BODYGUARD: A terrorscapist drama of our times…

BODYGUARD:

TX: BBC1, Sundays*, 9pm, 26/08/2018 – 23/09/2018 (six episodes)
w: Jed Mercurio, d: Thomas Vincent & John Strickland, p: Priscilla Parish & Eric Coulter, m: Ruth Barrett & Ruskin Williamson (World Productions / Netflix Distribution)

“Whose ideology will really win out, the Prime Minister or the Home Secretary?” – Laura Kuenssberg, Bodyguard, episode 3, 02/09/2018

Bodyguard was by far the most successful British television drama of the autumn 2018 season in terms of viewing figures; its significance is in its popular reach and how we see the world through this drama serial. Bodyguard is a hi-octane Bourne and Bond-style thriller which is deliberately foregrounded in political consciousness today. This review recognises the popular as important, perhaps even more so, as Mercurio’s British outlook is being projected internationally via Netflix.

Bodyguard is successful at retaining interest and generating excitement through the first five episodes; it contains suspenseful plotting and nurtures the sort of establishment conspiracy narrative that British television drama was especially good at in the 1980s. However, this troubling vortex is forsaken in episode 6 for a pat resolution, revealing one single bed egg in the police force was behind it, in league with petty criminals. We’ve landed adrift in Touch of Frost (ITV, 1992-2010) terrain, not the sort of current-day take on Edge of Darkness (BBC1, 1985) or A Very British Coup (C4, 1988) that was potentially suggested.

Lead character David Budd is also a sphinx without a secret; a sort of everyman come ‘troubled family man’, showing little inkling of Scottish identity despite his accent. He lacks the depths initially suggested through his friendship with the maverick former army Sergeant and member of ‘Veterans for Peace’, Andrew Apsted (Tom Brooke, giving one of the best performances). Afghanistan is simply where Budd and Apsted served together and the cause of Budd’s PTSD. The complex geopolitics are elided as Mercurio provides us with a straightforward dialectical binary of the arguments: bad politicians led us into it for ‘nothing’ (Apsted) vs. ‘I can’t see any justification for believing the Taliban would govern Afghanistan in peace and harmony, or Iraqi insurgents would ever have formed a stable democracy, or Isis would ever form a state with which the world could have diplomatic relations. And, Andrew, I certainly do not miss the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.’ (Budd, who could be Alastair Campbell’s latest mouthpiece). In addition, the resolution, wherein it is proved that Budd simply needed to open up about his feelings and admit weakness in order to re-join the nuclear family, is too simple by far.

While the trope of using actual BBC journalists within a fictional drama was fresh and amusing in Russell T. Davies’s revival of Doctor Who (BBC1, 2005-), it is here deployed with a routine, annoying inevitability.** Witness the roll-call who appear in image or voice: Laura Kuenssberg, Sophie Raworth, Martha Kearney, Nick Robinson, Andrew Marr, John Pienaar, the absurd John Humphrys. This BBC drama’s use of BBC journalists is seemingly to create verisimilitude, appealing to the ‘real’, in an era when the Corporation really is being assailed from the left for being too close to the Conservative-DUP government. Former BBC employee Owen Bennett-Jones is right in the LRB to characterise the BBC’s actual position as: ‘We can’t afford to tell the truth if it means alienating a politician who could in the future have power over our funding’ – which he evidences by BBC journalists’ lack of serious questioning or correcting of Brexiters’ erroneous on-air claims. The BBC has, for better or worse, a role in promoting consensus about national identity and tends towards the ‘received wisdom’ and ‘centre ground’ of the day – making its job all the harder in polarised times.

When the actual UK Prime Minister now is the former Home Secretary, Mercurio and the BBC’s blending of fact and fiction becomes concerning. Indeed, the only ideological divergence depicted is within the governing party, as Kuenssberg asserts. The opposition may as well not exist in this ‘family quarrel’ between PM and Home Secretary, as no dissenting individual voices or characters are presented – instead, the civil liberties protesters are presented as an angry mob and are merely given a glib and not so catchy chant: ‘RIPA-18! No police state!’ Ominous shots of everyday London locations are backed by the familiar voices of the BBC journalists, delivering portentous ‘news’:

NICK ROBINSON: We’ve had confirmation this morning from the Home Office that Home Secretary Julia Montague will go ahead with her speech at St Matthew’s College.

MARTHA KEARNEY: Civil liberties groups plan a major protest outside St Matthew’s College later today.

JOHN HUMPHRYS: Julia Montague was, of course, the target of a recent assassination attempt and she’ll use today’s platform to address the challenges in the fight against terrorism.

It is easy to imagine founding Director-General John Reith’s incensed bafflement at the casual, glibly relativist involvement of this roster of BBC journalists, whose already battered credibility is not exactly enhanced by their insertion into a sensationalist fiction. The BBC doesn’t just have to fear its perception by the political right as hapless, ‘inclusive’ liberal-left bureaucrats (W1A) but how the political left perceives its cautious cleaving to an unstable “centre-ground” rather than its former – broadly Suez-Secret Society era – spirit of independence, inquiry and truth-telling to power. Unfortunately, the BBC has been ‘brought to heel’ too many times – the sackings of DGs Milne (1987), Dyke (2003) – to give us any confidence that it’ll start standing up for genuine plurality and truth above following the power.

Bodyguard’s cavalier use of the journos-in-fiction trope is part of its terrorscapist essence. Terrorscapism is a new sub-genre of sensationalist topical drama based around exploiting fears of terrorism in the collective unconsciousness for the purposes of vicarious entertainment. In it, morality is usually painted in broad brush-strokes. Hare’s relatively successful, if more infernally plodding Collateral (TX: BBC2, 12/02/2018-05/03/2018) is merely a more liberal-left variant, with its more ‘concerned’ portrayal of Syrian refugees and shadowy MI5 dealings. Terrorscapism tends to eschew overt, complicated politics, with caricatured figures like Collateral’s John Simm playing David Mars MP (a Peter Hain-esque exemplar of New Labour’s liberal side) and Bodyguard’s Keeley Hawes playing Tory Julia Montague MP (a composite of Theresa May and Amber Rudd’s authoritarian stints in the Home Office). These figures are presented as ‘above’ the fray in being more ‘principled’.

This terrorscapist drama’s most entertaining and tense sequence is its first: the attempted suicide bombing of the train, a crisis shrewdly defused by the empathetic Budd. His human interaction with would-be bomber Nadia is compelling while we feel the latent threat of horrific pyrotechnics. Unfortunately, the silent, scared Nadia is about the best that we get from her character. As the series progresses, too many scenes revolve around the dull likes of Anne Sampson (Gina McKee), Counter Terrorism Head in the Met, speaking in clipped terrorscapist clichés. We hear much of “national security” (9 mentions), somewhat less of “civil liberties” (4), which is admittedly a good measure of where our political discourse is at.

Worse, Bodyguard lacks ideas. It gets by on thrills and suggested depths for five hours, but the final 75 minutes amounts to one ponderous, drawn-out ‘spectacular’ set-piece, followed by banal ‘revelations’ of ‘culprits’. A disgraced police officer is cuffed; conferring retribution. Nadia is revealed, in hackneyed ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’ style, as an ‘empowered’ Islamist mastermind behind the terror attacks; confirming prejudices. This is unforgivable not just for its self-congratulatory smugness, but for its irresponsibility in the current political climate of Islamophobia and increasing far-right terror activity, given that she is the primary Muslim woman in the drama. One other particular drama in BBC’s Autumn 2018 season does it significantly better, and avoids such easy Other-ing. We will come to it later.

This absurd ‘surprise’ revelation functions as a comforting sop to our all too sour Britain of 2018 – and even more so, six months on. Yes, Jed, challenge the stereotype of the submissive Muslim woman victim, but not in aligning her with Jihadi ideology without there being any additional in-depth individuation of Muslim characters. The Muslim terrorist is thus affirmed in a certain viewer’s mind as a quiet, but definite threat to British values and security.

Ultimately, Jed Mercurio had 375 minutes which he could have used to explore a few ideas alongside the suspense and set-pieces, or engage with political complexities like W. Somerset Maugham, Eric Ambler or Graham Greene or John le Carré. However brilliant much of it is a thriller, episode 6 leaves a profoundly nasty taste in the mouth as a drama of today. In a documentary on radical television drama, Jimmy McGovern once said, semi-jokingly, that he hoped that, on Judgement Day, God would let him into heaven, “but that bastard over there who wrote 282 episodes of Casualty with his talent, and counted the money, he can go down there…”

Now, where does that leave Jed Mercurio?

*Episode 2 was on Monday 27/08
** Conspiracy drama academic Joseph Oldham has rightly told me that Spooks (2002-11) uses this device three years before RTD: Joanna Gosling appears in series 1 episode 4. Also, Lez Cooke’s history of British television drama has reminded me that an actual TV journalist appears within the fiction of Edge of Darkness (1985), interviewing Craven on TV, as well as pro-CND Labour MP Michael Meacher, which rather reflects that drama’s greater political radicalism compared with Bodyguard.

Brexit Britain: Day #995 – Wor Nigel leads us… where?

Saturday 16 March 2019

Day 995 in the British Brexit house! Ah, and a tiny section of the housemates (100, apparently! A few lasses but apparently mostly elder gents) have opted to spend £50 to spend their Saturday morning at political march in Sunderland. In the rain. As you do.

I get it. The people of provincial or ‘Average Britain’, as Donald Horne described it in 1969, feel let down. They have been let down, by all governments from Thatcher onward and, most emphatically, by the austerity politics of Cameron-Clegg. Misty-eyed Remainers should read James Meek’s accounts of how globalisation has damaged specific communities, such as this one about Cadbury’s in Keynsham. The EU is not as some call it a ‘dictatorship’ but its free-market ethos has led to people losing out in certain places.

What I simply do not get is the trust large numbers seem to place in certain public figures: witness one Nigel Farridge. Why trust him more than a May, Miliband, Cameron or Blair? He’s done little constructive work as an MEP. He grandstands and speaks a populist language that makes him seem ‘different’ to a large number of people who opt to see politics in simple terms. Sometimes, seeing politics in simple terms is necessary; usually, it is dangerous and at the core of the problems we face.

A minimum of research leads you to the conclusion that this man, who went to fee-paying Dulwich College and became a stockbroker in the City of London in 1982, is no true man of the British people. He is a man of the affluent south east, very in favour of free-market economics which tend to benefit the already well-off; his emphasis on immigration is a tactic, as he steps back from associating with UKIP now that they have explicitly moved to the far-right. This ‘patriot’ has strong links to powerful nationalists such as Putin and Trump and he is regularly paid to appear as a ‘broadcaster’ on Murdoch’s Fox News.

Today, he began to lead a march that tries to latch onto the iconography of the 1936 Jarrow Crusade, following a fairly similar route. However, it is not quite the same as that tenacious endeavour of the Great Depression, born of material despair. To quote the Chronicle here: ‘The route features notable gaps, where it appears the campaigners will be transported up to 30 miles from the end of a stage and to the start of the next, instead of walking.’ And, as Geoff Thomas (via David Stubbs) has noted: ‘Farage’s marchers are being asked to complete the route to London in half the time the original Jarrow marchers took. These were 200 men selected on the basis of physical fitness from a larger pool of volunteers. Some 20 miles a day they’ll have to cover and, unlike on the Jarrow march, no rest days.’

Jarrow is now represented by Stephen Hepburn MP, who I gather represents some of the Blue Labour tendency John Gray identifies in yesterday’s New Statesman: Gray plausibly argues there is massive, latent support in provincial England and Wales for combining left-wing economic policies such as nationalisation with an agenda of law and order and cutting immigration. In 2017, some of these insecure, fearful voters went to Corbyn because of the former, some went to May due to the latter.

Former Jarrow MP at the time of the Jarrow march was Ellen Wilkinson; when education minister in 1947, she called for a high-minded ‘Third Programme Nation’, with access to culture and education shared by the many. It is a shame this only partially came to pass and then dwindled entirely, despite the efforts of fine folk like Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Arnold Wesker and Jennie Lee.

We are living with the consequences, but need to deliver tangible economic improvements for ‘Average Britain’ and address its justified anger at governments of the last 40 years. While consistently arguing against the scapegoating of immigrants. If not, we will be threatened with a Farage-fuelled, Boris Johnson-led Britain, as John Gray warns.

A ‘Fox News Nation’, if you will. Ponder on that.

Somehow, I don’t think the Jarra marchers were charged £50 for the privilege of marching alongside an ex-stockbroker in a flat cap. Apparently one who, by many accounts, got into his car by the time the gaggle reached Seaham.

Brexit Britain: Day #993

Thursday 14 March 2019

Day 993 in the British Brexit house! Lots of shouting, a pair of mad dogs in the Question Time audience having a barney, more yakking on about ‘sovereignty’ than about sharing or saving the planet. Less evidence of thinking or, even, research going on from the ‘researchers’ (ERG). Less and less evidence that even Brexiters can agree on what they want: Gove is for being a “vassal state” of the EU that controls immigration, Johnson is for an even deeper isolation which threatens the UK itself.

I cast Channel 4’s Dispatches on ‘The Brexit Millionaires’ via the laptop, onto the telly. It got me wondering just what the Leave voters in places like Sunderland make of the profiteering leading figures on their side… For example, Jacob Rees-Mogg (who has made an estimated £7m since the Brexit vote) and Crispin Odey (who made £220m). Also, the patriotic Mogg man’s firm has invested not in the UK, or even Somerset, but in China and Russia. You “get your country back”, but instead empower a new super-rich elite just as deeply embroiled in global capitalism; but who aim to gain from the economic recession of No Deal and avoid tougher new EU rules on Tax Avoidance that are due to come into effect shortly. Jacob has taken his lead from his father, former BBC Governor and Times editor William, who advocated a game-playing approach to “disaster capitalism” (see Andy Beckett’s article here).

To widen the picture… Observe: Farage, live on the BBC yesterday, claiming he would try and sabotage an extension to Article 50 through his connections in Italy. Apprehend: our favourite person with a “de Pfeffel” middle name trivialising child abuse, and proving unable to see the irony concerning a certain colossal amount of public money poured in the Thames over a farcical bridge project in a certain mayoral tenure. These really are tawdry, entirely self-interested people who simply cannot be trusted with power. They are not cavaliers at all, or Brexiteers – as there is no unity behind a specific cause.

See: Liam Fox, who has “rolled over” trade deals with around 9 out of 69 countries we currently benefit from via our EU membership. If so, it will take us until 2033 before he is finished! And my rough calculation doesn’t take into account that the hardest deals – i.e. with bigger world powers – are yet to do. Move to a different part of the superstructure: the media! Gather: Julia Hartley-Brewer, who constantly harks back to the supposed folk wisdom of one 2016 vote and who refuses to stare 2019 reality in the face.

To paraphrase both The Doctor and Special Agent Dale Cooper: “WHAT YEAR IS THIS?”

It comes to something when Hammond and even Gove are made to seem as beacons of probity, in comparison. Architects of much austerity are able to assume a mantle of “reasonableness” due to the nature of their avaricious opponents on the “Brexit Right”, who have notably walked away from responsibility. Seems we could now be sucked into another, debased, poisonous referendum (though, admittedly, it would be better if a choice between the Deal and Remain, as thus less abstract and more concrete; no scope to allow people to imagine their many Brexit panaceas).

The lie of a Hard Brexit posits exchanging EU membership with a say, for pipe dreams of the Commonwealth, with probably less say. The Commonwealth is far less populous than the EU, has no political organisation behind it and which we were proportionately trading much less with by the 1960s anyway. Imports from the commonwealth dipped from 38% of our total imports in 1948 to 20% in 1972; over the same period, exports fell from 38% to 20.5% Brexiters elide the likely necessity of the British in a ‘No Deal’ situation having to beg ‘charity’ from the trustworthy, outwards-looking Groper in Chief of the USA… The latest disgrace is that these pipe dreams seem to be fusing with Troubles nostalgia, see Johnny Mercer MP’s comments on an ex-British soldier being tried for alleged crimes during Bloody Sunday in 1972: “one soldier too many”, implying none should ever be legally held to account.

It really does seem pointless to go ahead with Brexit. Democracy is a changing process, not a faith with landmarks set in stone. However, considering current political economy and how the cards are stacked, a Norway option would be the most sensible and is a genuine compromise. I’m unsure we actually deserve it though. It’s hard to maintain enthusiasm in one’s country when so often the level of debate (at least online) is: “Brexshit”, “Remoaner”, “we won, you lost, get over it!” and our favourite, currently, “Why don’t we just leave?!”

Now, that delight, a second referendum. A 5-page questionnaire with ranked options and attached supplementary reading matter would be apter for this issue than an insultingly simple binary. If we do get the likelier, self-harm avoiding outcome of a Deal versus Remain, the ERG will try to claim betrayal. With some gall, considering the utter lack of ideas and plans they have had – and their selective blindness to the United Kingdom’s constituent nations, Northern Ireland and Scotland. These ‘researchers” incompetence has led to a scenario whereby we have seen IRA mail bombs to London and Glasgow, in 2019.

If we have to have another referendum (not generally a good way of doing things; imagine if we’d taken this approach in the 1960s to abortion, capital punishment and the decriminalisation of homosexuality?), then instead of Osborne, Cameron, Mandelson, what about getting Caroline Lucas, Patrick Stewart and Neville Southall to front it? The decent MP, the captain and the keeper! With some more adept political operators from the left and centre running the campaign than, gulp, the mighty Will Straw.

Much national humiliation – and worse, danger to security and life – might have been avoided had the Tory government (and Labour too) backed the SNP’s late 2016 plan: for Brexit, but with single market and customs union membership. But maybe a bit of humiliation is due, given so many politicians and voters still have an inflated idea of our world status. No one has learned the lessons from Eden, Blair or indeed remembered why we asked to join so many times in the first place.

Last night was what seemed like Part 13,377 of an absurdist morality play-turned-soap opera, with John Bercow out-Blesseding Brian Blessed (or is that Henry Irving?) and a “HOUSE OF FOOLS” (Daily Mail front page) only narrowing rejecting a seismic, UK threatening historical change. A government whipping against its own motion, which had been given ballast by Hammond and Gove’s dire forecasts for the future. A Gove now happy to assume the “expert” mantle, perhaps not appreciating the lessons of the old ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf’ fable. Government ministers abstaining on a matter of vital national importance. Historically, this will likely rival the Suez Crisis; we can only hope that it will involve less needless loss of life.

Introduction

I was going to write a lengthier introduction to this new blog, but the events of Friday 15 March 2019 bring perspective. I am a May, living in May’s Britain and this blog will be my story of living in these absurdist, sadly too dark-absurdist, times.

We have seen a neo-Nazi murder of 49 people in New Zealand. We also saw climate protests from pupils and students from schools in 123 countries, overshadowed by the grim events in Christchurch.

We have a choice between a culture of common, civilised humanity or a barbarism based on racial scapegoating. For too long, media outlets in the USA, Australia and the UK, among others – many owned by one privileged white man – have with their rhetoric created a climate of opinion that does not explicitly endorse but certainly does provides fertile soil for a far-right culture to grow and advance.

Enough of us chose the right path in the 1930s, and again in the 1970s with the emergence of Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League. We know which future to choose.