Downsize This!

Michael Moore

Back around 1993 in the early days of the X-Files (before they made seven thousand episodes and everyone got bored) BBC2 used to follow Mulder and Scully with something called Michael Moore's TV Nation. I guess most X-Filers switched off but not me. Mulder and Scully and Moore was an American triple-bill made in TV Heaven. Who would have thought back then that the fat bloke in the baseball hat would become America's leftie-in-chief ten years later.

And you don't have to be a Guardian reader to want to give the man three cheers. In an American political landscape seemingly populated largely by religious fanatics and other assorted aliens, Michael Moore is at least the kind of political animal recognisable a British audience. He probably wouldn't win a seat here in true blue Dorset but he wouldn't lose his deposit, either.

So what went wrong with his book? Well, nothing, in small doses. It's mostly made up of short chapters, sometimes funny, sometimes angry. And when it comes to his opponents on the right, always putting the boot in, hard. Which is fine, except that sometimes he can't seem to decide whether something makes him angry or whether it's funny. Too often he decides it's both and then the chapter sinks gently and unsatisfyingly between two satirical stools. An example chapter is the one in which he lines up, I think, Cuba, Libya, Canada and a few others in a beauty contest to find a brand new enemy for America to use in place of the Soviet Union. Now, this book was written long before 9/11, and it's not Michael Moore's fault that the chapter reads like something written in another lifetime. But even without the benefit of hindsight it's a rather silly couple of pages.

I haven't read the books which came after Downsize This! but the reviews whisper "more of the same, more of the same" to me. I'd prefer to see him back on BBC2, running around in a chicken suit and poking rich people in the backside with a stick. Maybe silly-and-angry comes across better on screen than it does in print.