Today the British Council is presenting a debate on the role of the arts in democratic change. When they asked me to take part I was initially sceptical. Do the arts really need to be politically relevant? Can’t they just be pretty, or interesting, or fun?

Surely no one goes into the arts to change the political landscape. People who want political influence go into politics. People who want to be cartoonishly poor, then feel bitter about their fringe status, then become successful but still quite skint, then feel bitter about their mainstream status, then become passé and then die, convinced that their genius will only be recognised by one undergraduate pursuing her thesis generations after their deaths: they go into the arts.

And what has democracy ever done for the arts? Fifth-century BC Athens was the original paradigm for direct democracy. No one voted for representatives to go and debate their futures or make their decisions. They turned up themselves, listened and voted by raising their hands.

And art flourished during this time. Aeschylus’s surviving tragedies are full of pride for the role that a civilised society can play in the lives of its citizens. When Orestes turns up in Athens, in the Eumenides, he is a ruined man, pursued by the Furies. He has done his duty and killed the murderer of his father, Agamemnon. But since Agamemnon was killed by his wife, Orestes’ mother Clytemnestra, Orestes now bears blood guilt himself. This is, of course, the problem with retaliatory homicide — for each death that is avenged, a new cycle of death begins.

But Orestes is not killed by the Furies, or anyone else. He is brought to stand trial before the Areopagus, the great Athenian court. He is acquitted of murder, and the Furies abide by the court’s decision. In a play filled with gods and monsters, it is the ordinary democratic process of a court of Athenian citizens that can cut through an insoluble problem and impose moral and legal authority on a chaotic world.

Democratic societies still use art to shape their perception in the rest of the world. As the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts developed, for example, many countries expressed disapproval of US foreign policy.

But at the same time the political television drama The West Wing was a huge international hit. It offered, in essence, an alternative reality, one where a left-wing, intellectual humanitarian was President of the United States. Jed Bartlet cared about global warming, agonised over the death penalty and, when furious with God, could — and did — curse him in spontaneous Latin.

And it wasn’t just left-wing political porn that attracted audiences who could condemn America on the news while gobbling up their cultural offerings. The first series of 24, the one-man-saves-America-from-terrorists adrenalin fest, was broadcast less than two months after the September 11 attacks. And as the world flipped between sympathy for America’s losses and disquiet at its response, we all tuned in to the ticking clock and its hawkish hero. The same audiences who were appalled by the Abu Ghraib prison scandal watched in delight as Jack Bauer punched, shot, electrocuted and even decapitated threats to American security. And our appetite for a man to torture his way to safety remains unsated; 24 is about to begin its eighth series.

It’s not just serious drama that bounces off a democratic society, either. Political comedy has relied on democracy for millennia. Aristophanes’ scabrous comic play The Birds is a pungent critique of the weaknesses of Athenian democracy. The birds set up a state in the sky, Cloudcuckooland, to try to escape the corruption of men on Earth. It doesn’t take long for the corruption to follow them up into the heavens.

Rather more recently, Spitting Image had a lasting impact on our political sphere. For those of us who grew up watching, it is still almost impossible to think of John Major in any colour other than grey. And David Steel, whose puppet was a tiny pocket-sized irrelevance, was never taken seriously again. If, indeed, he had been previously.

Political comedy needs democracy, for the excellent reason that political comedians tend to have a short life expectancy under dictators. Cristian Mungiu’s excellent film Tales from the Golden Age which opened last week is a selection of satirical urban myths set in Ceausescu’s Romania.

It’s easy to see why it has taken so long for this film to be made: the second story is called “The Legend of the Party Photographer”. As a tired old man and his nephew try to finish work and go home, they are constantly thwarted by party officials who need them to doctor photographs of Ceausescu. First he must be made taller, then taller still. No matter that he will be taller than he is even in other doctored photographs, he must appear bigger that the other politician in the same picture. They come unstuck when trying to edit his hat into, and out of, one picture at the same time.

The stories in Mungiu’s film were clearly inspired by the nightmare of living under a vicious dictator. It is a paradox of oppression that it encourages precisely the kind of mockery that it tries to obliterate. But he had to wait 20 years for a democratic government before the film could actually be made. In artistic terms alone, as Churchill said, democracy is “the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried”.

Natalie Haynes will join Grayson Perry and Razia Iqbal to debate the role of the arts in democratic change at the Barbican Arts Centre, London, this morning. www.britishcouncil.org

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