Who cares if Wagner’s 200? The plague of the anniversary

Back in the 1960s, the producers of the Tonight programme had a running joke for linking the show’s segments. They would use lines like: ‘And that item commemorated the 23rd anniversary of….’ Or: ‘On Tuesday Mr Jones would have been 73.’ There is something about anniversaries, however audaciously crowbarred in, that always gives the illusion of order amid the chaos and relevance among the accidental.

But today anniversary-itis has not only stopped being a gag. It has become a bore. What are, after all, merely accidents of the calendar have in some places become the dominant factors in our national life.

Sometimes it is anniversaries of major world events, at others a coincidence of an individual birth, marriage or death. What may be significant for a living monarch does not automatically matter for a dead artist.

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