Start the Week
22/11/2010
Andrew Marr takes a satirical look at the world in Start the Week. The satirist PJ O'Rourke makes a plea to the American public, Not To Vote, in his latest angry critique of liberal politics, while the writer and comedian Armando Iannucci explores the latest chapter in the life of his Machiavellian spin doctor, Malcolm Tucker. Mikhail Bulgakov's absurdist tale of how a stray mongrel becomes human is brought to the stage by Simon McBurney. And the classicist Mary Beard delves beneath the volcanic ash to uncover everyday life in the Roman town of Pompeii.
Producer: Katy Hickman.
- Duration:
- 41m
- Broadcast on:
- 22 Nov 2010
- Audio Format:
- other
Thank you for downloading the Start the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello, the Irish political class have surrendered today. Their proud Celtic boom exposed as a long, thin part of self-delusion. As the British struggling with debt helped to bail them out, Westminster is hardly in a position to pat itself in the back, so it's appropriate that we're talking about politics with a satirical sneer today. Armando Yunuchy, who's the thick of it, ripped open new labour, has a book about that out, and he plots against the coalition as well. Simon McBurney has directed an opera which rips into the delusions of Soviet Russia based on a bleak and long-band novel by Bulgokov. Later, Mary Beard will be leading us along the streets of Pompeii, Roman life, turns out to be rather ruder, rougher and wilder than our vague notions of austere fellows in Toga's ordering slaves around. First though, the favourite satirist of the American right and many others too. Here is how PJ O'Rourke describes politicians in his new book, Ratchet George purveyors of monkey, doodle and baked wind piddlers upon Merit beggars at the door of accomplishment thieves of livelihood envy coddling tax lice, applauding themselves for giving away other people's money, muck dwelling bottom feeders, graying fat on the worries and disappointments of the electorate. PJ O'Rourke, you call your new book Don't Vote, it only encourages the bastards, but literally you would vote, would you or not? Oh yes, I gave all my many followers, which I suppose would be my six-year-old son, and one dog, one of the three. I gave them special dispensation on our election day to take a day off from my credo and actually go to the polls. To what good? I'm not sure. This is a book which anatomizes a lot of your targets are specifically American in terms of healthcare policy and Obama and so on. There is of course this very colourful insurgency going on in American political life at the moment the Tea Party movement on the Republican side. To what extent would you allow yourself with that? To what extent do you share their feelings? I think it's sort of fun, I think it's sort of interesting. You know it's a very American way of doing things. We have perceived, as the political class in Europe has perceived that entitlements or political entitlements are simply too high to be as I think the left likes to say sustainable and that we're all going to go broke, especially the moment that my generation of baby boom generation retires that it's just going to be the end of the world and worse than the Irish housing crisis. Sort of giant Irish Irish Irish everywhere and here there's a sort of top down movement to scale back government spending government entitlements and funnily enough from in the United States in a very American way it's from the bottom up and so there are a bunch of people out there being their own Sarkozis and of course that means everybody acting just as strange as Sarkozy himself does. And why do you think things have turned around so fast from the Obama election where you know the politics seem to be entirely different everybody decided that Obama was a completely new start and hope and all the rest of it and very very quickly from an outsider's point of view that political weather changed almost in a snapping of a finger and may well change again yet it's the people put entirely too much hope in the political system find themselves continually seduced and abandoned and they keep rummaging around for something entirely new without addressing the underlying problems remain the same whether you have Bush or whether you have Obama or whether you have you know the man in the moon so people don't seem to be able to get their heads around that and they keep looking for an easy fix. And you argue in this book that a lot of the problem has been caused by the confusion between positive rights and negative rights. Isaiah Berlin actually was the first person to use those terms and yes negative rights are our rights to be left alone our fundamental freedoms freedom of religion freedom of expression freedom of assembly and so on. Positive rights or as I call them my book gimme rights are our rights to to education our rights to housing our rights to a decent living wage health care etc. They are two very different categories of rights this is not to say that that all positive rights that all the gimme rights are wrong it's simply that they they entail a considerable price we have to pay for them not just in taxes but in the the build the agradentization of the political system we have to give the political system a great deal of power in order to deliver these positive rights to us and that of course is the problem that's what entitlements is all about. And for those who don't know your own political trajectory you started on the left as a you know rights of all kinds man really what change what was the moment that changed you? Oh I got a job you know so often happens I got a job paying $150 a week and we got paid every two weeks and it was 300 bucks and I needed that 300 bucks and so did my landlord and when I got my paycheck I netted out it's sort of 185 or something and because of federal tax and state tax and local tax and the contribution to pension fund which of course I was very interested in at that age and so on and so forth and I said wait a minute I mean screaming and yelling for socialism demonstrating the street for socialism growing my hair long and dressing funny for socialism and here I get a job with a capitalist pig corporation find out we have socialism already they just took half my pay you know and it's been that's what that was said I suppose the more serious theme in the book is what how people have to behave if they're not going to be oppressed by an over-mighty political class ah there's the rub yes people actually have to take responsibility for their own behavior and we don't none of us cared much to do that yeah yes I'm laying down so I'm trying to lay down some sort of basic political principles and is it political in a free country in a free and democratic country it's all about freedom and power and responsibility and of course the we give a great deal of power away as persons in order to get rid of that responsibility and of course get as much freedom as as we'd like often a little bit more than it's actually good for us and yet we seem to have a culture where on both sides of the Atlantic many many of us and I say us when things go wrong it's somebody else's fault we don't actually take responsibility for oh yeah and that's becoming grained and I wonder whether that can be unengrained yeah good question don't know um the that's the beauty of being a journalist is that you know you just have to flick on the lights and see the vermin scamper you know you don't actually have to step on them it's an easy job really yeah yeah what are the rest of us mega this uh Amanda well I wonder whether uh the democrats in particular made the great mistake of thinking that the tea party was good for them in that it would produce so many crazy candidates on behalf of the republicans that it would split the republican vote and all the independents would go to the democrats the problem the tea party for the democrats is it turns out not to be the mad right it turns out to be a protest movement by those who are just extremely disaffected and they grumpy from the grumpy it's the it's the grumpy it's the aggressive grumpy America who are all congregated whether they stay with the tea party in the next two years good question but the other thing is this dilemma of separating negative from positive because in fact a lot of the extreme right advocate quite aggressively interventionists approaches towards behavior you know they are they are telling us abortion they're telling us uh you know what we should be spending our money on research and what we should be doing what we should be doing in the bedroom and not doing the bedroom and what kind of relationships should be uh made legitimate and so on and and and there is a parallel here with David Cameron setting up something called the behavioral insight unit at number ten which starts more well in it's very very sinister bj well one of the problems whether the tea party will ever turn into anything that's really important is that it encompasses among its grumpy members uh people from the uh you know sort of christian conservative right all the way through to very libertarian uh sort of types and and really they're they're they're one uh a point of agreement is that the size and scope of government has grown too large but some but which part of the scope and which part of the size is not something that they particularly agree on if you get on into something like foreign policy you know you know they're all over the map uh you know everything from nuka ron to you know uh withdrawal american troops from everywhere including america but this is the problem with you know with politicians of all shapes and sizes is that they're in favor of uh devolving pie and handing it away pie until they get into pair themselves and there's a whole lot of things they decide they want to do so at the moment it's let teachers teach give schools complete freedom to teach the things that we want them to teach that's you know in the order that we want them to teach you know for the cost yes yeah my problem with with pj's approach is the kind of not stepping on the vermin line because there's something about this political satire which is really grounded in your case in loads of argument but it's also tremendously fun and it's full of can pithy one line as that we can all enjoy you know even if we're from the left and i i kind of had the feeling when i got to the end of the book that this will this book will be sitting in the loo of you know every american politician left and right and they'll all be enjoying it and they'll all be having a chuckle about it and i wondered if you thought that sort of undermined its message and like maybe the vermin could have been a bit more trampled on so that a bomber couldn't read it out to michelle late at night say with a bit of a t-shirt as i'm sure he will now you're quite right you know and it comes down to to solving actually solving political problems rather than pointing at them and pointing and making pointed fun of them and so on um i i confess i simply don't find myself smart enough i mean it's sort of like getting into the questions of central banking and i'm in people natter along for about us i'm with them for a sentence and a half and then gone you know but that's why people have it against satirists isn't it you know they come in they come in spray gun everywhere you know it's easy targets and then yeah always tearing down never building up and i you know i confess that's me but surely surely that uh set eyes and in some sense is not about necessarily trampling on the vermin but simply exposing the truth i mean there's this whole thing about the relationship between you know tragedy and comedy that tragedy is you know you know uh it really is is is is something which is sort of truthful about human beings and in that it's beautiful and comedy is somehow light artificial and escapist whereas of course you know i think the opposite is true which is that tragedy sort of preserves the illusion that we're somehow a noble creature whereas comedy exposes the the horrible truth which is that which is why we hate being laughed at in real life isn't the question is who about whom is it the truth you know whose truth does satire expose and so if you go back to the ancient world which i know better than this um the double bind of the satirist which they always played on was the satirist reveals more about himself than he does about his target so who's being laughed at it's always the writer because the writer has the very faults i wonder about pj it is a very false that he's in the mall love of freedom and greed for power absolute irresponsibility that's what it is leading up off the political system Armando you you said i think about obama that when you asked what why you didn't do do him you said because obama's tragic uh not comedy they're not comedy and i don't do tragedy so we're going to come on to what you're what you are up you you've got a book out about the the thing of it which is the missing doesack files department of social social affairs and citizenship under the cuts either social affairs or citizenship might go but at the moment it's the department of social affairs and citizenship and the book purports to be all the um files that malcolm tucker carries all the mouth number ten spin doctor yes he's left them on the train and they contain not only his diaries but all the filthy has and other people and other ministers and his notes on speeches that have been sent to him and his changes of policy and press cuttings and so on he he was by far um the sort of the central figure of the thick of it this unbelievably scatological character and a bit a bit like really bj rog's writing i mean you know you're going along for the for the exuberant verbal displays as well you know it's um and now we've got a government which has no malcolm tucker figure in it and i'm i'm thinking this must be a big problem for the next next version when you when you turn to the coalition well i don't think there are i don't quite agree with the fact that there is no malcolm tucker figure i think he said how do i think he said the malcolm tucker whoever he or she may be is actually a number of people mostly anonymous but there is this strange split between the steve hilton treehugging side of soviet camera and psyche and the andi caulson uh much more journalistic cutthroat i think they're much more sinister now actually rather than theatrical or something very theatrical about uh mandelson and so on and dressed in black and wandering around and and the the anonymity is absolutely terrifying the fact that is scary caulson is is is a disgusting figure i think but also the fact that you you're always suspicious whenever a government says the art the spit the era of spin is over because that in itself is almost almost lying in the technical term yes i spoke about to to mary's point about uh why do satirists you know switch the light on exports vermin and not trampled on the and and just make a plea for um the fact that the opposition is a good thing you know deconstructing other people's arguments i think is a good thing i i particularly feel that we've had a terrible opposition in parliament for but the last 30 35 years which is why we've had two very long periods of quite authoritarian government one after another and we've had a terrible opposition because basically they're sitting around waiting to get into government yes and and and also trying to court their positive message and and tell themselves and tell us that they're listening to what the people are saying whereas in fact uh a much more forensic analysis of argument i think is something that uh the public would actually benefit from i think the public has felt for a very long time that it hasn't got to the meat of whatever's being discussed because things aren't being discussed openly but if your analysis your forensic analysis of new labor could be boiled down i know it's not easy to do it to a simple proposition it would be that they spent fun they spent most of their time thinking about presentation and the way they they showed themselves um to the public and not nearly enough time thinking about real stuff and if if that's the proposition as to new labor what's the proposition as to the coalition you think it's the same thing and it's also it's also a new labor's case it was a it was a fear of bad headlines and a fear of not being elected again yes uh the old Roy Jenkins thing about Blair being like a butler with a hugely heavy Ming Vars going along along corridor desperate not to drop it yes the Ming Vars being his opinion poll ratings yeah and with the coalition i think they're still forming that sort of point of view but there is an in there's an interesting tendency i think and i quite a worrying tendency for them to say that because things are so bad we can therefore suspend the normal rules of politics brackets and do what we like uh so not only do you have things like the cuts which have been argued for in terms of the national debt and things being a lot worse than you thought but you have an extraordinary shake-up of the NHS that wasn't discussed in any election and any election manifesto was just announced well of course having a coalition means manifestos don't count anymore and that's the other argument the other argument is neither of us we're elected and therefore there is that point ever we know we can do what we love it but they do love a crisis don't they i mean they're absolutely positively love a crisis clinton actually came right out and said that then well his one regret about his presidency was that there was no enormous national crisis that he was it had to face well that was rubber manuals first uh utterance when he took over a chief of staff for Obama said yes she's never let a good crisis go to waste yeah yeah and that's part of the bush's ratings going up after 9/11 9/11 happened wow he's very good at it oh man no i'm i'm going to push a bit we're going to earn i know i haven't got a leg to stand on because i i don't trample on vermin you know at all you know less a two thousand years old um but the skeletons i think again i think part of the problem is that we enjoy what you do so much that in some ways you might say that okay it exposes it and i i'm all for exposure i'm all for people talking in the weapons of words but it's so so funny so i'm using so engaging that actually it turns out to be rather conservative medium that we've enjoyed seeing the foibles exposed and having a good laugh and that's where the opposition then ends so instead of opening up new ways of thinking about humor is always conservative because it depends for its laughs on people's predispositions and their prejudices and and and the things that they already believe so there's always an element however left wing the humerus may supposedly be here radical or so on or something common great comedy producer john Lloyd did not like look news spitting image he actually said as a comedy uh writer and producer you almost have to think like a daily mail editor in that you have to think what is it the public are just beginning to become aware of and then touch it now i i'm starting against that i i am aware of the tightrope you do uh you do walk when you're when you're doing for the one of the better words that are because i agree there is an element because we have such a strong uh satirical tradition in the UK we don't have one of protest which is why when we see students chucking fire extinguisher yes the French go into streets we turn on the television yeah and have a bit of a laugh flower in water and and and milk politicians rather than bricks and and what doesn't happen to satirists of course in this country is that they find themselves banned and in threat of their lives which takes us to a satirist whose satire of the Soviet state in 1925 was so dangerous that it endangered him and was banned almost immediately a dog's heart uh micha bulgakov's uh novel has been turned into an opera uh simon bernie's um directing this at the ENO um simon before we turn to the opera itself let's just talk a little bit about bulgakov and the novel and the central conceit of it's it's a pretty ferocious attack on the idea that of man's perfect ability as the soviet state hoped um yes i mean i'm not sure and i know the the the novel very well and i'm i'm not sure that it's that it has a single target like that uh you know the story is about a um a dog starving wounded um freezing on the streets who gets taken in by this professor who then doesn't experiment on him and puts in a man's testicles into his body and then he turns into a man and then this man becomes become so disgusting and disreptible and actually denounces him to the kgb that he decides to turn him back into a dog that's essentially what the story is but i think the reason that it was banned was the man from whom the testicles came uh was a man called klimchagunkin and klimchagunkin means mr pig iron now given that starland had just come to power who's man steel the parallel was too obvious and the point about klimchagunkin was not actually that he was the soviet state but that he was just someone who appropriated ideology in order to uh you know the dog when he turns into klimchagunkin decides well if i if i uh appropriate the communist ideology then i'm going to get a really good room i'm going to be in the biggest flat and that's the point uh and the his point about starland is that actually i don't think starland believes in anything and of course the the the in that sense i think the most interesting thing about boogarkoff is that uh he he he was kind of prophesying what was to come because after a remember in 1925 with a new economic policy suddenly there was great hope in the soviet union you know uh you've got to remember that at the the the revolution one two percent of the population could read and write you know ten years later that was 40 percent there was some amazing things that were being done as a result it was very necessary what was happening and and and great hope was coming out of it but of course what was happening fortunately starland was coming out of it too unfortunately the the politicians were coming into it at that point and taking power completely and so when there's a great description of a reading of the boogarkoff novel in in 1925 lots and lots of people sitting around roaring and roaring and roaring with laughter loving every minute and of course there's one kgb guy writing all uh writing it all down and reporting back in its band but they were laughing at the notion of starland on on the way since they they knew enough about starland do you think um well uh it was just a funny book i think it's also a very very funny book i mean i think that it's it's uh even it's funnier in russian there are many things that are not translatable for example even the title uh my brother who speaks russian pointed out to me yesterday that the title actually means something more like um you know bitch heart i mean it's between bitch rather than a dog's heart you know and so there is a there is a sense of in in bitch heart there's the whole idea of the uh you know the satire is also about the nature of the human condition it's not just about starland it's about the sort of the the the the fallibility of of the way that we go about things and that's the other shadow on the horizon is the fact that philip philip vich is a scientist and the idea of the arrogance of science at that particular point where does it lead well of course the the prophecy of where it leads is both the holocaust if you like on one side and the uh atomic bomb on the other um and this question of not only you know when we're talking about satire it's not only the question of politics and responsibility it's actually knowledge i think and responsibility which is the question of what we're faced by now because as we get more more knowledge as i hold up my mobile phone here which is an extension of my brain and we seem to know more more it's uh if the if if the predictions are right it's doubling the amount of knowledge that we know it has sort of you know is doubling almost every year self-serve no no but we we we have a responsibility but our human beings capable of that responsibility i don't know doubled our goodness hasn't no absolutely not absolutely and so you've got you've got the novel and you've got the new music uh written especially for it you're a man of the theatre um an actor and and theater director that sounds awful well man of the theatre as a man of the theatre as Simon McGurney explained to us then um the particular problems and in an intriguing aspect of doing an opera the director an opera rather than the plays or is it very similar well in in one word it's a nightmare um it's really really difficult because you've got you you know you've not only not only have you got um actors to deal with but these actors have to sing and not only do you have these singers but you've got something which is very curious called the chorus you know who are also actors and singers but who have a kind of a third identity which is this collective i know it's not only do you have it here as well well yes and you've got a puppet and a puppeteers and but you've also got this mysterious thing of an orchestra and musicians and somebody else that you got to work alongside who is the conductor uh let alone before you do any of your other theatrical things so it is absolutely stand up comedian in here to have every possible public performance and nightmare in one place yeah but it's kind of i'm i mean i suppose it's why i held off doing opera for a long time even though i was asked to do it but once i was in it i suddenly found why it's so beautiful which is that all you got to do is follow the music and the music in this case is is absolutely sensational uh sashar askharov grew up in in in soviet russia and there's really every illusion of the music of that period i mean i think it's absolutely brilliant and so if you just follow the music does a lot a lot of schostakovich and so i know he doesn't he doesn't really quote i don't think i think i mean he was uh here's the here is a composer who had to compose a patriotic hymn for the mig 16 and he was a young man and he was absolutely terrified he's a Jew and uh he when he was approached by the KGB he said we think you're a very good candidate to write a patriotic song for the a mig 16 he rang his father said what do i do his father said do it you just do it and he found himself in Siberia in a an airfield being sat in a mig 16 to get the atmosphere of it and then his song apparently came very famous so it is infused with these preposterous soviet hymns for example and and it is brilliantly graphic and muscular so you know in order to do an opera what you have to do is follow the music and the music will tell you what the characters are feeling how they're interacting what the action is doing and every time i lost my way i thought we'll just stop for a moment listen to the music and he'll tell you what to do and the eno international opera is well known for putting on um new operas and you quite clearly you know chose not to do a Verde or a Mozart whatever if you're first opera is this part about the kind of people you're trying to bring into the opera house not the usual not the usual set well i mean i i think that you know opera it's origin is something incredibly popular and in particularly in the 19th century it's it's a popular art form and people forget that it now is supposed to be you wanted sound and color and spectacle that's what you went to yeah that's right and now it's sort of thought of being an elitist art form but i i think actually we're at a time where all those ideas are breaking down again um because uh here was a new piece and generally when people go to new pieces in the opera they think oh my god we're gonna have to sit through this for hours and nobody my Italian speaking friends tell me it's you know it's soap opera you know it's that it's yeah yes it's coronation street or something you know there's lots of it is and actually i'm thinking about mary's world it follows directly on i mean you can follow the you know kamedi latte into uh Mozart and then you can follow it into 19th century opera but kamedi latte in fact you can follow the roots of that right back to uh it's almost street theater in Rome well we're going to move some of the slip from one coliseum to another i was thinking so yeah and indeed to the streets not a roman of Pompeii where mary beard has been um investigating for many many years too many to count too many to count um i've said in the film that you've made there's an aerial shot of Pompeii and i hadn't really listened to see that quite how big Pompeii actually is in terms of the number of streets and houses and so on still there um but the point about this is that you've um you've been rummaging through pretty much a whole bunch of skeletons um who were discovered a little away from Pompeii trying to flee and then that they were caught um and they all died um and this has brought new insights into what life was like in Pompeii yeah what we're trying to do is is is get rid of the sort of disaster image our disaster movie style of Pompeii you know when vassuvius explodes and everybody's killed and it's shock horror you know bulgar litton robert harris all the rest you know perfect it's it's great makes a great story but the idea is to say look uh what's interesting about Pompeii is how you can explore the ancient world from it you say angi you look at the um you look at the aerial view you see all these streets actually what you've got is an ancient town that you can walk into uh you can go down a back street you can see nobody from the 21st century and you're back in the ancient world and that's even for kind of cynical hard-hearted classes is like me that's still kind of very in your face what's interesting about Pompeii is that actually terribly famous now um you know almost everybody in the world knows knows that Pompeii was destroyed by some kind of eruption at some point but in the ancient world it was a bog standard boring little town but nobody had really hurt off until it got flat by the volcano so we're trying to go back into the life and we're trying to use some skeletons to see what the people were like how tall were the people in Pompeii you go round and ask people in the street now do you think people in the ancient world or even people in the 15th century were they bigger than us or smaller than us and everybody would say all people smaller they're all smaller because you know they didn't have very good diet and little runs and we're tall we're giants compared with the people of the past well what's interesting about these skeletons just simple things like measuring them you discover that they're actually taller than the modern population of Naples that's fascinating yeah good diet um reasonable medical care and there's one there's there's a black man there who's probably quite well off as well he's not necessarily a slave anyway it's very hard to tell how rich people were from their bones thank heavens um but you can get some hints and if if skeletons are found ate carrying money and with nasty bronze stains on them it suggests that when they were fleeing they were fleeing carrying quite a lot of goodies and there's an almost certainly black African skeleton in this assembly to about 50 who is got clearly got stuff with him now he might be a slave because he might be the poor buggers had to carry the master's goods while the master runs on ahead and leaves the slave with the cash but we're looking in Pompeii at a culture that is actually there's all sorts of ways of seeing this much more mixed much more cosmopolitan even in this sort of piddling little backwater there's an amazing moment where you show us an Indian female sculpture halfway through which looks exactly like a modern Indian sculpture and had been imported into Pompeii and I knew there was some kind of traffic between the Latin world in India I didn't realize it was as common as that yeah um how big how whoever it was got this wonderful statue of a dance or perhaps the goddess Lakshmi we haven't a foggiest clue but it's it's kind of exciting and you know in a funny way it's one of the you know one of the upsides of Roman imperialism and there were many downsides of Roman imperialism particularly if you were the conquered but one of the upsides is it does make the Mediterranean and beyond part of a world in which people exchanging ideas and goods and statues spices you know there's amazing paintings on the walls of Pompeii with the Pompeians images of what Egypt would have looked like I think this idea of cosmopolitanism is so exciting in your in your film because it gives the lie as well it reminds you this idea of nation which is a very very modern idea and you know I mean I've never felt particularly English my father's America my mother's Irish but I suppose I am English but this you know in the south of Italy of course even today there are villages which speak Greek you know and it was as much Greek in a sense as it was Latin and there must have been incredible relationship which I felt in your film with North Africa people going backwards and forwards and you know it suddenly opens up because we had this very cliched idea about what Rome was and one of the most exciting things I've found about Mary's film was suddenly you go you know not only is it really not what we thought it was but you know it feels incredibly like us today didn't it I also think I mean you know what has changed on that is slavery for a story yeah I'm very very very recently 1958 in Saudi Arabia slavery was finally out loud and of course it still exists well exactly and anyway if you were looking on this timescale I mean you know 200 years ago for the abolition of slavery is not very long ago yeah I feel quite like youth something but every time I get these one of these little fantasies about saying oh so really rather like us I think would you like to be a woman in ancient Rome when I think no thank you though I think I think of that and I think of the bulgekof world and then you think this so where does this notion of progress come from where does this vast condescension of posterity come from actually you look back and in crucial ways we haven't moved very far no that's why it's still worth reading what the Greeks and Romans wrote because they're not somehow looked in some primitive prehistoric dinosaur age with nothing to tell us they're talking about all the concerns which are ours they're talking about satire and politics and autocracy and how you deal with politicians and whether you should put the devotee or not basically shockingly modern I mean you read Plato's Republic it was just like reading any other tea party track well no he's got ways well it's it's like any utopian it's like anybody who's got a bunch of hot hair in their head about how a man is perfectable and society and and Mary saying well you know you're quite right you know wouldn't want to be a woman in ancient Rome but that what I found interesting was the implication of that program was that the the it implies that there must have been such a variety of other cultures outside Roman culture and in some of the cultures outside Roman culture the place of women was very very different and that's one of the moving things about the Indian statue you suddenly felt that well here's a there's a sort of power in this this female figure which suggests that there's a very you know that's compared to all the fallacies which are just splattered exactly yeah what's that Mary what's what's up with the very very very willy obsessed culture I think that's and the problem is as it's technically known as as we can say we call it willy obsessed and there are lots of expression for that I'll tell you later and one of the puzzles is how on earth you understand it you go look at a bread oven you know it looks like a modern pizza oven Pompeii and you know what have you got over the top of it a big willy now classes is actually terribly bad at explaining this you know they say it's too it's it's for fertility or to keep off the evil eye anything from the bread oven and and i can i i i come come gradually to actually rather more boring conclusion about it which is that this is a man's world a blokeish world how do you correlate power success getting on in life riches wealth or the willy somehow does the correlation for you you know man is that wonderful and in a day without Viagra that's right you love you love the amazing picture of this figure who's got an enormous painted phallus and he's weighing it against a bag of bag of some fruit and money you know that is what it's so it's it's a semi-comic version of sort of sticking the double-headed eagle or the crown or something like that all over the place or er or whatever it might be moment in mary's film as well when she suddenly it goes into the streets of of Naples and finds a fantastic brilliant graffiti of of um um a dick you know with with balls i mean absolutely fantastic and suddenly yeah yeah yeah probably i mean yes bollocks free was on his hands that's right all we can say that's for sure um there's a there's a there's a moment in your book pj uh where you talk about the the one time there was an attempt to book Plato's republic we were talking about the the politicians into effect the dion there's siro cues was it is that right siro cues you know we've had this name mary um uh is is that story true we don't know that for a fact that the plato went to to dion's siro cues do we know no but um it's it's true and inverted commas i think that there's true enough too good to check as we say in journalism you know there's a clear connection between what these guys in insistly are doing and and the political ideals of the monarchies so gets tried plato's republic gets tried and comes well guess what happens it doesn't go very well is that right now cheers before bed no plato's republic could never go very well no um players republic even plato if pushed would have said it was you know a wonderful fantasy with which to beat the opposition um i'm afraid it's just idiots who think you can put it seriously that's what happens when writers try to trample on the rats then when they get a good hit it should be glad that we thinkers at least you know keep our feet off the vermin less what my i was thinking i mean there is an interesting parallel with the the soviet experiment there too and plato which is again the notion of the philosopher kings the notion you get the cleverest people your professors and your medical people and your political philosophers and you put them in charge and everything is going to go well yes well i i mean i think the the the people ask about the banning of of of bulgakov and uh the way that um starlin started to take out uh uh people but i think there's something even more basic about what happened in starlin's case which was that anybody who uh became almost became famous um always found themselves at the wrong end of starlin i mean in some sense starlin wanted to be the star performer and he could not stand anybody else getting any limelight and as soon as they did they were taken out why was we killed i yeah this is a very interesting question but i mean uh one of the fascinating things of it is is a is a picture actually we use in the production we use starlin's wallpaper on the on that big wall that is his very wallpaper if you come and see it um but the end of it once he did once he died um people were able to go and visit starlin's house and apparently at the end of his life he lived in such fear of being killed that he had doubles of himself in the rooms and he would literally crawl crawl from room to room in his own house this is wonderfully like roman imperial power because one of the store is told about the emperor demission who ruled in the late first century ad is that he was so terrified of being attacked in his own palace that he had mirrors put up on all the walls so he could see who was walking up behind him and so the fear that starlin created eventually um came home to roost simply became you know he became in this sort of husk of fear um good yes exactly um because we had we we had some too bad montefiore he did a a biography of the young starlin on the shows one some some wonderful book somewhere back and he basically played paint starlin as a kind of asiatic pirate in his early days i mean he was he was just a hood yes who saw the work hmm but that's why bulgakov was so accurate and if you like bulgakov did try and stand stand stand on the on the vermin and he did he did in a sense i mean he was he he killed he killed him simply um uh by silencing his voice well we live in much easier happier times for satirist sanity for politicians thank you to all of my guests i'm going to burn his production of a dog's heart is on at the english national opera and you can hear mary beard in pompey on bbc two in the mid of december amanda yunuch is missing dosaq files and pj or rooks don't vote it just encourages the bastards are both out now next week egypt russia and turkey with tarrick osmond francis spufford and elif shalefk but for now thank you for listening and goodbye
Andrew Marr takes a satirical look at the world in Start the Week. The satirist PJ O'Rourke makes a plea to the American public, Not To Vote, in his latest angry critique of liberal politics, while the writer and comedian Armando Iannucci explores the latest chapter in the life of his Machiavellian spin doctor, Malcolm Tucker. Mikhail Bulgakov's absurdist tale of how a stray mongrel becomes human is brought to the stage by Simon McBurney. And the classicist Mary Beard delves beneath the volcanic ash to uncover everyday life in the Roman town of Pompeii.
Producer: Katy Hickman.