Beppe Grillo, the Italian comic, social activist and blogger, came to Oxford* – sponsored by the Axess Programme and the Italian Studies at Oxford network – and gave an audience of about 400 a (free) exposure to a show which crosses the lines between comedy, satire, social comment and a civic call to arms. Among Europe’s most popular bloggers, he’s built on his wit and stage presence a movement whose main aim – through “Vaffanculo” (or “fuck off”) days – seeks to have removed from the parliament those members who have criminal convictions. Grillo spoke in Italian: that limited the event to - mainly – the Italian scholarly community, students and teachers, in Oxford: but they still filled a sizable hall in the Taylorian Institute.

The event was chaired, if it can be so described, by David Forgacs, professor of Italian at University College London, and me. We put some questions to him at first: he began to answer them, sitting in a little panel with us on the stage – but soon segued into his act, rising, then using the stage for a kind of ballet, as his comic persona as a simple man oppressed, outraged and astounded by the follies of his country convulses his body and loses his tongue into a flood – half protest, half comedy.

Grillo hates the Italian press: our original proposal, that one of the panellists should be my friend Enrico Franceschini, Repubblica’s London bureau chief and a novelist, was refused. He hates it, he says, because it takes political subsidies (which is true); because if doesn’t adequately oppose the Italian political system to which, he believes, it is too closely linked; and ignores him. The one image he showed in his act was a picture, on the front page of the Turin daily La Stampa, of him addressing a meeting: the picture was cropped so that it seemed as though he was talking to an equestrian statue on a plinth across from his platform: widened, it showed the Turin piazza packed with people.

A flavour of the man and his campaigns can be got from his website – including that in English. Three things to say of him as a media figure:

First, he’s something of what his opponents say of him: he’s a demagogue. The satirist Daniele Lutazzi, in a 2007 article in Micromega, said of his style that, “Se parli alla pancia, certo che riempi le piazze, ma non è democrazia dal basso: è flash mobbing” (“If you speak to the gut, you can surely fill the squares: but that’s not democracy from below, it’s flash-mobbing”). Grillo doesnt differentiate: politicians of the left as are as bad as the right – though he did, at least for a time, endorse the Italia dei Valori party of  Antonio di Pietro. And newspapers as poisonous as the present Giornale are put on the same plane as Repubblica, which has kept up a constant pressure on the Prime Minister to respond to questions about his political and personal deportment last year.

Second, he’s been among the most successful of political activists in constructing his own alternative network – though website, appearances, rallies and organisation of alternative structures. He’s also drawn huge attention, national and international, to the more glaring horrors of Italian political life. He has not succeeded in subtantially damaging the Berlusconi government: but nor has the left opposition.

And third, he’s a great comedian. Humour, as a legion of satirists and comics have discovered in the past decade, is not just a political weapon, it’s a means of seeing politics. This is a movement of very great importance: it’s still not clear how much it contributed to democratic engagement and good government; but it’s fun.

*Photos and podcast of the Oxford event to be uploaded shortly.