Has Political Correctness Gone Mad? (C4) | All 4
SS-GB (BBC1) | iPlayer
Patriot (Amazon Prime)
Inside No 9 (BBC2) | iPlayer
Gap Year (E4) | All 4
That Trevor Phillips was at it again. Bloody second-generation immigrants, coming over ’ere and taking all our ethical high horses and, um, questioning their validity from the point of view of a black person, er…
At least he tried. Imagine what would have happened had the job of questioning political correctness fallen not to the ex-head of the Commission for Racial Equality but some non-PC swivel-eyed fruitcake?
Very likely nothing. That’s the point, and a fraught and muddled point for C4 it must have been, attempting to critique the loss of free speech while whipping the tablecloth from under that whole premise with every minute’s continuing airtime. Certainly, Nigel Farage was given a goodly amount of play as he and Trev chummed around in armchairs, each preaching to the converted, around a question which could easily have been not (with those wearily ironic quotation marks) “Has Political Correctness Gone Mad?” but “Was It Ever Sane?”.
Probably once, concluded the milder Phillips, but a good while ago (Nige dated the rot, loon-wrongly, to 1968). Instead, Phillips sought to argue, the social insistence on correct forms of language (rather than the brighter alternative, the correct kind of attitudes) has led us down a cul-de-sac where policing ourselves over how we clothe our words has come to matter inordinately more than how we cloak our true thoughts. Which would have been a good argument, a searing argument, had it been steadfastly made.
What there was instead was a run-round of the usual houses – Sir Tim Hunt’s “sexist” “joke”, students banning sombreros, ostentatious sensitivity (so-called virtue signalling), internet trolls, social confusions. It made for a semi-interesting programme, but had promised so much. What there very much wasn’t was just Phillips, by himself, talking quietly into a camera, fleshing out points. Gone for sure are the days when big brains such as AJP Taylor would simply be allowed to talk into a camera for 15 minutes. That only happens perforce on radio – witness John Gray’s “A Point of View” on Radio 4 a couple of Sundays ago, a masterpiece of compressed lucidity.
Indeed, when Phillips went further, claiming that PC tyranny by his one-time tribe, the liberal elite, had led not just to Brexit and Trump but meant, further, that “[it’s the very] minority voices and opinions which are most likely to be suppressed”, there was not a single shred of expositional evidence, which I and you would surely have appreciated, if only out of courtesy. At one point the arguments even got mired in swearing (surely more of a generational and faddish concern) and mussed the hair of the differences between free speech and self-expression.
He was best in his conclusions: “I get it that [there’s a need to] protect women, ethnic minorities, LGBT people from hurtful abuse. But no-platforming Germaine Greer won’t help the boy who really feels he wants to be a girl; sacking a distinguished scientist won’t get more women into engineering degrees; and an employer not calling me ‘nigger’ to my face won’t stop my job application hitting the waste basket.”
His relatively modest proposals – stop confusing symbols with substance, and recognise that part of progress may include learning to live with offence – seem like the beginnings of a way back. But this was not a “brave” commission by Channel 4. There was nothing in the hour to find offensive, unless you count (as I relentlessly do) the phrase “impacting on”. Phillips, yes, is courageous, to the extent that he’s lost many friends in his Damascene conversion, and he is a likable televisual companion. But I can’t help wondering whether, in employing the poster-boy for radical rethinks of multiculturalism, Channel 4 sacrificed some rigorous analysis. Douglas Murray, Alex Massie … now that would have been brave.
I find this whole row over SS-GB minorly mystifying. There are, you know, subtitles. I heard every word perfectly, possibly because my TV set is made from a scavenged Box Brownie and 1932 coathanger, and the only big question should be why Sam Riley is so uncannily channelling the actual voice of John Hurt. But the BBC has promised to “look again” at the sound issues, so I shudder to think what tonight’s episode (the second of five) might hold. Will the actors be holding up speech-placards? Maybe one of those gaily ill-dressed deaf-signers who hog corner screens at 1am will be cheerfully acting out all the smooches and threats? That Riley’s character mumbles is entirely understandable. He has all the bad lines. Most heroes do. But Detective Doug Archer is further compromised by Riley’s actorly knowledge that he doesn’t really want anyone to hear what he’s saying, as so much of that is a lie, which leads to the best of us mumbling, and certainly Archer’s not the best of us.
I would have loved it to explore wider issues, of post-jackboot music, monarchy, language and changing mores, but the book didn’t either. For the moment, it’s a handsomely noir police procedural, as Len Deighton intended. And, so far, despite my brain reeling with so many subfusc wartime retro-dramas, it’s the best of the bunch. Lend it your ears. Even though the not-unfascinating question of whether Britons would have collaborated has been wholly overshadowed by a row over ear-trumpets. How very British.
Gap Year is rather good, which is (again) minorly mystifying, as the eight-part comedy-drama is written by the team behind the savagely underwhelming “Rome-com” Plebs. It’s hugely helped by the presence of Tim Key, possibly our most undervalued TV comic talent since Kevin Eldon, and features near-credible characters getting into near-credible gap-year situations, the spoilt bastards, and being, entirely credibly, less than super-witty about it all, just like life.
But Inside No 9 is better. The kicker for this horror-com’s third season had Philip Glenister and Jason Watkins in juicy roles they must have salivated over – a one-act drama featuring their caricatures, subverted – and could have phoned in, but thankfully didn’t. This argument over a restaurant bill was dark, biting, often blink-and-you’ll-miss-it hilarious, ultimately prosaically disappointing, but that just made me want more. Bring it on.
Patriot, which launched last week on Amazon, is one of those exciting and wholly new genres, as if Homeland or 24 had stumbled into Fargo, and might succeed as did Breaking Bad for Netflix, and The Sopranos for HBO. Cleverly written, never speaking down to fat brains, Steve Conrad’s 10-part creation features Michael Dorman as an undercover US agent who can’t help revealing his every outrage in a delightfully whimsical folk-song, performed in public, and much winning engineering talk of “truss underbellies” and “cracked L-quadrants”. It also features Luxembourg, Milwaukee and Iran, surely a pub joke waiting to be written. It’s also glorious: trust me, it’s going to be big.
