The Grand Tour for Oprah fans

Back in the 17th and 18th century the privileged offspring of European landed gentry undertook what was known as the ‘grand tour’. The BBC’s excellent In Our Time* describes it as “…The idea was for wealthy young travelers to finish their education with an extensive trip to Europe to experience its natural beauties, its cultural treasures and, if they were lucky, its sexual permissiveness.” This was basically a several months, or occasionally a several years, tour of notable European cultural cities normally ending in Italy. Most historians view the Grand Tour as a general waste of time (though the entry in Wikipedia suggests otherwise). The British Aristocracy was particularly fond of the Grand Tour and a whole tourist trade sprung up to cater to visiting rich kids. As suggested above a lot of the participants behaved exactly as the British tourist would now. Stick anyone from a privileged background on a six month jolly around Europe and guess what? They behaved badly, followed the trail blindly and learnt very little.

I have a very dim view of the Grand Tour and had almost forgotten about it completely until a recent trip to my local Borders. Borders isn’t exactly the highbrow Mecca but it is a still book store. As I stood in the meandering check-out line I looked around and took in all the summer titles that were being heavily featured (pushed). A lot of them were in the form of "How I changed my life" or “Look how unusual my life is”. As I got to the very front of the queue was a large picture of all America's favorite, ever morphing woman: Oprah. Along, with her beaming image was a large tray full of copies of her book of the month. I don’t know exactly what it was but it seemed to be some tome which would allow a reader to experience someone else’s life. That was when I suddenly got an image of all these middle class woman on their own version of the Grand Tour. Those Oprah lovers slavishly following her recommendation and experiencing at a distance someone else’s life while making no change to their own....

But that does the rest of us no harm does it? Probably not but it does have an impact on what does or does not get published. Have you noticed how many of those books there are out there at the moment? To get onto Oprah’s list is to sell millions and millions of books. Surely every publisher wants a piece of that. To a certain extent Oprah has turned the high street (or Mega Mall) book store into the literary equivalent of reality TV.


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Bazza




*In Our Time, Originally aired 5/30/2002. IOT is well worth a listen most weeks.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20020530.shtml
Link for full page and archived show – will need RealPlayer to listen.