Twenty-twenty Vision (2000)

TV Review from the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

The turn of the millennium is a time for thinking of the future and starting anew, but it is also an opportunity to reflect on the past and to learn from it. With the male propensity for compiling lists so prevalent among reviewers of late, why shouldn’t the Socialist Standard get in on the act? If any group of people have clear ideas why the past was unsatisfactory and how the future could be a whole load better it is socialists. So here we go with twenty TV nightmares of the past balanced by twenty TV wishes for the future:

We should have pulled the plug on . . .

• News reports that refer to any given dictatorship across the globe as “Marxist”.
• Programmes intent on uniting Tony Blair with a comfy chair and a pair of sycophantic interviewers before mealtime.
• Channel Five’s sickeningly nationalistic coverage of England matches.
• The Price is Right.
• The aliens with overly-large foreheads constantly on Sky One.
• Brookside, about three years ago, Neighbours at least ten years ago and EastEnders after the very first filming session.
• Every US kids cartoon since the Hair Bear Bunch.
• The exponential growth (in both width and coverage) of overly matey TV chefs.
• Bellicose, belligerent and biased war reporting (all channels, every year).
• Judith Chalmers.
• Solemn and revered historians on BBC2 (solemnly received by us and greatly revered by themselves).
• Kids TV presenters who invite us to “check it out” with our “posse” if we are “in the area”, the area in question being the King’s Road or Camden Lock, not Brixton, Toxteth, Moss Side or Harlem.
• Royal correspondents.
• Gordon Brown’s sinister attempts at smiling to camera.
• The incisive, penetrating and totally unscripted interviewing of Des O’Connor.
• Anything involving Jeremy Clarkson and subliminal erotic fantasies about fast cars and motorbikes.
• Songs of Praise.
• The ‘devil-may-care’ and ever-so-wacky participants of Extreme Sports.
• Interviews with Barbara Cartland (the contrast button on my TV set is worn down).
• The Money Programme (natch).

The above choice is a personal one so please remember that any offence caused is purely intentional.

We should plug into . . .

• The abolition of the TV license, “pay-per-view” and all monetary payments for TV subscriptions. Free access to the airwaves!
• The Royal Family, the moving tale of a dysfunctional extended family getting to grips with life in a classless society without butlers, palaces or command performances.
• Community-controlled television rather than multinational pap and brainwashing.
• The Antiques Roadshow, without the blue-rinse money grabbers feigning interest in everything but the long-awaited valuation.
• The disappearance of all Party Political Broadcasts in a society where there are no longer any political parties.
• Men Behaving Badly, to remind ourselves of how desperate we were in capitalism to laugh at something – indeed, anything.
• Direct democracy via television and the internet.
• The accurate dissemination of information rather than the sustained idiocies of modern advertising.
• Blue Peter without charitable endeavours and coke-head presenters.
• Television for children which isn’t dominated by violence and gang warfare.
• News broadcasting shorn of its class content, political bias and servitude to the market.
• Re-runs of The Prisoner, so we can remember what life became like in capitalism.
• Re-runs of the Queen’s Speech during Comedy Hour.
• People playing sport for fun and entertainment, not money.
• The Bill, without being able to comprehend any of it anymore.
• The concluding episode of EastEnders.
• What the Papers Say without the Daily Mail.
• Casualty without a crisis (admittedly, this might be stretching it a bit).
• The final edition of the Jerry Springer Show, where Jerry is outed as a transsexual bigamist who has been cheating on his sister’s pet Alsatian.
• Wish You Were Here, and really think that for once we might be.

Dave Perrin

All Our Yesterdays (1999)

TV Review from the June 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rumour has it that Esther Rantzen is the most objectionable person to work for in the entire BBC. This may well be true, though the competition is likely to be great. Far less of a challenge to her dubious talents are the current talk show programmes competing with her BBC2 offering, Esther. They are, without exception, uniformly miserable. There are now so many of them, and so narrow predictable are the subjects they typically address, that they have reached a point of market saturation. It is entirely possible they are in the process of disappearing up their own sphincter, and that won’t be a bad thing.

Most of the competition for the dreary British offerings from Esther, Kilroy and Vanessa Feltz et al comes from the United States, the country which pioneered this particular form of televisual flatulence. The one programme of this type which is unparalleled in its venality is the Jerry Springer Show. This is a show which makes a virtue out of insulting the intelligence of its audience, serving up supposedly real-life but nevertheless half-baked social traumas which are played out for the cameras by people who are for the most part third-rate actors and actresses. The plot—and it is a plot of sorts—usually revolves around a particular individual who has “cheated” on their lover. Of course, you just know when it starts that the featured woman’s lover is really going to be her brother, and that he has come on the show to say that he has caught a terrible sexually transmitted disease from next door’s alsatian and therefore can’t provide her with children. Not that this will matter as she herself has gone on the show to reveal that she’s about to elope with the entire Harlem Globetrotters who then come on stage for the big fight finale. To get a real handle on this, think of ITV’s Saturday afternoon World of Sport wrestling from the 1970s, minus Reg Gutteridge and half-decent acting.

With competition of this calibre even Esther Rantzen could put together something which seems almost convincing. And one tea-time in the middle of May she actually did!

Goodnight sweethearts 

Esther’s programme on this occasion centred on a young couple who have decided that they have had enough of the 1990s. In many respects, this is a quite understandable sentiment—indeed, after seeing the Jerry Springer Show, an entirely rational one too. But it was their response to their negative views about modern living which set them apart. This couple made for entertaining television because their solution to their unhappy situation was to go back in time. To be more precise, to act, dress, eat and behave generally as if they were living in the 1940s. They eschewed television, refused to use modern electronic devices such as computers and washing machines, wore clothes straight out of Goodnight Sweetheart, drank cocoa and brown ale and ate powdered egg. Of course, some compromises had to be made with the outside world of the near-21st century, but they attempted to keep these to a minimum.

Rarely can a couple of guests have captivated the interest of a studio audience so completely. One audience member who was beside himself at the thought of a couple of thirty-somethings wanting to live life like the 1940s was Gyles Brandreth. That they refused to acknowledge the wonders of late twentieth-century capitalism was incomprehensible to him. Indeed, he claimed—as did one or two other guests—that they may have mental problems. Now Brandreth, whose main contribution to the progress of humanity was securing the record for the longest after-dinner speech ever made, and whose other newsworthy trait is his status as a failed Tory MP so fanciful and lightweight no-one ever thought it worthwhile bribing him, was on a sticky wicket here. And the reasons the 1940s couple gave for choosing the lifestyle they’d adopted didn’t sound nearly as ridiculous as Brandreth in any case, even on one of his better days. A more relaxed pace of life, a greater community spirit, higher levels of trust and lower crime—all the things modern capitalist society isn’t and can never be.

The problem with their approach of course—as they recognised as well as anyone—is that no-one is an island and it is impossible to escape the “modern world” in its entirety (though perhaps they should also have been more cognisant of the fact that Britain in the 1940s wasn’t quite they idyll they perhaps pictured it to be). There can be no escaping the modern market economy as it relentlessly devours all before it in the name of “globalisation”. The real tragedy of this situation was that this was an intelligent young couple, recognising the very real nightmare represented by today’s market madness, but content to look backwards towards an imagined past instead of committing themselves towards creating a more humane future. Misguided they may certainly be, but mad? Probably no more so then the members of the studio audience who giggled nervously at them. And as any amateur philosopher knows, isn’t insanity nothing more that a sane reaction to an insane world in any case?

Dave Perrin

Living in a Free Society – a recent experience (1999)

From the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following is offered without comment. It tries as honestly and comprehensively as possible to offer an objective account of the events surrounding an invitation to appear on a television discussion programme earlier this year.

A couple of months ago I was invited to take part as a representative of the Socialist Party in a Kilroy programme about Jack Straw’s “three strikes and you’re out” policy for burglars.

Two days before the programme was due to be recorded I was telephoned by a research assistant who wanted to know what kind of thing I would like to say. I offered two thoughts. One, a tactical objection to dispensing with juries, and thus with the whole idea of tying justice to particular circumstances—not least the personal circumstances of the criminal. And two, an objection to a discussion about burglary which failed to acknowledge that society was based on the legalised exploitation of one class by another.

The researcher wanted to know more about the latter point, so I offered a brief summary of the Socialist Party’s position. “Oh,” she said, “I’m not sure about that. You have to remember that our viewers are very ordinary people. I think they would find that very difficult. I certainly do.” I suggested that the ideas were not so much difficult as novel, and offered the opinion that having been invited onto the programme as a representative of the Socialist Party, I would expect to have an opportunity of putting our case. The researcher was unhappy and suggested that I come as an individual and make only the first point. I observed that I thought it ironic that the programme would be discussing the automatic imprisonment of individuals and here she was telling me that I was also to be imprisoned: I wouldn’t be allowed to say what I wanted, only what she wanted me to say. I wondered whether when members of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties were invited to appear on the programme they, too, were told that they wouldn’t be given an opportunity of putting their parties’ cases? The researcher didn’t answer, but withdrew her invitation to me to attend.

Michael Gill

Broadcasting: A Counterfeit Reality (1999)

Theatre Review from the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Talk of the City by Stephen Poliakoff. Royal Shakespeare Company at the Young Vic.

I find myself writing this review of Stephen Poliakoff’s rich and revealing play about censorship in the BBC in the years before World War II, the day after the NATO announcement that it viewed the content of Serbian television as so much propaganda. It is also only two days since a correspondent to the Guardian noted that whilst letters to the paper have been full of various opinions about the bombing of Serbia, no such differences of opinion have been evident in radio and television broadcasts. And, coincidentally, it’s a couple of months since an invitation to appear on the Kilroy programme was withdrawn because I wouldn’t express opinions in line with the wishes of the production team. All of which remind me of a couple of quotations which I noted when I was reading the Open University unit, “Science, Technology and Everyday Life, 1870-1950”, a couple of years ago:

“The so-called ‘mass media’ serve to generate consent in their audiences by representing the real world in ways which confer legitimacy on the social order in which they subsist.” “Communication is not only about who is talking to whom, and how; it is also about who is not talking to whom and why.”

Talk of the City is a zippy, immediately accessible show which is played with great exuberance and panache by a talented cast. It offers us review host, Robbie, inclined like most comedians to embroider his material in the light of his feelings and creative impulses at the time of delivery, and who is forever in trouble with those who produce his show and would have him never depart from the script; ideas man, Clive, anxious to offer listeners an account of what is happening to the Jews in Germany in 1938, contrary to the covertly anti-semitic line of many BBC managers; and a retinue of BBC officials sensitive to government policy, anxious to tow the party line, who insist on approving every last word before it is voiced over the airways.

The programme contains the complete text of the play and foreword, “Some Background Material—BBC in the Thirties”, which offers about a dozen quotations from internal memos, the BBC house magazine, ex-employees, etc. a real snip at £2.50. Two quotations give the flavour of the culture of the Corporation in the mid- to late-1930s:

“I really believe that they (BBC managers) really thought that everybody who was doing a productive job was necessarily childish and irresponsible and needed controlling” (Maurice Chapman). “I received a letter from the Northern Regional Studio, asking me if I would talk on Repertory Theatre while I was up North. I said I would. I was then informed that a copy of my talk must be in the hands of the BBC at least a fortnight before the date of broadcasting, and that I must go to the studio to rehearse. ‘Otherwise,’ I was told, ‘the project must be abandoned.’ ‘The Project,’ I replied at once, ‘is abandoned'” (JB Priestley).

Nowadays, however, censorship is managed more subtly. Recording programmes in advance and enquiring of those who plan to take part what they might wish to say, can be used to avoid “unsuitable material” being transmitted over the airways. [My own recent personal experience is instructive, and is reported elsewhere in this issue.]

Talk of the City is a splendidly lucid piece of adult theatre, but it is also arguably historically and culturally adrift. By failing to connect with today’s media and avoiding a more substantial critique of broadcasting, Poliakoff seems to be inviting audiences to see the events of the late 1930s as an unique series of events. Socialists, however, would see them as representative of the continuing control of the cultural and political agenda by agents of the capitalist class who wish, as the Open University quotation has it, “to confer legitimacy on the social order in which they exist”.

Michael Gill

Between the Lines: Fear on the Dole (1992)

The Between the Lines column from the June 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fear on the Dole

Hysteria is ever-present on The Oprah Winfrey Show. They scream about child abuse and rock stars and women who had babies without realising they were pregnant. They scream, they clap, they weep, they bawl, they sigh. Oprah Winfrey is America's therapist; her show is a condensed session of yelled collective introspection. If anyone wants to know what America is like they would do well to watch The Oprah Winfrey Show.

On 6 May (Channel Four, 5 pm) the topic was unemployment. The format was the usual mix of victims and experts—the victims weepy and public about their intimate miseries: the experts victims of their own political ignorance. The victims gave eloquent testimony to the anger and sadness of being a human statistic, cast upon the alter of profit as sacrifices of the recession. One spoke of how she would sit at home crying uncontrollably. Another spoke of his anger at feeling impotent in the face of the "The Economy". An audience member, displaying the statutory Winfreyesque flood of tears, spoke of his rage at being told that he was not wanted as a skilled worker and how unemployment had strained his marriage and forced him to seek the aid of a psychiatrist.

Oprah's experts were worse than useless. They were witch doctors, offering remedies for a disease which they did not begin to understand. A loud financial columnist spoke how the unemployed must accept in their own minds that the worst that will happen to them is a cut in their standard of living. Her message was to "be realistic" and plan for poverty. What insulting crap! Poverty of the worst kind can mean your kids dying because you can’t afford medical attention for them; it means having to eat bad junk food; it means having your home taken away; it means depression and humiliation and, sometimes, suicide. The other expert, an editor of a magazine called Psychology Today, rambled on about the need not to feel like a failure if you lose your job. But as a wage or salary slave you are a failure if you cannot sell your labour power for a wage or salary. He is right to tell the system's victims not to blame themselves. but self-respect doesn't pay the rent.

Oprah herself—who is a millionairess owner of a TV company—urged the unemployed to see the problem of losing their livelihoods as an opportunity. Her pompously stated "spiritual" philosophy is that every new problem creates a chance to move on to new life chances. The American wet dream is alive and well, as is the nightmare of despair which keeps awake millions of American workers who do not know where the money will come from to pay the bills which are the weights around our necks under capitalism. The show treated unemployment as if it was a natural catastrophe, like an earthquake or a plague. Nobody said that it was an inevitable effect of a removable cause: The Profit System. Nobody said that the way out of the rut is for workers to organise consciously and democratically to create a world where all may work and none may work for an employer. Neither the cause of the malady nor its cure were even touched upon. And they wept and they trembled and they raged and they bore witness. All to no effect.

Christ's College, USA

Staying in The Land of the Unfree (USA Ltd). Everyman ( BBC1, 3 May. 10.25 pm) had a worthwhile documentary about religious fundamentalism in America. Featured was the bizarre Bob Jones University where male and female students are forbidden to touch each other, students from different "races" are segregated, women are given classes in how to submit to their husbands and every lecturer has a Bible in his hand.

The so-called university is a theological nut-house created for people who want to acquire faith in place of knowledge. The extremities of the Bob Jones style of indoctrination is but a magnified version of what has gone on in Sunday schools and compulsory Religious Education lessons in schools for generations. The fundamentalists are simply taking to its illogical conclusion what is inherent in all religious dogma.

There was a frightening degree of organisation amongst these dangerous cranks: they run holiday camps at which kids are driven mad by preachers and they force handicapped people, many of whom are unable to walk away from them, to endure their relentless nonsense. A girl who received awful burns in an accident was told that this was god's will and that if he had meant her to have hands (which were burnt away in the accident) he would have let her keep them. The girl's father, an evangelist ranter, screamed at his congregants that they were all sinners: it is as natural for humans to sin as for dogs to bark— our only course is to repent. The audience screamed out to god, repenting for crimes that they probably lacked the imagination to commit.

With Bob Jones running a university and Oprah Winfrey as their therapist it is little wonder that the frustration which ignites murderous street riots is the order of the day in capitalism's showpiece nation.

Steve Coleman

The Punch & Judy Show (1995)

TV Review from the January 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Breast implants, sexual fetishism, supermodels and Chippendales. Sex therapy, intimate tattoos and witchcraft. No, you won't find any of them discussed in this column, but you certainly will find them if you watch This Morning with Richard and Judy long enough.

Certainly, morning television never used to be like this. In fact there never used to be much on TV in the mornings at all outside of the kids’ summer holidays when Heidi. Barnaby the Bear and England losing at cricket made their annual appearance on BBC 1. But some years ago ITV hit out with a concerted attempt to win ratings and advertisers with its morning magazine programme from the Albert Dock in Liverpool. With its quirky mixture of high fashion, sex and astrology This Morning soon gained a cult following, particularly among Britain's students, thus demonstrating like nothing else the current poverty of student life.

Two years ago BBC 1 attempted to regain the initiative with the imaginatively titled Good Morning With Anne and Nick, hosted by the prim Tory Anne Diamond and professional bloke Nick Owen. At first it floundered badly but it has now overtaken its rival in the ratings, provoking what some at the BBC have claimed is a "dirty tricks" campaign from Granada.

The BBC version of what is basically the same programme with different presenters is more homely than its ITV rival, though it suffers from many of the same difficulties. Foremost among these is something which becomes apparent within minutes of turning the set on. Both morning magazine programmes are lowest common denominator television. They are the tabloids of the small screen. Both have their main stories, big-name interviews, guest columnists (doctors, cooks, etc.), pop stars and astrological features. True, they may not have topless models posing for their audience, but when voyeuristic TV comes via features on breast implants or leggy models parading the latest high street fashion in stockings and suspenders, the comparison with the tabloids is all too clear.

The Joan Collins Fan Club
Like all the successful tabloids, This Morning and Good Morning demonstrate a preoccupation with the good life and high society. The BBC 1 version sends professional glamourpuss Tania Bryer to all the top parties and events so that she can report back to the millions not so fortunate, in a sort of Daily Mail meets Hello! magazine feature for TV. Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan's programme is even worse on this score. This Morning demonstrates a preoccupation with high fashion which is thoroughly out of keeping with the type of audience it attracts. No doubt there are a few Kensington millionairesses who tune in, but the staple audience for morning TV consists of housewives and househusbands, the unemployed, pensioners and students. Just how many of them are likely to be able to afford the glamorous Versace outfits paraded in front of them with such frequency? A feature on wedding dresses is liable to show little costing less than several thousand pounds, as if this is the norm for a cash-strapped working class. The message appears to be that "you too can aspire to this", but the class system means that those watching are going to do plenty of aspiring with scant reward for their efforts.

Ian McCaskill
While it is not normally easy for the humble reviewer to develop a class analysis of the weather forecasts, morning television provides the opportunity. This is because Good Morning With Anne and Nick has a novel approach to weather forecasting. It does them for one person. That's right — just the one, or sometimes a couple if it is feeling charitable. Invariably it is for Quentin or Arabella from London Docklands or something similar who want to know what the weather is going to be like for their midwinter month-long holiday in Mustique. Sod Rockall, Shannon and Dogger Bank, its the Seychelles Good Morning is interested in. How else to warm the cockles of a pensioner’s heart? Whatever, it's nice to know they're thinking of us all.

But to be sure, the crisis-beset proles are not forgotten entirely. They are the fodder for the phone-ins. on embarrassing topics sandwiched between the pap. "From Ainslie in the kitchen with his seafood platter to our phone-in on crabs in the bedroom. VD clinics all over Britain have been reporting difficulties . . ." This is the sort of link Anne and Nick are good at when such a time comes, and that is fairly often. The phone-ins themselves are designed so that desperate people can tell the world about their problems and then receive a few words of advice from an agony aunt, doctor, psychiatrist or whoever else is available. They are excruciating. Not only that, but there is something worrying about programmes that devote so much of their time to such exploitation of others' misfortunes. If anyone actually puts the phone down with a problem solved it is very rare and, moreover, besides the point. The object is to get all the gory and embarrassing details out on air before the adverts come on or before it is time for the next fashion report.

If you haven’t already guessed from all this, morning TV is to be generally avoided, and it is indeed possible that many only have it on because it provides welcoming background noise at a dull time of the day. It is at best twee, invariably voyeuristic and at worst moronic. So if by any chance you're asking whether this morning is a good morning in the home of your TV reviewer, then the likely answer is no. it bloody well isn't.

DAP

On The Box (1998)

TV Review from the October 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last Friday I found myself in a television studio feeling unable to take part in what was going around me without wanting to throw up. I am seldom at a loss for words, but I am struggling now to describe this programme with any degree of objectivity or enthusiasm. I wouldn't know whether to call it a game show or a quiz show. And I am still not quite sure what the point of it was. True the information I had received on it had not endeared it to me long before I was due to take my place, along with three other socialists, in the studio audience. I rarely watch programmes of this ilk. A woman representing the Audience Research Unit had promised me we would be involved in a lively debate. Now I think I could be forgiven for believing this might lead to an opportunity to voice ideas sympathetic to socialist thinking. I didn't know then that the studio audience had been—how can I put it? — manipulated.

We arrived at the television centre several hours before the programme was due to go out, whereupon we were ushered upstairs, along corridors, round corners until we finally reached a place called "hospitality", but which looked like a works canteen. We were invited to help ourselves to tea and coffee. I jokingly asked if we got a glass of wine. Sharon from the Audience Research Unit told me "We can't run to that." I bet they "ran to it" for the guest celebrities. Someone called out names from a list and about six people marched off to another part of the building. The same people turned up later, already in place in the studio, and did most of the talking once the programme had got underway. And I had thought it was going to be a free for all. What naivete on my part; but this was my first time ever on television. Of course this did not necessarily mean we could not voice our opinions, but what it did mean to us was that having once discovered that people had been previously singled out for their contribution, and having realised also that the programme was tasteless and a load of rubbish to boot, we became hard put not to sit in the front row of the studio audience with arms folded and wearing, each of us, expressions of doom. It was so awful.

This is what was on offer. A panel of three celebrities (one of them describing herself as a "socialist anarchist" in some information handed out to us), a studio audience taken from a cross-section of the public, a well-known name to "host" the programme, and a chair reminiscent of the Mastermind hot seat. Three people in the news that week had been asked along to occupy the chair, one at a time. Each member of the panel would ask questions of the newsworthy guest with the intention, I think, of making him squirm. The audience got its turn, but the people who had been primed beforehand spoke first and had the most to say. Anyone lucky enough to get in after that was often cut short so that the next chair guest could be introduced. But not before we had voted. We were asked to hold up a card with an H on one side and a V on the other. H for hero, V for villain. Such responsibility! We three didn't bother, except that I did vote once in an attempt to look as though I was joining in. Debate was very limited before we were expected to make that all-important decision as to whether the chair guest was a hero or a villain. One contestant for the chair was the landlord of a pub who had incurred local disapproval for wishing to employ male strippers on his premises. The host went to town on this one with a line in jokes and puns on male genitalia, the kind of which I had given up laughing at when I was thirteen years old, and I didn't laugh much then either. "Turkey's giblets" was one of the expressions used. It was all so pathetic that my fellow-socialists and I looked at our watches and yawned. It was going to be some time before we could repair to the pub.

It is no wonder that when the programme went out the cameras seemed to have missed the three of us. We could be seen as three blurred images. It was obvious that someone in authority had given us the thumbs down. What self-respecting producer, concerned for his ratings, is going to allow shots to be taken of three people who look as though they are taking part in a mass suicide? What a relief. Who wants acquaintances coming up to them in the street the next day saying "I saw you on telly last night" when in reality that turned out to be the last place they ever wanted to be. And talking of reality-that little square box in the corner of our living room is not reality whatever else anyone thinks it is. Even members of the celebrity panel looked bored and lethargic and they were getting paid. Since we live in a world where money is the name of the game then perhaps audiences should be paid too. Not that a freebie could ever be any inducement for me to take part in such tripe.

Heather Ball

Capitalism: no deal (2008)

From the July 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under capitalism most people must be losers.

Daytime telly is a form of wallpaper: meaningless moving pictures to fill the time between adverts selling insurance or offering to unlock the equity in your home. The prime example of this form is the endless Deal or no Deal, fronted by the great survivor of light entertainment, Noel Edmonds. Ridiculous though the show is, it serves as an unwitting allegory of capitalism.

The premise is that 22 boxes containing a card each detailing a monetary sum between 1p and £250,000 are distributed among the players. One player is selected, and they will win the money represented in their box. The complication is that before they do that, they have to open everyone else’s box, and at various stages a character called “the fat banker” will ring a phone and offer to buy the player’s box.

The game is obviously entirely random – once the boxes are distributed, there is nothing more the player can do – at most, if they play it right, they can negotiate a good deal with the bank; but even that is down to the luck of which boxes are eliminated (the more lower score boxes are eliminated, the higher the banker’s offers). To emphasise this mechanistic process, if a player accepts the offer from the bank, they are asked to keep on playing as they would have done, to see what they could have been offered, and see whether they could have won more. Players are shown what money could have been theirs, and encouraged to believe that they have lost that money they never had.

If this sounds dull (and it is) the players are encouraged to pad the show out by devising complicated patterns of selecting boxes to eliminate. Even more, they are encouraged to give each other pep talks and egg each other on to think positively. Obliquely, this is associated with Edmonds’ own advocacy of “cosmic ordering”, by which you ask the universe for something and it gets delivered. All of which serves to pad out what is essentially a fairground game of chance into an hour of television.

So, just like capitalism, the wealth – in the boxes – is distributed randomly and unfairly, with only one player having more wealth than the rest put together in their box. Like a market, players have to try and sell their box without knowing what other boxes are out there, but they are encouraged to try and reach for the maximum prize. The players are tantalised and mesmerised by the prospect of £250,000, and very often go on to lose because the contents of their box, as eventually opened, are less than they were previously offered.

Like capitalism, the game disguises its true inhuman mechanics through a mixture of hope and delusion. The slim chance that one person can win is enough to entice the players to keep going, and to keep believing in their cranky positive thinking systems.

The fact is, in capitalism, the fact of birth sets the opportunities available, and is as random as the distribution of boxes. Of course, a few people do manage to climb out of their situation – but it helps if a decent sum was dealt in the first place, and the way they play the game depends as much on luck as it does on their own skill; but the idea that they are self made, and got where they are today entirely through merit is entirely believed by the people who too wish to make the big win like they have. Just as many lose the game, entirely through no fault of their own, but are left with the lingering memory of what the banker said they were worth, and what they have lost.

It is just such thinking that the Tory Party rely upon. Until recently, they have been trailing massively in the polls. The good betting was that at the next election, the most they could hope for was a hung parliament (possibly with themselves as the biggest party). After all, the electoral system is currently against them, they need more votes absolutely to win enough seats to have an overall majority than the Labour party needs.

After years of assiduously refusing to give the Tories any leverage on tax, Labour slipped up, and abolished the 10p basic rate of income tax they had introduced – effectively raising the rate of tax on the lowest earners. That some of that was off-set by rises in the minimum wage, and (less obviously) by the increase in statutory holiday entitlement from 20 to 24 days. Such mathematical factors, though, weigh very little against the conscious fact that people will see the deductions on their payslip increasing in size, and they can be told that it is the government snatching their money away.

This is grist to the Tory mill – they were able to return to their old refrain of being for cutting taxes, and telling people how the highway robbers of Labour were taking their hard earned money and squandering it. Suddenly, they were able to spring into a massive lead in the polls, and romp to a massive victory in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election. A victory so massive, that were the swing to hold to the next general election, the Tories would be guaranteed a massive overall win. Suddenly, the hug a hoody and cod greenery were cast off, as the Tories found that their old dog whistle was working once more, and the promise of cuts and cuts and cuts of taxes became the effective way to make friends and influence voters.

Simultaneously, it shattered Labour’s capacity to claim to be on the side of the poor – appearing to throw the burden of a tax cut on the poorest in the land. After all, it was to fund a cut in the 22 percent band that the 10 percent was abolished – Labour couldn’t even point to a reform that the tax increase paid for. So, of course, the leftist rivals of Labour (and the party’s own left wing) managed to jump on the bandwagon and launch an attack on the tax cut, which benefited the Tories by playing into their game. Labour have paid the price for claiming to be able to run the game capitalism better than their Tory rivals.

The secret of the Tories success is that they can simultaneously feed off hope and despair. The hope that one day, with a bit of hard work, you too can make it if you’re left to your own devices. The despair that you’re being robbed by the government through taxes and that your money is being given to those who are living the life of Riley while you slog away. This is the political equivalent of cosmic ordering, of positive thinking. You have a chance – it doesn’t matter how the boxes have been dealt, if you play the game right, you will make it in the end. The same thoughts animate the hopes of all those who pay the prole tax to phone into TV game shows, or buy national lottery tickets, for their big break out of their rut.

Of course, what people don’t see is that they’ve been robbed before the tax man even arrives. Those who work for a wage or a salary are being taken for the value of their unpaid labour that their employer extracts from them through the sleight of hand that is the wages system. Just as the sleight of hand in Deal or no Deal is that the production company, Endemol, make many times more than they give away in prize money, and indeed, wouldn’t even run the game unless they did so. Recognising that, though, would require shattering the illusion of the game.

Seeing that the distribution of wealth means that there must be losers, that those who win got there by luck, that those who lose got there by luck, destroys the game itself. Destroy the cosmic ordering and you remove the incentive to keep playing the game. That the game of capitalism is itself pernicious and destructive demands that it be removed outright, not played as best you can. If a game is inherently unfair, no tweaking of the rules, no aspirations, no change of player is going to alter that.

It is socialists’ job to arm our fellow workers with such knowledge and be a voice to cancel out the obscurantists calls for “thinking wealth” or other such mind candy that is the modern opiate of the masses. Latching on to tax campaigns, whether to relieve the poor or tax the rich, means keeping truck with the rules of capital – the game in which the winners are fixed before hand. So, when the fat banker asks us, “Capitalism: deal or no deal?” No deal! We say.

Pik Smeet