An F-word of warning to those who may slip on political banana skins

COME ON, as Hillary would say, let’s get real here. Nobody was surprised the Taoiseach knew that word and could use it.

The high-minded comments would lead you to believe that swearing in The House is as bad as swearing from the altar of a church. It isn’t. If it hadn’t been a slow news week, it wouldn’t have got half the coverage it got.

It does, of course, point to the dangers of the live mike, and to the advisability of assuming that any microphone in the vicinity is live, even if it looks dead.

People in radio studios, for example, should never assume that just because the red light isn’t on, they’re not being broadcast. The late Gerry Fitt, before every interview, perhaps as a way of calming his nerves, used to tell jokes of intestine-pleating filthiness. Half the time, at least a portion of the joke would be broadcast by an ostensibly inactive microphone. This would result in a deluge of phone calls from listeners, the majority of whom, while infuriated, were mainly maddened by missing the punchline.

On the other hand, a CNN reporter who visited the ladies’ room while wearing her radio microphone did what speakers at conferences need to be warned against.

She favoured the entire audience with a vivid, live sharing of the sound effects attendant upon the purpose for which one visits a lavatory. However, in her case, it got even more exciting, because the network for which she was reporting went on the air around the time she moved out of the cubicle and started to repair her make-up, while sharing with a pal her views on her husband’s sister, which were colourful, not to say pleasingly vicious. They were broadcast to the nation. What fun that reporter must have had returning home that night.

How people react to the unintended broadcasting of an off-the-record mutter depends entirely on their pre-existing view of the mutterer. Hence the preponderance of texters to radio programmes praising, rather than criticising the Taoiseach for the F-word episode.

The kind of radio programmes that broadcast such texts are by their nature self-selecting: the texters tend to be under 30 and male. They loved what he said. Fair dues to him, they enthused. About time we had a politician who tells it like it is. A straight talker. The Taoiseach, said these texters, isn’t like the rest of the politicians, waffling and obfuscating.

What those texters noticed was Brian Cowen talking like a (very) human being. Interestingly, this isn’t how he usually talks in the Dáil.

Analysis of the Taoiseach’s Dáil discourse reveals it to be unusually abstract, conceptual and general. The vigour of his delivery makes people believe he’s being more direct and clear than he actually is. It’s the way he tells ‘em.

On the day of the famous incident, the Taoiseach listened to a lengthy question from the leader of the Opposition and then discussed issues somewhat related to the question, in sentences filled with what Macauley called “the big, grey words of the lexicon.”

Then Enda Kenny asked a second question. It was only when the Taoiseach got ratty with the permanently choleric Dr Jim Reilly that his communication got up close, personal and exciting.

Once he started to jab his index finger at the opposing benches and tell them he could organise shout-downs any time it suited him, the big grey words disappeared and everybody understood what he was on about.

Richard Bruton began to smile the smile of a man watching another man being marvellously lucid on the wrong topic. Enda Kenny had the look of a man fishing for mackerel and landing a whale: he knew he was on to a good thing, but the scale of it was a bit of a surprise.

NOT long afterwards, the Taoiseach again demonstrated both sides of his communication capacity at a conference about the Lisbon Treaty. He read a conceptual speech and he explained why he had got so ratty at Leaders’ Questions. He had been interrupted 44 times, he said. Great quote.

Clever way to arm his defenders: “For Godsake, Brian only lost it after he’d been interrupted 44 times.” It did, however, raise a number of questions. Had he counted the interruptions at the time or did someone have to go through the tape and work out the total? Were there really 44 separate interruptions? Would 43 have been an acceptable total?

The entire episode will serve as a free promo for Leaders’ Questions in future. Now, to the plain people of Ireland, Leaders’ Questions is of interest only when one of the participants squashes another (which doesn’t happen that often), when someone uses the slot to showcase their wit (as did the greatly-missed Joe Higgins and Pat Rabbitte) or when someone puts their foot in their mouth up to thigh level.

Oddly though, the American body politic has decided that Leaders’ Questions is the way to go. Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain has announced he’ll introduce a version of it, if elected.

This has met with widespread approval. Not so much because the American public yearn to watch the weekly appearance of their president undergoing hostile questioning. More because the American public, especially the Democrats, know that McCain, a war hero who, having shown unmatched discipline in the face of torture, has shown, in peace-time, a remarkable incapacity to show discipline in the face of criticism. They’re enthused by the hope that he will lose his temper early and often.

We in Ireland take much the same approach to Leaders’ Questions, which is why Brian Cowen’s F-word episode won itself so much coverage.

Fans of the House of Commons version believe their version is a lot more witty than what happens in the Dáil. Which is true, but should not lead either Eamon Gilmore or Enda Kenny to line up a team of joke-writers. Being funny is not hard. Being productively funny, on the other hand, is enormously difficult.

Being productively funny means a) avoiding the obvious and b) provoking the Government spokesperson into making a mistake.

It requires an approach akin to the advice given to a young film director by an old Charlie Chaplin. The film director presented Chaplin with the clichéd scenario of a fat woman and a banana skin. It would be easy to get a cheap laugh out of her stepping on the skin and coming down hard, he pointed out. How would Chaplin get a bigger, more lasting laugh? Chaplin said he would establish the banana skin in a close -up shot first of all, then cut to a shot of the fat woman mincing towards it, then cut back to the banana skin, then cut to a close up of the woman’s face as she spotted it, then cut to a wide shot of her stepping daintily over it.

And disappearing down an open manhole on the other side of the banana skin...