It’s bats! How Victorians trumped Donald with their own fake news
Lord preserve us from the sight of Ian Hislop dancing to jazz music. Pirouetting and highkicking, the Private Eye editor looked like Mr Toad in a leotard.
It wasn’t really him, of course. And it wasn’t a lookalike. Facemapping software wielded by a hacker with a punk mohican had superimposed Hislop’s saggy features onto the head of a professional dancer, in Fake News: A True Story (BBC4).
Fans of The Capture, the BBC1 high-tech surveillance thriller that concludes tonight, will know all about it.
This is the so-called ‘ deep fake’ video-editing tool, used by fiendish spymasters to manipulate CCTV footage. Hislop should count himself lucky he was seen apparently doing nothing worse than the splits.
Best-known as a team captain on the long-running Have I Got News For You, Hislop was making a one-off foray into a subject whose history he clearly knew well. The sections on how Victorian newspaper editors competed to outsell their rivals by inventing outlandish stories were fascinating.
An 1835 series in New York’s Sun newspaper, announcing that highpowered telescopes had found life on the Moon, was not so much fake news as fabulous pioneering science fiction. decades before Jules Verne
MASTERPIECE OF THE WEEK: A retired detective told me he rarely watches crime dramas because they get so much wrong. But he was glued to A Confession (ITV), about the flawed hunt for killer taxi-driver Christopher Halliwell. ‘It’s bang on,’ he said. and Edgar rice Burroughs imagined alien worlds, the Sun’s wizards invented a race of batwinged humans who hunted unicorns and appeared to mate in mid-air. It was lurid stuff.
For 40 minutes the documentary kept up a brisk pace, from spiritualist scams to World War I propaganda about German atrocities that had an unforeseen effect 25 years later: it made people in Britain who remembered the lies less likely to believe the true stories during World War II about Nazi death camps.
But Hislop flagged when he came to modern-day hoaxes. For a man who makes his living in various ways from current affairs, he seemed bored by allegations of fake news tearing U.S. politics apart.
He covered it in a droning interview with former BBC director-general Mark Thompson, now boss of the New York Times, which was one of the dullest monologues I’ve heard in a while.
Hislop briefly mentioned Private Eye’s brushes with fake news, but he was referring to misunderstandings where dimwitted members of the public failed to realise they were reading jokes, not facts.
Some years ago, the Eye ran a cover photo of the Queen inscribing her name in a gilded book, with the headline ‘Millions sign petition to stop Trump state visit’. Private Eye is now on a ‘fake news’ online blacklist. Talk about a sense of humour failure.
The fake news in Motherland (BBC2) was that the new mum at the school gates, Meg (Tanya Moodie), was a superwoman. Apparently an international business consultant, she struck deals in multiple languages on her mobile while raising five welladjusted children and enjoying a blissful marriage.
Naturally, Julia (Anna Maxwell Martin) loathed her. ‘Where’s your secret sadness?’ she fumed. But this is Motherland, where parenthood is the seventh circle of hell and every day when you haven’t strangled one of your little darlings can be counted as a success.
No surprises, then, when Meg turned out to be a raging alcoholic who regarded hijacking a bus and confrontations with the police as ordinary hazards of a good binge.
Even if this comedy is a trifle cynical and earthy for some tastes, it’s always worth it for the deadpan world-weariness of Liz (diane Morgan) — who reckons the chief compensation for being a single mother is getting ten per cent off at dorothy Perkins.