Campaigning genius
Jamie’s Ministry of Food (Channel 4, Tuesday); Ian Hislop Goes off the Rails (BBC4, Thursday)
In Ian Hislop Goes off the Rails (BBC4, Thursday), our presenter failed yet again to answer the question which has been bugging many of us for years: just which way does the man vote? My own feeling is that it can’t possibly be Tory. I think he’s a bit like Jeremy Paxman — another of those handsomely remunerated, public-school-educated presenters who believes in most of the things a Tory ought to believe in (the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, riding to hounds, warm beer, Brief Encounter, probably) but finds himself in perpetual revolt against his true nature because he has a notion in his head that to be a Tory is not to be nice.
That’s just a theory, though. It might, alternatively, be that they simply understand how to get on in television. Suppose, as Hislop did, you were making a documentary about Dr Beeching — the ex-ICI fat cat who in 1962 devised the wicked plan to slash Britain’s railway system by a third. You’d hardly score many BBC brownie points, would you, by concluding that his brutal utilitarianism was just what our ailing railways (and, more to the point, the British taxpayer subsidising them) needed?
Hislop’s conclusion, more or less, was that while Britain’s railways had indeed been in dire need of a prune, the Beeching cuts had nevertheless done great damage to our sense of community and nationhood and history. And that Sir John Betjeman was a jolly good egg, much nicer than the grisly Dr Beeching. I totally agreed with all of this, but still felt a bit cheated. Hadn’t Hislop — yet again — rather had his cake and eaten it?
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George
October 2nd, 2008 6:42pmIan Hislop is easy to read. He craves approval, but at the same time is repelled by it.
That's why he laughs all the time at his own jokes. (When Nigella Lawson pointed this out, he responded to a woman who quite clearly frightened him to death with: 'it's like eating your own food'.
If you were a very small, small boy who also looked odd and were put in the public school system, you might end up like Hislop.
Being picked when quite young to be editor of Private Eye so you can get back at every one is very heaven to someone like this.
TDK
October 5th, 2008 6:26pmYou know that no government, the Conservatives who appointed Beeching or Labour who implemented the vast majority of the closures, had to actually implement his proposal. If was wrong, it was the politicians who got it wrong.