It appears even Glenda is having a bit of trouble with her subeditors this week:
But it’s hard to decide which is more unlikely: that a mere member of the copy desk would criticise the work of one of Fleet Street’s brightest stars, or that a subeditor – who, as a group, shall we say, tend to be a little older than their colleagues – wouldn’t understand a reference to a 1970s film (really, any 1970s film).
Columnists are not, as a rule, inclined to have production functionaries overrule their jeux d’esprits; they are more lightly edited than any other writer, because the quality of their prose is what’s earned them the job, for gawd’s sake???! There is a presumptive hands-off rule for several star writers at the Tribune (not one that I agree with – it is this blog’s position that everyone should be edited, sensitively, and that silly mistakes just spoil a joke), and in any case it would be for the columnist, not the subeditor, to decide what references were culturally salient.
Given the international decline in copy desks, one might be tempted to say that there are no millennial subeditors anyway. That would not be true at the Tribune, which still proudly invests in subs and as a result has a desk that ranges in age by almost 50 years – ideal, in theory, for catching almost any generation-specific error that might elude a colleague. It’s just that the younger ones have the good sense, by and large, to work on the website, in social media and in video – channels that may still offer them employment into the future – and leave a group of increasingly grizzled Gen X-ers to grow old with the paper.
However, that didn’t stop this headline appearing on the website:
A cultural reference to The Life of Brian? Hard to believe a boomer didn’t write that: you’d need to be in your 60s (NOTE: or not – see comments) to have seen that the first time round at the cinema. Maybe Glenda is right: maybe 1970s films are a universal frame of reference that speak to all generations, in which case I’m in prime position to capitalise.
Or has this reference just sailed over the heads of most of our younger online audience, because it’s just too “old”? I don’t if know I feel lucky, or whether I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
Ten minutes past deadline 
I was reading only a few days ago that the “not the messiah” line and the one about blowing the bloody doors off were reckoned the two funniest lines in films (or perhaps in British films), which doesn’t say much for film comedy, but perhaps does mean they have been so concreted into the public consciousness that even your youngest sub could place them.
That’s probably true. I often wonder about how much people in their 20s today know about popular culture in previous decades. When I was a kid, in the 70s, there had only been about 20 years of rock’n’roll, so oldies shows would go right back to Bill Haley and the pioneer years. Now there’s another 50 years on top of that – for young people, it must seem like this vast forest of culture that’s impossible to get to know completely.
It may be, however, that they know the popular culture that was about in their parents’ house. My knowledge of music in the past 40 years is woeful, but I remember some of my father’s tiny collection of 78s – O Sole Mio (Gigli version, I think), Pomp & Circumtance 1, In a Monastery Garden, In a Persian Market. All decent middlebrow stuff: it occurs to me now that he must have had pretensions to Middleclassdom.
And, weirdly, I can quote catchphrases from ITMA. I must have been too young to hear it broadcast, but the catchphrases remained common currency of my parents’ conversations for years. Maybe my children’s elderly memories are stuffed with lines from the Goon Show.
Yes, that could well be it – a younger member of staff with Python-era parents. It’s true, the old popular culture that you do discover, you tend to adopt unselfconsciously as your own
A late fact-check on your odd claim that one would have to be 60 or older to have seen Life of Brian in the theater: of course that’s not true. I was born in March 1965, placing me among the very oldest of those Gen-Xers growing old with the print editions of various papers; I’m 58 right now, obviously, and was just as obviously 14 when I went to see Life of Brian in a NY movie theater late in the summer of 1979 (not to mention 10 when my father took me to see Holy Grail in some other NY theater in the spring of ’75). Why put a number on the low bound of an age range when it’s clearly the wrong number?