13 Thursday Jun 2019
Posted in Brexit, Journalism, Political Satire, Politics, Satire
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‘Ande soe yt was thatte thye people of Albion looked acrosse the water to theire cousins yn the New Worlde who were rul-ed by a dylusyonal rhyhte wynged narssyssyste ande theye sayeth: ‘We want one of those’… ande theire wyshe was granted ande yt was trulye thye ende of dayes.’
Amen.
03 Monday Jun 2019
Posted in Journalism, Main Stream Media, Media, Politics, Social Media, Writing
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BBC News, Bias, Channel 4 News, Cockroft Rutherford Annual Lecture, Dorothy Byrne, Fran Unsworth, Impartiality, Jon Snow, Mark Kermode, More Or Less, Politics Live
Last week, as a proud alumnus of Manchester University, I attended the annual Cockroft Rutherford lecture, given by Dorothy Byrne, Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel 4. She argued the case for strong political journalism as a key pillar of our democracy, coupled with an analysis of why those who wish to subvert it have turned their weapons on those who seek to report on them.
You can see her whole lecture here. It’s about an hour long and the lecture proper doesn’t start until about twenty-five minutes in. It’s very entertaining and incisive. Well worth a looksee.
In the colour factor corner…
However, in a largely convincing account of the nuanced meaning of due impartiality, Ms Byrne seemed to have a bit of a blindspot as to some of her own channel’s output. She took a good deal of righteous delight in attacking the BBC for giving undue airtime to climate deniers in the name of balance, conveniently forgetting that it was Channel 4 who led the way on this with The Great Global Warming Swindle back in 2007. She decided that a six part BBC documentary about David Cameron’s tenure as PM would be a waste of money – without having seen it (it may be, it may not be – who knows? There’s certainly plenty to say about his rise to power and, deride it or not, his pivotal premiership 2010-2016. Her uninformed, prejudicial dismissiveness was hardly setting a good journalistic example) and she took great pride in quoting a statistic that said that 90% of Channel 4 News’s audience believed that their coverage was truly independent, the highest of any mainstream news programme.
Duh. Of course they do. They’re Channel 4 News’s audience.
When people say – as many in the Cockroft audience did – that they think Channel 4 News is more independent, or more balanced than the BBC what they mean is, they agree with its very particular Guardian style Liberal/Left – and pro-Remain – agenda. They want Jon Snow and Krishnan Guru-Murthy to express their righteous indignation at people with Right Wing/Brexit views.
I like Channel 4 News. I watch it every day.
Jon Snow – concern etched on his face. His particular brand of liberal left hand wringing can be pretty wearisome. I can wring my own lefty liberal hands, ta, Jon.
I like The Guardian. I have a subscription. Not because these news outlets are impartial (which they aren’t) but because they have a very clear agenda, which throws a clear light on things, albeit from a very distinct angle. As long as you know what that bias is – and it is bias – you can evaluate what the truth may be. A bit like a Mark Kermode film review. I listen to Mark every week, but there’s no getting away from it, he likes all sorts of tedious shite – however, as long as I know what sort of tedious shite he likes I can work out whether the movie is worth seeing or not.
A terrific critic, but oh Lordy, I’ve felt my life draining away watching some of the films he has recommended.
I prefer BBC News. Why? Well for the reasons Fran Unsworth enunciated in yesterday’s Observer in response to this broadside the previous week.
And in the red corner….
It tells me all sorts of things I DON’T want to hear. Its commentators come from all corners of the political spectrum, not just the ones I agree with. I have to work a bit harder to make my own judgements. The interviewers aren’t trying to express my rage (I can do rage on my own, thank you very much). It’s not presented to me wrapped up in a parcel of satisfying righteous indignation.
Many of my friends on Social Media vehemently disagree with me, insisting that while ‘we’ may be able to divine the truth from such output, most viewers aren’t bright enough, and will be easily swayed by, say, a Nigel Farage, unless the interviewer leaps on them and tells them – and tells the viewers that they’re wrong. Angrily!!
Bloody hell, that’s patronising. And not just a little arrogant as well.
Core to our democracy is the trust that people, by and large, are pretty smart and that everyone has the skills to make considered judgements providing they are given the tools. That’s far preferable than the presenters or interviewers editorialising on our behalf. That’s presumably why the BBC has invested so much into the Reality Check team and they are referred to most days on the BBC TV News. But it is our responsibility as an audience and as participants in the democratic process to make the effort not to go out and make a cup of tea when Chris Morris tips up, or when the fact checker feeds back on PMQs on BBC2’s Politics Live which he does EVERY week. Expecting to be spoon fed won’t help the democratic process – and hats off to the BBC for constantly pointing people to Reality Check web pages, Reality Check news items, the very brilliant More or Less on BBC Radio 4, The Briefing Room etc etc etc.
This is the programme that does more than any other to tool the listener up to root out bullshit for themselves…
So I will never say: “Well of course I understand what’s going on but it’s the stupid masses who don’t… so they need to be told what to think.” I see an awful lot of BBC bashing social media from people who take that attitude, and it depresses me. Just as in drama – my own personal trade – no one ever wrote a decent script assuming the audience to be more stupid than the writer.
So, for this Marmoset, it’s bloody amazing that the BBC has the courage to go on doing this, and we should treasure it, not bleat on Social Media because it isn’t saying precisely what we as individuals think. The day it does that is the day it has stopped being News and become our own personal echo chamber.
10 Wednesday May 2017
Last summer, in the heat of Owen Smith’s challenge to Jeremy Corbyn for the leadership of the UK Labour Party, this particular Marmoset pissed off a lot of people, blogging about the Bottom Ten Lazy Political Generalisations propagated by the moon-eyed/swivel-eyed (delete where not applicable) acolytes of Mr Jez-We-Can, who wander the echoing labyrinth of Social Media, their faces periodically melting like Indiana Jones Nazis whenever said Echo dares to mutter: ‘Actually, perhaps he can’t’.
BTW When I say ‘heat’ I’m referring more to the foetid steam that rises from microwaved three-week-old leftover rice pudding. It has the capacity to scald but it smells like sour baby poop.
Oh, by the way, if you’re hoping for a measured commentary on the lefty social media chaterati response to General Election 2017, then you’ve come to the wrong place. I warn you now, there will be swearing.
The Marmoset is NOT IN A GOOD MOOD.
The more emollient voices chided me: ‘But surely, Jeremy’s tenure as leader is precipitating a debate we should have had years ago.’ Ehm, hello?? I think we did actually have this debate, certainly in the 1980s and quite possibly a good few decades before that as well. The answer was as clear then – as it is horribly clear now. Remember this guy?
Well he was wrong about that as well. History repeats itself first as tragedy and then as an even worse fucking tragedy – except this time the Marmoset is 57 years old and doesn’t know if he’ll live to see the left of British politics recover.
But… I hold my hands up. I was wrong. Just like Karl.
Yes.
I’ve said it.
The Marmoset was 100% wrong.
I repeatedly intimated in my August 2016 blog that certain political tropes on social media were intellectually lazy. What a load of utter bollox. No! Here we are, two years after the train wreck of the 2015 General Election; two awful Labour Leadership elections; not to mention the EU Referendum, and the same people are churning out the same clichéd, simplistic, reductive, un-evidenced nonsense they spouted throughout all those sickeningly ill-fated campaigns.
This amount of wilful self delusion isn’t lazy – it’s bloody hard work.
Recently, for the sake of my blood pressure (and everybody else’s patience), I disconnected myself from FB because, far from learning a single thing from recent debacles, the quality of popular dialogue on the left of Social Media appears to be sinking to new lows. But if Tweeters and FBers insist on inventing new tiresome political clichés/excuses/expressions of moral and political outrage, then I reserve the right to fashion another ‘Bottom Ten’.
I won’t bother with the whole Alan Freeman ‘pop-pickers’ thing.
‘Not ‘alf!’
Well… ok, just to get us going: ‘Coming in at number ten!’
10) ‘The real reason Theresa May called this election is…’
I’ve seen a few bizarre reasons touted, but the main one is that it supposedly puts to bed accusations of Tory electoral fraud at the 2015 General Election – a story championed by Michael Crick at C4 News. Ehmmm… How does that work exactly? Any electoral fraud charges won’t just go away because an election is called. Even if every suspected MP stands down at this election – and I don’t believe that they are, certainly not at the time of writing – then issue remains very much live and will re-emerge if the CPS decided to press charges. (NB. Since writing this blog, events have moved on and the CPS have decided not to press charges in all but one constituency, South Thanet, where a decision remains to be made – but my point very much still stands.)
I’ve also seen posts suggesting that Theresa May’s real reason for going to the country is something vaguely to do with Philip May making loads of cash (no, I don’t understand that either) – or, that other golden oldie, to cover up accusations of a paedophile ring at the heart of the establishment. Wha…? Regular visitors to the Marmoset may remember what this dubious little monkey had to say about conspiracy theories.
This election is about her control of Brexit and maximising the Tory majority at a time when the opposition is at its weakest thanks to the poor and unpopular stewardship of Jeremy Corbyn. No more, no less.
9) ‘You can’t trust the Polls! Look what happened in 2015, Brexit, Trump etc….’
Polling gets a lot of stuff wrong, because while it’s a science from which we demand exactitude, the parameters are constantly shifting, and it’s a challenge for the methodology to keep up. But statisticians are generally smart cookies and able to learn from their mistakes, so before we start bleating about how we can ignore the polls, it’s worth a click or two (if you can be arsed before proclaiming) to check the facts. Let’s look at the oft cited straws at which poll-deniers are wont to grasp:
The 2015 General Election: There were 92 polls during the campaign, 17 of which were dead heats. In 42 of the remainder Labour had a small lead, and in the other 33 the Conservatives led, sometimes by as much as 6%. The Tories won with a 7% lead. So the clues were there for anyone who wanted to find them, and the inaccuracy, such as it was, concealed a far greater advantage for the Conservative Party. Something very similar happened in 1992 when, despite only garnering a small parliamentary majority, John Major defied Labour-favouring polls by scoring the highest popular vote of any Prime Minister in UK electoral history.
The EU Referendum: These polls were a bit more accurate as a whole, with quite a few anticipating the result closely… and where they were wrong, favouring the Remain side – yes, you guessed it – they hid an actual bias towards the less liberally inclined Leave voter.
The 2016 US Election: The polls were derided for not predicting Trump’s historic (!) victory, but Clinton won the popular vote by nearly three million votes, so they were hardly out of the ball park.
And what do all these have in common? The polling critically over estimates the level of Labour/Left support. There are some voices suggesting that polling companies are trying to factor in this left leaning bias from previous surveys, and have overcooked their compensatory mechanisms. The local elections with an 11% Tory lead as opposed to the 18% predicted in national polls might give this weight, but then again, voting patterns in local contests are different from those in general elections, so frankly, who knows. What we do know is that a polling error that would wipe out a consistent 18% lead has no historical precedent.
‘Ah yes!’ Exclaim the Moon-Swivellers, ‘but Jeremy defied 200/1 odds to become Labour Leader in the first place!!!’ Hmmm… that’ll be with a self nominating electorate, many of whom paid three quid for the privilege. It doesn’t count. It really, really doesn’t count.
The Only Poll That Counts… …and it’s usually more conservative than the pretend ones.
8) ‘The Main Stream Media is biased against Him!!! ‘
(That’ll be ‘Him’ with a capital ‘H’ – I mean, He deserves one, surely)
Oh god, I am SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO bored of this one… and anyone who’s dabbled with the Marmoset will know I’ve jabbered on about it at some length before.
But sadly – tediously! – it seems that the point can’t be made too often. Aside from whether there’s anything like the bias that the Facebook-erati claim (there is and there isn’t, that’s for another day) – or whether bias either way is ’cause’ or ‘effect’ – the tiresome bit is the endless tinnitus whine of the complaint itself.
If you, Dear Reader, are inclined to media-blaming, convinced that potential Labour voters are swayed from their true course by the establishment, Oxbridge cabal at the BBC; or the mere existence of Murdoch sponsored front pages in newsagents; or Krishnan Guru-Murthy with his devastating page one questions for Jeremy Corbyn on Channel 4 News; or The Daily Mail which, for some reason, these potential Labour voters are already reading (yeah… go figure that one…); or… or…. or…. (cough, splutter, aneurysm) …LAURA KUENSSBERG (‘Burn the witch!! Burn the witch!!!!!)…
…if you are one of these people whinging and moaning and mewling and puking about media bias, what you are actually saying is: ‘I’m really smart!! I’m intellectual, me. I know THE TRUTH. But out there are lots of STUPID people who will sway with the wind like moronic sheep – unlike ME, far cleverer than the dimwit lumpen masses who are incapable of independent thought, but, annoyingly, on whom Labour victory depends!!
Sorry… was I ranting. Breathe.
A common trope on FB and Twitter is to berate the BBC for giving too much air time to Nigel Farage and UKIP. Let’s ignore the four million license fee payers who voted UKIP at the last election and concede that perhaps there is some weight to this criticism. What just happened at the recent May local elections? Wipeout for UKIP. And it looks very much as if June will see them swept from the arena once and for all, despite all that media coverage.
Why? Because people aren’t stupid. They are capable of independent thought, and the former UKIP voter has made the quite rational judgement that their time is gone, and that Paul Nuttall is even more ridiculous than Nigel Farage.
It’s a shame really, because right now anyone seriously wanting Labour victory could do with an electorate divided along UKIP lines… perhaps if you still have media-blaming proclivities you could write to the BBC and ask for a bit more UKIP propaganda to help shore up some Labour marginals!
Oh yeah, and while we’re at it… The Main Stream Media? What are you actually talking about? Newspapers with their ever declining circulations? Or would that be Social Media, Facebook, Twitter – used by billions of people – where people talk bollocks to their mates who already agree with them or read lengthy blogs written by self-opinionated gits tapping away in their attics…
Oh… hang on…
7) ‘If only people would get out and vote, we could swing this election!!’
When His Corbyness first caressed the wipe-clean leatherette arm-rests of his Labour throne, he countered those who dared suggest that he needed to woo the centre ground – or that polling indicated a somewhat oceanic lack of popular support – by boldly asserting there was an army of non-voters – The Disenfranchised, The Young Pee-Pul – who he would galavanise into registering, and who would propel him into 10 Downing Street at the head of a revolutionary tsunami.
Two years later, the tsunami is looking a tad like the wash from a drifting pedalo, and while no one, not even the Marmoset at his most curmudgeonly, would refute the importance of getting people to exercise their hard-won democratic rights…
…swinging from this particular twig, licking on my favourite rainforest exudate (look it up), I notice the bark is starting to splinter, and I offer this word of warning to anyone blaming Labour’s woes on low turnout – and seeking salvation by rousing the apathetic masses into the polling booth.
Yum! I love a tasty exudate!
The inconvenient truth is that there’s no particular evidence to suppose that those who don’t vote are necessarily Labour supporters. Indeed, post war history implies the opposite. The turnout for the EU referendum – 72% – was unusually high compared to recent General Elections – between 7% and 12% higher than the last four elections. 2001 (59%) and 2005 (61%) had low turnouts – both Labour victories… 2010 (65%) and 2015 (66%), the turnout went up, and it favoured the conservatives. 1992 when John Major was helped by a near record turnout of 77%.
When Blair defeated Major five years later it was on a turnout down by 6%. Other record turnouts include 1950 when Clement Attlee’s legendary, landmark government was ousted by Winston Churchill on an 84% turnout. Attlee’s victory was on a turnout twelve points lower. And my understanding from everything I’ve read about it, is that the higher turnout at the EU referendum favoured Vote Leave. So when we shout to the Social Media heavens for a greater turnout on June 8th, the phrase ‘be careful what you wish for’ comes to mind.
But given that people who don’t vote, er… don’t vote, then of course, this is, by definition, unknowable. If we accept that as true, I tentatively suggest that making the disenfranchised a core part of one’s campaign might be just a little fruitless. Even assuming we want to improve things for the disenfranchised (I know I do!) it’s still a better use of energy and resources to target one’s efforts at the people who actually go to polling booths, and who might be persuaded to chisel their cross in your particular box. Duh.
What we do with power when we get it is one thing – but an election is about winning votes. To flip Mario Cuomo on his head, if Labour want to win, we need to campaign in prose in order to have the slightest hope of governing in poetry.
See what I did here?
So let’s sum up a bit. The cumulative effect of turnout blaming and media blaming is that Labour’s path to victory is now reliant on a lumpen mass of weak-minded, easily brainwashed Murdoch/Mail reading dimwits incapable of independent thought who are additionally incapable of getting themselves to a polling booth.
Patronising and insulting to the electorate?
Most definitely.
True?
Thankfully not.
But until we change our attitude about this and concentrate on the non-tribal voting demographic whose allegiances we need to win, then victory will continue to elude us.
6) (Wrings hands) ‘But it’s all bloody personality politics – it should be about the policies!’
Oh FFS. Of course it’s about personality! And character. Representative party democracy or not – a general election is about electing a Prime Minister. It’s a job interview, and the public will make their own choice about who they think is up to the task. They will use their gut and their life experience to decide this.
They will put competency very high on their list, and vote for someone they may not even like that much if they think they’ll get the job done. Of course policy is important – double duh! – but they’re trusting their lives, their children’s lives, their money, their jobs, their future to the stewardship of the nation’s ultimate line manager. And when was the last time you thought ‘the personal qualities of my line manager is of no consequence to me whatsoever’?
Who do you want driving the car, your lovely but dozy uncle who’s always scraping the verge, turning round to tell you stories of victories past, or your charmless tight-fisted aunt whose eyes never leave the road? You wouldn’t invite her to a party, but you want her wheel. Getting there alive is better than never getting there at all. In the case of May versus Corbyn, Theresa looks like she knows what she’s doing. Jeremy doesn’t.
Uh-uh! Don’t go off on one. I’m not saying that Theresa does know what she’s doing, but I am saying that if you sit, empathetically, in the swing-voter’s back seat then it is easy to see why she would be perceived that way. Which brings me neatly to….
5) ‘But Theresa May… she’s a bloody robot!’
Oh yes, in electioneering terms, absolutely. This GE is being sung from the Lynton Crosby playbook turned up to eleven – and it’s certainly an eyeball peeling, eardrum shattering sensory assault. This may be hard for some guests of the Marmoset to stomach but David Cameron used to croon the Crosby tunes with a good deal of charm.
No, not him…
This guy.
Sorry, you’re going to have to stick with the idea of David Cameron having charm. Remember, winning this election (if that were possible) is about persuading people who found Cameron to be charming – or Nigel Farage to be credible – that they’d rather vote for Jeremy Corbyn this time round. Try to stay focused on that idea.
Now excuse me while I jump back a metaphor. Think of the Lynton Crosby election-winning mechanism as a relentless, piston-thumping engine… In Cameron’s charming kid-driving-glove mitts, it is encased in a shiny chassis, shimmering in the sun as it flashes through a grove of poplars, shock absorbers and silencers rendering its pumping cylinders quiet as a whisper.
Sadly this time round, the charmless aunt has been handed the brutalist stripped down model. Lynton only has a few weeks, so there’s no chassis, no shock absorbers, no silencers… this is a V8 Crosby machine in the grinding raw.
Theresa May’s oily election machine
Yup. We can see all the working parts. But the point is – the parts are working – the engine driving the May Robot is just as powerful, no matter how much we can smell the oil steaming off the cylinder block.
May’s team know what the selling point is – they’ve done the focus groups… (oooh… did I hear you sneer just then? Behave.) …and consequently they know what their target demographic thinks. Recent polling shows that concern about the outcome of Brexit exceeds concern for the future of the NHS in some surveys. It’s startling, but not surprising. It’s completely rational to be absolutely bloody terrified. I am! If Brexit goes tits up then everything else is fucked. Not only that, but huge swathes of the population – left, right, leave, remain – quite rationally understand that many in the EU are determined to prove that there can be no happy ending for anyone else with ideas about making a run for it.
So there’s one message: May’s a ‘bloody difficult woman’ who’ll fight the UK corner. Strong and stable and all that – and mock though we relentlessly do – May held down the scalp-strewn post of Home Secretary for six years, one of the longest tenures in recent history.
But she just keeps on saying it… because she and Lynton understand that if you’re a non-tribal voter and you care about the economy, you’ll vote for the person who you think can handle Brexit; if you care about immigration, you’ll vote for the person you think can handle Brexit; and if you care about the NHS you’ll vote for the person who you think can handle Brexit.
Feast your eyes on this Survation Poll from Saturday May 6th 2017
Suddenly, because of Brexit, the Tories have the upper hand on healthcare. Yeah, I know, it turns the stomach and it’s sacrilege to write such words on a left-of-centre website, it’s barely possible to accept, but accept it we must, for it is true.
No… I can feel you REFUSING to believe me. Look at that poll again – go on, do it!! – and rest assured it won’t be the last to send the same message.
But, you cry, Andrew Marr asked her a dozen questions and she didn’t answer a single one – it was just ‘strong and stable’, ‘strong and stable’ all the way. Duh again! Her refusal to engage with anything else just goes to prove the point. She’s so strong and stable she won’t be drawn on anything and just sticks to her core message. It’s a win-win, almost post-modern, strategy.
Now for a personal window into the domestic life of this Ninja monkey. Mrs Marmoset is worried about me because I keep saying admiring things about Theresa May, but my admiration is the same as one might have for the Alien. Being able to bleed acid blood through five decks of the Nostromo is pretty damned impressive….
…and you need more than guns if you’re going to bring one of those mothers down.
Which segues nicely into…
4) ‘Well I’m voting for Jeremy because he is the only politician who has integrity, is truly genuine, is a proper socialist, represents true Labour values etc etc etc etc etc etc….’
If you must, but is that seriously the best reason you have?
Ah, I hear you say, with a smug flare of the nostrils, a keen narrowing of the eyes, a minute ago you said that personality was important. Yeah, smartarse, I did. But values on their own, ideals on their own, integrity (aka a bull-headed adherence to one point of view for the whole of your life) and a Santa list of sub-polytechnic-politics-subsidiary slogans does not a personality make. As for ‘genuine’ – what the Johnny-Cash does ‘genuine’ mean anyway? People thought Johnny Cash was genuine when he sang about prison life, but Cash never spent more than a night in the slammer for petty misdemeanours.
The very intelligent exlectorate rightly evaluate personality as Life Experience, Work Experience, The Ability To Get Things Done, and crucially for a Prime Minister, Leadership Skills (that’ll be leadership as in not having everyone in sight resign around you). Any idiot can have ideals – most of us have fabulous values and principles – but it takes real character to make them happen. Thirty-three years on the back benches, voting against your own side, and organising protest rallies hardly counts.
This is why people posting admiringly about Corbyn soldiering on after his front bench resigned and the near unanimous vote of no confidence are wrong – and this is why any other party leader would have resigned at that point. You can’t go into an election once your colleagues have told the rest of the country that you’re crap. You can’t go into an election with a front bench team made up of a talentless rump whose only qualification for office isn’t skill or experience, but that they were the only ones who didn’t vote you down. It’s not even a matter of whether the others were right to resign in the first place. It’s just a cold reality that there’s no way back from that. You’re stuffed – like a pig at a Bullingdon initiation party – and it’s a great oinking signal that you need to exit stage left and let someone lead the party who can command the confidence of a strong team.
That’s my idea of integrity.
And humility.
And personal strength.
And genuinely caring about the values of the Labour Party.
Ploughing on regardless is arrogant, stupid and selfish.
Jeremy Corbyn – about as genuine as Johnny Cash
3) ‘If you don’t vote for Jeremy then it’s a vote to close the NHS, kill people on benefits, blah blah blah…’
After the local and mayoral elections on May 4th this sort of post was all over social media like Donald Trump’s hands in a cattery…. (….think about it).
Or this…
Although this kind of nonsense has already been brilliantly satirised in a painfully true spoof for The Independent – click here – there is more to be said.
The long term consequence of a landslide Tory victory may well be some, if not all, of these terrible things listed in those posts. Of that I have little doubt. However the short term consequence of so characterising any who might disagree with those who like to call themselves the progressive left is not one extra vote for the Labour cause.
Why? Because it’s lazy, reductive, patronising, arrogant, smug and wilfully obstructive to the reality of how elections are won… the last of which I reckon is pretty important if you really want to see a Labour government any time soon.
It starts from a nauseating moral high handedness, the assumption that only a Labour voter truly inhabits the moral high ground. So when wonderfully skilled ex-Coronation Street actors proclaim, sonorous and heartfelt, about Labour being the party that ‘gives a toss’, they have no idea how alienating that is to millions of people. What are they saying? That because someone votes Tory they don’t care about people?
If Labour are ever to win power again we need the votes of millions of folk who have voted Conservative in the past – and you’ve just told them they are moral scum.
This stuff is underpinned by the assumption that any right thinking person will automatically see the notion of Conservatism as toxic. Well, hold the front page. They don’t. They don’t automatically see being conservative as this…
…and even if they do, they don’t necessarily experience a spasm of involuntary revulsion. For millions of people around the country being a conservative voter looks just like this:
It could just as easily be a still from a Ken Loach movie
If we are to win people over – to persuade, to cajole – then we have to banish this morally superior stereotyping to the self righteous trash can of losing strategies where it belongs.
Jeremy Corbyn has even managed to fuck up that sure-fire winner of a slogan: ‘For The Many Not The Few’. Over in Toryland, Theresa May speaks daily (and don’t we know it?) about negotiating a Brexit that works for everybody. She uses the word advisedly. Everybody.
Everybody.
Now, while you or I may well doubt her sincerity, like it or not, the word ‘everybody’ means just that, and crucially excludes nobody.
Back in Corbynopolis, Our Jezzer has taken a phrase – For The Many, Not The Few – and made it sound hostile and exclusive. In his campaign launch on 9th May, he talked about:
‘…a reckoning for those who thought they could get away with asset stripping our industry, crashing our economy through their greed and ripping off workers and consumers’
It sounds like a declaration of war. It’s an expression of hate. I know many people who would look at me and say: ‘And your problem with that is…?’
While most people want to see a reduction in inequality, they are also aspirational. This kind of oratory is all about ‘us’ and ‘them’ – it reads as aggressive and divisive, and there are plenty of ordinary people wondering whether they might become a bit too ‘them’ to prosper in a Corbyn led society. Of course a Labour government will be founded on redistributive economics, but it needs to be framed in language as inclusive as that used by Theresa May.
Theresa May??? Inclusive????
I can feel the reader balking at everything I write – sputtering in disbelief – but listen, really listen to the difference in the language used. At a recent election appearance in Tynemouth, deep in traditional Labour territory, Theresa May addressed the gathering thus:
‘We respect that parents and grandparents taught their children and grandchildren that Labour was a party that shared their values and stood up for their community. But across the country today, traditional Labour supporters are increasingly looking at what Jeremy Corbyn believes in and are appalled.’
The Tories attack Corbyn personally – hammering away at his personal politics, competence and leadership skills – but you’ll never hear them deriding Labour voters themselves for their values. You’ll never hear them proclaiming that if you’ve voted Labour in the past you’re morally bankrupt and killing disabled people.
Why not?
Because they want our votes.
The language is carefully constructed to LOVE the Labour voter, while driving a wedge between them and their vulnerable leader. Is it really beyond the wit of the Labour Party and its supporters to something similar and talk respectfully to people who are potential Tory voters but whom they want to persuade? Do we really have to talk like bullies?
And if you still think I’m wrong, scroll up to that opinion poll again. 47% of people think May will create a fairer society than Corbyn’s paltry 37%. Look at it – and learn.
2) ‘Ok, so Corbyn let us down over Brexit – but what else could he have done?’
Well… turning up for the referendum campaign would have been a start. Revisionist Corbynista acolytes blindly refuse to acknowledge any responsibility on their saviour’s behalf but Jeremy’s near sabotage of the Labour Remain campaign is well documented. Remain lost by just over 1.3m votes so all we needed was another 650,000 little pencil crosses and we wouldn’t be in the truly terrifying mess we’re in right now. Whilst the reasons for the Leave victory are many and complex (as grippingly recounted in Tim Shipman’s fantastic book, All Out War) it’s hard to believe that an enthusiastic pro-EU Labour leader, seizing the opportunity and the agenda couldn’t have secured that. For all their own shortcomings, I have absolutely no doubt that either Andy Burnham or Yvette Copper could have got those votes… easily.
What else could Corbyn have done? Well, he could have consulted with his shadow cabinet colleagues on the small matter of Labour Party Policy before coming out at 7.28 am on the morning of 24th June 2016 and calling for Article 50 to be invoked as soon as possible. And people are surprised that most of the shadow cabinet resigned? They are often blamed for their ‘disloyalty’, but hey – pot-calling-the-skillet-le-creuset! – they hardly had a choice in the circumstances.
Oh yeah, and then we get to the bloody ‘will of the people’ and invoking a three line whip for Labour MPs to wave Article 50 through the Commons. Labour policy is something to do with ‘holding the government to account’ but exactly how this is to be achieved now the party has completely rolled over on the issue is quite beyond this tufty little simian.
From up in my tree, savouring my exudates, it is nothing less than the betrayal of a generation.
Corbyn apologists argue that he had no choice. The People Had Decided – ‘The Issue of Brexit Is Settled’ yadda yadda – and crucially Labour is haemorraghing votes in Labour heartlands to UKIP. Well, let’s look under the bonnet of that particular premise.
Offering a convincing counter narrative might have been something worth considering. Just maybe? As the reality of Brexit bears down upon us, the zeitgeist of 2017 is that of a nation – Remain and Leave voters alike – looking down the barrel of a gun.
Corbyn derides May for taking a confrontational stance with Brussels, but with the barrel right in our faces, which strategy is going to play best with a nervous/terrified electorate?
‘Please can we stay in the single market, and we’re happy to fulfil any conditions to achieve that even if we have no power in the union any more, pretty please…’
or
…whipping out our own weaponry and snarling: ‘Go ahead, Juncker, make my day’. The electorate are feeling that, given the choice, they’d rather die on their feet than live on their knees, which is why Labour-UKIP defectors are now turning to the Conservatives in their extremely crucial hundreds of thousands.
Bizarrely, Theresa May is capturing the Clint Eastwood vote
Emily Thornberry – Labour’s patroniser-in-chief – pops up on the telly, almost daily, to tell us that Labour has no choice but to look both ways, as they try to satisfy both urban Labour Remainers and Labour heartland Brexiteers but you can see in her eyes – and the doleful look in Keir Starmer’s sad little peepers – that she knows it’s a confusing, untenable and impotent fudge.
So what was the alternative?
The clue’s in that last word – Labour could only seize the agenda by offering an actual alternative. Corbyn’s strategy is to try not to mention the ‘B’ word at all, but there is no way round the cold hard fact that this is the Brexit election. There is absolutely no way Labour can kick Brexit off the top of the agenda. A savvy Labour leader would have stopped trying to dodge that particular bullet, and rather made a grab for the gun itself.
Yes. It would have been a very high risk strategy, but the opportunity was there for anyone bold enough to take it. If the Tories want a Brexit election then let them have it, but pitch Labour as the party that will withdraw from Article 50 and hold the EU together.
Be bold. Use the election to re-run the referendum.
Labour are barely scraping 30% in the polls. Why not make a pitch for the 48% who were desperate to Remain in the EU… and rather than accusing Tory or Leave voters of being knuckle-dragging moral scum offer frightened Leave voters a way out of this mess.
Look. I’m not saying I know this would have worked – I have no hard evidence to say that the numbers stack up in the required marginals – and the time when this might have been a realistic option has most definitely passed – many former remainers just want to get on with Brexit – but even now it seems a far stronger, and more responsible pitch than the chicken broth Labour are offering the electorate at the moment. I choose ‘chicken’ as my flavour advisedly.
Yes, the Labour manifesto has a few salty promises, but it still runs scared of the single issue that will decide the outcome.
To go into an election, supporting an ill-defined, half baked Brexit (surely the ultimate ‘Tory-lite’ and I don’t even approve of that phrase), promising to borrow half a trillion plus god knows how much at a time of huge economic uncertainty, dissing anyone with entrepreneurial aspirations, declaring war on a vaguely defined ‘other’… and telling people daily how awful everything is… well, it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that Theresa May’s poll lead remains stubbornly beyond any previously recorded polling error.
1) ‘We must unite to defeat the Tories at all costs!!’
Oh yes, this is definitely at number one.
This mantra of the left… the same people who told anyone who doubted the Corbyn project to ‘Fuck off and join the Tories!’.
Well, whaddya know? They did.
But wait… there’s a real election happening and Labour are about to get absolutely hammered so suddenly the devout are realising that far from winning a majority being some sort of bourgeois Blairite peccadillo, without it the country will be well and truly stuffed.
The founder of Momentum proving the utter stupidity of the hard left
Meanwhile, the ex-journalistic tragedy that is Paul Mason, who, a few months ago could be seen on our TV screens, jabbing his finger, muttering darkly about mass deselections is now twitching on the Newnight panel calling for a progressive alliance.
‘Seriously Paul, go fuck yourself.’ Sorry to swear in such a personally abusive way, but that was what I shouted at my telly the other night. The rank hypocrisy of calling for us all to unite to stop the Tories at all costs. If he and his kind really believed in ‘stopping the Tories at all costs’ then they wouldn’t have voted for a complete numpty to run the party… TWICE!
These days Paul works hard to keep his jabbing finger under control
Other voices from Planet Corbo simply say ‘hold your nose’, vote for Jeremy. Let’s have a period of purdah where you keep your eviscerating anti-Corbyn blogs to yourself.
Give me a break. It really doesn’t matter what I think, or what I say. I’m just a rare and rather cute little marmoset. It’s neither here nor there whether the lefty chaterati on Facebook or Twitter are critical of the J-Corb – mostly we’re just talking to our own gang anyway. Whether or not different factions of the left think he’s incompetent and a liability – as I do – is irrelevant. That’s not going to affect the result. I’m voting Labour anyway, even if I do think he’s a waste of skin.
The only pertinent issue is whether non partisan, floating voters can be persuaded to trust the guy. They’re not listening to any squabbles we have – nor would the pretence that I, for example, thought for a second Corbyn could make a competent PM convince one floating voter to cast their vote his his way in a marginal. No. They’ll make that decision for themselves. Shutting up about it won’t improve things. We can’t pretend he’s doing a good job when he isn’t, as if somehow if we all close our eyes the very obvious shortfalls of him and his so-called team will go away. They won’t. The real problem isn’t me being rude on Facebook or this blog – that’s of no importance whatsoever – but the indifference of the voting public to someone they recognise as neither worth their vote, nor a passing thought.
As my wonderful Sheffield mother-in-law is wont to say: ‘Jeremy Corbyn? He’s got nothing about him.’
If we want the result to be not quite as bad as the polls suggest then we really need to tackle the strategy – not for getting pissed-off Labour centrists on board – but all the other people who are needed to make this thing slightly less of the car crash it’s promising to be.
***
If I sound angry and contemptuous – it’s because I am. I’m frightened as well. Really frightened – more so than any time in my life.
And I do lay what’s happening – from Brexit to the upcoming electoral catastrophe – firmly at the door of the persistent Corbyn believer. Je most definitely accuse.
The point blank refusal to acknowledge an overwhelming accumulation of evidence – which has far exceeded the Marmoset’s worst expectations – puts them in the same category as flat-earthers, homeopaths and creationists – and if I have no respect for those people, then I certainly can’t be respectful of evidence-denying Corbyn believers.
Faith over empiricism. No thanks.
As Michael Heseltine famously said: ‘Labour will win again, when it wants to win’. And that will be when we remember that being in power is the primary objective of Labour as a political party, and that electioneering IS an exact science.
Empiricism over faith. Always.
As for the Marmoset’s bottom ten desperate political clichés… to be fair, most of them stem from people’s desperation, but that makes them no less frustrating.
We need to stop thinking so simplistically. We need to get smart. We need to win again.
***
Of course, at the time of writing there are four whole weeks until polling day, during which time Theresa May could be caught doing something unspeakable to a kitten – or to National Treasure Alan Bennet with a slice of Battenberg – or both, at the same time, and on live TV..!
In which case, all bets are off, and you can scratch all of the above.
The Marmoset scratching all of the above.
08 Tuesday Nov 2016
Posted in Film, Film Criticism, Free Speech, Ken Loach, Manchester Home, Writing
I have something to tell you.
(Shuffles nervously… looks at the floor)
The thing is…
How can I put this?
Oh for God’s sake, I’m just going to come out and say it!!!
“I am the NinjaMarmoset and I don’t like I, Daniel Blake.”
I love Dave Johns. He did a gig at the Heatons Comedy Club and was bloody hilarious.
I actually declared this out loud in a social setting the other night and was greeted with looks of utter horror – jaws dropped, visibly, in front of me – as if I’d publicly stoved in the head of kitten with a paperweight fashioned into the shape of ex work and pensions minister Iain Duncan Smith.
It’s not hard to imagine IDS as a paperweight, or even a snow globe. I’m sure I don’t need to post a picture of a kitten.
‘But these people have never been given a voice before!!’ one complainant wailed, eyes wide, starting to well with anger and distress. ‘And… I know lots of social workers – I’ve got social workers in my family!! – and it’s TRUE!’
As I started to explain where I was coming from, choosing to bypass the largely irrelevant detail that I’m actually married to a social worker, they stormed off in disgust. And the following day, they had wielded that most vicious of modern punishments… they blocked me from their Facebook page!!!! Not just unfriended me, mind, but blocked me altogether. Wow. They were REALLY angry. It’s a dagger through my heart, I tell you!!!
Everything has added weight when translated into French
Yes, yes, I know, the film has won the Palme D’Or at the world’s most prestigious film festival; yes, I know it has received unanimous four and five star reviews, hailed as a ‘battle cry for the dispossessed’ by The Guardian; and yes, I know the only people to publicly criticise it are bile filled right wing poverty deniers such as the objectionable Toby Young – or government ministers who haven’t actually seen the movie.
Sorry. I still really dislike it, and, uncharacteristically, I was intending to keep this to myself. After we came out of the movie, I quipped to my companion: ‘There’s no way I’m posting anything about it on Facebook – I’ll be lynched!’
But the mere fact I was even saying this – and that my flip comment came true (if you count being blocked from Facebook as the modern equivalent of lynching) – suggests that there are some bloody innards here that are worth a poke around amongst.
There’s a reason you don’t see anybody on social media left of, say, Ken Clarke, voicing criticism of this film because, basically, if you don’t like I, Daniel Blake then you are officially a bastard.
Or I’m the only (left of centre) person in the world who doesn’t like it. That’s possible, I suppose.
What the-Daniel-Blake is going on here?
Let’s start with the film itself:
SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT
I’m not messing around!! Here be spoilers.
Daniel Blake’s a Geordie joiner who’s had a major heart attack. His doctors say he is too ill to work, but he is turned down for Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) and declared fit by the privately run Work Capability Assessment ‘decision maker’. The movie recounts Daniel’s attempts to get the ruling overturned, and his descent into abject poverty. Along the way he meets single mum Katie and her two children Dylan and Daisy. She’s had all sorts of terrible shit happen to her, and starves herself to feed her kids. She dreams of going to college, but ends up working as a prostitute. Daniel becomes a surrogate father and grandfather to her family, and she helps him when he finally gets his appeal for ESA. On the day of the hearing which intends to prove that he really does have a terrible heart condition…
…well if you can’t guess what happens in the toilets just before he’s about to speak then clearly you have never been to the cinema before.
I am fully aware that everything depicted in this film happens on a regular basis to people all round the country. The degrading Kafkaesque insanities of living in poverty and the benefits system are rehearsed many times every day, as they have been for decades.
They are part of my DNA.
One of my earliest memories is the bailiff coming to call when I was four years old. Apparently he told my stepmother (an out-of-work social worker, as it happens) that we didn’t have anything worth taking apart from the radiogram (here’s a link for younger readers)…
Basically the iPod of the 1960s
…but as we didn’t have any electricity at the time, the loss of it wasn’t the greatest of tragedies. Trying to feed the family on a single bag of potatoes for a week was far more distressing for her. Later we had the gas disconnected, and our phone too. In those days there were no pay-as-you-go inclusive-minutes mobiles, such as are used by the characters in I, Daniel Blake. After narrowly avoiding eviction a few years after that, things did get a lot better, and apart from a year or two (on and off) on the dole in my early twenties (even in the rosy 1980s signing on could be a pretty grim experience) I have led a comfortable life.
But the visceral reality of having nothing – the fear of it – the shame of it – never leaves you.
So I should love I, Daniel Blake, right?
Well, no. I don’t go to the cinema to see things because they are ‘real’. Or because they are a statement of something that is ‘factually true’. That’s not drama. If I want facts, or an exposé, I can watch an episode of Dispatches or Panorama or read an article in The Guardian or The Canary (NB One of the outlets listed in that sentence is not actually somewhere that deals in factual journalism and was included for purely humorous purposes). I already know what’s going on, as did – I would posit – every liberally minded middle class film enthusiast in Screen 1 of Manchester’s Home, the independent cinema where I watched the film. Toby Young may not believe the plot of Daniel Blake, but I would be amazed if a single person came out of that screening saying; ‘We blow me down with a feather, I had no idea!’
A lot of the audience were in tears, so the visceral power of the film couldn’t be denied (except to me, for whom the visceral power of actually having nothing is still more potent). So what was my problem? Hard hearted bastard? Or is it a ‘writer’ thing? It’s my job and I’m applying professional standards to a work of political cinema whose qualities go beyond the normal tenets of dramatic film making…?
If I were doing a blind assessment of this script (as my work often demands of me), I would doubtless admire its intent but I would be pretty forthright about its technical failings.
The story is clunkingly linear and schematic – reliant on acres of spoon fed, off-screen, uncontested back story (clearly no one is interested in the concept of the unreliable narrator in this movie). Lovely, lovable people are brutalised by nasty jobsworths working for the state machine. The characters – good and bad – are two dimensional. They have no inner contradictions, no complexity. Both Daniel and Katie are flawless salt-of-the-earth types. Daniel is a martyr in the great Christian tradition – a saint in fact – more than a saint! He’s a carpenter (a bit like… hmmm… let me think); he can conjure useful things from nothing – bookcases, food, heat from flowerpots and bubblewrap… (…but sadly not wine, as he’s teetotal); at one point he actually cures a small boy of ADHD (it’s like… its like… it’s like… a miracle!); he befriends a prostitute (see where I’m going with this?); and then dies for all our sins at the end (‘Tonight Matthew I shall be Jesus Christ Himself!’).
I, Jesus Christ
A two dimensional cipher – and in Blake’s case, entirely passive. His only transgression throughout the movie is a little bit of illegal graffiti. When I was on the dole I found ‘ways’ to subsidise my income. Everybody did – and they still do. The fact that we had to is no less politically significant than what happens to the eponymous victim of Laverty’s screenplay.
Presumably this is the point – these are ‘blameless’ good people beaten to a pulp by the system. Even if you play by the rules you will be destroyed, because the rules are designed to destroy you. We are left feeling outraged, a little bit guilty… but ultimately virtuous, because we have shared Daniel’s pain.
But passivity is not dramatic. Watching a puppy being strangled for two hours might be grimly distressing, but without even a moment where the puppy turns to snap at its attacker, what we are witnessing is a ritual sacrifice… not a story, not a drama.
I’ve always been allergic to didacticism and polemicism – and I say that having contributed to quite a bit of it as a young actor, deviser, director etc in the 1980s. My hackles rise the second I sense I’m being ‘told’ what to think – and boy oh boy does IDB tell us what to think. It pins us back in our seats, puts its moralistic hand around our collective throats and leaves us no option whatsoever to think for ourselves… right to the final speech – the eulogy at Blake’s funeral – Loach and Laverty hammering us over the head with their message. There is only one conclusion to be drawn from this film, resistance is futile.
How the Marmoset felt at the end of I, Daniel Blake
I find it manipulative – patronising – tedious – suffocating – a form of political dumbing down. And when voicing any kind of dissent becomes a pariah-inducing social gaffe, then it becomes a form of bullying.
Drama isn’t there to ‘tell us’ stuff. Drama exists to enlighten, to enrich our lives by using the contradictions and conflicts of character and story to illuminate the world around us. Not to show us facts – but to throw light from surprising angles on what reality actually means, in all its messy ambivalent glory. It’s the difference between something being ‘truthful’ and simply ‘true’. It’s about asking questions, not answering them.
Shakespeare wrote: ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’, and Hamlet remains a great play because it leaves the audience to wrestle with the answer – with the million imponderables it poses.
Of course, I’m comparing Apples and PCs here. Hamlet isn’t a polemic, and I, Daniel Blake unashamedly is. It’s in the great tradition of political, campaigning cinema (NB to my horrified Facebook blocker, should you ever read this, there have been hundreds of films giving voice to the lives of the dispossessed, you just haven’t seen them). And, fair enough, just because this particular marmoset goes all ninja about it, it doesn’t render the movie somehow invalid. That’s just a matter of taste, isn’t it?
Well, let’s explore the polemic – Daniel as martyr to the wilful destruction of the welfare state – as a ‘battle cry for the dispossessed’ – who can argue with it? And if it ‘converts’ a single callous heart to the cause of compassionate welfare provision then surely that trumps all artistic criticism – just as Cathy Come Home was integral to the foundation of the charity, Shelter in the 1960s and Jimmy McGovern’s Hillsborough TV drama brought the crimes and injustice surrounding that disaster into the public consciousness in the 1990s.
Actually yes, probably, that is true, but I’m still fascinated as to exactly how IDB achieves its goal.
So… there I am, I’m watching the movie… but something is knocking at the back door of my political consciousness, and it’s really pissing me off. I ignore it, content that whilst the movie may not be to my taste, clearly it is an important event for a lot of people.
Then, hours later, in the middle of the night, I slip into my dressing gown, climb down the stairs of my inner contrarian and open the back door, and who should be on my back step, shivering in the rain, firmly dumped there by Ken Loach and Paul Laverty, but… Tiny Tim.
Yes! Seriously. It was him…
Tiny Tim – 1960s activist, ukulele player and falsetto singer.
No!! Not him!! This guy!!
Tiny Tim – blameless Dickensian poverty icon!
Sorry.
Yes! That’s what I don’t like about the polemicism of I, Daniel Blake – it’s dependant on a quasi Victorian – and arguably reactionary – notion of ‘the deserving poor’.
Who, reading this, doesn’t find their teeth set on edge when politicians start intoning about ‘doing their best for hard working families’? Why? Because of course everyone wants to help ‘hard working families’. It’s a meaningless thing to say. The test of a truly compassionate society is how we deal with ‘slightly indolent families’ – or ‘downright lazy families’ or ‘dangerous anti-social families’ who have gone completely off the rails.
What audience member could ever begrudge Daniel Blake his ESA benefit? He’s worked all his life. He’s paid his dues. He’s cared for his dying wife. He cures the sick. He deserves every penny. He’s the epitome of the deserving poor. But getting angry at Daniel’s injustice isn’t really what this country has to wrestle with right now. What if Daniel didn’t ‘deserve’ it?
Let’s imagine The Marmoset had written I, Daniel Blake (indulge me!).
Daniel’s a joiner – a competent, if mediocre joiner – who regularly knocks stuff off from his building site – and does cash-in-hand jobs on the side to avoid – no, evade – a bit of tax. He’s got an invalid wife and caring for her doesn’t come cheap. Like 49.3% of his fellow Newcastle citizens he votes for Brexit on June 23rd largely because he sees his mates priced out of jobs by cheap EU labour, and he’s particularly incensed when he learns that the Slovakian family in the flat next door are claiming benefits. Sitting in our lovely indy cinema drinking craft beer from plastic cups, he makes us uncomfortable, but we forgive him, because his wife is dying.
And then, bloody hell, she actually turns up her toes. Daniel’s grief-stricken – and he loses whatever meagre allowances were coming his way as his wife’s carer. He is hit by the bedroom tax. He has a heart attack. He can’t work, but is ruled capable and has to go through a lengthy and Kafkaesque process to appeal it. He is so angry and humiliated that he takes out his frustration on the Slovakian family who he knows are collecting benefits seemingly without hindrance.
Wow… now we’re feeling REALLY uncomfortable. This appeals process sure is cruel and dehumanising, but perhaps Daniel deserves it!
So my goal as a writer – wanting to interrogate the subject thoroughly and challenge my very intelligent audience – is to take Daniel on the most difficult journey I can throw at him. Everyone is angry when the ‘saintly’ Daniel Blake of Loach’s film is humiliated and dehumanised but I want to make the audience equally angry at the humiliation and dehumanisation of tax-dodging, Brexit voting, marginally racist Daniel Blake…
…because the core of a civilised welfare state is that benefits are provided according to need, not because we deem a fictional character morally worthy.
But if we are going to use fiction to throw light on a difficult subject, and if we are truly compassionate, then the humiliation of ‘bad’ Daniel must be no less wrong that that of ‘good’ Daniel… and to make the story narratively satisfying, Daniel can learn this too. He realises – just in time – that his anger at his neighbours is nothing to do with them, per se. They have been set at each other’s throats by the failings in the system, and by the inequalities in the macro-economics that drove them here in the first place. Daniel and his neighbours have more in common than they ever realised. If they understand this in time, the film is uplifting and feel-good. If Daniel realises this too late, then it’s grim social realism and we have to have another very expensive craft beer in the bar before we go home and watch something on Netflix.
The alternative – the one we see on screen now – is lazy. It’s lazy and simplistic, and it allows – encourages – the audience to be lazy and simplistic too.
I’m about to make a highly ironic comment
Perhaps that’s why the film, as it stands, is more commercially successful than the marmoset’s version would ever be.
The last sentence was layered with multiple ironies, just in case you didn’t notice
Well… perhaps that’s unfair. As I said earlier, perhaps that’s the point.
Perhaps there’s a reason that Loach (who has directed a few nuanced masterpieces in his time – Kes being one of them) has opted for the melodrama of Victorian philanthropic guilt as his chosen dramatic form this time. Perhaps he and Laverty believe that the times are so Victorian, the audience must be spoken to as Victorians.
On the one hand, I hope that’s true, because at least it makes some kind of sense, and I can happily shut up moaning about it; on the other, I sense it isn’t, and a great film maker has fallen into a depressing and reductive trope which paralyses the debate by reducing the issue of welfare to simplistic, immutable and ultimately sentimental moral absolutes.
I, Tiny Tim and all that.
And on the subject of Tiny Tim, if you’ve never heard the guy – or if you remember him fondly… have a click on this.
12 Thursday May 2016
Posted in Jeremy Corbyn, Journalism, Labour Party, Politics
So… 38 Degrees have dropped their petition to have BBC Political Editor, Laura Kuenssberg, sacked for alleged bias against Labour Leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
The petition kept popping up on my Facebook feed – often posted by people I consider to be friends, and, just as often, accompanied by offensive and indirectly sexist comments. I didn’t just disagree – as a writer, and occasional journalist myself – I was viscerally alarmed.
I complained three times to 38 Degress about the petition, but despite the pledges on their feedback pages, never received any kind of acknowledgement or reply.
I argued that it brought the campaigning organisation into disrepute. The sexism and misogyny was indeed a primary issue, but sadly neither David Babbs – nor the short sighted and/or neo-totalitarian types who signed this thing – understand the fundamental problem with targeting a specific journalist – regardless of gender. Personally – speaking as someone who follows unhealthy amounts of political journalism – she doesn’t appear to be in any way biased. She’s a journalist equally likely to report on splits in the Tory party (as she has done many, MANY times; there is far more coverage of right wing splits in relation to the EU referendum at the moment in the UK), the Lib-Dems, UKIP etc as she would with the very real splits in the Labour party. She’s a political editor – it’s her job to report this stuff, the problem won’t go away if Laura Kuenssberg doesn’t mention it. Not when senior party members are battling it out on Twitter.
The Labour Party hardly needs Laura Kuenssberg to advertise their splits…
But this isn’t the point.
If someone watching a BBC News item is unhappy with with the way something is reported, then the thing to do is to take it up with BBC News, and question editorial policy overall (by the way, they will reply to you). That’s perfectly fine, and the right of the UK license fee payer. Indeed that kind of public accountability is fundamental to the way the BBC works. You certainly don’t have that kind of direct accountability in most other areas of journalism.
BUT – and it’s a massive swollen arse of a ‘but(t)’ – targeting individual journalists is a completely different matter.
Think about it – especially anyone reading this blog who signed this thing – what is the BBC supposed to do? Let’s just imagine that 38 Degrees had submitted this petition. How would you expect the BBC to react?
Treat it with the contempt it deserves, hopefully. They would have to.
Because obviously if the BBC did start sacking journalists because of public pressure exerted by specific interest groups, what message would that send?
The reason totalitarian regimes censor, sack, blacklist, imprison – or even execute – individual journalists who report or say things they don’t like, is to send a message to every other journalist that the reporting they do must fit a pre-determined political agenda – otherwise they’ll be out of a job. It’s a form of intimidation and bullying from which anyone who believes in free speech – and indeed, a fair and just society – should absolutely disassociate themselves.
Are these the values of the new activist left? I sincerely hope not.
But there’s something else going on here. For most of my lifetime the most vociferous braying – accusing the BBC of bias – has come from the right of British politics, insistent that the BBC is staffed by an army of vegetarian, politically correct pinkos (amongst which I count myself – although I’m not a vegetarian).
Ironically, as someone who has spent much of his professional career working in a range of capacities for the organisation, there is actually some truth in this – ! – although BBC journalists and other creatives take a lot of pride in their ability to stick rigorously to the corporation’s much vaunted principles of impartiality. Perhaps too much sometimes. When I first worked for the BBC, I spent a day observing at the World Service and was moved to tears by the dedication of the journalists there to report fairly on regimes who had certainly not treated them fairly before they had come to the UK. The BBC doesn’t always get it right, but there’s something infectious and almost obsessional about those values within the organisation, certainly, as I have experienced it.
But these days, the main chorus of disapproval comes from certain elements within the Corbyn left – not Corbyn himself, I hasten to add.
So what’s this about? Is there something just plain nasty lurking here? Well… there may be in places – there’s definitely a few old Trots and Militant types who have hitched themselves to the Corbyn bandwagon – but I genuinely don’t think that’s the issue.
I think this is about a lack of purpose at the heart of the Corbyn project. It’s a movement that has lost its way to such a degree that it feels it can be shaken off course by a BBC journalist reporting on internal party splits. Surely if Corbyn had anything about him, he would be leading the agenda, and a few negative stories would be neither here, nor indeed, there. Cameron is repeatedly ridiculed by factions on the left and right, and I would argue that one reason he is such a canny survivor – and indeed successful – as a politician is because he refuses to be rattled by such stuff. Love him, hate him – he’s ‘the guy’ and he’s getting on with it. Plus he’s very good at laughing at himself.
Jeremy Corbyn has an oft stated objective of motivating an unseen army of people who currently don’t vote. So far, so noble. But check out what happened yesterday (Wednesday 11th May 2016) at Prime Minister’s Questions. He led on two questions about the ‘Workers Posted Directive’.
No, I had no idea what that meant either.
Neither did Andrew Neil nor Jo Coburn, on the BBC’s Daily Politics, who had to Google it live on air.
Jo Coburn & Andrew Neil as bemused as ‘Martin from Stockport’
Kuenssberg to her credit did actually know something about it – and thought it was a decent – if obscure – issue to raise. Jo Coburn then said they were getting lots of texts and tweets expressing similar confusion, and read out an email from ‘Martin in Stockport’ declaring that he ‘was a political junkie but still had no idea what the Labour Leader was talking about’. Yup folks, that was me.
That detail aside, it’s a visceral demonstration of how lost Corbyn is.
When people say we have to stop carping and get behind the Labour Leadership – I ask: ‘Get behind what?’ Corbyn’s stinging campaign to support the Workers Posted Directive – which may well be important, but apparently affects 0.7% of EU workers? Seriously? Even after Andrew Neil explained it I still didn’t understand it. Are we supposed to believe that the serried ranks of the disenfranchised will be stirred to the barricades by Jezza’s uncompromising stance on the issue?
‘What do we want???’
‘The Workers Posted Directive!!’
‘When do we want it???’
‘Back-dated to April 1st!!!’
But worse was to come. In the same PMQs, after wishing David Attenborough a happy birthday, Corbyn omitted to congratulate Sadiq Khan for his amazing (centrist?) victory in London last week – leaving a back bencher (whose name I can’t remember), Tim Fallon (leader of the Liberal Democrats) and indeed David Cameron himself to hand out the plaudits to Khan.
Here was a golden opportunity to big-up the broad Labour tent and absolutely slam Cameron for backing Zac Goldsmith’s dog whistle racism last week. But for some reason, Corbyn opted to go big on the Workers Posted Directive… and snub his new, extremely popular Labour mayor on the week’s most high profile platform for any leader of the opposition.
This wasn’t just missing an open goal…. this was missing an open goal when the other team had pissed off to the pub and left the field completely undefended.
If you are reading this – and you are someone who believes passionately in a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn – then perhaps concentrate on developing that message into something coherent around which we can all coalesce. The electorate don’t owe him their support. And I, as a (more or less) lifelong Labour member don’t owe Jezza my support. Wasting your energy trying to get a female journalist sacked is not only reactionary in the extreme – but it demonstrates that there isn’t enough going on at the heart of the project. If Corbyn was truly inspirational, then you wouldn’t care what Laura Kuenssberg said. You’d be selling his message… whatever that is. I mean, I really don’t know any more.
Winners don’t complain about the opposition, or the crowd, or, indeed, the commentators. They win because they are good at what they do, and they rise above any obstacles put in their way.
08 Friday Apr 2016
WARNING! SOME OF THE FOLLOWING IS ABOUT TAX LAW!!!
PS THERE AREN’T MANY JOKES
Some years ago, when I was pulling in a more than decent six figure whack from my travails in the TV writing industry, my lovely accountant (you know who you are!) lobbied me pretty intensively with regard to ‘incorporating’ myself. For those unfamiliar with this concept – essentially it meant turning myself into a company – Martin Jameson Ltd – subject to beneficial rates of corporation tax – and then paying myself from the dividends, thereby reducing my tax liability by thousands of pounds every year.
All this from just a few episodes of Emmerdale Farm!!
This was a completely legal form of tax avoidance – although I think the tax benefits have shifted a bit these days – and a commonplace amongst many media professionals. It went on all the time and no one thought much about it.
Well I thought about it – very seriously – but on balance I decided that a) it sounded like an awful lot of hassle (which would have been one reason my lovely accountant was keen as he would ‘take care of it’… for a very competitive fee of course) and b) as a democratic socialist earning a decent fist, I actually wanted to pay my fair share of tax from which my health care, kids’ education, state infrastructure etc was paid. So far, so virtuous.
This is what I looked like when I decided not to incorporate
Many of my contemporaries – including several who would regularly tout their working class lefty credentials – chose to exploit this completely legal method of reducing their personal tax liability.
Of course all self employed media hobbits exploit a well established system of tax avoidance. We run our own businesses, work from home, provide all our own working materials, pay for all our own research, buy our own heel balm and hairy foot coiffure etc etc… and so quite reasonably the costs of these items are not subject to tax at whatever is our highest rate. The list of things we can legitimately claim for is decided upon and constantly reviewed by the bods at HMRC.
Hobbits can legitimately claim for foot care products
But tax avoidance it most definitely is – as opposed to tax evasion, which is illegal – and until a couple of years ago no one batted an eyelid. But now multi-nationals are keeping their patents off shore and their UK franchises pay royalties to those ‘parent’ companies equal to any taxable profits here where they make their cash – and hospitals are starved of it. And Prime Ministers’ fathers set up – completely legal – offshore funds, and offer their kids a chunk, who profit from the tax free status, and everyone goes MEME crazy on Facebook.
So is one form of tax avoidance ‘better’ than another – more, or less, morally acceptable?
Going back to the arcane tediosity of being a self employed scribbler, did I, having made my goody-two-shoes decision to pay self employed income tax as per normal, stand sanctimoniously in judgement of my colleagues who chose a less taxing route?
No. Absolutely not. It was completely legal and a matter of personal choice. Pay unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and if Caesar says incorporating is ok, then clearly Caesar has factored that in. Caesar can make that illegal if he wants to. However, interestingly, in recent years, anyone openly declaring their left wing credentials is a lot more wary about going down the incorporation path. It’s starting to be seen as a bit iffy.
So what about the other more aggressive forms of tax avoidance? Are they ‘worse’?
Well, the argument runs that the problem with the ‘Starbucks’ strategy, or the offshore tax haven strategy is that, although they are legal, they are essentially inequitable. You can only do these things if you have shed loads of dosh in the first place – so therefore the law is structured so that the very wealthy have opportunities to reduce their tax liability that aren’t available to the rest of us on more meagre incomes – even the hobbits.
So is it right to lambast those wealthy types for their moral vacuity, hypocrisy, greed etc for exploiting these tax loopholes? Should David Cameron be drummed out of office for some shares in his Dad’s company he owned ten years ago?
‘Thanks for the money, Dad’ – ‘Keep it under your Panama hat, son’
Of course, everyone’s entitled to an opinion, and it’s certainly emblematic of the way that inequality is written into the statutes of our society at a very deep level, but I can’t help thinking that the individuals aren’t really the issue.
This is about law in a democratic society.
I’ve attempted, here, to find some kind of dividing line to delineate where I think tax avoidance moves from the sensible to the poisonously inequitable – but I’ve certainly met people who are astonished, even outraged that I can set a percentage of my telephone costs off against tax, or travel for work purposes, or paper, or books and DVDs I use in my research, theatre and cinema trips, many other things… Depending on your starting point, everybody’s bottom line in the tax-sand is different.
Which is why we have a democracy, and we vote in a government, and we accept that the majority wins, whether we agree with them or not, and they get to make the laws for the time they are in office. Democracy isn’t about taking EVERYONE’s opinions into account. That’s chaos. We do the voting thing precisely to avoid that chaos.
So if we don’t like the way Starbucks behaves, or the Ian Camerons of this world, then, sure, have a pop, but the only practical, useful, meaningful thing is to lobby – in order actually DO something about what happens next – to change the law itself.
The problem with throwing mud at someone for exploiting the law as it stands, or stood in the past, is that then we are asking individuals, or companies, to make a subjective decision about what tax they should pay, as if there’s a sort of instinctive right and wrong about this stuff. It’s predicated on the idea that there is some kind of natural ‘common sense’, a moral law, that everyone’s agreed upon.
There isn’t, and they aren’t. We aren’t!
And then it all gets mixed up with the background radiation that is social media’s distaste for anyone who has any cash at all – ! – unless, of course, it’s someone they like, such as a footballer or an artistic creative. But that’s a whole other blog…
The German cartoonist George Grosz would have flourished in the age of social media!
It’s so very easy to be morally self-righteous, but moral self-righteousness is fundamentally subjective, so in the end we just have to decide as a country what we want to do and legislate for it – and not be surprised when individuals or companies work within the laws our democracy provides for them.
Although, of course some of us do make that subjective choice…
Excuse me while I go and polish my halo.
06 Sunday Jul 2014
Posted in Sexual Politics, Writing
Back in the heady pre-austerity days of 2006, when the BBC was still flashing the cash and could throw a party and actually mean it, I was downing the canapés by the dozen (writers always eat as much food as they can, especially if it’s free) at a swanky ‘BBC Talent’ party somewhere only moderately posh in London. Over there was George Alagiah; over there was Graham Norton, chatting to him animatedly was Simon Amstell; Michael Buerke was looking a little miserable…. And isn’t that Michael Portillo in the corner? Gosh, his head seems disproportionately large in relation to the rest of his body. Should I go over and say that I don’t dislike him half as much as I did when he was in office? Maybe not. Instead, I find myself talking inanely about my daughter’s dance classes to Anton du Beke and Arlene Phillips. They do a very good job of looking vaguely interested.
I could go on. This was name-drop central. A strange out-of-body experience where anyone and everyone from BBC Television was out guzzling and chomping their way through your precious license fee. If you’re a writer, you are essentially anonymous, and so although you have earned your right to be there, it’s not quite on an equal footing. You recognise pretty much everyone in the room – you feel like you know them personally, they are so familiar to you – but no one has a clue who you are. It’s a slightly surreal feeling of privileged powerlessness.
And then it happened. I’m chatting to one of the script editors from Holby City, when I feel a strong hand enclose itself around my right buttock, and give it a firm squeeze, one of the fingers most definitely engaging with the central crevice. Sorry. Too much information.
I flip around, startled, and find myself looking into the beaming face of an extremely well known TV Chef. He grins at me, enjoying my moment of surprise, his eyes twinkling, and says: ‘Just off to the loo’. He winks, and trots away.
Was that…? Yes it was.
Ok. So, obviously I knew who this guy was, but I had never met him before, I certainly hadn’t been talking to him, and had only cursorily noticed his presence earlier in the evening. The point I’m making is that this bit of hand-to-bum engagement came totally out of the blue. No flirting, no sexy come-ons across the vol-au-vents. Needless to say, I didn’t follow him to the loo, and had no further contact with him all evening. And, to be honest, I thought it was extremely funny. FFS I was 46! I texted and emailed my friends about it. I have dined out on the story. My Best Man quoted the tale at my wedding last year. Everyone laughed.
And look, I really, REALLY, don’t want to get po-faced about it. But recent events – Savile, Harris, Clifford, Stuart Hall – have made me re-evaluate it, just a bit.
Of course, I’m not traumatised by what happened one tiny bit. I genuinely thought it was extremely amusing. But there was something else going on.
Why did this man think it was ok to grope a complete stranger’s bum in such a very public place? Ok, so I’m 46 at the time, and this guy has no power over me, so there’s no threat as far as I’m concerned, but then on reflection… he doesn’t know that. If I’d been a dyed-in-the-wool homophobe, I could have turned around and hit him. I could have been a younger, more vulnerable BBC employee and felt incredibly compromised. What is it that gives him the sense that he can do this? Well, presumably he’d had a few to drink, but it’s more than that.
He’s famous, and I’m not. Even if I was inclined to grope mens’ bums at BBC Talent fests, there is absolutely no way I could randomly hook on to a well known celebrity’s arse in full view of everyone in the room, while they are talking to someone in what is, at least partly, a professional context. If I had, I would probably have been summarily ejected from the venue. This does say something about the ‘power’ of celebrity. I cringe at that phrase, but I can’t see a way round it. He knows I’m not going to make a fuss. It’s a media ‘do’ so I’m certainly not going to be openly homophobic!
And interestingly, although women experience such gropings as commonplace (although hopefully less so these days) I doubt very much whether any man would have groped a woman in that way at that particular industry function.
I’m not going to name this person, because I don’t want to cause any unnecessary embarrassment to a man I have no other knowledge of. I have no gripe with him. Like I say, it was trivial and did me no harm.
But even there… if, in the future, something more serious were to be associated with this individual (and I’m definitely not saying it will be) would I become complicit in not having done something to check potentially predatory behaviour?
I want the world to be fun. I don’t want to live in a world where we’re afraid to touch each other. I don’t mind being groped by the occasional TV Chef. But the line between fun and friendliness – and something darker that uses power for self gratification – is blurry.
Normally I end these blogs with some kind of pithy conclusion, but in this instance I’m floored. I suppose the answer is quite boring and dull. It’s about respect. Simple as that. The problem is I don’t want the world to be boring and dull.
So we’ll all have to work hard at being mischievous and cheeky, and occasionally flirty – but in a respectful way.
How’s that for a punchline?
15 Tuesday Apr 2014
Posted in Writing
I think this might break another rule of blogging, but for anyone interested in TV writing and what the job truly entails I commend this terrific blog to you, written by someone else – ! – my good friend Lisa Holdsworth – entitled They Say The Darndest Things, which decodes the tooth jangling, eyeball exploding double speak of the everyday pitch/commissioning meeting.
Writer, blogger and media pundit, Lisa Holdsworth
Click here to read Lisa Holdsworth’s terrific blog.
And when you’ve stopped laughing/cringing/screaming… well what more can I add except a few choice, related anecdotes, just in case you thought Lisa was exaggerating in any way. However, sadly, and unlike brilliant Lisa, in most of my stories, I was left completely lost for words, gulping like a beached goldfish…
‘We LOVE this, but what if….‘
Quite a few years ago I wrote a treatment for a psychological thriller about an ageing, failing Detective Sergeant, who becomes obsessed with a serial killer and ends up murdering his own daughter. The treatment was sent to a major broadcaster, and three days later (which is quick) I got a call to say that they LOVED my treatment and would I come down to London for a meeting. Suitably excited, I hopped onto the next Pendolino and soon found myself sitting opposite a senior and well known Drama Producer and, by her side, her eager and enthusiastic assistant.
‘Yes,’ they said. ‘We LOVE this! We absolutely LOVE it. But… what if… what if…
Me, cautiously: ‘Yes?’
‘No, really we LOVE this, it’s amazingly written, and especially the relationship between the father and the daughter, it’s so truthful, but what if, what IF… he didn’t kill his daughter?! What if instead of killing her, they formed a father and daughter detective partnership? And instead of it being so dark, there were jokes and banter…?’
Sigh.
‘What THEY want…’
A few years later, I was at a pitch meeting for a project I had been developing. I think it was pretty coherent, well-rehearsed, pithy, but layered too… I do my best not to bore people, but I could feel the producer’s attention wandering. She was staring at the venetian blinds over my shoulder. I stopped. ‘Something…. wrong?’
‘No, no…’ she said. ‘I mean, it’s a nice idea, but the reason I asked you here is because what they want…. what they REALLY want – the HOLY GRAIL – is…’ She leaned forward as if sharing the actual location of that elusive, sacred object. ‘The HOLY GRAIL… the thing they REALLY WANT… is… William and Mary.’
I opened my mouth to speak, but I couldn’t assemble a form of words that made any kind of sense. My mental rolodex was whirring, and for the briefest of moments I thought I as about to be offered a commission for a historical drama about the co-regency of William III and Mary II from 1689-1694. Clearly accusations of dumbing down were unfounded!! Then of course sanity returned and I realised that she was referring to the popular itv comedy drama starring Martin Clunes and Julie Graham. But having got the right William & Mary I realised that I was still none the wiser…
‘William and Mary… with, erm… Martin Clunes…’ I intoned vaguely trying to sound as if I was on her wavelength, but failing miserably.
‘Yes. We thought with your experience you’d be the ideal person for this.’
‘What…?’ I was riding the fine line between question and statement – sometimes the Australian interrogative has its uses. ‘You’re making a new series of it..?’
Even as I said this I realised how bonkers it sounded. For a start, this producer had no connection to the aforementioned itv ratings hit. Also there was the small matter of William & Mary already having an extremely good writer of its own. Not to mention the fact that I had, to my shame, never watched more than twenty minutes of the show.
‘No, no,’ said the producer impatiently as if I were one of Mr Gradgrind’s slower pupils, ‘We’re thinking of developing something LIKE William and Mary because THAT’S WHAT THEY WANT.’
‘Ah, right’ I said dimly, wondering what had happened to the idea I had been pitching not five minutes ago, which tragically for me, bore no relationship to William and Mary, either historically or comedically. ‘Only it’s a bit different from… I mean to say, I’m not sure that it’s really where I want to be going right now.’
Ouch ouch ouch ouch.
‘I mean, that’s erm, that’s why…’ I’m stammering like a fool now,’…that’s why I came to you with this idea…’ I flap my hands vaguely in the direction of the pitch document, ‘which I’m afraid isn’t really in William and Mary territory. Sorry.’
‘You see,’ the Producer’s assistant piped up, eyes shining. ‘What they want – WHAT THEY WANT – is stuff that’s a bit like things they have already… only different.’
I could see the brilliant, undeniable logic of what he was saying, but in that moment I could think of nothing either witty or devastating; I just parroted like a fool.
‘Something they have already… but different… hmmm. Interesting.’
‘The One Thing We Don’t Want is any more Cops or Docs’
They do.
‘No One Is Interested In TV Shows About actors, writers or the television industry.’
This is undoubtedly true. There are no successful shows about TV writers, TV comedy actors, impressionists eating fine food, extras, people trying to get shows commissioned, people writing soaps, advertising or newsrooms. They just don’t happen.
‘I gave your script to a friend/my kids/the girl who does my nails to get a second opinion.’
Well of course Lisa Holdsworth is one quick thinking and smart cookie, so she wisely responds with: ‘It’s always good to see things through a fresh pair of eyes’.
My resemblance to the mythical cookie, however, extends only to the crumbs at the bottom of the packet.
A long time ago in a script meeting far, far away… myself and a few writers – and an executive from a large broadcasting organisation – were summoned by a famously powerful producer for a first draft meeting on a block of scripts that were due to headline a new prime time TV series. The producer turned to me and started with: ‘I showed your script to my driver…’
‘Oh yeah?’ I said brightly, happy to respond with a suitable platitude, with all the wisdom of She That Is Holdsworth.
But the producer reached into his jacket and pulled out a neatly folded sheet of A4, covered in dense scribbles. ‘And these…’ he unfolded the sheet slowly, deliberately, ‘…are his notes.’ And he proceeded to read to me, and to everyone else in the meeting (which included the script editor), the detailed notes of the company driver.
After about a quarter of a page of the ‘chauffeur edit’, I tentatively raised my hand. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, just a little tightly,’I’m sure your driver is a great bloke and everything. And I’m sure he has some very genuine and useful opinions about what he sees on the television, but this is a first draft, and we do actually have a highly trained script editor here, and really, if your driver has the skills to shape these scripts that we’re trying to develop, perhaps we’d better ask him to leave his car and come up and exec the series, and [the executive from the major broadcaster] can go down and start a new career as your driver.’
The producer paused. He narrowed his eyes, and refolded the paper… very slowly, and put it back in his jacket pocket. I had the sense that I’d better check under my car from now on.
I lasted another three months on the show, and when we finally parted company, it was, believe it or not, a happy day. Sadly I have to report that the series was not a success, and as far as I know, the driver is still plying his excellent motoring skills on the streets of our fine capital.
Reader – they do say the darndest things – but I make this plea to you – heed The Word Of The Holdsworth. Heed it, I tell you!
06 Sunday Apr 2014
Posted in Emmerdale, Holby City, Writing
Tags
Bonnie Wallis, Butch Dingle, cancer, Continuing Drama, Death, Emmerdale, Holby City, Jac Naylor, Jonny Maconie, Soap
I realise that I have broken the first rule of blogging by posting once and then leaving it for ages. I could pathetically blame the radiotherapy which has laid me out (it’s that or the medication) or take this opportunity to tell the world about my crimes, and my guilty conscience. I could try to lay low, pull my hat down low and my collar up, but seeing as 4.4million people tuned in last Tuesday 1st April 2014 and collectively gasped (it trended on Twitter for about the length of a gasp) as a regular character was brutally mown down in her nuptial prime, I think the best thing I can do is confess that not only was I the author of the narrative that drove that truck (and not jealous love rival Jac Naylor as some Twitter wags have suggested) but feeling rotten as I was, it cheered me up no end. Which possibly makes me some kind of psychopath – and a serial psychopath at that (Serial? See what I did there?). And like all serial killers I seem to be developing an MO.
Holby’s Bonnie Wallis about to meet her doom…
I first got the taste for blood back in 2000 when I was asked by Kieran Roberts, the then producer of the itv Yorkshire village soap Emmerdale, to deal Butch Dingle a lethal blow, courtesy of a seventeen ton truck which would conveniently land on top of a minibus full of much loved characters – and Malandra Burrows (NO!! I take that back! Malandra is lovely, just couldn’t resist a cheap gag). Admittedly it was left to my brilliant writer friend Karin Young to dispatch the (very good) actor Paul Loughran unto the great post-soap panto-contract in the sky, but I was the one to give him the deliciously terminal injury. I can’t even argue that it was a crime of passion. No, this character assassination required meticulous planning.
The seventeen ton truck on top of a minibus thing was a given. I was never quite sure why… perhaps there was a job lot of heavy duty stunts available that year. However, having handed me a seventeen ton murder weapon, the production team then revealed that the most obvious bit of road through the exterior Emmerdale lot at Harewood House was unavailable to us because it had been built above a primary water main and because the road was only a pretend road and did not conform to public highway building specs, dropping said truck upon it would most likely fracture the pipes and deprive the north of Leeds of its water supply. And so, a convoluted chain of events, a bit like a plot line out of Final Destination, had to be constructed in order to get the truck and the minibus to interface fatally somewhere vaguely recognisable as our primary location.
The minibus was another problem. Why were all our characters in the minibus in the first place? The story office obliged with a plot line about Alan Turner running a minibus service into the local town (can’t for the life of me remember why) which would have done the trick, apart from it being well established that all the characters had their own cars and rarely used public transport. So, the first half of the episode consisted of a lot of scenes of people complaining about their cars needing to go into the garage.
Back to the truck, whose brakes had failed (What?? It happens!!), which needed to leave the main road and drive around a tight corner at speed (in order not to linger over the water main) in order to leap into the air and then fall upon the unsuspecting Emmerdalians. So a few strategically placed children were all that was needed to encourage the driver – Kirk Smith – to choose the path of destruction rather than the safer one of the main road to Hotten straight ahead though empty fields where he could crash with impunity. ‘Leap into the air…?’ I hear you repeat uncertainly. We all know that trucks do this quite naturally, especially when the load hasn’t been secured properly inside and sways about a bit. Should this happen then the truck will fly over as if a compressed air concrete pile driver has been ejected through a specially pre-fabricated hole in the bottom of the chassis in order to ensure the vehicle tips exactly on cue.
There was only one opportunity to film this, and so five cameras were rolling as the stunt was executed meticulously, and the truck landed as planned on a minibus occupied with suitably attired dummies (insert your own joke there about ‘why didn’t they use a stunt bus?’ – I’m not going to do it!).
It was actually a genuinely exciting stunt to watch, and when the dust had settled a burly technician commented that it was a good job that the bus was full of mannikins because clearly all the characters inside would have been killed instantly. You can see here for yourself:
Later the same year, Kieran met me under a canal bridge at dusk to give me the details of my next hit, Emmerdale farmer’s wife, Sarah Sugden, who was to be having an affair with her toyboy, Richie, in the barn, just as her adopted son, Andy, decided that it would be a good idea to burn the place to the ground in order to collect on the insurance and sort out his adoptive dad’s financial problems. Given this fatal confluence, you would have thought it unwise to leave a LARGE CYLINDER OF ACETYLENE by the door, which, should it explode, would send yet another soap actor hurtling towards panto land…. You can imagine my glee when I heard that the explosion had to be re-shot to make it more explodey!! You can see the final result if you join at about 16 minutes into the episode:
I now had the smell of pink diesel on my hands… and it’s easy to forget that there are real consequences to these joyfully cathartic screen murders. For a start – panto jokes aside – it usually means that someone has lost a steady income stream, which can be a scary thing for an actor, especially if they’ve been on a soap for a long time. Hopefully though it’s a natural end to a contract and they’re happy to go out with a bang. And if they’re iconic enough there’s always the chance that they will return from the dead, like Kim Tate in Emmerdale and Dirty Den in EastEnders. Conversely, they can make the mistake, as one well known (but unnamed) soap actor did, of getting drunk at a party and insulting both me and the series producer, after which he and I looked at each other and said, simultaneously, and without prompting: ‘Over a cliff.’
Fast forward 13 years – and having written regularly for Casualty and Holby City – I’ve seen off countless guest characters who I dispatch with the callous disregard of a drive by shootist – even if I feign sadness for them at the time.
If you stop to think about it, this is majorly dysfunctional behaviour.
But just when you think you’ve killed so much that it has become no more than an itch to scratch (my daughter says that you can always tell when a Holby patient is going to die, because they have the holiday of a lifetime planned, or they’ve just planted something in their garden that’s due to bear fruit next year), someone offers you a contract that truly stirs the blood again. Last year I was commissioned to write Episode 25, Series 16 of Holby City in which love torn senior Nurse, Jonny Maconie would finally prise himself free of icy, damaged cardiothoracic consultant, Jac Naylor, and marry Bonnie Wallis, the nurse who has held a torch for him ever since they met at Nursing College. Just as everyone starts to think that he has jilted her at the register office, Jonny turns up in a taxi, short of a fiver. As Bonnie crosses the road to give him some change, wondering if this is what it’s going to be like for the next forty years…. BAM!
So here’s the interesting thing.
Conventional writing wisdom has it, that to kill a character randomly at the end of a story is a cheat – a deus ex machinae – that will leave the audience frustrated and annoyed. If you’re going to kill them randomly it has to be at the beginning of the story, as an inciting incident, or else their death needs to be earned through a suitable confluence of plot so as to be narratively satisfying. However, in this instance, the good burghers of Holby City editorial team had decided that Bonnie’s demise needed to be a cruel and ironic twist – and most importantly, embargoed to scare the willies out of the audience.
This created a genuine challenge. How to seed the event enough to earn it, but still to have it seemingly come out of a clear blue side road?
The solution seemed to be to suffuse the whole episode with a sense of impending doom… from calling it ‘The Cruellest Month’ (it was transmitted on April Fools Day – irony and a literary reference all in one, folks) to peppering the script with casual references to car crashes and collisions – to building up the expectation that Jonny and Bonnie’s wedding was ill fated from the start. Except that right at the last minute, we solve the problem that has been dogging Jonny throughout and hit the couple with a truck instead. Yes it IS a narrative cheat, but it doesn’t feel like one because the audience have been building up to something for 55 minutes, and so it’s actually both satisfying and surprising when it happens, but not in the way they expect.
The other trick is to make sure that the ‘surprise’ death fulfils the story imperatives of the narrative – e.g. Jonny has been saving up saying ‘I Love You’ to his bride to be until after the wedding, so it’s satisfying that when he finally gets to say it, it is to her dead body – and it becomes an inciting incident for more story.
So in many ways, counter to all my normal instincts, this has to be the most satisfying, least contrived and genuinely shocking death of a TV character I’ve had the privilege to write. I hope the lovely actress who played her, Carlyss Peer, can forgive me.
And much as I resist such cheesy notions, it’s hard to avoid the fact that I wrote the script while going through scans and biopsies for life threatening health condition, so perhaps the idea if being hit from left-field felt more real for me than it ever had done before. Which does go to show, that although, as writers, we play with the lives and deaths of our characters like careless puppeteers, life can play with us just as carelessly.
If you haven’t seen it – Holby City – The Cruellest Month – might possibly still be lurking round on YouTube…
Until next time…. take care crossing the road.
