P. J. O’Rourke does British television – very well

Well, I have just spent a very agreeable and maybe even an informative hour, watching P. J. O’Rourke telling me about the history of California’s state governors, on BBC4 television. Hyram Johnson, Brown, Reagan, Brown Junior, Gray Davis, Schwarzenegger – they have been a quite interesting lot, whatever you think of them. I say maybe informative, because you never really know how much of the story is really sinking in when you watch television. But, it felt informative. I certainly never felt as if my intelligence was being insulted.

O’Rourke neither concealed nor overdid his own conservative/libertarian leanings. He was the Republican Party Reptile of old, but now, he said, in connection with how Ronald Reagan ran political rings around the hippies (underestimating Reagan’s political savvy and seriousness was a habit that started early – that was made very clear), that he now entirely understands anti-youth policies. The story O’Rourke told was not so much of big versus small government, but of oscillations between somewhat simplistic outsider promises to clean things up, and a safe but grubby pair of hands to sort out the resulting confusions, followed by more promises to clean up the grubbiness, and so on indefinitely.

Two things have somewhat distressed me about O’Rourke’s career in recent years. First, despite several attempts over the years, he has never made much of an impact on British TV, unless you count his recent British Airways adverts. And the other thing that has somewhat worried me about O’Rourke is that, especially in the last book of his that I read, the CEO of the Sofa, I thought I detected a straining after comic effect with distressingly leaden consequences, and a somewhat disturbing lack of substance, at any rate compared to previous books like Republican Party Reptile to name but one. O’Rourke should be out in the deserts of Libya, the jungles of Borneo or wandering around Russia, not sitting on his own sofa. And the lack of substance, I believe, caused the over-reliance on bad jokes, because when O’Rourke feels that he is not saying anything of interest, he feels the need to tell a joke in order to keep everyone’s attention.

O’Rourke’s best jokes, I think, are only incidentally humorous. At their heart there is always a deeply serious proposition, one of my favourites being in Parliament of Whores, where he says that the last guy who can stay awake gets to make the law. For, you see, the boringness of the political process is actually central to its nature, and only certain sorts of people (like very well paid people) have the patience to stick at it. Central to the brilliance of that book is O’Rourke’s key insight that the Federal Government of the USA is beyond his personal ability to comprehend it, for the simple reason that it is beyond anyone’s personal ability to comprehend it. It is just too big for anyone to get his head around it all, and any pompous political writer who tells you that he personally does comprehend it all is lying. Good point, very good point. And funny too, incidentally, but only incidentally. O’Rourke is, in other words, a very witty man, but not a professional comedian, a professional comedian being someone who can tell jokes for no reason and still make them sound funny.

When O’Rourke has a story, he forgets jokes and just gets on with telling it, as he did this evening when he recounted the constantly fascinating twists and turns of Californian gubernatorial politics.

Also, television is a team business, and I suspect that O’Rourke benefits both from the help and the criticisms of others. Deep down, I believe O’Rourke to be somewhat lacking in confidence, which is where those bad jokes come from. But his lack of confidence is often also where his best insights come from. He fears that he is rather dumb, but at his best is not afraid to appear dumb. (In this respect he resembles Ronald Reagan.) “Is it just me or is this very boring?” “Is it just me or isn’t there a lot, and I mean a lot of Federal Government?” “Hey, these Russians are a lot like us!”, and not at all like these aging lefties who say they love them.

If I am right that O’Rourke rather lacks confidence, he would also be the type to benefit from editorial guidance and encouragement. “No PJ, that was really interesting. It’s a good story and you told it. We don’t need it to be funnier. It already is quite funny, and quite funny is quite funny enough.” And so on. I do not think it a coincidence that O’Rourke’s very best writing was done early, when he had to impress editors, rather than later when he just had to write something.

Nor do I do consider it far-fetched to guess that P. J. O’Rourke might be genuinely please to know that I thought this programme was really good. I do not know under what auspices it was originally made, but well done the BBC for showing it. If you want to watch it, it will be repeated this same evening on BBC4 at 11.50 pm, and then again at 7 pm tomorrow evening, and then twice more on Sunday.