YOU can’t say television doesn’t make you sit back and wonder. Take The West Wing, which returned to Channel 4 last night. How is it that a gang of scriptwriters in Hollywood can draft more coherent, more impressive, more inspiring campaign-trail speeches than veteran political speechwriters who have years of specialist Washington experience?
For instance, can you imagine Martin Sheen’s Josiah Bartlet being asked if he’d have gone to war against Saddam if Saddam had refused to disarm and replying, as John Kerry did, “You bet we might have!”? Is it likely that one of Jed Bartlet’s advisers could have persuaded his boss to quip, as Kerry did, that the “W” in George W. Bush stands for “Wrong”, thereby allowing wags to snigger that this may be so, but Americans still don’t know what “John Kerry” stands for?
Scriptwriters working on The West Wing also have the knack of making politics seem exciting, occasionally even high-minded, when we know that in reality politics is a world inhabited by people such as Clare Short and Ken Livingstone and Al Gore and Dick Cheney, none of whom you’d trust to organise your sock drawer, let alone run a country.
The reason we are able to focus so clearly on how wide the gulf is between the fictional and real White House candidates is because we rejoin Bartlet at much the same stage in his re-election campaign as that of the two real presidential hopefuls slugging it out in America.
This coincidence is the result of Channel 4 viewers of The West Wing lagging a series behind their E4 cousins, who are already on series five. Anyone know why? Does Channel 4 figure that the audiences who yearn to watch Big Brother around the clock on E4 (the televisual equivalent of watching photosynthesis) are the very people who are most likely to be aching for first sighting of a series which portrays the policy-wonk inner workings of the White House?
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Bartlet is ahead in the fictional polls on TV, but he could probably run in the real November ballot and be elected the next president of the US if George Bush and John Kerry were his only rivals. And remember, Sheen not only has the requisite big hair like Kerry’s, he even has the requisite Vietnam experience. No need to rely on conflicting reports on whether he was there or not, or of how many he killed. We saw it all with our own eyes in Apocalypse Now.