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Red Pepper magazine. August 1998
The BBC editor who rejected the McLibel documentary blamed its non-appearance on a failure to meet the 'legal and editorial standards' required by 'mainstream broadcasters'. This echoes the film's central theme, a mismatched encounter between corporate mediocrity and DIY ingenuity. On a shoestring budget, Franny Armstrong and volunteer technicians followed Helen Steel and Dave Morris's epic self-defence against McDonald's bullying libel writ. Their footage was often in demand for news items; but the full story, as told by the participants, was too raw for the major networks. who opted instead for dramatisations starring well-known actors. In the protagonists' own version, Steel and Morris, playing themselves, re-enact their own cross-examinations of McDonald's expert witnesses, devastating performances of which leading QCs would be proud. There are interviews with infiltrators paid to spy on London Greenpeace, recorded conversations with worried senior executives from the US and some truly disturbing scenes at a sponsored playgroup fun day. Most chilling of all, however, is a scrolling list of more than 90 UK organisations who in previous cases gave in to McDonalds' legal threats, before two unemployed environmentalists had the courage to call their bluff. If, as its makers suspect, the persistence of this climate of fear is the real reason for British television's refusal to screen this serious and important film, it only shows the continuing need for such radical grassroots activism to challenge the corrupting matrices of economic. judicial and cultural power in which more established institutions are so fatally enmeshed.
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