Thanks to the upcoming General Election - or #GE2015, to use its now-obligatory social media "handle" - there's a great deal of politics on the radio these days.
And one of the liberating/terrifying things about the campaign is that it brings forth political opinions from people we don't normally hear from on the subject. People who don't normally care who governs the UK or aren't allowed within six feet of a microphone if they do.
Joey Essex is one such person. He's from reality show The Only Way Is Essex and has spent the last month or so talking to political leaders for a one-off programme to be aired on May 5 called Educating Joey Essex. With a camera crew in tow, he was interviewed recently by BBC Radio 5 Live's political guru John Pienaar on his Sunday morning show about what he had learned so far. It was gruesome stuff. "Did you really think they were called the Liberal Democats?" was one of the more depressing questions Pienaar was forced to ask after Essex had repeatedly used the feline version of the name.
Undeterred, Pienaar was at it again on Sunday (Pienaar's Politics, BBC Radio 5 Live, 10am) when he invited Queen guitarist Brian May into the studio to give us his political tuppence-worth. May is campaigning for more "decency" in politics through his Common Decency project. "Come to the website and we will all get together and we will swarm around good, decent people," he said. But what did he mean by decent people? Is an MP who votes for £30 billion of cuts in public service a decent person? "I'm not standing for Parliament so in a sense I don't have to answer that question," he said, sounding like a politician already.
But the best of the week's unlikely political intruders was veteran American pundit, author and satirist PJ O'Rourke. "The BBC, in its wisdom, thought one way to cover a confusing election would be to bring in a confused American to shine the clear, cold light of complete ignorance on the whole subject," he told listeners at the start of two-parter PJ O'Rourke On The UK Campaign Trail (BBC World Service, Tuesday, 9.30pm).
O'Rourke began with the observation that British politics used to be so simple that even an American could understand it: you had two parties which scooped up most of the available votes while the Lib Dems, the party for "people who can't make up their minds and are proud of it", picked up the rest.
The rest of the half hour was equally full of O'Rourke-isms, though they weren't all delivered by him. He did characterise the Coalition as "a tango" in which the Conservatives led while the Lib Dems "danced backwards", but had the producers seen fit to apply canned laughter to the show rather than the bursts of jazzy muzak they did use, the observations made by political historian Peter Hennessy would also have been deemed giggle-worthy.
"The Queen," he told O'Rourke, "is like Heineken lager. There are certain parts of the constitution only she can reach" (this after O'Rourke had sought an explanation for what he had just witnessed: David Cameron driving to Buckingham Palace to tell HRH something she already knew, namely that Parliament had been dissolved and #GE2015 was looming).
Happily, there was much to be learned from the confused American. I didn't know, for instance, that there are two Nigels standing in South Thanet - there's Mr N Farage, obviously, but there's also a Mr N Askew. Unlike comedian Al Murray, who pretends to be a pub landlord and is also standing, Mr Askew is the real thing and runs a boozer in nearby Margate. He's standing for something called the Reality Party which was founded by Bez, the one in 1980s Madchester band Happy Mondays who didn't actually do anything except dance and occasionally play maracas. "A colourful character," said O'Rourke of Bez in an aside. "He's reputedly escaped from reality more than more people have." Like a good many of our politicians, in fact.
In next week's concluding episode, O'Rourke visits Scotland to talk to (and about) the resurgent Nationalists. It'll be well worth a listen.
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