Hilarious... just watched a trailer for next week's Dispatches documentary on Channel 4. The trajectory of Dispatches over the years mirrors Channel 4's fall from being the essential channel on British TV in the 80s and early 90s, through to being a shock-jock parody of the cutting-edge now, engaged in a desperate attempt to grab audience share (or not so desperate in the case of Big Brother.
Whilst Dispatches doesn't usually plumb the depths of deliberately misleading, disinformative nonsense like The Great Global Warming Swindle (which I will do a post on once I've re-watched it, if I can face it, sometime next week), it's rarely a classic. To a large extent this is because it seems to be a programme which is regularly up for hire by any political commentator who can think of a wacky idea for a programme, or even a title. Sometimes this format can pay off - for example Peter Oborne's documentary Why Politicians Can't Tell the Truth during the 2005 election was a work of genius - but, in the hands of a lesser talent (which most of the people approached to do Dispatches sadly are) it's pants. And Peter Hitchens, who is doing a show next week attacking David Cameron as a "Tory Toff", is pretty much the least talented of the talentless. Just from the trailer, this looked like the crappiest programme ever: to whom, exactly, is the exposure of Dave as a "Toff" gonna be news? Who on earth (apart from Sion Simon) has EVER bought the fiction that Dave is "one of the lads"? You'd have to be brain dead, or Peter Hitchens (the same thing?) to buy this shit.
There are many ways to make a probing, critical programme which would analyse what Dave Cameron is really up to with the 'New' Tory party, and whether he would make a good Prime Minister. But this programme (next Monday at 8pm) won't be one of them. And none of those probing, critical programmes will ever be made by Peter Hitchens. Ever.
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