Who are those dumbed-down authoritarians?
Easy. They are our moral guardians
ROD LIDDLE
If there's one thing about the Angus Deayton affair which was less edifying than the coke and the whores and the multiple — if somewhat historic — infidelities, it was hearing a government minister, wreathed in sanctimony, pontificating about the rectitude of sacking the benighted presenter.
Tessa Jowell — for it was she — pronounced on the matter when asked to do so on the Today programme. She prefaced her remarks by going all coy and saying something along the lines of 000h, urn, I'm really not sure it's my position to say anything about all that, you know, ha ha, quite outside my brief — which is what they always say, government ministers, immediately before pushing their piggy little snouts into all manner of things that would be much better off without their attention.
And then, as one might have predicted, she ploughed right on and gave the nation the benefit of her considered opinion. Yep, it was probably right to sack the man, she argued, and then began a brief exposition on the requirement of television presenters (and, mysteriously, footballers) to act as role models for a grateful, supplicant nation. We look up to them and therefore they have a duty to conduct themselves in an appropriate manner, she said. Ian Hislop, Deayton's loyal friend and colleague, may well agree with her.
But what a palpably absurd argument that is. I've never met a single person who looks up to television presenters. We might envy them their money and their fame, and even their cocaine and expensive whores, but we hardly think that they represent a model of personal human aspiration. And, of course, it is largely because they are flawed and tormented by strange, misshapen demons that we find them remotely interesting. But we don't want to behave like them, for goodness sake. I've done a little bit of television presenting, on a pretty low level, and I fully expect that Tessa would consider me to have the morals of a Gabonese pit viper and therefore entirely unsuitable to be displayed before a vulnerable and terrified public. Or, at least, I fervently hope that she would think that. I certainly don't want her to think that I have her morals, whatever they might be.
And can you imagine what television would be like if it were populated solely by the morally upright? By people who don't take drugs or have energetic and exotic extra-curricular sexual encounters, but instead are a sort of grotesque composite of Pastor Albert Schweitzer and Simon Stylites? Have you ever watched television in Tehran? Or the former Soviet Union? Please, save us. Bring on the had people: the more the better.
Ministers are increasingly heard to expostulate on all manner of things over which, theoretically, they have no jurisdiction whatsoever. They have become, of late, television critics, art critics, health-and-safety executive officers and media commentators. There has been a veritable rash of this sort of business recently, of which Tessa Jowell's pontifications are merely the most glaring example. We are used to dismissing such things with the catch-all phrase 'nanny-state interference-, which perhaps it is, but I wonder if it doesn't tell us something more interesting, politically, about our government.
A year ago, a junior minister called Beverley Hughes took it upon herself to attack the Brass Eye special about paedophilia, a television programme which, incidentally, made me cry with laughter. I say 'took it upon herself but, probably, this is not the whole truth. Ms Hughes was a very new minister at the time, and it is surely inconceivable that she would have lambasted Channel 4 for its alleged tastelessness without express instruction from her shadowy sponsors up above.
She was not alone in finding the programme
grossly offensive, mind the Daily Mail, for example, launched a vituperative attack on Brass Eye and Channel 4, demanding that there be no repeats of the edition and, furthermore, that grovelling apologies be made to those people whose children had suffered at the hands of the evil, ever-present paedophiles.
More recently, the arts and culture minister Kim Howells attended a showing of the contenders for the Turner Prize and, publicly, delivered himself of the opinion that it was all (to offer a condensed summary) 'conceptual bullshit'. You may well agree with him. Certainly the populist press agrees with him. It is rare for an art exhibition to take place, especially one containing works by anyone from the Goldsmith's School — which is, incidentally, the most successful European art movement of the last 30 years — without an attendant howl of outrage from the middle-market tabloids. Mr Howells — a failed artist himself, as it happens — was very much in rune with that pugnacious but rather limiting vision of popular culture presented to us on a daily basis by the Mail, Express, Sun and Minor. Likewise, Tessa Jowell and Beverley Hughes found themselves in happy agreement with what we are reliably informed by the tabloid newspapers is the collective consensus of that almost certainly mythical place, 'Middle England'. People who live in Middle England, it seems, may not know much about art but they sure can tell a Titian from a tin of shit. They don't find media hyperbole about paedophiles a suitable subject for laughter, and they are implacably offended by the presence of Angus Deayton on their television screens.
I'm not sure that these denizens exist at all, but, if they do, it is surely the government's job to ensure that they are protected from foreign mischief, provided with a competent system which enables them to feed and educate themselves, and, if possible, afforded a standard of living that allows them to enjoy their leisure time boycotting art galleries and being privately but vociferously censorious about shag-happy, drug-addled celebrities. No matter how tempting it might be to curry favour with Paul Dacre, or Piers Morgan, or Rebekah Wade for some imagined electoral gain, it is surely not the job of government ministers to impose upon the populace a prescription for popular culture and entertainment and, indeed, morality.
And what a stunted, dumbed-down, authoritarian and philistine prescription it is. It is all rather redolent of Plekhanov, an early Soviet literary critic and ideologue, who, in effect, argued that art and culture should not offend or challenge, but instead be uplifting and a servant to the aspirations of revolutionary society as a whole. What a ghastly idea.
My response to these sort of imprecations from government ministers is, as you might expect, adolescent and puerile. Whenever a politician starts to tell me that the film I've just watched, or the book I've read, or the art installation I've recently visited, is unhelpful and should be banned, I go out and do something of which I know they would deeply disapprove. Sometimes it is simply leaving chewing gum on the pavement (this now being, officially, the most crucial issue facing our nation). And sometimes it is buying under-the-counter hardcore pornography from the corner newsagents. Sometimes it is lighting fireworks in the back garden, merely to annoy the government minister Nick Raynsford, who has told us we mustn't. Political resistance is a dangerous and time-consuming activity, but someone has to do it.
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