Sean Clarke Friday October 3, 2003

If anyone ever set out to prove that the medium wasn't the message, it's Michael Moore. With Moore, the message is the message, and the medium is neither here nor there. He believes there's something fundamentally wrong with the way America is run (and that the rot spreads) and he's prepared to use any means necessary to tell you. As a writer, he's got a bestseller under his belt in Stupid White Men. As a film director, he has an Oscar for his documentary Bowling for Columbine. As a stand-up he recently performed a well-received six-month one-man show in London's Roundhouse. In fact, if you had to choose one word to describe him, the most satisfactory would probably be satirist - comedian seems too toothless, campaigner too earnest. Think Jeremy Hardy with a beer belly, or Bill Bryson with balls.

Moore, now 49, first came to the British attention with his 1989 film Roger and Me, a guerrilla documentary about the decision by General Motors to close their plant in Moore's home town of Flint, Michigan. In it he developed the door-knocking, give-them-enough-rope style of documentary-making that would prove so successful in Bowling for Columbine.

Roger and Me also showcased Moore's credentials as a working class US leftist, a breed we in Britain are sometimes inclined to assume doesn't exist. His brash, uncompromising stance can make middle class liberals uncomfortable, but Moore dismisses them as "police for the right", and vaunts the grass roots labour movement of his home town.

His abrasive style also keeps him on difficult terms with publishers - in any medium he works in. His award winning satirical show TV Nation lasted one season on US network ABC before being dropped and picked up by rivals Fox, who again managed to endure the discomfort for exactly one season. In the end, he gave up on US networks and got Channel 4 to back his new effort, The Awful Truth, which at least managed two seasons.

But it was his book Stupid White Men which really made - and very nearly sunk - Moore's reputation. The book, a hugely energetic rant on the evils of the Bush-Rumsfeld administration, calling Dubya the "Thief-in-chief" and demanding that the US marines evict him from the White House, was nearly pulled by its publishers when Al-Qaida attacked New York and Washington shortly before its planned publication.

Moore says the publishers then wanted to pulp the entire print run, and asked him for a substantial rewrite to fit the new mood in America, without which he should surrender half his advance. He refused, and after a six month stand-off, they backed down and released the book. Which, of course, went straight to number one.

Without a doubt, Moore has his critics. Some pick holes in the detail of his arguments, for instance with the starting premise of his film Bowling for Columbine, that the teenagers who went on a killing spree at their high school in April 1999 had been bowling the same morning. It seems that this was an early police report later contradicted, but it's hard to see how this dents Moore's central proposition that America's preoccupation with guns is unhealthy and fuels a broader acceptance of violence which informs its foreign policy.

Others prefer the feet of clay approach, reporting, for instance, that on his last night at the Roundhouse he threw a diva's temper tantrum, shouting at stage hands, keeping the audience waiting, and leaving without saying goodbye. The other side to the story goes that Moore received death threats while in Britain, a situation which understandably made him a little fractious, and that he fulsomely thanked Roundhouse staff at the end of his final show.

Moore himself tends to laugh these criticisms off. He tells the story of a British reporter who questioned whether Moore's plan to rebaptise all the Protestants in Northern Ireland as Catholic was really the best way to end the province's troubles, before quietly (but not perhaps accurately) suggesting that it was the British who invented satire. The implication being that maybe we might not always take him so literally.

If anything has earned him the enmity of America's rightwing establishment - something Moore would surely welcome - it was his not unexpected, but rewardingly spectacular outburst at last year's Oscar ceremony. With the war in Iraq only just started, and Hollywood consensus demanding a low-key night, expectation was high that some of the Tinseltown residents with known opposition to the administration might use the podium as a soapbox. In the event, decorum reigned all night. Until Moore took the mike.

Flanked by his fellow nominees, and brandishing his best documentary Oscar as though he meant to knock some leftist sense into celebrity heads, he used his full 45 seconds and more on a breathless denunciation of George Bush and those around him, stopping only when he could no longer be heard over the band which struck up to silence him. "We live in fictitious times," he said. "We live in a time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons."

His new book continues where that speech left off. Unsurprisingly, Moore hasn't mellowed since then, and nor has he come round to Dubya's way of thinking, and he aims to use his share of Bush's infamous tax cuts to campaign against the Texan's re-election. Just don't expect him to pull any punches.