The very modern ‘Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer’

 

The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer was released during the autumn of 1970, just a few months after the Conservative Party had won the June general election and ended the Labour governments six years in power.

While coming from a time that may seem very distant, Rimmer deals with themes that have an extremely modern feel – specifically questions about the authenticity of politics and the extent to which political image represents reality. It also has something to say about the extent to which people really do want to participate in democracy or prefer leaving it to nicely packages fraudsters – like Michael Rimmer - out to feather their own nests. It is a deeply cynical movie.

Work on the script started in 1968 – the year of the Parisian revolt, of unprecedented student discontent and industrial unrest in Britain, and Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech, the first instance in which the politics of race became mainstream in the UK. These were interesting times – and the film reflected on those times.

Rimmer was written by John Cleese and Graham Chapman, one third of the Monty Python team, the film’s director and by its star Peter Cook. Cook had played a leading part in the revival of political satire in the early 1960s – he also helped form Private Eye. At the start of the decade performers like Cook, largely from Oxbridge backgrounds, began to make very pointed attacks on contemporary political figures. This was not the first time such humour gained prominence: in the late eighteenth century Gilray’s cartoons tore apart monarchs and their ministers.

The Victorian era however inaugurated a more conservative and respectful attitude to social and political authority. 1960s Satire was evidence that that kind of deference was beginning to break down – not just in politics but also in society more widely.

Some see the breaking down of deference as helping to undermine faith in politics, of destroying established British political culture. We are living on the other side of this cultural revolution and so the style of comedy exemplified by Rimmer we may now think unremarkable. Indeed, thanks to what came after, like Spitting Image, Yes Minister and The Thick of It we probably now find it difficult to take politicians at all seriously.

Rimmer also benefited from the lifting on cinema censorship which occurred during the 1960s – there was a time when any subject deemed ‘political’ could not be released - you will also see a lot of nudity as a consequence.

The heart of the film’s narrative is – as the title suggests – the rise of Michael Rimmer. He is a man who comes from nowhere – he is a blank canvass – who manipulates the techniques of opinion polling, advertising and television to promote himself, first becoming an MP, then Chancellor, Prime Minister and finally President of the United Kingdom, in effect dictator.

He takes over a ramshackle public relations agency – which the director claims was meant to represent Britain – and creates a sleek operation based on manipulating and creating opinions rather than measuring them.

His success leads politicians and bishops to his door – both religion and politics being already in trouble during the 1960s. Indicating their basic similarities Rimmer is employed by both parties to improve their images – although he decides that the Conservatives offer him better opportunities.

If the film deals with matters that have now passed into history it also tackles issues that have become of abiding and increasing concern – like the relationship between the reality and presentation of politics. By the late 1960s both parties’ had adopted the campaign techniques of the advertising industry. If none of this was as new as some claimed – image and perception being at the heart of electoral politics - the scale and importance of the relationship was novel. Moreover parties could now use the medium of television – 1959 was probably the first television election. The film depicts this process in a variety of ways.

Rimmer realises he needs a wife if he is to have a political career – so he runs a poll to find out who is the public’s favourite woman - and as the Queen is taken, he marries the second one, the result being an empty marriage, one -  like his politics - based on appearance not reality. But Rimmer's lack of substance is his greatest political advantage.

Of course, The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer is a comedy – but comedies are very often the means by which serious ideas are raised and which gain bigger audiences because they do not lecture their audiences.

And as I know from personal experience, no-one likes to be lectured.