Meet the big, floppy child who defends liberal America from the ranting right
Storyville - Al Franken: God spoke BBC4
To get a fair idea of Al Franken's place in American culture, you need to imagine Rory Bremner ditching his television series at the height of his popularity, coming out for one political side or the other and, eventually, jacking it all in to run for parliament. Franken spent around 20 years impersonating Henry Kissinger, among others, on the satirical show Saturday Night Live before writing the sort of polemical books that provide the US with its national conversation and us with the overwhelming urge for a nap.
The difference between Franken's books and most of the foam-flecked bestsellers in the charts was that his stood up for America's benighted liberals rather than the alleged "silent majority" of ultra-conservatives. Walk into any branch of Borders in the US and you'll be ambushed by racks of covers that scream "I am a hard-faced, civil-rights-denying, poor-person-starving git". Not wanting to be out-ranted, Franken's dust jackets yell: "Yikes! I'm a liberal who isn't po-faced!"
In Al Franken: God spoke (8 March,
10.30pm) the documentary-makers Nick Doob and Chris Hegedus - long-term collaborators with the film's executive producer D A Pennebaker - catch Franken as he's about to take on the ultra-right in its zone of greatest comfort and influence: talk radio. Much commercial spoken-word radio in the US makes Richard Littlejohn look like the would-be Marxist "Wolfie" Smith (played by Robert Lindsay in Citizen Smith), while progressive opinion is all but confined to National Public Radio.
We see Franken as a man driven by righteous anger and the memory of his late father, who switched to the Democrats in 1964, swearing to his son that "no Jew could be against civil rights".
Indeed, Franken induces the sort of misty-eyed longing I last experienced watching The West Wing. He's less laboured and less obviously a self-publicist than Michael Moore: he wears normal middle-class clothes (his dad was a print salesman from Minnesota) on his lecture-cum-stand-up tours, rather than the baseball-capped Johnny Worker look long after graduating from the proletariat.
With a tuppenny budget and Franken as its big draw, the liberal radio station Air America goes live in the year of the 2004 presidential election, with the express mission to get Bush out of office. It goes off air within two weeks when it runs out of money (something that, oddly enough, never seems to happen to right-wing stations), but manages to wangle its way back to solvency in time for Franken to host shows from the Democratic and Republican conventions. At the latter, he gets called a "snake" by a bug-eyed fellow host.
You begin to realise that ultra-conservatives are noticeable for the blindness of their conviction and the sheer fear of uncertainty that drives it. Thatcher had it, too. As does the columnist Ann Coulter, a truly bizarre woman who is filmed stating that Joe McCarthy is her favourite historical figure.
"There seems to be a lot of hatred coming from the left," complains the conservative radio jock Sean Hannity to Franken. Funny, really, considering Franken hasn't called anyone a "snake". I'd like to think the film-makers followed Franken for long enough to expose his own nasty bits, should there be any. But there aren't: only signs that perky Franni, his wife of 28 years, treats him like a big floppy child and that he plays the role very well. There is something in him of the little boy who can't believe how nasty people can be, though I'd take naivety over cynicism any day. She gets him out of bed on election day, puffs up his pillows so his back doesn't hurt, orders his room service breakfast and puts away the tray, and makes him watch the TV news when he says he can't face it.
Later, as the results come in, Franken is wearing a hoodie, into which his head literally shrinks when he discovers that John Kerry has lost. The wisecracks dry up; within days he's talking about running for the Senate back in Minnesota, and Franni sets about finding them a new apartment.
British loony-rightists will see the inclusion of this film in the schedules as another sign of the BBC's liberal bias. That only goes to show how much we need a Franken of our own. lAdam Curtis takes a critical look at modern ideas about liberty.
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