What’s your favourite length? Six millimetres? Two furlongs? Forty five thousand days? Depends on the context, I suppose. Seven hours is far too long for a film but not long enough for a holiday in the Maldives. Penises. The longer the better, that’s what the culture tells us, but I’d suggest that a mile long penis is too much. A mile long penis, the width of a shoelace - that’s no good to anyone. It’s a nuisance in fact. Both for the owner and much of the neighbourhood. That’s why I had the surgery.
For some time now I’ve been thinking that things, and not just my medically remarkable appendage, are too long. The Irishman, that was too long. So long that it’s never been mentioned again. We all watched it - the only film long enough to be seen from space - once and that was enough. No repeated viewing meant that nothing from that movie lodged in our heads. No one ever says - “remember that bit in The Irishman” because no two people remember the same bit from that film because no two people went to the effort of watching it twice. So it left the discourse. What a waste of everyone’s time.
Films being too long is not an uncommon complaint. It feels like everyone thinks that all contemporary films could lose at least forty minutes, everyone expect the people who make them. “We think your films are too long.” we say. “Tough shit.” they reply, as they release an eight hour long romcom. Perhaps it’s all a conspiracy by Big Babysitting to get more paid hours.
My solution is a quota. If you want your film to be longer than two hours, you have to apply for a license. Only so many licenses are handed out. That way we still get epic masterpieces like (insert your favourite epic masterpiece here) but are saved the bother of a two hour twenty minute long kids’ movie - I’m looking at you Spider-man: Across the Spider-Verse.
So I don’t like long things. And yet, and yet - this is where this post takes a turn - I have just enjoyed The Ashes to such a degree that I am bereft at it ending. The Ashes, if you’re not familiar, is a series of cricket matches. The Australian cricket team have just travelled to the UK (long flight) to play five, five-day-long matches against England with the series ultimately ending in the genuinely thrilling conclusion of a draw. And I wish it had gone on for longer.
Test cricket, those of us who care are told, is under threat. Test matches used to be timeless. They played until the game reached a conclusion, which could last as long as eight days. I should, for the ignorant, define a day - they start playing in the late morning and finish in the early evening. At some point, someone, presumably with an actual job, suggested that they should perhaps put a limit on it and it was decided that if the game wasn’t over at the end of the fifth day then the match would be a draw.
Then, about fifty years ago, someone had the radical idea of playing a game that finished on the same day that it started and one day cricket was born. It took a full thirty years for somebody else to think of a cricket match that lasted about two and a half hours and the format of T20 was invented. Now there’s a new slightly shorter still format called The Hundred. The game, like mobile phones at the turn of the century, is getting smaller and smaller.
Now in India (the game’s largest market) particularly and much of the rest of the cricket loving world, T20 is the most popular format. Logic suggests that test cricket’s days’ are numbered and that the number may end up being not be five but zero. But it is in test cricket’s absurd mile-long shoelace-like length that lies its beauty. A T20 game is just something you did that day. You went to the post office, you had a meeting with Janet, you cleaned the bathroom, you watched a T20 match. It’s trivial. If you’re following a test match, you may still have to do other things, but for five days there’s a story playing out. In T20 things are constantly happening and by their regularity their significance is diminished. When something happens in a test match it feels huge because sometimes you’ve had to wait two days for it. The time is part of it. The time is not something to get through but something to sit with. The match is a little life, with ups and downs, small victories, tragedies and lulls. Some lives are full of excitement and others are turgid affairs devoid of joy. But they’re all, those that go the distance at least, significant just by the very fact that they happened. By their length.
Ben Stokes, England’s current test cricket captain, has changed the game somewhat. He’s somehow managed to make things constantly happen for five days straight whilst maintaining test cricket’s embedded gravitas. Test cricket is now like John Wick but written by Tolstoy. In entertainment terms this may be test cricket’s zenith, and it may have come just before its final descent. It won’t last forever but I hope it goes on for a very long time.
I’ve spent many a happy Summer at Headingley, and evenings in the cinema. I endorse all the above.