A forebear of mine, a Victorian polymath, developed a passion for Thomas Hardy's Wessex or, to be precise, for Dorset, which Hardy immortalised under that name. Come summer, he would descend on the West Country to identify every hamlet, brook and tour that featured in the novels. Later, he would turn up on Hardy's doorstep, notebook in hand, anxious to confirm the accuracy of his surmises, hunches and deductions. I am sure that there were times when the great man's politeness must have been, to put it mildly, strained.
There is more than a touch of this about Anthony Hayward's book on John Pilger. Of the 25 footnotes to the introduction, 15 refer to interviews with Pilger - apparently by Hayward himself, although this is not always clear - and one of the others refers to one of Pilger's own books. I cannot imagine Pilger being so unmannerly as to tell his acolyte that there is a limit even to loyalty, but if he ever reads this book he will surely permit himself a rueful reflection on his own generosity.
It is not that Hayward has betrayed him, or even misrepresented him. It is simply that a reporter as fine as Pilger deserves a far better book than this, if he needs a book at all. Television and, before television, tabloid journalism, have been Pilger's territory for decades now, and he has made them peculiarly his own, to the point where a limp encomium like this will hang around his neck like an albatross, rather than a garland. Hayward does acknowledge that Pilger has been criticised, and takes it upon himself to refute this criticism, but even here we get the impression that Pilger's more powerful critics have not been given an airing, and that knocking down straw men doesn't do much, in the end, for his subject's reputation.
A biography of Pilger could have been a powerful book, even in the hands of as open an admirer as Hayward - but Hayward makes it clear that writing a biography is not his intention. Equally, a gutsy account of the politics of making anti-establishment documentaries, in which Pilger would have been guaranteed an honoured place, would have been an important contribution to the history of the medium. But it isn't this, either. Instead, it is a flat and featureless account which manages, extraordinarily, to turn brilliant television into lack-lustre prose.
There are times when it almost jumps into life, as in the account of an ITA (Independent Television Authority) executive, closely aligned with Nixon's ambassador in London, Walter Annenberg, losing his cool at the affront to American hegemony embodied in one of Pilger's powerful televisual essays. For the most part, however, it is - unbelievably - a long sequence of paraphrases of Pilger's programmes, illustrated by direct quotations from Pilger's to-camera pieces, which leaves us, really, no wiser about anything at the end than we were at the beginning.
The very idea of summarising a series of television documentaries between hard covers is inherently absurd. Television, like the Daily Mirror for which Pilger used to work in the good old days, is a tabloid medium: its heady mixture of words and images simply cannot be translated onto the printed page, and this attempt to do so succeeds only in stripping Pilger's message of much of its original power.
When it works, this book does succeed in identifying some of the perennial problems associated with television journalism, even if its treatment of them is haphazard and unsatisfactory. One of them is the question of balance: it is instructive to see the IBA (Independent Broadcasting Authority, which replaced the ITA) staggering towards a realisation that you could not reasonably expect political balance within each programme, but only across a series of programmes, some years after the much-maligned Conor Cruise O'Brien had come to the same conclusion. And balance, of course, as Pilger well knew, begged a number of important questions: for many of those controlling British television, it meant a balance between the right and the centre.
ANOTHER is the problem, endemic to all journalism, of the episodic attention span. By returning again and again to the subjects of earlier documentaries, Pilger emphasised that novelty can be a velvet snare even for serious journalists, and demonstrated that the really important stories remain stories long after the first crisis has evaporated and the world's gaze has turned - or been directed - somewhere else.
No, Pilger's best memorial is not the printed page, but the peculiar and always fascinating medium of television, where the anti-establishment attitudes of his Irish convict ancestor are fused with a powerful sense of indignation that things are wrong which can and should be put right. He may occasionally go over the top, but there is nothing bogus about his passion, and much to learn from his demolitions of self-serving officialdom and his raw energy in pursuit of injustice.
John Horgan is professor of Journalism at Dublin City University. His most recent book is Noel Browne: Passionate Outsider