Where is all the British political schmaltz?

The Paul Richards Column

British writers and film-makers have seldom produced a portrayal of politics as a noble pursuit, conducted by decent people. The Americans have the West Wing: cracking dialogue, gripping plots, clever characterisation, and great teeth. The West Wing not only gave the Americans the fictional president they wished they had instead of George W Bush, it contributed to the election of the real president they’ve got. In 20 years’ time, people won’t believe that the Matt Santos storyline in the final season of the West Wing was scripted and filmed before the election of Barack Obama. It is art presaging life on a monumental scale.

The West Wing has a long line of cinematic precedents. An American President casts many of the same actors, in different roles just to confuse you. The President in the West Wing is the chief of staff in An American President. But the conceit is the same: decent people can do good, even at the top of the greasy pole.

Dave does the same. Its strap-line was something like: in a country where anyone can become president, someone just did. Dave, a voluntary worker is swapped for his doppelganger the president, and applies the same values of altruism to the US budget as he did to his charity work. It taps into the American sense of democracy and meritocracy, that the little guy can beat the system. You can see the same thing in Mr Smith Goes to Washington fifty years earlier, with everyman Jimmy Stewart working the system to help him community. It is politics as a rerun of the War of Independence: citizens versus the redcoats. In Independence Day, the President is not only a decent guy, but also a fighter pilot who leads the charge against alien invaders. The President as warrior-king, complete with an eve of Agincourt pastiche speech.

What do we get? Jim Hacker: vain, bumbling, insecure, out of his depth, and run ragged by Sir Humphrey. Francis Urquart: psychotic, murderous, and cruel. Politicians from The New Statesman to The Thick of It are depicted as either stupid and talentless, or ambitious and scheming. I am struggling to think of a positive image of politics in any UK drama or movie. Even David Hare’s The Absence of War, a drama based on close observation of Labour’s 1992 election campaign, had as its dominant theme a politician (Kinnock?) with personal flaws and feet of clay.

The closest we’ve ever come to a US-style dramatisation of politics is in Richard Curtis’s Love Actually. The Prime Minister, played by Hugh Grant, is young and good-looking, falls in love with the tea lady, and stands up to the US president at a press conference. Cinema audiences cheered, and Tony Blair referred to the scene in a party conference speech. Here, we see the PM we would probably like to have, and the US president is shown as a bully and sex-pest. And I’ve written about dear old Harry Perkins, the Sheffield steel-worker who makes it to Number 10, in this column before.

So why do American audiences lap it up, and we just sneer? You might argue that the Americans are fonder of their schmaltz than we are. Yet we love all those US rom coms and sit coms. Is the British system more venal and corrupt? Does it simply provide more material? Yet the country that gave us Watergate, Iran-Contra, the Bay of Pigs, gerrymandering and Tammany Hall is hardly above reproach. It is right to say that we have a healthy satire industry in the UK. We love to see our politicians lampooned in Private Eye, humiliated on HIGNFY, or barracked on Question Time. It is a tradition as old as party democracy, rooted in the satirical ballads, polemical pamphlets and vicious cartoons of the 18th century. No wants to return to the era of deference.

But it is the lack of balance that disturbs me. There should be some political schmaltz to counteract the satire. Why has no-one scripted a biopic of Aneurin Bevan or Barbara Castle? Or told the story of Labour’s 1945 victory? Or fictionalised a British Prime Minister who wants to help the poor and improve the country? Surely the way that British politics is so cynically portrayed contributes to our democratic crisis, and not merely reflects it. It may be funny, but it is also corrosive.

It’s a question being discussed on Radio 4’s PM programme on Friday afternoon, and you can hear what I have to say then, unless my unremitting calls for a British West Wing end up on the digital cutting room floor, because the producers think the British are far too cynical.