Hold on to your seats, everyone, and grab yourselves a stiff drink. I’ve got a story gleaned from this week’s Dispatches: How Murdoch Ran Britain (Channel 4, Monday) so shocking that it will completely change your views on government, the media, everything.
OK, here goes: in 2004 Tony Blair wanted Britain to sign up to an EU constitution. When Rupert Murdoch discovered this, he personally intervened by running a Sun front-page story headlined ‘TRAITOR’. The effect was almost instant. Within days, Tony Blair had offered the people of Britain a referendum on the EU.
Yep, sorry about that. What you were doing was waiting for the exciting revelation. And what I was doing was taking the piss out of presenter Peter Oborne. I don’t care if he writes for this magazine, occasionally; I wouldn’t care if he was editor: if a topical news documentary is going to drag me from my precious University Challenge viewing slot, it needs to be a good deal better than the stale tripe served up by Oborne on Monday.
You could tell how desperate he was by the quality of the rent-a-quotes he employed: Lance Price; John Prescott; Geoffrey Robertson QC. Eh? Apart from being an Australian and available, how exactly is a leftie human rights lawyer in any way qualified to comment in a meaningful or enlightening way on Rupert Murdoch? Were we all supposed to go, ‘Jeez, I used to think Murdoch was great. But now someone of the eminence and unimpeachable political neutrality of Geoffrey Robertson QC has told me he’s bad, I’ve shifted my views completely.’
And I’m not — trust me, Hugh Grant; please don’t let this stop me being the first columnist you turn to when opening the Speccer — holding a brief for Murdoch here. I’m just asking for a bit of intellectual consistency. Have not newspaper proprietors, from the Beaverbrooks to the Rothermeres, always exerted a degree of political influence over governments? Does Oborne honestly believe that, if Murdoch had headlined his story HERO instead of TRAITOR, all the Sun’s readership would dutifully have turned into rampant Europhiles and applauded Blair’s cynical, treacherous attempt to surrender yet more of Britain’s sovereignty to the EU? And in what way, pray, was it an undesirable outcome of Murdoch’s supposedly wicked meddling that the British people ended up being offered the chance to express their views on a vitally important issue in a referendum?
TV is getting more annoying. Possibly, this is just a sign of my getting older and more irritable but I don’t think so. With money tighter and audiences more fragmented, TV’s response has been to make its content more cheap, dumbed-down, formulaic and hucksterish.
Take Jane Moore’s new series Wonderstuff (BBC2, Monday). Nothing wrong with the premise: journalist shows us how everyday objects (this week: soap, shampoo, toothpaste) are made. Nothing much wrong with Moore as a presenter, either. What’s dire is the programme’s intelligence-insulting eagerness to reassure us how watchable it is.
‘I’m going on the most important, moving journey since Scott’s last voyage to the Antarctic,’ Moore tells us at the beginning. ‘Never, in broadcasting history, has a journalist been given a more thrilling assignment. So excited am I by the joys which lie ahead that I have experienced 23 consecutive orgasms, just thinking about it…’ All right, maybe she didn’t put it quite so strongly but that was the gist. And I don’t blame poor Jane. Perhaps I’m wrong, but this smacks of the guff overanxious producers and directors impose on newish presenters. They’re terrified of an imaginary viewer sitting at home going: ‘Who is this new woman person? Why isn’t she Fiona Bruce or Richard Hammond? Why should I care about this “stuff” she’s going to be telling us about in the next few weeks? I’m switching over right now…’
In some ways, they are right, though not for the reasons they think. Wonderstuff is a bit of a rip-off of one of the most reliably, unexpectedly interesting programmes anywhere on TV: How It’s Made (Discovery). One reason why How It’s Made has been such an enduring success (it started in 2001) is that it trusts its material. There’s no visible presenter there to pull faces or to play ‘Miss Dumb’ as a foil to the show’s resident ‘expert’. It simply takes us to a factory and films the production process from start to finish, with a bland rock soundtrack and a fairly anonymous voiceover telling us what’s going on. Which is all that we need, really.
Sure, it was nice to learn that soap is made of alkaline solution of wood ash mixed with animal fat: come the imminent economic collapse, when those of us left have to resort to the barter system and subsist on home-grown turnips, this knowledge could come in really handy. But — for all her obvious charms — I don’t think I really needed Jane there to explain why this was interesting. Like most, if not all, TV viewers, I can work out that kind of detail for myself.
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