Politics, please

New release Swing Vote, a light-hearted romp set against the backdrop of a contemporary US election, typically deflects the intricacies of the political process in favour of box office returns.

With electoral turnout dwindling on both sides of the Atlantic, it's easy, if spurious, to claim that people aren't interested in politics. And film marketeers prefer to drum up media controversy with sex and violence rather than a subject that's regarded as dull and undramatic.

Is part of the problem our increasingly fuzzy concept of just what politics actually means? The mainstream British press and broadcasters sweep our brand of personality politicians into the celebrity corner of the Westminster Village. Another imperialist gift from the US?

Our multiplexes provide no avenue for debate about government systems, whatever their complexion, nor enlightenment for the generation waiting to take over.

Instead, with few exceptions, we're offered pseudo politics. Bags of biopics, comedies and thrillers clad in well-worn political robes. Though more cogent treatments trickle out from Asia, Latin America and eastern Europe, neither Hollywood nor British cinema has rushed to redress the balance.

But Britain is fortunate in that television writers such as Trevor Griffiths and Dennis Potter found outlets for serious political drama which engages a wider public. TV executives have acknowledged more readily than film producers that fiction, not documentary, conveys more truth about abstract nouns.

Real politics can attract audiences.

Acclaimed offerings from both left and right, including House Of Cards, Yes Minister, and the long-delayed Our Friends In The North, revealed more about the process than hours of Parliament TV. The best of them extrapolated the personal from the political. Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing and its big-screen predecessor Wag The Dog provided rare US parallels.

Yet there is still no big-screen challenge to the status quo. Sometimes, Ken Loach holds a flickering candle, as in Land And Freedom, but there's little illumination. This is unsurprising, given the way Western governments are currently proving that they will sell out the majority of the people to prop up a dying capitalist system.

Surely there's no better time for film-makers to posit something new, something to finally torment the flabbiness of the existing political process.

It may even be a torment that punters are willing to pay for.