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 (more…)