The British Broadcasting Corporation has a new Chairman. Samir Shah took up his role at the beginning of March, telling staff that, from hereon in, “We [the BBC] must be the home for showcasing the full range of British culture and talent, geographically of course, but also in terms of class and thought in all its diversity.”
Did Mr. Shah really mean these fine words, though, or were they merely All Gas and Gaiters?
Are You Being Served?
How in touch with the average British person outside the usual BBC bubble is Shah likely to be? Well, according to his CV, he was born in India, has a CBE, was privately educated at West London’s Latymer Upper School, has an Oxbridge doctorate for his 1979 thesis ‘Aspects of the geographic analysis of Asian immigrants in London’ and is a known quangocrat, being Chairman of the Runnymede Trust race-relations think-tank between 1999-2009. In other words, he probably wasn’t part of the core target audience for old episodes of Spike Milligan’s Curry & Chips.
Possibly Shah’s words about “showcasing the full range of British culture and talent… in terms of class and thought” were influenced by the release of a report from those unlikely blue-collar champions at Ofcom back in December, criticising the broadcaster for failing to appeal more meaningfully to working class audiences, who often felt poorly served and patronised by the BBC’s output, which is clearly not aimed at the degenerate likes of them.
If there is one particular genre of programming Mr. Shah should concentrate on refocusing towards the benefit of a working class audience, however, it is surely comedy – specifically, that of the sitcom, once one of the BBC’s main areas of acknowledged expertise, but now one of its greatest weaknesses.
Curb Your Enthusiasm
One of the few relatively popular sitcoms from the corporation, the comedian Lee Mack’s long-running Not Going Out has just finished a repeat-run on BBC One, having notched up its hundredth episode with a festive special on Christmas Eve. And yet, despite being demonstrably popular, the show was nearly strangled at birth, only escaping cancellation early on in its run following an online audience petition. As Mack has complained, ever since the show started broadcasting in 2006, “broadsheet snobs have been asking ‘How can this show be on television in the modern age?’ That’s not the question. The question is, what is it about this show that is winding you up? Audiences love this sort of comedy.”
And there, Mr. Mack inadvertently answers his own question. If audiences love his shows, then this does not really matter, as the modern-day BBC quite self-evidently hates the vast majority of its own viewers – who, quite logically, now increasingly hate it right back.
For Mack, the sitcom itself is an inherently working class artform, and one which, crucially, bypasses the traditional role of the upper-middle class critic as an arbiter of quality. If an audience is laughing at the jokes in a show – even if that is an episode of the allegedly primitive half-hour of juvenile knob, poo and bum jokes for retarded Northern whippet-breeders that is Not Going Out – then, says Mack, “it negates their [the critics’] job… if your job is to make them [the audience] laugh, and they laugh, then what can the critic say?”
With other, more critically acclaimed – but distinctly unfunny – modern day BBC ‘sadcoms’ of the Fleabag or Motherland type, however, the broadsheet critic or BBC commissioner’s role becomes more amenable to his high opinion of himself as an aesthetically enlightened cultural gatekeeper. What is a sadcom, precisely? In a laudatory profile, the Guardian helpfully explains: “Most of the time, they won’t have you doubled up with laughter. By unshackling themselves from the promise of gag after gag, they are free to be as interesting and progressive as they like.”
A dire, unfunny, painfully woke s(h)itcom with few real jokes in it, then – Rev as opposed to Father Ted, basically. To the typical Guardian critic or BBC commissioning editor, if the audience fails to laugh at Fleabag, then perhaps this does not necessarily indicate that Fleabag is not particularly funny: maybe it just demonstrates the audience is not intellectually or morally advanced enough to appreciate all the jokes, let alone the general Leftish message being imparted. Therefore, guesses Mack, “I just think they just said, ‘Let’s call it comedy-drama instead’.”
Mack recalls one dismissive Guardian review of his show, in which a central criticism of it was that, quite shockingly, “The studio audience falls about laughing.” Heaven forfend!
Studio-based sitcoms filmed before crowds are now something of a rarity in TV-land, perhaps because, if dismal crap such as Alma’s Not Normal or Man Like Mobeen were indeed filmed in front of real, live, human beings, they would most likely be received with the stony silence they so richly deserve. As Mack rationalised about the Guardian’s bizarre objection to his comedy show being received with actual human laughter: “Early on in your career you think, ‘I wish they weren’t so sniffy about what I’m doing.’ And then you realise what’s really happening when you read a bad review – they’re actually reviewing the [entire] genre.”
Only When I Laugh
Why do today’s cultural guardians so hate studio-based sitcoms with live laughter-tracks? Possibly because they represent the former presence in Great Britain of that evil thing which must now be disavowed and dispelled at all costs – a tangible sense of a shared national community filled with common values and outlooks. Sitcoms used to be about universally recognised common types, archetypes of the various aspects of our national character: figures like Basil Fawlty, Del Boy Trotter, Alan Partridge, Alf Garnett, Captain Mainwaring, Victor Meldrew, et al., were known to us all in fleshly reality, albeit in less cartoonish form. The main protagonists of issues-based ‘sadcoms’ like those generally pumped out by the BBC today are not.
The new and ever-growing genre of racial sitcoms – that is to say, ones where blacks and Muslims are the main, saintly characters, and the whites who surround them the only remaining acceptable butt of their jokes – is just another expression of these atomising trends. Today, we get pained and disapproving Left-wing academic analyses of now-derided 1970s sitcoms like Love Thy Neighbour, where a black couple moves in next door to a bemused white couple, in which jokes like the following are relentlessly overanalysed and deemed to be evil: “First, she [the white neighbour] explained that in future she would buy him [the black neighbour] black socks (so the holes wouldn’t show) and then that she was planning to give him white gloves at the cinema (so that he could see his choc-ice).”
Once, when Britain was less balkanised, less like Lebanon, 99% of viewers, 99% of whom were white, could be relied upon to react to jokes like the above with the same broad reaction. But not today, as we are all forced to retreat into competing silos of mutual identitarian adversity and loathing by the all-time civilisational wonder that is ‘diversity’. This fact can be seen in a confected furore surrounding a 1975 episode of the classic slapstick Frank Spencer vehicle Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, repeated on BBC Two in December 2021. As part of the plot, Frank dresses up for a kids’ party in a department store, introducing himself to the children with the rather camp words “I’m the chief of the pixies, I’m the friend of all the little boys and girls!” “Oh no you’re not,” replies one distinctly unimpressed little lad, “You’re a poof!”
Back in 1975, nobody would have thought to complain about the fact a homosexual was being held up as a figure of public fun on a TV comedy show. Back then, actual homosexuals like Kenneth Williams could build an entire comedy career out of being so treated. By 2021, however, queer politics dictated things were now very different, and the BBC Executive Complaints Unit was forced into action. Although they did actually dismiss this particular humourless complaint, one reason for the BBC censors doing so was that, prior to broadcast, a stern public warning had been issued to viewers about its “outdated language”. “Outdated” to whom? To those who now control our mainstream public media-space, that’s who.
Heil, Honey, I’m Home!
The very embodiment of the pious Lefty comedy critic so bemoaned by Lee Mack is surely David Stubbs, a walking bundle of self-hating ‘white, male, cisgender, Oxbridge’ progressive neuroses whose 2023 book Different Times: A History of British Comedy was widely panned in print and online when it came out as being the rough equivalent of a blind man with no penis reviewing an erotic movie – a man with no sense of humour reviewing comedy shows. (That’s a joke by the way, David – I know you have some difficulty in identifying them.)
Amongst Stubbs’ many bizarre reported conclusions were that Are You Being Served? sowed the “seeds of Brexit”, that Fawlty Towers would have been better without Manuel in it, that Porridge failed lamentably “to indict the penal system” and that there was not enough explicit focus upon distressing far-Right Nazi atrocities in Dad’s Army. Despite its name, Open All Hours disappointingly wasn’t about the street-corner experiences of a hard-working disadvantaged young black prostitute either, although very possibly The Brittas Empire was wholly responsible for the transatlantic slave trade and the Bengal Famine.
Overall, argued Stubbs, the entire British sitcom genre was one gigantic subliminal ploy designed to get viewers to vote Tory by pushing them into adopting reactionary attitudes like laughing at Frank Spencer done up like a fairy and acting like one too. With attitudes like this, perhaps Stubbs should be reviewing TV for the Guardian? Well, unsurprisingly, an extract from his opus did indeed appear in the rag in question, under the telling headline ‘Punching up: how British comedy became kinder and more inclusive – without losing its edge’.
Here, Stubbs bemoaned “the hegemony of the laugh track” on shows like Not Going Out, praising instead mildly humorous (and mildly boring) contemporary BBC mood-pieces like Detectorists, in which “the actors were conscious of a need not just to raise laughs but also to take on the obligation of maintaining the well-being and mental health of those watching” thus transforming comedy into “a safe space for all”. Except any watching Evil Tories, obviously.
Going to see a “trans, lesbian, autistic… recovering alcoholic and drug addict” stand-up comedian at his local pub, Stubbs appears to undergo a sudden epiphany: “British comedy had never been in a better moral state. It has been strengthened by its inclusivity, its diversity, its neurodiversity, all the embedded values of political correctness.”
A better moral state? What about whether or not the shows in question are actually funny or not? Apparently, that is now wholly irrelevant. If the jokes are bad (or even outright non-existent) then it doesn’t matter – just so long as they are the right kind of jokes, with the right kind of targets. Ironically enough, isn’t this just how Bernard Manning once used to operate too, but from the direct reverse bigoted political perspective?
White Cisgender Men Behaving Badly
A similarly egregious essay appeared in Esquire magazine for July 2021, ‘How Sitcoms Got Less White, Less Male… and Funnier Than Ever’, in which author Tom Nicholson inaccurately observed that “the last five years have been a golden age for British sitcoms” – presumably not a reference to the continuing popularity during that period of Mrs Brown’s Boys.
If popular sitcoms of the past once captured some very real things about our national character, laments Nicholson (who, predictably, is himself every bit as white as Eddie Booth from Love Thy Neighbour), then “for decades, that element of our national character was mostly forged by writers from a very specific sliver of the nation. They may have gone to private school. They probably went to university. [Galton and Simpson didn’t, nor did John Sullivan, nor Johnny Speight, nor Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais…] They were almost certainly a man, and they were definitely white.”
That final ‘disgrace’, of course, might just have had something to do with the fact that, up until 1997, when Tony Blair’s Cabinet unilaterally told the civil service to open up the nation’s borders and civil servants immediately replied Yes, Minister, Britain had always been an overwhelmingly white country. Whom did he expect Terry & June to have been written by, precisely? A pair of Chinese Rastafarians?
The “glaring whiteness of British sitcom history” (Would Nicholson ever dare speak of “the glaring yellowness of Japanese Noh Theatre history”, or “the dismaying brownness of traditional Indian Bollywood cinema”?) as “a white space” was finally being overcome, however: “The old way of making sitcoms [i.e., putting jokes in them] had to wither to let more voices in, and it’s not a coincidence that just as British sitcom has become less male, less middle class, less white, less straight and less London-centric, it’s also been far funnier and more original than it has in decades.” As proved by all those hilarious, high-rating episodes of Dreaming Whilst Black you’ve never actually seen, of course.
Nicholson cites Channel 4’s then Head of Comedy, Fiona McDermott, to the following effect:
[Sitcom is] one of the best forms for tackling some of those bigger issues, whether it is mental health, whether it is inequality, whether it is female representation, whether it’s something like our response to Brexit … If we don’t do that, we just risk drowning in misery.
No, Fiona: none of that ‘claptivist’ crap is the purpose of comedy at all. The main overriding purpose of comedy is to make its viewers laugh, not to get them to think about “tackling the bigger issues” like mental health. Isn’t laughter supposed to be the best medicine, anyway?
One Foot in the Grave
Nicholson virtuously – and rather unsmilingly – concludes his piece thus (with my emphasis added):
The ‘situation’ bit of ‘situation comedy’ hasn’t really changed, but the perspective has… It’s a reflection of how the country’s changed, too. It often doesn’t feel like it, but the sitcoms we make and watch show we’re more interested now in hearing from people who’ve been ignored [other than Brexit voters, of course]… and that we’re more ready to talk about difficult, awkward subjects with a bit of nuance. Sitcoms can do that now.
Yes, but who is this “we” here? Once, viewers of shows like Dad’s Army, ‘Allo ‘Allo and Blackadder Goes Forth would have known the answer to such an answer immediately. Today, however, in our vibrantly diverse, post-1997, multi-channel, multi-identity world, there is no collective “we” left to be invoked within the living rooms of Great Britain any more at all. The only “we” that counts now is that demographically defined by the term ‘the governing class’ – the ones who get to commission, make and broadcast the programmes that, increasingly, only people like they themselves actually want to watch.
One of my favourite old BBC sitcoms was a fake 1990s documentary series called People Like Us. Evidently, those running the BBC these days liked at least one part of the programme, too – its title.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
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