AND ANOTHER THING
The Potter calls the Digger black and the custard pies fly
PAUL JOHNSON
There is a silent Laurel-and-Hardy short called Fight of the Century, which develops into a large-scale and deeply satisfying pie- fight. The last few feet of the film are, alas, missing but even before that an entire street of people, including men in top hats and ladies with lorgnettes, are sloshing each other in the face with these splodgy missiles. I and my grandson, Tycho, watch this little movie over and over again with delight. Why should a 64-year-old and a three-year-old alike take such enormous Pleasure in seeing men and women get their mugs covered in custard?
One reason, I think, is the speed with which the pompous and pretentious descend to the same mindless level of mutual aggression once their self-esteem is physically assaulted. We are cave-man bruisers under the skin. Thus we are all currently enjoying the brawl between Camille Paglia and Julie Burchill, two grotesquely overrated, overpaid and spec- tacularly aggressive and self-important women — an encounter which has been described by a third, Germaine Greer, as 'mud-wrestling with tits'. What the row is about is as much a mystery as the pie-fight. The point of it all is the abuse. Burchill threw the first pie by reviewing Miss Paglia's book in The Spectator, and assert- ing that Paglia 'couldn't think her way out of a wet paper bag', is 'crazy as a loon' and hands out 'crap'. Paglia throws back that Burchill's work is 'sloppy, dishonest and distorted', marked by 'cliched locutions, braying rhetoric and meaningless incoher- ence'; she is a 'sheltered, pampered sultan of slick, snide wordplay'. Both claim victory like old-style boxing champs. Paglia: 'I went over her like a tank.' Burchill: 'I'm 10 years Younger, two stone heavier, and nastier.'
The truth is, as these hoydens know well, that verbal pugilism is a highly salable com- modity, the key element in a heady cocktail which boosts sales, circulations and ratings. Hence the conundrum: which is the win- ning mixture of abuse, sex and politics? The Sun newspaper? Or a Dennis Potter play? The answer is — both. Of course, there are differences, but they are essentially about markets, not morals. The Sun supplies erot- ica, potted views and vituperation to the blue-collars, shopgirls, typists and pension- ers. Potter's brew is the tipple of the chat- tering classes. It's all a matter of business, innit?
To be fair, both the Sun and Potter also have a talent for verbal wit and a sense of pathos, carefully crafted for their respective audiences. When it comes to articulating rage, however, I think I give Potter the edge. He does not have quite the slashing scalpel of John Osborne, our maestro of polemic; after all, he is only a television dramatist, not a proper one. All the same, he can teach the Sun a thing or two, and I commend to Kelvin MacKenzie and his splash-subs Potter's latest philippic, origi- nally delivered on Channel 4 and partly republished in the Guardian. But then it has doubtless already been, as the lawyers say, 'drawn to the attention' of MacKenzie, as he is dismissed therein as 'a sharp little oaf. Rupert Murdoch, however, is the main target. He is compared to 'an enor- mous toad who croaks at all our doors and windows'. He and his employees are foul- and wet-mouthed, sewers, vandals wreaking vengeance and oozing ordure, guilty of can- nibalism, fetishism, sadism — worse, Thatcherism — and sordid, money-grab- bing, people-despising, voraciously nibbling rats. Just to open the Sun, Potter says, is to 'stain your soul' or risk having it 'emptied' from your 'blown-away body'. The solution is to have Murdoch strung up but 'cut down while still alive and left to croak out exple- tives'.
This tirade is not entirely aimless pie- throwing like the Burchill-Paglia exchange. Potter is incandescent because his latest offering, Lipstick on Your Collar, has been taken apart by the tabloids for indecency, and to the uninstructed Murdoch is the liv- ing symbol of tabloid journalism. I doubt if Murdoch has heard of Potter. Equally, I doubt if Potter has ever met Murdoch, so 'Take you to our leader? That's a bit problematic right now.' all his rage has been unleashed without a clear view of the target. Quite why Mur- doch should attract such hatred is puzzling. So is his nickname. He is not at all my idea of a digger. He comes from the Australian gentry. His father, Sir Keith, was a Harmsworth protégé who figures in Tom Clark's rousing book, My Northcliffe Diary. He built up a nice little newspaper empire down under, though he never engrossed the equity. Murdoch's mother, the Dame, was a sort of antipodean Lady Bracknell. He had the usual education given to Aus- tralian boys of his class and, like many of them, came to Oxford for a final polishing. Considering he has spent his entire life in the media, he is reassuringly unscarred by it all, being courteous, soft-spoken, amusing, well-informed, a good listener and not par- ticularly opinionated, at any rate by Aus- tralian standards. It is a pleasure to have him in one's house. I am not sure I would say the same about Potter, who sounds like the sort of person one would keep not just at arm's length but out of spittle range. If, however, he were confronted by the mild- mannered and inoffensive Murdoch, I sus- pect he would be at a loss how to proceed. A much more convincing symbolic personi- fication of media capitalism would have been Potter's Channel 4 boss, the well- upholstered, gold-handshaking Michael Grade, whose chubby features are usually to be glimpsed, like his Uncle Lew's, at the sucking end of a colossal cigar. But Grade, being a patron of the chatterers, is exempt from criticism.
All these rows, in fact, are elaborate pan- tomimes, fought in public but according to hidden rules and secret alliances, and for opaque objectives of which ordinary people are unaware but which are transparent to the initiated. In the old days, historians used to distinguish between the Real Nation and the Political Nation, the latter being the ruling elite which determined things unless the people rose in irresistible fury. Now we have a third force, the Media Nation, the few thousand men and women who set the agenda and write the score on both sides of the Atlantic. Sometimes they have important issues to go on about. Most of the time they simply hurl pies. It may be childish and a waste of good verbal custard; but nothing which matters is at stake, no one is going to get hurt, and the Real Nation, like my grandson and myself, set- tles back and enjoys the fun.
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