The Satanic Verses: 30 Years On (BBC Two) | iPlayer
This Time With Alan Partridge (BBC One) | iPlayer
Warren (BBC One) | iPlayer
Storyville: Defying the Cutting Season (BBC Four) | iPlayer
What an immensely warm, thoughtful companion was Mobeen Azhar, a Bafta-winning producer now before the camera for The Satanic Verses: 30 Years On, a fiercely useful retrospective on the Rushdie affair, and therefore how galling to see him reduced to blithering, near-tearful frustration at the blindly self-defeating actions of those so similar to himself – Yorkshire-born and Muslim-born.
Azhar, also a presenter on the BBC Asian Network, was able, now, to laugh with self-ridicule at how, growing up in Huddersfield post-fatwa, he and pals would play schoolyard games of “How would you kill Salman Rushdie?” It wasn’t the only laughter; I thought reformed racist Matthew Collins a splendid addition to lucid, informed, contextualised understanding. Asked whether, before he left the National Front in 1994, he had ever read The Satanic Verses, his reply was tinder dry: “We were the NF. We didn’t read books.” Collins’s point was that the fatwa pronounced on the book in 1989 was the greatest recruiting sergeant the NF could ever have had. “Best gift ever.” There was a 40% increase in membership.
But any laughs died towards the end, after an immensely even-handed trawl through the entrails of the past 30 years, in which Azhar correctly concluded that Muslim reaction was not kneejerk so much as an inchoate yell against racism, ridicule, the postwar immigrant experience. (Though it was still, is still, about a book, and wanting it banned and burned. And, my, haven’t the tabloids, then and now, fanned and triggered both sides? It was cringeworthy to see anew the Sun’s “20 ways to spot a Mad Mullah”, but I remember being ashamed even then.)
Back in Bradford’s Centenary Square, an angry man tore the book from Azhar’s hand and ran screaming and cursing, as the cameras followed with wary caution. Azhar could only blink in faint astonishment. They found, later, pages of the book, ripped and burned. His conclusion? “As a community we are not ready, not mature enough, to even have these kinds of discussion. We are so ready to react. An unthinking shut-down-the-discussion, can’t-have-a-conversation reaction. I am so pissed off.”
Throughout, I couldn’t help wondering what the parallels would be in today’s climate of offence-taking as digital artform. Even with Iran much changed, and Khomeini long dead, would we, in self-censorious Britain, have anything like the intellectual rigour, even the honest intellectual engagement, to see the argument as one of freedom of speech? I like to hope The Satanic Verses could be written today; that Penguin could as staunchly defend its publication (even as translators around the world were being targeted: Hitoshi Igarashi was stabbed to death in his university office); that the British protection services would be as willing to protect principles; liberals to dare quote John Stuart Mill.
But the world has spun terrifyingly fast: four shamingly short years after “Nous sommes tous Charlie”. One telling interview was in that Bradford square just before the book-ripping, with three teenage girls: even though they accepted it was a work of fiction, they were adamant – with courtesy, and polite smiles, but still adamant – that freedom of fiction should still be limited, that there had, even in makey-uppy, to be “boundaries” and “respect”. Well, a sweet Colman raspberry to that.
There was something metatextually fascinating about the scheduling on Monday night, when the BBC followed Warren with This Time With Alan Partridge. Steve Coogan’s return – remember, this character was created in 1991, and that’s some longevity in comedy years – was by and large triumphant. I clutched myself gleefully at the pitch-perfect pastiche of The One Show, replete with fixed grins and soft-soaping and “questions” that a stuffed velveteen rabbit could bat back with a sleepy paw, and sudden shifts to “investigation”: goodness, that real-life show is one drift of dreck.
Susannah Fielding is a terrific asset. I’m immensely looking forward to further intense interplay between those two egos sitting slightly too forcedly close together on the couch. Partridge now has just enough (intensely hard-won) self-knowledge to know when he’s flubbed something; his tragedy is that it can never be enough to prevent re-flub, often before the mouth has closed. Grand already and can get only better.
On the other hand… what were they thinking of with Warren? Poor Martin Clunes: after so much redemptively good work – Vanity Fair, Manhunt, even Doc Martin’s a lovely rounded well-acted part – he has apparently chosen to star in a “comedy” that could have been written in 1974. About a grumpy driving instructor. And that’s it, folks. No jokes, no clever lines, no acknowledgments that there’s nothing inherently laugh-out-loud in just saying “garden centre” or “driving instructor”, or indeed that time and tastes move on and all that’s left is a talented actor staring at the camera with what’s meant to be sardonic pith but might actually be howling existential angst.
A searing Storyville charmed and alarmed but not, alas, in equal measure. Giselle Portenier’s access-all-areas tale of a safe house in Tanzania, in the Serengeti, where young girls can escape their families for the December “cutting season” made often for harsh watching.
Defying the Cutting Season introduced us early to girls such as delightful 13-year-old Flora, and the police officers who defy their own communities to enforce the law against female genital mutilation, illegal in Tanzania these past 20 years, and the woman at the heart of that safe house, Rhobi Samwelly.
There was much grimness: the shock on the faces of young boys, watching a video about FGM; the contrasted curled lips on the faces of their older-teen counterparts, having simply, dully, grown up to accept that their wives would be less willing to stray if “cut”; the greed of the fathers, bartering the mutilation of a daughter’s body in exchange for double the number of cows.
But it was nothing in comparison to the pain of girls as young as eight, torn between the idea of freedom, of living lives as educated women, and being reunited with their families, who had promised, and agreed, with wildly varying degrees of credibility, not to cut. The grannies were often cast as the bad guys in this scenario, and rightly so. But the pain, the tears, in the choosing, hope or family… surely no person should ever be so tested, eight or 13 or 50?
