The English and the Irish, with their profound and deep wells of literary
achievement, have had a great deal to say about each other, but for all the
eloquence and logorrhoea, they’ve rarely been able to rise above turgid,
purple, otiose drivel. It’s astonishing when you remember how much of each
other’s lives we’ve taken up and how much thought, emotion, prose, poetry,
history, drama, essays and epistles have been poured into Anglo-Irish
relations and how embarrassingly bad most of it was and is. Try to think of
some piece of our shared culture that is still readable, watchable or
repeatable. Swift’s A Modest Proposal, perhaps, Yeats, a bit of Brendan
Behan, though he’s little more than a coarse period piece now. The three
recent decades of Troubles were replete with chronic journalism and
buttock-clenchingly clichéd drama. It is as if we were too close to see each
other clearly.
No medium has suffered from Hibernian hyperbole as much as television, slickly
addicted as it is to the pleasing truism, the received emotion and the
collectively guilty sentimentality. TV’s relationship with Ireland and the
English has grown out of buckets of unquestioned colonial grovelling and
Celtic whimsy plus an addiction to tragedy. On television, Ireland is a
nation obscured by mythic truths that everybody already knows. The latest
offering in the Irish blood and Guinness soap opera was Five Minutes of
Heaven.
I’m not entirely sure what this thought it was. It wasn’t strictly a
mick-taking docudrama. Neither was it faction, nor a straight piece of
storytelling. It said it was based on the experience of two real people and
was a story of reconciliation, or its absence. Strictly as a piece of drama,
it was cast in the long tradition of Anglo-Irish overwriting. As ever, the
Celts were credited with being in love with words at the expense of
coherence or logic, and its plot came on like a 19th-century French operetta
without music, so after an opening that was contemporary and vaguely
believable, we were worked up to an ending that was fancifully and mawkishly
melodramatic.
And all this would have been, in Yeats’s phrase, just more blood and sucked
sugar stick, if it weren’t for two strikingly credible performances: Liam
Neeson as a reformed and emptily born-again UVF assassin and James Nesbitt
as the messy and raging brother of his victim. They were characters that
were watchable in a drama rather than as impersonations in a reconstruction.
So it had a greater truth by being freed from the hobble of mere facts. As
ever with Ireland, the audience brought in its own packed lunch of
prejudice, not least the knowledge of the re-emergence of terrorist killings
and Neeson’s own personal tragedy. Both actors were remarkably succinct at
revealing a speechless internal anxiety and conflict. They made this not
just simply watchable but compelling.
Oratory is all anyone talks about at the moment. Apparently it’s back, and
it’s been returned to the podium and the lectern by Obama, of course, who is
turning out to be a veritable Swiss army knife of civic lost property. He is
the Roy Castle of politics. Is there no bleeding end to his talent? The
thinking woman’s doner kebab, Alan Yentob, took his camera off to the
presidential inauguration and used it as a platform to declaim on the
history of public speaking. Yentob is as pixelated and thunderstruck by the
new president’s presence as everyone else. There was no question of
objectivity here, he was a pilgrim. Now I’ve heard Obama speak, and I’m less
enamoured than most of you. He sounds like another skinny lawyer with a
mellifluous voice and he’s not as good as the West Wing.
In Yes We Can! Yentob compiled a collection of the predictable
highlights of speechifying down the ages in a sort of Top 10 Now That’s What
I Call Talking: JFK asking not; Roosevelt with nothing to fear; King’s
dream; Churchill on the beaches; Mark Antony borrowing ears and Henry V
filling his breaches. It was all a bit like a hurried school project
pillaged from the internet.
The programme’s assumptions seemed to be all wrong. Oratory didn’t go away, it
just went everywhere. It’s only the politicians who stopped being good at
it. Everybody else has been talking 19 to the dozen. Listen to DJs on the
radio or advertising or the thousands of motivational speakers or TV chat
shows. The world is full of the sound of voices. There must be thousands of
years of them on the internet. We’re replete with spoken words. Lecture
halls, theatres and literary festivals are all sold out with audiences
yearning to hear stuff. Oratory, in all its variety, has never been more
cacophonous. It’s only politicians who have become dull and tongue-tied and
self-conscious and guarded about speaking in public. Obama sounds as good as
he does because he came after a president who purposely dumbed up and
because everyone else around him is so god-awful.
Yentob naturally went to the Lincoln Memorial to dissect the Gettysburg
address, a fine and ringing funeral oration. On the opposite wall, he might
have noticed another speech, perhaps more appropriate to the occasion:
Lincoln’s second inaugural address, made a few months before the president
was assassinated. It is, I think, the most perfectly moral, just,
conciliatory and thoughtful wartime speech ever made. It contains the
eye-melting phrase: “It may seem strange that any man should dare to ask a
just god’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s
faces.”
Yes We Can! failed to listen to its own subject. It wasn’t a coherent
argument. It was never clear what it was trying to tell us: was oratory a
good thing or a selection of glib tricks and sophistry to gull the public?
Is it content or delivery that counts? The great thing about Lincoln’s
Gettysburg address is that none of us heard how he said it. Those who did
were singularly unimpressed. It’s the written word that continues to move
and sustain long after the spoken one has disappeared into thin air. The
very best American orator was publicly mute. Thomas Jefferson refused point
blank to make speeches, but wrote the single greatest piece of declamatory
prose, the Declaration of Independence, which has shouted across 300 years,
but was never spoken out loud.
Oratory was passed on to the most bizarre of reality talent shows this week. The
Speaker is what Methodists and the United Reformed Churches might have
come up with as a godly answer to The X Factor. It is a nationwide
competition to find the best teenage orator, to discover, or rather uncover,
a whole regiment of wannabe William Hagues. The judges were decent: Jo
Brand, the district nurse of cheap and hopeless TV, always on call to help
out an ailing format; a motivational basketball player; and a Rada drama
teacher out of an Ealing comedy with a terminal case of dressing-up-boxitis.
The problem with this programme is everything about it and everybody on it.
I mean, what sort of 17-year-old wants to make public speeches for the sake
of speaking? In fact, this wasn’t about oratory at all. It was auditions for
dramatic presentation, attracting strange overmothered stand-up drama kids.
My own monosyllabic teenager took a cursory look and declaimed down her
nose: “What do they get for this?” It’s a question that still hangs. There
is no cash, no recording contract, no invitation to the Conservative party
conference. Perhaps the winner gets a bell and a job as an apprentice town
crier.
Alexandra Tolstoy had a moment in the Tatler spotlight some years back when
she turned up waving a mane of blonde hair, her famous name and an
Uzbek/Mongolian/Tajik horseman who she’d found on the Silk Route and
married. If I remember, they planned to raise foals together. Now she’s
back, fronting Horse People, a series on horses and the people who
live with them, a sort of a four-legged Top Gear. For all her Russian
background, she is severely handicapped by one of the worst cases of St
Trinian’s delivery you can find on TV, but gamely the gel compensates by
being up for it. Sadly, having gone all the way to Siberia, she took a
cameraman called Wayne who was as bad a photographer as I’ve seen outside of
CBBC.
We watched small, wizened horse farmers who herded small hairy horses that
didn’t appear to be much good for anything except eating. Alexandra’s
steely, Sloaney aplomb dissolved into tears as she watched them whack some
old mare on the head for dinner. What’s really odd about horse people is
that they don’t mind putting vicious metal bars in horses’ mouths, kicking
them with spiked heels, whipping them with sticks, making them pull
carriages or ride into riots, but they have hysterical fits of the vapours
when someone suggests eating one. As great old uncle Tolstoy might have said
about this programme, all happy horses are alike, every unhappy horse is
unhappy in the same way.
Five Minutes of Heaven (BBC2, Sunday)
Yes We Can! The Lost Art of Oratory (BBC2, Sunday)
The Speaker (BBC2, Tuesday)
Horse People (BBC2, Tuesday)
