‘Party Animals’: The Politics of Youth
As if we needed another, it looks like BBC2’s new ‘political’ ‘drama’, ‘Party Animals’, is one more harbinger of the new Dark Age that’s poised to flatten all in its path in a tsunami of twattery. With Chris Moyles riding at the forefront like a doughnut-stuffed horseman of the apocalypse, obviously.
Making its debut this week, the show performed the singular feat of simultaneously being an allegory for the old Dark Age that swept through Europe in the early Middle Ages *and* being symptomatic of the cultural cretinism that’s giving birth to the new one.
For those that missed it (which was most of you, it only garnering 1.3 million viewers), ‘Party Animals’, as the title suggests, follows the daily lives of a bunch of young Westminster insiders as they shag, snog and snort their way across the 21st century’s political landscape.
Just as Europe in the Middle Ages was dominated, to its detriment, by young, uneducated princelings, ‘Party Animals’ sees virtue in the country’s political machine being run by twenty-somethings who seemingly know next to nothing. So much so, one of the characters, who is 31 and deemed past it, is killed off in a bloody road accident.
All the elements you’d expect are present and correct: the two cocky work-hard/play-hard lobbyists who, when not subsisting on a nocturnal diet of coke and Jack Daniels in order to clinch their deals, are coming up fresh as daisies the next morning to throw a football to each other in the office; the gorgeous but hard-bitten female reporter; the ball-breaking woman MP with the heart of gold; and the token ethnic character, a female researcher who, naturally, is shagging her married Tory MP boss.
The piéce de resistance, however, and the character we’re supposed to identify with the most, is Danny, the quietly-spoken, slightly clumsy but driven and caring researcher for aforementioned cold-but-gold MP. He’s poorly dressed with greasy hair, geeky specs, drawls in flat Naarthern vaarls, and he moons over the office intern. Like Jarvis Cocker without the machismo.
The thing is, without the portraits of politicians that line the corridors the characters are always striding down (the one of David Cameron looks like he’s being obscenely inflated), you could easily forget the show revolves around politics. The ‘Good Behaviour Bond’, a reward for ASBO kids going straight, that Danny and his MP try to get through Parliament is what Alfred Hitchcock called the ‘macguffin’ - a hook on which to hang what passes for the plot. For all its relevance, they could have been sweating over the Arc of the Covenant, a recipe for egg salad or, considering the dramatic tension that was stirred up, a sodding Mars Bar.
In an age where nobody, except for the show’s writers apparently, thinks taking cocaine or swigging tequila from the bottle is particularly ‘edgy’ any more, the whole premise could have been set in a provincial village Rotary Club and had the same impact. Or on a pig farm in 9th century Saxony.
Christ, it was shit.
(First published in this week’s edition of The Friday Thing.)
Posted on February 2nd, 2007 at 3:43 pm
Oh good, a This Life for the 21st century.
I never saw, This Life. Now I know to avoid it. Thanks!
Thing is, calling it shit implies that there was some substance to it, whereas it was just so bland and utterly meaningless that it left no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ judgement possible, just ‘meh’.
You mean you’re not past it at 31? I know I was.
Did the camera wobble around a lot aswell?
As a twenty something westminster village/lobbyist wannabe, can I tell you that the danny characters do exist? They are also delusional, believing that the fate of the country hangs in the balance every time they pick up the phone. This is why Party animals exists: to enable these delusions. I might add that anyone who’s anyone in politics is busy at 9pm on wednesday nights and only the Danny types of this world are available to watch it. K Street is way cooler.
Jeez it does sound bad!BBC’s conception of the political class presumably.
Mind you the coverage of real politics on the BBC is as bad.Every edition of Newsnight,Question Time is dominated by pundits who have no real idea what they’re talking about.In fact the Any Answers phone-in section of the Radio 4 Any Questions debate wherein the public comment on what the panel have said has become increasingly embarrassing for Dimbleby in that the people ringing in demonstrate as often as not a far greater understanding of the topics discussed than the panel.
One of the panel on Question Time last Thursday was Tristan Hunt billed as an “historian”.I think he’s of those in-house BBC history men,like Niall Ferguson,the one who sexes up the Empire ( that’s the British one from which the “Liberal” US one has a lot to learn …you get the level yea ?).This Hunt was asked whether he thought our foreign policy helped create muslim fundamentalism.Yes he waffled he could see why the question had been asked but no it wasn’t Blair no it was something essential,intrinsic to Islam that made these guys hate us!
Then as he was ogled by Mark (rehabilitated rentboy ) Oaten,the Liberal MP,he disposed of any responsibility any prime or foreign minister might have for muslim disquiet.
Well this is about as sexy as BBC political coverage gets!Oaten,by now salivating,probably didn’t disagree outright with Hunt but didn’t totally absolve the government and politely made as much political capital in the time allowed.
I don’t know how it ended but the general and widespread disgust felt and quietly expressed re- British foreign policy by the overwheming majority of the British muslim community barely got a mention before I retired wondering what kind of fantasy world these people live in.
Evidently it’s a world where young uneducated princelings still disport
themselves and laud it over the great unwashed.Still at least we can turn them off!