Why Hillary needs to lift the hearts of the audience, music hall-style

The odds are on an unsatisfactory win by Hillary Clinton, which will present her with a task of healing and inspiring a deeply polarised nation, writes Terry Prone

This starts with John Major and the pussies. A first for the Irish Examiner, we modestly point out. Now, the younger, newer readers may not be desperately familiar with John Major, so let us introduce him as a former Conservative leader in Britain, and a prime minister who was a gift to satirical TV programmes because he was so respectably, blandly, boringly grey.

What wasn’t generally known at the time was that Major was the only son of two music hall artists, who travelled the roads of Britain before his birth and afterwards, entertaining thousands in local Hippodromes. This left Major with a love for, and insight into, music hall which led him, after he retired from politics, to write an excellent book about that now dead form of entertainment and some of its outstanding stars.

Pictured in the book, in one of those black and white Victorian photographs, with the creases of lengthy storage running across the middle, were the members of a singing sister act. Three of them, prettily dressed in ankle-length crinolines, adopting that “I’m so innocent” pose that calls for half a smile, half concealed by a delicate little forefinger, head tilted to one side.

These three would enthrall an audience with several songs, moving from the girlishly demure to the wide-eyed slightly naughty. Having got the audience firmly on their side, they would then advance to the footlights and gesture for silence before posing a question in a stage whisper.

“Would you like to see our pussies?” they would inquire.

Understandably, the audience, particularly the male component of that audience, would go wild. In response, the three performers would tease and excite them further, doing the old music hall trick of hand to the ear “I’m not sure I heard you — do you really want to see our pussies?”

When the audience were at full affirmative bellow, the three girls would signal a fanfare from the band, lean forward, clutch the hems at the front of their dresses, delay a little, and then, in unison, yank the skirts over their heads to reveal that each was wearing a frilly petticoat dotted with pockets, and in each of the pockets sat an adorable kitten, its whiskey little face peeping over the broiderie anglais of the petticoat pocket. And the curtain comes down.

The girls provided something for everyone in the audience, albeit not precisely what some of that audience might have been hoping for. The guys in the stalls got to feel macho and reckless. The women got to tut tut and then feel reassured by the sweetness of the joke’s punchline. Each wife got to stick a mock-reproving, aren’t-you-dreadful elbow in her husband’s well concealed ribs. The husband got to feel that he hadn’t quite lost it, even if, like Bill Clinton, the man wasn’t quite sure what “it” was, in this particular case.

Nearly two centuries later, an American Presidential candidate has revived that whole vaudvillean tradition, albeit a little on the short side when it comes to mischievous charm. The reactions evoked, however, are exactly the same. When it came to music hall, the audience came already convinced, and fuelled for affirmation with a few pints of pale ale. On occasion, they may have seen the act before and, like superannuated children, they may have taken undiluted pleasure in reiterating their vocal responses to it.

The vulgarity of it freed them to let loose, the collectivity of the music hall concealing them from any posher disapproving people present, although the chances were that the more disapproving people would wait to go to the theatre to see some more serious presentation. Being effectively lied to by the women on stage and let down by them wasn’t an issue. This audience didn’t have much of a life and the adrenalin rush of feeling safely wicked was a more than satisfactory payoff for the lie.

The people who lined up to see “proper” ballet or “serious” theatre looked for much of the same, except at a different level. They wanted to be shocked, surprised and to leave the theatre convinced that they now understood the world in a better and nobler way.

The problem with the music hall versus serious theatre of the current US Presidential election is not that the music hall side is so degrading in its squalid delivery to its audience, but that the serious side has failed to satisfy the legitimate needs of its quite separate audience. The odds are on an unsatisfactory win by Hillary Clinton, which will present her with a task of healing and inspiring a deeply polarised nation — a task for which she has no track record.

If Hillary Clinton inadvertently played into Donald Trump’s progress, so, too, did other factors, many of them affecting mainstream media, and chief among them the reverential observation that “there’s a lot of anger out there”. Whenever that observation is made, it carries two assumptions with it. The first is that the anger is justified. The second is that it has been caused by traditional politics. Neither is necessarily true.

In the past, when jobs left an area, leaving the factory workers unemployed, they had a number of reactions, least of which was anger. If you look at photographs from the depression, the one emotion you do not see is anger. Fear, grief, disappointment and hopelessness are present in the emaciated faces looking out of a dusty black and white past. Not anger. Never anger.

In fact, anger, historically, is not associated with the downtrodden, but rather with the upper classes. It was John Mortimer, himself a lawyer from a privileged background, who described the judges of his time as constantly exercising “the old middle class prerogative of being permanently in a most filthy temper.” It was just a habit. A right unchallenged by family, friends or colleagues.

The prerogative of being permanently in a most filthy temper is now found in middle aged Americans, predominantly male. The difference is that their bad temper is used to excuse racism and bigotry while being presented to politicians as if they had caused it and must find a way to assuage it. It has turned a whole sector of American life into — as Michael Moore puts it — a Molotov cocktail ready for throwing by a candidate who in real terms presents no solutions to the putative causes of their anger, but who, in his campaign, has provided emotional purgation and permission to roar like an old music hall audience at the dirty words and dirtier images characterising his campaign.

In response, Hillary Clinton has often quoted Michelle Obama’s great line “When they go low, we go high,” without seeming to fully understand it and certainly without delivering on it. Clinton has confirmed her own existing following — just about. What she has patently failed to do is to present a vision of America that lifts the heart of the audience and leaves them convinced that they can be part of a better, nobler future.

Donald Trump: Life and Times

Hillary Clinton: Life and Times