Video killed the radio star, but who killed the WTF! pop video?

The fabled music video director Tim Pope is to appear at the North Berwick arts festival, Fringe by the Sea, next month. A memoir is forthcoming – My Weird Eye: Adventures in the Golden Age of the Music Video – but for his aficionados his work already serves as an aide-memoire for the 1980s and 90s.

Pope also makes films. He worked closely with David Bowie, but he’s probably best known for giving the Cure their otherworldly visual signature, including my all-time favourite video, for Close To Me: a shivering poem to existential angst, with the band squashed into a wardrobe sent bouncing down a hill.

What an intoxicating ride Pope’s vast oeuvre is: from Talk Talk to the Psychedelic Furs to Neil Young. There’s Soft Cell delivering codpieces and provocation in the banned Sex Dwarf video, and Paul Weller and Mick Talbot naughtily stroking each other’s sun-drenched ears in The Style Council’s Long Hot Summer. Siouxsie Sioux wafting through a hallucinogenic Venice in hairy-armpitted splendour for Dear Prudence.

What happened to the WTF! music video? To a pop culture that celebrated – and financed – transgression and imagination? If the music video is a dying art form, it’s one to mourn. Just as songs become earworms, the best videos act as eyeworms. As the song plays, the brain fizzes with crazy images (crashing wardrobes, studded leatherette, acid-tinged gondolas).

Is it a sign of ageing to sigh at the modern slurry of dead-eyed twerk-merchants and “authentic” troubadours dismally strumming? Probably. Still, video killed the radio star. But what killed the amazing, bonkers pop video?

The actor Jim Sturgess, now starring in the TV series Mix Tape, regrets not savouring his early fame, saying: “Sometimes, I wish I’d enjoyed it a bit more.” How refreshing: a “famous” breaking ranks from the celebrity-misery conveyor belt. Boy George once said he wished he’d not grumbled through his Culture Club days and instead just had fun.

Usually, all we get is how gruesome fame is: the paps, the pressure, make it stop! Until it does stop, and then it’s: “Come back – check out my lovely product!” Didn’t Sting say something like: “You pay me for being famous; I make the music for free”? Who among us agreed to pay Sting to be famous? And how do we get a refund?

One of the darkly delicious incongruities of the modern celebrity era is how convinced the famous are of our unseemly fixation on them, when – just floating an idea – surely the most obsessed with fame are those who pursue it themselves.

Sacré bleu! The French are being body-shamed. It’s estimated that nearly half of French adults are overweight and obese, because of increasingly tucking into KFC and McDonald’s. The EU has been implicated because of the lack of transparency over ingredients in fast food.

This is quite a cultural shift, including in the Anglo-French literary sense. For decades, British women have been conditioned to feel inferior to their French counterparts. Hectoring tomes have appeared citing French women as inspo for how to stay slim, chic and everything that lumpen, knuckle-dragging British femininity is apparently not. Rude! Suspiciously, these books rarely seem to be written by a French person, but more often by someone who has visited Paris for all of five minutes, spotted one modish femme supping a bowl of consommé and completely overreacted.

How is this going to fly, with France awash with KFC sharing buckets from Calais to Toulouse? It’s now oddly disorienting not to feel haughty foreign disparagement of my unacceptable British waistline. Some other European country will have to step in.