Jonathan Meades Quotes

One doesn’t mind adverse criticism so long as it isn’t stupid.

There is a tradition of television which isn’t dross and stands up. Betjeman’s programmes, which were made for 2/6d with one man and a cine camera, were amazing to watch because he was such a great talker.

Brummies run themselves down, they’re very self-deprecating. Whereas Yorkshire people certainly aren’t.

I don’t know about virtual world, I think it’s more a kind of parallel world. I think the advantages and disadvantages of technology are hugely exaggerated. It doesn’t make that much difference. Sure if you’ve got a mobile phone, you use that over your landline. But I think that life goes on and we absorb stuff.

I think in space or music or art or literature of any kind there has to be some kind of void where the viewer or the spectator or the listener or the reader can insert themselves into it, and there is a certain kind of architectural space which is totalitarian, which does not allow you to do that.

I don’t see any point in having a public service broadcaster which attempts to compete with the commercial sector. Obviously part of its remit is to entertain, but entertainment doesn’t necessarily mean scraping the bottom of the barrel and appealing to the very lowest common denominator.

If you have slightly pathological interest in all the components of places, it forces you to engage with them in a way that perhaps otherwise you wouldn’t, and that’s the only way I can put it.

I like irrational things. I like scenarios where I can think, ‘It would be great if at this point we could do x.’ And there doesn’t have to be a reason for ‘x’.

When I started writing fiction it always seemed in retrospect (I didn’t realise at the time) that it was always caused by environments rather than by incidents and characters.

The only bright feature of cultural relativism’s triumph is that it has become establishment orthodoxy and will thus one day be derided, resisted and overthrown.

When I first started writing in my early 20s it was literary criticism for a very eccentric magazine called Books And Bookmen, which allowed me to write, more or less anything.

I think the French agonise more about being French, I don’t think English think about being English that much. I think the Scottish think about being Scottish and the Welsh think about being Welsh, but the English don’t really care. But the French think about it all the time, it’s an absolute preoccupation.