On talkSPORT on Friday night, George Galloway, the MP turned cat impersonator turned phone-in host, was busy lowering expectations for Channel 4’s The War on Britain’s Jews? “Richard Littlejohn,” he told a caller who had expressed reservations about the documentary’s presenter, “is a drivelling guttersnipe who long ago fell out of the gutter into the sewer . . . This man is a moron. This man is a boor. This man is an idiot.”
Any Galloway listener who actually went on to watch the programme would have been surprised to find the “moron” from the Daily Mail sounding passably credible on the subject of the rise of British anti-Semitism. It is a serious matter. Since 2001, antiSemitic incidents have almost doubled to 594 last year, which, Littlejohn calculated, was “more than ten every week”.
He interviewed a rabbi attacked by a gang in North London, stood outside a Jewish school in Manchester guarded like a fort and spoke to the local chief constable who said attacks on Jews had gone up more than 20 per cent in two years. The scourge of the Left even talked to Labourites, first the MP John Mann whose committee had concluded anti-Semitism was a growing problem, and then to Lorna Fitzsimons who narrowly lost her seat in Rochdale in 2005 after Muslim activists produced a leaflet pointing out that she was Jewish.
Littlejohn’s presentation was hindered by his addiction to clich?. “You don’t have to be an antiSemite to hate Israel but it helps,” he joshed. And: “Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they are not out to get you.” But when he stuck to the facts he was all right. The BNP is at heart Jew-hating. AntiSemitism is openly expressed in the Middle East. (But then we knew that.) Where he faltered was in his attempts to prove that anti-Semitism had “entered the mainstream” and that the Left, “who pride themselves on their antiracist credentials” were “some of the worst offenders”.
To make that assertion, I assumed, he must have found some pretty juicy quotes from mainstream Leftists. But beyond a marcher’s placard, “We are All Hezbollah Now”, he hadn’t. Peter Wilby, the former editor of the New Statesman – who once foolishly published an anti-Zionist-looking cover (and then apologised) – posited an alternative theory. The Left passionately opposes Israel’s conduct and its criticism sometimes spills into anti-Semitism, but, no, being against Israel was not a “cloak” for antiSemitism. Personally, I’m with Wilby.
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Not, of course, that I would accuse Littlejohn of impugning the motives of others. That would make him no better than a critic who thought his hunt for anti-Semitic Lefties was, in reality, a search for a stick – any stick – with which to beat the Left. Such a critic might as well accuse Channel 4 of trying to discredit a legitimate concern about the rhetoric used against Israel by employing a hack not quite up to the task.
Perhaps it should have hired Lucy Spiller, the editor of the fictional celebrity scandal magazine Dirt, from which Five US’s new import, Dirt, cribs its title. Spiller is played by Courteney Cox as a Friend gone bad, the sort of editor who fires a member of staff for calling her a bitch on a private text and blackmails celebrities to dish the dirt on their peers by collecting videos of their sexual indiscretions.
“I don’t care if you are on your deathbed, your mother is on fire and we are on the brink of a nuclear war, I want those photographs on my desk tonight – give my love to Maria,” she hectored a photographer promisingly at an early stage in the pilot. Sadly, Dirt went from fun to sordid in just 30 minutes – and it was an hour-long show.
An actress overdosed because of a Dirt exclusive, a paparazzi snapper (played by the Brit-actor Ian Hart) turned out to be not just sleazy but schizophrenic; when his cat died in a pool of sick, his cancer had apparently been induced by the magazine’s bad karma. Spiller, meanwhile, keeps both a stun gun and a vibrator by her bed because, you know, she ain’t happy. The tone, like the pacing, was all over the place. Cox was the best thing in it and even she looked confused.
Out of the box
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The early end to the potential saga of kidnapped Margaret Hill in Nigeria will presumably have especially pleased the Channel 4 News presenter Alex Thomson. In a pretty extraordinary outburst, he tells Press Gazette: “I have been sickened by the way the media have allowed themselves to be taken for a full-scale ride by the McCanns.” Madeleine’s parents’ conduct “a contributory factor in the abduction” was “largely down-played or ignored altogether by sycophantic, gullible blanket coverage.” Adrian Chiles returned last night with The One Show and there he’ll be, daily, for the next year. His fellow journalism students at Cardiff are not surprised by his success. While they were struggling with essays for their tutors, young Adrian, I learn, was filing match reports for the News of the World.