Cosmo Landesman

When did it become OK to be boring?

Being boring was once the worst of all social sins. Now it’s practically compulsory

[Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images]

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[/audioplayer]I can remember back in the 1970s when a girlfriend of mine, sensing my lack of interest in her very long and very detailed analysis of the lyrics of Bob Dylan suddenly said, ‘Am I boring you?’

Of course she was. And of course I denied it. Why? Because it was a hurtful and embarrassing thing to say to someone. Back then to be seen as boring was the verbal equivalent of having bad breath or body odour.

But today no one worries about boring other people — or being branded a bore. I know this because my intelligent and amusing friends are quite happy to just chug along, talking and tweeting about the most mundane of matters. I never knew how fantastically boring my fascinating friends could be. And that’s because we once did our best to hide our boring bits from each other. What happened?

I grew up in the bohemian world of Britain in the late Sixties and early Seventies. In that world you could be a drug addict, a transsexual, an alcoholic, a thief, a liar, a psychopath — or all of the above — and no one would bat an eye. However, to be a bore was met with moral disgust.

Being a bore could actually get you barred from a pub, as my father discovered when in the 1980s he was ejected from the Coach and Horses — yes, the one made famous by The Spectator’s Jeffrey Bernard — by its then landlord Norman Balon on the grounds that my dad was a bore.

We used to mock the Great British Bore in this country. He — and it was usually a man — was satirised in the pages of Punch and ridiculed in Private Eye’s ‘Great Bores of Today’ column.

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