THERE IS nothing wrong with older people. There is no disgrace in standing before an audience in which everyone is over 60, least of all if there are hundreds of them. Yet there is a presumption that not attracting young people to cultural events is a problem.
Every time I sit in on a committee or planning group for a presentation or discussion, someone is bound to say, “but what can we do to bring in more young people?” The implication is that if only old people come, an event is somehow a failure.
But I am past caring about whether young people will come. It’s not as if old people are dying out; well, they are, of course, but there are plenty more coming up behind them.
The young people who are too distracted or too busy or too cool to come to a debate now will one day be old too. They will have the free time and the same need to get out of the house.
I am writer in residence at Queen’s University Belfast. The theme of the residency is media. It is sponsored by the BBC. The post has been created in honour of Louis Mac Neice.
At my first event, I looked out across the heads in front of me in the university’s grand Canada Room to see if I could find any students. There were one or two. Nearly everybody there might have come free on the bus. And most of them were women.
This is the market we have for public discussion today and I’d rather work with it than shun it.
The late Edith Devlin was regarded as a miracle-worker in Queen’s because of her literature class. She was running it into her 80s and it was unlike any other lecture or class because hundreds came. Her lecture theatre was like a market place. There would be one woman at the front selling jars of honey, another managing a book exchange stall. At 11am, midweek in Belfast, she had a bigger audience than most touring theatre productions.
The same thing happens routinely at U3A, which has shed its original title, “University of the Third Age”. My friend Betty asked me to come and talk about my new book on cycling. I thought I would be going into a little community hall on a housing estate and talking to a dozen sleepyheads. They had to bring in extra seating. I sold 50 books. I could have sold honey as well.
There are practical reasons why older people make up such a large part of audiences. They have the time and they are fighting boredom. Younger people are busier and tired, and maybe need encouragement more than derision for staying away.
But that is no reason to suppose that older people make for an inferior type of audience. Isn’t there a danger that some will wet themselves or ask stupid questions? Aren’t old people boring? Maybe. Some are.
Teenagers can embarrass you too. Some might arrive with their trouser-bands down across the back of their arses and their underpants showing.
The audiences I am meeting are retired professionals. They are intelligent. They read books and discuss them. They have thought for longer about things. They are settled in their thinking.
Those who organise the summer schools and public discussions may want to see a hall charged with the exchange of ideas by the new world shakers. I do too. But I don’t trust that I am going to get a more thoughtful response from a younger person. Anyway, it makes more sense to work with the audience you’ve got than to wish you had a different one, the one that didn’t turn up.
Malachi O’Doherty is writer in residence at Queen’s University Belfast. His latest book, On my own two Wheels; Back in the Saddle at 60, is published by Blackstaff Press