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I remember
'I'm Alan Partridge', the fantastic television series in which Steve Coogan
portrayed the memorably mundane television and radio presenter Alan Partridge
as he struggled to regain his foothold on the mountain of television.
Anyway, there's a bit where Partridge is discussing his leisure activities
with one of the staff of the motel in which he is staying, a waiter who
seems to be traumatised by his experiences in the Army, and at one point
he says that his favourite book is 'Bravo Two Zero', and that it gets
better every time he reads it. 'Bravo Two Zero' is one of two popular,
factual accounts of an ill-fated SAS mission during the gulf war, in which,
seemingly, several dozen authors were dropped behind enemy lines with
the express purpose of gathering facts for future books about the mission.
Which made me wonder. I know that there are war reporters, and that there
was a photographer who landed on the beaches at d-day and all his film
was badly-developed so that it looked washed-out, but do the military
actually hire people to tag along on secret missions so that they can
write down what happened afterwards? Or, like the Apollo astronauts, do
they train the soldiers to gather facts, take photographs, and write down
their impressions at the time? I imagine that the soldiers must take an
hour at the end of the day to knock out a few hundred words on the events
of the day on rubberised palmtops, and that they must strike, not at dawn,
but during the 'magic hour' when the sun has dipped behind the horizon,
and the light is diffuse. Michael Cimino tried to film most of 'Heaven's
Gate' during the magic hour, which is why it ended up costing so much.
Terrence Malick had much more luck during 'Days of Heaven', although his
subsequent retirement suggests that he became so addicted to the light
that he slept for twenty-three hours of the day, rising just as the sun
set in order to bathe, eat, read a paper, and go to bed again.
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"I know that
there are war reporters"
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Do they re-enact
significant events, like the soldiers with the flag on that Pacific island?
They must have a way of propping the corpses up again, or perhaps they
bring along fold-out white outlines to use instead, or inflatable, helium-filled
bladders to go inside the lungs of the dead soldiers so that, when pumped
up, they hover in the air at just the right height to appear standing.
Too little helium and they flop to the ground - too much, however, and
they alert the surrounding area to the presence of enemy soldiers, which
is perhaps why you never see this kind of thing in the news.
Anyway, on the subject of Alan Partridge, I thought 'that's funny - but
why should it be?' The joke is obviously that 'Bravo Two Zero' isn't a
proper book, it's a mass-market piece of pulp sensationalism about an
SAS soldier, whilst Martin Amis' 'London Fields', for example, is a worthwhile
work of literature. And that if Partridge had been reading the latter
it would have shown him in a better light (although his throwaway comment
that the book seemed to get better every time he read it would take on
a whole new meaning - the impression would be that Partridge was skimming
through the Amis novel as an affectation, or that he had not understood
it, or that, worse, he was treating it as if it was a mass-market novel
and not a work of high art). But why? Why is a work of fiction held in
higher regard than a work of fact? I do not know whether 'Bravo Two Zero'
is well-written or not, but I assume the writers of 'I'm Alan Partridge'
believed that most of the audience had not read the book, either, which
is why they picked it and not Ben Elton's 'Stark', which is very badly-written
indeed. Would an autobiographical account of Neil Armstrong's Apollo flight
merit such derision? Or Bobby Charlton's account of scoring the final
goal at the 1966 world cup final? I think not. So it's not the fact that
it's a biography that's the object of humour. And it can't be the author,
because nobody knows who he is. He's probably a rugby-playing Will Carling
type who spends his time doing motivational speeches for management training
seminars, or acting as a bodyguard for rich businessmen, or coaching Sean
Bean in being Sean Bean.
So it's the subject. People fighting and dying.
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