Banana-skin humour

The Front Against Censorship has rushed to criticise Public Broadcasting Services for cancelling the programme VIP Xow because of one scene in which former AD chairman Arnold Cassola threw shoes at photographs of the president, the prime minister and the leader of the opposition.

If I were to take the cancellation out of context, then I would agree that it smacks of a rather Tunisian approach to control.

But context is all. The state broadcaster can’t transmit a show in which shoes are thrown at pictures of the head of state for the amusement (ahem) of the masses. The president and the prime minister – now, those are different, but you’d still have to explain to me exactly how this is entertaining or amusing high-level satire of the sort the public broadcaster should be paying for and transmitting.

Scrapping something because it turned out to be rubbish isn’t censorship, and if PBS took its decision on those lines, which I suspect it did, then it should just come out with it and say so isn’t of using the shoes as a get-out clause.

Throwing shoes at the a picture of the head of state is something that belongs on a private television station, but even then you risk a run-in with the law, which says that you can’t be insulting or offensive towards the president. The police might decide, you never know, to be strict about it in between looking for the Mosta egg-throwing culprits and investigating the transmission of pay-for porn channels in hotel rooms.

Many countries have similar laws about the head of state, including home-of-free-speech Britain. The United States, with its championing of the First Amendment which allows even hate speech and violent pornography, has one about the flag. So let’s not get too excited.

There’s also a mammoth difference between insulting and denigrating a person, even if in the guise of humour, and mockery or mimicry. You might have an endless parade of comedians mimicking and impersonating the Queen on the BBC, making fun of her idiosyncrasies, but you will not get somebody shown urinating on her image or throwing shoes at it.

Nor will you ever get anyone burning the United States flag on any television station there, public or private, unless it is in news coverage of anti-American Satan riots somewhere suitably primitive and Islamic.

Besides, mimicking the person is not the same thing as mocking or insulting the role. Mimicking George Abela and making fun of the way he walks and talks is different to insulting him in his role as head of state. Then, you’ve insulted the head of state and not George Abela.

Throwing a shoe is a grave insult, apparently, or has taken on that status in view of fairly recent events. So if throwing a bucket of urine at the president’s photograph would be considered shockingly unacceptable, then so must throwing a shoe.

The trouble is that the producers of VIP Xow, the very same ones who are responsible for that cringe-making and sub-standard Zoo, have neither the intelligence nor the education to work out these distinctions.

That is the root cause of the problems with Maltese ‘satirical shows’. You cannot have satire without intelligence, because satire depends on sharp wit and insight both for its development and for its appreciation. What we are talking about here is relatively dull-witted people producing shows for a remarkably dull-witted audience, the sort which appreciates slapstick humour and music-hall comedy.

Slapstick humour and music-hall comedy have important roles to play in entertainment, but they are not satire and they appeal to completely different sorts of audiences. They are separate genres.

Lots of people here in Malta like to hold up British television satire as the gold standard. You can argue about this forever; the fact remains that you will understand it only if you understand the culture into which it was born. Understanding the language is not enough.

That’s why only a tiny percentage of Maltese people ‘get’ Rowan Atkinson in Blackadder, for instance – despite far more knowing English – while Atkinson is a runaway hit in Mr Bean, the comedic descendant of Stan & Laurel and Charlie Chaplin.

Even intelligence alone is not enough, by any means. I’ve seen clever people glaze over right through some of the best satirical shows in recent television history, completely mystified at the proceedings. I have sat next to a very clever person who dozed with boredom right through Bruno.

The British satirical shows some love to praise are not produced by people of average wit and intelligence. On the contrary, they are the work of people who are, to a man and woman, extraordinarily intelligent and highly educated (Sacha Baron-Cohen included), even if not through conventional means. Truly, it takes a wise man to play the fool, because fools are capable of no more than playing themselves.

Then there’s that pesky cultural difference which, coupled with the pressure to ratchet up viewership figures, means that the Maltese version of Yes, Minister would necessarily have the minister letting go loud farts when he thinks nobody is listening, while the civil servant smirks behind the door, slipping on spilled coffee and falling because he’s got his tie trapped in the car-door. And all of it done with that hammy ‘this is my acting voice; now watch, there’s a joke coming’ delivery.

“It did not cross our minds that the scene was in bad taste or potentially illegal,” VIP Xow’s Chrysander Agius told the press. Perhaps not – but what is of even greater concern is that it didn’t cross their minds that it wasn’t funny.

Oh, look, there’s Arnold Cassola throwing shoes at George Abela, Lawrence Gonzi and Joseph Muscat! I’m killing myself here! Somebody slap me on the back! Quick, quick, a glass of water, quick!

I happen to think that Public Broadcasting Services took advantage of the incident to cancel a show it wanted to get rid of anyway because it’s so bad. Perhaps it should do its choosing a lot more carefully next time, and leave this kind of thing to the political stations.

This article is published in The Malta Independent today.