A familiar OE-led balls-up: Rory Stewart’s The Long History of Ignorance reviewed

In my next life I intend to have my brain removed in order to become a telly executive. You know: ‘where ignorance is bliss/ ’Tis folly to be wise’ (Thomas Gray, OE). Such ignorance is a state which, happily enough, Rory Stewart, OE and a fully tooled-up Mob from rent-a-thinker (what one of those executives, without a hint of irony or faint praise, once called ‘television intellectuals’) are just now kicking around in the hope that they may rehabilitate it and release it from its sty of obloquy.

Rory is a very keen type – what used to be called an all-rounder – and, despite his protestations otherwise, he is untouched by the piggiest ignorance, and addresses his audience and contributors with the zeal of a scoutmaster.

The BBC has clearly poured a generous couple of quid into this rich if random talking-head radio series. Rory is, in all but name, going on a ‘journey’ (mandatory for the lame-brain sheep who run the BBC), a house tic that is no style but a formulaic crib that lacks all wit, all humour – rank absences which signal ‘seriousness’ in BBC eyes.

Most of the six episodes are made up of the Mob putting their extemporised foot in it. Had they been obliged to write scripts and reflect on those scripts beforehand, they might have done better than nervously proffer a familiar OE-led balls-up, whose repeated subject is not really ignorance but the perennial favourite: me, me, me. Boastful solipsism comes readily to this caste. (Though being so humbly down to earth it is reluctant to call a syllogism a syllogism.)

The choppy collaged format is appropriate to the medium. The great master of improvisation Keith Johnstone knew very well that spontaneity which has not been rehearsed invariably falls back on generalities and comforting commonplaces.