..incisors eventually surrendered. I could tell the difference between linoleum and the Italian tiles that they tried to imitate without needing to resort to a hammer and chisel. In the film ‘Stagecoach’ when the Indian fell amongst the team of horses, went under the stagecoach , caught the axle and climbed back onto the swaying vehicle, I knew that Yakima Canutt had really risked his life in the cause of filmic reality. My admiration was such that I spent months falling down real stairs without padding in the hope that I might have the stuff to be a stunt man. I didn’t though the brain damage is becoming obvious.
Conversely my certainty about the real world was subverted by the fact that I didn’t realise that my mother was actually a brunette until I was sixteen and she was some years past thirty , only realising that there was something amiss when she became a redhead overnight.
The super-saturated colour staginess of the Wizard of Oz was well over the top -though just as frightening to the young - and the papier-machinations of the early Japanese Godzilla movies were endearingly phony. The difference between blurry focus filmic artificiality and the reality of New Zealand was immediately apparent. The early King Kong is a different, strangely credible universe but it isn’t our own. You agreed to enter it because, like all theatre, it demands that you suspend belief which its artificiality encourages. The later, rather bloated, Peter Jackson version is strangely less credible though infinitely more realistic.
But things have y changed as technology has became rampant and a master where once it was merely a servant. You can often see the chroma keying in Star Wars - most curiously you see it more on television than at the movie - but occasional effects and images are astounding soaring above the cardboard costumes. Yet fortunately not good enough because the intermittent dodginess makes the adventure more exciting - although no doubt George Lucas will have fixed everything by version seventy-eight and the movies will be truly dull. When the Hobbits entered Rivendell I could tell it was a really a piece of artwork in the background; when the U.S. Marine Corps F-35B Lightning tries to blast John McClane of the freeway in Die Hard 4 you can tell the fakery (even more obvious to the true nerd when the plane hadn’t flown at that stage), but now there are
all too many moments when you really have no idea what is real and what has been executed in serried ranks of graphics servers in a planet that may, or may not be, ours.
In some ways it’s marvellous but in others it is quite soul destroying.
When Ford, Oldsmobile and Chevrolet advertised their cars in the 1956 National Geographic a magazine that was then, to a prepubescent me, the source of the most aspirational objects in the known universe i.e. US Super Sabre fighter pilot endorsed Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses, I could tell that it was a painting (or a hand-touched-up touched up photograph) being used in the advertisement. It was endearing and homespun and somehow made the expectations being desperately raised in the copy rather quaint.
But now I am beginning to realise that I don’t know half of what is going on. In this world where I thought that product photographers were slaving away in their studios paying off the 50 megapixel digital back of the Swiss made Hasselblad, taking beautifully lit images of expensive things I now know they are now mooching around hoping that the bank hasn’t realised that the nt overdraft payment might be just a tad slower than anticipated. Those wonderful pictures of Rolex watches aren’t the result of careful studio lighting but rather somebody importing their engineering drawings into a product like Keyshot (Keyshot .com) and doing it for themselves. I’m sorry that you thought you picture of the Adidas Jacket was real or that the four pickup trucks in the field might have got people into the outdoors for an afternoon’s fun shoot but that just isn’t the case.
Bloody computers again.
Should I complain, given that past twenty years of my life was spent making this all happen? Well yes and no. But mainly yes.
Every time we separate ourselves from the materials we use we lose something. When I occasionally write using a pen, doing my best Cathedral Grammar calligraphy, I am in a different mindset from when I type. Not just the fact that I fully marshal my thoughts before I write but that the fact of writing changes what I write. I know that when I have written these intermittent columns in longhand before copying them into a computer so that I can send them to be uploaded they are better, funnier and even slightly more incisive.
When the printing press replaced illuminated manuscripts the world was measurably better but immeasurably poorer, a way of regarding the world at leisure was lost. When art schools stopped teaching drawing the earth should have stopped in its rotation for drawing teaches the coordination between hand and eye, the difference between looking and seeing. I draw on both a computer and on paper – but something in me tells me that only one of them feels like real drawing.
We can never go back but if we did we would be tripping over many a baby that went out with the bath water.

*Refutation of Bishop Berkeley
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that everything in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."
Boswell: Life