Creating an authentic characterisation is a challenging prospect, doubly so when you have many to build, all based on real, still living people. Both the strengths and weaknesses need airing, so how do you go about that without pissing off all the people you’re dramatizing?
A writer must build a well-rounded individual with a depth to their psychology that rings true, otherwise a minor character may remain two dimensional or a major character can become a caricature, a magnification of press clippings and famous moments.
While conducting my research for AVBS, I came across a technique writers use to populate busy scripts with realistic characters by using personality profiles to ensure the fictionalised people had realistic ins and outs. (Apologies to writers if I am revealing a trick of the trade). I found a psychological profiling system reminiscent of the Jungian profiling system and specifically a book called Riso & Hudson, The Wisdom of the Enneagram. As it turns out, what I found was a surprisingly good method of extrapolating intimate psychological architecture.
I found the Enneagram system particularly appealing because I could fill out a quiz to get the results and those results were detailed, offering up significant speculation (and only speculation) on the psychological origins of those whose mental make-up I was excavating. After reading as much as I could on Jeremy Corbyn, I took the quiz, answering on his behalf.
I found the results to be profound, not least because according to my answers, Jeremy’s enneagram profile type was called ‘The Peacemaker’. I went back to some of my interview subjects with the results and they concurred; this profile certainly does sound like The Absolute Boy.
The superego message is the most important technical finding about Jeremy for the drama. His internal judge does not ask whether he is doing well, leading well, or even fighting hard enough. It asks whether the people around him are okay, and if they are not, he will tirelessly fight to defend them. This applies not only to his inner circle, but his constituency too.
Here you can read the full overview of the enneagram type I think Jeremy is.
In my view, it’s an uncanny and accurate perspective on who Jeremy is as an individual: conflict averse but also consensus hunting. In my view the accuracy is down to two major factors. Firstly, the details of the lives of public figures are often well documented. We know the family situation; we’ve seen them struggle under inordinate amounts of pressure throughout their career and we’ve seen them flying high in their moments in the sun too. As such it is not too hard to reverse engineer a politician’s character, especially when they wear their heart on their sleeve in the way that Jeremy Corbyn has done over the years.
If you are interested, you can take an enneagram test to find out your own profile here.
I’ve developed profiles like this for Seumas Milne, Karie Murphy, John McDonnell, and Peter Mandelson, among others. Mandelson’s is fascinating simply because there is so much gumpf out there to sift through on the man. Alistair Campbell’s collated umpteen volumes of diaries alone has hundreds of character references and anecdotes relating to the paedophile adjacent prince of darkness. As such my file on Mandelson is vast, and I’ll share Peter’s profile in the coming days.
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