The Day That Satire Died in Britain

I can date almost exactly when satire died in modern Britain. It died one day in March 2015.

Why do I say this? Because it was then that Private Eye began to issue its podcast, entitled Page 94.

We have to distinguish between several things in order to make sense of this.

First, we have to distinguish between script on the one hand and audio and visual on the other.

Second we have to distinguish between relative anonymity and relative publicity: being a writer and being a voice and a face.

The two are related, obviously. It is hard to be anonymous when one is filmed or recorded: for, then, one’s voice is heard, one’s face is seen.

Private Eye: well, we always knew the story about Beyond the Fringe, That Was the Week That Was, the Shrewsbury-Oxford conspiracy of Christopher Booker, Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton, Paul Foot, plus other figures, famously Peter Cook, also Nigel Dempster, and, classically, Auberon Waugh (I got all this from Humphrey Carpenter’s book That Was The Satire That Was). But in the older decades one always read Private Eye without knowing who had written what. One knew that Ingrams had handed the editorship over to Hislop in 1986, and that it had more or less worked out. But no one knew anything. The satire came from the beyond. I remember seeing Francis Wheen’s book on Marx without at first knowing that he had anything to do with Private Eye.

Private Eye began as a sort of kiddie protest against Macmillan. Everyone in 1962 had an impersonation of Macmillan in their repertoire. Ingrams thought that Private Eye might die when Harold Wilson became Prime Minister in late 1964, but an adjustment was made and Private Eye became a genuinely scurrilous bother to all sides and every side. Above all, it was mostly anonymous. For instance, ‘Piloti’ was Gavin Stamp. But I remember years and years ago asking someone who ‘Piloti’ was – one had to ask someone who knew (I think it was Ian Harris who told me). Do you remember the old Times Literary Supplement? In 1910 it was wholly anonymous: reviews were magisterial, as if coming from on high. After 1974 the reviews were published under a name. There was a time when I knew the names; now I don’t. But there were arguments both ways. Anonymity meant something like the Secret Ballot in politics. One could say what one thought. One could murder a book. But transparency meant political correctness, wetting one’s powder, ostentatiously rolling logs, engaging in reciprocal conspiracy.

Now, the TLS is one thing, Private Eye another. And here is the particular problem for Private Eye. For TLS is earnest. Open, public, reputable. Whereas Private Eye is not meant to be earnest.

What I most dislike about the Private Eye podcast is that it is half-earnest and half-jolly-mockysticks. And neither of these is anything like as good as satire done in the dark, written starkly, as if coming from under a rock or from on high. Satire is meant to be a mixed method. It comes from satura, which means, originally, a mixture of poetry and prose. (I discovered this when I was reading about Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, yes, indeed. Forgive me: je suis ein Skoler.) Now, maybe you think half-earnest and half-jolly-mockysticks is satura: but it is not. It is just good-natured, appealing to a sort of band of the ‘radical centre’. It sounds so mainstream, so central, so higher-educated in a very 21st century sort of way. For God’s sake, Helen Lewis is one of the major commentators on the podcast. I have no idea how much she writes for Private Eye or for how long, but she is famous for being a Disliker of the Manosphere and Hostile to Jordan Peterson. You, like me, probably first came across her when you watched J.P. versus H.L., as a sort of more combative-intellectual-lengthy version of the J.P. versus Cathy Newman thing.

Now, if, like me, you think of J.P. as a portent: as a revelation that something had gone badly wrong by 2017 or whenever it was, then you have to think that Helen Lewis as a voice, and a face, and a broadcaster, is not satirical. Nay, she is a commentator: she is no different from Jacob Rees-Mogg, or David Starkey, or George Osborne, or Aaron Bastani, or Owen Jones, or Rory Stewart. They are humorous, no doubt, but not satirical: they are in more or less earnest because they are political figures and because one can see their face and hear their voice.

In case you doubt what I am saying about this, I shall refer back to a piece that stunned me when I read it. Years and years ago, Michael Oakeshott objected to news broadcast in audio form. He wrote a very readable essay in which he argued that news in newspapers leaves us alone, since it is not written in a tone of voice. One can read the news, and have one’s own view about it. A serious story, one can mock. Or row. Or laugh. Or cry. Or feel irritation. Or disagree. Or misunderstand it. But on the radio the news comes with a tone of voice: a BBC voice, objectionable not or never for its accent, but objectionable for its seriousness or, ha, ha, later, especially after David Frost, its flippancy, and throughout we are being told, by the tone, what to think: how to be one-of-us, how to join-the-mainstream.

And the Page 94 podcast is very toney. It says we-are-people-like-us and other-people-are-not-people-like-us. I liked the myth of this when I saw no faces and heard no voices, but I dislike it when I hear the tone of voice and see the appealing, agreeable faces. I am a reactionary: and I react. I resist: I do not want to succumb to tone, especially if it is not an sincere tone, but a half-earnest and half-jolly-mockysticks tone. I don’t want to join their plump, bare-legged gang.

I think if we had been able to hear and see Foot, Ingrams, Waugh et al. Private Eye would never have become so successful.

I remember my delight years ago when I found that the great literary critic Ian Robinson and his friends on a website called Edgeways were writing pieces critical of Private Eye. Entitled Eyewash, their column, now defunct, accused Private Eye of losing the plot a bit. In 2005 they tried to put an advert in the Eye, and the Eye refused it! Not wanting anyone to worry about inadequate levels of satire.

In case you are not convinced by my argument, let me bring in Ronald Knox. In Essays on Satire, published in 1928, he distinguished satire and humour. He said:

• Humour depends on good humour; it depends on not wanting to correct anything.
• Satire is corrective, and wants to correct something in the world.

(Interestingly, he said that we often think humour is older, but he thought that satire was ancient and original, and that humour was a sort of benign post-French Revolutionary bit of English good nature.) The humorist is edgeless, harmless (like A.A. Milne or Ricky Gervais in The Office). And why? Because, Knox explained, he “‘makes a present of himself to his reader as a laughing-stock”. Whereas the satirist is edgy, has edge, makes one feel the blade, and does not turn the blade on himself (like Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes). “In satire, on the contrary, the writer always leaves it to be assumed that he himself is immune from the follies and the foibles which he pillories.” And again: “The laughter which satire provokes has malice in it always…”

Satire is superior then. It is not known for self-criticism. And this is fine. There is no problem with this, as long as we do not see or hear the satirists. Because, as soon as we see or hear those superior, contemptuous satirists, we see or hear that they are, and I quote, “immune from the follies and the foibles that they pillory”. This might not matter for a one-off. But it matters when we have an institution, a decades-long authority, going on for, er, 94 years. Aye, this is the problem with Ian Hislop. He is a walking I-am-immune-from-the-foibles-I-pillory. And has been for decades. This is fine, fine, fine, as a literary pose: as a bit of fake objectivity, and as the justification for visions from under a rock or from on high. But wholly unacceptable when the unfollied and unfoibled face and voice is self-satisfiedly seen and heard to be condemning everyone else. We see and hear the self-satisfaction. In fact, Hislop has been peddling this self-satisfaction, somewhat successfully, since Have I Got News For You became a thing in, er, I have to check, ages ago, when I were a lad, in 1990, for God’s sake. Alright: that was a one-off. And he was Hizza, a one-man band.

But no, now here he is, he is the leader of an army, a comitatus, with gels and bare-kneed old boys in his gang, and, magnificently, opinionatedly, Dame Helen Lewis, who could talk her way into anyone’s podcast – all of them playing PLU (People Like Us) games, a band of other-people-have-flaws people, a band of other-people-have-follies people, a band of other-people-have-foibles people. And they sound so stuck up. They might as well be recorded by Gary Lineker.

Oh, and they are by and large on the radical centre Left, or whatever it is. Their laughter involves a Leftish twist to the face. Haw, haw, haw, hee, hee, hee.

Finally. I have no doubt that like me, you cannot forgive Private Eye – the great entity that resisted Diana in 1997 – for wholly capitulating to COVID-19 in 2020 and for a long time afterwards. So much for satire, criticism, scepticism, anything at all. Hislop and gang just ate the pill, took the jab, read the paper, walked the dog, socially distanced, chuckled complacently, wobbled their jowls and looked aggrieved with funny TV forehead-exploding consternation that anyone could disagree with them.

Bloody M.D.

Oh, and on Page 94, in their most recent edition, they say that Blair is a “climate-denier”.

Private Eye is as bad as Banksy. Worse, since older in vintage.

And now it is Helen Lewis who looks like a portent.

“It’s like Question Time!” she said.

I’d say that one should only listen to pontificators if they sound capable of being self-critical, self-sceptical, self-ironical. And Page 94 does not. Private Eye in its audio-visual form is just toney centrism.

Have I been understood? ‘Satire’, as now heard and seen, is no longer satire. It is avowedly taking a side, avowedly ideological, just half-earnest, half jolly-mockysticks establishment noise.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.