If Iran can sue Hollywood over Argo, should we all sue Jeremy Hardy?

I think we should all support the Iranian government in its legal action against the Hollywood actor and director Ben Affleck, for misrepresenting their lovely country in the film Argo. They have a serious legal team lined up to counter the suggestion raised in Argo that Iran is full of half-witted, bearded, brutal Islamist maniacs, all spying on each other and shouting very loudly in the streets and markets etc.

It always occurred to me that this was precisely what Iran was like but, having never been to the place, one should keep an open mind. The Iranians insist that it is a perfectly pleasant country and that Affleck’s film, which is a fictionalised account of the CIA operation to free a bunch of US hostages from Tehran back in 1980, is simply American propaganda.

It is the principle of the thing which interests me. If the Iranians are successful, then so might we be if we sue for having been represented by Hollywood, in 100 years of film, as sexually repressed colonialist imbeciles with bad teeth who would not today exist were it not for the bravery and generosity of the USA; a pale and epicene race of rather aloof and arrogant people who are happy only when sipping a cup of tea or being beastly to the Irish. I am sure there is more to us than Hollywood lets on. Britain gets it in the neck from both right-wing and left-wing US film-makers; whatever we do, we cannot win. So let’s sue. I’d chip into a legal fund if there was the hope of preventing Sean Penn, say, from ever opening his thin little mouth in public again. The Iranians are right that Hollywood’s calumnies have an effect; they lodge in the public mind and create an impression. But I never thought we could do very much about it.

Of course we might well be hampered in court when the defence points out that British film-makers tend to depict their own country in precisely the same way these days. We might not have a leg to stand on once the judge has been shown works from the canon of Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Terence Davies, Neil Jordan and so on. The defence could even play excerpts from BBC Radio 4 and, in particular, contributions from the network’s in-house ‘comedian’, Jeremy Hardy, to establish for once and for all that the view of Britain as shown by Hollywood is as nothing to the contempt poured upon it from our own state broadcaster.

Mr Hardy is in the news this week because of a show, Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation, which has been described by some listeners as unmitigated, dour, metro-left-wing drivel. The woman who commissioned it, Caroline Raphael, seemed to agree. Or at least she said that there was great difficulty in finding comedians who were not left-wing, so the BBC was forced to employ the likes of Hardy.

This is not the point, in my opinion. The problem with Hardy is not so much that he is left-wing and a comedian, it is that he is left-wing but has never said anything remotely funny in 20 years — a very long fallow period for a comedian, longer even than the fallow period which has afflicted Woody Allen and Martin Amis — during which time he has been employed continually, and almost exclusively, by Radio 4. Nobody else, anywhere, wishes to hear him, or see him — except for the most important speech radio network in the country. Nobody from TV has swooped down, as they swooped down for Chris Morris and Steve Coogan and Stewart Lee. All of those three are leftish, and so is another former Radio 4 contributor, Armando Iannucci. But the big difference is that they had something more beyond their politics: i.e., they were funny. There’s a decent case for saying that Iannucci and Morris are the two cleverest and funniest comedians of their generation.

But here’s where the bias lies: Radio 4 thinks it is enough that Hardy has agreeable political sensibilities, so it doesn’t matter that he is about as funny as a dinner à deux with Vicky Pryce. I could name you a hundred comics right now who would be wittier, sharper and cleverer at doing some rant-to-the-nation broadcast, i.e. the wonderful open-goal format gifted to Hardy. And most of them would be leftish — but you wouldn’t mind, you might not even notice, because they were funny. Hardy is a little like another Radio 4 staple in this — Sandy Toksvig, who has also been criticised for uppity leftish opinions. Can anyone tell me of a single occasion upon which Toksvig has said something funny? And yet Radio 4 — alone — employs the woman, presumably because her liberal opinions accord with those of the people who run the station.

It is true that there are not many right-wing comedians around. Alexander Armstrong (of Armstrong and Miller) is one, sort of, and he’d be a lot funnier than Hardy. But then a convocation of insurance loss adjusters would be funnier than Hardy. Like most of the best comedians, David Mitchell does not let his politics get in the way of his humour, whatever his politics might be. The same is true of Frankie Boyle, although I suppose that in other ways he might not suit the Radio 4 demographic. But then nor, really, does Jeremy Hardy.