Last night on television Michael Hogan A fierce reminder of the effects of the Rushdie affair
Do feelings still run high about Salman Rushdie’s contentious 1988 novel The Satanic Verses? Judging by the combustible climax of The Satanic Verses: 30 Years On (BBC Two), they certainly do. Presenter Mobeen Azhar took a copy back to Bradford’s Centenary Square, site of book-burning protests three decades ago, to vox-pop current residents about how opinion had moved on. A man who had been arrested in the protests snatched the book from Azhar’s hands, ripped it up and tried to set it alight. An emotionally charged slanging match ensued. It was a moment of raw, genuine aggression – the sort we don’t see much on TV outside of The Jeremy Kyle Show.
This thoughtful film examined the novel’s lasting impact on the Muslim community in Britain. BBC Asian Network journalist Azhar read the book for the first time and admitted that it made him uncomfortable but still argued for Rushdie’s fundamental right to write it. Returning to his native Yorkshire, Azhar met a range of people involved in the Rushdie affair: from mosque leaders who took an early stand, to journalist Yasmin Alibhai-brown, who was inspired to wrestle with her own religious beliefs.
An astonished Azhar heard how Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa, which ordered Muslims to kill the writer and forced Rushdie to go into hiding for nine years, actually had its origins in the UK. He even met a jihadi who was radicalised by the controversy and a former National Front activist who recalled how it became a recruiting tool, boosting membership by 40 per cent.
Most instructive were Azhar’s attempts to put the furore into a wider context. He explained why so many British Muslims, worn down by everyday racism, felt under attack. Blasphemy laws at the time only covered Christianity, hence they took matters into their own hands.
Evocative archive footage propelled viewers back to the late Eighties. Pitch battles with police were still shocking to see, as were tabloid headlines demonising protestors as “Mad Mullahs” – a caricature that British Muslims have lived with ever since.
Rushdie himself was a rather pompous background presence.
The Satanic Verses might be his most notorious novel but Shame and Midnight’s Children are far superior.
Azhar’s thesis floundered midway through, becoming circular and repetitive, but this fine film reignited in an impassioned closing sequence. The climactic confrontation was a reminder that the spectre of the Rushdie affair and the culture wars it sparked are, sadly, still with us.
Conservative MP Nadine Dorries seems to be on our screens more often than the Testcard girl. The Junk Food Experiment (ITV) was her third foray into reality TV, following stints on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! and Tower Block of Commons.
I wonder what shy, retiring Dorries’s Mid-bedfordshire constituents make of her fame-hunger? It’s not as if there’s any pressing Parliamentary business at the moment.
This programme was an idea stolen from, sorry, “inspired by” 2004’s Super Size Me, which found filmmaker Morgan Spurlock living on only Mcdonald’s food for a month. ITV commissioners clearly figured that insufficient attention had been paid to the Oscar-nominated documentary, so effectively remade it.
Six celebrities – I use the term loosely – became guinea pigs in an overfeeding study to see how fast food affects our bodies. Dorries and singer Peter Andre were joined by The Chase’s Shaun Wallace, actress Hayley Tamaddon, Olympian Tessa Sanderson and Made in Chelsea’s Hugo Taylor for three weeks eating only burgers, fried chicken or pizza – Britain’s top three favourite junk foods, gastro-fact fans.
They were soon dropping like overfed flies. Whinging Taylor bowed out with “ciao, ciao”. Tamaddon’s Irritable Bowel Syndrome gave her a painfully inflamed stomach and Sanderson’s blood pressure became dangerously high. Both withdrew on doctor’s orders. Dorries, however, stuck it out, even taking her own burger to dinner at 10 Downing Street. She also informed us that she was “passing rabbit pellets”. Dignity, Nadine, always dignity.
Dietary expert Dr Michael Mosley, normally found fronting classier BBC Two productions, should have known better than to supervise this dumbeddown experiment on low-rent celebrity lab rats. It was overlong, under-thought and taught us little.