His theory, well worked through with myriad examples, connections and illuminating digressions, is that to understand how we choose to entertain ourselves we must return, once again, to the Victorians; precisely what Danny Boyle did, Sandbrook explains in his preface, when he created the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012 – which is why we liked it so much. On this reading, it’s no surprise that, when the seventeen-year-old Tony Iommi made prosthetic thimbles from melted down Fairy Liquid bottles so that he could continue to play guitar after he had chopped off two fingers in a steel press, he went on to form Black Sabbath; the foundries and coalfields and sheet-metal works that surrounded his Birmingham upbringing, products of the Industrial Revolution, could hardly but lead to heavy metal.
