Free Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse by David Mitchell

“People have certain expectations of a Michelin restaurant but we don’t have cloths on the tables and our service isn’t very formal,” she explains. Her bare scrubbed wood tables (in 2004, when the place opened, there was only one of them) and seasonal ingredients wowed the Michelin men’s jaded appetites. Sick of starch and the sommelier’s bow, they found her approach refreshing. A tear was brought to the gastronomes’ eyes by her honest home cooking in a leafy environment a world away from the tarnished splendour of haute cuisine’s saline trickery. At its best, you can’t beat home cooking. But Mum doesn’t always make a roast and your favourite pudding. Sometimes it’s fish fingers with a side order of yesterday’s sprouts. Those attracted by the star, less tired of intricate dishes in swanky restaurants than the judges, may have thought the Suttons seeds rack and display of watering cans detracted from the ambience of their anniversary dinners.
    In the end, the award robbed customers of the very feeling of serendipity that made the Michelinsters commend the cafe in the first place. They had denied others their delight in thefood being much better than they’d expected. It’s like a review of a farce which tells people they’ll roll in the aisles. “They won’t now,” I always think. Nothing short of an earthquake will make an audience roll in an aisle when they’ve braced themselves.
    Our level of expectation is crucial to our enjoyment of food, wine, holidays, plays, films and TV shows. We flatter ourselves that we’re objective but our judgments are clouded by our hopes, by whether something was better or worse than we’d anticipated. The films I’ve most loved, as well as those I’ve most hated, are the ones I’ve known least about in advance. When I’m well briefed, my range of responses clusters more closely around the average. It’s almost impossible to find a brilliant film brilliant if dozens of people have told you it’s brilliant in advance. “You
have
to see it – you’ll be amazed!” they say, and then I can’t help expecting it to transcend the medium – to be more than just a film, even though I can’t imagine how. A film with free sandwiches, perhaps, or useful tips for putting up shelves.
    So it’s difficult to know what to do if you think something’s excellent. You want friends to discover it by chance, like you did. But you want to make sure they do. How do you push them towards it without elevating their expectations and increasing their capacity for disappointment?
    This was a worry for me after seeing
The Muppets
recently. I hadn’t read any reviews or spoken to anyone who’d seen it, so I watched with few expectations, other than having adored
The Muppet Show
as a child. And I loved it. I was alternately moved and amused. I laughed and, had my education not severed the link between my tear ducts and my brain’s emotional centre, I would have cried. But, just by saying this, I may have Michelin-starred the shit out of any joy you might derive from it. Sorry.
    A lot of my enjoyment, with the greatest respect to those who made the film, came from my nostalgia for the TV show. I’m a great one for sneering at remakes but, in this case, myreminiscence glands were aflame; I was desperate to experience again the warm hilarity which had made me love that programme three decades ago.
    I can’t help feeling that they don’t make shows like that any more – that the 1970s was the golden age of television, certainly of children’s television. The medium had come of age but not yet lost its youthful verve. A joyous psychedelic creativity was finding its outlet in programmes such as
Rainbow, The Magic Roundabout
and
The Muppet Show
. Crazy, brilliant things which wouldn’t make sense on paper were being tried out because TV was still insufficiently organised to ruin itself.
    I genuinely can’t help feeling it but I doubt it’s true. I suspect there are brilliant