You know how it is—you’re sitting alone with your loved one, staring at the darkness creeping up the walls, feeling the whisper-voice of anxiety at your ear, afraid to glance at your phone lest you find a BREAKING NEWS notification, afraid to read a book lest your mind strays and finds its way back to the memory-foam groove of current affairs, afraid to look outside lest Brexit itself manifest in living flesh and walk among us. This condition of yours becomes unbearable; you decide to medicate. You could bingewatch some show on Netflix. But it’s 2019 and you remember how too much screentime makes you feel all sticky and unwashed inside. A voice whispers to you from across the years, and remembrance of a most analogue pleasure comes flooding into your mind like the light of revelation: you decide to do a jigsaw. But it’s 2019 and analogue stimulation just isn’t enough to cut it these days, so you set the TV playing in the background—set to some safe, apolitical programme, a nature programme let’s say. You steer well clear of David Attenborough though, since you’re in too fragile a state really to bear the weighty load of corporate climate guilt. Countryfile, or something.
Picture it: You’re having a nice time, a time of total thoughtless oblivion. You’re on the home straight (the jigsaw straight), and you’re pretty much unable to get up until you find and fit every last piece. You need this, to finish the thing, to make it perfect, for just one thing to be perfect and finished and satisfying and complete. But now your programme winds up, and you begin a merciless slide into the passive consumption of whatever’s-on-next. After a few moments of laserlike focus on the hunt for a giraffe’s neck, the word Brexit breaks like a wave into your mindless state. You can feel your heartrate climbing. You keep your eyes trained down, hunting among the pieces. People are screaming at each other, screaming Remain and Leave. And through it all, the voice of Stephen Nolan loudly cuts. The remote has come to rest halfway across the room, thrown aside earlier with unaccountably reckless abandon. You devote all your energies to a wild search for pieces as the panic curdles in your gut once more.
Unfortunately for you, it is in precisely this way that you discover the existence of The Top Table. For the reader who has managed to avoid it, The Top Table is BBC NI’s latest venture in late-night political-talk television. The premise is this: on one side of the table, a straggle of under-21s from across the UK; on the other, a number of politicians/professional-talkers ranging from the obscure to the Jims Allister and Wells. A politician might also be beamed in from Westminster and the like. With Stephen Nolan playing the somewhat unlikely role of moderator, they sit round the eponymous table and debate the hot-button issues of the day. How fortunate that you’ve tuned in just in time for the very hottest of buttons on tonight’s Brexit Special edition.
The show begins and, just when you’re weighing up whether you can risk breaking your jigsaw-flow to make a lunge for the remote, just when you’re asking yourself what exactly the point is of a programme exposing you to yet more political blather, Nolan happily elucidates. ‘This is the show that puts young people in the very heart of political debate in this country.’ It’s the show in which the youth of today get to ‘take the politicians to task’.
You discover very quickly that while yes, you can’t not take your hat off to the BBC for having unambiguously accomplished the putting of young people in the heart of the country’s political debate, that accomplishment is by no means the kindness they’d have you believe it to be. The debate in question is that eternal, flagellistic one, whose heart turns out not to be the sort of place you’d volunteer to go—the heart of something dark and swirling and malevolent. So The Top Table certainly succeeds in inducting this handful of poor, unelected unfortunates into the unrelenting firestorm that is what every discussion about Brexit must inevitably become. Or maybe it’s more like The Purge, but for words. The Top Table locks young people and politicians in a room together, and affably tells them, ‘Anything goes, there are no rules—but just for an hour. [Do with this information what you will].’ And they really maximise it, the young people, this opportunity to shout at politicians. Yes, lots of shouting gets done. Unfortunately, as you’ll rapidly discover, in no way is that the same thing as holding those politicians accountable.
Under the weight of these discoveries, it won’t take you long to slump exhausted to the floor, no longer able to lift a single piece of jigsaw, no longer able to tear your eyes away from the trainwreck on your screen; you wonder aloud: why would anybody ever agree to be on this programme?
And I suppose the answer is that the contestants on the show see The Top Table as the means by which to catapult themselves towards a career in journalism, or article writing, or mainstream politics, or professional-talking-on-the-news. Certainly, The Top Table seems to be setting itself up as the gateway to that kind of success. It extends to our contestants the promise of Thomas, Thomas-who-was-once-a-mere-contestant-and-is-now-a-serious-journalist, Thomas who is now to be seen conducting interviews on behalf of Stephen Nolan—this could be you, if you’re good enough. And what, you ask, does good enough mean? Happily again, Stephen will tell us. At the end of the programme, he commends the contestants for their performances, saying ‘you’ve been loud, you’ve been passionate and you know what you’re talking about.’
Consider the behaviours The Top Table is selecting for here. It has chosen from among a great mass of hopefuls four contestants who are loud, who are passionate, who hold tightly to rigid ideological doctrines and who are neither apprehensive nor ashamed to use every rhetorical trick in their rhetorical trickbox to score cheap and petty victories over their opponents. The Top Table rewards young adults for being good at the dirtiest type of political discourse: the type that shouts interlocutors down, that wouldn’t be seen dead listening to someone from the rival camp unless it’s to watch with beady eye for an opportunity to dodge—riposte!—fire one of their slightly-off-topic-but-pre-prepared-debate-winners. Success here means knowing how expedient the cheap shot can be. It means knowing that answering a direct question can expose you, and that it is good to refuse to do so.
All this is just the nature of the game that has been constructed for our generation. We’ve seen the Internet, we know how it’s done. When you’re constantly under threat of interruption or irrelevance, it is imperative that you pre-package your words, that you hone your beliefs into positions and then into projectiles, designed for maximum impact. It’s a style of play modelled by one side of the table, and taken up by the other. On The Top Table as everywhere else, you must score points rather than discuss views.
I’ve been calling these young people contestants because it’s impossible to get around the fact that The Top Table feels like a gameshow. It wouldn’t feel at all out of place if points were dished out at the end, if celebratory fanfares began to sound, if a contestant gasps in mock-surprise, shaking hands with her rivals before being told she’ll be jetting off on the next flight for Westminster to work an all-expenses-paid internship with the BBC.
I know there’s nothing new about this, I know this is just what political discourse looks like now, I know we’re all used to it. But the distinctive sin of this particular programme is to put it all in the mouths of young people, of people not so much younger than me, and to reward them for it. There’s something deeply disturbing about discovering that this sort of behaviour isn’t just the special domain of politicians, about watching in horror as people who ought to see all that as fake and counterproductive likewise shuck off all vestiges of authenticity, so as to better run the race they’re given to run. To know that they know it’s a game; to see they already know how to play it.
The central premise of the show is that the youth of today have voices which are just as valid as those belonging to the political class. And I mean, ok. But what becomes astoundingly, violently clear in the course of this episode is that yes, politicians exist for a reason—they are more knowledgeable about politics and the people of their own constituencies than their youthful opponents. Let that be a lesson for us when next we denounce the political establishment.
In many ways, the programme is set up to address the question of authenticity. ‘These politicians,’ it cries, ‘they don’t know what the man on the street is about. What really matters to the youth of today?’ And you’d think that if authenticity is what we’re after, the young adults would have it in spadefuls more than the politicians. What’s startling is that the reverse is true. Our (English) contestants make appeals to ‘Irish blood’ and ‘Scottish blood’, or their ‘Irish Catholic heritage’ to give themselves rhetorical license to speak knowledgeably about Ireland or Scotland. Another contestant can tell us what Northern Ireland wants, because, as she says, she grew up during the Troubles. They invoke these sacred liturgies in the hope of summoning up the Will of The People in aid of their cause. Without authenticity it all devolves into clichés by the hour’s end. ‘Without democracy there is only tyranny,’ is the impassioned plea of one contestant. New lows are reached when, using his final opportunity to speak, a contestant chooses only to repeat wholesale the infamous slogan, ‘Let’s get Brexit done.’
Across the table, the politicians find themselves commanding authenticity much more easily, and can even be seen to defer to the experience of others better informed. Anna Soubry, for example, tells us that the Johnson Brexit deal is ‘really bad for the future, if I may say, of Ireland, in my opinion.’ These are the sorts of qualifications that are admirable and important to make—to show she self-consciously lacks the authority, experience, knowledge and, yes, authenticity to make pronouncements about Ireland. A lot of that can be chalked up to the maturity a venerable politician might hope to have developed over a long political career. Regardless, it’s something you will not find on the other side of the table.
There’s a particular moment of schadenfreude when one of our random dudes summons up the optimism to challenge Ms Soubry about what her constituents might think about her now-independent status. Watching her pull rank and slap that boy down felt good, like how I imagine kicking the cat would feel.
If I’m a little uncomfortable writing that last line, that’s the point—The Top Table takes the gladiatorial brawl political debate has now become and turns it into a bloodsport. It hands the captive Christians a sword and points them in the direction of some metalbound juggernaut swinging a morning star. The crowd, naturally, goes wild.
It’s political theatre, basically. We judge our politicians based on their rhetorical performances—we shake our heads in embarrassment when they are caught wrongfooted, we cheer at particularly impressive slapdowns. In as much as the show wants to make sport out of taking aim at our politicians and letting young people dunk them in the gunge, in as much as the show wants to make sport out of locking our politicians in a cage and watching them take bites out of each other, I say fair enough. They’ve managed to get themselves elected; they’re used to this game. But The Top Table flips the script, and that’s what’s uncomfortable. The young people who’ve made themselves contestants on this show are now set on that same stage. They’re naïve, they’re not experienced entertainers, and we still want them to perform, to dance for us, to cover all the songs that make us want to dash our heads against the nearest wall. The joy of seeing a particularly awful politician humiliated, dispatched by quick wits in debate, now becomes the twisted pleasure of seeing particularly annoying and vocal members of the young citizenry kicked about by experienced politicians, and by each other. It’s a strange game when it becomes about which politician has the good sense to pull their punches.
Even Stephen Nolan, who has made a career out of shouting people down, gets a bit uncomfortable about all this. At one point he reprimands Edwina Currie for belittling one of the contestants. At another he stops the debate altogether to make a plaintive plea, ‘Can we not have a conversation around this table without screaming at each other?’ Butter does not melt; there is no hint of irony.
What can move us beyond our impasses and red lines? Can the unifying fabric of society be restored between people who have separated themselves to ideological extremes? These are the questions we think of as being most important at this socio-political juncture. I had thought people broadly accepted that the answers to those questions had something to do with thoughtful consideration of another’s viewpoint, refusing to vilify your interlocutors, building relationships across the gulf(s), etc.
Another formulation of these questions might be: what possible merit can there be in creating cultural structures which reward those among the upcoming generation who most readily conform themselves to the cookie-cutter mould of extreme, monochromatic ideology? Does ‘getting the youth engaged in politics’ mean beckoning them inevitably into the same old, loud, rigid camps? I can say this for The Top Table—it surely offers us some answers.
The Top Table will next appear on your screens at the end of the month, and the Brexit Special is available on BBC iPlayer. If you’re of the opinion that what we really need is another hour of people screaming invective at each other, if you enjoy that feeling of teetering on the brink of an imminent toxic apocalypse, or if you just need to harness stress as fuel to finish your jigsaw at double speed, I’d commend it to you.
This review was written in a time before Brexit had been got done.
chumpishly 