Beaton, not stirred

Last year the Indy chose the headline, Is Alistair Beaton Britain's greatest living satirist?, to trail its profile of the Spitting Image writer turned playwright.

The answer is clearly no*, as anyone who has seen his most recent works - The Trial of Tony Blair and A Very Social Secretary - will well understand. (He was also, lest we remember, co-responsible for 1990’s Dunrulin’, an execrably unfunny BBC1 sit-com depicting Margaret and Denis Thatcher’s post-Downing Street lives.)

Rather, he is the clunking fist of modern satire - shades of grey, nuance, character development and subtlety are all knocked to the four corners of the earth by his tediously heavy-handed approach.

Tomorrow, Mr Beaton’s executive producer on those earlier collaborations, David Aukin, turns his attention to John Prescott in ITV1’s Confessions of a Diary Secretary. I won’t be watching. Nor, it seems, will The Guardian’s John Harris, who lambasts it as “another contribution to the chain of comedies and dramas in which TV's much coveted edginess is simply a matter of wildly speculative scripts about politicians in office”.

However, I do feel the need to stick up for the show in one respect. Mr Harris alleges that:

Its acme of awfulness is a reconstruction of the watershed Brown-Blair summit at Prescott's Admiralty Arch flat in 2004. Brown requests a higher chair than Blair's, only for the latter to observe that - please, hold on to your sides - "Gordon's always looked down on me."

He’s entitled to his opinion about the humour. But, at least if we are to believe the Indy on Sunday’s political editor, Steve Richards, the incident is real enough. Indeed, he wrote a column describing just such a scene in July 2004:

The truce began last November [2003], when Mr Prescott famously hosted a dinner, acting as a mediator for both men after they had fallen out in public. Friends of the duo describe that evening as "cathartic". Mr Prescott is uniquely trusted by both figures. Indeed if there was not a John Prescott there would be a need to invent one in the current stormy climate. I am told that when the three of them first sat awkwardly around Mr Prescott's table, Mr Brown complained about his chair, that it was uncomfortable and too low. Mr Prescott rushed off to get the Chancellor a more satisfactory seat. He asked Mr Blair if he also wanted a new chair, to which the Prime Minster replied, "No, it's alright, Gordon has always looked down on me." That characteristically self-deprecating and accurate joke lightened the tense proceedings.

I have to say I find it hard to believe that (rather pointed) joke would actually have lightened the atmosphere between Messrs Blair and Brown. But I find it even harder to believe that this example of accurate characterisation will transform Confessions from overblown farce into acute satire.

* The answer is Chris Morris as any fule kno.

Correction (28/2/07): this post originally, and erroneously, referred to Alistair Beaton as the writer of Confessions of a Diary Secretary. The only link to Mr Beaton is via the show's executive producer, David Aukin, and I have amended the article accordingly. Though he hasn't requested I apologise - simply to correct what was wrong - I'd like to take this opportunity do so anyway.

Why journalists and politicians should get out more

John Harris - a likeable left-winger who recently managed, through painful contortions and with multiple nose-pegs, to square his conscience with re-joining the Labour Party - yesterday railed against the complacent assumptions of the liberal media. (That he did so in, of all places, thegrauniad has its own internal irony.)

Still, it’s a well-written, well-argued and well-timed piece:

Just before this year's local elections, I spent time in Stoke-on-Trent … where the BNP were snapping at the heels of a broken-down Labour party, sending round leaflets that read less like the Potteries' take on Mein Kampf than something put out by the Socialist Workers' party ("Labour betray the working man and woman - potteries, mining steel ... all destroyed"). The regenerated urban wonders of Manchester were less than an hour away, yet here were scenes that are actually more common than some people would like to believe: walled-up factories, Poundstretcher shops, low-paid service-sector jobs, and the abiding sense that the good life was happening somewhere else. A couple of days later I ended up discussing all this with a former editor of a tabloid newspaper, who looked at me as if I was slightly mad. His counterargument was based on the usual mirage of limitless affluence and what used to be known as embourgeoisement: "Britain is booming," he snapped back. And there it was, the predictable sound of a cloistered elite that either misinterprets macroeconomic statistics or fails to see much beyond the end of its own metropolitan nose.

Much of what Mr Harris writes is true - both that there is huge poverty (relative and absolute) in the UK, and that this is largely ignored by the national media, cosily ensconced in their latté-sealed designer-metropolises.

There is a real and growing disconnect between what is reported - whether by the media or government - and what is actually the case.

Unemployment today may stand at 1.7 million - but there are another 2.7m folk claiming incapacity benefit, many of whom would once have been regarded as unemployed before the Government ‘adjusted the figures’.

And though the CPI inflation rate stands at 2.4%, we all know that actual inflation is much higher than this because the Government excludes those things which might be considered inflationary (where I work we factor in 5% as the real increase in annual costs).

Mr Harris and I would disagree on how you solve the appalling inequalities that still exist: I believe you can best help people by giving them access to those markets which those of us who are comfortably off unthinkingly take advantage of each day; he would argue for a state-sponsored solution that requires people to come cap-in-hand to government to have their poverty date-stamped. Where we can agree is that the scale of the problem has to be acknowledged, and that the media’s self-reinforcing and panglossian attitude is stifling debate.

Sure, parts of Britain are booming. Mostly they’re the parts where journalists and politicians live. They, we, should get out more.