Dialogue: Attention will span matters of absolute interest

"But," said the terribly earnest man on my car radio, "is a shortened Hamlet really Hamlet?"

It was a bit like asking if three-quarters of a worm is a worm, but, being a literary bod, I was keen to hear the answer, so I drove twice round the roundabout that precedes the radio blackout of the Lyttelton road tunnel.

Brilliant inventions, roundabouts. Sort of self-policing traffic lights. Even though they daunt the elderly a bit, they're exactly the sort of no-nonsense practical thing I would like to have invented.

Something that works and that you don't notice because it works. But anyway, twice round the roundabout I went, stalling to hear the answer to the Hamlet question.

That's something else I'd like to have done. I'd like to have written Shakespeare. True, lots of earnest, breathy, radio-type people who got bullied at school keep banging on about the intertextuality of his imagery, but Shakey's far too dead and deaf now to have to worry about that sort of flim-flam.

All he did was write a bit, act a bit, have fun, make money and retire as soon as he decently could to a big house in Stratford he'd had his eye on since he was a grubby child. Practical as a roundabout was our Bill and shucks to the critics.

Anyway, in answer to the Hamlet question the woman said, "Oh, absolutely," as she was sure to do, being the sort of woman who says "absolutely" absolutely all the time.

"And of course," she went on, "pretty soon no one's going to be able to concentrate for more than a quarter of an hour on anything without a break, not even Hamlet."

At which point several car horns sounded and I was obliged to drive into the sudden silence of the tunnel, where I found myself bowling along at a merry 20 km/h behind Shakespeare's unmarried elder sister driving a Ford Ammonite.

Amid the white tiles and fluoro lights of the tunnel, which always remind me of a sort of mesmeric bathroom from Star Trek, I had an abundance of time to reflect on the predictions of Miss Absolutely.

When we finally broke back into daylight she'd absolutely gone from the airwaves, along with the earnest man, their place taken by a tone-deaf Spaniard singing the Beatles' Nowhere Man in his native tongue. Having plenty to think about, I turned Senor Ningun Sitio off.

I'll lay a dollar to a stuck pig that Miss Absolutely was about to go on about attention span.

Our collective attention span, she would have said, is shortening by the day. Consider, she would have said, the novels of Dickens with their expansive drift across time, and the eagerness with which the Victorian public lapped them up and clubbed each other over the head with their enormous attention spans as they fought to get their beaks into the latest Blackwell's magazine to learn the long-winded fate of Edwin Drood wrapped up in a thousand subordinate clauses.

Compare that, she would have said, to our fast-food, sound-bite, short-sentence culture of today.

Where reading is snappy. Where a 30-second advertisement is too long.

Where slogans replace thought. And clauses sentences. No verbs. That sort of stuff.

People today, she would say, though of course she would implicitly but absolutely exclude herself from this generalisation, want things now or not at all.

Instant gratification. No patience. Lots of action. Guns. Death. Sex. Gimme. In short, we're going down the long slide to dumbsville.

Having taught for 20 years, I've heard it all before. And so have you. Children can't concentrate any more. You and I can but the young ones just can't manage it, the poor little darlings. They need constant stimulation.

They can't sit still and they don't read and they lack imagination and the world is going to the dogs.

And even the dogs are more skittish than the Fidos of yesteryear.

Well, phooey to all that. A short attention span has always been the excuse for lazy teachers and lousy playwrights. Give kids, or adults, or even the dogs we're all going to, something that interests them and they've got attention spans as long as the Harbour Bridge.

Bore them and those spans shrink to nothing.

That is how it was, is and always will be. Hamlet will keep going and people will watch it because it's good.

They'll even attend in monstrous doses to the moderately good. Harry Potter volume 4 is as long as Bleak House.

So, is a shortened Hamlet still Hamlet? Yes it is. Is it as good as the longer Hamlet? No, it isn't.

Will Hamlet survive? The Hamlet shortened by a dolt, no. The Hamlet written by clever Will, yes - absolutely.