The Guide #165: How Paddington affected a quiet takeover of the cultural landscape
Like an awful lot of people, I went to see Paddington in Peru this weekend and – anaemic reviews be damned! – I had a pretty good time. Paddington’s third outing is definitely a drop off from the first two (though those, especially the second, set an almost impossibly high bar). It missed the lightness of touch of director Paul King, who just has a writing credit this time around. The jokes weren’t quite as precise, the baddies not quite as memorable, and the plot – involving ancient Peruvian relics, magic bracelets and steamboat captains haunted by the failures of their ancestors – felt a little convoluted.
Still, it was preferable to the E-number waterboarding that watching most children’s films feels like. The film is bright-eyed, inventive, charitable – and is about something, gently probing at the idea of what constitutes “home” for people who have migrated. The franchise seems to be settling into a comfortable, family friendly middle-agedness – there will probably be at least another three of four instalments, and we’ll soon struggle to find much to say about them.
But Paddington Bear, the 21st-century juggernaut – well, there is tons to say about that. Can you think of a bigger revival in fortunes for a cultural creation? Barbie, perhaps – though she already had a level of cultural ubiquity that Paddington, unchanged since 1958 in his duffel coat and floppy, oversized proto-bucket hat, didn’t.
When I was little, while not quite a Peruvian relic, Paddington certainly felt a bit fusty. Michael Bond’s series of books already belonged a very different, more patrician Britain. And, though charming, the stop-motion 70s BBC adaptation, with its little felt puppet moving jerkily along in front of cardboard cut-outs, seemed wildly out of step with the bright, loud, violent US cartoons that had started to smash their way on to British TV in the mid-80s. Compared with the steroidal antics of the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles (as they were forced to be called over here), Paddington seemed very quaint.
Of course, that was his secret weapon all along. For the first Paddington film, in 2014, King and co-writer Hamish McColl spotlighted the same qualities that made Paddington feel dated three decades before. It leaned into the idea of the kind, articulate, unfailingly polite (well, in everything bar table manners) Paddington Bear as a refugee, not just from South America but from a previous, more genteel age. The films are consumed with nostalgia for a half-forgotten London, of umbrella shops and townhouses, but it’s also a world that feels breezily, multiculturally modern.
The branding behemoth that has clanked into gear alongside the films has been entirely predictable, but still it has been eye-popping in scale. Paddington has been a stuffed toy staple for 50 years (invented, as this great Esquire deep dive into Paddington’s history recounts, by none other than Jeremy Clarkson’s mum) but the production line has been supercharged of late. Collaborations and pop-up shops abound, from London to Lima. An inevitable Paddington musical is due in the West End next year, preceded by that 2020s must-have: the immersive experience production. If this commercial onslaught has been relentless, there has at least been some restraint in what is being hawked: the Bond family have always been pretty careful custodians of their “IP” and the tie-ins haven’t messed with the spirit of the bear too much.
But Paddington’s ever-presence isn’t just a matter of pounds and pence. There’s a cultural omnipresence too. That was of course supercharged by his sweet, slightly stilted video with the Queen for the Platinum jubilee, which became something far stranger after her death: the memes of him seeing her off into the afterlife, the giant mounds of blank-expressioned bears piled up outside Buckingham Palace, the growing idea of Paddington as the Ferryman, as death himself.
Despite being everywhere, Paddington has managed to just about sidestep the culture wars (bar a recent flashpoint over the crass Home Office publicity stunt of granting him a British passport). Instead, people feel able to project their political fantasies on to him: those of a liberal bent cling to the bear as a symbol of migration in a world turning ever more hostile to refugees; conservatives, who initially denounced the first film as “anti-Ukip propaganda”, can, post Queen vid, paint him as an icon of traditionalism and a figure of the establishment. (Certainly the UK government are well aware of Paddington’s soft power.)
There is of course a third group: those who find the idea of projecting complex, real-world politics on to a kids’ bedtime story facile, not to mention insulting to actual migrants. But even they, in their vocal disdain on social media, only help to contribute to the Paddington supremacy.
This may have a shelf life. Maybe we’re already seeing the beginnings of the Keep Calm and Carry On tea towel-ification of Bond’s creation. People might soon tire of all Paddington, all the time. Perhaps he’ll return to his former status as a fusty, mid-century character, passed over for louder, shinier creations. But not any time soon.
