My parents loved Classical music. We didn’t see eye to eye on all music, but they did instil in me, not force on me, a love of classical and opera. On long motorway drives my Dad would have a classics CD on and whenever the William Tell Overture would play he’d steadily increase speed until we were speeding in the fast lane. Me and my sister sat in the back of the car and loved it. It helped to be introduced to classical music in a way where you stumbled across it. It was just there, a part of life.

Dad worked in an office above a Cinema in Oxford Street for a while and I have a memory of being in the cinema watching the famous scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where we first see spaceships floating, somewhat waltzing through space, to the sound of Johann Strauss’s The Blue Danube. None of my family remembers this. There is no one to corroborate the tale, but I do have this beautiful, magical, ephemeral memory and a sense of wonder that I can only ever dream of now.

I also remember how Dad insisted for all his years that the only reason I liked Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was because a young spikey haired and flamboyantly dressed Nigel Kennedy had made it popular at the time I started listening to it. I would insist for years that I didn’t even like Nigel Kennedy. I still don’t have strong feelings one way or another about the man.

My knowledge of Opera took a boost in 1996 when the Paul McGann Doctor Who film was released. In Sylvester McCoy’s last scene as the Doctor, before he changes into McGann, he’s lying on an operating table and something operatic plays as the soundtrack, and McCoy opens his eyes and says, “Pu-ccin-i.” It’s not that I hadn’t heard that piece of music before, but that’s the first time I heard that name and I then decided to find out more and then before you know it, I listen to Puccini.

Here’s another one. When I was young, I’d watch the A-Team. I loved it. There was this one quote in an episode that stuck with me, and it wasn’t, “I ain’t gettin on no plane Hannibal.” Although that is a classic line. It was this: With his usual Colonel Hannibal Smith cockiness and charm, George Peppard gloats at the end of one adventure, “Some are born lucky, some achieve luck, and some have luck thrust upon them". I always loved that. I fully appreciated from a young age that there was something special about having luck thrust upon you, that the Universe was choosing you, that you, the you that you’d carved out for yourself, were singled out to be lucky.

I didn’t know that they were paraphrasing Shakespeare and that the original quote from Twelfth Night was, “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them".

I’m glad I didn’t know. The A-Team context had more impact and was really cool. The original Twelfth Night version has the character Malvolio say it and it’s a completely different context, as he is being tricked into believing in his greatness, when he’s really a bit of a joke. Would it have stuck with me if I’d come across Malvolio before I’d watched the A-Team?

When it came to getting into Shakespeare, I think it did help to have Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes playing “Romeo + Juliet” in the 1996 Baz Luhrmann film. And ever since I saw that film it’s always “+” to me and never “And.” Look at the poster for the film and try telling me I’m wrong. And it was modern dress, and they had guns, and it was loud, shouty and cool. It was colourful and moody, and the two leads were amazingly cute together. I don’t even like the film that much. I’m not even sure it was any good. But it was not Shakespeare as they sold it to me in school. 

Also, throughout the Nineties we had a Shakespearean actor as the Captain in Star Trek. The first time the words, “…..in apprehension how like a God,” had a big impact on me was when I heard Patrick Stewart say them in Star Trek. Christopher Plummer as an evil Klingon shouting, “Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war,” was inspiring. Whilst I’m also pretty sure I only read Moby Dick because of Ricardo Montalban as Khan angrily spouting and spitting out, “…. from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee". 

To this day the only poem I know off by heart is this one by Emily Dickinson:

My life closed twice before its close—

It yet remains to see

If Immortality unveil

A third event to me

 So huge, so hopeless to conceive

As these that twice befell.

Parting is all we know of heaven,

And all we need of hell.

That came to me via an X-Men Cartoon. Doctor Hank McCoy, a big fury blue Mutant with a genius IQ, said the, “Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell,” bit, but he did reference Emily Dickinson and that’s how I discovered Emily Dickinson.

What stands out for me is that all of that I’ve referenced above have one thing in common. They all sound good to me. In particular, when it comes to Shakespeare, people often tell me that they don’t like the language and say, “I Can’t be doing with all that “thee and thou” stuff.”  What if it was in Star trek or Homer Simpson said it? The Simpsons is littered with cultural social and political references, pastiche and homage. It’s entirely possible to get most of your “culture” from watching hours and hours of Simpsons. And then you too can be accused of being part of the “intellectual liberal elite”.

Some are born cultured, some achieve culture, and some have culture thrust upon them by The Simpsons.

So, now if you say, “I was reading Rights of man by Thomas Paine,” and anyone accuses you of being intellectual, point out that you only read it because the comedian Mark Steele featured it in one of his Mark Steele Lectures, which is both very funny and very educational.

If you want to go, “As Jean-Paul Sartre says, Hell is other people,” then quickly follow that up with, “I heard Michale J Fox say that in the American Sitcom Family Ties.” Although he does add, “but heaven is other people too.” Sartre didn’t say that bit. Family Ties can also be referenced if you should mention A Clean, Well-Lighted Place by Ernest Hemingway.

You might be risking it if you say that you love Strauss’s The Blue Danube ever since you heard it in 2001: A space odyssey. The latter probably doesn’t counter the former and you end up doubling down on your intellectual liberal elitism.

Possible reactions to the above could be to see that I am trying to justify any “intellectualism.” Or that I’m outing myself as not “intellectual” at all. Truth is, I don’t think people want praise or criticism for liking things that others might tag as “intellectual.” Who deems what’s intellectual and what’s not? Does it matter how you stumble across what you like? I studied Film Studies at Basingstoke College of Technology. As a result, I know a fair bit about films. Quentin Tarantino worked in a video store and as a result he knows more than anyone about films. We could probably both talk about French New Wave films, François Truffaut and Cahiers du Cinéma (If you haven’t done A-Level film then I’ll save you Googling it. It was an influential French film magazine that started in the Fifties).

That feels like borderline intellectual snobbery to suggest that most people reading this will not have heard of Cahiers du Cinéma. At the time when I studied film it wasn’s seen as intellectual at all. Film studies or any kind of media studies were seen at that time to be a soft subject.

I also find it hard to know where anyone wants to draw the line between being “intellectual and artsy” or being “Culty.” I think Culty is used when something is a little weird, a little off beat. What side of the line does anything David Lynch directed come under? How about anything Anime? What about Manga Shakespeare? That’s a tricky one because on the one hand it’s a comic book and on the other hand it still has that “thee and thou language” going on. The soundtrack to Blade Runner? Does that count as liking classical music? Who cares?

I suppose more than anything else, I wanted to put “being cultured” in perspective. I’m not saying that every so-called cultural comment has to be explained away as not cultured because you learned it via Doctor Who, or Star Trek or The Simpsons. But neither should you wear that knowledge like a badge because you think it makes you look clever. Who says knowing about classical music or arty films or Shakespeare or Dostoevsky or Pinter or David Lynch or French New wave cinema or Russian Cubist artwork, makes you clever? It’s all just stuff you stumbled across and happened to like. It just has a label.

Years ago, working for a big hotel chain, a bunch of us went for drinks one evening. There was a guy there who was a self-published part time writer and somewhat of an expert on Marcel Proust, and it doesn’t get much more la-de-da than Proust. I say this with all the love and respect of all those people I worked with in the hotel trade, but it wasn’t a crowd of literati types. As a conversation starter this guy asked, “Does anyone know which is the country from which there is no return?” I thought to myself, “Read the room. No one here wants to talk about Hamlet right now.” I just politely said, “Are you making a reference to Hamlet? Wrong crowd,” and we all went back to our drinking ourselves into oblivion. That guy? He really wanted the mantel of intellectual liberal elite. He deserves that label. Give it to him. He can keep it. The rest of us, I’m not so sure about.