Cutting Edge is above politics
THERE was a very interesting moment during the last episode of the current series of Brendan O’Connor’s Cutting Edge, when Tommy Tiernan was talking about Jeremy Corbyn, and then Alison O’Connor made her own contribution to the discussion on Corbyn and his effect on the British Labour Party — and immediately you could feel that something in the room had changed.
There was nothing wrong with what they were saying, as such, but it just felt slightly different to the other conversations which had been going on, and Brendan O’Connor seemed to pick up on this too, moving it on immediately to something that was a bit more... well, cutting edge.
As to what that is, exactly, I’m not quite sure — and I don’t think anybody can define it in precise terms. It’s more of an atmospheric thing, what the old people would call a “vibe”.
What I think it might be, is a sense that we are somehow hearing “issues” being discussed in a way that is unfamiliar to us; that our brains have been so numbed by the simplistic patterns of current affairs that we can hardly believe that someone we last heard on Morning Ireland or on This Week being profoundly uninteresting, is actually capable of much more.
It’s like they’re now in some different country, dealing in a different currency, everything is just a bit different, and better than the usual stodge.
So in that moment when you could feel it going a bit wrong, and O’Connor stepped in to terminate it, all we were hearing was the slightest hint of the kind of talk that we are hearing all the time in news and current affairs programmes.
It’s just that the slightest hint was enough to remind us that we didn’t want to find ourselves in that place, that we live there most of the time and it doesn’t seem to be doing us much good.
Again I’m not sure exactly how this is accomplished, it’s just clear that the three people sitting around the Cutting Edge table seem to have arrived in that most ideal state for live TV, whereby they have had a couple of drinks, no more or no less, to get them going — in a figurative sense, of course. Though, of course, it is not drink that is driving them, it is some other energy, perhaps just the freedom from some bogus “objectivity” which may be holding them back in the more conventional arenas.
It is a very important matter, these limitations which we find in much of our mainstream broadcasting. For example you could be watching a debate on the “issue” of alcohol on a politics programme, indeed you could be watching many such debates over a very long period of time, and somehow for all the apparent seriousness of the protagonists, it is all drivel. How do they do that? I do not know. But I do know that it happens, and I suspect it is something to do with the essential structures of what we call “political” discourse, that ultimately they are designed to shut down the issue under discussion, not to elaborate on it. And at its most bovine, we find that some deeply fascinating subject is reduced to the ultimate inanity, its relevance to the fortunes of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael.
On the issue of gambling, in which I have taken a deep interest, I can feel it drifting into this realm in which public representatives are starting to talk about “the legislation”, and using words like “funding”.
And while it seems that there’s nothing wrong with that, it feels like the start of the process whereby the most interesting things in the world start shrinking to suit the workings of a clapped-out machine.
Perhaps when something officially becomes an “issue”, it is taken away from the care of mere human beings, and handed over to those who will have a great time with it, using words like “policy”.
So when we’re watching Cutting Edge, we are liberated for a while from the old machine, we are even getting the impression that this is what these well-known people are like, in real life.
Whatever that is.