I’m really getting into the BBC show Absolute Power, airing on the ABC at the moment. It’s about a public relations firm called Prentis McCabe and the lengths to which they go to ‘spin’ the day’s news to their client’s advantage.
A little while back one of Prentis McCabe’s celebrities got himself into trouble, with his misdemeanour splashed across the newspapers and 6 o‘clock news reports. So, the firm swung into damage control. Their strategy was to persuade the public that this person wasn’t necessarily a bad person; instead he was suffering from a disease that led him to act badly. And because they couldn’t find a disease that fit his transgression, they did the next best thing—they invented one. They called it Maquiro-Hennel Disease, gossiped it to tabloid editors and even set up a website on it. The really funny thing was that within minutes of launching this website on Maquiro-Hennel Disease, they began receiving emails from people glad to finally know what’d been wrong with them all these years!
The truth-contorting efforts of Prentice McCabe do backfire occasionally.
A couple of weeks ago the storyline revolved around a public servant who did something very illegal and went to jail for it. In jail he supposedly found God and wrote a book about his discovery. The problem was it was all false. The public servant’s conviction and jail sentence had all been an elaborate hoax to sensationalise the book and sell more copies. But when the public servant was released, he really did find God, wrote a second book about his real conversion and exposed Prentis McCabe as the ones behind the original scam!
The language in Absolute Power is pretty rough at times and so are some of the themes. Stephen Fry, who plays Charles—that’s Prentis McCabe’s senior partner—has some great lines though. ‘We all lie,’ he said in one program, ‘I’m just part of a profession that’s required to be economical with the truth.’ In another show he said reflectively, ‘There was a time when people stood by their falsifications. Now it’s honest liars like me that are martyred.’
I like the humour and wit of Absolute Power. It’s incredibly well written. But I think it’s giving us more than entertainment. As Charles Prentis places ludicrous stories in the tabloids, destroys the reputations of his enemies, and makes heroes out of the lowest of the low, he shows what happens when truth becomes a commodity to be bought and manipulated. It could well speak powerfully to our generation.
In our postmodern times it’s popular (even beneficial) to believe truth doesn’t exist—that all we really have is a variety of viewpoints, all considered ‘truths’, even if they contradict each other. If that’s true (if I can use the word), we’re in trouble. As Os Guiness has said, without truth we’re all vulnerable to manipulation. ‘If truth is dead,’ he says, ‘right and wrong are neither… [and] the conclusion is simple: Might makes right… Victory goes to the strong and the weak go to the wall.’
As the morally-destitute folks at Prentis McCabe turn their wife-cheating entertainers, ruthless politicians, bad-boy footballers and duplicitous TV personalities into saints, we soon see that when absolute truth dies Absolute Power reigns.
Maybe the genius of a show like Absolute Power is that, with a witty line and a belly laugh, it shows just where our popular beliefs could be taking us.
