All Satirical Passion Spent

June 2008

ITV billed the first series as the successor to Spitting Image. If only this were true. The writers had no energy and no ardour. It did not take long for the viewer to guess that they were happy with the world as it is.

Take their attitude to terrorism. Satirists might concentrate on the government’s threat to basic liberties, as many on the Right and Left have done. Alternatively, they might turn on a judiciary whose rulings allow “Londonistan” to survive.

What no one with satirical passion would think of doing is telling tit gags Benny Hill would have rejected as not funny enough. Yet Headcases had the animated Gordon Brown explaining to Jacqui Smith that she must show more cleavage as the terror threat increases. When an attack was imminent, she must sound the alarm by appearing topless before the Commons. Meanwhile Brown, a politician who has taxed and spent on a scale beyond the dreams of the Left of the 1990s, became in ITV’s hands a Victorian Scrooge who watches every penny from his counting house desk. You could almost hear them saying, “he is Scottish and a son of the Manse so —eureka! — we will show him as a skinflint!” Conservative readers will blame the broadcasters’ liberal bias for ITV’s failure to wound or even graze. I’m sure there’s truth in the charge but suspect that a deeper “bias against understanding” was at work.

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ADAMS

June 27th, 2008
1:06 AM

A good article, and I love the magazine so far. To bring up Headcases in this important subject is, I think, irrelevant. It's a small, mistaken programme. It's not the 'New Spitting Image' and only said it was to get some publicity. Let's focus on proper satire. Columnists, stand-ups, sketch-writers and cartoonists. And I think they're doing fine. Rory Bremner, Craig Brown, Matthew Parris, Morland, and there are many others. The limits are always going to be the Brass Eye factor (Daily Mail outrage) and the timidity of Editors in general. And part of that is, yes, don't scare the punters. Or confuse them. However, satirists should speak to everyone. Not just the Westminster Village or 'chattering classes', as they sometimes do now. For example, however bad Ed Balls may be, he is not yet on on the nation's conscience. Yes, one could struggle to expose him every day in a cartoon or column, for example, but if he's not well enough known, he's not well enough known. Full stop. You can work your fingers raw drubbing him every day, but only a "public" story (dodgy political 'initiative', scandal, faux pas... ) will bring him fully to the public's sight. Finally, I believe you are being depressive. Quote: "To call satire a conservative art is another way of saying that it is the art of the defeated." You were the one who called satirists conservative. I disagree. Good ones do not harbour "nostalgia and alarm" but look forward to a less imperfect society. Above all, they sniff a fault a mile off, draw attention to it, but, above all, make sure the punter gets their drift!

Peter

June 10th, 2008
3:06 PM

But Blair has gone now, and it turns out he was nowhere near as Right wing as those who mocked him — myself included — imagined. Yes he was. And your journalism stands up well if read today. Don't give up on us. It is unsurprising that Cameron can easily accept a Blairite settlement and even campaign on the basis of outflanking it on the left!

Neil

June 1st, 2008
1:06 PM

Part of it is possibly that since the hounding of the makers of "Brass Eye", probably the last genuinely biting satire to reach TV, by the regulators and reactionary parts of the media, broadcasters are too scared to show anything too hard-hitting, with the obvious knock on effect on writers no?

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