Some of the examples Bacon mentions in our conversation, however, are much more everyday and closer to home. “A younger female friend came round to see us recently. She was talking about a friend of hers called Sam. ‘When are you seeing him again?’ I asked. ‘Why do you assume Sam is a man,’ she replied. ‘You’ve just misgendered my friend.’ It is those sorts of exchanges that just make me feel exhausted.”
So what is his definition of cancel culture? “Sometimes,” he suggests, “it is easier to say what it isn’t.” He cites the example of a notional chief executive of a large company who, in a radio interview, makes a racist remark.
“It causes such an outcry that the individual” – note he has learnt his lesson and is using gender neutral language – “is fired. It goes down as one more victory for the cancel culture, but is it really? Or would that chief executive have been fired just the same if it had happened 10 years ago?”
Then there are the occasions when wily politicians use cancel culture to present themselves as victims. “Here in the States, I have seen plenty of examples where those who have said something stupid or offensive in public then turn up on Fox News, claiming to have been cancelled. But they are talking on a national television channel. How does that count as being cancelled?”
It may be as simple as playing up to the idea, popular in some quarters, that we are all caught up in culture wars. “By constantly describing things as part of cancel culture when they aren’t,” Bacon argues, “we are making it seem bigger than it is”.
He may be coming at this issue with his own baggage, but he believes that what we now call cancel culture is old-fashioned public shaming under a new guise. “It would almost be a better phrase for it. In the old days it was the newspaper editor who would decide, ‘we are going to turn someone over’. Now with social media, it is up to any individual. All the world is a stage and everyone has access to it. They can decide to turn on an individual and shame them.”
But it is, he adds, about more than pursuing individual misdemeanours. There are occasions when there is a real and substantial issue at the heart of the clash that is generating so much heat.
He discovers this when, as part of the documentary, he travels to Cambridge. Last month, the broadcaster and art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon was banned from ever again speaking at the Cambridge Union after giving a speech there in which he read out loud in a cod German accent parts of Hitler’s writings that included anti-Semitic and racial slurs.
When voices were raised in protest, Graham-Dixon backtracked and apologised, saying that he had only been trying to expose the evil of the Nazi ideology. But the union refused to back down, and when the president of the debating society issued his own apology, the whole episode quickly became the latest cause celebre in the controversy about cancel culture.
For his part, Bacon interviews a young woman of colour who was in the audience that night and was deeply hurt to hear the N-word read aloud. “You could react and say, ‘oh, she’s being oversensitive’,” he says, “but listening to her I realised she was teaching me something important about how it feels for her. Perhaps this example of cancel culture was a chance for me, as a white, middle-aged man, to think more carefully. And is that so awful?”
That pragmatic see-both-sides approach is how he pitches the whole documentary, moving between the serious examples and the more frivolous. He very deliberately steers the whole thing away from courting controversy. “I know that John Cleese is doing a series on a similar subject later this month, so I will leave the polemics to him.”
But controversy may well be generated anyway, Bacon concedes, because he also looks at the trans rights activists who have done their best to cancel both well-known feminists (Germaine Greer, Jenni Murray and Fay Weldon among them) and academics, including most recently Kathleen Stock, who was forced out of her post at Sussex University for speaking up about the tension between gender self-definition and the biological facts of sex.
“I expect that there will be some people who will object to those sections if only because we interview two academics from Reading University who also disagree with the trans activists,” says Bacon. “It illustrates the negative places we have got to with cancel culture. Even hearing their viewpoint will be controversial for some people.”
Bacon is reluctant to go much further down this line. “If you are running an institution,” he says when I press him, “and you’ve got to work out rules around who can use which bathrooms, then you may have no choice other than to enter the debate, but I’m not in that position. What I will say is that people deciding that they do not want to enter the debate is worrying.”
