I love Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe.
It’s simply one of the best things on TV anywhere.
Anyway – this week they covered the ongoing Iraq Inquiry, and in particular coverage of Blair’s appearance at the Inquiry.
Except, the programme couldn’t show any of the the Inquiry. This is because television programmes can’t show clips of Parliamentary procedings and I assume that this Inquiry, which was announced by the Prime Minister last year is considered to fall within that arena (NB A tweet from Matt Wells says that the contract to take pictures eplicitly prohibits satirical television. I’d add that Brooker uses most of his footage without permission – hence the credits throughout).
I talked about this a little last year, in relation to Have I Got News For You. Those rules say:
no extracts of Parliamentary proceedings may be used in any light entertainment programme or in a programme of political satire
It’s worth noting that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart did show Blair’s appearance at the Inquiry. And in a satirical manner – the segment was entitled “Faulty Powers” (see what they did there?). And that show was then broadcast on More4. The Daily Show took their footage from CSPAN who evidently rebroadcast it in the US.
Indeed, the programme has only just dropped off the 4OD player – otherwise you could watch it right now.
Yes – that was probably an editing oversight on C4/More4’s part. But it just shows that we’re still ridiculously prevented from showing footage in a free manner.
Anyway – go and watch this week’s programme, if only because it has another one of those mini-documentaries from Adam Curtis.
Oh – and if you want to search for Blair featuring in The Daily Show’s coverage, it’s the Feb 1 2010 edition you need to find on the internet. To be honest, it’s not actually that good.