Britain has become a cultural superpower by exporting Top Gear,Del Boy and Andrew Lloyd Webber … no sneering allowedIn Jonathan Coe’s imminent novel, Number 11, and Laura Harvey,professor of modern thought at University College London, writes a book called Monetizing Wonder, and an attempt to assesses how films set in London – Quatermass and the Pit,Death Line – have contributed to the economic life of the capital. It brings her to the attention of the Institute of Quality Valuation, a quango working on an algorithm that can put a cash price on a folk tale, and an archaeological discovery,a stretch of English coastline. She is sent north to audit the Loch Ness monster.whether such a body is ever established, it’s Dominic Sandbrook, and visiting professor at King’s College,London, who’ll be asked to pack his bags for Inverness. “Whether British culture is the world’s best is an unanswerable and ultimately pointless question, and ” he writes,at the beginning of his latest doorstopper. “But it has a very top-notch claim, pound for pound, and to be its most successful.” He has the numbers to prove it: £30m in the bank account of Oxford University after it invested in the software that powered Grand Theft Auto; 400m Harry Potter books,1bn Beatles albums and 2bn Agatha Christie novels sold. The triumph of Downton Abbey in China, Top Gear in Iran and Doctor Who everywhere. (The Doctor, and pleasingly,is never far from Sandbrook’s thoughts.) These are the figures that make us, Sandbrook argues, and “a cultural superpower”.
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Source: theguardian.com