Adam Curtis has yet another fascinating post on his new BBC.co.uk blog in which he discusses the demise of heckling at the hustings:

Political journalists I have asked don’t know how widespread heckling is these days – because they don’t tend to stray outside Westminster.

I think it raises a really interesting question. If people don’t heckle any longer is it because they no longer believe in politics, or is it because they no longer believe in themselves?

Is it that they have come to see their politicians as creatures who no longer have any ideas or vision, and who have absolutely no idea or understanding of what is happening in the world, so there is no point in heckling them any longer?

Or is it that we, the people, have no ideas and no understanding of the world ourselves? That we have no vision any longer of what the world could be like, or what changes we would like made – so we have nothing to say? And thus nothing to heckle about.

So however angry we are we remain mute and sullen.

Or maybe we do still heckle? It would be very interesting to find out – please let me know.

The blog is accompanied, as usual, by a compelling rarity from the BBC archive, a film made for the Beeb by Joseph Strick, an American New Wave film maker who was amazed by what was to him the alien phenomenon of political heckling. It’s essential viewing for political junkies.

The Parallax Brief will ask fellow Think Politics blogger, the MP Andrew Gwynne, to watch the film and see if his experience is that there has been a drop in heckling. Perhaps some other politician-bloggers might comment — Iain Dale, for instance, has just been though two open primaries, and it might be interesting to hear whether he was heckled at all.

However, the Parallax Brief believes that heckling has, indeed, reduced, but for more obvious reasons than Mr. Curtis suggests: namely, that politicians do not put themselves in situations where they might be heckled as often as they once did.

It’s television’s fault, and is something that has happened in a wide variety of fields: The Parallax Brief calls it “the boxing syndrome”. Once upon a time, most cities and towns would have at least one boxing show every weekend. However, television made it possible for a million or more people to watch a single fight, when it had previously taken thousands of local boxing cards to satisfy a million boxing fans. These days, therefore, boxing events are far, far rarer.

Similarly, television is now by a long way the most important medium for politicians. Ask David Cameron whether he would honestly prefer to have a ten second soundbite on the six o’clock news that cast him in a positive light, or put in ten stellar town hall performances, and it is clear which he’ll chose. On the other side of the coin, at one time, the only way to really get to know an MP or a Prime Minister was to go to a meeting and listen to him. Now, television allows millions of people to see and hear politicians.

Readers might remember John Major’s “soap box speeches” during the 1992 election, which were seen as a shocking return to “old fashioned” campaigning. Standing regularly infront of a public audience without stage management had become that rare.

Of course, it is also probably true that increasing living standards mean the causes held dear by socialists don’t feel as if they’re on the desperate edge of now in quite the same way they were, while there is no militant trade unionism and pervasive state control of commerce as in the 70s, or great left wing-led social upheaval as in the 60s, to ignite Conservative passions.

But it is television that has had the real impact.

However, if television has had an insidious effect on political interaction, it will very shortly become apparent that the internet will be its saviour.

Thousands of people write politics blogs, offering opinions on every aspect of public policy; many tens of thousands more interact with politicians or other politically interested citizens on social networking sites and forums; indeed, Norman Tebbit, that august big beast of many years wrote in his second ever blog entry: “Well, well. What an introduction to blogging. At first I thought it was quite unlike anything else I’d done in my political life, but after a while I realised that it is really rather like an old-fashioned political public meeting of the kind that has melted away since television took politics away from the grass roots in the constituencies and concentrated it into the TV studios. It is a pity we can’t have real-time heckling (yet?) but blogging has got life and guts.”