Weighty Stateside weekly the New Yorker has received praise in the past week for The Ban, an online documentary on how the British government sought to silence Irish republicans in the 1980s by outlawing the broadcast of Sinn Féin leaders’ voices.
The film, by Roisin Agnew, sets out how Margaret Thatcher’s government banned broadcasters from airing interviews with republican leaders, only for the likes of the BBC and ITN to get around it via the simple means of dubbing over them with actors’ voices.
The documentary features footage of an interview with Sinn Féin’s “deputy leader, Rory O’Connor, who under broadcasting restrictions must inhale helium to subtract credibility from his statements”.
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It then shows O’Connor sucking the gas from a pipe before telling his interviewer in a high-pitched voice how “Sinn Féin is a legitimate political party… your tone is antagonistic and you’re making me very angry”.
What UK viewers – and possibly not those in the US – may note is that “Rory O’Connor” is one Steve Coogan, the presenter is Chris Morris and the clip is from The Day Today, the 1994 parody of news programmes by Morris and Armando Iannucci.
It comes after an interview with Gerry Adams complaining that the ban and subsequent dubbing was “dehumanising” and at no point explains or indicates that it is satire. It could, of course, be an intentional joke. But it does beg the question… does the New Yorker assume its media-savvy readership is au fait with a 30-year-old British comedy show – or does it genuinely believe the broadcast ban required senior Sinn Féin figures to drink in helium before giving interviews?
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