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A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
November 20, 2001
Sam Bahour
Plain
Truths About Palestine
Michael Ratner
Moving Toward
a
Police State
November 19, 2001
Edward
Said
Suicidal
Ignorance
November 18, 2001
John Farley
Shame on You,
Chelsea!
Kalpana
Sharma
Flower
Power:
A Blow for Peace
Tony Mauro
The Quirin
Ruling:
FDR's Horrible Precedent for Bush's Terror Courts
C.G. Estabrook
American
Crusades
November 17, 2001
Zoltan Grossman
It Ain't
Over Til It's Over
November 16, 2001
Rick Giombetti
Rep.
McDermott and
the Decay of Liberalism
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Voices
of Muslim Feminists
Mokhiber/Weissman
Kill,
Kill, Kill
November 15, 2001
George
Monbiot
Blasting
Our Way
Toward Peace
Jack McCarthy
Hitchens
Mind-Meld
and Hot Bodies
Steve
Perry
Afghan
Puzzle Palace
RAWA
We Do Not Accept
the Northern Alliance
November 14, 2001
Jensen/Mahajan
The
Press Must Press Harder on Afghanistan
David Vest
The Great Unificator
Harry
Browne
Preventing
Future Terrorism
November 13, 2001
Peter Mahoney
Veteran's
Day, 2001
Rep. Ron
Paul
Expanding
NATO
Is a Bad Idea
November 12, 2001
Robert Jensen
Goodbye to
All That...
Patriotism
Nancy
Oden
My
Day at the Airport
CounterPunch Wire
East Timor
10 Years
After the Massacre
C.G. Estabrook
Instead
of Terror
Alexander Cockburn
Wide World
of Torture
November 11, 2001
Douglas
Valentine
Homeland
Insecurity: The Politics of Terror in America
November 10, 2001
Grover Furr
Seeking an Opposition
to the Afghan War
Bruce
Kyle
Anatomy
of a Green Smear:
Backstabbing Nancy Oden
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War Diary
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bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
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Pakistan
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The Memphis Blues Again:
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Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
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Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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November
20, 2001
Race and
Ratings in Tony Blair's Britain
How Britain's Public TV Channel
4 Killed V.S. Naipaul's Mr Biswas
By Tariq Ali
This is the story of why V.S. Naipaul's comic
masterpiece, A
House for Mr Biswas, which won him the Nobel Prize for
Literature a few weeks ago, was turned down in 1998 by an over-hyped
inert mediocrity named Michael Jackson who had just usurped the
top job at Britain's Channel Four. (Channel Four is a special
TV channel created by an Act of Parliament in 1982 to cater to
minorities who were not being served by mainstream TV. In its
early years it was a phenomenal success and coverage of Latin
America, Asia and Africa quadrupled as a result. With the advent
of Tony Blair's New Labour government, the Channel went disastrously
down-market.)
It was almost exactly five years ago
that I suggested to Peter  Ansorge,
then Head of Drama at Channel Four, that A House for Mr Biswas
could be made into a four-part serial. He went home and re-read
the book and found it as exciting and even more amusing than
the first time. Before he could do anything he was asked to vacate
his post. Jackson--the Peter Mandelson of British TV-- had taken
over, evinced an interest in drama and wanted to appoint his
own Commissioning Editor. That was, after all, the art of being
boss. Villify the past and dump the people "tainted with
too much experience." He had learnt all this at the expensive
management school in the United States to which Sir John Birt
of the BBC had dispatched him so that he could become top-manager-material.
Here you pick up management jargon: someone else's bad ideas
are stuffed, mounted and repeated like a mantra.
The new head of Drama was Gub Neal, a
literate and cultured fellow who had not only read Naipaul, but
told me that A House for Mr Biswas was his "favourite novel
of all time". Another plus sign was that he had lived in
the West Indies. He commissioned four one-hour scripts. I established
contact with the author and was invited to lunch. Naipaul spoke
of how he had always hated the idea of his work being polluted
by cinema and television. I heard of a dinner many years ago
at "Mr Ford's hacienda" on the West Coast. A dinner
whose vulgarity had offended the writer. He left before the final
course, unable to work with Hollywood. "Mr Ford" was
Francis Ford Coppolla. That was a long time ago. He had changed
his mind, partially under the influence of his new wife, Nadira.
He was now ready to discuss possible dramatisations. Ismail Merchant
had bought the rights to The
Mystic Masseur but had asked Caryl Phillips to write
the script. Naipaul was filled with foreboding. It might turn
out to be awful. It did.
We agreed on Farrukh Dhondy as script-writer.
This had been Dhondy's profession before he was wrecked by an
over-extended tour of duty as Multicultural Commissioning editor
at Channel Four. Now he was out of the box and could work again.
Peter Ansorge joined the team as a co-Producer and Script Editor
(his old job at the BBC many moons ago). The scripts were written,
carefully edited and approved by the author. He liked them because
Ansorge had curbed Dhondy's inventiveness and forced him to stay
close to the original. Naipaul's dialogue in the novel worked
extremely well in the dramatization.
Gub Neal liked the scripts. We were in
search of a Director. An ominous silence followed. Then a phone
call. The project had been cancelled. Why? It later emerged that
at the crucial meeting to discuss finance, the scheduler and
the marketing men who now dominated the Channel had been told
that all the main characters in the novel were Trinidadian Indians.
This made it difficult to contract Hugh Grant or Denzil Washington
to play Mr Biswas. In twisted logic this meant it could not be
shown at prime-time and would have to be screened after 11.30
pm. The brave Michael Jackson shrugged his shoulders. A fox fears
every minute for his skin. In that case, he is reported to have
said, we can't afford the project. The brave Gub Neal did not
even put up a fight. Market-nihilism won that battle and many
others because the creative people were too scared to fight back.
Gub Neal, too, was dumped when he couldn't produce a ratings
hit. And so, poor Mr Biswas was killed. It wasn't racism, but
ratingism. Market-realism almost always kills creativity. No
risks are taken. A television station that refuses to permit
young directors the right to fail will wither and die. Its happened
to BBC1 and Channel Four, where the only thing left worth watching
is the news. Jackson used to hate the news and wanted John Snow
to be more like the Channel Five newscaster, but I digress.
A Channel created by parliamentary remit
to cater for the tastes of political, intellectual, ethnic minorities
had been captured by the market. The only "minorities"
permitted were sexual: women with big breasts, men with large
willies, etc., etc. Anatomy superseded belles-lettres. This became
the sum total of the remit. C4 became a brothel and if the short-list
of those due to succeed Jackson is accurate, then his successor
will be even worse than him and C4 will descend from the gutter
into the sewage system. Jackson himself is off to the United
States to work as the head of some entertainment channel or the
other. As the late Daniel Singer used to say: plus ca change,
plus ca le meme chose...
When I told the story of Mr Biswas to
Jeremy Isaacs, the founding-father of old Channel Four, he looked
sad. We recalled his watch at Channel Four. It seemed unimaginable
now. New Labour, New Culture, Old Market. Once C4 had begun to
sell its own advertising the end was nigh. Michael Grade was
strong enough to defend his own instincts against the market-men,
but Michael Jackson like his creator, Sir John Birt, was a man
without instincts. There is an emptiness in their souls. What
they and their clones lacked was supplied by focus-groups and
other market devices. Similar focus-groups were used by the BBC
and with similar results: a loss of diversity.
There is now an increasingly ignored
minority in Britain--the intelligent viewer. This minority crosses
every possible divide: class, gender, age, race and political
affiliations. Over the last decade it has been increasingly ignored
by the public service broadcasting networks for the simple reason
that executives have been confident in the knowledge that intelligent
viewers had no alternative. Nowhere else to go. They were prisoners,
destined to languish in the only available facility. Instead
many of them just switched off. That's one reason that C4 confronts
an advertising crisis. One feels like writing to Chancellor of
the Exchequer Gordon Brown: "Put them out of their misery.
Privatise the sods", but then I know I'll miss John Snow
and the only serious news bulletin on TV and so the letter remains
unwritten.
What can one say of a culture in which
pride of place is often awarded to programs on home decor, cooking,
hospitals, cruise liners, pets, mindless quiz shows presided
over by brainless quiz-masters, etc. The youthful and self-consciously
jokey tones of so many presenters is pure pastiche, the mimicry
of styles imagined to be popular and, therefore, without any
real sense of the comic. Contentless clowning only serves to
emphasize the dead and stifling character of the new canon. An
environment has been created where philistinism flourishes without
serious restraints; where innovation usually means weightless
iconoclasm and where complex issues tend to be avoided on principle
except when there is a war. Then the executives confront their
empty cupboards. No serious program on Afghanistan for a decade
which can be plundered for footage!!
The desire to maximize ratings leads
both private and public sectors in the same direction. Public
service broadcasting was always conceived of as a mix that was
both popular and often appealed to minority tastes. The overall
shift in our culture has tended to swallow the latter. The trend
is unremittingly towards a strictly hierarchical and celebrity-star-led
media, where the more you watch, the less you know.
Over the last decade British culture
has become increasingly self-referential, self-congratulatory
and, as a consequence, shipwrecked. Here, as in other areas,
New Labour has been worse than the Major/Clarke Tories. As we
approach a common European currency, the dominant culture in
Britain has swathed itself in a blanket of parochialism. TV,
radio and newspaper coverage of the rest of the world has declined
dramatically over the last five years. Though our citizens travel
more than ever before, they are less informed than before. The
result is an overall lowering of educational and cultural standards.
In most European Union countries there
is regular coverage of the politics and culture of member-states
and in Spain, France and Germany of the rest of the world.. In
Britain, there is little coverage of EU, leave alone the rest
of Europe or the world. Human-interest stories---life-politics---seem
to be the only route to the rest of the world: natural or human
disasters, sex-scandals, famines, assassinations, funerals of
heads-of-state and, of course, wars.
A few weeks ago I received a phone-call
from a senior Franco-German broadcaster. Could she please see
the scripts of A House for Mr Biswas? CP
Tariq Ali,
a frequent CounterPunch contributor, is the author of The
Stone Woman, just published in paperback by Verso.
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