Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Death by television

Tanya Gold hails Paddy Chayefsky’s cult satire Network, celebrating its 40th birthday this month, and its uncannily prophetic vision of a world dictated by TV

issue 12 November 2016

Forty years ago this month a film appeared, so prescient I wonder if its author, Paddy Chayefsky, saw the 2016 American presidential election campaign in a crystal ball. It was called Network and it foretold the rise of Donald Trump.

The plot is King Lear appears on Newsnight: a newsman run mad. The protagonist is Howard Beale (Peter Finch), an anchorman at a failing network. The year is 1976, and America is embattled with inflation, depression and the end of the Vietnam war. It is not a time for American heroes, to paraphrase Chayefsky’s acolyte Aaron Sorkin writing in The West Wing.

Beale’s ratings are low. He is fired. He announces that he will kill himself, live on air.

‘I just run out of bullshit,’ he says. ‘Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living.’ There is ‘the God bullshit’ and also ‘the noble man bullshit …if there is anybody out there who can look around this demented slaughterhouse of a world we live in and tell me that man is a noble creature — believe me that man is full of bullshit’.

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