Farewell, Melyvn Barg

Over at the Guardian, Mark Lawson laments the end of Melvyn Bragg's South Bank Show. Personally, I'm overjoyed that this preening bighead is off the screens. How I wish Radio 4 would do the decent thing and put down In Our Time, his radio show in which he pretends simultaneously to be as ignorant as us and as clever as the scientists and intellectuals he has as guests. Let's leave him alone with his endless novels about clever, misunderstood northern grammar school boys coming down to Oxbridge and becoming clever, misunderstood novelists etc. etc. etc.

That said, old Melvyn's ITV show is their last figleaf against accusations that the channel is an insulting, steaming turd of naked commercialism. This decision essentially says 'we know what you're like, viewers. You're all lazy, stupid slobs who want Jade'n'Ant'n'Dec'n'policecamerapropaganda'n'nonews'n'nothingyou'renotalreadyfamiliarwith and if that's too highbrow for you, we've got ITV4 waiting, you scum.

Or, as Lawson puts it:

Twenty five years ago, ITV scheduled a two-part special about the French modernist composer Olivier Messiaen in peak-time on Good Friday. Nowadays, there would be more chance of a second coming of Christ.

Are people more stupid, less curious, less interested in the outside world? I refuse to believe it, even of my students (joke). But they are given fewer and fewer chances to develop interests outside the dullard mainstream. Schools and universities can't, because they've got targets to meet. The WEA and their ilk are all but dead. 'High' culture is expensive, and TV executives have decided that cheap TV is 'what the people want' - so that's what we're getting. The future is Davina, stamping on your face, over and over and over and over.

'ello 'ello 'ello

Last night I watched ITV! Worse than that, I watched In the Line of Fire, a fly-on-the-wall 'documentary' about CO19, the Metropolitan Police's armed squad. It was clearly part of the coppers' post-Menezes PR push, so I was curious to see how they'd deal with that episode. In the end, it was handled with kid gloves - the critical comments weren't presented by the narrator but relegated to clips from news broadcasts and pictures of newspaper hoardings - as though the narrator couldn't bring himself to utter any criticism of the police. The head of CO19 was filmed giving his position without any questions - so there was no chance to challenge him. No mention at all was made of the jury's decision to disbelieve key police claims about the circumstances of the shooting. 

The effect, therefore, was to remove any credibility: this wasn't a documentary, it was a hagiography, shading into propaganda. No doubt the circumstances of gaining access to the squad implicitly required a positive spin, but the whole exercise smacks of a concerted public relations exercise on behalf of the police, and of spineless, lazy TV programming by a media which is becoming increasingly rightwing. I was quite amused to see India 99 appear on the show - it's the police helicopter which has its own show, Sky Cops on the BBC. That's a postmodern moment. Will the In The Line Of Fire incident appear in the next series of the Jamie Theakston-narrated show? Are there any police cars without a TV crew? 

I do think that this mindless deification of the police across all channels for the sake of exciting pictures of 'goodies' v. 'baddies' is dangerous. There's never any questioning of policing methods (why are they all in cars?) Aren't they ever wrong? If anyone remembers the Guildford 4, Birmingham 6, West Midlands Serious Crime Squad, Miners' Strike or any of the peace, poll tax, anti-capitalism, anti-war or anti-racism protests, you'll know that policing is (and always has been) far more nuanced. More than that, these shows promulgate the idea that crime is a matter of 'good' working class people protecting 'us' from 'bad' working class people - devoid of social context. I don't remember any shows following the activities of the Serious Fraud Office or any of the other operations going after white-collar crime - though perhaps that's because such operations are usually failures. It's far easier to pretend that crime is all about drunk black teenagers nicking cars and claiming too much child support rather than bankers defrauding us all of billions of pounds.