After 10 years of media stories on The Death of the Hipster, the powers that be at the ever-relevant BBC4 finally decided that they should look into this hipster thing. Clare Balding being unavailable, they alighted on Peter York, 72, author of 1982’s The Sloane Ranger Handbook and former chairman of a DTI committee. The resulting documentary is due to air later this year.
Unfortunately, even if York can wrap his head around the subject, it’s a bit like reporting on “the teenager” in 1971. If he ever existed as a unit, the hipster has long since forked off into any of a dozen sub-tribes. But to give the Beeb execs a bit of a run-up, may we submit the following documentary commission proposals for around 2026 (subject to Howard Jacobson’s availability)?
The Createenager
He moved into your shared house. His contribution to the kitchen: three shot glasses, a Sports Direct mug and a giant plastic vat of Whey Protein with Creatine. Too large for the cupboards, it glowers at you from next to the toaster. He eats nothing else, blending it with wholewheat oats and soya milk in his Nutribullet.
Half of these guys are swinging kettlebells heavier than the vat. But the other half never quite got round to the exercise component, and so have taken on the shape and pallor of a Linda McCartney sausage under the weight of all that whey. He is the historic character of Banter Boy melting under the new wave of male grooming.
The Neo-Libertarians
Of course you’d call them the “alt-right”. You’ve bought into the SJW-enslaved media’s attempts to tar them as racist. There’s a video about it. Check your facts. The type is: over-educated under-employed men in IT with vape-bongs who quote Thomas Paine and Milo Yiannopoulos as though they were equally valid sources. This is what happened when the New Atheism petered out and all the goateed men in that coalition realised that all the blue-haired women were going off to start fourth-wave feminism.
The Worthily Polyamorous
Yeah, you know, they tried the whole Judeo-Christian man-woman thing. Now they exist in a parallel world where they wearily announce they “barely know anyone who is still in a conventional relationship”, leaving you pinioned between the fear that your life is a stuffy, bourgeois hell, and the terror of having to wade on to the Omaha Beach of seeing multiple people. They are always trying to stress that the key thing about polyamory is “communication”, rather than “not stabbing your lover’s lover”. But no matter how many times they explain the intricacies, it’s hard not to think of their love life as a bit like a cleaning roster tacked to the fridge.
Hugger Muggers
Everything that makes the older generation shudder when they hear the term “millennials”. This is not only the first generation to be poorer than its parents, it’s the first generation to be nicer, and that should worry us all. Raised in an era of touchy-feely parenting, their Pollyanna views are a genuine reflection of the bland pleasantness of PC going mad.
At their school, you were more likely to have a special assembly held in your honour than be stuffed in a locker. Raised in the Total Celebrity era post-Perez Hilton, they seem to believe Taylor Swift will be genuinely bummed by their response vlogs about her latest confected incident.
Canaristas
Radicalised by the student protests of 2011, that bloke throwing a fire extinguisher off Tory HQ was their Rosa Parks moment. There is only one Jeremy, and Paul Mason is his prophet. They quote articles in the Canary as though it were the New York Times, and always start conversations about politics weirdly assuming you agree with them.
In an earlier era, they would have been the ones at a party buttonholing you to dispense some factoids they half-inched from an Economist article. But the new wave of radicalism, with its intricate rebuttal of the “narratives” of the MSM (mainstream media to you sheeple), has afforded a sexier outlet for that style of intellectual narcissism.
