The Jason Arday Affair Should Have Been Comedy Gold

Was A Very English Scandal, the series about the Jeremy Thorpe trial, the BBC’s last brilliant comic drama? Released in 2018, the three-parter was written by Russell T. Davies, directed by Stephen Frears and starred both Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw. Striking the perfect balance between comedy and drama is rare, but something that the BBC once excelled at.

In a similar vein, what about ITV’s comic drama Confessions of a Diary Secretary, concerning John Prescott’s affair with Tracey Temple, his diary secretary, played by Maxine Peake? The affair came to the public’s attention when Ms Temple sold her story to the Mirror in 2006, with the TV film coming out the following year. This was brave programming – lampooning the sitting government, albeit after Prescott had resigned, took fortitude.

Armando Iannucci demonstrated his genius for satire with the Thick of It. Iannucci’s co-writer Jesse Armstrong – of Peep Show and Succession fame – also had a hand in writing Chris Morris’s 2010 film Four Lions, about four hapless would-be Islamic suicide bombers. Could either of these works of comic brilliance be produced today?

Though not political, Peep Show, Motherland, Fleabag and the Inbetweeners are all examples of great British comedy drama. Can you imagine what fun the teams behind those shows could have had with the Jason Arday affair? The whole thing was comedy gold – until suddenly it wasn’t.

As a subject for comedy, Arday was untouchable until the Guardian, the BBC, James O’Brien and Cambridge University turned on him.

For the two weeks between the Guardian publishing a piece questioning some of Arday’s more fanciful claims on August 1st and the announcement of his death on August 14th, Arday was temporarily ‘in play’ for the Left as much as he had always been for the Right.

To some extent, Arday was the first person the Right has ever cancelled – though even in the end it was the Left, rather than the Right, who sanctioned his defenestration.

Undoubtedly, once support from the various Leftist institutions started ebbing away, a mad scramble to commission books, line up interviewees for documentaries and prepare movie pitches would have been set in motion. All would have been comic. The situation was ridiculous, the characters ridiculous, the institutions ridiculous.

Then suddenly, with his death, Arday went from zero to hero. From sacrificial lamb to martyr. And in so doing he became, once again, untouchable. The opening chapters of the books will have been deleted, the interviewees stood down and the movie pitches binned.

The loss for the British TV and film industry is, in its own way, also tragic. No doubt your ideas are better than mine, but just for a moment indulge your creative juices and imagine the comic possibilities of the Life and Times of Jason Arday.

At the risk of failing to conform to colour-blind casting, I would have seen Oscar-nominated Daniel Kaluuya in the starring role. He has the necessary ability to combine Arday’s childlike innocence – so evident in all the clips to camera I’ve seen – with that underlying mendacity and duplicity that allowed him to set Carter Ruck and the Met Police on anyone who questioned his authenticity.

Maxine Peake would have been perfect to play Hilary Cremin, the senior Cambridge professor who hailed Arday as the “best in the world!”

Obviously, Hugh Grant would have landed the role of BBC Director General Matt Brittin, and Ben Whishaw would have been nailed on for yet another best-supporting actor award following his inevitably flawless portrayal of Jolyon Maugham – or possibly James O’Brien.

It is all too tragic that Russell T. Davies and Armando Iannucci will never now produce that perfectly pitched script that would have pricked the inflated pomposity of Cambridge, the BBC and those other institutions that lauded Arday.

Sadly, the truth is that if any film is now ever made, it will follow the narrative adopted, after Arday’s death, by the BBC – the institution that did so much to build the pedestal from which he fell. He will be portrayed as a tragic victim: a victim of cruel racism, a victim of hate, brought down by the vicious vindictiveness of the ‘far Right’.

But let us just indulge ourselves a little longer imagining the comic masterpiece that so nearly was. How would Arday have been portrayed in our imaginary film – as a fool or a knave?

Was he Frank Abagnale, the brilliant conman played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can, or the eponymous hero of Forrest Gump, played by Tom Hanks?

Though neither is quite an apt model: Abagnale really did pass his commercial pilot’s licence by swotting from a textbook, and Forrest Gump – well, the character – really did perform his heroic sporting and military feats. Abagnale is the master manipulator; Gump the ingénu to whom miraculous things happen.

Even if neither quite fits the bill, Abagnale’s story offered a route to a kind of redemption that Arday could have taken – but it would have required a mea culpa. If he had come clean and said something along the lines of: “OK, fair cop, you got me bang to rights. I just wanted to see how far I could push it” – then I, for one, would have applauded him.

In the same way that Abagnale, after his release from gaol, switched sides and created a highly successful career advising banks on how to spot and prevent fraud, Arday could have switched teams – pointing out the pomposity and lazy racism of DEI-obsessed institutions such as the ones that elevated him.

It is possible he could have been prosecuted for fraud or misrepresentation, but I rather doubt it. More likely these matters would have been handled as internal HR issues – a final written warning, perhaps.

I am not at all sure that the Right ever saw him as an enemy; rather, he was ridiculed, a figure of fun. But had he switched sides, I think he could have found a warm welcome. We love a repentant sinner.

However, the Left, once it was obvious that they had been ‘played’, narrowed his choices. Self-evidently, martyrdom was the only route he could see to achieve redemption. That was the real tragedy of Jason Arday.