Ian McMillan: I’m not trying to be clever, just saying what I think

My mate Keith was playing the drums in a theatre show in Leeds years ago and he used to catch the last train home and read a book; he said that most nights he got heckled by lads further down the carriage who shouted, “Look at the college boy with his book!” He once shouted back, “You’re further down the carriage of Life than me!” which he considered quite a clever line, but he still had to get off a stop early and run down the street holding his drumsticks like weapons.

I more or less know how he felt. When I worked on a building site in Sheffield in the late 1970s, as well as calling me “Degree” because I’d got a degree, my fellow workers used to call me “The Intellectual”, mainly because I read books at dinnertime in the cabin. ‘He’s here!’ they’d chorus, ‘The Intellectual!’ and I’d smile indulgently and read my book. And then, not long ago, somebody said to me, “You’re a bit of an intellectual, aren’t you, Ian, even though you hide it well?” And I smiled and turned the book I was reading upside down to get a cheap laugh. So then, as we proceeded with the idea of the Intellectual Special I started to get more interested in the idea of The Intellectual, and also the idea of The Public Intellectual. I protested to my producer that I was a bluffer and an auto-didact, picking up ideas and knowledge from all over the place but never really having the brainy staying power to concentrate for longer than it takes to soft boil an egg. She ignored me and said it would be good to look at the idea of The Intellectual and whether or not we needed them in The Years of Austerity or, as they call them round here, The Decade of Nowt. So we did the Intellectual Special.

One of the intellectuals we had on the show said something very interesting about The Life of The Mind. We were talking about the fact that lots of people (me included) can drone on for hours fairly knowledgably about football and it’s not seen as odd to be obsessed with the offside trap or to be able to quote match statistics from the last several decades, but if you try and talk about philosophy or politics with the same conviction and attention to detail you’re seen as strange or dull or, worse, strangely dull.

Let’s be honest: I write these Tuesday columns because I want people to enjoy them, but I also want to make my readers think. That’s what newspapers are for, in my not-so-humble opinion. As well as being full of news and sport they should be full of opinions that you find welcome or unwelcome and which get the old grey matter churning; they’re think-tanks as well as information boxes.

So every week I come across something in the news or I think about something that’s happened to me and I try to widen the initial thought out into an argument or a point of view that people might agree with or disagree with but which will make them think when they’ve put the paper down or turned the page, saying things like “That Ian McMillan doesn’t know what he’s on about!” Does that make me an intellectual? I’m not sure. My idea this week was going to be about those lanyards and name tags that so many people wear: I was going to explore the idea of them being the main item that the 21st century will be remembered for.

But then another of the intellectuals on the show talked about being wary of the pseudo-intellectual, and when he said it I went redder than a red balloon that had been splashed with red paint and tomato ketchup because I have been that person.

I have gazed at pieces of art in galleries and tried to impress people by saying, “I think those blue lines are representative of the artist’s inner turmoil” and the people I’m with have said things like, “Shall we go to the café?”. The thing is, I wasn’t trying to be clever or intellectual: I was just saying what I thought and if it came out a bit awkwardly it was just like when you’re learning to play the violin: the notes will always sound daft and squeaky until you get the hang of them. It’s the same with the giving out of opinions in public: the more you do them, the better they’ll get. In theory, anyway. What time’s the café open?