The real BBC scandal is that John Prescott has been allowed to talk about class
Obviously, the senior powers at the BBC should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. What a cock-up. What a failure of leadership. What a grubby betrayal of Reithian values. Is our licence fee really well spent on this gibbering nonsense? What were they thinking of? Why did they commission a two-part documentary on class from John Prescott?
Russell Brand on class; that could have been interesting. He’d have prank-called the poor and told them he’d shagged their pets, perhaps, but at least he might have approached the subject matter with a relatively open mind. Jonathan Ross, too, although he’d probably have got bored like he always does, and started telling Lord Onslow that he was ‘a very good-looking man’ while absentmindedly rubbing his own thighs. Prescott, though, was a missed opportunity. Did you see it? Maybe you saw a bit of it. No journey. No discovery. He just wandered around Britain not knowing things, and not learning them, either.
What class are Brand and Ross? Tricky. Both middling, I’d say. Ross, state-educated, but the son of a radio presenter, and apparently unrelated to anybody who doesn’t work in the media. Brand has a rougher edge, but he has been a stage-school brat since his teens. Bit of a fight, I’d have thought, to hold on to that accent. Both of them, y’know, speak the way that Tony Blair always tried to. Professionally, they’re safe facsimiles of the working class. Just posh enough not to mind that they aren’t posher. The Beeb is exactly where they belong.
Not so Prescott. He’s more ITV2. He claims he’s interested in class but, like the lowest star of reality television, he’s actually only interested in himself. All he seems to want from class is an excuse. ‘It’s not your fault, John!’ he wants somebody to say. ‘Britain’s whole working class talks like they’re about to go under a general anaesthetic!’ Only, if so, where have they all gone? Where are all the respectable working-class people who make as little sense as John Prescott? Are they down mines?
Speaking to Simon Hoggart, still ostensibly about class, Prescott somehow managed to convey the message that his major resentment was that people might assume that his muddled speech was an indicator of muddled thought. And then, sitting in a cab, three teenage girls, without a GCSE between them, managed to outwit him into saying he didn’t like Cherie Blair. Why does he still not get it? The big mystery about John Prescott isn’t why he never rose further. The big mystery is how he rose as far as he did.
He had a impressive rapport with those marginalised south London girls, true enough, but so would another marginalised south London girl. We wouldn’t necessarily want to put one in charge of Communities and Local Government.
Classism today is like irritable bowel system. Many sufferers would probably be fine, if only they could think about something else. But Prezza just keeps on straining away. Prescott: The Class System and Me is a pointless, bloody rupture, and what little relevance class still has in Britain, it misses, utterly.
One could argue, for example, that where class has disappeared, it has left a void. That’s why call centres are so awful, and why it’s so hard, in the south-east, to find anybody who can put up shelves. Or one could examine the demise of deference, and wonder whether in some ways we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. One could draw a conceptual link, perhaps, between the way Prescott’s new young female friend will cheerfully call the Queen a ‘slabby bitch’, and the way Brand and Ross think it’s funny to humiliate a septuagenarian veteran of the screen. Class could help us understand why Osborne keeps hanging out with Nat Rothschild, or why Lord Mandelson remains a slut for a yacht. It would be nice, maybe, to see the Right Honourable John Prescott thinking about all that. Rather than just looking shifty at the Henley regatta. Highlands with a monolingual Hungarian called Laszlo.
It was a weird time. Our hosts weren’t entirely sure what either of us was doing there. Hence, I suspect, the outhouse. I had just split up with their daughter but hadn’t realised it yet, even though everybody else had. Laszlo’s circumstances were more complex. He’d arrived with a girl who was a friend of the family, and bilingual. She’d dumped him and left. Nobody spoke enough Hungarian to ask him when he was leaving. Or even if he was OK.
We bonded, Laszlo and I, over broken hearts and cigarettes. Mine were Marlboro Lights. His were stronger, and had a name spattered with vees and zeds. He played me his favourite songs on his wonky Walkman, and I pretended to like them, even though they were basically grunge with trumpets. And in time, and largely through mime, Laszlo asked me if I was interested in politics. Sort of, I said.
And so, for the next two days, we talked politics. Or rather, he talked politics. And, by politics, he meant Hungarian politics. I understood very little, and I recall even less, but I remember thinking, even then, that in the global scheme of things, Hungarian politics probably wasn’t quite where it was at. Still, I didn’t have the heart to say anything. Indeed, I didn’t have the Hungarian to say anything. Plus, I was out of Marlboro Lights.
I can see where he was coming from. Early 1990s, end of the Cold War, to Hungarians, Hungary must have seemed like the centre of the world. Only everybody else knew it wasn’t. Mind you, had I got a word in, I’d probably have talked British politics. And I doubt he’d have been gripped, either.
Anyway, the point. He popped into my head, did poor Laszlo, just the other morning. I was looking up one of the recent Mandelson stories in a cuttings library, and I noticed that Mandelson had been written about, in the past 24 hours, 114 times. And of all these stories, from local newspapers, national newspapers, websites, newswires, radio transcriptions and the rest, there were only three that didn’t come from the UK. One was Le Figaro, one was a Russia wire, and one was in Canberra.
So, in Russia, France and Australia, they care about Peter Mandelson. A bit. And everywhere else in the world, just so you know, they don’t.
Previous page
