Damian Thompson has narrated this article for you to listen to.
How do you live with yourself when 179 air passengers are burned alive on a South Korean runway, and you’ve spent the last few weeks binge-watching YouTube videos about plane crashes? The obvious answer is that I need to seek help. I have a defence, but I don’t think any British jury would buy it. I started watching the air-crash videos to escape the anxiety caused by the American presidential election. Anxiety that Donald Trump might lose, that is.
On YouTube there’s always someone listening. It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet for monomaniacs
I can imagine Emily Maitlis and Rory Stewart’s reaction: ‘Self-declared Trump supporter chills out by imagining planes full of holidaymakers falling out of the sky. That figures.’ But I don’t care what they think. Their horror-struck faces were one of the joys of election night. Not that I saw it live – I was so freaked out by the prospect of a Kamala Harris victory that I handed over my SIM card and router to a friend to avoid the agony of watching it unfold. I know this sounds completely loopy, but I blame YouTube – the crystal meth of online entertainment for people like me who can’t let go of their pet topics.
My childhood was dominated by a smorgasbord of obsessions: Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who, coin-collecting and Beethoven. Even today, my old schoolmates shudder at the memory of my playground lectures. Did they know the George III 1787 sixpence came in two varieties, with and without a semée of hearts? Or that Beethoven wrote alternative finales to his string quartet Opus 130? Or that…
Like the unseen flower in Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy’, I was wasting my sweetness on the desert air. But on YouTube there’s always someone listening. It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet for monomaniacs.
Henry Kissinger once said that the bitterness of academic politics was in inverse proportion to the importance of the subject. I noticed the same thing when I got into vaping. I logged on to YouTube and found a real battlefield. Tattooed experts poured scorn on each other’s coil-building techniques but reserved their deepest contempt for ‘stealth vapers’ who inhaled puffs from their mouth rather than dragging clouds straight into their lungs. Not wanting to seem a wimp, I collected a drawerful of sub-ohm tanks that blasted out Arctic Ice or Butterscotch Cheesecake.
After six months of hacking up my lungs I threw it all out. The habit cost me two grand. I resolved to stay clear of YouTube pundits. I was doing OK until last summer, when I became obsessed with the US election. I’d convinced myself that western civilisation couldn’t survive four years of Kamala’s cackle.
With polls showing razor-thin margins for both candidates, I turned back to YouTube for reassurance. I sat through five podcasts a night. In the end I couldn’t go to the supermarket without number-crunching the electoral college. If he wins North Carolina and Georgia, but loses Pennsylvania, does he need Wisconsin and Michigan to reach 270? (‘Unattended item in bagging area!’) A colleague suggested a diversion. ‘Once you discover Mentour Pilot you’ll be hooked,’ he said. ‘He covers air crashes, but tastefully.’
Mentour Pilot is Captain Petter Hornfeldt, a Swedish commercial pilot who explains the technical mishaps that send jets hurtling into oceans or cliffs. His lilting voice, sharp scripts and slick graphics flatter you into thinking you understand – sort of – how a faulty angle-of-attack vane can cause the manual and automatic speed trim systems to fight each other. The suspense builds as you wait to discover how disaster will strike.
I wouldn’t describe Mentour Pilot’s YouTube channel as soothing, exactly, but in my frazzled state it felt less disturbing than the notorious Selzer poll showing Kamala winning Iowa. And Captain Petter is tasteful, so long as you ignore the clickbait thumbnails on his home page. (‘Never Saw it Coming!’ shrieks one headline, with a helpful arrow pointing to the mountain looming in front of a jet.) There are no grisly photographs and he never discusses crashes under investigation, which rules out the Jeju Air Disaster.
By 6 November it was safe to return to US politics channels, but there’s a limit to how much conservative gloating you can take. Yes, it’s fun to watch Rachel Maddow gasping like a guppy fish in a compilation of ‘best liberal election night meltdowns’. But after a few hundred replays even that gets old.
Enough digital poison, I thought. Time for an analogue antidote: my collection of classical LPs from the golden age of stereo, cut from master tapes and pressed on vinyl. The problem? The maddening mystery of static.
Everyone agrees that the correct cleaning routine eliminates crackle. No one agrees on the details. So now I’m back on YouTube, listening to thunderous philippics against heretics who use too much isopropyl alcohol in their distilled water or buy a vacuum instead of an ultrasonic cleaning machine.
I’ve acquired all the liquids, an anti-static gun, two rival machines, and after every mesmerisingly dull lecture I test its recommendations. Do any of them work? It’s too early to say: I still have at least a dozen vinyl-cleaning recipes to try. As for actually listening to music, isn’t that what Spotify is for?
The pilot and YouTuber Captain Petter Hornfeldt – name checked in Damian’s piece – joined Damian on The Spectator’s Edition podcast to discuss further:
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