Tony Blair on trial.
I watched 'The Trial of Tony Blair' last week. It came from the same source as 'A very Social Secretary', which I had started watching gleefully a few months ago, but ended up feeling some degree of sympathy for David Blunkett. I couldn't feel any similar degree of sympathy for Blair, and that is puzzling.
There has to be some measure of good in everybody, that is human nature. Sometimes the goodness in a person takes time to be appreciated, and sometimes the same process of time can reverse the picture, and the actions of a man can become questionable.
Until I watched 'A very Social Secretary', my opinion of David Blunkett was coloured mainly by the way the media were presenting him; a rather intransigent man with a mission to stamp down hard upon terrorism, no matter what the sacrifices others (us) might have to make. The play showed that, far from being a coldly-calculating puppeteer, he was as much caught up in the tide of things as the rest of us. It also showed me that a strong desire to do good, coupled with too much power, might be just as bad as an evil man determined to have his way with the world.
However, after his second fall from grace, 'Gunner' Blunkett seems to have been able to throw off the heavy mantle of responsibility and revert to being 'one of us'. His reaction to a proposal to use evesdropping equipment to monitor people's conversations on the streets was to suggest it was an invasion of privacy. He gave no hint that he might be aware of the irony of the situation, so perhaps the memories of his time in office have faded with the reversal of the corruption that the power had laid upon him. As with the potrayal of him in the play as on over-emotional and un-fulfilled male, this human lapse left me thinking that he was after all a warm and caring human being.
So why didn't I get the same insight into Tony Blair after watching the play recently? Was it because it was a speculative work, and therefore didn't have the same sense of 'rightness' that Blunkett's story had engendered? It might have been fiction in that it was looking forwards, not backwards, and the future is as much an open book as the past is a closed one, but there were some wonderful touches to it that made the setting seem real. The irony of Cherie Blair discovering that her neighbourhood was now more Arabic than the Middle East made me laugh, but is a forward-looking insight as valid as a backwards-looking one?
Was it perhaps that the characters were't so close to life? Blair and Brown just didn't seem to be as accurately-portrayed to me as Blunkett and Campbell had been in the first -play. I don't mean that as a criticism of the actors, or of the writer, but I did not feel I was watching the actual men in the same way that I watched Blunkett.
Or was it that, although I had been able to empathise with Blunkett, I could find no way to empathise with Blair? Was he not human? Has he, because of his part in the Iraq debacle, crossed over the line that divides Churchill, Thatcher and Major from Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin? The play showed him haunted by visions of children in the war-torn ruins of their homes, puzzled because his intentions had been good but the results seemed to belie them.
In real life, Blair comes across as the opposite of Blunkett the Home Secretary. There is none of the arrogance that Blunkett showed. Blair always manages to sound as though he cares passionately not only about the issue, but about the cares of his audience. The most abrupt or discourteous thing I have ever seen him do is to brusquely move on from one journalist to the next when he didn't like the question. He doesn't seem like a man who could have blood on his hand. You can't imagine him barking over the phone to 'use machine-guns if you have to, I don't care'. And yet, 'a man can smile and smile, and be a villain still'. Am I seeing the image rather than the real man? Is there a real Blair to see?
I used to be an avid fan of Lexx, and have all of the episodes on tape. When I ever manage to get the time, I shall watch them again. In the earliest episodes was an insect life form with bad intentions towards the human race. It was characterised by jet-black eyes with no iris pattern at all, and when the insect life-force possessed other beings, they too lost their coloured eyes to the obsidian-flood. In the more recent 'Hogwatch', the central villain Mr. Tea-time (sorry. Mr Te Atame), also had one jet-black eye. Two or three years ago, whilst watching two appearances by Bush and Blair, I was struck by the black gaze that each turned upon the camera. It was as if each man was capable of dilating their pupils at will to the point where there was no iris left. Or are they aliens, intent on bringing about our downfall from within, just as His Shadow planned?
Or am I just over-tired and in need of a good long rest?
There has to be some measure of good in everybody, that is human nature. Sometimes the goodness in a person takes time to be appreciated, and sometimes the same process of time can reverse the picture, and the actions of a man can become questionable.
Until I watched 'A very Social Secretary', my opinion of David Blunkett was coloured mainly by the way the media were presenting him; a rather intransigent man with a mission to stamp down hard upon terrorism, no matter what the sacrifices others (us) might have to make. The play showed that, far from being a coldly-calculating puppeteer, he was as much caught up in the tide of things as the rest of us. It also showed me that a strong desire to do good, coupled with too much power, might be just as bad as an evil man determined to have his way with the world.
However, after his second fall from grace, 'Gunner' Blunkett seems to have been able to throw off the heavy mantle of responsibility and revert to being 'one of us'. His reaction to a proposal to use evesdropping equipment to monitor people's conversations on the streets was to suggest it was an invasion of privacy. He gave no hint that he might be aware of the irony of the situation, so perhaps the memories of his time in office have faded with the reversal of the corruption that the power had laid upon him. As with the potrayal of him in the play as on over-emotional and un-fulfilled male, this human lapse left me thinking that he was after all a warm and caring human being.
So why didn't I get the same insight into Tony Blair after watching the play recently? Was it because it was a speculative work, and therefore didn't have the same sense of 'rightness' that Blunkett's story had engendered? It might have been fiction in that it was looking forwards, not backwards, and the future is as much an open book as the past is a closed one, but there were some wonderful touches to it that made the setting seem real. The irony of Cherie Blair discovering that her neighbourhood was now more Arabic than the Middle East made me laugh, but is a forward-looking insight as valid as a backwards-looking one?
Was it perhaps that the characters were't so close to life? Blair and Brown just didn't seem to be as accurately-portrayed to me as Blunkett and Campbell had been in the first -play. I don't mean that as a criticism of the actors, or of the writer, but I did not feel I was watching the actual men in the same way that I watched Blunkett.
Or was it that, although I had been able to empathise with Blunkett, I could find no way to empathise with Blair? Was he not human? Has he, because of his part in the Iraq debacle, crossed over the line that divides Churchill, Thatcher and Major from Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin? The play showed him haunted by visions of children in the war-torn ruins of their homes, puzzled because his intentions had been good but the results seemed to belie them.
In real life, Blair comes across as the opposite of Blunkett the Home Secretary. There is none of the arrogance that Blunkett showed. Blair always manages to sound as though he cares passionately not only about the issue, but about the cares of his audience. The most abrupt or discourteous thing I have ever seen him do is to brusquely move on from one journalist to the next when he didn't like the question. He doesn't seem like a man who could have blood on his hand. You can't imagine him barking over the phone to 'use machine-guns if you have to, I don't care'. And yet, 'a man can smile and smile, and be a villain still'. Am I seeing the image rather than the real man? Is there a real Blair to see?
I used to be an avid fan of Lexx, and have all of the episodes on tape. When I ever manage to get the time, I shall watch them again. In the earliest episodes was an insect life form with bad intentions towards the human race. It was characterised by jet-black eyes with no iris pattern at all, and when the insect life-force possessed other beings, they too lost their coloured eyes to the obsidian-flood. In the more recent 'Hogwatch', the central villain Mr. Tea-time (sorry. Mr Te Atame), also had one jet-black eye. Two or three years ago, whilst watching two appearances by Bush and Blair, I was struck by the black gaze that each turned upon the camera. It was as if each man was capable of dilating their pupils at will to the point where there was no iris left. Or are they aliens, intent on bringing about our downfall from within, just as His Shadow planned?
Or am I just over-tired and in need of a good long rest?
posted by Sopwith-Camel | 8:18 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home