Once upon a time – as all the best stories used to start – once upon a time, fiction mattered. It reflected and shaped the hopes, fears and values of the nation, and it played a key role in social cohesion. Now it doesn’t. Its place has been usurped by non-fiction – and I think this is a Bad Thing.

The point is that we used to have a shared stockpile of stories. In Britain, it was built on fragmented tales from the Bible, the national myths of King Arthur and Robin Hood, and historical anecdotes of dubious authenticity concerning Canute, Alfred the Great, Robert the Bruce, Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh and others. This was the base of a fictional culture, to which were added contributions from novels, art, poetry and music, and then – in the last century – movies, radio, television, advertising.

To be clear, we’re not talking about culture generally, or even popular culture, but something slightly different and much more important: the common culture. It’s a dense network of references, and it informs our lives, language and thought; it’s the stuff that everyone is aware of because it’s just there. A collective conscious. And it exists far beyond its source material, so that if you haven’t seen a single episode of Doctor Who, you still know what a Dalek is. You don’t need to watch ITV to use a phrase like ‘Should’ve gone to Specsavers’. Without reading a page of Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson or J. K. Rowling, you know about Sherlock Holmes, Jekyll & Hyde and Hogwarts.

These things remain, of course. That world has not suddenly vanished. But it’s living on past glories now. The stock is not being replenished. There has been not a single addition in fifteen years, and that is a long enough period to suggest that it really might be over.

What was the last advertising slogan to enter common usage? Probably the ‘Simples’ of CompareTheMarket, and that was 2009. The last comedians to break through to a mass audience – Ricky Gervais, Peter Kay, Michael McIntyre – are of a still earlier vintage. The last pop singer to really matter, whose music become part of common, not just popular, culture? Amy Winehouse? More likely the Spice Girls.

This is not about quality or sales figures – Adele (first single 2009) and Ed Sheeran (2011) can shift units – but about what permeates into the public consciousness. Even reality TV is longer producing new material, the last significant British creation being The Great British Bake Off in 2010. Those shows that survive are mostly notable for actual reality, for what happens off-screen; the likes of Strictly Come Dancing and MasterChef make the news now for stories of backstage shenanigans. Similarly, adverts are noteworthy for controversy, not content – so that in 2023 Marks & Spencer could be lambasted for supposedly showing the Palestinian flag being burnt in a Christmas ad.

I propose the Miliband Test. When Ed Miliband taunted David Cameron’s government in 2012 with the image of Downton Abbey (‘We all know it’s a costume drama; they think it’s a fly-on-the-wall documentary’), he did so secure in the knowledge that the reference would be understood, both by his immediate audience in the House of Commons, and by those who saw the soundbite on television. Has there been anything new since then that would fit the bill? Possibly – for a brief moment – the imported game-show format of The Traitors.

It’s not that culture doesn’t matter anymore. The TV drama series Mr Bates vs The Post Office (2024) and Adolescence (2025) had a huge impact. But the former was a true story, and the political resonance of the latter depended on its claim to be inspired by reality – had it been billed as pure invention, the prime minister would not have called for it to be screened in schools. Because fiction doesn’t count anymore. We are moving into a post-fiction world.

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It’s no coincidence, of course, that this has happened alongside the advent of social media. The restless scrolling and swiping militates against the production of fiction, because it eradicates narrative. There is no beginning, middle and end – the very stuff of fiction – no past or future, just a perpetual present.

The need for a shared culture remains, but in the absence of fiction we have the dominance of ‘reality’, a social agenda dominated by news stories and sport, not by Morecambe and Wise or who was on Top of the Pops last night. Strip away major events – the Royal Family, Brexit, Covid – and what have been the shared moments of the last ten years? The fortunes of the various national football teams, dissatisfaction with politicians and politics, and a handful of hashtags (#MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter) that emerged from the internet to dominate conversation around the dinner-tables and water-coolers of the nation. It’s all factual.

Look at the chart of the UK’s biggest albums last year, where the highest placed British entry (if we exclude a Fleetwood Mac compilation) was Charli XCX’s Brat. The title provided an online slogan for the summer of ’24, and Collins dictionary named ‘brat’ as word of the year. But what attracted public attention was the phenomenon, not the music. The album produced seven top 40 hits and the vast majority of people couldn’t name a single one of them.

Yet public discussion has never been noisier. Quite apart from social media, there’s been a proliferation of talk-radio stations, of low-budget TV news channels, of internet platforms, and they all have to fill their time with something. Most of it turns out to be whatever’s being reported elsewhere in the news. That brings a necessity to say something vaguely new on a restricted number of topics, and to say it quickly – with as little reflection as possible – before someone else gets in. Or else there are podcasts that dignify chip-paper controversies with more detail than they deserve. There’s a problem of proportion and, since the human need for narrative remains, there’s a wish to link events, to make sense of a world that’s mostly messy.

In the ensuing clamour, concern turns to questions of fake news, disinformation and the denial of objective truth. Perhaps that’s inevitable when reality intrudes into the space formerly occupied by fiction.

In any event, most of us tag along, convinced that we should have an opinion on whatever the subject of the day is, taking sides in political disputes far removed from our own lives. We join in these futile ‘debates’ with the same energy that used to be devoted to Blur vs Oasis, Ken vs Deidre, Sean Connery vs Roger Moore. (Delete according to age.) None of it really matters, because what I think about… oh, let’s say Donald Trump, for example, is of no real-world consequence whatsoever. He might as well be Dirty Den or Nasty Nick for all that my opinion counts. But it feels as though it should be more significant because there is reality involved somewhere, so a note of seriousness permeates what should be small talk.

It’s unsettling, both personally and socially. There’s a permanent sense of crisis, as each moment is rapidly replaced by another, leaving little trace. The stories we tell ourselves as a society no longer have the element of continuity week on week, let alone a sense of stretching back across generations. And we feel more nervous and insecure as a result.

We’ll probably get used to it, of course, because human society is adaptable. After all, we got used to living with the fact that nuclear weapons existed. And we’ll have to get used to it, because the change is irreversible. The electronic media are now the only game in town and they are far too numerous and diffuse to allow for shared fiction. We consume our entertainment from myriad outlets and discuss it in small, discrete bubbles. The atomisation is reinforced by the fact that the companies supplying us are largely foreign, but really it’s all about the structure.

Perhaps the twentieth century was the golden age of fiction. Over its course, the cultural power of the Bible declined, but there was the emergence of a new mass culture, growing out of recorded entertainment: film, gramophones, broadcasting. In Britain, it was epitomised by the BBC/ITV duopoly. But that’s gone and the common culture to which it contributed so much is also dying.

Because, to repeat the point, we’re not adding anything. Nothing at all. It might be too much to ask for something as enduring as a Hamlet, a Heathcliff or a ‘Hey Jude’, but there isn’t even a Mr Bean or a Mr Blobby – just a Bonnie Blue. Our everyday shared culture is changing radically in nature, and it’s almost certainly to our detriment. Because where the fiction was held in common as a cultural identity, the non-fiction provokes argument and prompts division.

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My thanks to Sam Harrison for his help in developing this piece.

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coming soon…

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