At the start of what promises to be a bumper year for crypto-patriotic television 'commemorations' of the First World War, the BBC has begun broadcasting its four-part documentary series Britain's Great War, fronted by Jeremy Paxman. Predictably enough, neither Paxman, nor the programme's interviewees (including Julian Fellowes, who delivered a paean to the brutal Lord Kitchener of Battle of Omdurman and Boer War infamy), offered many opinions to which Michael Gove or Max Hastings would object. You 'can't fail to be impressed' by the numbers of men who signed up for the war, enthuses Paxman, who also refers repeatedly to 'the war effort' - a phrase whose nominalized neutrality elides the chaos and murder that this 'effort' entailed.

Even less subtle is Paxman's interview in the second episode with two contemporary Clydeside unionists. When these men express their admiration for the Glasgow shipbuilders who struck against their profiteering owners during the war, Paxman responds by jovially dismissing the workers as 'difficult buggers'. In a similar vein, Paxman asks the relative of a conscientious objector who refused conscription whether such men were not 'just being awkward'. This is psychologism as historiography. Just as Paxman, in a recent interview, regarded Russell Brand's rejection of bourgeois electoral politics as an expression of apathy ('you can't even be arsed to vote'), he regards those who objected to war on principle as having an attitude problem. Clearly, these men needed to buck up their ideas. Indeed, the list of those too dense or perverse to get behind the war effort includes such irredeemable dunderheads as Bertrand Russell, Eugene Debs, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, all of whom were jailed for their opposition; what a bunch of losers!

It is in summing up his own attitude towards the 'conchies' that Paxman makes explicit his opinion about the war in a direct address to camera. Describing 'absolutist' objectors as 'cranks', he emphasizes that the war 'had to be fought' to save Europe from becoming a gigantic German colony. Yet the moral force of this argument would be easier to accept if Britain in 1914 had not presided over the most extensive empire in the world - a feat achieved by an unparalleled dedication to deadly force. But Paxo does not register Britain's history of colonial violence; he even opines that military conscription was a tough sell in Britain, since it contradicted the country's 'respect for individual freedoms'; these were, presumably, the freedoms that Britain was safeguarding through its pre-war terrorisation - including rape, torture and murder - of India, China and South Africa.

If the working-class perspective on the war is absent from Paxman's own commentary, it a structuring absence: Paxman often seems to be arguing against the anti-war position he knows many of his viewers will share. What else could people do, he asks exasperatedly, except join the 'war effort'? This is a rhetorical question, no doubt, but it is one to which Lenin had a fairly convincing answer: the working class had to turn the imperialist war into a class war by overthrowing the butchers who had led their friends and family members to the slaughter. And this is precisely what workers attempted to do, with tragically limited success, in Russia and Germany at the end of the conflict.

One might wonder whether there is any real reason to worry about how the First World War is being spun in the media. James Heartfield writes in a recent article on the subject:

"Those arguing over the First World War will find out soon enough that there is neither the opportunity nor the danger that there will be an upsurge of nationalistic identification with the British war effort. The depleting forces of popular militarism are clear for all to see."

I'm not sure about this. Certainly, a third world war is not immediately on the horizon - and even if it were, it would likely be fought with nuclear weapons, conveniently dispensing with the need for a mass mobilisation of brainwashed, jingoistic conscripts, even if these could be created. Nevertheless, programmes like Paxman's - together with popular 'militainment' documentaries and dramas on television and campaigns such as Help for Heroes - have the general effect of instilling a sense of nationalism and rationalising the horrors of war in ways that serve to justify current imperialist adventures. For this reason, they must be clearly exposed for what they are: nationalist and militarist state propaganda.

'No matter how brutal the crime, you will always get glorification of heroism and tradition from the eunuchs of bourgeois culture' (Amadeo Bordiga)

Dancing on the Edge, the five-part BBC2 series whose final episode will be broadcast on Monday, has all the hallmarks of a late-period Stephen Poliakoff artefact: sumptuous settings; deep focus shots revealing a wealth of period detail; an Expressionist use of colour with lots of vibrant, Meaningful Red; a camera that lingers on black and white photographs; mouthwatering scenes of feasting that bring together unlikely combinations of people; and the looming shadow of fascism. So far, so familiar. But predictability maketh the auteur and Poliakoff’s latest extravaganza has been anticipated and analysed by Britain’s television commentariat with almost as much relish as a new film by Lynch or Tarantino; The Guardian, for example, has been running an online episode-by-episode guide to the programme. The question is: is Poliakoff’s drama worthy of the hype?

There’s no doubt that Poliakoff has written an impressive array of distinctive television plays in recent years; but even Robin Nelson, in his recent, mostly affirmative book about Poliakoff, expresses concerns about the sentimentality and lack of dramatic plausibility he detects in some of the writer’s work. Certainly, since his return to television in the late 1990s with such elegant and off-centre offerings as The Tribe (1998) and Shooting the Past (1999), the doyen of BBC quality drama has divided the critics like no other auteur around.

Dancing on the Edge follows the ups and downs of a black jazz band – an interesting focus for Poliakoff, whose dramas seldom feature black actors – that quickly becomes the talk of early 1930s London. The band’s rise to fame is assisted by the charismatic music journalist Stanley Mitchell (played by Matthew Goode, whose appearance, speech and mannerisms here strikingly recall Damian Lewis in Poliakoff’s earlier Friends and Crocodiles). Things take a darker turn, however, when Establishment corruption and racism rear their ugly heads. In this sense, the drama recalls Poliakoff’s 2009 film Glorious 39, in which the crookedness of ‘pro-appeasement’ parliamentarians on the eve of the Second World War becomes increasingly apparent (Poliakoff’s view of Britain’s role in that war as progressive permeates his oeuvre; it’s not a view that I share - but let’s leave that geopolitical debate to one side for now). Stanley gets one over on the Nazis when he invites Louis Lester (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the band’s pianist, to perform at the German embassy; but in Dancing, as in Glorious 39, it’s not just the German elites that are rotten and in Monday’s finale we will discover, I suppose, just how far the web of corruption extends. Donaldson (Anthony Head) already looks like a bad egg and the American mogul and freemason Masterson (John Goodman) is looking increasingly shifty (although I have a feeling that this could be a red herring).

The lingering camera shots and glacial narrative progression of Dancing on the Edge confirm Poliakoff as the master of ‘slow television’ (to borrow Amy Holdsworth’s phrase). In fact, notwithstanding Louis’s getaway scenes in the fourth episode, Dancing on the Edge has crawled along, at times making The Jewel in the Crown look like The Bourne Identity. For some critics, this is frustrating. Mark Lawson, for example, complains that Poliakoff’s leisureliness seems to have become an auteurist indulgence which is not motivated by any diegetic requirement. That may be so; but in an age of turbo-capitalism when what Nelson identifies as ‘flexiad’ aesthetics are so dominant in film and television, I welcome Poliakoff’s change of pace, his attempt to stop the flow of what Adorno called film’s ‘relentless rush of facts’.

Much of what happens in Dancing on the Edge is implausible from a realist perspective. In episode three, for example, the band’s singer Jessie (Angel Coulby) is subjected to twists of fate worthy of a Hardy novel. And then there’s the question of language. Here, as in most of Poliakoff's television dramas, the dialogue is markedly repetitious, stiff and sterile. Barely five minutes pass without one character declaring another to be ‘interesting’, ‘extraordinary’ or ‘important’; yet in the absence of almost any character exposition or backstory, viewers are left with few clues as to why these adjectives pertain. And for a drama that pays so much attention to period detail, the idioms are oddly anachronistic. To hear Pamela (Joanna Vanderham) lament that she ‘can’t be there’ for her creepy brother Julian (Tom Hughes) is disorientating because, to echo Lawson’s criticism above, there seems to be no narrative rationale for the inclusion of such a contemporary phrase. In light all of this, it is difficult to resist the conclusion - and some commentators have given up trying - that Poliakoff simply cannot write.

But perhaps there is more to it than that. It is tempting to read into the clichéd, frigid superficiality of Poliakoff’s stilted dialogue a Gatsby-esque critique of bourgeois alienation and emotional repression, although this analysis doesn’t quite work, since almost all of Poliakoff’s characters – good and bad – tend to talk the same way. In a more general sense, however, the reticence about expressions of interiority does, I think, serve a potentially valuable critical function, disrupting television drama’s conventional recourse to psychological realism and character ‘depth’. For me, there is something refreshing about characters who refrain from laying bare every aspect of their own, or others’, inner lives. Television fictions – particularly soap operas, legal and police dramas – are so full of characters feverishly explicating their reasons, histories and motives that to escape from such torrents of ratiocination can come as a welcome relief and even introduce an element of mystery. After four episodes of Dancing on the Edge, we have learned next to nothing about the backgrounds or motives of the main characters; but for me this adds to the enigma of it all.

My concerns about Poliakoff relate not so much to plausibility or writing style as to social and political representation – especially in connection to class. The problem is not so much that Poliakoff often writes about toffs rather than workers (after all, there are plenty of television dramas featuring working-class characters). It has more to do with the ways in which ordinary people are portrayed. Too often in Poliakoff plays, working-class people either serve as angelic helpers for powerful men (like Stella in 2006’s Gideon’s Daughter) or appear as hooligans intent on wreaking havoc – see, for example, Caught on a Train (1980), Bloody Kids (1980), The Tribe (1998), Friends and Crocodiles (2005) and Joe’s Palace (2007).

While there are some sympathetic working-class characters in Dancing on the Edge – notably Stanley and his assistant Rosie (Jenna-Louise Coleman) – Stanley’s mother is a bovine comic butt and when he is on the run from the police, Louis is crashed into by an aggressive working-class boy on a bicycle who shouts ‘watch out you bastard’ at him (although the accident is clearly the boy’s fault). The hoi polloi on the streets, it seems, are almost as unpleasant as those beastly Germans.

That said, there’s currently nothing quite so beautiful as Dancing on the Edge anywhere else on British television. The decision to broadcast it on BBC2 rather than BBC1 may be an indication that Poliakoff no longer has the industrial clout that he did a few years ago; nevertheless, I hope that the present drama is not – as is being rumoured in some corners of the Internet – Poliakoff’s television swan song. Poliakoff’s work may have its faults and it is marked, as suggested above, by a certain social and political conservatism; but it is considerably more visually arresting than most of the drama on British television at the moment.

The recent killing of Osama Bin Laden provoked widespread criticism among left-wing and radical commentators. This is hardly surprising; after all, even among liberals, Osama's value to the Western powers as a scapegoat and all-round bogeyman was well understood. By contrast, the events surrounding Ratko Mladić's arrest, and in particular its media reporting, have elicited far fewer expressions of concern, either from mainstream journalists or from radical and leftist bloggers. 

On The Guardian's Comment Is Free blog, Misha Glenny (whose book The Fall of Yugoslavia lays the blame for the break-up of the country squarely, but in my view quite unfairly, at the door of Serb nationalists) praises the Serbian president Boris Tadić for the part he played in capturing the Butcher of Srebrenica. But as Glenny himself acknowledges, bringing Serb war criminals to justice has been a key condition of Serbia's EU membership; for this reason alone, the president's deliverance of Mladić can be seen as an act not of moral resolution, but of political expediency.

As well as smoothing Serbia's passage to EU membership, much of the recent media reporting of Mladić's arrest reinforces longstanding Western propaganda about the Bosnian war. Rather like Glenny's article, Henry Porter's recent piece in The Guardian, for example, implies that the war in Bosnia was perpetrated solely by Serbs and that the war's only victims were Muslims. By focusing on Serb atrocities and omitting any mention of the role of the Western powers in the devastation of Yugoslavia, the news media continues to present the great powers' manifold economic, political and military manoeuvres in the region - including the brutal Operation Storm in 1995 and the decisive bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 - as so many noble interventions in the fight against virulent Serb nationalism.

The virtual absence of any challenge to the media's recurrent presentation of the Bosnian war as a Manichean struggle between good ('the West') and evil (the Serbs) shows just how deeply the dominant narrative of that war has penetrated public consciousness - and just how far down the memory hole anything resembling an adequate account of the Balkan wars has been shoved.

We can have no sympathy for Mladić, who surely now faces severe punishment for his crimes. But to celebrate his arrest, as Timothy Garton Ash does in another Guardian Comment Is Free contribution, as evidence of 'a global movement towards accountability' is to ignore the fact that 'international justice' operates systematically in the interests of the powerful. That is why Mladić is now languishing in The Hague - and why Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright are not.

TV say if you’re poor, you must be slow and shiftless / But you pay ’em to say that so we don’t want it different – The Coup, ‘Lazymuthafucka’

The dreams have no dream - Adorno, Minima Moralia

This blog tends to focus on the propaganda function of contemporary news and current affairs media (that is, after all, where the biggest lies are to be found). Yet popular media formats also help to sustain capitalist hegemony. A brief consideration of some of the themes and concerns of contemporary lifestyle and reality television will help to illustrate how class-based discourses are diffused through popular culture.

Gilles Deleuze proposed that developed capitalist societies transitioned in the course of the twentieth century from ‘disciplinary societies’, in which capitalists manage workers through physical discipline and institutions, to ‘societies of control’, in which individuals voluntarily internalise the interests of their rulers. In the society of control, the media – and in particular the ‘domestic’ medium of television – play a major role in constituting us as capitalist subjects by manufacturing a social consensus based on bourgeois values. In 1962, in the wake of the Pilkington Report into the quality of British television, Raymond Williams noted in his article ‘Television in Britain’ that ‘majority television’ was ‘outstandingly an expression of the false consciousness of our particular societies’. Williams’s judgement remains eminently applicable to popular television today. In The Apprentice, contestants compete against one another for an internship with a business mogul, while in Dragon’s Den and High Street Dreams, ordinary members of the public seek to impress businesspeople and financiers with their entrepreneurial acumen. Other programmes fetishize the acquisition of houses (tellingly called ‘properties’ in lifestyle television-speak), while television programmes about obesity, exercise, cosmetic surgery and dieting encourage viewers to focus their attentions on their personal well-being and appearance. Indeed, the proliferation of ‘transformational’ reality television programmes in recent years – from home improvement shows to makeover programmes – reflect and reinforce a profound investment in disciplinary work and biopolitical self-regulation. In such programmes, as Adorno observed of contemporary capitalist society in Minima Moralia, ‘everybody must have projects all the time’, so that ‘the whole of life must look like a job’.

Such television programming also interpellates working class people as self-contained units of production and consumption, fostering what the Marxist writer Christopher Caudwell liked to call the ‘bourgeois illusion’ of individualism. Little wonder that so many people today believe that human beings are ‘naturally’ selfish – a proposition that has been refuted by scientists from Peter Kropotkin to Stephen Jay Gould – and that this supposed ‘fact’ precludes the possibility of communism. (It might be noted here that even if human nature were essentially characterised by selfishness, this would constitute an argument not against communism but in favourof it, since the fact of human selfishness would necessitate reciprocal social arrangements capable of preventing the exploitation of some human beings by others).

The entrenched individualism of these popular television programmes tends to vitiate any sense that the problems faced by working class people and communities can be overcome collectively. In each episode of Channel 4’s reality programme The Secret Millionaire, an undercover millionaire encounters several community-minded individuals, each with their own project designed to help a disadvantaged group of people. At the end of the episode, the millionaire reveals her identity, writing a cheque for one or more of the deserving causes she has encountered. Here, as in Slavoj Žižek’s ‘chocolate laxative’ paradigm, capitalism is posited as the remedy for the very problems it has caused. Channel 4’s How the Other Half Live operates on a similar premise: a wealthy family donates money to a poorer one, having first ensured that its members are deserving of support. In programmes such as these, working class people are urged to ‘better themselves’ through hard work. This in turn tends to deny agency to the working class as a class, implying that complex social problems can be rectified not by the collective action of the workers against their exploiters, but by a combination of individual effort and perhaps, for a lucky few, thedeus ex machina of benevolent philanthropic intervention – a proposition that chimes with the emphasis placed upon private charity in the Cameronian one nation fantasy of the ‘Big Society’. As for collectivity, we are left with the ersatz participation of the X Factor phone-in.

The radical critique of ‘reality’, ‘aspirational’ and lifestyle television formats should in no way involve a moralistic objection to consumerism; after all, in contrast with the gloomy ressentiment and anti-consumerism of left-liberal politics, the communist demand is nothing if not a demand for more. The criticism is rather that lifestyle television’s exhortations to social mobility and consumerism serve to occlude both the reality of exploitation and the potential for collective socio-political action. They also disregard the increasing poverty of the working class. As the ‘wealth gap’ widens and social mobility rates stagnate, average wages and living standards for workers in ‘developed’ capitalist societies have fallen in recent years, as even the capitalist news media are sometimes compelled to acknowledge.

The increasingly fragile fantasy of upward mobility finds expression in many other popular media forms today. It is a convention of hip-hop videos, for example, to be set dually ‘on the street’ and ‘at the mansion’. In the dream-like logic of the music video, celebrity rappers transition effortlessly between these two settings. Association with ‘the street’ allows even the most sybaritic celebrities to maintain a reputation as ‘authentic’, ‘real’ and ‘cool’. The mythologisation of easy social advancement, meanwhile, furnishes an aspirational ideal while eliding the economic constraints that preclude social mobility for the majority of people in the real world. As such examples suggest – and as any advertising executive knows – capitalist hegemony is maintained not only through the assertion of nationalist symbolism and state propaganda, but also through the reconfiguration of human dreams, desires, aspirations and emotions.

As well as encouraging individualism and voluntarism, many popular media forms ridicule of working class people who attain media prominence: witness the outpouring of class hatred in tabloid television’s treatment of working class – especially female – ‘chav’ or ‘white trash’ celebrities, such as Jade Goody, Kerry Katona and Britney Spears, who are often censured for their emotional instability, stupidity, vulgarity, corpulence or maternal incompetence. It is precisely such undisciplined and recalcitrant working class people that the experts and gurus of ‘rehab’ reality television aim to instruct in the virtues of self-restraint and hard work. In BBC3’s Young, Dumb and Living Off Mum, young working class people are mocked for their indolence and cajoled into taking low-paid, service sector jobs. In Channel 4’s Benefit Busters and The Fairy Jobmother, meanwhile, presenter Hayley Taylor mobilises a mixture of moral censure and therapeutic rhetoric in an attempt to wean working class families ‘off benefits’ and ‘into work’ – as though unemployment were, to use the phrase of the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, a ‘lifestyle choice’.

But it is perhaps in the treatment of crime that the anti-working class nature of these popular media formats is most evident. The police force is all but venerated in reality television documentaries, while working class criminals, from violent gangs to ‘hoodies’ and ‘chavs’ are excoriated in the news media and in television docusoaps such as Bravo channel’s Street Crime UK and its replacement Brit Cops. And while largely juvenile, anti-social crime does constitute a genuine blight on society (one whose impact is felt most keenly in working class communities), what Marcuse termed ‘the mature delinquency’ of the ruling class – such as brutal invasions and bombings, lethal sanctions on food and medicines, health and safety violations – are either simply not classified as crimes or ignored; indeed, corporate and political crimes barely feature in crime-related television programming. The truth is that the most pernicious and chronic threats to the well-being of working class people are posed not by other workers, but by what Žižek calls the ‘objective’ or systemic violence of capitalist social relations, which finds expression in work-related ‘accidents’, poverty, ‘stress’, environmental damage, genocide and warfare. But there’s not much entertainment value in discussing any of that.