Robert Webb gave the following highly revealing answers to a Guardian interview in 2005:
Which living person do you most admire and why?
Christopher Hitchens
What makes you depressed?
Suicide bombers and their apologists
Which living person do you most despise?
George Galloway
he has now found a way to channel his hatred of the anti-necon movement into “comedy”, by making a sitcom poking fun at me, and making light of our government’s alliance with the Uzbek dictatorship.
Our Men, commissioned by the BBC, is a hilarious comedy about the drunken and incompetent British Ambassador in Tazbekistan [which the BBC says does not represent Tashkent, Uzbekistan] and the jolly despot President Kairat [No relation, says the BBC, to President Karimov].
Let us remind ourselves about the Uzbek regime with which the UK has a close military alliance. There are over 11,000 political prisoners held in terrible conditions. Thousands are tortured every year. There is absolutely zero freedom of speech, media, religion or assembly. All opposition parties are banned. Millions are forced into slave Labour in the state cotton plantations, including many thousands of children as young as eight years old.
Over 800 pro-democracy demonstrators were killed in a massacre at Andijan in 2005. Routine torture includes beating with rifle butts, smashing of knees and elbows with hammers, suffocation by gas mask with closed vent, electrocution,
mutilation of genitals, rape, both homosexual and heterosexual, rape with objects, and torture of children in front of their parents. There are properly documented instances of the most extreme torture imaginable, including Mr Avazov, on whom whilst Ambassador there, I obtained a pathology report from the University of Glasgow which said he had died of immersion in boiling liquid.
(Click for full size)
Good for a laugh, that, isn’t it?
But something is happening with Mitchell & Webb more sinister than an argument about the limits of comedy. World War 1 was terrible, but Blackadder Goes Forth is still funny and legitimate, while Mash and Catch 22 undermined war with humour. But this Mitchell & Webb vehicle is being written with the active cooperation of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
Because the Uzbek government, the fifth most corrupt in the world according to Transparency International, is being sustained and protected by its alliance with the United Kingdom. Just last week the Defence Secretary announced to Parliament a new partnership with this vicious ductatorship which will see most of the equipment of British forces from Afghanistan leaving through Uzbekistan:
The Republic of Uzbekistan has already played a constructive role in helping to secure Afghanistan’s stability but will face increased security challenges once ISAF has withdrawn from Afghanistan. We have therefore been examining options for gifting surplus UK equipment to help meet those challenges. The departmental minute which I have today laid before Parliament describes a gifting package to the Republic of Uzbekistan of surplus Leyland DAF trucks and Land Rover spares that is intended to contribute to this. Both items have been examined and cleared against the consolidated EU and national arms export licensing criteria, which include an assessment of whether the equipment might be used for human rights violations or internal repression.
The last sentence is as breathtakingly tendentious as anything that has ever been said to parliament, but it is only about Uzbekistan, so nobody cares. In the last three years nobody, on any side of the House, has ever said anything about the appalling human rights record of the Uzbek government.
There is certainly huge room for satire in the British government’s support of this despotism – Bremner, Bird & Fortune did it to great effect. But the Mitchell and Webb comedy is coming from quite a different direction.
The comedy in “Our Men” comes from the exposure not of the hypocrisy of foreign policy, but from the exposure of our drunken and incompetent Ambassador. That is exactly what the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has put a huge media effort into telling everybody I was, ever since I blew the whistle on the Uzbek regime and our complicity with it.
The comedy also aims to defuse the horror of our alliance with Uzbekistan and make it banal, accepted and safe.
There is an obvious issue of copyright here, as the substance and themes of Our Men are clearly taken from my book Murder in Samarkand. My literary agent therefore contacted the man of business at Mitchell & Webb’s production company, Big Talk. He said that the series is completely different from Murder in Samarkand ; it has nothing to do with human rights and “the writers have researched the project with the diplomatic service“. That is a direct quote from my agent’s record of the conversation.
Talk about comedy at the service of the establishment. Big Talk also deny having heard of me or Murder in Samarkand, and say that Tazbekistan is not meant to be Uzbekistan. They lie. Here is a quote from their advice to actors, issued through the actors’ website Spotlight:
The accent is mild Russian. Perhaps have a listen to an Uzbek national speaking English to get an idea.
When David Hare went to Tashkent to research his adaptation of Murder in Samarkand, (which became the radio play starring David Tennant), which strongly attacks the government stance, he was not allowed even to enter the grounds of the Embassy to discuss it. Sir David Hare was left standing outside a locked gate. Yet the Diplomatic Service has been working with the writers of Our Men. The reason why lies in the quotes from Robert Webb right at the start of this article.
This is comedy in the service of the state; where the victims are the butt.
“David Mitchell has made some exceptional comedy and made some outstanding condemnations of war lies, bankers, poitical ills etc.”
Yes yes luvvie, très exceptionnel.
That’s when it’s not being outstanding, anyway. (I thought they meant the same?)
Oh, how du jour Mitchell sounds! Has he exposed how the huge expansion of the ‘higher education’ system took place on the orders of money-lenders? How and why average personal debt in Britain is so much higher than in places such as France, Spain, Germany, Scandinavia, even the United States? How the insurance sector is as predatory and thieving as the banking sector? (I bet he hasn’t. For 5 years or so, punters in Britain have had the OK to be superficially critical of ‘bankers’, but the insurance boys…well let’s keep quiet about them.) Because frankly if someone wants to get their head round this stuff, the first thing they’ve got to do is turn off their TV – preferably permanently.
“But the hopeful ’10 O’clock Live’ show which David was the most effective host in, despite delivering some rare passion and information in the early episodes,”
Yes, luvvie.
“it descended into a conflicted angry news farce, with low points including Charlie Brooker denigrating people for working in Supermarkets and Mitchell schmoozing compliantly with previously condemned warconman Alistar Campbell.”
You sure do follow stuff.
“David Mitchell has been one of the most soulful and sharpest of the tv chatty comedians; self deprecating and now with success moving on to deprecating other things. Things that wont get him into trouble with his media colleagues, and perhaps his devastingly sweet and clever, establishment friendly, culture cogitating media wife Victoria Coren.”
Dig the adjectives and adverbs. Do you want a job? 🙂
@Mary – agreed. The paying of reparations should be a main demand, as well as prosecution of war crimimals, which shouldn’t be just of the very top people. We want a near future where when soldiers are ordered to go to Afghanistan, they say ‘hell no, we won’t go’.
My impression from occasionally conducting low-level surveillance on ‘ARRSE’ (the British army internal-market participatory propaganda site with a fittingly juvenile name) is that we are a very long way from that. Further than in the days of Greenham Common.
I could not have said it better than John Goss above.
I have just been looking the duo up. We have the incubator at Cambridge University and Cambridge Footlights to thank for this pairing. Gone are the days of Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and the rest who gave us satire and humour. The current crop of comedians seem an incestuous self-regarding crowd and to me, quite unfunny. Why are they so dull and reactionary?
Strange that they have progressed from this.
Mitchell’s first project with Webb was in January 1995, a show about the First World War entitled Innocent Millions Dead or Dying: A Wry Look at the Post-Apocalyptic Age. Webb later described it as being “fucking terrible”. After leaving university he and Webb began performing a number of two-man shows at the Edinburgh Fringe.
Webb is a member of the Labour Party, enough said, and they were best men at each other’s weddings, the most recent being that of Mitchell and Victoria Coren.
Three big cheers for David Mitchell! No, not that one. The county court Judge David Mitchell.
RAF Fairford protesters win legal battle
http://civilisation3000.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/raf-fairford-protesters-win-legal-battle/
Judge says police action was ‘an interference with the right of ordinary citizens to go about their business’
Anti-war campaigners have just won a landmark case at the Central London County Court after ten years. In March 2003 approximately 159 protestors, including some Quakers, set out from Euston for the Fairford military aerodrome to protest against the war in Iraq. They were stopped by the police three miles from the venue and sent back to London under a police escort.
/…
Craig, I suggest you find out exactly who at the FCO’s Diplomatic Service appointed the staff to “help with the research” for this series. Attitudes diffuse between people, and we can’t generally tell those who are projecting propaganda from those who are merely repeating that which they’ve innocently absorbed.
I think people like Mitchell, Brooker and Fry (I don’t include Webb in this as he’s clearly just a harmless tit) could be considered quite dangerous as they are the ones who – in their self satisfied vaguely left-wing intellectualism – delimit the debate. Anything that is considered too outre for their self-serving (and let’s be fair, occasionally funny) musings is reviled as coming from spotty Assange wannabe who has a picture of Alex Jones on his bedroom wall. Hence whole swathes of legitimate debate about quite important things like western intelligence services’ war crimes are off the MSM agenda. The very people who might be interested in these subjects are put off by ‘comedy’ exactly of the ilk this article is about.
Outsourced to Big Talk Productions. The founder is Nira Park and the head honchos are Kenton Allen and Matthew Justice.
Biogs http://www.bigtalkproductions.com/people/
I see Allen was once with Elisabeth Murdoch’s Shine.
Making programmes for the BBC is a lucrative business presumably.
I am sending a printed copy of Craig’s article, photos and all, to Milord Patten to register my disgust and outrage at this obscenity and to ask him to get it taken off the schedule.
His PA is:
June Prunty
PA to Chairman
BBC Trust
180 Great Portland Street, London W1W 5QZ
T. 020 3214 4941 E. june.prunty AT bbc.co.uk bbc.co.uk/bbctrust
There’s Mark Thomas I suppose. Also Peter Richardson who did the Comic Strip programmes. The one about Tony Blair last year was pretty good I thought.
Checking the writing history on IMDB I see that co-writer Rupert Walters last credits as a writer were for episodes of “Spooks”. Somewhat curious.
He’s currently doing something else for the BBC called “A Spy’s Life”. Interestingly he’s mostly done book adaptations.
There was an open debate at LSE last night on Humour, under the auspices of the Forum for European Philosophy dialogue. The philosopher Julian Baggini was lightweight and poor, but Hardeep Singh Kohli dealt at various points with serious aspects of what could and could not be funny. Some of his examples were close to what seems to be happening with “On Men”. If anyone knows how to draw Hardeep’s attention to this string, I think that might help to create the type of public debate that a number of contributors rightly see as a desirable outcome, difficult though that may be to achieve. I’ll try with some LSE contacts.
Digging further, as well as “A Spy’s Life” for the BBC he appears to be working on “Spy Project” which seems to be this: “Project will be inspired from the true story of intelligence operative Kathi Lynn Austin in dealing with arms trafficking and terrorism. She is noted to have undertaken field missions in Africa, Europe, Southeast Asia, also Central America and most recently worked on contract for the U.N. Security Council. ” From http://www.aceshowbiz.com/news/view/00012787.html
He also lists “Blowback” by Kudos Productions under current projects but I can’t find any further info on that. Title sounds interesting though.
Definitely an interesting co-writer. http://unitedagents.co.uk/rupert-walters
” ‘Oh What a Lovely War’ was broadcast as early as 1961. Good for a laugh, what happened to British prisoners held by Japanese forces, wasn’t it?..”
No. You can’t have seen it: it was about the Western Front.
Some demonisation of China ongoing today. There is a different daily choice of ‘state’s enemy’ by the MSM.
China military unit ‘behind prolific hacking’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-21502088
Sky News have their reporter in Shanghai waving his copy of the report around.
Chinese Military’s ‘Global Hacking HQ Found’
http://news.sky.com/story/1053970/chinese-militarys-global-hacking-hq-found
Second only to the sensational SA murder charges with the harpie Alex Crawford reporting on her iPhone from the courtroom. She is normally in Syria working up the war propaganda against Pres. Assad and before him, Col Gaddafi in Libya.
Can’t you get Sue, Grabbit and Runne on to them Craig for plagiarisation, misrepresentation, defamation et al? We will all contribute to a fund for costs.
If Robert Webb is to be believed it is not a straight comedy but apparently a “drama with a dollop of comedy” Would be nice if the person who isn’t you turns out to be the hero. If that’s the case maybe you could get a cameo appearance. Perhaps it is more subversive than you fear. Probably not though.
O/T but related.
Secret Courts: Email your MP
February 18th, 2013 by India Thorogood
Is this the end of the principle that no one is above the law? The government are currently pushing drastic changes to our justice system through parliament, which would allow trials to take place in secret. If they’re successful, it could mean serious abuses like torture, or detention without trial, never come to light. This would make government cover ups much easier, and make it much harder to get a truly fair trial.
Your MP could be voting on secret courts as early as the 25th February. And it looks like the vote could be very close. There’s already been a massive rebellion in the House of Lords, key Liberal Democrats, Labour and top Conservatives have all spoken out against the government’s plans. With some pressure from us, their voters, we might just persuade enough MPs to stop this attack on British justice.
Time is running out to stop these changes. Click here to email your MP to stand up for justice and vote against secret courts now.
/..
http://blog.38degrees.org.uk/2013/02/18/secret-courts-email-your-mp/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+38DegreesBlog-PeoplePowerChange+%2838+Degrees+-+people.+power.+change.%29
Mary,
I have spoken to Sue Grabbit and Runne. Minimum court costs of £30,000 just to get started, and if I go for an injunction I need to post an indemnity of circa £500,000 in free cash. You offer is very kind, but I fear the law only exists to protect those much richer than we are.
I still think my idea is the best one…cost you zilch for a lot of free publicity…
I’m instinctively very reluctant to criticise shows/films etc before having seen them. I’m particularly reticent if the criticism is that the show has a political view with which I disagree.
Two reasons for this – (1) this is a favourite tactic of right-wing reactionaries, to criticise something for a bias that offends their beliefs. Among other weaknesses, it comes across as horribly whiny. And (2) you never know what might be in the content. If they’ve drawn some Bremner, Bird and Fortune inspiration for the show – and how couldn’t you if you wanted to poke fun at the establishment – there could be some good satire in there.
However, there is a legitimate issue to be pursued here – the idea that the writers have been collaborating with the FCO. The most obvious parallel is the utterly horrible Zero Dark Thirty, the only redeeming feature of which is that there was no particular effort made to obscure the propaganda. If that’s what has been happening behind the scenes here, the BBC should not be putting this show on our TVs.
This is not a point about whether Mitchell and Webb make comedy I like or approve of, and certainly not whether I agree with their political views. It’s whether they are complicit in a propaganda effort. It’s whether they are, if you will, putting horsemeat into our public broadcaster’s serving of beef lasagne.
Eddie-G,
I agree with all that. There is, however, also a genuine question of copyright theft. I find Big Talk’s claim never to have heard of Murder in Samarkand, and to have been struck absolutely independently with the idea of making a series about the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan (of all places), a blatant lie.
A tweet by Kenton Allen of Big Talk Productions. https://twitter.com/kentonallen
Feb 18 kentonallen@kentonallen
Take 20 Day 16 Back on it. Felt rather good. Now off to the Foreign Office for an historic read through….
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Wow Mary that is unbelievable – talk about a smoking gun!!!
“”It’s such a good subject,” Mitchell told Reader’s Digest. “We couldn’t believe that something along these lines hadn’t been written before.”
Mitchell will play Keith Davis, the newly appointed British Ambassador of Tazbekistan, while Webb is cast as Neil Tilly, Deputy Head of Mission.
“Like a lot of things we do, it’s exploring different attitudes to authority,” Mitchell explained. “In contrast to Peep Show, these are highly capable senior people who very much have jobs. But they have very different views on [how to do them].”
He added: “Some people will think my character is right and some people will think he’s wrong, and both sets of people will be correct.””
Read more: http://www.digitalspy.com/british-tv/news/a430964/david-mitchell-on-new-bbc-two-sitcom-its-such-a-good-subject.html#ixzz2LMMoBzlt
Follow us: @digitalspy on Twitter | digitalspyuk on Facebook
A situation comedy to die for. I don’t know what’s becoming of our yoot.
‘xcuse me, sorry to butt in everyone. Just bringing some O/T but, I think, important news.
It sounds as if the case for Assange’s safe passage is already with the European Court (of Justice? of Human Rights? – the video doesn’t make it clear which).
RT’s post-election interview with Rafael Correa (and English transcript):
“If Assange’s lawyer, Baltasar Garzón, is lucky at the European Court and achieves a safe passage for Assange, who is staying at the Ecuadorian Embassy, the situation will be finally resolved. It is all now in Europe’s hands.”
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/343850
Terry wrote:
Oh, how du jour Mitchell sounds! Has he exposed how the huge expansion of the ‘higher education’ system took place on the orders of money-lenders? How and why average personal debt in Britain is so much higher than in places such as France, Spain, Germany, Scandinavia, even the United States? How the insurance sector is as predatory and thieving as the banking sector? (I bet he hasn’t. For 5 years or so, punters in Britain have had the OK to be superficially critical of ‘bankers’, but the insurance boys…well let’s keep quiet about them.) Because frankly if someone wants to get their head round this stuff, the first thing they’ve got to do is turn off their TV – preferably permanently.
I dont disagree much, but unfortunately TV is the most influential technology of the time, so it begs involvement also from (at least some of) those who wish it wasn’t.
This blog is gutsy and evidence that faithful Englishmen do exist. The rest are sucking on celebrity nipple and football obsession.
Craig,
Point taken, but I am not sure they are denying the Uzbekistan angle for fear of copyright lawsuits etc, I reckon they are being evasive about something else. And my working assumption would be that it is because of having worked with the FCO, this might have been part of the deal – or at the very least, intended to avoid any official embarrassment if the Karimov gang don’t like the show.
Here’s the thing, when asked if Uzbekistan was the place they had primarily in mind, the obvious answer for an artist would be: “sure, we drew ideas from many areas, and from writing particularly about modern Uzbekistan, including Murder in Samarkand. The final output however is something that is ultimately fictional, in the spirit of a show like ‘In The Thick of It’.”
(As a comparison, Sacha Baren Cohen openly admits Gadaffi was the main inspiration for his character in The Dictator. Why would Mitchell and Webb not be able to do the same when they’ve made even less effort on fictionalisation?)
Whichever lawyers helped write the responses know well enough that a copyright lawsuit would be a longshot anyway – a bungling drunkard establishment ambassador is hardly a caricature uniquely applicable to how the government smeared you – what’s more surprising is that they’ve made no attempt to defend the program on purely artistic grounds.
Right. Some facts to counter all this absurd tinfoil-hat stuff. A friend linked to this post on Facebook and as I read it my disbelief turned to full-on hysterical laughter.
Firstly: that Guardian questionnaire. The Hitchens answer is tongue-in-cheek. Check out the sketches Webb wrote and performed satirising Hitchens on That Mitchell and Webb Sound. And can you really not imagine why a Londoner in 2005 might not be a huge fan of suicide bombers? And then what? The government thought ‘Ah, I see from the Guardian that Webb is One Of Us. We must recruit him to appear in propagandist sitcoms’. Hilarious fantasy.
Secondly: the ‘drunken incompetent’ ambassador character that you claim is smearing you. I can’t find any reference in any of the pre-publicity of the show to any such character. The character Mitchell is playing is described as highly ambitious.
Thirdly: The absurd claims of plagiarism. I don’t think you’re as famous as you think you are. I vaguely remember reading about you in the newspaper but had never heard of your play or your book. I think a stretch to assume that anyone involved in this show had heard of it, and it’s really rather daft to be talking about lawyers.
Fourthly: Kenton Allen’s ‘smoking gun’ tweet. That’s the point where I burst out laughing. If there’s this big conspiracy going on why on earth would he TWEET about it?
Full disclosure: I’ve known David and Robert for twenty years. The idea that either of them would be involved in either plagiarism or ‘government-approved satire’ is beyond laughable. This is quite simply a comedy set in an embassy. It’s not a rip-off, it’s not a cover up, it’s not a smokescreen, and you’ve really made a bit of a fool of yourself with this post.
Perhaps you’ve met Robert’s wife in the course of your human rights activism? She worked for several years at the Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture. Just thought I’d mention it.
Jon Taylor,
And I think it is beyond belief that anyone involved with the show could not have heard of Craig Murray once they became involved with the project. If it was set in say South America you might have a point but “Tazbekistan ” and called “Our Men” which obviously nobody noticed was similar to “Our Man in Tashkent” _ Try Googling that.
Pull the other one,