Newsbeat: David Cameron in the Live Lounge (Radio 1) | iPlayer
The Documentary: PJ O’Rourke on the UK Campaign Trail (World Service) | iPlayer
As anyone who gets any of their news or jokes via the internet knows, there is a way of selling stories known as the listicle. Buzzfeed is built on this: a quick glance at its website gives me “18 Times Election Leaflets Failed So Hard They Almost Won”, “16 Moms Who Made Facebook A Cringeworthy Place” and “15 Knees That Look Like Famous People” (they don’t really). The listicle is fine by me: a quick and easy way to get information across, it’s not that different from the box-out section in a newspaper feature. It’s just sad that the feature around the box seems to be disappearing.
Anyway. The popularity of listicles, with their funny gifs and soundbites, has meant that our news has changed. It’s full of quick hits: sugar rushes for us to get happy or outraged about. Which brings me to David Cameron on Radio 1’s Newsbeat. If I’d not listened to the show, but just the reporting about it – the “highlights” – then I would assume that Cameron had been embarrassingly awful, that the Newsbeat audience were biased against him and the host, Chris Smith, utterly rude.
Though Smith was a bit rude, the event wasn’t like that, honestly. I’m no fan of Cameron, but he wasn’t rattled once: not when asked about the NHS, not when asked about a potential Conservative coalition with the DUP, not when Smith butted in with “you had a go at stabilising Libya, didn’t you, by bombing it!” in the manner of a presenter who’s just had something shouted at him in his earpiece. Cameron wasn’t even fazed when Smith said: “I bet you £1,000 you don’t win a majority”: a pretty rubbish interjection, but not so much more irritating than some of the interruptions the Today programme goes for. Cameron remembered how much the minimum wage is, but not the living wage, which varies across the country: it didn’t unnerve him. When a transgender audience member called him out for referring to “gay and lesbian people” when he’d been asked about the LGBT community, Cameron instantly apologised. “I bet you don’t know what the T stands for!” said his questioner. But Cameron did.
What he should have been called out on was his disingenuousness. The prime minister seemed to genuinely wonder why housing was in such a pickle, why local authorities turn away homeless young people, refuse to house them as they’re not seen a priority. It was then that someone should have said, “But you’re in charge!” In the end it was all fine. A bit shouty, a bit annoying, but actually, despite everyone’s best efforts, a bit flat – as the whole of this election has been.
So hooray for PJ O’Rourke, here to jolly things up. In the first of two half-hour shows on the election for the World Service, the US satirist and long-standing funny Republican pointed out that, in the UK, “the familiar two-party-plus-one system… appears to be breaking down”. Let’s “bring in a confused American to shine the clear cold light of complete ignorance on the subject!” he said, though O’Rourke is very far from ignorant.
And he did his work for this programme, interviewing political correspondents and activists, MPs of all hues. He even talked to a member of Bez’s Reality party. He travelled to Thanet, to Downing Street, and everywhere he went, he asked quick curious questions and got interesting answers. In Nigel Farage’s constituency, where Farage was nowhere to be seen (O’Rourke found this incredible: in the US, candidates barely leave their constituency, they’re always campaigning), he spoke to a Labour candidate who grew up in the area. He said that the problem in the area wasn’t immigrants but long-standing poor housing – a factor I’d not heard mentioned before.
He’s a class act, O’Rourke; just his script is worth the price of entry. “Farage appeared with a multicultural group of backers and emphasised the reasonable aspects of Ukip’s platform”; “A lightning rod for all sorts of storms and squalls… but if there’s lightning, where’s the thunder?” Sadly, but perhaps predictably, given he’s a rightwing humorist, he came out as very pro-Boris Johnson, mostly because Boris seemed to be having fun. Still, next week, he’s going to tackle “Why the SNP could hold the balance of power in a nation I thought they wanted to leave”. Go PJ.
