`Nobody up here pays attention to reviews . . . most of the written word has gone the way of the dinosaur" - thus Bruce Willis, reacting last year at the Cannes Film Festival to negative reviews of his film The Fifth Element, put the cat amongst the feathered fraternity of film critics, prompting many angst-ridden think pieces on subjects close to their hearts. Was Bruce right? What are critics really for? Who's paying for this lunch?
Critical Condition, a humorous four-part series produced and presented by Guardian journalist Jon Ronson (who made the excellent Dr Paisley, I Presume earlier this year) goes behind the scenes to look at the day-to-day lives of this reviled but indispensable species. Slagging off critics has always been a popular sport, especially among the criticised. In making his lofty pronouncement, Willis found himself in more august company than you'd find at the usual Planet Hollywood opening. The worst insult Vladimir and Estragon can hurl at each other in Waiting For Godot, at the end of a list which includes "moron", "vermin" and "sewer rat", is the final, unanswerable "Critic!". They arouse understandably strong reactions among their victims: actor Richard E. Grant describes Time Out's Geoff Andrew as "the bastard who ruined my life".
The first programme in Ronson's series reveals the Edinburgh Festival Fringe holds two clinics - one to counsel performers who have had bad reviews and another to give advice to performers who have had no reviews on how to attract the critics. We are, it seems, a necessary evil, although there's a current sense, which Willis tapped into, that critics have had their heyday and are now a dying breed.
The performing arts increasingly take their cue from the PR machines of the big Hollywood studios, preferring to generate as much inoffensive flim-flam in advance as possible, by way of star interviews, profiles and the like.
In movies, the process has been taken a stage further, with magazines and television shows such as Moviewatch relying on "ordinary punters" and websites for the lowdown on the latest release. Is it any wonder critics are nervously updating their curriculum vitaes?
Starting on Wednesday with one of the more specialised branches, comedy reviewing (and featuring the rarest and bravest of creatures, a critic who gets up on stage to show he can do it too), Critical Condition observes in turn, critics of opera, film and theatre as they go about their daily grind of canape-munching, freebar-lurking and, of course, bitching and backbiting. The opera programme in particular depicts a small, claustrophobic world of simmering jealousies and ancient feuds. Some of the subjects fully live up to Estragon's billing, particularly the odious Christopher Tookey, film critic of the Daily Mail, who has carved out a little niche as the voice of outraged Middle England. Tookey comes close (but not too close) to admitting his attacks on such "depraved" movies as Crash and Lolita have as much to do with breaking out of the entertainment section and on to the front pages as with any genuine concern about sex and violence, and he's cynical enough to attribute his indifference to a murder which occurred outside his own door to the coarsening effect of watching too many Hollywood action pictures.
Tookey may be the nastiest piece of work featured in Ronson's series, but there are several other tiny monsters on show, and the programme forces one to the depressing conclusion (well, it's depressing for this sometime reviewer) that the life of the critic is friendless, shallow and delusional, best suited to dysfunctional, bitter loners. Oh dear - and I've always enjoyed it.
Critical Condition starts on Wednesday on Channel 4 at 11 p.m.