They don’t make TV like this any more. “You used to sacrifice and kill us publicly,” intones John Berger, plummily speaking for the animal kingdom over a montage of depressed bears behind bars at the zoo and sad-eyed horses in a field. “Today your slaughterhouses are hidden away. It’s not from us that you hide them, is it? It’s from yourselves.”
True, it’s presumptuous, perhaps even speciesist, for the great art historian and novelist to ventriloquise caged gorillas and butchered cattle, the better to indict humanity’s denial and unconscious self-loathing over what it does to animals. But that’s exactly what Berger does in a beautiful and chastening film he made for the BBC’s Omnibus in 1980 called Parting Shots from Animals.
Berger’s thought is that we used to worship animals, put them in pride of place in our art. They were our gods, our companions, our soulmates. We would hunt with them and eat them without shame. But then, 300 years ago, something terrible happened. The philosopher René Descartes decided humans were essentially different from animals, supposing that only the former had souls and that the latter were kinds of furry robots. Later, during the industrial revolution, animals were further marginalised when we made machines that could more efficiently labour for us. Now? We have disappeared animals from public life, as ruthlessly as Stalin or Pinochet.
What happened to TV with such radical political and cultural messages? Arguably it died in 2003 when the BBC took Omnibus behind the shed and put a bullet through its brain; or in 1995 when it decided that The Late Show was not subversive TV but an expendable luxury product for the wannabe intelligentsia; or when Channel 4 mutated from Britain’s most self-consciously radical TV channel into one that made Embarrassing Bodies and Making Bradford British.
We used to have The Late Show with Sarah Dunant; now we have The Late Late Show with James Corden. You can’t tell me that isn’t symptomatic of television’s decline.
Berger’s film is just one of a clutch of radical programmes drawn from BBC and Channel 4 archives curated for an afternoon screening under the title Theory on TV at London’s Whitechapel Gallery on 5 May as part of a season of archival trawls called Radical Broadcasts, in which I’m participating. Later in the month, there will be an evening at at London’s Institut Français of archived TV films about Gallic theory including a Late Show about Roland Barthes and Channel 4 show about Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. Bet you can’t wait.
Sadly, though, you’ve missed a screening of the time RD Laing appeared on daytime chat show Good Afternoon in 1977. To get a sense of how counterintuitive the psychiatrist’s interview was, imagine radical feminist Catharine Mackinnon popping up on Loose Women or or the Chapman Brothers making a showstopper challenge of their artwork Hell in Bake Off. All of which, incidentally, would happen if I ever get to be a commissioning editor. Which, by popular demand, I won’t.
Other films to be screened on Saturday include David Lodge grappling with post-structuralist theory at a conference on the linguistics of writing at Strathclyde University in 1986; Stuart Hall and David MacLennan discussing why Karl Marx mattered in 1983; and Edward Said musing on how ostensibly great western literature is complicit in the crimes of empire in 1993.
What all the above shows have in common is that they are unthinkable on today’s telly. Pitch any one of them to a commissioning editor in 2018 and you’d get shown the door. Cultural studies professors talk about Marx? Are you kidding? Edward Said expatiates on the western hubris of Kipling and Conrad? “Expatiates”? Christ, no! This meeting is over!
And yet, TV has lost a lot in switching off its radical intellectuals. Take Said’s superb documentary, a bracing distillation of the themes of his book Culture and Imperialism. Suited, booted and staring down the camera as if the TV audience was his class at Columbia University, the intellectual begins an authored hour called The Idea of Empire, broadcast in 1993 not long after the first Gulf war. “When you read a brilliantly elegant and ironic novel, do you think of colonial slavery?” he began. “Or when you read a brooding existential narrative by Albert Camus, do you think of the atrocities of the Algerian war of independence? Or when you watch images of the Gulf war and you see the technological superiority of the the American army and air force, do you think of European Orientalists?” A beat. “I think you should.” I know I felt roundly told off.
In 2018, if you want to encounter dissenting radical voices, turn off your telly and download podcasts such as Counterpunch radio, or Agitpod with Owen Jones and Ellie Mae O’Hagan, the Australian Radical Philosophy podcast and my personal favourite, This Is Hell (slogan: manufacturing dissent since 1996). Intellectual dissent is too difficult for TV to handle - which is especially disappointing nowadays, when viewers seem to have no difficulty dealing with the most complicated, often philosophically dense, dramas in the medium’s history including The OA, Legion and Westworld, to name just three.
Oh come on, you might well say. There is radical telly on prime time still. Think of David Olusoga or Mary Beard presenting their segments of Civilisations on BBC One recently. And it’s true that Olosuga’s critique of empire and Beard’s feminist deconstruction of patriarchal art history were two fingers to Kenneth Clark’s 50-year-old patrician narrative. And, better yet, a person of colour and a woman got to tell the story.
That said, any subversion in Civilisations was itself subverted by the way the series bent the knee to the prevailing values of the licence-fee-depleting, visually narcotising travelogue. The BBC boasted that the eight-programme documentary spanned 31 countries on six continents, and covered more than 500 works of art. The soothing wallow in unceasing beauty diluted the abrasiveness of the professors’ radical messages.
Olusoga’s perversely sumptuous critique of empire made Said’s earlier meditation on the same theme seem like guerrilla film-making. Instead of flying Said all over the world to look moody in photogenic locales, it parked him in his New York apartment, where he would hold court to camera. Otherwise, the visuals consisted overwhelmingly of archive newsreels and 8mm footage filmed of Said by his father in pre-1947 Palestine and 50s Egypt, where the tyro intellectual spent his formative years. More energy, more airtime, and much, much less money were spent on argument than on visually beguiling viewers.
There’s no way, though, back to these kinds of radical programmes. We will never hear a voiceover again by someone as posh-sounding as dear old John Berger. A much more important reason is that these programmes weren’t quite as radical as they may have seemed. Where were the women? Where were the black or brown intellectuals? Take Hall and McLennan riffing on Marx’s relevance in the early 80s. Watching this recently, as both men swivelled in their armchairs and chatted to host historian Juliet Gardiner, it gave me a Proustian rush – reminding me of my experience of so much TV discussion in the 70s and 80s, when men would lean back in their chairs as they held forth about something abstruse (think: Bryan Magee on The Great Philosophers or Tony Benn puffing at his pipe before telling Robin Day about socialism), until that sexless moment two inches of male calf emerged between sock and trouser leg.
These calf exposures were emblematic, too, of how putatively intellectual radical TV got so up itself, so comfortable at hearing the sound of its own unchallenged voice, that it became part of the problem.
If radical TV has a future, and it probably doesn’t, it cannot return to such production values and can’t just involve patrician, calf-exposing male intellectuals setting the world to rights. But something needs to change. Britain’s got talent? Maybe, but in 2018 our TV has very little subversive to say.