Strictly Politics.

Many years ago my student theatre group were in the national finals. After our final performance on Christmas Eve we crashed a party at the Phoenix Theatre Bolton. Arriving stone cold sober at midnight into a party of thespian lovies made me wonder if I was in actual fact a stick. Strictly reminds me of that in these drab autumn weekends. Every year a new cast of none theatricals is thrown into the sun drenched waves of hard work, costumes and glitter and levels of mutual appreciation the likes of which they have probably never experienced before. Without exception they love it. They’re energised, expanded, and, well loved. They find new dimensions to living, that it’s far bigger than they previously imagined. I along with the biggest BBC audience bask in the whole glow of it. In comparison Brexit and parliament’s shenanigans do the exact opposite taking turns to angrily denigrate each other. We, their audience, shiver in the cold of induced despair. SO what if Westminster took a leaf out of Strictly’s book? What if at the end of each week the parties gave their solutions to the weeks business and four well respected ex politicians gave them marks out of ten. They would lose marks for misleading information (poor footwork), bombastic belligerence (bad body position), and poor argument (dreadful top line darling), and well it would be called Strictly Parliament. The Beeb would have a killer show and the rest of us would feel included and slightly more optimistic. And maybe on Monday morning we would go into work feeling we’re working towards something rather than running away from it.

Fakein Hell.

A clip on Instagram shows a herd of sheep. Each time the cameraman says anything the herd erupts into a mass bleat. “nice day”- baaaa, “who wants a banana?”- baaaa as regular as clockwork. Funny but worryingly surreal in these days of fake news and call and response politics. Brexit has become as gripping as Peaky Blinders and we’re closing in on the final episodes of season 2. Politics has become entertainment and as such is beholden to the intrigue of plot twists rather than the truth of some far off reality. We’re reading our reality like it’s a book of entertaining fiction, a gripping who-done-it, a game of Cluedo. And only when a rainstorm turns its pages to pulp in our hands might we see it for what it is. Reality has a continuous thread to it, like piecing back together a complex faulty mechanism. Only by following that thread to its conclusion can we successfully make it work. Each conjecture must be resolved, each relationship understood and each part assembled correctly. But fiction can take any form, it being merely the produce of a mind for other minds to unpick. Each time a political actor does something for effect he or she is introducing a source of fiction, casting a hairline crack in the wheel of progress. At some point though not immediately it will fail to some unforeseen calamity. So Fake News is the province of the losing side because ultimately who would bet a fiction against a fact and win? And pity them as follows not seeing the difference.