Goggleboxing clever

I am going to let you in on a secret that too many of the too online and those in SW1 (this is a Venn diagram that is, basically, a circle) forget – politics doesn’t have to be po-faced.

This week we will see the Budget announced by the Chancellor, John Healey. We have had a few indicative announcements – the protection of low-income pensioners, a doubling of the budget for dealing with rough sleeping – but mostly it has been kept in fairly close secrecy. Politics is continuing as it has done and will do with those at the centre making key decisions that will affect all of our lives.

Too many think that this responsibility means that politicians should be kept above us all. A separate breed who move around in their grey suits never showing their taste, their personal passions, their preferences for fear of being on the wrong side of a cultural argument. Those who want our politicians to behave as superannuated civil servants would keep politicians as a breed apart from the rest of us. I cannot stress how wrong-headed I think this is. And let’s be blunt. Labour tried this in its recent leadership and it clearly didn’t work.

READ MORE: 2008 and all that…

This discussion has come to the fore following the Prime Minister’s appearance on Gogglebox (along with Liverpool Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram).

For many years, I co-hosted a podcast called The Zeitgeist Tapes, which looked at how popular culture covers politics. We looked at things as diverse as Mr Bates vs The Post Office, the Pickwick Papers and Dirty Dancing (which I contend is the most political film of the 1980s). The title was taken from a phrase in The Thick of It where the PM is given a clips tape of the week’s telly to allow him to sound like a human able to reference the week’s cultural conversation.

I suspect that episode was inspired by the moment when Tony Blair, someone who (as PM) always understood the importance of being a part of the national conversation, raised the “campaign” to free fictional Coronation Street character Deirdre Barlow. 

There was a sense of sneeriness in The Thick of It and this scene was no different. The joke was the PM needing the tape because he had absolutely no idea about what was happening on the telly. In this, writer Armando Iannucci was reflecting the view that politicians should stay out of ordinary things like having a view on soap opera storylines.

While I loved The Thick of It as much as anyone else, I always had to separate that love from my disagreement with its narrative about the people who populate politics and the ways in which they are – and aren’t – like the rest of us.

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Burnham has been criticised by other politicians across the spectrum from a highly animated Green councillor to Kemi Badenoch. Both say that Andy Burnham shouldn’t have time to do Gogglebox. This might be a reasonable argument if there was any sense that the few hours it took to film the show – which was, let us not forget, for Stand Up to Cancer – meant that other work was dropped. But this government seems to be carrying on as usual with a lot of pre-budget activity taking place.

What we are actually seeing is Burnham’s downtime being well utilised to show his human side and bring this into living rooms across the UK. The PM was sitting on the sofa in Downing Street in a fetching cardigan chatting with his mate about Countdown and misting up over the stories of cancer sufferers. His scenes were mixed in with those of other famous folk as well as some of Gogglebox’s much-loved regulars. And his responses were much the same. And that’s the powerful point.

There are times when politics can and should rise above the ordinary. We need leaders who can stand above the fray and galvanise us as a nation. But knowing that these extraordinary people also have ordinary lives is essential as we try to understand how the policies they are implementing will affect our ordinary lives.

Being po-faced is such an unattractive quality. We rarely want to spend time with such austere people in our real lives. So why are a noisy minority so convinced that this is an essential quality in our politicians? The public aren’t. But left wing politics often falls into the trap that caring passionately about injustice has to come along with never experiencing joy.

Labour has always struggled with this sense, but we also have a long tradition of support for the arts and culture – high and low. We should always be the party of bread and roses too. Voters need to see themselves in their politicians. And sometimes that means showing them that we too are a bit crap at Countdown. 

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