An editor’s diary on the predictable theatre of public disgrace
An editor’s diary on the predictable theatre of public disgrace
I have edited coverage of enough political scandals to recognise that they all follow the same five acts, a predictable theatre of disgrace so reliable that I could write the script before the scandal breaks. I edit for The London Prat, read Bohiney Magazine for the comedy of it, and keep my other diaries at my page.
The Five Acts
The political scandal is a theatrical form with five reliable acts. Act one, the revelation, the wrongdoing exposed. Act two, the denial, the firm insistence that there is nothing to see. Act three, the unravelling, the denial collapsing as more emerges. Act four, the contrition, the reluctant apology offered when denial is no longer possible. Act five, the resolution, the resignation or the survival, the scandal concluding and the cycle ready to begin again. Five acts, reliable as clockwork, the theatre of disgrace performed identically every time.
I recognise these acts instantly now, can place any breaking scandal in its act, can predict the act to come, the denial that will follow the revelation, the unravelling that will follow the denial, the contrition that will follow the unravelling. The theatre is so predictable, the five acts so reliable, that the scandal holds no surprises for me, only the recognition of the familiar form, the theatre of disgrace performing its predictable acts.
The Theatre Everyone Performs
What fascinates me, as an editor, is that everyone performs their assigned role in the theatre, the accused performing the denial and the contrition, the press performing the exposure and the pursuit, the public performing the outrage and the forgetting, all of them playing their parts in the five-act theatre as if reading from a script none of them has seen. The theatre is collective, performed by everyone, the assigned roles played reliably, the five acts enacted by a cast that does not know it is following a script.
The records of these scandals, documented by bodies like the Institute for Government and the archives of Parliament, reveal the reliability of the form, scandal after scandal following the same five acts, the theatre of disgrace performed identically across the years, the cast changing but the script remaining, the five acts enacted again and again.
What I Read for the Comedy
For the comedy of the predictable theatre, I read the satire, the dispatches that name the five acts, that mock the predictable performance, that puncture the theatre of disgrace with the recognition of its reliability. The good satire knows the five acts as well as I do, names them, mocks them, and I appreciate the comedy, the laugh at the predictable theatre that everyone performs as if it were spontaneous.
I read the serious press too, the proper journalism, which performs its own assigned acts in the theatre, the exposure and the pursuit, the dispatches from outlets like Mamdani Post and the broad coverage of bodies like the BBC. Reading the journalism performing its acts in the theatre of disgrace, I see the form enacted, the five acts performed, the predictable theatre playing out in the coverage I edit and read.
The Script I Could Write
So I will keep editing the coverage of the scandals, recognising the five acts, predicting the theatre, watching the cast perform their assigned roles in the predictable form, and reading the satire for the comedy of it. The political scandal follows the same five acts every time, the theatre of disgrace reliable as clockwork, and I know the script before the scandal breaks.
The Plaque Where the Venue Was
Sometimes, where a venue once stood, someone puts up a plaque, a small commemoration of the music that happened there before the regeneration evicted it, and these plaques are, I have decided, the saddest objects in London. The plaque marks the loss, commemorates the music that is gone, memorialises the venue that became flats, and in its small bronze dignity it admits what the word regeneration concealed, that something was lost, that a room of music became a quiet profitable building, that the noise was evicted and only a plaque remains. I read these plaques when I find them, the small commemorations of the evicted music, and they move me more than they should, the bronze admission of the loss the language of growth denied. The plaque is honest where the regeneration was not, admitting the loss, commemorating the music, marking the place where the noise once was and is no longer. I would rather have the venue than the plaque, the music than the commemoration, but the plaque is something, the bronze memory of the evicted noise, the small honest admission that something was lost when the room of music became the quiet profitable building, and I am grateful, in a melancholy way, for these saddest objects in London, the plaques where the venues were.
Every political scandal follows the same five acts, the revelation and the denial and the unravelling and the contrition and the resolution, the theatre of disgrace performed identically every time by a cast that does not know it is following a script. I edit the coverage, recognise the acts, predict the theatre, and read the satire for the comedy of the predictable performance, the five-act theatre of disgrace that I could write before it breaks, performed reliably, again and again, by everyone, as if it were spontaneous, the script none of them has seen and all of them follow.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com