I watched Tommy Robinson’s/Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s ‘Panodrama’
documentary last night.
Wait. Don’t panic.
Hear me out.
It’s a fascinating
piece of filmmaking.
The story follows
Robinson, fresh out of prison (in his mythology, he was imprisoned
for doing nothing wrong except being an anti-establishment hero of
the working class) worried about a planned BBC Panorama documentary
about him, and coming up with a plan to bring it down, to expose
‘that it’s scripted, that they lie, that they clip, that they
invent things, that they edit… the tactics they use to get the
narrative they want.’
We are expected to
trust him as an ordinary bloke fighting the establishment, and he is
undoubtedly a charismatic figure: it is easy to see why he developed
such a following and fanbase. His presentation style is charming, a
relatable everyman, somewhat like a blend of Bradley Walsh and
Dominic Littlewood.
The plan involves
Lucy Brown, one of Robinson’s colleagues, agreeing to meet with
Panorama journalist John Sweeney while secretly recording their
conversation. They come up with the plan during a natural chat at
Brown’s dinner table. A natural, unscripted chat between two
ordinary people – with two cameras set up for shot/reverse shot,
and don’t forget the off-camera lighting kit. The scene, while
presented as natural, is inevitably partially scripted, perhaps a
recreation of an actual chat they had, or a condensing of multiple
conversations in different formats across days or weeks.
Brown’s meeting
with Sweeney takes place at a pub, where a lot of alcohol is consumed
– when paying the £220 bill, Sweeney brags that he is on expenses
for the evening. It is fairly standard for journalists to use alcohol
to loosen their sources’ lips – the boozy lunches of Private Eye
journalists are especially notorious. Brown is in on the game, and is
using the tactic back at Sweeney, who makes several off-colour jokes
and comments throughout the evening, as he himself gets increasingly
drunk.
After reviewing the
secretly recorded footage, Robinson contacts Panorama and agrees to
an interview at a location of his choosing. Unbeknownst to the
Panorama crew, the location comes with a projector screen set up,
ready to show clips from the secret recording. In the gloriously
theatrical finale, Robinson turns the tables on Sweeney, revealing
the secret recording and questioning him about media bias and his own
inappropriate comments. Having exposed the bias and hypocrisy of the
liberal mainstream media, the victorious Robinson walks out. It is a
beautifully done piece of theatre.
That is the main
arc, but a few smaller threads are worth mentioning. Robinson has
heard that Hope Not Hate, what he calls ‘a far-left extremist
organisation’ have been involved with the Panorama documentary.
Robinson mentions that they describe themselves as antifascist with
links to antifa, ‘an organisation that leading members of the
American government have called to be proscribed as a terrorist
organisation.’
He meets someone
whose ‘life was ruined’ by Hope Not Hate, despite him having
‘broke no law’. Tom Dupree, described in the lower third as a
‘Hope Not Hate Victim’, supposedly lost his job and his career
because Hope Not Hate researchers got in touch with his employer
about political opinions he had been sharing on social media about
‘the controversial stuff, immigration, Islam’. We do not get to
see what his opinions and statements were: Dupree and Robinson simply
reassure us that they were ‘not extremist’, ‘just speaking
openly’, and ‘no hatred, just facts’. This would be far more
convincing if we could see Dupree’s actual comments (and if Dupree
didn’t have a strong ‘middle class white supremacist’ vibe
about him), but alas that may have ruined the Innocent Victim
narrative.
The crux of the
Innocent Victim narrative is the point that Dupree ‘broke no law’,
as though breaking the law is only reason someone should lose their
job. The film conveniently omits mentioning any Diversity &
Inclusion policies his employer might have had which Dupree’s
comments might not have been in line with – never mind his
employer’s understandable fear that Dupree’s public comments
could bring the company into disrepute.
Another thread is
the threats and blackmail which Robinson’s former colleagues have
received from journalists. Colleagues show him threatening text
messages supposedly received from journalists – others speak on the
phone about such threats given in person, and even actual assault.
As part of the
expose, Robinson and Brown use a website to fake a threatening text
message – it appears to be from Robinson’s phone, threatening
violence on Brown if she gets involved with Panorama, but we see that
it was sent via text-faking website and Brown herself typed it out.
The purpose of this is to show how easy such things are to fake, and
how the journalists will believe it because it is part of the
narrative they want to tell.
In the theatrical
finale, Robinson relays these allegations of abuse and shows the
threatening texts to Sweeney, while acknowledging that they are not
from him but are another example of media hostility and corruption.
Later on, after Robinson has questioned Sweeney over his many drunken
comments, Sweeney, clearly intending it as a retaliatory ‘Gotcha!’
moment, brandishes a print-out of threatening text faked earlier, to
which Tommy laughs and triumphantly declares that the text is fake
and never came from his phone, all the while glancing at the camera
in a ‘I told you so’ way.
Sweeney persists
with the questioning, not realising how thoroughly he has been caught
out. Robinson points out that the BBC would have aired the fake text
uncritically – Sweeney responds that they would give him the right
to reply. Robinson points out that the allegation would stick in
people’s minds far more strongly than his denial.
And this is where
the true magic of film comes into focus. Robinson showing how easy it
is to fake texts means that the threatening texts from journalists
immediately become suspicious – were these faked too? When Robinson
asks Sweeney about the abuse his colleagues have received from
journalists, Sweeney says he has heard the allegations but doesn’t
know if they’re true etc etc, but Sweeney’s mumbled, nervous,
rambling reply is not what sticks to the viewers head. The allegation
sticks in the viewer’s mind more strongly than the suggestion that
it might be fake.
Throughout the film,
Robinson claims he is constantly clipped out of context by the media.
And then he does this same thing against Sweeney, clipping choice
sentences out of the hours-long conversation with Brown, and
questioning him on it. It must be admitted that many of these lines,
including use of the slur ‘woofter’ and Sweeney saying he finds
it funny to annoy Greek people by speaking Turkish to them, would not
be improved by context.
At one point,
Sweeney gets frustrated and angrily declares that he is the
journalist and he should be the one asking questions – it comes
across as an entitled tantrum, as he gets a taste of his own
medicine. It is very satisfying seeing Sweeney squirm and be exposed
as a hypocrite; the underdog narrative is extremely well crafted and
you can’t help but cheer on.
In a particularly
beautiful moment, Robinson refers to Sweeney as a member of the
Establishment, to which Sweeney responds that he is not a member of
the Establishment and please do not say that he is. In response,
Robinson plays a clip of Sweeney saying ‘people like us, in the
Establishment’. Beautiful.
The film is many
things: it is an expose of media manipulation techniques, but it is
also itself a case study in using those techniques to construct a one
sided narrative: it’s scripted, it lies, it edits, it clips, it
invents things; Robinson uses these tactics to get the narrative he
wants.
By focusing on media
manipulation techniques, and then using them itself, the film throws
everything into question. How can anything be trusted? When things
are so easy to fake, how can we know what is real in our increasingly
media-saturated world?
Very
unintentionally, the film becomes reminiscent of the works of Philip
K Dick and Christopher Priest. Robinson is our unreliable narrator;
fakery and unreality are everywhere and nothing is to be trusted.
Part of me was hoping for a post-credits scene showing Robinson
playing with an origami unicorn.