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Dan TDM has turned my generation gap into a chasm

JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty
JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty

It is said that the essence of a foreign language is found in its untranslatable words, and the spirit of a culture in its jokes. To this I would add that the character of a generation is summed up by the dumb things they watch on YouTube.

I’ve been arguing this point lately with my children, who are obsessed with a YouTuber called Dan TDM.

Mr TDM (aka Dan Middleton) is a 26-year-old from Northamptonshire who abandoned his job stacking shelves in Tesco to play computer games. He is far from the first young man to follow this life path, yet Middleton has turned the base metal of pointless endeavour into gold.

Almost literally, in fact: his bedroom videos, in which he comments on his sessions playing games such as Minecraft, have been viewed more than 10 billion times. It was reported this week that he earns more than £12 million a year, much of it in revenue from YouTube.

Middleton follows in the unvarying tradition of children’s TV presenters: squeakily upbeat, wholesome and brightly apparelled (blue hair/neon tattoos). He seems utterly decent. Kind to his dogs and wife, he does not curse and (unlike other YouTube celebrities such as Pewdiepie) he has yet to make any disgusting racist remarks in public.

On these grounds he is unobjectionable, if mildly annoying. My complaint, issued relentlessly to the children, is that the whole concept of them gawping for hours at a kidult twiddling his thumbs is just so reductively, nihilistically pointless. Why would anyone — particularly my children, who I rather wish were prodigiously reading Dickens or learning to paint with oils — waste their time watching this crap?

To this, they have two responses: “He’s just really good at Minecraft, daddy,” they say, eyes rolling. “And he’s funny.”

Quietly devastating, this. The unspoken retort is that which has been spoken by children to their fathers for generations out of mind. You’re square and you wouldn’t understand.

I suddenly realise how my parents felt about the Wu-Tang Clan, and their parents about the hippy movement, and their parents’ parents about Elvis.

I suddenly feel quite misanthropic. “He’s not funny, he’s a twerp,” I snap, and turn the flashing screen off. They look at me with scowls, and I sense them picking me, quite rightly, for the miserable old tosser that I am.

I’m lost in space with Stars Wars

A confession: I don’t like Star Wars. I understood Carrie Fisher, I think. Daisy Ridley, certainly. But the rest of it seems portentous, torch-waving hokum, which trades on little more than cheap nostalgia and CGI thrills. Appalling and heretical — but there it is.

Dogs and masters, wedded by blissful ignorance

Dogs are great at reading our moods, says Sophie Scott, a professor of neuroscience at University College London who is giving this year’s Royal Institute Christmas lectures. Yet we humans are, apparently, lousy at reading dogs: forever hugging them and petting them at unwanted moments and getting on their doggy nerves.

Professor Scott anticipates that dog owners reading the latter part of that statement will feel a form of indignant exceptionalism, believing that they know their animal, whose wish to be petted like a rag doll is written all over their furry face.

Personally, I accept that I haven’t a clue what my dog is thinking. Where I take issue with Scott’s hypothesis is in its assumption that my dog has the slightest idea what I want. On no occasion have I ever asked him to go into the garden, eat fox s*** and then return to the house to try and lick me about the neck and face — nor to arse-sniff every Jack Russell and Labradoodle he sees, leaving me shrilling his name across the park.

But here we are, content in a relationship in which both of us misreads the other, doing as we please and mistaking it for what the other probably wants. It is not unlike marriage: companionship based on wide-bandwidth tolerance, and a realisation that things could very easily be worse.

You know where to stick ‘meat tax’

An unusual but pleasing sight in a restaurant in Geneva this weekend, as the diner at the next table orders a large steak frites, eats it, then orders a second steak frites for dessert. I have never seen this before and am impressed, resolving to try it myself soon.

What horror, then, to come back to London and read that various ninnies are recommending a “meat tax”, on the basis that meat is environmentally damaging and not awfully good for you.

This ghastly idea needs stamping out before it begins. You can tax fags and beer and shopping bags and diesel fuel and houses all you like. But the day a man is no longer free to order two steak dinners in a row without the Government dipping into his pocket will signal the death of western liberty.