TV review: Posh and Posher: Why Public School Boys Rule
Britain and Great White Silence
Why the toffs are back in charge is a big question; it's a
shame Andrew Neil didn't have the answers
John Crace
@JohnJCrace
Thu 27 Jan 2011 07.59 GMT First published on Thu 27 Jan 2011
07.59 GMT
Posh and Posher Andrew Neil tv review john crace
What happened to
social mobility?
We're continually being told "we're all in this
together" but politicians are notoriously edgy when their own social
mobility comes under scrutiny. So with three-quarters of the coalition cabinet
now millionaires and most of the top jobs in all parties sewn up by public
school or Oxbridge graduates, Andrew Neil's Posh and Posher: Why Public School
Boys Rule Britain (BBC2) was a timely examination of why, after a succession of
state school-educated prime ministers from Harold Wilson to John Major, we have
returned to a 1950s political elite.
In many ways the question was more interesting than the
answers, which followed the predictable line of a cultivated sense of
entitlement, social networking and a financial cushion that enables the
ambitious to work for next to nothing as special parliamentary advisers in the
hope of getting parachuted into a safe seat at a later date.
It didn't help that Neil kept moving his own goalposts so it
was hard to follow the argument. He started by talking about public schools in
general, then rapidly narrowed it to just two – Westminster and Eton – without
worrying why those from other public schools miss out. He then shifted to
Oxbridge and while there is an overlap and a similarly pernicious sense of
closed shop, it's not the same thing.
He was on much stronger ground when he got on to education
in general. Like many high achievers of his generation, Neil was a grammar
school boy and he made a straight correlation between the arrival of
comprehensive secondary education and the rebirth of the English political
elite. Despite this he couldn't bring himself to call for the reinstatement of
a two-tier system, as the price of consigning 80% of teenagers to the limited
expectations of a secondary modern was not one worth paying. So we were rather
back where we started.
Most telling were the absences. The message must have gone
out that the topic was toxic and no one important should talk to Neil under any
circumstances. So he was left talking to past-their-sell-by-date Tory grandees,
the sidelined David Davis, and Peter Mandelson, who will talk to any camera
that's pointed at him. The highlight was the Tory backbencher and wealthy
Somerset landowner Jacob Rees-Mogg. Here was a clown who could win the next
election for Labour singlehandedly with his plummy declaration: "I am a
man of the people. Vox populi, vox dei." Alan Johnson's cameo appearance
as the lone trade unionist took on a ghost-like poignancy after his resignation
last week sounded another death knell for social equality.
At least some ghosts came back to life. Last year Herbert
Ponting's film of Scott's last trip to the Antarctic got an HD tart-up and in
Great White Silence (Discovery) we were treated to magical images of both ice
and men. It was like going through a wormhole to be back among an expedition
whose collective memory has long since been as frozen as their bodies. All that
spoiled it was James Cracknell. The former rower may have been to the
Antarctic, but he is no polar historian and his ability to misinterpret almost
everything he saw during his film commentary was breathtaking.
As the ponies and the motor sleds were unloaded from the
Terra Nova, Cracknell hailed Scott's modern approach to polar transport. He
didn't mention that the ponies were spectacularly useless as they sank into the
snow, nor that the sleds continually broke down in the cold and were abandoned.
He accepted Scott's decision to abandon the dogs on the Beardmore Glacier,
saying they couldn't pull uphill, and he made a virtue of manhauling, while
failing to acknowledge that Amundsen's dogs pulled the Norwegians all the way
up on to the Antarctic ice-cap far more quickly.
He praised Scott's decision to leave the final make-up of
the polar party to the last minute, when most recognise that his
spur-of-the-moment decision to take an extra man to the pole when he only had
provisions for four was a fatal error. He hailed Scott's devotion to science in
collecting geological samples, when Scott's own diaries reveal this was mainly
a piece of face-saving after coming second, and the extra weight may have
contributed to his team's death.
It was a wonderful piece of rehabilitation for Scott, but as
history it was desperately flawed. You'd have been better off watching the film
as Ponting originally intended. With no sound.
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