BBC Newsnight Discusses Kingdom Come:

He's one of the few people telling some kind of truth about the untruths all around us




Discussion by Hardeep Singh Kohli, Paul Morley, Michael Portillo, Ian McMillan and Rosie Boycott.

First broadcast on BBC Newsworld TV, 22nd September, 2006

Transcription by Mike Bonsall

JGB Voice-Over Introduction: Our 'streets' are the cable TV consumer channels. Our party insignia are the gold and platinum loyalty cards. Faintly risible? Yes, but people thought the Nazis were a bit of a joke. The consumer society is a kind of soft police state. We think we have choice, but everything is compulsory. We have to keep buying or we fail as citizens.

There almost is something fascist about the big shopping mall, the lines of aisles, the slogans, the banners, the pressure to conform. I can see the sinister possibilities just waiting. It's not as if the people who go shopping there have any other centre to their lives, most of them, I suspect, don't, and that's what worries me.

...a new kind of hate had emerged, silent and disciplined, a racism tempered by loyalty cards and PIN numbers. Shopping was now the model for all human behaviour, drained of emotion and anger.

I think the book is positive in its final message. I think of myself as a sort of weather forecaster — I see stormy weather, but most storms eventually pass — I just want to limit the damage.

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Hardeep Singh Kohli: Paul, in terms of suburban dystopia Ballard really sets the bar. Is this a continuation of that?


Paul Morley: Well, it's the latest instalment in something he's been doing for 40-odd years now; kind of predicting, commentating, judging, creating if you like, the reality that's all around us. I mean, if you look what's happened since I read this book — while I was reading it, you know — we've had the TV presenter in a car crash, we've had the largest shopping-mall in the world opening in Shepherd's Bush, we've had the burning of a TV studio in Budapest, we've had the heckling of the Home Secretary, you know, by a British Muslem. I mean, this is the world Ballard's been saying has been coming for a long time and here he is with his latest instalment. It's a kind of great riff, it's a series of great ideas -- put it this way: it's more likely to be filmed by Cronenberg than Spielberg. So those of you expecting the storytelling Ballard, maybe, you know, hold up a little bit.

It's a series of ideas. He's improvising with pure ideas about a world that, in a way... where he says about being positive he's absolutely right — it's surprising that this thing doesn't happen — that suddenly people wake up from the fact that they're being told what to do, and completely, you know, cause chaos. And he's been saying it's going to happen and it's almost like people are beginning to say: well, haven't you been saying this for an awful long time? Well yes, he has, because in fact no one has woken up to the fact — he's one of the few people telling some kind of truth about the untruths all around us.

Hardeep Singh Kohli: Michael, is the fact that this is a series of ideas both its great strength and its great weakness as a book?


Michael Portillo: I think to say it's about ideas is to flatter the book. I think it's the most heavy-handed — it's just a, sort of, sledge-hammer against consumerism — page after page of the wretched stuff, every character queuing up to tell us how dreadful consumerism is. This pastiche of a plot built out of a sort of fascism that arises from shopping centres and cable shopping channels — dreadfully written, I thought — page after page...

Paul Morley: We must all put up our hand here and say: please don't say it's dreadfully written...

Michael Portillo: Dreadfully, dreadfully, I'm happy to read you bits. I couldn't believe the heavy handed... You really want me to, you want me to...

Hardeep Singh Kohli: Because under the BBC guidelines, I have to give Paul the right to reply in a moment...

Michael Portillo: "I could see years of poor narration [sic], self-neglect and arrogance, the face of an assassin [sic] through the ages, of rootless metropolitan men from an earlier era who had survived into the twenty-first century, as out of place among the four-wheel drives and school runs of prosperous suburbs [sic] as Neanderthal Man discovered in a sun lounger beside a Costa Brava [sic] swimming pool." It's just appalling.

Hardeep Singh Kohli: Isn't that a problem with the book, is that it is diatribes spouted through rather vacuous characters. Do you believe any of the characters?

Paul Morley: I believe the characters, as I would believe characters I've come across in a dream, and I think that's often the case with Ballard. And I think — as a part of the unified theme of everything he's been doing — I'm going to believe in those characters absolutely. I see those characters around me all the time. I see, you know, David Cruise — the main character — the TV presenter, who is utilising the friendliness and familiarity of the TV presenter to become a kind of leader — I see that in Michael, so in a way I see those kind of things...

Michael Portillo: No I'm the other way around.

Rosie Boycott: But it's a very lazy novel. I thought it was...

Paul Morley: But lazy on what basis?


Rosie Boycott: Oh, incredibly cardboard-cutout characters, no emotion in it, you don't care about the characters. And I thought it was extraordinary to write a whole novel, which is really about the effects of consumerism — and a lot of the stuff, say, that professor Layard's been writing about — the study of happiness, the weakness of consumerism, and that it doesn't emotionally fulfil you or satisfy — and yet there's nobody in the book who is an actual consumer — and that he's very, very weak on his sense of product...

Paul Morley: Actually there is somebody... The reader is the consumer... I mean, it's a lot...

Rosie Boycott: I think he's lazy because he's sitting in his own little suburb and observing this phenomenon — he's right in a sense, yes he is a seer, that it's got lots of problems with it — but it's a kind of lazy book. I think it's a bad novel at heart, as above story.

Hardeep Singh Kohli: It wasn't just consumerism that Ballard's having a go at; it's TV presenters, immigration, cable television, sport, small towns. I mean, is there anything he hasn't tried to undermine in the book?


Ian McMillan: Jam probably but apart from that...

Hardeep Singh Kohli: I think there was a paragraph having a go at marmalade...

Ian McMillan: ...I love Ballard, and I was disappointed that it wasn't more of a novel. And yet Paul's right that it was a series of ideas, but was a bit — what I call the Columbo style of writing — at the end of Columbo they all sit around and explain what's just happened. There was a lot of that, where people said: so you mean... There was a lot of that — and maybe it's right if it's just a novel of ideas — if it's just a note pushed under the door — then that's right, but it's not quite a novel, it's a...

Paul Morley: I think if it had been a first book and that was what you got — fair enough, but as...

Ian McMillan: It is part of a huge canon...

Paul Morley: ...may be the final pages, and like the Dylan album, that last song — you know, let's face it, we're getting to the stage now where he is...

Michael Portillo: If it had been a first book it would not have been published. This would never have got published.

Rosie Boycott: Do you think anyone pays any attention to it though? When you write a book like that, does it actually change anything?

Paul Morley: No, but I think that's also what he's talking about — the numbness of feeling that there is — that you can write a book like this.

Rosie Boycott: You've said exactly what I mean, that I think the book was devoid of feeling. There was so little passion within it, and so little real — you didn't feel for anybody — and that's weird.

Hardeep Singh Kohli: Wasn't there actually, kind of, raw, unguarded diatribe, rather than something passionate in it? Wasn't that the fault of it?

Paul Morley: Well, I wouldn't say it's a fault as such, because I would say it's a common — and where we've all kind of arrived. You know, a lot of us — you know around us — what he's viewing is where we have arrived — where we lack feeling — we respond because the media tells us to feel a certain way. We act because, you know, the commercial world tells us to act a certain way. But we've lost our own judgement about how to feel.

Hardeep Singh Kohli: Well, that's Kingdom Come, everything but uncontroversial, by JG Ballard, published by fourth estate.