The Trial of Paddington Bear

Sorry. The Trial of Tony Blair.

There’s been a lot of rumbling and now it’s here, The Trial of Tony Blair on More4. Channel 4 finally takes its hands off the Big Brother cash-cow and Trumanshow-esque 24/7 Jade Goody show, and flexes its satirical muscles again. But I wonder how many people are tuning in hoping to see Tony suffer?

He was the hero of our generation. It was our first vote, and we used it to overthrow the many years of conservative rule our parents’ generation had bestowed upon the world. He was young, he had sparkling teeth and a seemingly moralistic view of the future, and we fell for it. Moreover, he had Oasis and Blur on his side – not even the NME could get them to appear within the same edition, but here our future PM had brought them together.

And tonight we’re going to see him brought to trial for war crimes in the Hague. There’ll be the T-shirt acitivists, I’m sure, sitting watching their Black-and-white sets screaming, “Hurrah! What I said would happen whilst I was at Oxbridge is finally coming true. See the people realise the truth!”. But Tarquin will be wrong. There will be no war crimes trial. There will be no seachange of public oppinion.

Reality will not be an echo of this programme for one reason. Politicians rarely come a cropper. Jeffrey Archer is still writing and enjoying his peerage perks, John Major is still seen as dull despite his ‘confessions’, and Tony Blair will still rattle on like an elderly subway train into the future. There’s kind of a neverending futility to it all. Jeremy Vine can have as many lunchtime phone-ins with ‘Angry from Essex’ spilling forth venemous bile about atrocities here and there, but the world will carry on. There’ll be another suited and booted shiny chap to take his place.

Let’s face it, it wasn’t Tony alone. If Teddy Kennedy can walk away from the ‘drowned woman in his own car’ Chappaquiddick, then what Tarquin will see on More4 is far from prophecy.

I’m a fan of Robert Lindsay. I enjoy reruns of him shouting “Power to the People” and “Freedom to Tooting” as Citizen Smith. His portrayal of Blair is better than Bremner or Culshaw, but this isn’t his two-fingered victory salute to New Labour. It’ll probably do more to help Blair than Cameron.

Forget the false-hope of political seachange. I’ll be watching Jack Reagon style police brutality, with handbrake turns in a vinyl-roofed granada with a backing track of Bowie and T-Rex with Life on Mars… a man transported back in time by a car accident – much more like reality.