If you were to ask Curveball to name three geniuses we probably wouldn’t say Einstein, Newton… …We’d go Ianucci, Gervais, Merchant. COOGAN.

And we’re not alone. A disease has infected contemporary culture in the last 15 years. Few educated British males (and it’s overwhelmingly males) between 20 and 30 have escaped. The symptoms are easily discerned: a discussion begins between two sufferers. The subject matter is wholly innocuous. All seems safe. Then, out of blue and at lighting speed, there erupts into the conversation an Alan Partridge quote, or one from David Brent.

The infection is utterly contagious. Within seconds the sufferers have left all hope of coherent conversation behind. They are now insensible, gibbering wrecks, repeating any quote they can think of which bears even a passing reference to their current situation.

In the dairy aisle of the supermarket? “Smell my cheese.” Appearance just been insulted? “Mister Toad?!” Embroiled in a political debate? “This is not political debate!”

Occasionally an alternative point of reference might rear its head, but Blackadder, Peep Show, The Simpsons—these are all mere variants of the primary disease. Always there is regression to the Brent, or to the Partridge. There is a notorious axiom, named Godwin’s Law, which states that, given time, all online discussions will ultimately revert to Hitler. Curveball here posits a similar Law: that, given time, all discussions between British men in their mid-20s will ultimately revert to Brentridge.
These outbreaks are all too common, and sadly there is no cure. But at least they are confined to conversations between fellow sufferers. There is, though, a more pernicious, more debilitating aspect to the disease. It’s about delivery. Not how people walk the walk, but how they talk the talk. Vis a vis…you get the picture.
For the infected Brentridgean has, by 2010, been exposed to these quotations for a decade or more. So much so that the cadence of the voices, the pacing of the sentences, all have been absorbed into his normal patterns of speech. A whole generation…you know…speaks in ellipses. Yeah? Clauses are clarified after a comma, in a way. Sentences trail off into nothingness, so…

It’s life imitating art. But what’s amazing is the extent to which this phenomenon has penetrated the consciousness. Comparisons to the effect upon the English language of Shakespeare, of Tyndale’s bible translation, of Orwell…well such comparisons are obviously rubbish. They are rubbish. But there is a real and lasting influence upon the spoken word of a whole generation at work here. Someone should really be studying this. (Just Say No to cuts in Linguistics funding!)

And the most interesting time is still to come. For among the quoters of today – inflicting their inflections upon each other, mimicking the failed TV characters of their youth – there exist the failures of tomorrow. The middle managers, the media might-have-beens, the mediocrities and the misanthropes. At the moment the quotes are, just barely, ironic. The speech patterns, though involuntary, are ironic too. But what happens when they (we? I?) grow up? Young men imitating Partridge for a laugh is one thing. A raft of middle aged failures unconsciously aping Brent…well wouldn’t that be intolerable? Life would become one big sitcom. But the point about sitcoms is that they’re only funny from the outside. Those inside are never in on the joke. Is that what any of us want?
This country.