Back in my youth there were comedians. They told jokes, made sketches and skits, acted in sit-coms and made guest appearances on game shows. I'm not going to indulge in some sort of list-making but there were legions of them - some with peak time shows on TV, some making up the numbers at the end of assorted piers and a whole pile, most I guess, scraping a living on the club comedy circuit. Some of them were achingly funny, the sort of people (Eric Morecombe, Tommy Cooper) who just made you laugh almost without effort, while others less so. It was a job and a very good living for the best.
One place, however, you didn't see comedians was on Question Time. Or indeed anywhere near politics or public affairs. It's not that comedians will have lacked for political opinions - they're mostly sharp, bright people and sharp bright people have political opinions. It's more that, I dunno, we didn't reckon that the political opinions of TV comics were any more valid that, say, the opinion of the solicitor on your high street, the woman who runs the successful boutique or the man opening the batting for Pudsey St Lawrence. It seems this has changed - comedians now (not all of them but a frightening proportion) seem to view their business as essentially an extension of political debate.
In 2015, Megan Garber argued in The Atlantic that comedians were the new public intellectuals. More and more comedy came with moral messaging, she pointed out: “Comedians are fashioning themselves not just as joke-tellers, but as truth-tellers—as intellectual and moral guides through the cultural debates of the moment.” Whereas once philosophers and political theorists held a public role of guiding national debates and parsing the nuances of current affairs, comedians were increasingly taking on that responsibility.I don't know when all this started - maybe with Ben Elton unfunnily shouting "Thatch" a lot on Saturday Live - but it really isn't a good look. Especially when, as some appear to do, actually being funny, maybe telling a joke or two gets lost in the essential objective of sticking it to the (old, white) man. Occasionally down the pub us grumpy old folk mumble into our pint about how there's sod all in the way of good comedy these days because the sort of stuff we laughed at in the 1970s has been banned by the social justice warriors in their quest for a perfectly fair, equal and (it seems) spectacularly boring society.
This bowdlerising of comedy is fine (unless, that is, you want something on telly to laugh at) but it still does not explain why anyone thinks somebody telling jokes - regardless of how right-on they are - is any sort of moral guide let alone someone we should have on TV to pontificate on current affairs, foreign policy and the government of the day. Yet this is what we do, people whose job should be to take the piss out of the government, politicians and self-righteous social justice campaigners are paid to come on telly and make serious commentary about these things. With precisely no qualification at all beyond being in the producer's address book (do they have these things now-a-days or is it all on the phone), having a smiley demeanour and several hundred thousand followers on Twitter.
TV current affairs programming has become little more than an extension of the entertainment business - folk get invited on because they're box office (lots of social media supporters, a penchant for safe controversy) not because they know anything at all about the subjects being discussed. Even the favourite politicians of these shows - Farage, Rees-Mogg, Abbott, Flint - are there because they provide that box office in a way that regular front bench politicians don't. Name recognition matters more than the ownership of a brain cell - this is why comedians get onto current affairs programmes not because what they say is helpful, thoughtful, insightful or intelligent (said comment could, of course, be any or all of these things but this is a happy coincidence not something planned for).
This confection results in news and current affair programmes designed to focus on what's trending on Twitter (or at least in the 'Blue Tick' Twitter the programme makers look at) and a preference for celebrity over analysis - just look at how two TV chefs have essentially written Britain's food policy on the back of a couple of shows and a book. Debate around important topics is boiled down to sound bites, slogans and lame jokes provided by comedians, media-friendly academics, gobby pundits and politicians whose shtick is controversy for controversy's sake.
Comedy isn't made better by its providers looking over their shoulder at the political effect of their jokes - the humour should be enough. Eddie Izzard - pretty much the trendy political comic's trendy political comic - was incredibly funny talking about rotting fruit and whether le singe est dans l'arbre. I'm not sure being snarky about politics much improved his oevre. For sure, you can't say no comedian can ever appear on a current affairs show but we have to start asking whether what we want is entertainment shows for that (pretty small) part of the public that enjoys politics as a blood sport or programming that has a degree of depth, analysis and intelligence. If we want the latter (and I'm sure the grandees of the BBC will pretend this is the case) then we need to send the comedians back to do comedy shows.
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