Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy

by David Mitchell

  Everybody really didn’t. Online the outrage was splattered around like Kensington Gore at the end of Hamlet. Artistic directors, theatre critics, playwrights and rival arts journalists all had a pop at how “entitled” and “underqualified” the presenters are, how they apparently wouldn’t be so dismissive of football or novels, and how terrible the BBC is for employing them. Playwright Dan Rebellato tweeted, “Dear @bbc when you need people to talk about theatre, don’t send these idiots, send me. At least I know what I’m talking about,” while arts blogger Victoria Sadler got in with “Hey @BBCFrontRow I think I can help. I actually go to the theatre & have great opinions.”

  I’m not quite sure what a “great opinion” is. Is it the opinion that something’s great? If so, I bet the theatre world would love her to get the job. Or is it a correct opinion? In which case it’ll be that the seats are uncomfortable. Because they are. “Oh, come on!” you may be thinking. “If the seats are so bad, how come it’s so easy to fall asleep?” That’s a poser.

  At this point, I should make clear that some of the most joyous and energising experiences of my life have been in the theatre. I love theatres and I love shows. But the part of theatre I like most is being on stage. I find that enormous fun. You’re all dressed up with something to say and loads of people are watching and, with a fair wind, they might laugh and clap. That is, in my view, lovely.

  I’ve never been so keen on watching. Don’t get me wrong, some shows are brilliant, but some are awful. I feel I should be supportive of theatre because (and I don’t mean this to sound kinky), since I like being watched, it’s only fair that I should watch other people now and again. But I don’t enjoy it anywhere near as much as prancing around myself, and I would be amazed if my view isn’t (possibly secretly) shared by most performers.

  So I’m a bit squeamish about this show-off community, of which I’m proud to be a member, getting on its high horse about how grateful people should be to pay up and be showed off to, and insisting other media be reverential about how magical it all is. I’m not sure theatre criticism should be the preserve of, as Dan Rebellato suggests, those who know what they’re talking about. Because that really just means insiders, people who see a lot of theatre and therefore don’t necessarily react to it like a normal punter. Theatre is not for experts; it’s supposed to be for everyone.

  So when three intelligent, well-informed broadcasters mildly imply that theatre isn’t a huge part of their lives, that shows can go on a bit, that the seats are uncomfortable and it’s nice to have a few songs, I think that’s fair enough. It hardly disqualifies them from broadcasting on the subject – they’ve expressed views held by many. And, when the theatre world is immediately furious and calls those critics sneering lightweights, one suspects they’ve touched a nerve.

  No one would deny that some theatre shows are boring. There’s no shame in that for those involved in the productions if they’ve done their best. They attempted something difficult, so it’s a noble failure. But it’s a failure. And it’s only going to happen more often if theatreland’s knee-jerk response to a bored audience member in a back-breaking seat is to scream at them to show some respect.

  * * *

  A winning photograph in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2017 competition has been disqualified because the animal in the picture turned out to be dead. That’s according to the people running the competition. The photographer swears otherwise.

  This isn’t the overall winner, I should clarify – just the winner of one category. The overall winning photograph is coincidentally also of a dead animal, but in that case it was considered a good thing. In terms of the competition, that is. In general terms, it’s a really bad thing: it’s a picture of a black rhino that’s been killed and had its horn hacked off so that someone evil can sell it to someone ignorant.

  That’s very bad, but the photo is deemed very good largely because that’s so bad. It’s good to do a picture of something bad, that’s the rationale. It helps, like an x-ray of a tumour. It’s better to know. It highlights the rhinos’ plight and, as we all know, raising plight awareness is a major way of making a real difference. Sometimes I think I should get an OBE for my retweeting alone.

  Anyway, it’s an absolutely horrible picture, if you ask me. To want to put it on your wall, you’d have to have something wrong with you. But I suppose that’s the point. And perhaps it shows a lot of technical skill. Though I don’t really see why – it must be trickier to catch a hummingbird mid-slurp or some otters chatting. Ask any of those photographers who do big school groups and they’ll tell you: the trick is to get them to stay still. Which, with a slaughtered rhino, is a piece of cake. The poachers have really helped you out there.

  It was taxidermists who allegedly helped out the photographer of the disqualified picture, though they were no more aware of their complicity than the poachers. This photo, entitled Night Raider and formerly declared the winner of the “animals in their environment” category, depicts an anteater apparently stalking a termite mound in a Brazilian nature reserve. But the Natural History Museum (which runs the competition), having consulted five independent scientists, is convinced the anteater is stuffed. In fact, that it’s a stuffed anteater taken from a nearby visitors’ centre.

  If you examine a picture of this particular item of taxidermy, and then look at Night Raider, you will probably agree. It’s either the same anteater or the one in Night Raider has elected to strike an uncannily identical pose. Perhaps it was taking the piss out of its deceased colleague, adding insult to being-hollowed-out-then-filled-with-wire-and-wood-shavings. It’s possible, I suppose. Certainly, the photographer, Marcio Cabral, continues to assert his innocence and says he’s going to return to the reserve later in the year to prove it. I’d be intrigued to discover how.

  But, for now, let’s take it as a working hypothesis that the museum is right and Cabral borrowed a stuffed anteater and propped it against a termite mound before taking his temporarily award-winning snap. The competition rules state that “entries must not deceive the viewer or attempt to misrepresent the reality of nature”, and obviously he’s done that to some extent. The viewer has been deceived into inferring that the anteater is alive. Then again, it doesn’t really misrepresent the reality of nature: anteaters do attack termite mounds – he just failed to capture it actually happening. So it’s not like a mock-up of a lion having a salad.

  I’m not defending what Cabral has allegedly done, but it gives an interesting insight into what we want from eye-catching wildlife photography. Obviously, it has to look good (or visually arresting in the case of the mutilated rhino corpse) and it has to show something genuine about the natural world. Night Raider ticks both of these boxes, despite the fakery: it’s a pretty picture and anteaters eat termites (the clue’s not in the name). But it seems we also need to believe these photos depict something that literally happened at the moment they were taken.

  It’s like with anecdotes: if a person told you they’d once been mugged, you’d be drawn in, even if the sequence of events was fairly mundane. But if it turned out they hadn’t really been mugged, the story would lose all interest. The events they described will undoubtedly have genuinely happened to someone, but not to whomever you’re talking to – so sod it. They’re just lying. Anteaters attack termite mounds, but that’s not what was actually happening in the picture – so sod it. The photographer’s a liar.

  “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth,” wrote Albert Camus. Well, if Night Raider is a lie, and it tells the truth about anteaters, is it fiction? Yes. Crap fiction. It’s not a very interesting truth – only marginally more compelling than if the anteater was pictured approaching an anthill. My imagined mugging anecdotalist could, instead, have written a short story about someone being mugged. But, if it’s billed as fiction, it has to be twice as entertaining and insightful to get half as much attention as simply claiming: “This just happened to me!”

  This photograph’s level of in
ventiveness is insufficient for it to pass muster as fiction. It’s a much more competitive field. Suddenly you’re not just up against a flower with some dew on it, but Star Wars. Hence the need to pass it off as truth – so it’s not storytelling, it’s cheating.

  It’s not cheating to wait years to get the shot. It’s not cheating to frame out a bin or a power station. It’s probably not really cheating to shout to make some geese take off. But it is cheating for a man to drag a stuffed anteater all the way from a visitors’ centre to a termite mound.

  But if only a wildlife photographer had got a snap of that happening. What a fascinating and authentic image of eccentric mammalian behaviour that would be.

  * * *

  In February 2019, in an interview with the Independent as part of a press junket, the actor Liam Neeson said this: “I went up and down areas with a cosh, hoping I’d be approached by somebody – I’m ashamed to say that – and I did it for maybe a week, hoping some ‘black bastard’ would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could … kill him.”

  Is it because of Liam Neeson, I wonder, that John Humphrys has announced he’s going to retire from the Today programme? Was Neeson’s astonishing interview in the Independent what finally made the great Radio 4 inquisitor realise quite how much you can get out of an interviewee if you give them a bit of space to speak?

  Interviews and interviewing have been in the news a lot. Not only was there the extraordinary confession Neeson volunteered in the middle of what was supposed to be a perfectly vacuous press junket, and Humphrys’s equally unexpected proclamation, but also Maureen Lipman, writing in the Radio Times, had a pop at the modern style of chat show. “The sofa is crammed, like a chapel pew, with English actors telling their juiciest genitalia stories while the host sniggers in a three-piece suit,” was how she described the genre.

  I don’t think Liam Neeson’s anecdote would have amused Graham Norton, though. I can imagine him glazing over in horror and wishing that, instead of putting Neeson on the sofa, he’d been seated on that red tippy chair. If the producers of his new film Cold Pursuit had been able to pull a big chair-tipping lever before Liam could say “black bastard”, they wouldn’t have needed to cancel the premiere.

  By now, Neeson’s words will have been subjected to more scrutiny than some moderately controversial Bible verses, but I don’t think the very first piece of analysis, from Tom Bateman, his co-star, who was also being interviewed, has really been bettered. He went with: “Holy shit.” Come to think of it, that’s also a workmanlike gloss of a lot of Bible verses.

  Neeson’s remarks are, more than anything else, colossally surprising. They seem completely disconnected from the entire narrative of what’s supposedly happening to public discourse at the moment. You know, the whole feeling that celebrities “have to be so careful”. The sense that anyone saying anything publicly needs to tiptoe round the sensibilities of dozens of interest groups; that you never know when you’re crossing some line or other without meaning to; that basically, whatever you say, no matter how bland, “you can’t win”.

  Frankly, I think those fears are often justified. I think freedom of speech is sometimes hemmed in unnecessarily and perfectly nice people who have said something slightly careless can get into unfair trouble. Then again, I’m an affluent white man and I accept that I probably don’t get all the ways in which certain statements can subliminally reinforce prejudice against historically oppressed sectors of society. But that’s been the debate, right? It has, hasn’t it? I wasn’t imagining it?

  And then, quite calmly, under no pressure, in the middle of a press junket, when he could’ve just droned on about how the filming conditions were really chilly or something, a movie star baldly announces that he once went round with a cosh for a week in the hope of killing someone black. It feels like a hallucination.

  We’re all minutely attuned to the subtle ways in which things people say are or aren’t deemed acceptable, our ears straining for the faintest whisper of a dog whistle, and then, “Bang!” It’s like the moment in Fawlty Towers when Basil starts miming to trick Mrs Richards into turning up her hearing aid and then suddenly yells at her. Liam Neeson seems to be asking: “Is this a piece of your brain?”

  In their befuddled shock, many commentators have reached for the obvious question: “Is Liam Neeson racist?” He says he’s not. Many say he is. Others have defended him. The trouble is, even if he is racist, it doesn’t come close to being an adequate explanation of why he said what he said. Being racist might explain why he hung around with the cosh 40 years ago, but it doesn’t explain why he’d tell anyone now. Out of doing it and telling people, in some ways it’s the latter that’s hardest to fathom – and it’s also only the latter that we definitely know happened.

  I haven’t got an explanation, by the way. I’m still on “Holy shit.” It’s just incredibly weird. Was he stuck for something to say? How frightened of an awkward silence can a grown man be? But could it possibly be social anxiety? And a little racism? A mixture of racism and social anxiety? Now he really sounds like Hitler. Or was it the fact that the film he was promoting is about vengeance and so was his story? Did he say it all simply because he couldn’t get over how extremely apposite it was?

  One thing is clear: he shouldn’t do interviews. Some people are saying he shouldn’t do films, but he certainly shouldn’t do interviews. Except possibly, if Lipman is to be believed, the modern sort of chat show. On them, she claims, there are far too many guests, “so we learn nothing about any of them. Nada. Except that they are famous and good sports.” “Oh, if only!” the publicists of Cold Pursuit must be thinking.

  I’m not sure I really want to learn much about the actors who are in the things I watch. I know a lot of actors and most of them are nice people, but I don’t think knowing them helps me enjoy whatever they’re acting in. It makes it more likely I’ll have to bloody turn up and see it, but it doesn’t improve their work, even when they don’t have a history of violent racist plotting.

  It’s illogical really that, of all the people involved in making a film, it’s the actors whom we’re encouraged to know lots of real-life stuff about. It would be much easier to buy into the fictions they depict if we weren’t so fully informed of the reality. Why not tell us about the private life of the designer or the cinematographer? Knowing about their affairs, divorces, strange opinions or huge houses won’t make the fictional characters on screen less believable.

  So, if you like cinema, I think the modern chat show has got it just right. The best way of enjoying a film is to know nothing at all about the actors. Except that they’re famous and good sports.

  * * *

  Sometimes I think I’m the perfect person to analyse the cultural impact of music. I’m pretty sure no one else has ever thought that about me, though. And, actually, even I don’t think it very often.

  My weakness in the role would undoubtedly be my ignorance of music. Not complete ignorance: it’s impossible, it turns out, no matter how little interest you show, to remain alive for 44 years in modern Britain without having heard of Mozart and Rihanna – though I had to check the spelling of the latter. And, come to think of it, I’m quite partial to Magic FM on a car journey, and also I watched that Bros documentary everyone’s going on about.

  But I admit I don’t know much about music. Is that really such a problem, though? The more I think about it, the more I reckon that’s actually what might make me amazing at analysing its cultural impact. I don’t have any musical tastes that could skew my judgment and confuse the analysis with thoughts of whether this bit of music, or type of music, is “better” than that bit or type. I can see what’s really going on, unencumbered by strong views on Coldplay or David Bowie or clapping at the end of movements (which Elvis Presley’s entourage were reduced to at the end). I don’t have a dog in the fight, which makes me ideal as an analyst of dog fighting.

  Someone who does have a dog in the fight is Mark Wigg
lesworth. He’s the former music director of the English National Opera so must be massively keen on music. He’s probably got all of Rihanna’s albums and a poster of Mozart in his bedroom. So I was worried, when I saw he was dabbling in some analysis of the cultural impact of music, that he might be out of his depth. Well, you be the judge. Unless you’re into music at all, in which case perhaps you’d better stay out of it.

  It was about the ENO’s policy of performing operas in English – which means, in the majority of cases, in translation (though I’m sure that’ll change after Brexit, when home-grown opera is freed from its Euro-shackles). This is an issue in the opera world: should operas be sung with the words they were composed for or those the audience can understand? Writing on the music website Bachtrack, Mark Wigglesworth stoutly defended the latter policy.

  If you’re currently struggling to care because this is a discussion of something that happens in rooms you have no intention of entering, then let me try to grab your attention by mentioning the slagging off. Alongside some reasoned argument asserting that “opera is drama first and foremost” and “beauty is not as powerful a medium as meaning” (that’s worth a fridge magnet), Wigglesworth had a tentative dig at his opponents’ motives: “A more unspoken view is one that thinks singing in a foreign language ‘keeps the riff-raff away’,” he said, adding: “I do believe a certain pleasure in cultural elitism exists, even if only by a few.”

  You can feel the nervousness as he wrote that. “I don’t mean you!” he’s reassuring any specific opponent of translated opera who might take offence. “You think what you think purely on artistic grounds, and I respectfully disagree! It’s some other guys, who happen to have the same opinion as you but for much less wholesome reasons, who are the snobs.”