Proper Gander: Lights . . . Camera . . . Political Action? (2024)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The response to Mr Bates vs The Post Office was a surprise reminder that TV programmes can still have an impact, even with so much else on our screens competing for our attention. The four-part series shown on ITV dramatised the campaign by ex-Post Office staff against their convictions for theft, fraud and false accounting. Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of sub-postmasters were prosecuted, with thousands more suspected of fiddling their accounts. Consequently, many lost their homes as well as their jobs, fell into debt and some ended their own lives because of the pressure. Their convictions were based on discrepancies and shortfalls recorded on their Post Office branch’s accounting software, Horizon. When some sub-postmasters realised there was a pattern of innocent people being convicted, they grouped together and formed The Justice For Sub-postmasters Alliance to co-ordinate their campaign. In 2019, England’s High Court ruled that the Horizon system was faulty, acknowledging the real source of the accounting discrepancies. So far, only 93 sub-postmasters have had their convictions overturned. In 2020 the government established a public inquiry which was ongoing while Mr Bates vs The Post Office was being broadcast.

Toby Jones portrays Alan Bates, who founded the campaign group and persistently worked to persuade lawyers and MPs that the convictions were unjust. The story is one of ‘skint, little people’ as Alan says, who found themselves victimised by the rules, procedures and economic prerogatives of powerful institutions, and who are fighting back. The Post Office is represented and defended by then-Chief Executive Paula Vennells and Head of Partnerships Angela van den Bogerd, both played as shifty and conspiratorial. The IT company behind Horizon, Fujitsu, is depicted as a cold, shadowy institution, but perhaps with less emphasis than might be expected. While the drama ends with a call for the government to take more responsibility, it puts Conservatives such as James Arbuthnot and Nadhim Zahawi (who appears as himself) in a very good light. Blame is placed on the Post Office rather than the economic and legal framework which allowed for the whole situation.

While Mr Bates vs The Post Office has raised awareness of the scandal beyond its 10 million viewers, it has been reported extensively before. Problems with the Horizon system were first highlighted in 2009 by Computer Weekly magazine, which has since published hundreds more articles, alongside investigations by Private Eye, Panorama (see Proper Gander June 2022) and journalist Nick Wallis, whose 2021 book The Great Post Office Scandal was serialised in the Daily Mail. The issue has been in the background for years, but Mr Bates vs The Post Office has managed to give it unprecedented attention. After its episodes were first screened in early January, a different angle on the topic was reported on news media each day: the way that suspects were interrogated, the millions paid to Fujitsu, the petition to strip Paula Vennells of her CBE, new legislation to quash the convictions, and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak supporting a knighthood for Alan Bates.

Why has it taken Mr Bates vs The Post Office, rather than any of the previous exposés, to galvanise this action? As Marshall McLuhan said, ‘the medium is the message’, and the docudrama format of Mr Bates vs The Post Office enables it to have more of an impact than a straightforward documentary or written article. All these formats are interpretations of research into what happened, with the difference between them being in how this research is presented. In re-enacting what happened, a docudrama can employ the techniques used in filmed drama to engage the viewer. Dialogue is carefully chosen by the writer and rehearsed by the actor, often working with the real people being portrayed. Scenes are lit, filmed, scored and edited in ways intended to draw in the viewer to how the producers want the story to be told. When this is done proficiently, the re-creation of an event can have more of an emotional impact than being told about those events or even watching real footage. This gives docudramas an advantage in making the viewer feel emotionally invested in an issue, which is needed to fuel any political action. Only knowing that something is wrong or needs changing isn’t enough.

Previous docudramas have succeeded in shaping prevailing attitudes to events. The most well-known remains 1966’s Cathy Come Home, which showed a family becoming homeless and then being further persecuted by the state machinery and lack of adequate support services. The script was based on thorough research and largely filmed on location (a rarity at the time) with hand-held cameras and improvisation, giving additional authenticity. While Cathy Come Home drew attention to homelessness and led to the formation of the charity Crisis, the only reform to legislation it prompted was to allow husbands to stay with their wives and children in homeless hostels. As for wider change, director Ken Loach said that the film hasn’t achieved this: ‘it all gets smothered in this bear-hug of approbation, so that the energy of it is dissipated’ (tinyurl.com/3uasacat). A docudrama which had a particular impact on policy was The Day After, broadcast in America during 1983. This prediction of what a third world war would be like convinced then-president Ronald Reagan to pull back on nuclear proliferation. Hillsborough, shown on ITV in 1996, took a different approach to these by portraying real people, as does Mr Bates vs The Post Office. Hillsborough dramatised the campaign by the families of those who died during the Sheffield Wednesday football disaster to overturn the official verdicts of accidental death. When the deaths were instead ruled unlawful in 2016, MP Steve Rotheram stated the docudrama was ‘massively influential’ in the outcome (tinyurl.com/yeyucap4).

The momentum generated for a couple of weeks in January by Mr Bates vs The Post Office looks like it will speed up a resolution for the sub-postmasters which will hopefully improve their situations. However, the government’s apparent enthusiasm for the convictions to be overturned is perhaps due more to them wanting to attract support in a general election year than to them being concerned that the campaign will develop further if they don’t take action. Still, Mr Bates vs The Post Office has reminded us that TV has some strength, especially in the format of a docudrama, and the programme also optimistically shows how people driven by a common cause can self-organise and co-operate.

Mike Foster

Blogger's Note:

Correction from the March 2024 Socialist Standard

February's Proper Gander (print version) stated that Shelter was founded as a result of Cathy Come Home. The programme in fact inspired the creation of the charity Crisis. Apologies.

Proper Gander: Hack To The Future (2022)

The Proper Gander Column from the August 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

A thread which runs through the work of film-maker Peter Kosminsky is exploring how people relate to ideologies which defend power structures. For example, his 2017 drama The State described the journeys of extremist British Muslims joining ‘Islamic State’ in Syria, while his latest series The Undeclared War (Channel 4) takes a different angle by examining how cyber-warfare is used to drive political agendas.

The drama is a high-tech take on the Cold War thriller genre, set in 2024 when a cyber-war between the UK and Russian governments is escalating. The lead character is Saara, a student on work experience at GCHQ who discovers what her colleagues miss when fighting on the cyber-front against the Russian state’s hackers and opinion-makers. Much of the plot relies on characters staring at rows of code on computer screens, which is livened up by being represented as Saara searching through dreamlike tunnels and rooms. Otherwise, the script goes for verisimilitude, unusually referring to many real organisations, not only GCHQ and its Russian counterpart the Federal Security Service (FSB), but also the BBC, Twitter, BT’s Openreach, Swift and the main political parties.

It’s one of those dramas set in under-lit rooms with tense conversations underlined by sombre music, but it’s convincingly acted, carefully structured and grounded in research into cyber-warfare. The fictionalised activities of GCHQ, the FSB and their associates are based on what’s been reported in the real world, and given some dramatic licence by the near-future setting. While The Undeclared War’s plot is driven by hacks and counter-hacks into the Russian and British state’s infrastructure, along the way we see strategies used by Russia’s authorities which aim to mould people’s views and behaviour. The result is an uneasy reminder that events and how they are reported can be manipulated to suit the narrative of power-hungry states. Ironically, this feeling of doubt about what’s real is mentioned in the drama as part of what the Russian government wants to encourage.

With social media being a conduit for many people’s interpretations of events, it’s also an opportunity to shape perceptions. Two of the drama’s main characters meet when working at the Glavset ‘troll farm’ in Russia, sending at least 80 tweets a day, chipping in to chats about British politics to stir up trouble. These places do exist, and not just in Russia. In 2017, Freedom House (a think tank funded by the US government) found that 30 states worldwide hired people to ‘spread government views, drive particular agendas, and counter government critics’ on social media (tinyurl.com/4tdsevez). As anyone who uses Twitter will recognise, its discussions can be easily derailed by crass or provocative comments of the kind knowingly spread by troll farms.

How television is used to push a particular agenda is shown in the drama through the activities of Russia Global News (RGN), with a studio in London and reporters in the open. This isn’t a real TV channel, and if it were, it wouldn’t be allowed to operate in that way during a cyber-war, given that its closest real-life counterpart, RT UK, had its licence withdrawn by Ofcom following the invasion of Ukraine. One of RGN’s staff makes the fair point that criticisms that it’s a ‘propaganda mouthpiece’ are hypocritical when they come from journalists told what to say by the media corporations which employ them. RGN’s broadcasts aren’t obviously pro-Russian, but convey their message through more devious tactics. Its back-office staff set up two bogus Facebook groups (the lefty ‘Luton For Labour’ and fascist ‘Take Back Control Of Luton’), wait for people to join and then post details of a demo at the same time and place on both groups’ pages. RGN’s reporter and camera crew turn up and record the subsequent violence when far-right numbskulls meet leftist demonstrators. This plot-point has a reportedly actual precedent. In his 2016 documentary Hypernormalisation, Adam Curtis described how pro-Russian state ‘Political Technologists’ sponsored fascist groups, anti-fascist groups and parties opposed to Putin, then let it be known that this had happened so no-one could tell how real those organisations were. As one of RGN’s staff explains, the point isn’t that their news is false, ‘the point is to get people used to the idea that everything’s a lie, that there is no truth. And once they accept that, well, biggest liar wins’.

The Undeclared War is set around a future general election, another target for the Russian state’s FSB. Databases are hacked, distorting exit poll results reported by the BBC and taking people from ethnic minorities likely to vote Labour off the electoral register. RGN reports this as pro-Tory election-rigging, and fakes footage of an ensuing riot in order to spread unrest. These scenes hopefully aren’t based on actual occurrences, although there’s evidence that the Russian state has interfered with US presidential elections and the Brexit referendum, and that the US state has a long history of intervening in other countries’ elections.

Cyber-warfare as described in The Undeclared War is as much about psychology as it is about technology. The script refers to the strategy of ‘reflexive control’: manipulating an enemy’s behaviour, in this case to promote the interests of the Russian state. This approach isn’t new, but it finds new applications as technology develops. In the drama, this is shown as attempts to influence the responses to hacks and to create interpretations through TV broadcasts and social media. The Undeclared War is set in the future, but much of what it depicts is already here.

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: Making A Drama Out Of A Crisis (2019)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

The great big mess Parliament’s made of leaving the EU wasn’t what the ‘Vote Leave’ campaign told us it would be like. If you believed the slogan on the side of that bus, it would be as simple as transferring the £350 million apparently sent to the EU each week into the NHS’s needy coffers. That particular stunt was one among many examples of how the campaign strategists tried to shape opinion in the run-up to June 2016’s referendum. The manoeuvrings of the Vote Leave campaign team were recently dramatised in Channel 4’s revealing one-off Brexit: The Uncivil War.

Vote Leave’s chief strategist, and the drama’s central character, is Dominic Cummings. His CV includes running projects to stop Britain adopting the Euro and ratifying the EU’s constitution, and being Michael Gove’s main adviser during his unpopular stint as Tory Secretary of State for Education. Despite having a key role in shaping the Leave campaign, Cummings hasn’t been widely heard of, or attracted the attention of many journalists or commentators until now. Instead, the faces of the Leave campaign have been those of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, who are hardly glowing examples of humanity. In the drama, Cummings is portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays him as the usual Cumberbatch brooding maverick-type with an annoying amount of self confidence. He stands on tables, he cycles on the pavement, and he talks in blunt, opinionated aphorisms.

His manner makes him disliked among the ranks of white-haired, old-fashioned Leave-supporting MPs, not least for his boasts about wanting the campaign to look like ‘an insurgence against the establishment’. They needn’t worry about him doing anything to really challenge the status quo, but they should have realised he’s much savvier than them about how political campaigns are run in the 21st century. So, his approach utilises the latest social media tools, with its messages carefully honed from research and data.

Cummings wants his campaign to focus on ‘cost and control’. He’s reluctant to bring immigration too much into the pitch, saying there’s no need to target people who are against immigration as they’re already likely to back leaving the EU. He also thinks that Farage’s influence will lose them support, but sidekick Matthew Elliott suggests that Farage and his ilk can do the ‘heavy lifting’ on bringing xenophobia into the debate so ‘Vote Leave’ can keep their hands clean on the issue. The drama makes much of the lightbulb moment when Cummings thinks up the slogan ‘Take Back Control’, saying it appeals to the desire to regain what’s supposedly been lost. He wants leaving the EU to be a seen as proudly returning to the correct order, rather than bumbling into the unknown, as it’s turned out to be.

Also featured in the drama is Craig Oliver (David Cameron’s Communications Director), the Remain campaign’s main strategist. He’s depicted in a more reasonable, positive way than Cummings, albeit exasperated by his own campaign’s uphill struggle. Chatting with Cummings down the pub, Oliver says his campaign has had to counter a ‘slow drip drip drip of fear and hate’ he attributes to immigration. He tells Cummings that the Leave campaign ‘feeds a toxic culture’ of mistrust, while Cummings tells Oliver that his type has dominated politics for decades, and ‘change is exciting’. In an earlier scene, Cummings had recognised that (capitalist) referenda reduce complicated issues to crude binaries and sharp divisions in opinions. He doesn’t seem to realise, though, that his approach to the campaign exacerbated this.

Both sides of the campaign are shown to have a patronising, estranged attitude towards the general public. To them, each person is just a potential vote, there to be moulded into believing enough to cast it. The campaign teams ‘segment and target’ groups of people, such as ‘Ardent Internationalists’: degree-educated, gay marriage-supporting Remainers, and ‘EU Hostiles’ who are 98 percent white and retired, each comprising 11 percent of voters. Dividing up people into groups goes much deeper and more detailed than this, though. Our online activities leave behind a wealth of information about us, and algorithms are the mysterious driving force behind how this data gets processed, correlating who we are with what we prefer. Specialist software gathers information on websites visited, or tweets retweeted, or Facebook groups joined, cross-references it with each other and builds up a vast database of who is interested in what. Millions of Facebook users had their data surreptitiously mined by the disgraced consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica, and sold on to Vote Leave. This information was then used by the campaign to target particular adverts to particular groups of people. So, anyone who clicked on a specially-designed Facebook post about Turkey, for example, would be sent the version of a Vote Leave advert which they will be most receptive to. The idea is that you’ll convince someone of something easier if you exploit its connections with something they already agree with. Barack Obama’s presidential election campaign led the way with this strategy, apparently.

Reducing people’s preferences to data is a simplistic way of relating to others, and when used to shape opinion, is manipulative and demeaning. The campaign teams are more comfortable treating the electorate as statistics than dealing with them as real people. As Brexit: The Uncivil War shows, modern political campaigning is about using the latest technology in an insidious, cynical way and glossing over complex issues. Why risk trying to change opinion through balanced, reasoned debate when you have tools like targeted adverts and a big red bus plastered with an extravagant claim?

Mike Foster

Sociology of Eighteenth Century French Drama. by G. V. Plechanov. (1928)

From the December 1928 issue of the Socialist Standard

Part 1.

Part II.
The choice of heroes from the ancient world was one of the numerous manifestations of the passion for the old, which itself was an ideological reflection of the struggle of the newly blossoming social state with feudalism. From the time of the Renaissance this love for the old civilisation passed over to the age of Louis XIV, which, as we know, has been compared to that of August. But when the bourgeoisie began to be imbued with an antithetical frame of mind, when in its heart “hatred together with a thirst for justice” began to grow, then the fascination of ancient heroes— fully shared by its educated representatives —appeared antedated, and the events of ancient history seemed to be insufficiently instructive. The hero of the bourgeois drama is “the man of the middle state,” more or less idealised by the ideology of the bourgeoisie. This characteristic case, of course, could not harm the portrayal.

Let us go further. A true creator of the bourgeois drama in France was La Chaussee. Now what do we see in his many productions. An opposition to this or other sides of aristocratic psychology, a struggle with these or other prejudices—or, if you choose, vices—of the nobility. The contemporaries valued, above all, the moral preaching these productions embodied. And from this point of view the tearful comedy was true to its origin.

It is known that the ideologists of the French bourgeoisie who aimed to give its portrayal in their dramatic productions, did not display much originality. The bourgeois drama was not created by them, but was carried over to France from England. In England this kind of dramatic production sprang up at the end of the seventeenth century as a reaction against the awful looseness which then predominated on the stage, and which was a reflection of the moral fall of the English aristocracy. The bourgeoisie—struggling with the aristocracy—wanted the comedy to become “worthy of the Christians,” and began to preach in it the mores of its class. The French literary innovators of the eighteenth century, borrowing extensively from English literature everything which corresponded to the conditions and feelings of the French bourgeoisie, carried to France this characteristic of the English tearful comedy. The French bourgeois drama, no less than the English, preaches the virtues of the bourgeois family. This is one of the secrets of its success. At first glance, it seems entirely inconceivable that the French bourgeois drama, which, around the middle of the eighteenth century, appeared to be an established literary production, fell to the background even before the classic tragedy, which, from all logic, should have receded before the bourgeois tragedy.

We shall shortly see how this strange circumstance is explained, but, before, let us say this;

Diderot, who, thanks to his passionate desire for innovation, could not but be attracted to the bourgeois drama, and who, as we know, participated in the new literary field (recall his Le fils naturalle in 1757, and his La pere de famille in 1758) demanded that the stage give a representation, not of a character, but of a condition—particularly a social condition. He was replied to in the following manner: Social conditions do not define a person.  "What is,” he was asked, “a judge in himself (le jugen soi)? What is a merchant in himself (le negociant eti soi)?" But here was a wide misunderstanding. Diderot talked not about the merchant en soi, but about the merchant of that time, and especially about the judge of that period. And that judges gave much of instructive material for very realistic scenic representation is best seen in the famous comedy, Le marriage de Figaro. Diderot’s demand was only a literary reflection of the revolutionary aims of the French “middle state” of that era.

(To be continued.)

Part II continued.

Sociology of Eighteenth Century French Drama. by G. V. Plechanov. (1929)

From the January 1929 issue of the Socialist Standard

Part II

Part II—continued

A child of the aristocracy, the classic tragedy, unlimitedly and indisputably reigned on the French stage while the aristocracy predominated socially in the bounds assigned by the constitutional monarchy, which itself was a historic result of the lasting and embittered struggle of classes in France. When the supreme position of the aristocracy began to be a subject of dispute, when people of “the middle state” were possessed of a rebellious frame of mind, the extant literary conceptions began to appear to these people unsatisfactory, and the old theatre not instructive, enough. And then, simultaneous with the gradual fall of the classic tragedy, the bourgeois drama made itself evident. In the bourgeois drama the French “man of middle state" set his family virtues against the deeply-spoiled aristocracy. But that social contradiction, which France then had to solve, could not be decided by the aid of moral preaching. The subject was then not about the removal of aristocratic vices, but the removal of the aristocracy itself. It is understood that this could not come to pass without embittered struggle, and it is not less clear that the father of the family, in all fervent esteem of his bourgeois morality, could not serve as the model of an untiring and intrepid martyr. The literary portrayal of the bourgeoisie did not inspire heroism. And yet the opponents of the old order felt the need of heroism, were conscious of the necessity of the development of civic virtues in the Third Estate. Where was it possible, then, to find models of such virtue? There — where they searched before for standards of literary taste : in the ancient world.

So again the reversion to heroes of the old civilisations. Now the opponent of the aristocracy says no more — like Beaumarchais—“Of what concern to me, a citizen of a monarchical state of the eighteenth century, are the events of Athens and Rome?” Now the Athenian and Roman events re-awakened in the public the liveliest interest. But this interest took on another character.

If the young ideologists of the bourgeoisie were interested now in sacrificing a young princess of Aulis, they were interested in it mainly as a source of material for revealing superstition; if their attention could be attracted by the “death of some Pelopennesian tyrant,” then this attraction was due, not so much to its psychologic as its political side. Nor were they attracted by the monarchical age of August, but by the republican heroes of Plutarch. Plutarch became the text-book of the young bourgeois ideologists, as the memoirs of Mme. Rolland show. And this love for the republican heroes once more revived an interest in ancient life. Imitation of antiquity became the fashion, and it put a deep imprint upon all French art of the time. We shall note that, in addition, this same imitation weakened the interest in the bourgeois drama, because of the prosaicness of its substance, and for a long time delayed the death of the classic tragedy.

Historians of French literature frequently have asked themselves in surprise: what is the explanation of the fact that the plotters and workers of the great French Revolution remained conservatives in the domain of literature? And why did classicism fall only a long time after the fall of the old order? But in reality the literary conservatism of the innovators of that time was only external. If tragedy did not change as a form, then it suffered a necessary change in the matter of content.

Let us take Spartacus, the tragedy of Sorraine, which appeared in 1760. Its hero, Spartacus, is full of yearning for freedom. For the sake of his great idea he even refuses to marry the girl he loves, and all through the play he continues to talk about freedom and humanity. In order to write such tragedies and praise them, it was absolutely essential that one be not a literary conservative. An entirely new and revolutionary substance was poured into the old literary leather flasks.

Tragedies like those of Sorraine and Lemverre exemplify one of the most revolutionary demands of the literary innovator Diderot: they depict, not characters, but social conditions, and especially the revolutionary social tendencies of the time. And if this new wine was poured into old leather flasks, then it is to be explained by the fact that these leather flasks were overshadowed by the same antiquity, the general love for which was one of the most significant, most characteristic symptoms of the new social mood. Side by side with the diverse types of the classic tragedy, according to Beaumarchais, the bourgeois drama could not but seem too poor, too insipid, too conservative in its content.

The bourgeois drama was brought to life by the opposite attitude of the French bourgeoisie, and no longer was suitable for the expression of its revolutionary inclination. The literary portrayal accurately defined the transition of the bourgeois; therefore the characterisations ceased being interesting when the bourgeoisie’ lost these features and when these features ceased to seem pleasant.

The classic tragedy existed close to the time when the French bourgeoisie finally triumphed over the defenders of the new order, and when the love for the republican heroes of antiquity lost all social significance for the bourgeoisie. And when this time came, the bourgeois drama received new impetus, and suffered some necessary changes according to the peculiarities of the new social condition, but these changes were not important nor definite enough to prevent the drama’s asserting itself on the French stage.

Even those who refused to acknowledge any consanguineous relation between the romantic drama and the bourgeois drama of the eighteenth century would have to agree that the dramatic productions of, for instance, the son of Alexandre Dumas represent the bourgeois drama of the nineteenth century.

In the productions of art and literary tastes of a given time is expressed the social psychology; and in the psychology of a society which is divided into classes much will remain vague and paradoxical to us if we continue to ignore—as the historical idealists do, despite the best intentions of the bourgeois historical scientists—the mutual relation of classes and the class struggle.

(Translated for Modern Quarterly by Bessie Peretz.)

Concluded.

Proper Gander: Guarded Bodies (2018)

The Proper Gander column from the October 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Would you like someone always by your side, there just to take out any would-be assailants or even take a bullet for you? Fortunately, most of us don’t have the kind of life where we’re likely to need this, even if we were in a position to hire someone. However, it’s different for the senior politicians who have their own personal, steely-faced minders. This is the set-up of BBC1’s blockbuster drama Bodyguard, which features Richard Madden as David Budd, the police protection officer (PPO) assigned to Julia Montague, a Tory Home Secretary.

As a bodyguard, Budd’s role is to keep his ‘principal’ safe from dangers such as assassination, theft, kidnapping, violence and harassment. There’s some tension between the two characters as Montague supported military action in the Middle East, and Budd is an ex-soldier haunted by his time fighting there. Inevitably, there’s sexual tension between them as well, although sleeping with their principal presumably isn’t in a bodyguard’s job description.

At least 10.4 million people tuned in to Bodyguard’s first episode, one of whom was Theresa May, although she reportedly switched off after 20 minutes. Writer Jed Mercury has been behind other hits such as Line Of Duty, Bodies and The Grimleys. His breakthrough came in the mid-‘90s with Cardiac Arrest, which was as much an angry polemic about working conditions in the NHS as it was a drama. He’s always thorough with his research, this time bringing in ex-bodyguards as advisers and basing much of the plot in real-life departments of London’s Metropolitan police. PPOs are part of the Met’s Royalty and Specialist Protection branch (SO1), which provides protection for the royal family, some government officials and visiting heads of state. The police force as a whole is there to defend the status quo, which this department does in a more literal way than most. The Counter Terrorism Command (SO15) works to detect, investigate and prevent terrorist attacks and networks, which in the drama has a fraught relationship with MI5 in uncovering who’s behind the threats.

The culture of the police and politics is depicted as starchy and clinical, with suspicion rather than much warmth between the characters. This is ideal for a thriller, of course, but isn’t the kind of world which seems attractive to work or live in. The inner workings of government, police and security services are likely to be cold and bureaucratic, being there to prop up a divisive, restrictive system. The fact that politicians need bodyguards demonstrates how removed they are from those they are supposed to represent. The threat of attack comes from people or organisations so affected by the system that they are desperate and damaged enough to see violence as the way to respond. Although tactfully not referred to in the drama, it comes only a couple of years after the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox by a far-right loner, and the attack in Westminster by an Islamic extremist. Since then, the process for MPs wanting to make additional security arrangements has been simplified, and they have been offered training in Krav Maga, a type of unarmed combat. A wider effect of this climate is an increase in surveillance, not just of suspects but of everyone. In the drama, the Home Secretary is keen to strengthen the real-life Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which covers state powers of surveillance, from undercover officers to bugging to intercepting communications. These days, it takes just a few clicks of a mouse to uncover what anyone has put online, their whereabouts and their movements. Bodyguards are only one part of the state’s security machine.

Bodyguard has a twisty-turny plot which takes us away from what’s recognisable. But how realistic is the series’ basic set-up? In an article in the Mail on Sunday (26 August), ex-PPO to three Foreign Secretaries, Detective Constable Paul Ellis said the programme did ‘a terrific job’ in portraying a bodyguard’s role, adding ‘the relationship between a PPO and their charge, or principal, is fluid in that he or she is not actually your boss – you’re a police officer and as far as security goes, you’re the boss’. Ex-Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said as a Minister she ‘was used to the constant company of aides and officials. But what I had never experienced before was the 24-hour-a-day presence of armed police officers as one of the senior Cabinet Ministers who receive personal protection. … You could hardly make a good drama from the mundane reality of what it’s like to have personal protection. I would have liked to see them try to make a compelling television scene out of the burly protection officer having to make small talk with constituents at a coffee morning’. According to former protection officer Brian Isdale, getting involved so intimately with their principal’s life can mean bodyguards ‘start to adopt the mannerisms of those they are protecting. It’s known as ‘red carpet fever’’ (Guardian, 21 January 2011).

So, being a PPO to a politician is a peculiar relationship, both close and alienating. But then you’d have to be a bit peculiar to be a politician, or someone who would take a bullet for one.

Mike Foster

Between the Lines: A Workers' Guide to the Soaps (1987)

The Between the Lines column from the August 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Workers' Guide to the Soaps

What political function do soap operas perform under capitalism? This might look like one of those pretentious academic questions which sociologists like to make meaningless noises about, but it is in fact a question worth asking. Millions of workers watch serialised dramas known as soap operas. (The term was coined in the USA where the soap companies used to sponsor TV serials.) The top two programmes in the British TV audience ratings — before news output or variety entertainment — are soap operas: EastEnders and Coronation Street. When a star in one of these dramas marries, falls ill, has a fight at a party or dies it is national news: remember the death of Pat Phoenix, who played Elsie Tanner in Coronation Street, which made front-page headlines in the national press last year?

The simplistic answer to the question posed is that TV controllers like to entertain viewers with fascinating drama and soaps do that. If we were living in a society where making people happy — satisfying their needs — was the criterion for production, then we might find such a reason for producing soap operas plausible. But we don't and it isn't. So. why do TV companies spend vast fortunes on producing soap operas? The first social function which they perform is to reinforce a picture of 'reality' — to show a designer-created world of social reality which viewers can use as a model for 'life as it is . . . and always will be'. Soaps reflect all of the capitalist myths about human nature (a negative and unchangeable condition, of course) and the apparently inevitable ways of the world, including possessive relationships. buying and selling, employment and the rest of the anachronisms of life under the profit system. Soaps show workers that they are not alone in the madhouse of capitalism — everyone is in it and in it is the place to be.

Secondly, soaps perform a moral role of telling workers what is right (according to the ethics of the owning class) and what is wrong. Characters on soaps are shown to lose out if they do wrong and to prosper even if not at once — as a reward for good behaviour. In recent times the crude attempts at moral propaganda made by the soap producers have become more transparent than ever.

Thirdly, soaps are about continuity: because they are on regularly they offer a rhythm — presented as a natural rhythm — to life. Bombs may be exploding in Ireland, kids starving to death in Mozambique and riots going on in Leeds, but at 7.30 every Monday and Wednesday normality is resumed because the familiar theme music to Coronation Street is on the air. It used to be said that civilisation would collapse if the ravens ever flew away from the Tower of London (a more foolish example of nationalistic rubbish it would be hard to think of), but the modern equivalent is that as long as the locals in Albert Square are in their places between 7.30 and 8pm on a Tuesday and Wednesday life as we know it is still intact.

These three functions which the soaps perform are of great political importance to the capitalist system, for remember, it is a system which is wholly dependent for its power upon the unconsciousness (politically) of the working-class majority who are the consumers/victims of the soaps. It used to be the Churches which performed the role of explaining reality to workers, of laying down the moral code, and of providing a continuity and regularity to the life of the system. Now that the Churches are emptier than ever the TV screen is the new medium for such indoctrination and the soaps are an important means of achieving propaganda success. It is not being claimed that soaps are a conspiracy to make workers accept capitalism. The way that capitalism conditions its victims is more complicated and subtle than that. Regardless of how consciously the soap opera producers intend to serve the system, that is the political function which they perform.

The most crass soap opera of them all — a programme which has almost carved a reputation out of being so bloody atrocious that it is compelling viewing — is Crossroads. The acting and scripts have been the subject of many a TV critic's merciless scorn, but the programme is not just dramatically awful: it is also a political drama. For example, it has for years conveyed the message that those who own wealth (in this case, the motel) do so as a result of hard work and, above all, superior intelligence. Conversely, the workers are all somewhat affable fools, lucky to be employed at all. My favourite character in Crossroads (a programme which, like everyone else who watches it regularly or occasionally, I deny having ever seen except by pure accident) is Benny, the mentally retarded skivvy who exists to be exploited by his bosses, patronised by his workmates and periodically ridiculed by the scriptwriters who evidently believe that being mentally subnormal is a terrifically funny condition and one well worthy of a few good laughs at the unfortunate Benny. In fact, Benny represents the ideal English wage slave: thick, compliant, loyal, uncomplaining and more willing to work than a horse on hormone injections. Benny is what they want us all to be. Don't laugh at him: you might just be laughing at your own reflection in the TV screen.

EastEnders is a truly hideous soap opera. Indeed, for my money it is the worst. As a result, I do my best never to miss it. Its heavy-handed moralising is sickening; its stereotyping is offensive; its romanticised picture of life in London's East End is a complete distortion (and worse still is its distortion of the East End's past); and its manipulation of viewers' emotions by means of cheap dramatic explosions is sinister. One of very many examples of what is foul about the programme is the recent story of Arthur Fowler, the unemployed and uninspired caricature of a prole. Arthur was caught stealing the Christmas Club  money, had a thoroughly unconvincing nervous breakdown in order to physically repent for his ultimate crime of taking money which was not his, went into a psychiatric hospital and came out an 'adjusted' man. Now Arthur — sorry, Arfur — takes every day as it comes, is genuinely thrilled when he is offered occasional casual work and realises how wrong he had been to transgress the law of property and how right the state had been to send him to prison for his sin. EastEnders is a programme about sin and repentance: most characters are usually in one or the other states. In times to come it will be seen for what it is: blatant, rotten propaganda of a pernicious form. Entertaining. yes: but then, so was witch-burning, I suppose.

Brookside is by far my favourite soap. You can see it on Mondays and Tuesdays (8pm, C4) or on Saturdays (5pm, C4). Like all soaps, you need to watch it for a few weeks before you will get into it, and my recommendation is that it is worth the time investment to do so because Brookside is probably the best TV drama available at the moment. It is clearly an anti-establishment soap and its depiction of life under capitalism is head and shoulders above the other soaps. But it too is a highly moralistic programme, setting out sometimes all too transparently to radicalise the viewer. Indeed, it is perhaps by watching TV manipulation being well executed in a programme like Brookside (where the temptation is to see the manipulation as an edifying process) that one can see much more clearly how the same techniques, but for different ends, are used in the other soaps.

Will there be soap operas in a socialist society? Who can tell? It is not for a small minority of socialists in 1987 to lay down a blueprint for how the socialist majority will decide to live. But the functions which soaps now perform will not be needed in a social system which has overcome the intense alienation of capitalism. Moralising drama will not be required in a society without leaders or led. The problems which occupy the minds of most of the characters in most of the soaps most of the time will simply not exist in a socialist society. That's my view anyway — and in the absence of letters from readers expressing your views mine is the only view you're going to get.

Steve Coleman

Your letters about TV programmes which you have liked or disliked and think worthy of comment from a political angle, or your comments on points made in Between the Lines should be sent to The Socialist Standard and will be considered for publication.

Proper Gander: Whatever Happened To Political Drama? (2016)

The Proper Gander column from the April 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

The phrase ‘cops ‘n’ frocks’ has been used to sum up the current state of British TV drama, with its lazy reliance on crime (Happy Valley, Silent Witness etc.) and the past (Call The Midwife, Downton Abbey). The range of dramas has narrowed considerably from previous decades, and the idea of televised drama being used to voice radical political ideas or critique social trends is sadly now more old-fashioned than a cathode ray tube.

From the 1960s, many plays found their homes in anthology series, a format which is as obsolete as political drama itself. Theatre 625 (1964–1968) featured dramatisations of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and works by George Orwell, August Strindberg and Franz Kafka. More widely remembered are The Wednesday Play (1964–1970) and its successor, Play For Today (1970–1984). Their emphasis was on original screenplays rather than adaptations, and therefore they concentrated on more immediate issues which otherwise might not have received much public attention. Around 600 plays were produced in these three BBC series, many of which were lost when their tapes were wiped in the belief that they had exhausted their economic potential. Notable productions include two plays about homelessness written by Jeremy Sandford, who slept rough as part of his research: Cathy Come Home (1966) showed a young family’s downward spiral into homelessness, while Edna The Inebriate Woman (1971) followed a woman’s life on the streets and in hostels, prison and a psychiatric hospital. The Spongers (1978) showed the devastating effects of welfare cuts on services for disabled people. The Black Stuff (1980) by Alan Bleasdale told the story of five Liverpudlian tarmac layers whose struggles with unemployment were subsequently described in its sequel series The Boys From The Blackstuff (1982).

As well as Bleasdale and Sandford, other prominent film-makers included director Ken Loach, producer Tony Garnett and writer Jim Allen. Outside the anthology strands, Loach worked with them on The Rank And File (1971), based on the Pilkington Glass strike which took place in a climate of trade union leaders being seen as too close to a government proposing laws against unofficial strikes, Days Of Hope (1975), which followed a family in the years after the First World War, and The Price Of Coal (1977) about a Yorkshire colliery community.

These plays are remembered as being ‘gritty’, focusing on hardship and aiming for realism by being filmed as if they were documentaries. However, the anthology format allowed for differing styles and messages, and even Ken Loach made an offbeat musical for The Wednesday Play. Other BBC series were thought experiments offering ‘what if…’ scenarios about possible drastic changes to society. Doomwatch (1970–1972) was set in a fictional government department which investigated threats from scientific developments, such as genetic engineering and behaviour modification. Distrust of the notion of scientific progress runs through Doomwatch like words in a stick of rock. ‘Progress’ has connotations of continual improvements, but science exists in a changing political and social context which shapes how it develops. In this series, politicians and scientists are depicted as secretive, self-serving and blinkered, suppressing awareness of unwanted side effects to further their own interests. Survivors (1975–1977) used the starting point of a pandemic wiping out most of the population to explore themes of replacing capitalist institutions, communal living and self-sufficiency. These dramas are less overtly political, perhaps because they aren’t based in real situations. The scenario described in nuclear war dramas The War Game (1965) and Threads (1984) fortunately hasn’t happened either, although these plays clearly criticised real-life government policies about preparing for and supposedly coping with armageddon.

Even children’s programmes occasionally tackled serious matters without talking down to their audience. Noah’s Castle (1980) was set in a near future where rocketing inflation leads to scarcity of basic commodities. The school-based Grange Hill (1978-2008) examined issues such as drug addiction and bullying as well as criticising the effects of funding cuts to education.

By the mid-‘80s, Grange Hill became less vocal about government education policies and Play For Today had had its day. Television drama was no longer a place to consciously voice political ideas, and instead the emphasis shifted to discussing more personal issues through soap operas such as EastEnders and Brookside. Soaps are more about juggling characters’ relationships than ideas, so the format doesn’t lend itself to exploring the impact of political and economic forces.

The mid-‘90s saw the final flowering of political TV drama. By this time, the documentary style of previous decades was going out of fashion, although the sense of anger remained. Cardiac Arrest (1994–1996) was a serial based on the experiences of writer Jed Mercurio when he worked in hospital. He describes a health service where staff have to rely on cynicism and cutting corners to cope with the hierarchies and impossible workloads. Our Friends In The North (1996) was Peter Flannery’s ‘state of the nation’ play, spanning thirty years in the lives of four people shaped by changing housing policy, police corruption and the miners’ strike. The plot of Alan Bleasdale’s GBH (1992) echoed events in the early ‘80s when Militant influenced the Labour Party and Liverpool city council. The other political dramas of the 1990s also had their roots in previous decades; Tony Garnett was an executive producer of Cardiac Arrest, and attempts to bring Our Friends In The North to the screen began since it was performed as a stage play in 1982.

All these plays passionately examine how people with little power or influence react to wider economic and political forces. They tend to be from a left-wing, rather than a revolutionary viewpoint, but still present experiences and situations from which we can draw our own conclusions. Why is television no longer an outlet for this kind of expression? These days, the BBC doesn’t want to alienate the government in case this leads to further funding cuts. It places more weight than it used to on its supposed ‘impartiality’. Any programme which presents a different viewpoint to acceptance of the status quo would be seen as ‘partial’, and therefore would not be produced. Even documentaries which expose injustices and corruption presuppose that the basic set-up of society is sound. This doesn’t mean that successors of Loach, Garnett, Allen and the others are clamouring to make political dramas and getting knocked back by conservative TV executives. What few successors they have probably realise that it’s not even worth trying.

Mike Foster

The Eileen Critchley Show (1991)

It turns out that Channel 4 is currently repeating Alan Bleasdale's drama GBH on its More4 channel. Best known for his earlier TV drama Boys From The Blackstuff, which by common consent is considered one of the most important and best loved dramas in the history of British television, Bleasdale was lauded and condemned in equal measure for GBH because so many people thought it was little more than a knockabout attack on the local politics of his hometown, Liverpool, and the then Militant Tendency's domination of its Labour council. Reproduced below is a review of the drama that appeared in the Socialist Standard at the time of its original showing, which delves deeper and goes beyond the notion that Bleasdale was doing little more than writing ten hours of television drama so that he could stick the metaphorical boot into Derek Hatton.

The Off the Telly website carries an interesting article on GBH, as part of a series of articles on Bleasdale and his work.

TV Review From The August 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Channel Four hyped it relentlessly as a Great Drama of our times. Militant renamed it BGH: Bleasdale Gets Hatton. Hatton himself went on Channel Four's Right To Reply to say that Michael Murray must have been based on him because the fictional character was a bullying, corrupt council leader. The Right wing objected because the series portrayed MI5 as being a shower of devious criminals - heaven forbid the thought. The SWP, who rarely comprehend anything that was not written by a dead Russian, denounced Bleasdale as a brown-nose who sold out to the ruling class. GBH (C4, Wednesdays and Sundays) seems to have upset them all. So does all great drama.

What was GBH about? Taken literally, it was implausible nonsense. Whole cities are not thrown into chaos by half a dozen or so Equity ruffians; Good and Evil rarely take on such vivid personal realisations as Murray and Nelson; even corrupt Labour leaders have more political know-how than Murray was shown as having. As fictional political history the series was drivel. Sadly, it is as fictional political history (FPH) that most lefties watched it and switched off in disgust. GBH was about power. It was about why people lust for political leadership, what they do with it, and how, after all the panting after it and delusion of luxuriating in it, most politicians come to discover that they do not really have it. Politicians are tools of power. The French professor, Maximilien Rubel, once wrote a letter to the Socialist Standard saying that the people who are our rulers are paranoid megalamaniacs who cannot be trusted. Maybe so, maybe not - certainly, even the most balanced of leaders must act like a madman if they are to dance to the cacophony of the profit system. Michael Murray, abused and beaten by power, became a political abuser and beater. It was the only way he knew. The political was personal. The brilliance of Bleasdale's writing was that Murray, the hateful petty tyrant, was so much more than that. He was more even than a comical, power-hungry stooge; a modern Chaplinesque Great Dictator. Murray was a man with whom we empathised. His was a world of the used and the users; he had been used and now he tried to use others. His world was our world: the world of human exploitation on every level.

Jim Nelson, Michael Palin's romantic hero of the series, was a man afraid and therefore strong because he understood - or began to do so - his fear. He spoke more than once of how in our society the poison is seeping down. The poison in question is the poison of power-madness and obsessive exploitation. The simplification that evil emanates from Tory bastards may have satisfied simple-minded rebels a decade ago, but now it is clearer to see just how the human perversions of power-madness are coming from all directions, including those movements which pose as being for the people. In short, the fleas from the Tory dog have rubbed off on to the Labour poodles who can only fight the Tories by being like Tories. As for Militant, it is infiltrating amongst the fleas, only able to get power by being more loathsome than the rest. They are playing the same game.

The message of GBH is that if you try to beat the Devil by dressing up as Satan you end up not being able to tell who is who. Murray thought he was being manipulated by Trots when he was really being used by MI5. The only reason he couldn't tell the difference is because there wasn't any. MI5 broke Murray. Bleasdale overstated the real power of the state to intervene in electoral politics. But then this was not FPH. What he got right was the power of the decent many to resist the arrogant few. That is one of the most hopeful political lessons; it must be, for workers are the many and the force against us is the very, very few. The scene in the final episode when the "decent workers", as the caricature portrayed them, stopped the "ignorant little gobshites", as the script referred to the thuggish Trots, from dictating to the majority was an inspiring moment. At that meeting leadership collapsed and illusory power was no shield: Murray wept and the boys who had only ever read one book and knew how to shout slogans were shown that democracy is bigger than them.

But wait a minute. Where was that great scene taking place? In the Labour Party hall. What was a bloke of principle and courage doing in that old wreck of a political whore-house? Here we see Bleasdale the faithful Labourite overcoming the writer of insight. On one level GBH was a series about why Labour should expel Militant. We socialists could not care less if they expel them or sleep with them or form a coalition with the Monster Raving Loonies, but if that is the political message which was being offered to us, then when are we to see the series about hypocritical, compromising, well-bribed Labour "moderates" who do not need to be crushed by MI5 because they are safe? You do not need state conspiracies to neutralise Neil Kinnock or Tony Blair - they come ready-neutered.

GBH will be talked about for a long time to come. It should be. Both Robert Lindsay (Michael Murray) and Michael Palin (Jim Nelson) performed in ways that we will not see again soon. The wit of the writing was a model of classical characterisation and symbolic plotting. It made us think, even though we were not all thinking the same thing. GBH was about a horrible corrupt country - "a cold land" - where the opposition was dirty and the "intelligence" people filthy and all of us either in it or against it.

Steve Coleman

Further Reading:
From the January 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard
Leftist Wonderland: Militant in Liverpool