A curious thing has happened. The television landscape, once a bastion of gritty realism and social commentary, is now dominated by a series about an ice hockey player falling in love with a university student. Off Campus, an adaptation of Elle Kennedy's romance novels, is not merely popular. It is a phenomenon. And its success tells us more about the state of Britain than any think tank report ever could.
Let us be clear. This is not a complaint about escapism. Every age needs its diversions. The Victorians had their sensation novels. The Romans had their chariot races. But when a show about a jock and a bookworm is deemed the pinnacle of our cultural output, we must ask: have we become a nation of intellectual pygmies?
The broader context is the surge in British adaptations of American romance series. Why? Because we have lost the capacity to tell our own stories. Our studios, once the envy of the world for Alan Bennett's monologues and Mike Leigh's kitchen-sink dramas, now churn out sanitised pap designed for global streaming algorithms. It is the McDonaldization of culture: predictable, bland, and utterly devoid of nourishment.
To be fair, Off Campus is well-made. The actors are charming. The cinematography is slick. But so was the fall of the Roman Empire, if you were watching from a villa in Tuscany. The problem is not the quality of the product. It is the poverty of our ambition. We have decided that the highest art form is a love story set in a sports arena. This is not a golden age of television. It is the cultural equivalent of bread and circuses.
Consider the historical parallels. When the Roman elite abandoned philosophy and rhetoric for spectacle, the empire crumbled. When the Victorian intelligentsia retreated into sentimental novels while the working class starved, the ground shifted beneath their feet. And now, when our brightest minds are tasked with adapting American pulp romance, what does that say about our faith in ourselves?
National identity is not built on imported fantasies. It is forged in the crucible of shared experience, of stories that emerge from the soil of our own history. Where is the adaptation of Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning for a new generation? Where is the series that grapples with the decline of manufacturing, the hollowing out of our towns, the quiet desperation of the suburbs? Instead, we get hockey players and women in love with their billionaires. It is a retreat from reality, a wilful blindness to the cracks in our society.
I realize this sounds curmudgeonly. I am accused of being a contrarian, a man who sees decay everywhere. But look at the numbers. Off Campus has been renewed for multiple seasons. Streaming platforms are scrambling for more of the same. The message from the market is clear: give us more escape, less reality, and for God's sake, keep it simple.
The irony is that the original novels are not without merit. Elle Kennedy writes with a certain verve. But the adaptation is the cultural equivalent of a mediocre pub lunch: it fills a hole but leaves no memory. We are consuming culture like we consume fast food, and the result is a nation of intellectual obesity: stuffed, vaguely satisfied, but profoundly unhealthy.
What is to be done? I do not have a manifesto. But I can diagnose the malaise. We have ceased to believe that our own stories matter. We have outsourced our imagination to America, to a fantasy of college life with its fraternities and ice rinks. It is a subtle form of colonization, and we greet it with open arms.
So enjoy Off Campus if you must. Let it be your guilty pleasure. But for God's sake, do not mistake it for culture. It is a symptom of a civilisation that has lost its nerve, a society that would rather dream of someone else's fantasy than confront its own reality. The ice may be cold, but the truth is colder.
