Mark Thomas: method and madness of a TV comic
Interview by Amy Otchet
Mark Thomas
The owners of Bradley House were exempted from paying capital tax
because their estate was supposed to be open to the public. Mark Thomas led a campaign
to make sure that it was.
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High jinx “It’s like brain surgery with a hammer,” a producer once
said when describing Mark Thomas’ television show, a mix of filmed stunts and improvisation
before a studio audience. Recent highlights include: |
Mark Thomas and camouflaged friends hold up a train transporting radioactive waste.
‘Democracy is not this rigmarole in which a politician puts on a public relations vision on how much you need this person to be elected. It is not about giving someone that you don’t know a mandate to do what they want. Democracy is about being involved in your community and having the information to decide “this is what we want and this is how we want to get it” .’
British TV comedian
Mark Thomas uses pranks and stunts to expose questionable government and business
practices. Thomas says this is democracy in action, but his victims don’t always
agree
Like many or your generation, you trace
your political awakening
back to the UK miners’ strike of 1984-85. But surely it stems back to your childhood,
growing up in a working class family but attending an elite school on a scholarship.
You were part of the “deserving poor”, deemed worthy of a first-class education.
This kind of experience gives you a very rapid education about class… All your
mates at home think you’re posh and all the people at school think you’re common.
So you find yourself caught in the middle. I think you’ll find that many comedians,
in particular, have this sense of being an outsider.
Two heroes of mine were both outsiders: Oscar Wilde, an Irishman who lived in the
cream of English high society, and Dave Allen, a brilliant comedian in a similar
position. Allen did this wonderful routine which I think sums it up.
He’s on stage in London and says, “Well, I tell Irish jokes. And I get in trouble
for telling ’em. But I think ‘sod it! If you cannot laugh at yourself, what’s the
point?’ A round of applause from the studio audience.
So he starts telling Irish jokes. “Two paddies leave Dublin to go to work in London.
The collective IQ of Dublin halves overnight.” A big round of applause. “You’ve got
to be able to laugh at yourself, haven’t you?” he says. Another big round of applause.
Allen goes on. “When the two get to London, the IQ there doubles overnight.” Smaller
round of applause. “I thought we agreed that you’re supposed to be able to laugh
at yourself.”
This catches the audience completely unaware of their own bigotry. That’s the eye
of the outsider.
Your brand of stand-up comedy seems to mean getting up on a soap box to denounce
wrong-doing. Why?
My tour manager always used to say, “It’s in the genes, mate.” You see my dad
was a lay preacher and my great grandfather was a Baptist preacher which I think
is funny. I’ll start to worry about it if my son decides to be a stand-up.
Seriously, do you have to focus on political issues in your work?
Every single thing that anyone says on stage belies their world view. It’s a
political decision to believe that people just want a good night out without having
to think. The person on stage who tells jokes portraying women in a certain way has
made a political decision to reinforce stereotypes instead of challenging people
to think otherwise. That performer is saying, “I want the easiest ride possible.
I want mass adulation on the back of you (the audience) not having to think.” The
difference is that I want mass adulation on the back of people having to think.
How do you design a TV comedy show to make people think?
We look at the series as our own “state of the nation” broadcast. It’s our interpretation
of where Britain is and where we are in relationship to the world.
We try to get in a position where we can ask questions that will illuminate the nature
of power in that situation. With Sellafield nuclear processing plant, the first thing
we did was to prove contamination (see High
jinx) by having samples of earth
from around the site analysed. We could then ask, “Is there a problem with the trains
running through that area to transport the plant’s nuclear waste? Or is there a wider
problem? Is the site irradiated?” The authorities won’t answer. This is a brilliant
situation in which we really get underneath the mask of public relations. The officials’
silence actually says that they’re frightened of the answer.
In the last three years, you’ve evolved from merry prankster to political satirist
and now you’re an information junky. What happened?
In the beginning, the show was about us taking risks—turning up at a cabinet
minister’s home at a quarter to seven in the morning in a tank asking if he could
help us export it to Iraq. Or turning up in Yorkshire during a drought with a tanker
filled with water as a “gift from the people of Ethiopia” after Britain privatized
the water works. We were drawing out the stupidity of the situation.
But the next year, we wanted to refine the show. There were bits which I was very
proud of but it wasn’t mature or rigorous enough. There wasn’t enough information.
So in the second year, we really wanted to be factually accurate. Now in this last
year, we wanted to go a step further and do stories that people haven’t heard about
elsewhere. So we’ve ended up being accidental journalists. We didn’t intend for this
to happen. But now that it has, we quite like it. Do bad for good—that’s basically
the ethos of the show.
Nine times out of ten, I think the most important thing is to actually ask the question
and get it into the public domain. Noam Chomsky, American linguist and activist,
described it very succinctly when he said that the media reflect the dominant interests
in the political climate. . . . Who owns the media? What are their interests? What
are the interests of the ruling elite that they’re working with? How are they setting
the political agenda? Look at any television programme that deals with supposedly
serious political news and you’ll find interviews with government spokesmen or women
on an initiative or piece of legislation that they’ve created. Maybe they’ll address
an issue the government is being attacked about. But nearly all the interviews will
be done with politicians, in studios with reporters who have to come back to those
same officials the next week for more news.
If they decide to actually question the relationships of power instead of focusing
just on the intricacies of elite policy, then they’re quite often going to run into
trouble.
But in staging the event, aren’t you sacrificing objective and balanced reporting?
If you take the ideas of objectivity, balance and impartiality to their logical
conclusion, then I believe you should have the right to reply to every single advertisement.
Every time an advert by petroleum companies like Shell or Esso comes on television,
then one and a half minutes should be reserved for someone from the public to say
what they think about those companies and their environmental records.
The idea of objectivity doesn’t exist in media—just the veneer of it. One of the
greatest quotes came from the British film-maker Ken Loach over a film he did about
union bosses and how often they betray the workers. There was a big row about this
film, with critics saying “You’ve got to be impartial” and the union bosses saying,
“We demand the right to reply.” Ken Loach turned and said, “I am the right to reply.”
In most of the media, impartiality just means not being too critical of the prevalent
ruling class perspective.
So your priority lies in being factually correct. Impartiality is not a concern?
We are the balance. I don’t know many people who have done television programmes
about the privatization of the national healthcare system aside from isolated reports.
On the case of the American spy base at Menwith Hill (see box),
there was absolutely no public accountability—hardly anyone knows that it’s there.
We want the authorities to reply. It’s not a question of the programme having balance
but the programme having balance in relation to all the other stuff going around—the
PR campaigns, advertising, government links to business, media collusion and so on.
Besides, when you’re doing a show on human rights abuse, for example, I really don’t
see how you can give a torturer the right to reply.
But maybe the lack of information isn’t so much linked to a conspiracy but simply
a consequence of commercializing news and treating information like a commodity?
News, especially on television, is a commodity packaged into the agenda of those
people (business and political elites) and their interests. But it shouldn’t be.
Information or “news” is really about things that touch your life, that shape what
you do and have in the world. You have the right to improve yourself through access
to information—this isn’t an affordable right available to some people but not others.
This is about people’s natural yearning to aspire to a better life and to educate
themselves. Ask kids what they want to do when they grow up and they say “Astronaut!”
No one says, “I want to work in a toilet.”
To treat this information as a commodity is to turn democracy into a joke. If democracy
is only about putting a cross on a ballot paper once every five years, then it’s
a joke. Democracy is not this rigmarole in which a politician puts on a public relations
vision on how much you need this person to be elected. It is not about giving someone
that you don’t know a mandate to do what they want. Democracy is about being involved
in your community and having the information to decide “this is what we want and
this is how we want to get it.”
Some people criticize this view and say that if you take it to the final degree,
you’ll have committees on how to run your street. I do not have a problem with that.
In your shows, there is always a very clearly defined “bad guy” or “evil empire.”
When will you turn the spotlight on the audiences’ own contradictions? The British
government is now recognizing that there is institutionalized racism in the police
force, for example. Yet people continue to insist, “We’re not racist. This isn’t
our problem.”
You’re very right to say that. It is without a doubt that a majority of people
in Britain, at some level, are racist. But as a white man, do I then say, “Right,
I’m going to challenge my own preconceptions on stage.”
I don’t see it as my role as a comedian to dredge my psyche to bring these things
to the fore. Also if you have a culture of racism, the lead has to be taken primarily
from the top to stop it. The relationship between racism and power is immensely important.
So instead of doing a show asking, “is my next door neighbour racist?”, it would
be more important to focus on those people who pretend to be accountable, but aren’t
fully accountable.
What do you think of the criticism that the show attacks the status quo but fails
to offer an alternative?
At the end of about half the shows, we offer a way of joining in the protest.
When we did the show on the referendum to save two hospitals from privatization (see
High jinx), we ended with an offer to help people in other
communities by giving them the information to organize their own referenda. Five
days later, we received 5,000 calls. This isn’t just about challenging authority
because we have the budget to do so—which, by the way, is very small in terms of
television. It’s about giving people information. That’s the starting point for change.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s a major achievement to get people to understand something
like the export credit guarantee scheme* in which the government writes off the debt
of various regimes to keep the profitability up of British companies dealing in arms.
People care about issues like arms deals, nuclear pollution or American listening
bases. They want change.
We’re also saying, never get nicked, never get arrested. So when we produce a show,
everything is done legally. If I get arrested, I’m a TV martyr. I’ve got Channel
4 (see a TV trouble-maker) lawyers backing me up to the hilt. But if someone
is arrested, they’re in trouble. That’s not what this show is about. We are not saying
that to get involved you have to be “special”. For example, we’re going to have between
500 and 1,000 people coming on July 4th for a balloon tour of the Menwith Hill base.
And it’s all legal. The idea is to get people to join in and take this protest as
far as we can.
Doesn’t this work bring a new set of responsibilities?
Aaahah! Maybe. A lot of people write in asking, “can you help?” You think, “Hell!
My heart bleeds but there’s nothing I can do.” Someone wrote in asking for help to
get traffic lights installed in the neighbourhood. It’s an absurd world when people
have to write to a comic for help. But I think the responsibilities are to the team
and to myself to keep our integrity.
Do you find yourself becoming self-righteous?
I’m very aware that I now get paid really well. I’m a performer, so I’ve got
an ego the size of London. But the programme is not just about my gratification.
It’s about doing something of worth. To avoid getting too self-righteous, we kind
of undermine the programme’s worth by laughing. We’re not hard-nosed journalists.
But somewhere in our work, there is truth or part of the truth or a truth. And that’s
important to us. But at the end of the day, we’re TV monkeys getting paid.
I don’t think we take ourselves too seriously but we do get obsessed by the work.
When we did the show about Colonel Halim Nawi [an Indonesian military attaché
who came to London to consult Thomas who was posing as a PR specialist, see box],
I was absolutely obsessed with all the details in the sting. After the interview,
my wife asked “What did he admit to?” It was incredible, I said—he admitted to using
UK military equipment, to torture, to the death of ten students and so on. My wife
just sat there and said, “Those poor families.” At that moment, I realized that in
all the details I’d lost sight of what was really at stake.
How do you get people to care about issues that may not touch them directly? Human
rights groups invest in major campaigns with giant posters of maimed and starving
children. But rather than engage people, this often makes them turn away.
It has to relate to people’s lives. For example, we went to the arms fair in
Greece disguised as a public relations firm (see High
jinx) not to just bring back general
facts about the numbers of weapons sold. We went to bring home information saying,
“these guys are torturers and they’re using UK equipment.” We are licensing arms
abroad which are used for murder, rape, genocide and torture and you, the tax-payer,
have paid for it.You have a choice here.
A lot of the human rights groups don’t take this approach of making people responsible.
Unless you engage people at their level without being patronizing, you’ll never be
very effective. Instead you’ll have a lot of hand-wringing. And there’s enough of
that already.
You’re like a plague politicians try to avoid. But if the show’s success continues,
a politician with a bit of public relations savvy could start to ask: “why hasn’t
Mark Thomas come and interviewed me yet?”
When that time comes, my wife has firm instructions on how to use the handgun.
Phooom!
* The Export Credit Guarantee Department is a British government department which facilitates UK exports by making available export credit insurance to British firms engaged in selling overseas.
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The making of a TV trouble-maker Even the briefest sketch of Mark Thomas would not be complete without a parenthetical
guide for those readers unfamiliar with the linguistic subtleties of south London.
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