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27 July 2011

Why our parliament is literally beyond satire

Comedy shows are banned from using Commons footage.

Just last week, I was writing about the relative health of satire in the US and UK and now comes a rather striking example of something the Americans can do and we can't.

It's already a source of chagrin to many lovers of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart that More4 shows only a weekly round-up edition, rather than the four nightly episodes that are produced by the team. But this week, even the "Global Edition" didn't make it on to British TV screens -- and the 4OD webpage lists the online version as being "unavailable".

Blogger Chris Spyrou noticed it and brought it to the attention of the TV writer Graham Linehan, who asked Channel 4 about it. A tweet from Channel 4 Insider -- the broadcaster's official presence on Twitter -- called it "compliance problems".

The full reason, tweeted a short while later, was this: "We are prevented by parliamentary rules from broadcasting parliamentary proceedings in a comedic or satrical context."

The user @fiatpanda later uncovered this response to a Freedom of Information request from Channel 4, which stated:

Guidelines on the use of the pictures are less prescriptive. They do specify that no extracts from parliamentary proceedings may be used in comedy shows or other light entertainment, such as political satire. But broadcasters are allowed to include parliamentary items in magazine programmes containing musical or humourous features, provided the reports are kept separate.

So there you have it. The Americans can make fun of what happens in our parliament but we can't. And, in case you're wondering, I've seen what I assume is the "banned" clip and it's gentle ribbing at most -- and has something important to say about democracy and the accountability of elected officials.

In it, Jon Stewart expresses his admiration for David Cameron "taking on all comers" during the Commons questions on the hacking scandal, in contrast to the rather anaemic questions that American leaders face.

After showing Ed Miliband, Ann Clwyd, Tom Watson and others giving Cameron some tough words, Jon Stewart remarks: "That's awesome! That's your CSPAN? That's f***ing awesome . . . I know how I'd respond to that kind of questioning [he cowers]. I bet the Prime Minister never had a chance!"

The tape then cuts back to the Commons, where Cameron tells the House his opponents were clearly "hoping for some great allegation to add to their fevered conspiracy theories. I'm just disappointed for them that they didn't get one".

After a couple more clips of a bullish PM, Jon Stewart notes: "England is awesome. That guy killed it. Remember when someone yelled "You lie!" at our State of the Union and everyone was like 'What has become of us as a people?' This is the Prime Minister of England, down in the pit, taking on all comers . . . This guy cut short a foreign trip for the privilege of it."

What US politics needs, Stewart concludes, is for Americans to "start drinking some motherf***ing tea and eating some motherf***ing finger sandwiches".

To follow Helen on Twitter, click here.

Helen Lewis is deputy editor of the New Statesman. She has presented BBC Radio 4’s Week in Westminster and is a regular panellist on BBC1’s Sunday Politics.

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JAVIER MUÑOZ
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7 April 2016

Salman Rushdie: how Cervantes and Shakespeare wrote the modern literary rule book

It is 400 years since Shakespeare and Cervantes died. Together, they defy boundaries of time, and the conventions that keep street life seperate from fantasy.

As we honour the four hundredth anniversaries of the deaths of William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, it may be worth noting that while it’s generally accepted that the two giants died on the same date, 23 April 1616, it actually wasn’t the same day. By 1616 Spain had moved on to using the Gregorian calendar, while England still used the Julian, and was 11 days behind. (England clung to the old ­Julian dating system until 1752, and when the change finally came, there were riots and, it’s said, mobs in the streets shouting, “Give us back our 11 days!”) Both the coincidence of the dates and the difference in the calendars would, one suspects, have delighted the playful, erudite sensibilities of the two fathers of modern literature.

We don’t know if they were aware of each other, but they had a good deal in common, beginning right there in the “don’t know” zone, because they are both men of mystery; there are missing years in the record and, even more tellingly, missing documents. Neither man left behind much personal material. Very little to nothing in the way of letters, work diaries, abandoned drafts; just the colossal, completed oeuvres. “The rest is silence.” Consequently, both men have
been prey to the kind of idiot theories that seek to dispute their authorship.

A cursory internet search “reveals”, for example, that not only did Francis Bacon write Shakespeare’s works, he wrote Don Quixote as well. (My favourite crazy Shakespeare theory is that his plays were not written by him but by someone else of the same name.) And of course Cervantes faced a challenge to his authorship in his own lifetime, when a certain pseudonymous Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, whose identity is also uncertain, published his fake sequel to Don Quixote and goaded Cervantes into writing the real Book II, whose characters are aware of the plagiarist Avellaneda and hold him in much contempt.

Cervantes and Shakespeare almost certainly never met, but the closer you look at the pages they left behind the more echoes you hear. The first, and to my mind the most valuable shared idea is the belief that a work of literature doesn’t have to be simply comic, or tragic, or romantic, or political/historical: that, if properly conceived, it can be many things at the same time.

Take a look at the opening scenes of Hamlet. Act I, Scene One is a ghost story. “Is not this something more than fantasy?” Barnardo asks Horatio, and of course the play is much more than that. Act I, Scene Two brings on the intrigue at the court of Elsinore: the angry scholar prince, his recently widowed mother wedded to his uncle (“O most wicked speed, to post/With such dexterity to incestuous sheets”). Act I, Scene Three, and here’s Ophelia, telling her dubious father, Polonius, the beginning of what will become a sad love story: “My lord, he hath importuned me with love/In honourable fashion.” Act I, Scene Four, and it’s a ghost story again, and something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

As the play proceeds, it goes on meta­morphosing, becoming by turns a suicide story, a murder story, a political conspiracy and a revenge tragedy. It has comic moments and a play within the play. It contains some of the highest poetry ever written in English and it ends in melodramatic puddles of blood.

This is what we who come after inherit from the Bard: the knowledge that a work can be everything at once. The French tradition, more severe, separates tragedy (Racine) and comedy (Molière). Shakespeare mashes them up together, and so, thanks to him, can we.

In a famous essay, Milan Kundera proposed that the novel has two progenitors, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; yet both these voluminous, encyclopaedic fictions show the influence of Cervantes. Sterne’s Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim are openly modelled on Quixote and Sancho Panza, while Richardson’s realism owes a good deal to Cervantes’s debunking of the foolish mediaeval literary tradition whose delusions hold Don Quixote in thrall. In Cervantes’s masterpiece, as in Shakespeare’s work, pratfalls coexist with nobility, pathos and emotion with bawdiness and ribaldry, culminating in the infinitely moving moment when the real world asserts itself and the Knight of the Dolorous Countenance accepts that he has been a foolish, mad old man, “looking for this year’s birds in last year’s nests”.

They are both self-conscious writers, modern in a way that most of the modern masters would recognise, the one creating plays that are highly aware of their theatricality, of being staged; the other creating fiction that is acutely conscious of its fictive nature, even to the point of inventing an imaginary narrator, Cide Hamete Benengeli – a narrator, interestingly, with Arab antecedents.

And they are both as fond of, and adept at, low life as they are of high ideas, and their galleries of rascals, whores, cutpurses and drunks would be at home in the same taverns. This earthiness is what reveals them both to be realists in the grand manner, even when they are posing as fantasists, and so, again, we who come after can learn from them that magic is pointless except when in the service of realism – was there ever a more realist magician than Prospero? – and realism can do with the injection of a healthy dose of the fabulist. Finally, though they both use tropes that originate in folk tale, myth and fable, they refuse to moralise, and in this above all else they are more modern than many who followed them. They do not tell us what to think or feel, but they show us how to do so.

Of the two, Cervantes was the man of action, fighting in battles, being seriously wounded, losing the use of his left hand, being enslaved by the corsairs of Algiers for five years until his family raised the money for his ransom. Shakespeare had no such dramas in his personal experience; yet of the two he seems to have been the writer more interested in war and soldiering. Othello, Macbeth, Lear are all tales of men at war (within themselves, yes, but on the field of battle, too). Cervantes used his painful experiences, for example in the Captive’s Tale in Quixote and in a couple of plays, but the battle on which Don Quixote embarks is – to use modern words – absurdist and existential rather than “real”. Strangely, the Spanish warrior wrote of the comic futility of going into battle and created the great iconic figure of the warrior as fool (one thinks of Heller’s Catch-22 or Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five for more recent explorations of this theme), while the imagination of the English poet-dramatist plunged (like Tolstoy, like Mailer) headlong towards war.

In their differences, they embody very contemporary opposites, just as, in their similarities, they agree on a great deal that is still useful to their inheritors.

“Lunatics, Lovers and Poets: Twelve Stories After Cervantes and Shakespeare”, with an introduction by Salman Rushdie, is published by And Other Stories (£10)

This article first appeared in the 08 April 2016 issue of the New Statesman, The Tories at war

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