Television
Acts of television
Alexander Chancellor
Apart from that, Mr Young, Mr Milne et al, how did you enjoy the play? I didn't enjoy it terribly. One of the reasons for this was that I couldn't really see the point of it. You take two extremists — Mr Martin McGuinness of the IRA and the Paisleyite Mr Gregory Campbell — you show them going about their business, private and public, you make them talk about them- selves and their opinions, you edit the whole thing very carefully, ensuring that they have absolutely equal exposure, and what are you left with? To be honest, a well-made but rather dispiriting pro- gramme. In contrast to the Governors of the BBC, who apparently felt that the programme (I am talking, of course, about the banned Real Lives documentary, At the Edge of the Union) made Mr McGuinness seem very endearing, I found him thor- oughly unpleasant. One does not start liking a man simply because he is shown at home playing with his children. His own words made clear that at heart he is no different from those black-masked, strut- ting IRA hit-men who were shown at a memorial service firing pistols and rifles into the air. I do not think, in short, that the programme could be fairly described as `soft' on the IRA, except possibly to the extent that it portrayed Mr McGuinness and Mr Campbell as identical opposites, while it would seem that Mr McGuinness actively organises murders and Mr Camp- bell does not.
The real problem with the programme was that it didn't tell one much. By the end one knew little more about Mr McGuin- ness than one did at the beginning. Is he really the IRA's Chief of Staff or isn't he? If he is, for what acts of terrorism has he been responsible? These are the sorts of question one would have liked answered, had it been in the BBC's power to answer them. What we got instead was a frustrat- ing portrait of a man who, so it would seem, is getting away literally with murder under the helpless eyes of British security and of the Ulster loyalists. It would have been nice to have seen the BBC helping tighten the net around him, but its scrupu- lous neutrality prevented it from attemp- ting any such task. This was not, however, a good enough reason for banning the programme. The only harm it could poss- ibly have done would have been to the BBC's reputation, which has suffered a great deal more as a result of it being taken off the air.
Germaine Greer's half-hour tirade against Mrs Thatcher (Opinions, Channel 4) did not quite come off, although en- gagingly delivered with much miming and funny voices. According to Ms Greer, Mrs Thatcher's purpose has always been the oppression of the poor, the destruction of the welfare state, and the promotion of her own shallow, misguided ideas of goodness and decency. She has been remodelled by Saatchi and Saatchi as a sham nanny figure designed to hold the nation in thrall. What irks Ms Greer most is the enthusiasm of the British electorate for being oppressed. `The abiding mystery will be why the British were so ready to identify with the bully when they themselves were being bullied,' she says. It all comes down in the end to la vice anglaise — 'a taste for humiliation and punishment at the hands of a strong woman, usually, but not always, in the form of spanking.' And her conclu- sion is: 'The truth is that Britain no longer has the prestige of a moral leader in the civilised world. Under the leadership of Boadicea Thatcher, we have become once more barbarians.'
The invective was sustained at fever pitch throughout the programme and, although it scored one or two hits, it was on the whole too rich and frothy to be easily digestible. There are also less ignoble reasons for supporting Mrs Thatcher than Ms Greer cared to admit, but that is by the way.
I was glad to see my distinguished namesake, John Chancellor of America's NBC television, discussing the banning of the McGuinness documentary on News- night (BBC2) last week. But this sober and experienced broadcaster had difficulties with the word 'terrorism'. For some reason he kept calling it 'television' instead — as in 'acts of television'. After watching Ms Greer, I began to think I understood what he meant.
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