A DOUBLE first at Cambridge, several published books, a career
in journalism, and captain of the Middlesex County Cricket Club to
boot. It hardly reads like the CV of a failure. Yet Ed Smith still
laments his inability to get selected more than three times for the
England cricket team.
In his contribution to The Value of Failure (Radio 4,
weekdays last week), Smith attempted to explain why a sense of
failure might haunt even the most apparently successful people -
and why, indeed, this demon can be of use.
Take Andy Murray, whose defeat at the 2012 Wimbledon final led
to his victory the next year. It was, in Murray's own words, a
liberating experience: the thought of never winning a Grand Slam
event loosened the stultifying grip of his own ambition, and
enabled him to play with more freedom.
Like everything, failure requires practice. The headmistress of
Wimbledon High School, Heather Hanbury, explained the reasoning
behind the school's "Failure Week", during which the pupils are
encouraged to take risks, fail, and learn.
In the hothouse environment of one of the top independent girls'
schools, the fear of failure is one of the greatest enemies of
achievement, Mrs Hanbury says. (It should be said that Failure Week
is counter-balanced by "Blow Your Own Trumpet Week", during which
success is celebrated with similar vigour.)
All of this sounds sensible - except that you cannot help
feeling sceptical about a philosophy based on such heady confidence
in the power of narcissistic self-actualisation. People succeed and
fail not just because they really want it, or have not learned from
their mistakes, but because real impediments stand in their way.
Another response is to question the system that bestows and
validates success.
We are all failed somethings. I am a failed golfer, lutenist,
and Arabic-speaker, to name just three. The TV host Jerry Springer
cannot escape the charge of failed politician, since he once stood
for Congress - something that we were reminded of in
Hardtalk (BBC World Service, Wednesday of last week). That
he was Mayor of Cincinnati, and still campaigns for the Democrats,
is neither here nor there. The charge is that he was a serious man
who sold out to trash TV.
The fact is that Springer's shows look mild now, particularly
when you set them beside the spectacle that is Jeremy Kyle. Even
episodes with titles such as "I married my horse" fail to raise
more than a single eyebrow. But Springer's defence of the format,
made vehemently here to Stephen Sackur, does not ring true: that we
are all snobs, regarding with contempt the noisy, chaotic
utterances of the unschooled and disenfranchised.
Nor is it good enough for Springer to claim that he has no prior
knowledge of who is going to appear on his programme, or what their
problems are. He is hardly an innocent in all of this.
Ultimately, the greatest contempt is shown by Springer himself,
when he admits that the show is "stupid". Charming though the man
is, there is a disconnect between the part he plays as entertainer,
and the wider cultural sphere that he claims to care about.