likely to vote Labour.
Hmmm. I wouldn’t be so sure. Indeed, the policy may yet come back to bite him, since increasing numbers of impressionable teens, in Britain as on the continent, seem to lean towards the extreme Right.
I just pray that Sir Keir won’t do as much damage to the country as that arch-champion of Cool Britannia, Sir Tony Blair, whose passion for ‘modernising’ infected and corrupted all our most hallowed institutions, from the Civil Service and judiciary to schools and universities, local government and the police. Does anyone believe a single one of them emerged the better for Blair’s attentions?
Sir Keir Starmer (pictured in Belfast) has been deliberately vague up to now, but from what we can see so far the omens are not good
As for myself, I learned long ago that nothing is quite so uncool as trying desperately to be cool. So it is that for the past 50 years, I’ve made no secret of the fact that I prefer Harry Belafonte to Jimi Hendrix, Hans Holbein to Damien Hirst, draught bitter to trendy cocktails and Jane Austen to just about everyone who has ever appeared on the Booker Prize shortlist.
Never in my life have I attended a pop festival, and only once have I visited a nightclub. That was back in the 1980s, when my wife and I were dragged there by her then boss. Never again.
Meanwhile, ever since I graduated in 1975 I’ve had my hair cut the same way — shortish and parted at the side — while every day of my working life I’ve worn a sober suit and tie.
On my days off, you’ll never catch me in blue jeans or trainers, let alone a T‑shirt, but only in a jacket and trousers, with sensible brown lace-up shoes. To this day, I wear a linen suit on the beach.
All right, I’m desperately uncool. But it’s a tried-and-tested look that has barely dated since the 1930s. How many slaves to fashion and modernity, looking back at their selfies in 50 years’ time, will be able to claim the same?
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