The Quiet Death of British Satire
Even at the best of times, England must seem like an exceedingly fucking weird place to outsiders. We’re the country who spawned Noel Edmonds, the country who allowed Jamie Oliver to rap on live television, the country who enjoyed feudalism so much that we decided to literally never get rid of it. Perhaps to outsiders we seem like figures from a Lowry painting: a curiously haggard species, knock-kneed and knock-toothed, our only respite from the slate-grey headwind coming when we stoop to pick up litter for the Queen, or when we slip our iPhone from our pockets to tweet that Michael Gove has a ‘face like a skinless sausage,’ (28 likes) a tiny dopamine rush that’ll later be used to deny us bail under the final draft of The Snooper’s Charter.
But you have to laugh, right? That’s the art-form we’ve always excelled in. In the face of a multiplex of national crises, we have long emerged as world class piss-takers. We could fill the Albert Hall with our lineage of nimble-minded satirists, those who have snuck into the Royal Box only to greet the climactic denouement with the flourish of a sharpened needle. From Priestley to Pope, Wodehouse to Wilde, Chris Morris to Steven Morrissey — it is in the British DNA to spin on our heels and expose those in power for what they really are. Wherever there is an obsession with stuffiness, etiquette, decorum, manners, appearance, vanity and tradition — you can guarantee that there’ll be some joker there to be point out that mate, you literally stuck your cock in a pig. Truly, 2016 is a carnival of the grotesque. The rubberised masks of the Spitting Image puppets would now be indistinguishable from the real thing, Punch Magazine would have to be redrafted on an minute-by-minute basis, meanwhile the likes of Oscar Wilde would be doing 600rpm in the Père Lachaise. What a bizarre sight this must be when viewed from the mainland; like an ant colony observed through a reversed pair of binoculars. What is this strange upside-down Dickensian world? Why do they all sing about saving the Queen? And look at that line of worker ants with the stethoscopes slung loosely around their necks: What are they marching for? What are they chanting? What is it exactly that’s written on those miniature placards?
But you have to laugh, right? You have to laugh. Except no. Not any more.
This week, in a moment laced with supreme comic-book irony, the Conservative Party’s resident Dilbert impersonator Chris Grayling MP reinstated his support for the arcane rule that parliamentary footage should not be allowed to be used in satirical programmes. Take a deep breath. A balding Tory MP, a balding Tory MP who literally has the word ‘Gray’ in his surname, is not merely asking you, but telling you not to take the piss out of the ruling elite. It was enough to make Charlie Brooker — who must’ve felt like Bart Simpson, catapult spring-loaded in a taut back pocket as Principal Skinner bends over to remove a particularly stubborn piece of doublemint gum — complain that the whole thing is a massive great big fucking joke. Well, not a joke. The opposite of a joke. A visceral affront to the very notion of a joke. Which is perhaps the very epitaph that would best describe the life and times of Chris Grayling himself. The Right Honourable Chris Grayling. He sounds like a roughly-hewn late-period Martin Amis character, a greyed-out corporate bean-counter, a man whose constitution only allows for the digestion of plain white Aldi ham sandwiches, a man whose chronic gingivitis has forced his wife to sleep in the other room. Chris Grayling. Jesus.
All of which brings me steering round to my main point. In an ideal world, there would be a weekly television programme that skins politicians alive. A programme that summons our great history of Juvenalian satire and fires it like a Gatling gun across the entire farcical, corrupted spectrum. There is appetite for this. Jon Oliver gets 20 million views in less than a week for goring into the likes of Donald Trump. He is our exiled imago figure, the workaholic ex-pat who knows that the British media would simply never, ever allow him to get away with the sort of impeccably-researched, hyper-lucid, poetic dismantling that he serves up week-in, week-out. It’s The Establishment see, They Don’t Like It Up ’Em. Which is precisely why we need it right now more than ever. We’re standing on the faultlines of history, in perilous danger of becoming precisely the sort of sedated little proletariats that Orwell warned about, sucking on our blue plastic light-up toys, clutching whatever glowing rectangle is nearest to hand, anything to distract us from the inevitable swan-dive into oblivion.
But idle distraction is not the answer. Ultimately, nothing makes the likes of Michael Gove et al purr more than voter disenfranchisement. Make politics distant, boring and inaccessible, make it about governmental white papers and statute amendments, obfuscate, deflect, blame-shift and manoeuvre — throw the proles the occasional bone now and then and retreat to your castellated tower — this is the way to get what you want. It’s death by a thousand imperceptible cuts, the freeze-and-thaw method of cleaving the country apart millimeter-by-millimeter until no-one can pinpoint how exactly we got here. Hitler had a thing or two to say this. And as politicians don’t seem to learn from past mistakes, perhaps it’s time we highlighted some things for them. Perhaps it’s time we, you know, blew the bloody doors off.
And this is why satire in the UK has suffered such a meek and quiet strangulation. The revolving door of The Establishment, of the same few shadowy figures controlling politicians, media and big business, has meant that genuine subversion is hard to find. At least not in mainstream channels. But guess what? We don’t need those mainstream channels any more. YouTubers you’ve never heard of get more clicks than peak-era Diana, The Internet largely remains an untamed Wild West. This is why we deserve more than the toothless, self-subordinating nihilism offered by The Daily Mash and other sub-Onion rags. We deserve more than cardboard cut-outs of Paul Merton and Ian Hislop dishing-up the same reheated stodges of received wisdom on a weekly basis. We deserve more than Mock The Week. The fact that Chris Grayling is calling the shots on UK comedy should act as a wake up call. We need something loud, raucous and savage. We need something where the blood drips from the screen as hypocrisies are slashed apart with a machete. The boot of authority has been pressed on our heads for too long, it’s about time that comedians kicked back.
