INNOVATE THIS:THE BLACKBERRY crumble story wrote itself. And the results weren't pretty. Blackberry's server broke down and for a few days the company's customers around the world were unable to send e-mail or search the web, forcing them to engage with the real world: "I had to sit listening for the entire meeting," someone was quoted as saying in the Financial Times.
Within a few hours, it became apparent that the root of the problem lay in the security system of the Blackberry network: every e-mail passes through Research in Motion’s (RIM) headquarters in the UK, based in Slough, a few miles west of London, under the flight path to Heathrow.
At this point, overworked and lazy journalists congregated around the Slough Wikipedia page, and found to their great relief two famous cultural references: John Betjeman and The Office. Armed with these titbits, they gave Slough a proper kicking.
In 24-hour news, it is not possible to merely report what happened, the writer must also “add value” to the news: a layer of analysis perhaps, or a bit of colour to help roll the story forward on to the next news cycle.
So, armed with this booty, some chose to lead with Betjeman’s 1937 poem:
“Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
It isn’t fit for humans now
There isn’t grass to graze a cow
Swarm over, Death!”
Many however, cut to the chase and made The Officethe story. Ricky Gervais grew up in Swindon, just up the M4, and chose Slough as the venue for his fictional paper supplier, Wernham Hogg. The opening credits show the roundabout and the bus station set to a soundtrack of early Rod Stewart. It was chosen for its connotations of career disappointment: co-writer Stephen Merchant once said it was the sort of place where "people label their staplers".
The Fox News headline on the morning of the Blackberry outage was typical: "No Joke: Blackberry Problems Began With The Office."
Reuters began its report with a faux seriousness – a description of the outside of the RIM building on the A4. Then after a few lines, the reporter got bored and just mainlined Wikipedia, padding the report out with references to The Jam ( Eton Rifles: "There's a row going on down near Slough"), Mars Bars (it's the European HQ) and a nice gag by "Slough-raised" comic Jimmy Carr: "If you want to know what Slough was like in the 70s, go there now."
Like Jimmy Carr, I too grew up a few miles away, and I’ve often thought there is something very unpleasant lying just beneath the surface of the whole “Slough is crap” movement.
Few of the reports reference the other facts that are just as easily available on the web, but which conflict with the neat, pre-ordained story.
They don’t tend to write that Slough has the largest Sikh population in the UK, as a proportion of its total (about 9 per cent). There is also a strong Polish contingent, a legacy of the second World War when their forebears played a key role in working in the factories, many of which remain to the hilarity of some media commentators, the same ones that so irritated John Betjeman. The town’s role as an industrial base attracted workers from Wales, who – insert belly laugh here – walked there along the Great West Road, to find employment and avoid starvation.
But this doesn’t explain the depth of the antipathy and I’ve come to think that the town is a poster child for something broader that doesn’t reflect well on us.
Psychologists are fond of telling us we hate most in others what we recognise as our own traits. Slough is where most of us work and live. The genius of Gervais’s creation was the recognition it engendered. We laughed but also squirmed because he’d captured perfectly what life at work is like for the majority of people.
Blackberries and iPhones are the dream. Steve Jobs’s legacy is a world in which gadgets are symbols of aspiration. We project on to them our hopes and ambitions. He made us look up, encouraging us to forget that as we tweet and text in our shiny pretend world, we’re all connected via an unlovely hub near Heathrow airport.
Shortly before his death, John Betjeman said he had two regrets. “I didn’t have enough sex,” he famously said when asked to reflect on his life. The second goes largely un-reported: perhaps because he realised he’d handed a big stick to bigots, he told his daughter that he wished he hadn’t been so rude about Slough.
It’s time to change the story.
