Sky News

NCF director Peter Whittle will be reviewing the news on Sky News tonight at 11.30pm.

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A False Target

NCF director Peter Whittle was one of the guests on BBC 2's The Review Show with Kirsty Wark on Friday night. You can watch it here.

And in the new edition of Standpoint magazine, Peter reviews the new Chris Morris film Four Lions:

MORRIS DANCING AROUND REALITY

Last month, I reviewed here David Baddiel's flaccid movie about inter-racial identities, The Infidel, and complained about its pussy-footing approach to matters Islamic. Well, now we have Four Lions, another comedy set on roughly the same turf, directed and co-written by the satirist Chris Morris, whose credibility within the "cutting-edge comedy community" is unimpeachable. The aim of this exercise seems to be to see the funny side of a bunch of home-grown Muslim suicide bombers and our reaction to them. 

Who do you think you're kidding? Nigel Lindsay in "Four Lions" 

Is this a laughing matter? Morris, who ran the gauntlet of tabloid horror when he famously spoofed the hysteria surrounding paedophilia on his TV show Brass Eye in the 1990s, seems to think so. He told the Sunday Times that the film would seek to do for Islamic terrorism what Dad's Army, the classic BBC comedy, did for the Nazis by showing them as "scary but also ridiculous". In a director's statement produced in the production notes given to the critics, he says: "A bomb goes off. We tear about like headless chickens. Then we try to calm down. We lock the door on our dread...We change our laws. We restrict our freedoms. We lash out at strangers. Brilliant. Of course we long to laugh at our fears but we don't know how."

But is this true? How exactly are "we" lashing out at strangers? More importantly from the point of view of this film, do we really "long to laugh at our fears"? If you think that we are, and that we do, then you are Morris's audience. But I'm not convinced. Denying the possibility of a real threat, pretending that there's nothing really to be afraid of, that bombers are idiots and halfwits, that we ourselves might be to blame for our scattergun over-reactions — now that seems to me to be a far greater problem. 

Morris is beloved of media types whose understanding of Islam, Islamism and terrorism varies between skin-deep and non-existent. Anything which sounds like a good chuckle behind the bike shed is fine by them. They will laugh at Morris simply on principle: here is one of their tribe who has had the contrarian guts, the courage, to go where others fear to tread, who hits "raw nerves", etc etc. The points being made are, actually, beside the point: sending people and situations up is all that matters.

What Morris does, he does with skill. The dialogue in this movie is sharp, fast and a million miles from the "Doctor, doctor, I think I'm a Jew" humour of Baddiel's effort. The performances are good, the film is well structured and the everyday observations ring true. The four lions (in fact there are five) are a group of Doncaster would-be jihadists whom we first meet trying to make a video message prior to an attempt to blow up the London Marathon. Other than one of their number, a white malcontent of the kind to be found in the Socialist Workers Party, they could be the 7/7 London bombers. They're kept in line by Omar (Riz Ahmed) who, of all of them, has a spurious kind of authority founded on a half-baked, half-formulated sense of political grievance. Dry-runs and preparations reveal the sheer idiocy, the bumbling incompetence of the group. They couldn't organise themselves out of a paper bag. The police are revealed to be pretty stupid too, shooting the wrong man and then using tortured jobsworth logic to explain away the error. 

The general cluelessness of both conspirators and the forces of law and order is the source of the film's humour from the start and it never really deviates from this narrow vein. But the Dad's Army comparison is wrong. First, I don't remember the Nazis looming very large in that much-loved series. The humour arose from the amateurishness of a group of ordinary men whose honourable motives were never in doubt. It was rightly assumed that we were with them all the way, that we saw ourselves and our relatives in them, and that we felt enormous affection for the sometimes cackhanded ways in which they attempted to rise to the occasion. The self-appointed army in Four Lions, for all the humour wrung out of their dismal efforts, want to annihilate us. Laughing at their buffoonery doesn't detract from this fact one iota, and it ultimately makes watching the movie an oddly hollow experience.

Are terrorists so incompetent anyway? Apparently, Morris started to think about the film when he read of a plot to ram a US warship with a boat full of explosives that sank. There was also that cut-and-paste ramming of a car into the front of Glasgow Airport. Ha, bloody ha. The truth is that Islamic terrorism has shown itself to be extraordinarily well organised for a good 20 years now. 

Go ahead and laugh at Four Lions but in the real world of 9/11, 7/7, Madrid and Bali, you will truly be seeking refuge in a fool's paradise if you want to pretend that they don't know what they're doing.

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BBC 2 The Review Show

NCF director Peter Whittle is one of the guests on The Review Show tonight on BBC 2 at 11pm.

The other panellists are Ian Rankin, Yasmeen Khan and John Bew.

Under discussion will be Chris Morris's new film Four Lions, Iron Man 2, a new production of Peter Pan and television coverage of the election

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Stifling & Smug

Michael Burleigh, best-selling historian (and member of the NCF advisory committee) has an excellent piece in today's Daily Telegraph:

What has the Left got to be so smug about?

Actors are the most visible manifestation of a much broader cultural and educational establishment that is stiflingly Left-wing.

Corin Redgrave's considerable energies were channeled into sectarian politics Photo: Christopher Cox Let's briefly imagine a parallel arts world. Temporarily forswearing their obsession with the police slaying of Jean Charles de Menezes or WMD, playwrights discovered a new field of human iniquity: a coolly deliberative black US president orders the assassination of citizens in Yemen, with which the US is not at war. No, I don't think this one will be "happening" at the Royal Court. It might over-tax the limited intellectual sinuosity of our playwrights, even though it's not far from the truth.

Where they fear to tread, we always have Britain's 10-a-penny comedians and satirists; you know, the ones who imagine sexual innuendo or swearing are daringly radical. What fun they'll have with Eton, although the only joke is why, after 13 years of a Labour government, it is still objectively better than every other British school. Related Articles Raise a glass to English wine makers Danger of Britain being left behind in space race The Championship: team-by-team guide to the 2009-10 season Michael Gove: 'It is a school's ethos that matters' Barack Obama's speech at Cairo University: Full text Barack Obama speech: the full transcript.

This week, the theatrical world is mourning the death of actor Corin Redgrave. An impassioned fellow, he once expatiated himself into a heart attack over the persecution of travellers. Most of Redgrave's considerable energies were channeled into sectarian politics of a simultaneously nasty and romantic kind. With patrician condescension, this alumnus of Westminister and Cambridge bought the Trotskyite splinter group Workers Revolutionary Party a "Red House", in which their sect leader, Gerry Healy, sexually abused around 26 female comrades.

The theatrical profession's enthusiasm for infantile and murderous politics has a long history, beginning perhaps with the French Revolution in which some of the most notorious Jacobin terrorists were theatre people – the actor Collot d'Herbois tried to update Lyons by demolishing it. All revolutionary movements, from the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks, as well as Fascism, have converted politics into a theatrical spectacle, with plenty of scope for articulate demagogues.

In this country, the Fifties Butskellite consensus virtually obliged dramatists, from John Osborne onwards, to kick against the pricks through an angry social realism which ended up parodying northern working-class life. Nowadays, the white working class is about the only minority one can legally make fun of.

Actors are the most visible manifestation of a much broader cultural and educational establishment that is predominantly and smugly Left-wing. Smug because it seems to seriously believe, without the slightest comparative evidence, that British culture, in the words of Culture Secretary Andy Burnham, has undergone "a renaissance" under New Labour. In what meaningful sense are Brit artists (or historians) "the best in the world"? The more aspects of life in this country approximate those of a failed society, the more insistent becomes the boosterism of "we've never had it so good".

Those who have spent lifetimes bemoaning the Establishment are now doing their best to join it. Taking this to new heights of surreality, in 1998 Tony Blair awarded the veteran apologist for Stalin, Eric Hobsbawm, a Companionship of Honour, uniquely honouring "the greatest living historian" (The Guardian) on whom MI5 has extensive files stemming from his writings in 1940. Another one to watch is TV don, the Hon Dr Tristram Hunt (Westminster and Cambridge) who Lord Mandelson is naturally inflicting on the hapless voters of Stoke. A Conservative blogger suggested that the Tories reply in kind, and recommended a clutch of Tory historians. Tellingly, most of them now work abroad, having long escaped the constricting grip of the Left on academic life.

The Left Establishment bristles with attitudes, which you dispute at the risk of social ostracism, a phenomenon rarely encountered on the Right. Of course, there are tedious Tories. But, in the main, they are more cautious with their anathemas, and are reluctant to declaim on causes they know they can do little to affect, let alone advocating for others what they do their utmost to spare their own offspring. This form of hypocrisy is notoriously well-represented on the liberal Left as they gyrate their children into nominally state-sector elite schools.

Prevalent, too, is a scatter-gun moralism, usually about things the Left is powerless to affect, such as the way in which human rights lawyers have credulously adopted the plight of imprisoned Islamist terrorists. They vent their opinions on everywhere from Chechnya to the Middle East, airily discounting complexities. The career of Dame Helena Kennedy, New Labour's arch panjandrum, is emblematic, as she glides effortlessly from representing alleged terrorists to book prize juries and theatre boards. Cherie Blair is the less camouflaged version of the same tribe.

Next month, we may well have a Conservative government which can lazily suck up to a Left-liberal Establishment which, like the BBC, wishes it ill, or it can choose to do something to introduce a much-needed pluralism into our increasingly stultifying cultural life.

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