There’s a game you have to play at the BBC and Jeremy Paxman plays it very well — which is why he is currently still the most famous Old Malvernian after C.S. Lewis whereas I’m way down the list at maybe fourth, fifth or sixth. The rules are very simple: no matter how great your sympathies secretly might be towards the British Empire, Tory values, climate-change scepticism, Israel, the idea of national sovereignty, Margaret Thatcher or any other manifestation of what the BBC would consider WrongThink, you must suppress, suppress, suppress, using the mental equivalent of that spiked metal ring the late Victorians devised to discourage young men from masturbating.
With Paxo, this self-administered therapy has been extremely effective over the years. I’m afraid I have no actual evidence for this, other than what I have been able to deduce from having religiously watched him harrumphing and snorting his way through University Challenge this past decade or more. But I’m sure I’m right: behind that luvvyish, double-cheek-kissing, polenta-chomping, Islingtonian public persona Paxo has adopted in order to advance his media career, lurks a cross between Flashman, John Bull and a ginormous Victorian gunboat shelling the hell out of the inscrutable, insolent Chink for having the temerity to try to stop us going about our innocent business of holding his country enslaved through addiction to our lovely opium.
This adds no end to the pleasure of watching Paxo’s new BBC series Empire, in which the two sides of his Jekyll/Hyde personality wrestle most entertainingly for supremacy. So, for example, he’ll be sitting at the Gezira Sporting Club in Cairo (one of the many splendid legacies from its days as a British protectorate) watching an agreeable game of croquet in the company of an elderly Egyptian gentleman dressed in the Western style.
‘We weren’t all that bad, were we?’ asks Paxo. The Egyptian gentleman thinks we were. Paxo tries again: ‘Was there nothing good that the British did?’ The gentleman thinks for a brief moment — then decides that there wasn’t. Paxo — manfully resisting the urge to bark, ‘Come off it!’ and remind the man of the aqueducts, the sanitation, the roads, medicine, education, health, wine, the public baths and peace — has one more try: ‘All the time we were here — 70 years — and we did nothing that was any good?’ Egyptian gentleman: ‘I think no.’
I can imagine if Paxo were wearing his censorious grown-up hat, this is the sort of glib, dumbed-down TV faux journalism he would excoriate. It is, after all, the equivalent of the lazy foreign corr’s stand-by: the conversation with the cab driver on the way from the airport.
The problem with the cab driver method, of course, is that it depends on which cab driver you get. And it’s the same with that chap from the Gezira Sporting Club. I’ve no doubt that, had his production crew desired it, Paxo could very easily have found a similarly clad elderly Egyptian gentleman with views more akin to that of the old man who once accosted me in a market in the Sudan and demanded crossly to know why the British had left.
But it’s not a criticism I’d venture seriously myself. The way documentaries work, you know exactly what you want your chosen interviewee to say before he says it. What Paxo needed for the purposes of this first episode was postcolonial ingratitude. He got it from the chap in the Gezira club; he got it even more so from the Israeli woman who, as a 16-year-old Irgun terrorist, had scouted the King David Hotel, prior to the placing of the bombs that killed 91 in September 1946. Did she not, Paxo wondered, feel even the slightest bit beholden to the hated British for what they did for the Jews with the Balfour Declaration? The woman paused a long while, then conceded — so unenthusiastically she might just as well have said ‘no’ — ‘It is possible to thank you. It is not a problem.’
Paxo’s point was well made. Whether it’s Britain nobly trying to sort out once and for all the Jewish Question or the US trying to bring Western-style democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, Imperial powers never get thanked for attempting to do the right thing.
I sense from Paxo’s wistful tone that he secretly feels much as I do about the British Empire: that, though of course the Empire had its flaws, the world was never more magnificent, decent or better run than when one quarter of it was coloured pink. Others will dispute this, some of them very crossly. And what I really wish is that there were a knob we could turn where, just briefly, we got to see the world as it would have turned out if, instead of the British, the Spanish or French had been in charge, or if there had never been an Empire at all.
My guess is a right old dump.
Comments