Speaking for America
HARRY Shearer is talking. The voice of so many beloved Simpsons characters, and an all-round American comedy icon, Shearer sounds so familiar that it feels as if Principal Skinner is here, hastily rifling through his files.
Shearer is on this side of the Atlantic to promote his new TV comedy, Nixon’s The One, which premieres this evening on Sky Arts. The show takes its cue from 198 hours of secret recordings of himself that Richard Nixon made during the years 1971-73.
Nixon’s weird taste for taping and bugging everybody triggered the Watergate scandal in 1973. It forced him to resign in disgrace in 1974, the only US president ever to do so.
Filmed as if captured by hidden camera, Shearer’s hilarious satire hones in on the comic wonder that resides in the transcripts of the Nixon tapes.
The show lays bare the former president in all his idiosyncratic ‘glory’ and re-enacts the surreal conversations Nixon had with everyone from special advisor Henry Kissinger to a befuddled group of dairy industry lobbyists.
Shearer says his interest in developing the show was to explore Nixon’s zany character, and to let the political subtext speak for itself.
“I didn’t want this to be a history lesson,” he says. “I didn’t want people to have to read up to know what it’s about. I wanted it to be purely about character. This guy had so many twists and turns in his personality and they’re all on display, because he had the lovely lack of foresight to record himself. What a gift.”
The show startlingly foregrounds the eccentricity of Nixon’s everyday speech. He is an intelligent man, holding the highest office in world politics, and yet he is dysfunctional when making small talk.
Speaking in a fumbling manner, Nixon is ill-at-ease conversing with people, a discomfort he masks with an absurd intonation of self-assurance.
If Nixon reminds you of anyone, it is Steve Coogan’s spoof chat-show host Alan Partridge.
Shearer laughs raucously at the comparison. “Yeah, except for one thing,” he says. “Nixon really ran a country. Also, Alan Partridge was a figment of Steve Coogan’s imagination. Nixon was a figment of America’s.”
Still, Shearer says that, despite his eccentric manner, Nixon was very bright.
“He was very smart and in certain areas, like foreign policy, he had quite a depth of knowledge. It’s undeniable that he was not an ignoramus when it came to that. But when you get to the stuff that politicians normally make a meal out of, which is being able to hang with people, to be garrulous and gregarious, Nixon had none of that.
“And yet he still got to the top, by sheer force of will. But his social skills were always frightening. His ‘regular guy’ index is really right around zero.”
Many of the funniest snatches of dialogue in Nixon’s The One recall the kind of exchanges one finds in the brilliant ‘mockumentaries’ that Shearer has made over the years with long-time collaborators Christopher Guest and Michael McKean, the most famous being 1983’s This Is Spinal Tap. Like so many of the characters in those films, Nixon is a man who tends to spout off confidently on any topic, whether it’s the benefits of a late-night glass of milk or the demise of classical Greek culture (“Aristotle was a homo. We all know that. So was Socrates.”). Of course, what is incredible to bear in mind is that every utterance in this show is verbatim.
This is what Nixon actually said.
“The first time I heard it, I thought you can’t write it better than this,” says Shearer. “For me, nothing beats reality. You just have to be quiet and observe it, edit the boring parts out, and you’ve got gold.”
This is not the first time Shearer has portrayed Nixon. The Californian says he has been obsessed with the man right back to his early days as a comedian in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Notably, since Nixon’s death in 1994, Shearer has been doing a regular sketch about the ex-president on his radio programme, Le Show. “I imagined three things in that sketch,” he says. “I imagined that there’s this place called heaven. I imagined that Nixon got in. And I imagined that he’s still taping. In a way, that’s been like rehearsing for this new show.”
Intriguingly, while comedy predominates in Nixon’s The One, Shearer’s turn as Tricky Dicky is humane. Between the laughs, the sense of Nixon as a man uncomfortable in his own skin is palpable.
“Comedy really has to be grounded in our common human frailty,” says Shearer. “But for certain happenstances of luck and will, we’d all be acting the same way, most likely. And you have to make that connection.
“Otherwise, you’re doing stick-figures. And they’re not fun to watch. They just become things to root for or against. There’s no rooting in this show. The same thing that’s funny about it is what makes it human. He’s a tortured man. And he’s a self-tortured man.”
Nixon’s The One is a one-off show, but Shearer is hopeful it may be picked up a series. “We’ve got some ideas,” he says. “We’re prepared.”
Certainly, it would be a topical show in an era when political disillusionment is now so rife. Shearer, who is a regular essayist and blogger on political matters, understands where that disillusionment comes from — despite the election of Barack Obama as president, America is “less changed than was expected.
“I think there’s a growing sense on both the left and the right that American politics is an insider’s game, and that there’s a shadow-play put on for the public but the game goes on regardless,” he says.
“Obviously, politics has always been something of an insider’s game and there’s a facade put on for the ‘edification’ of the public.
“But there were substantial, if not profound, differences between the Republican and Democratic parties in Nixon’s era, and I think what’s dawning on folks as we approach this year’s presidential election is that the differences today are just painted on signboards.”
* Playhouse Presents ... Nixon’s the One is at 9pm this evening on Sky Arts 1. Further information: sky.com/arts
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