After The End

Here is my major university project, a post-apocalyptic nightmare tale of dwarves, cloning and television. Confused? So am I...

My Dissertation

Here's my dissertation. I wouldn't suggest you bother reading it unless you have an active interest in TV satire...

TITLE: Is modern television satire biting the hand that feeds it?

INTRODUCTION

By the time satire hit our television screens in late 1962 it had already had a turbulent history. Indeed Jonathan Miller wrote, on the eve of the opening of The Establishment Club in late 1961,
‘English satire, unequalled in the eighteenth century for both ferocity and point, has dwindled into a whimsical form of self-congratulation.’ (Miller, The Observer, 1/10/61. Cited at www.petercook.net, 03/12/02.)
Among other things, Miller blamed public schools, the growth of good manners and the industrial elite for the sinking. The ‘satire’ that he speaks of though, is a term hard to define. Satire has been around in various forms since the ancient Greeks (Aristophanes was a particularly great exponent) and it seems goes hand in hand with mankind. As Matthew Hodgart writes: ‘The perennial topic of satire is the human condition itself’ (Hodgart, 1969: 10). Thus satire is part and parcel of human nature, a reaction to the absurdities and contempt that mortal life throws up on an ever-increasing basis. According to the Oxford English dictionary, satire is described as ‘the use of ridicule, irony, sarcasm etc, to expose folly or vice or to lampoon an individual’. Perhaps what is surprising is the omission of the word ‘humour’- long a staple of satire, perhaps the best outlet for satiric wit and certainly a key element of the satire boom.
By the time that David Frost and the That Was The Week That Was (TW3) team invaded our living rooms, English satire had found itself in a prosperous position of rather rude health. Thanks largely to John Bassett, ‘the Father of English satire’, who was the man responsible for taking Peter Cook, Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore to Edinburgh with the revue Beyond the Fringe, widely recognised as the fashion setter for what turned out to be the satire boom of the early 1960s (though many still question whether it was actually satire). Indeed, by the time that the BBC had jumped on the satire bandwagon, Peter Cook’s Establishment Club was already up and running, as was Private Eye, the satirical magazine that has proven itself to be the only satirical media of the period still available today, though obviously having gone through a number of subtle changes (and of course a few editors).
The reasons for this sudden satire boom can be attributed, typically, to a number of social, political and cultural factors. Ever since the end of the war, Britain had been slowly gathering back its economic base. Conscription had inevitably evolved into national service, consumerism was now ‘in’, and, in 1951, after a brief flirtation with a Labour government, Britain went Tory again. With the new Conservative government came a return to the pre-war conventions. Journalism was thus reduced to a pro-monarchy, politicians-as-superiors, hierarchical state. It was perhaps a sign of the times that, as Humphrey Carpenter writes;
‘…there was no self conscious ‘youth culture’. Teenagers were scarcely identified as a social group with its own tastes and needs, and young adults found themselves precipitated into a prematurely middle aged lifestyle.’ (Carpenter, 2000: 6)
Attitudes amongst the young, however, were changing. The Suez crisis of 1956 was the culmination of the growing political awareness among the young, highlighted in the literary world by a number of texts that saw their authors labelled as ‘angry young men’ (writers such as John Osborne and Kingsley Amis), the popular music sector saw the introduction of rock ‘n’ roll, and subsequently in political circles came the campaign for nuclear disarmament (CND) constituted in early 1958. 1959 brought the first television-advertised election campaign. This led to many of the young arguing that ‘politics was a matter not of civic duty but of consumption’ (Wagg, 1998: 266). Indeed, also keen to get involved with what could now be seen as changing times were a group of students from Oxford and Cambridge whose mainly middle class, privileged backgrounds led them to be, as Jonathan Miller states, ‘amused rather than really outraged’ (Wilmut, 1980: 4) by the politics of the day. This meant that the satirists had no particular political viewpoint, but sought to mock the idea of politics itself. ‘This, in practice, meant a freer market in comedy’ (Wagg, 1998: 266). Indeed, it is quite probably this reaction that led to the comedic revues of the footlights and so on, rather than they too becoming angry young men.
The Oxbridge Mafia as they became known, applied to the group of students who were to dominate British comedy for the next twenty years, first and foremostly with the satire movement, ironically both started and enjoyed by the elite- the very group which the movement sought to expose and ridicule. It was from this batch of rising stars that, via the usage of various connections, John Bassett assembled a group of two Cambridge and two Oxford graduates that became Beyond the Fringe, ‘The funniest revue for ages’ (Lewis, Daily Mail, 24/8/60. Cited in Wilmut, 1980). Once the revue had taken the Edinburgh festival by storm and after some heavy persuasion from various outsiders, the group took on something of a tour, while satire boomed all around them.
Satire was now ‘in’ (and ‘in’ in several different mediums) and thus it seemed only a matter of time before it was unleashed on the burgeoning group of television viewers. But since the introduction of small screen satire, its methods and targets have undoubtedly evolved, shifting the focus of satire to parallel the changing dominance of various meta-narratives, from the sacred cows of politics, religion and royalty to today’s obsession with celebrity and the media itself. But how and why has this change come about? With reference to Britain’s political, social and cultural changes that satire has both introduced and reflected over the last forty years, it can be shown that television satire, which exploded onto the popular culture scene with great force and menace, has now gone full circle, reflecting more accurately the world today than the mass media ever could. Is modern television satire therefore ‘biting the hand that feeds it’?



CHAPTER ONE:
The Death Of Deference

The BBC’s relationship with politics had been troubled from the outset. In order to retain the annual licence fee upon which the BBC was (and still is) funded, it is required by its charter to remain absolutely impartial. Indeed, there was even a period when whichever party was in power thought that the BBC should reflect and support the views of the government, even dealing the blame for election losses to our primary broadcaster. Thus it comes as something of a surprise that That Was The Week That Was ever came into existence at all.
TW3 was born out of the Tonight show, a five-times-weekly topical magazine broadcast from 1957. By 1962, however, Tonight had begun dabbling in satire, and the team had its eyes on the Saturday late night slot in the schedules. Ned Sherrin, another Oxford graduate and director of Tonight began formulating ideas for what would become ‘a mixture of News, Interview, Satire and Controversy’ (Carpenter, 2000: 207), loosely born out of an earlier idea from Peter Cook and John Bird. Hugh Carleton-Greene, then Director-General of the BBC was a liberal, which ‘accorded well with the BBC’s increasing break away from the cosy image of the 1950s.’ (Wilmut, 1980: 57). He therefore welcomed a programme with the potential to bite and amuse with similar voracity that he had experienced in the cabaret satire in Berlin before the war. Gaining the green light from the governors, Sherrin set about gathering a group of writers and performers capable of getting TW3 off the ground and into the living rooms.
TW3 was first broadcast on Saturday 24th November 1962 to an audience of three and a half million viewers (Carpenter, 2000), a figure eclipsed in subsequent episodes. One of the most instantly noticeable elements of the programme design was the relaxed format it had adopted. Cameras and microphones strayed in and out of shot, something unheard of at the time (though now almost a convention of such magazine programmes). Indeed, the show had a definite feeling of off-the-cuff spontaneity, with actors fluffing lines and reading from the scripts at their desks and no attempt at all to hide the studio environment. It was, as one of the cast, Willie Rushton put it, ‘live as hell’ (Cited in Wilmut, 1980: 61). Though perhaps surprising at first, this groundbreaking technique meant that the focus was in the content of the show, as intended.
Much of this content was, for its time, extremely risqué. Indeed, it was hardly difficult to shock in the social climate of early 1960s Britain. One of the most lambasted of the early sketches featured a conversation between Roy Kinnear and Millicent Martin about Kinnear’s trouser fly being undone. Though hardly controversial today it symbolises how times have changed, and certainly much of this liberalisation is thanks to TW3. Sketches like this were labelled blue toilet humour, but it was in its more satirical moments that the show really angered its critics.
Throughout its first series, TW3 made its objectives obvious- no sacred cow should be left un-satirised. At the time this mainly boiled down to the big three of royalty, politics and religion. This was the first time that any of the three had been treated with anything but deference, sometimes taking satire to the point of investigative journalism as with its exposé of record producer Norrie Paramour’s somewhat questionable claims for writing royalties. It is thus perhaps unsurprising that David Frost’s (the show’s anchorman) future career strayed from satire to more serious television journalism, given the nature of this type of sketch. Indeed, TW3 brought along not only a fresh look at satirical comedy but questioned authoritative figures in a way no-one had done before, paving the way for scandals to become regular headline grabbers and public figures to achieve notoriety overnight.
One of the most controversial of the early pieces involved a re-editing of Harold Macmillan’s speeches to give the impression that he was repeating himself and talking nonsense. This caused such a furore that the BBC subsequently imposed an internal ban on such tampering with news film. Perhaps surprisingly no action was taken against the piece, probably due to Macmillan’s own note to the postmaster general Reginald Bevins ‘It is a good thing to be laughed over, it is better than to be ignored’ (Frost, 1993: 61) wise words from a politician whose view of satire, shared by many of his political successors, was more readily accepting than satirists might hope for, somewhat turning satire on its head by using and enjoying humour intended to harm.
TW3’s treatment of religious subjects was similarly precarious. The producers found themselves very unpopular in the press thanks to a sketch in which a group of cardinals sang Arrivederci, Roma. Though this provoked a strong reaction across the country, in typical TW3 style there was more around the corner. Parodying the style of Which magazine, a sketch named The Consumer Guide to Religion caused even more upset when it was transmitted (after threats of cutting from higher up the BBC ladder). It featured an analysis of several religions and sought to mock not religion itself but ‘the churches’ increasing tendency to use worldly methods of selling their wares’ (Carpenter, 2000: 245) -or, at least, this was the excuse. The reaction to the sketch was very much divided, some called it blasphemous, others claimed they had missed the point, as is always the case with particularly biting examples of satire. Mocking, or appearing to mock, something as apparently humourless as religion is still precarious today, and in the early 60’s the introduction of such behaviour to the public domain, though offensive to many, was instrumental in the liberalisation of such values, questioning the meta-narratives that until then people had lived by almost automatically.
The parody side of TW3 was noticeable not only in the Consumer Guide but also in a number of other sketches, including a This is Your Life style programme, another example of the investigative role of satire at the time. The sketch consisted of a biography of the life and crimes of Henry Brooke (then Home Secretary and subject of much contempt across the nation). It highlighted, in an ironic manner, some of his questionable activities and thus acted as a powerful expose of corruption. However, its use of media parody was less an attack on the media itself than a recognisable genre, using the form to attack the content, the distortion of which added to the humour of a piece primarily concerned with highlighting the hypocrisy of such figures as Brooke.
Another member of the TW3 team able to draw similar conclusions from public figures and groups was Bernard Levin, veteran of the Tonight programme and host of the Invective slot. It was his job on the programme to all but interrogate people who, generally, deserved interrogating. Perhaps the most shocking and successful of these was his assault on hotel and catering giant Charles Forte, describing his company as; ‘lazy, inefficient, dishonest, dirty, complacent, exorbitant- but disgusting just about sums it up.’ (TW3, 2002) Here was a man suitably angry for satire, though his style of interrogation was more a predecessor of the Paxman-esque Newsnight presenter (something unheard of at the time) rather than any future satirists.
In contrast to the satirising of politics and religion, the royals were treated reasonably softly; indeed Ned Sherrin himself has said;
‘None of our items dealing with the royal family had the cutting edge that those with political or religious content sported’ (Sherrin, 1983: 84).
Perhaps the most memorable royalty sketch was a mocking parody of royal broadcasts, which David Frost delivered as a monologue in the style of Richard Dimbleby. The piece, describing the sinking of the royal barge, was done without an anti-royal slant, satirising the way in which the BBC report such events- the style of the piece. The subject matter of royalty was merely a device used to set up such a self-conscious parody. Perhaps this is partly because of the respect that the royals still commanded at the time, unlike in today’s climate of tabloid exposes and the treatment of royals as celebrities, something in which TW3 played at least a small part.
As the first series reached its end it had clearly had lost a great deal of its edge. It had started to lose its way quite early on, becoming self-referential after only the first few episodes, such was its impact. The jokes and sketches became less and less political, often resorting to toilet humour. The shock had gone, and with the BBC hierarchy paying increasingly more attention to the content and format of the show (largely because of the high number of sexual jokes rather than political ones) it is no surprise that, by late April, TW3 was in need of its summer break.
Though not officially decided at the end of the first series, the second series did arrive, as scheduled, on 28th September 1963, albeit with several constraints outlined by Stuart Hood (then controller of programmes) just ten days before the first broadcast. This included stricter structuring of the programme, thanks to the introduction of a programme after TW3, limiting its running time to fifty minutes (it previously almost always overran). Hood’s call for the omission of smut certainly didn’t go down well with the TW3 team, who were unaware of any increase in such toilet humour. Any smut that might have leaked out of the programme was more likely to be a reflection of the times than cheap humour. Whether the authorities liked it or not, the sexual revolution was underway- the pill had been introduced, and TW3 was merely commenting on this change rather than leading it.
The self-referencing continued into the second series with a number of asides about the arguments surrounding the programme during its summer break; ‘TW3 marked the point at which television made news, as well as reporting on it.’ (Thomas, 2002: 6). It was plain to see that TW3 had begun to satirise itself and others’ (particularly the press) view of it. This appears to be less the subtle wit of some of its earlier sketches, more a crude attempt to defy media superiors who were able to control public opinion far more discreetly than any politician. Though this had a ‘naughty’ edge to it, it seems that TW3 was becoming not smutty but smug.
TW3’s already precarious relationship with the BBC was further damaged by their attempts to undermine the BBC’s control over the show’s length. At the end of the first few episodes, Frost would sum up the plot twists in the following programme, in an effort to discourage the audience from watching it. The risk that Frost and Sherrin had taken in doing this paid off, and after just 3 weeks the series was scrapped, and TW3 had its late licence once more. Although this was a minor victory for the team, it further tarnished their reputation in the eyes of BBC chiefs who were becoming resentful of a programme that was once its favourite child.
As the series went on, the shock factor that had kept the audience on its toes in the first series had become the norm. It was no longer funny or exciting to tell the same jokes as they had done before about the same people. As Michael Frayn wrote at the time;
‘…to go on mocking the so-called Establishment has more and more meant making the audience not laugh at themselves at all, but at a standard target which is rapidly becoming as well established as mothers-in-law.’ (Cited in Bennett et al. 1963: 9).
In politics things were changing. Macmillan, rocked to the roots by the Profumo scandal, decided to step down as prime minister. His replacement, Sir Alec Douglas-Home was an ageing Conservative, behind in the opinion polls and representing an attempted return to post-war Britain that many could not stomach. His appointment angered several of the TW3 team, whose reply came in the form of an accurate, yet savage monologue written by Christopher Booker and delivered by a Disraeli-esque David Frost. Unsurprisingly, viewers wrote in to complain in their hundreds, not least thanks to the final line of the piece; ‘…there is the choice for the electorate, on one hand, Lord Home – and on the other hand Mr Harold Wilson. Dull Alec versus smart aleck’ (TW3, 12/10/63). This was, for many, the final straw. With a general election due the following spring and more and more complaints being lodged, the BBC decided to act. On the 13th November the announcement came that TW3 would finish its series not in the spring as scheduled but at the end of the year.
The televised reaction to the news was typically TW3. The very next programme contained a number of rather bitter sketches aimed at the BBC, which expressed more of the team’s feelings than any of their public statements had, Frost even labelling the axing as a ‘compliment’ in the press. To cut the programme at this point in its run only served to confirm its groundbreaking status; rather than let it grow old gracefully it has become legendary. TW3 single-handedly allowed television to break taboos. Using wit and humour to highlight society’s flaws it was given enough space within its medium to project a freedom of speech message that had no reversal. But a taboo can only be broken once, anything subsequent is a re-working of the same formula, and it was only a matter of time before this became the convention. Indeed, a number of programmes came along in the wake of TW3 aimed at taking on its mantle. ITV’s answer, somewhat fate-temptingly titled What the Public Wants ironically only managed to satirise itself by proving its title false, while throughout the 1960s, the BBC outputted a number of satirical programmes, including Not So Much a Programme and BBC 3 to varying degrees of success. None of these quite managed to rival TW3, perhaps because they were now routine. Slowly, satire fizzled out, making way for the absurdist, surreal comedy of the 1970s (still dominated by the Oxbridge mafia) in programmes such as Monty Python’s Flying Circus and The Goodies.
TW3 had one last surprise up its sleeve before it bowed out. The programme of November 23, the day after the Kennedy assassination, was played straight, with all the cast clearly hit by the news from across the Atlantic, perhaps because his ‘image of youthful idealism and vigour’ (Wagg, 1995: 267) was very much in line with their own ideologies. The show, though only 20 minutes long (the entire week’s writing was scrapped and replaced overnight), was a moving tribute that was praised by many, prompting Grace Wyndham Goldie, then high up the BBC ladder, to write ‘…it disappeared in a blaze of conformist glory’ (Cited in Sherrin, 1983: 90). Showing that satire in the immediate aftermath of an event is not always appropriate. Thus, a few weeks later, TW3 was no more. In the end it had suffered from the very freedom that had allowed it to become such a phenomenon. Though it had amassed a large group of followers, they were mirrored by a similar number of people opposed to the expression of such liberal attitudes and contempt for the Establishment that TW3 had mocked so vigorously.
‘It reflected controversy with the same vivacity, realism and wit as, on the occasion of President Kennedy’s assassination, it had reflected unanimity. But whereas unanimity has no enemies, controversy is surrounded by them.’ (Goldie, 1977: 238).
TW3 may have been broken down in the end, but it left a legacy that would be adopted and added to by future satirists, with values clearly visible in the media of today.



CHAPTER TWO:
If We All Spit Together We’ll Drown The Bastards

By the early 1980’s, Britain was once more in a state suitable for satire. The end of the previous decade had seen changes not dissimilar to the late 1950’s, with growing disillusionment with the Callaghan government. Thanks to high levels of unemployment and cuts in public spending, 1978’s ‘winter of discontent’ was inevitable, as strikes took over Britain. Amongst the young, anarchy was rife, highlighted by the punk movement and led by The Sex Pistols, harking back to the birth of rock and roll and the ‘angry young man’ of twenty years earlier. The election of 1979 saw the legendary Margaret Thatcher win power, while in comedy circles the cuts in spending ‘effectively destroyed much of the non-mainstream artistic environment that had sustained a large number of cultural workers’ (Wagg, 1996: 323). This led to a new batch of up and coming comedians bursting onto the scene and into the newly opened Comedy Store- the ‘Establishment’ of a new era.
The ‘alternative’ comics, as they came to be known (performers such as Alexei Sayle, Keith Allen, and later Ben Elton) broke away from the traditional sexist and racist jokes of northern stand up;
‘Political satire was very much part of their style, but usually looking at the way the behaviour of the government directly affected the lives of the audience, especially in terms of the then rapidly rising unemployment and increasing poverty among young people in particular.’ (Wilmut et al, 1989: XIV).
Thus it was very much social satire that the new breed of comics developed. Though containing elements of absurdism (long a staple of British comedy) its roots were in the working classes, as opposed to the Oxbridge elite that once dominated the scene.
Television in the late 1970’s saw the emergence of Not the Nine O’clock News, a magazine show with sketches based on a parody of the news. Though it proved there was still a market for television satire of sorts, NTNOCN was certainly in a more acceptable form, with inoffensive, affectionate parodies more comical than biting, leading descriptions of it being ‘insipid’ (Chester, 1986: 22). By the early 1980’s though, the Thatcher government had begun to make changes; the Falklands war divided the country, as did Thatcher’s plans of privatisation, deregulation, and anti-statism. As in the early 1960’s, consumerism was increasing, heralding the arrival of the yuppie (by then the mainstay of the Comedy Store audience). Suddenly there was call for high-profile satire once more, and it arrived in the form of several tonnes of foam.
The birth of Spitting Image was not without its problems. Whereas TW3 was a result of evolution within the BBC by a liberal DG, Spitting Image was born out of ideas generated by various independent artists and producers, without the imminently available resources or television slot that TW3 had benefited from. Indeed, it took a great deal of time and effort, struggles and setbacks for the programme to get firmly off the ground.
When the first series was eventually aired in the spring of 1984, it was greeted by a mixed response- as generic to satire as irony. This was hardly a novelty for the producers who had struggled with the Central television board over the pilot episode, much of which, though soft in comparison with later sketches, had to be cut at the last minute if the programme was to be aired at all. These cut sketches were mainly royalty-based ones, which still carried a great air of political incorrectness that dated back to the TW3 era. Such was the controversy surrounding the show that the first six programmes were all vetted by the IBA before transmission, perhaps an indication of the governing bodies’ immediate gut reaction to anything labelled satire.
By the end of the first series many apparent changes had been made that ultimately decreased the satirical edge that the initial idea craved. By compromising much of the risk factor associated with taboos, the series had increasingly begun to focus upon the notion of celebrity, the world of publicity. As Jon Blair (one of the shows producers) explained;
‘we have to get a mass audience because of the costs… it’s no good being incredibly acute in your observation if people aren’t with you.’ (Cited in Clarke, 1984: 23).
Thus puppets such as Thatcher, Reagan, Andropov and Gadaffi were joined by caricatures of Jagger, McEnroe and perhaps the most popular of the series, Anthony the (talking) Anteater. There was even an early appearance by a foam Bernard Levin, another indication of satire’s insistency on self-parody that shows the magnitude of TW3’s legacy. Another sketch, which showed Norman Tebbit drinking the liquidised hand of Robin Day, was able to use satire, specifically Swift’s A Modest Proposal to justify the inclusion of cannibalism as ‘almost archaic in satiric terms’ (Chester, 1986: 72).
The introduction of celebrities highlighted the postmodern angle that Spitting Image had taken.
‘Postmodernism is a contradictory phenomenon, one that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts the very concepts it challenges’ (Hutcheon, 1988: 3).
The ironic parodying of celebrities fits this notion of postmodernism perfectly, as humour is generated from subversion. Caricatures were not grounded in reality but used visual metaphors to convey personalities and traits. It is clear for all to see that Kenneth Baker (then Conservative chairman) is not actually a slug, that John Major is not really grey, but this reveals their public personas as respectively slimy and boring. As Dick Fiddy writes ‘The puppet personalities didn’t necessarily mirror the real people upon whom they were based’ (Fiddy, 1984: 68). Thus politics itself had become rather trivialised, reflected in the growing reliance upon public performance to market political perspectives. ‘They talk in ‘sound bites’; they give regular press conferences; they go on ‘walkabouts’’ (Wagg, 1996: 336). Spitting Image drew upon this feature and was thus able to reinforce the personas that were recognised by an audience much more interested in the representation of public figures than their ideologies, most of which had been lost in the media portrayal of politics anyway. The use of foam puppets automatically distances the audience from any insight into the reality of a personality. As with TW3’s re-editing of the Macmillan footage,
‘It will readily distort a literal truth in order to allege a broader, moral truth against its victim, to make a general statement about his or her character or function.’ (Crisell, 1991: 154).
The lack of a specific political viewpoint may be related to the differences in the core Spitting Image team. ‘There were too many egos involved to put any uniform ideological stamp on the output’ (Chester, 1986: 89). Indeed, it is to the programme’s credit that it was accused by various parties of being too left wing, too right wing and even too liberal during the same period. However, sketches about the miners strike showed much bias, with the puppet creators Fluck and Law refusing to trivialise Arthur Scargill as in doing so they ran the risk of treating the strikers themselves with similar disregard. Roger Law himself justified the bias, seeing the programme as the antithesis of the role of public relations and advertising gurus.
‘People say we’re too savage but you never hear of anyone going to Saatchi and Saatchi to complain that they’re too grossly benevolent’ (Cited in Chester, 1986: 117).
It is thus perhaps true that the modern media needs satirical programming to counterbalance the spin that is put on politics and the representation of public figures, though as a rule, ‘all public figures have to be open to ridicule, regardless of cause or constituency’ (Wagg, 1992: 278). By not satirising Scargill the Spitting Image team displayed a rare break of form.
Thanks to the growth of the mass media, political careers are lived in the spotlight and personalities are created and constantly re-defined by television and the popular press. As Tony Hendra (an early Spitting Image producer) put it, ‘There is no real Maggie Thatcher except for the one I see on TV’ (Cited in Robinson, 1984: 78). Reality is conveyed through communication, and indeed any form of truth is derived through the mass media, which cannot help but put its own distortion upon it. ‘Instead of referring to the real world, much media output devotes itself to referring to other images, other narratives’ (McRobbie, 1994: 17). The media has more and more begun to reference itself, blurring the lines between reality and the reproduced hyperreal. The parody of the hyperreal is thus a reproduction of a simulation, so the media is able to deliver us more and more information at the expense of reality’s meaning. Therefore a new meaning is created which embraces the notion of the media as part and parcel of society and thus the reality of everyday life.
Politics is no longer the platform for selling policies and ideologies to the voter. It may once have been but is now far more heavily reliant upon image. The very concept that the most powerful man in the world could be a former ‘B’ movie actor highlights this reliance. However it could be argued that this is by no means a recent development. The good-looking John F. Kennedy was just as much the aesthetic president that Reagan was, yet the aesthetics of politics that Spitting Image thrived upon passed by almost unnoticed twenty years previously. The satire of today has become far more media literate.
The threshold for what is deemed acceptable has also changed greatly since the heyday of TW3. Where the BBC had ended the programme’s run because of the impending election, ITV gave Spitting Image far more freedom in this area, even televising several election specials before the polls had even closed. Perhaps this is thanks to ITV’s independency, not having to hurdle a public service fence as the BBC so often has. Indeed the BBC is increasingly less likely to mount a controversial satirical programme thanks to its funding. Independent channels are freer to experiment in such areas due to revenue directly linked to the consumer via advertising. It is also a sign of the de-regulated times, that thanks to the liberalisation of television that TW3 certainly played its part in, freedom of speech is on the increase as fair game applies to more and more political areas. The format of the shows, which ‘will be filmed live and will be semi-improvised, with the audience firing questions at the puppets.’ (Jivani, 1992: 137) is a parody of the likes of Question Time and in keeping with the parodies of TW3, where the content of the show is ironically satirised and highlighted by the live debate format. However much more emphasis is put on the aesthetics of politics, as the media is used as a platform for spin and manipulation which Spitting Image draws upon to add another dimension to its purpose.
As politicians increasingly become as unrecognisable as the ideals they uphold, Spitting Image has ironically become a platform for politicians to find fame, celebrity, and thus marketability. As Michael Heseltine said;
‘In a sense, Spitting Image made me. I was an obscure member of the British government, a common or garden cabinet minister- and suddenly wherever I went, Hezza or Michael. I was a celebrity’ (www.news.bbc.co.uk /entertainment: 13/7/00).
Spitting Image had begun to have an adverse effect upon those it sought to ridicule. To be featured- even when mocked- on the programme meant success of sorts, the phrase ‘no publicity is bad publicity’ had never rung truer. Indeed to be featured on the programme was such an honour that, as one of the programmes many writers confessed:
‘A member of Thatcher’s cabinet was irritated with us- not for the viscous parodies of him but because we weren’t featuring him enough’ (Beaton, 2002: 3).
The contradictory effect that Spitting Image had begun to have was never more apparent than in the puppet of Thatcher herself, portrayed as a demonic, controlling, powerful robot-woman which led critics to suggest that:
‘Her preferred national image is of someone on top of the job, decisive, confident, reliable. Spitting Image probably suits her’ (Duval, 1988: 13).
In contrast to the opposition leaders, Thatcher’s stereotyped characteristics were the ones which she had managed to market to a nation looking for someone to resolutely lead, so perhaps Spitting Image had enhanced her standing. Though Thatcher herself maintains she never tuned in, the impact of the show was such that ministers would look out for the their own likeness to appear as confirmation of status, several of them even attempting to buy their own puppet.
Spitting Image had created a world in which celebrities, politicians and the royals lived side by side, all inhabiting the same social sphere and interacting using their own tag lines, idiosyncrasies and notoriety. In a similar way the programme itself soon became very self-referential, such was its own image that it made news as well as putting its own bizarre spin on news stories. There was such controversy over the proposed introduction of the Queen Mother puppet, with several national papers jumping on the bandwagon, that the team decided to counteract this by introducing her in the dying moments of the next episode, straight after an announcement denying the puppet’s very existence. This ensured not only that the team would have the last laugh, but thanks to all the controversy, they also gained their highest viewing figures for the episode.
Spitting Image, which lasted for twelve years (during the majority of the Thatcher and Major governments) had changed significantly from the creators’ original intentions by the time it mocked its last in 1996. By this point it had resorted to featuring celebrities who were writing for the show, again slipping down the ladder of self-reference as TW3 had over thirty years earlier. It had become difficult to ‘mount a popular television show which parodies politicians because they are increasingly remote from the general public’ (Wagg, 2002. See appendix). Leading cabinet and shadow cabinet ministers have become faceless, as Rory Bremner puts it,
‘At the moment we are presented with politics that is very fluid and politicians who are very bland… any politician who displays any sort of flamboyance is considered a bit of a risk’ (Cited in Culf, 1994: 10).
Indeed, many of the conservative politicians of the Spitting Image era such as Jeffery Archer, David Mellor and Neil Hamilton had by this time agreed to trade in what political clout they still had for their more marketable ‘celebrity’ status as their careers took them way beyond politics and thus satire. Thanks to consumer culture, long a staple of Thatcherism, the mass media’s chief commodity is the notion of celebrity. Spitting Image attempted to ironically subvert this culture by drawing upon its ridiculousness, yet by the end of its reign it had accidentally become one of the leading televisual exponents of celebrity, perhaps the greatest irony of all.
As the curtain closed on the Spitting Image era it was clear that the programme had made its mark. As with TW3 its legacy lives on. Having been credited with the introduction of satire-as-business (with an annual turnover of £2 million) it left in its wake a number of ‘satirical’ programmes which we have had a regular dosage of ever since, though such programmes have been labelled ‘assembly line satire’ (Pearce, 1995: 20) thanks to their conventional, almost mechanical approach to the genre.
The team extended the idea of satire-as-business into marketable tie-ins that one might associate with Disney. Not only could you buy the video, t-shirt or pencil case, but also the puppets themselves are still making news thanks to auctions and guest appearances as after dinner speakers.
Perhaps the downfall of Spitting Image can be attributed to the fact that, because the same Conservative government was in office for fifteen or so years, jokes were certain to wear a little thin.
‘People used to say that TW3 was a reflection of a Tory government going downhill. The same is true in a way of Spitting Image’ (Chester, 1986: 140).
Once the aforementioned government ceased to be, so in effect did the programme. ‘The ratings were down and the shock was gone’ (Wagg, 2002. See appendix). But by this time Spitting Image had managed to transform the face of television satire, taking a postmodern view of the world of publicity by parodying not only the celebrities themselves but also their representation and the way the average media consumer knows them.



CHAPTER THREE:
The Media Is The Message

The late 1980s and early 1990s saw something of an influx of popular topical humour shows on our television screens, echoing the post-TW3 developments their common generic conventions and the circle of pleasure and profit, all hoping in this case to take the satirical mantle from a Spitting Image that was fast descending into the quagmire of the has-been.
The pretenders to the throne (many of which have proven to have similar longevity to their predecessor) included Have I Got News For You? (HIGNFY), a satirical celebrity panel game which, after beginning brightly thanks to the strong rapport between the three regulars, soon took the Spitting Image route. Indeed, by the mid 1990s it was accused of having:
‘…softened its tone. The once brutal satire now looks cosy, with an excess of cod bickering and chummy anecdotes’ (Hebert, 1995: 16).
Though the programme has certainly stood the test of time, it is perhaps thanks to a satirical compromise that sees the political content of the show take a back seat while the interplay between the leading characters (career satirist Hislop, common man Merton and ironic compare Deayton) has become the focus of the show. Any true satire HIGNFY now seems to offer lacks the bite we are now accustomed to as the programme looks more and more like a stage for sarcastic witticisms and self-referential smugness, particularly in view of the shows regular guests, a mixture of alternative comedians, politicians and journalists who all inhabit the same social realm ‘the world of publicity’ (Paton et al, 1996: 9). Gone is the anger and contempt of true satire, replaced by a mild acceptance of the matters in hand and more concern with by-play.
The reasons for the lack of anger and in depth political ridicule in the show is perhaps a sign of our fragmented times, where politics is no longer considered a duty (and contains no general interest) and narrow-casting has meant that we are free to consume whatever takes our interest.
Present day fragmented subjectivity is captured and expressed in postmodern cultural forms, a kind of superficial pick-and-mix of styles (McRobbie, 1994: 28).
As we are literally able to pick and mix what we consume, HIGNFY has taken the road of populism, with viewing figures to match, that seems to have abandoned political statement in favour of tabloid politics and sensationalism to keep their large audience laughing.
‘Whatever people want they can now have- people don’t want politics, therefore on the whole they’re not going to get it. HIGNFY is a kind of icon of that postmodern supermarket (Wagg, 2002: see appendix).
Indeed, a good example of the show’s nature is in the episode that followed the tabloid revelations about Angus Deayton’s private life in 2002. As predicted by much of the popular press, both Hislop and Merton spent much of the show poking jibes at their host, apparently quite unaware of any other news there may have been at that time. The show was rewarded with high viewing figures and lots of laughter but sadly very little satire. Deayton was sacked soon after for making news, not satirising it.
In contrast to HIGNFY is the one-man band that is Rory Bremner, a career satirist and impressionist, who similarly has been on our screens in various guises since the late eighties. He too has made certain concessions, though taking an opposing route to that of HIGNFY. For Bremner, whose political satire remains acidic and biting enough, the compromise was that of viewing figures. As previously noted, Bremner began to find his particular brand of satirical impressionism (one that had seen comedian Mike Yarwood draw an audience of over 22 million just ten years earlier) was dwindling, as the market for politics itself decreased and the politicians themselves began to lurk in the shadows of the public eye. Thus the compromise was made. Bremner switched from the BBC to Channel Four and his audience sank to around 3 million, as he retained only the higher-brow minority.
‘The sheer intelligence of his work, the inclusion of obscure politicians and even, I suspect, his underlying moral indignation combine to limit his audience. He is admired and respected, but rarely raises belly laughs’ (Hoggart, 2002: 29).
However, Bremner has found ways to include such modern obscurities in a format accessible to those who, despite lacking knowledge, still retain their interest. In a recent one-off special Between Iraq and a Hard Place, Bremner, with help from veteran satirists John Bird and John Fortune, incorporates within his routine an explanation of the events surrounding the war against terror so we are able to laugh at stories regardless of our own previous knowledge of the campaign. However, his material is delivered in such a way that it begins to sound like;
‘A hectoring lecture by a stand-up comic from the Socialist Workers Party’ (Shelley, 2003: 31).
His more humorous jokes are certainly the ones where he is able to relate the events to our own popular culture and tabloid news. Thus comparing the relationship of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein to that of Ulrika Jonsson and Nancy Del’Ollio (they hate each other but like screwing the same bloke) is certain to raise laughs because the more accessible media coverage has focused on such tabloid news.
Though sacrificing much of the comedy in his routine, Bremner is still able to label his work as humorous, an achievement in itself when considering the case of Mark Thomas, a similarly angry comedian whose stand up revolves around highlighting society’s flaws by ‘playing the straight man to the state’ (Barber, 1996: 23). His late night channel four slot The Mark Thomas Comedy Product reached the point where the word comedy had to be removed from the title, so angry had his satire become that it was no longer actually funny.
Perhaps the most successful television satire of the 1990s is the work of Chris Morris, a former radio presenter who began to strike a satiric nerve with his contribution to Armando Ianucci’s On the Hour, the televised version of which hit our screens in 1994 under the title The Day Today. The programme, a parody of the news, sought to highlight the way that newscasters were treated with the same authority as the politicians of yesteryear, that they are perceived as being truth tellers by a public unaccustomed to the world of spin.
‘He parodies the vocal idiocies, the pretentious body language, and the absurd use of graphics, music and a host of other production details, especially in current affairs programmes’ (Dunkley, 1997: 23).
His argument was that just because newsreaders address their audience in an authoritative, sincere tone, their words are taken as gospel by the audience who are no longer trusting of other authority figures (such as politicians) giving the show a flavour of authenticated bollocks.
Though parody is by no means a new format, by satirising the media itself Morris was able to ironically highlight and invert the aesthetic conventions of television news in a self-reflexive way, which could be recognised by an increasingly tele-literate audience. Thus the format is no longer a tool used to expose the content but vice versa, the format becomes the focus.
‘The content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as “content”’ (McLuhan, 1987: 18).
Thus the parody is the focus, not simply the scenery, and the medium in turn is the message. Although this may suggest a postmodern outlook on modern satire, whereby the focus is on style, not substance, parody of this sort is able to highlight not just the aesthetic conventions of television but also their social consequences.
‘If media forms are so inescapable, then there is no reason to assume that the consumption of pastiche, parody or high camp is, by definition, without subversive or critical potential’ (McRobbie, 1994: 20).
The media in Morris’ view is a far more potent manipulator than his audience may imagine, capable of subtle spin, hiding truths, falsifying reality and blurring the line between society and culture. We live in a world today that is saturated by the mass media, which maintains its position by constant self-reflexivity and intertextual referencing. The media has created its own internal world which both treats itself as if it is reality, while all the time invading the outside world and recruiting more and more information in the guise of truth. The postmodern nature of the mass media distorts reality, producing a hyperreality that is so far removed from the original that it has become meaningless, lost in a sea of images and signs. Morris’ satire, by parodying this feature, takes us further into the hyperreal, epitomising the postmodern form by using the nature of television to underline the loss of meaning in the over-consumption of aesthetic information.
‘In the era of mass television there has emerged an attachment to surfaces rather than roots, to collage rather than in-depth work, to super-imposed quoted images rather than worked surfaces, to a collapsed sense of time and space rather than solidly achieved cultural artefact’ (Harvey, 1990: 61).
Similarly, the news according to Morris is all about the aesthetic. By retaining and emphasising its aesthetic conventions, while constructing content that is quite obviously ridiculous, he is able to suggest that television news contains as much truth as headlines such as ‘exploded cardinal preaches sermon from fish tank’ (The Day Today, 1995). In exaggerating the elements of a familiar genre, we also find humour.
In 1997, after controversy and setbacks befitting satire of a particularly biting variety, Morris’ own follow up to The Day Today was finally screened. Brass Eye aimed to expose current affairs documentary in the same way that its predecessor had done to television news. However, Brass Eye took the matter much further. By focusing each programme on a taboo subject or moral panic, such as crime, drugs and sex, the show took satire back into the realms of supposed ‘bad taste’ and created a talking point for politicians, the general public, and once more the ITC, who were to receive many complaints about the matters the programme tackled.
Not only did Brass Eye attack the media, but also it went back to the celebrity baiting of the Spitting Image era. By inviting celebrities onto the programme albeit by deception, the show was able to take an even broader look at the mass media and its effects on society. The celebrities, in Morris’ world are;
‘Offered as illustrations of the way truth is produced in society by thoughtless people reading unedited versions of other thoughtless people’s thoughtless scripts’ (Raven, 2001: 5).
Indeed, the celebrities who enter Morris’ domain personify this idea perfectly as they read out, with great sincerity, such lines as ‘cake is a made up drug’ and ‘it’s like being hit by a tonne of invisible lead soup’ (Brass Eye, 1997) seemingly without a thought of how ludicrous they sound. The inclusion of such celebrities also adds authenticity to the ridiculous.
The treatment of politicians in Brass Eye is unrepentantly cruel, a sign of how times have changed since the heyday of the BBC’s satire. Whereas politicians such as Macmillan were treated with a little courtesy, at least by the BBC themselves, the politicians of today are cut no slack by the lampooning satirist. An example of how far politicians can be pushed is in the treatment of David Amess, the Conservative MP tricked into appearing on the show to appeal against the new drug ‘cake’. Although the clues were there (the organisations behind the appeal were named F.U.K.D. and B.O.M.B.D), Amess was caught in Morris’ trap, doing himself no favours by even suggesting to raise the matter in parliament. As it dawned on him that he might have been tricked, Amess was still unable to stop the programme being broadcast, something that would have been unheard of in the TW3 era. Thus, the programme was screened and any credibility Amess had was undoubtedly lost, his political career surely in ruins. Though satire does not normally have such an immediate effect on politics, Amess surely only has himself to blame for the intrusion.
Although the series had clearly touched a nerve within both society and of course the media itself, stronger stuff was still to come. In 2001, in the wake of the public hysteria surrounding the emergence of paedophilia as the moral panic to end all panics, Morris produced a Brass Eye special that dealt not only with the subject, but also more importantly with society’s perception of it, thanks to the outrageously unhelpful popular press campaigns surrounding the taboo. With the extensive media coverage granted to the kidnapping case of Sarah Payne in particular, tabloid newspapers were keen to jump on the bandwagon creating mass hysteria and encouraging vigilantism by the News of the World’s ‘name and shame campaign’.
‘The media play on the normative concerns of the public and by thrusting certain moral directives into the universe of discourse, can create social problems suddenly and dramatically’ (Cohen, 1987: 17).
By attacking this dimension of the media, particularly so soon after the event, Morris walked something of a tightrope in producing a programme, which to the untrained eye appeared to be trivialising and ridiculing such an unsurprisingly sensitive subject. However, there are certainly several areas of hypocrisy that the media are able to play on to create hysteria within society. The sudden emergence of paedophilia (something that itself has not been on the increase) coupled with the little-reported fact that sexual abuse on children is far more likely to be carried out by a family member than a stranger, both highlight the distortion of truth by the media.
‘We ogle the tits on a 16-year-old on page 3 of The Sun and then go out nonce-hunting’ (Aaronovitch, 2001: 23).
Sex is one of the media’s most marketable commodities, and is used by all media forms to sell their various products by titillating their audience, another inconsistency that begs to be satirised. Yet when paediatricians are being attacked by a bloodthirsty mob that have clearly not been given all the facts, we are already in the realms of the surreal, staking a case for the real-life-is-stranger-than-fiction debate.
The shock factor associated with particularly biting examples of satire had returned with some aplomb, which undoubtedly led to misreading of the message and public outcry that echoed the hysteria. Much of the criticism came in various varieties of ‘it fell into the trap of trivialising the gravest offences against children’ (McCartney, 2001: 22) and the somewhat less articulate ‘a show that wanted us all to have a laugh at paedophilia and child porn’ (The Sun Says, 2001: 8). Though the complaints flew in thick and fast (over the following week the figure grew to around 3000) they only served to ironically underline Morris’ idea. As one Channel Four spokesman said of the outcry;
‘It illustrates one of the points the programme was trying to make- that people react to this issue in an unthinking way’ (Cited inLeonard, 2001: 9).
Those that were able to see beneath the surface of the programme, something that the mass media generally deters us from doing, were able to see the ironies within the issue. As Ian Hislop said at the time;
‘I thought that the Brass Eye on paedophilia caught that surreal amorality of television when it is pretending to take matters seriously’ (Cited in Bedell, 2001: 1).
Indeed, despite the various arguments surrounding the show, both defending and opposing its being screened, it certainly achieved one of its goals- to bring the issue into the public sphere and be discussed openly, rather than treated as the taboo it had previously been.
Ultimately though, Morris himself has left his argument half-made, as he disappeared from sight in the wake of the media frenzy. By refusing comment on the matter, he returns to the role of comedian, unwilling to stand and defend his viewpoint.
‘What Chris Morris is saying is don’t trust anybody, don’t listen to anybody, just make your own judgement, and I prefer something a bit more politically positive which is something you never get from these satirists’ (Wagg, 2002: see appendix).
Perhaps this is the point at which satire is unable to affect its targets, be they political, religious or media-based. The reluctance to stand up and argue without the comfort of a scripted, unopposed half-hour backdrop surely draws the line at the power of satire, despite all the arguments that could be made in defence of such a programme.



CONCLUSION

2001’s Brass Eye Special marked the end of controversial satire, for the time being at least. Much of the programming labelled satire since then has been more akin to the later Spitting Image format than that of Chris Morris’ work, with programmes such as Alistair McGowan’s Big Impression, 2DTV, Dead Ringers, and Double Take all using various techniques, from animation to hidden camera, to satirise the world of celebrity. However, all drawing on impressionism as they do means little room for variation of targets or jokes: Surely this is the realm of ‘assembly line satire’.
These programmes, though not without either their charms or their humour, are not capable of biting with similar ferocity to that of their ancestors. Rather they have focused upon tabloid satire; their favourite target is David Beckham. A recent example of this somewhat trivial approach is an episode of Dead Ringers that had five references to a Cherie Blair scandal that had hit the headlines that week, all of which boiled down to the same joke. Indeed, such programmes have been variously reviewed; ‘it consisted of cheap shots against rather obvious targets’ (Shelley, 2003: 39) and ‘the failure of the visual impressions distract you from the success of the vocal ones’ (Sutcliffe, 2002: 21).
But even in the heyday of TW3, criticisms were made of weaknesses such as toilet humour. Perhaps it is simply that our society has adapted to the boundaries that have been breached and since then that we find less shock and thus disgust in such comedy. Once the threshold of acceptability was lowered, the media was able to exploit this and ridicule the same targets. This in turn allowed satire to shift its focus onto the media itself, fast emerging as the 20th century’s chief manipulator. It is also thanks to changes in society that our topics of satire have begun to focus on the media and its effect.
‘2DTV was conceived in an atmosphere of celebrity-obsession, irony and complete lack of interest in far flung places with complicated internal politics’ (Bedell, 2001: 8).
Since the media has turned back towards the political, thanks to the happenings of the post September 11th war on terror, our society and the whole world we live in has certainly changed. The media has made politics newsworthy once more, though this is certainly not without its trademark distortion and aesthetic focus. Thus perhaps there is a calling for angry, biting satire again. There are certainly no end of targets and sources for such satire, due to the immediately available information it is possible to get hold of in our media-saturated society. Indeed, the irony of 21st century satire so far is that because of the number of programmes devoted to attacking the world of publicity, all playing upon the same conventions, they manage to work together to satirise the influx of media images we receive in today’s consumer led marketplace- what Umberto Eco might simply call ‘more’;
‘You don’t say that cigarette A is longer than cigarette B but that there’s more of it, more than you’re used to having, more than you might want, leaving a surplus to throw away- that’s prosperity’ (Eco, 1998: 8).
Certainly Thatcher’s free market, the rise of Sky and the introduction of digital television among other factors have contributed to the increase of choice in the media that we consume, but more choice does not necessarily equal more knowledge, or for that matter entertainment. The hedonistic hunt for short-term gratification has certainly trivialised much of the television we watch, as sensationalism and aesthetic pleasure dominates the channels vying for viewing figures, it is therefore perhaps a postmodern impulse.
‘Mankind is in the condition of running after the process of accumulating new objects of practice and thought… it’s something like a destiny towards a more and more complex condition’ (Lyotard, 1999: 144).
The media is certainly adding to this complexity that sees information blurring the path to meaning Thus, by parodying an evening’s television via a series of short sketches in numerous programmes on various channels, these programmes together satirise the increase in availability of all genres, the more populist the more marketable, whilst adding to the information overload by their mere existence.
‘The loss of meaning is directly linked to the dissolving, dissuasive action of information, the media and the mass media’ (Baudrillard, 1999: 79).
Maybe satire has begun to satirise itself.
The evolution of television satire has certainly reflected the path taken in society, from the attack of various metanarratives once still dominant in British culture, to the media-saturated postmodernity of today’s society. Thus it comes as no surprise that parody, ‘the perfect postmodern form’ (Bertens, 1995: 79) has become satire’s chief style. Though the definition of satire is a hard one to pin down, there are several areas that much televised satire has touched upon. Throughout its history, satire has often been known to self-reference, perhaps because, keeping a keen eye on the topical means any controversy satire is likely to generate comes from the same sources as the satirist draws upon. When TW3, Spitting Image and HIGNFY were making news, they used the publicity to ironically spoof themselves, thus affording themselves the last laugh. The best satire also mixes in a little controversy, be it in shock factor, subject matter or sheer rudeness- ‘vulgarity has always been a part of satire’ (Duval, 1988: 13). And it is only in these areas that satire can claim to be truly vicious, for anger and contempt, if delivered with enough wit, (often mistaken for bad taste) breed controversy.
The downfall of any satire that attempts to highlight and right the wrongs of our society is in the role of the satirist. Satirists are, at their core, comedians, their messages are cynical ones, which are all too ready to display flaws without ever having to come forward with an alternative. Satirical messages are simply, as Stephen Wagg summarises;
‘Don’t trust anybody, don’t listen to anybody, just make your own judgement- and I prefer something a little more politically positive which is something you never get from these satirists’ (Wagg, 2002: see appendix).
The power of satire, attacking whoever it may, is limited by both the availability of information likely to cause anger and the power of possible targets. There is only so much you can say about the same subject, before either the satire, or the subject becomes stale.
‘For a great new wave of satire to flourish, you’d need to bring back or re-create many of the moral certainties- religious, social and political’ (Clarke, 1990: 13).
-the very targets that television sought to bring down in the first instance. Thus satire appears to have gone full circle, from sacred cows through celebrity to the media itself and, with the re-introduction of world affairs to everyday consciousness, perhaps back to its political origins once more. The truth about satire though, is that it can only attack what is topical and thus the media is indirectly able to influence the targets of satire by creating and cultivating them in the first place.



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TELEOGRAPHY


The Anti-Establishment Club (BBC2) 2002

Auntie- The Inside Story of the BBC (BBC1) 1997

The Best of Spitting Image (Spitting Image, Central) 1992

Between Iraq and a Hard Place (Vera, C4) 2002

Brass Eye: Series and Special (Talkback, C4) 2001

Bremner, Bird and Fortune (Vera, C4) 2002/3
(Various other Rory Bremner, 1986-date)

The Day Today (Talkback, BBC2) 1994/5

Dead Ringers (BBC2) 2002

Double Take (BBC2) 2003

Have I Got News For You? (Hat-trick, BBC2/1) 1990-date

Not the Nine O’clock News (BBC2) 1979-82

The Mark Thomas (Comedy) Product (Lawless Films, C4) 1996

Spitting Image (Spitting Image, Central) 1984-96

That Was The Week That Was (BBC4) 2002 (1962/3)

2DTV (ITV) 2002


INTERNET SOURCES


www.news.bbc.co.uk/entertainment

www.koekie.org.uk/funnel

www.petercook.net

www.stabbers.org

www.tvgohome.com

www.private-eye.co.uk




APPENDICES

Appendix One- Interview with Stephen Wagg

Appendix Two- Interview with Jim Shelley


APPENDIX 1:

Transcript of interview with Stephen Wagg
(sociology tutor, writer and comedy compare) 5/12/02

Richard Sprenger- Would you agree that there has been a shift in satire from the political movement of yesteryear to the parody side of Chris Morris and so on today?

Stephen Wagg- Yes and no, TV parody is quite old established, I remember it being done on BBC as a child by Benny Hill, who started out as quite a subtle dry comedian on BBC in the 1950s. He was parodying TV shows then. It was also used by TW3, they did a famous parody of this is your life to make an attack on the home secretary of the day Henry Brooke, so parody has been in and out of popular culture for as long as TV itself in Britain. The real tension is in the way it has been parodied, sometimes it’s an affectionate parody, if you look at Not The Nine O’clock News there were a lot of straight parodies of TV people there. Pamela Stephenson did a few parodies of well known TV figures but she always stressed that they were affectionate ones whereas elsewhere as in TW3 they weren’t (as with Chris Morris) so its not the parody itself but the nature of the parody. There was a real tension in Spitting Image, Fluck and Law were, I think, Marxists and wanted the programme to have a more political edge in the end and there was a row between them and the people at Central TV about the balance between parodies of politicians and parodies of John McEnroe or whoever else it was, who was just a celebrity.

RS- So has political satire decreased in recent years?

SW- I don’t think it’s declined, I think it’s just lost its newness. I’ve just written something which is coming out in Contemporary Politics (internet journal) in which I argue that the world has changed, not satire, the idea of being rude about the politicians of the day was very exciting in political culture of 1962, its only a couple of years on from the time when politicians were being addressed as Sir on BBC Panorama, Dimbleby (Richard) would treat politicians with the same reverence as he would the royal family. They represented a political cast. It was daring and exciting in 1962 that they should be treated with any kind of irreverence. Nowadays we live in a kind of postmodern pic‘n’mix society, which we all accept. Politics is now treated not as a civic duty but as something that people might like to pursue and might not. It’s on a shopping list of consumer options and a lot of people aren’t going to choose it. Its routine now to call government ministers tossers or whatever we want to call them, so satire in the sense that it was understood in the early ‘60s is still there, but its lost all its novelty- culturally and politically.

RS- Do you think in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s Conservative politicians almost began to satirise themselves, as some of their behaviour was beyond satire?

SW- Again, yes and no, if you take David Mellor and Neil Hamilton, Mellor was a fairly successful politician who became the victim, I think, of corporate interests. One of his last political statements was to say that the tabloid press were drinking in the last chance saloon, now tabloid journalists were aware of infidelities on his part and were clearly given the green light to use those and his career was destroyed. Once his political career was destroyed though he opted for a media one and similarly with Hamilton. Hamilton was on the up, he first came to light when Panorama made a programme about him and other Tory MPs called Maggie’s Militant Tendencies, and he was described as having fascist sympathies, he was caught goose stepping around Berlin or something ludicrous, but the interesting thing about his career was he was given the full support of Margaret Thatcher and the BBC were threatened with legal action if they didn’t withdraw the programme, so both of them were serious political players at one time, but once they lost their political career, they both decided to trade in on their ‘known ness’ through the public exposure of politicians by television, they gain some kind of profile, which if they lose their political career they can use in a sense, independently, so I think they’ve become ridiculous after politics, they’ve agreed to market the degree of political caricature that they acquired as politicians.

RS- would you say it was similar with people like Geoffrey Archer or Jonathan Aitken?

SW- Archer is difficult to parody as we know. If you look at these people on some kind of sliding scale, it seems to me that Archer is at one end of that scale, he’s an authentically postmodern figure that sort of makes himself up as he goes along. There’s no grounded reality of Archer that we can pin down, he’s a self-creating political celebrity. They’ve all become parodies I think, and have agreed to be parodies, because of the sort of post TW3 culture that we have, whereas in ‘62 it was a daring and questionable thing to take the piss out of politicians, now its expected- politicians of today think they’ve failed if they don’t have some Spitting Image notion of themselves in the popular culture ether, they cultivate it, each generation of politicians that comes along more self consciously cultivates an image, they know how to manipulate it and if they lose their political career as it has done, then they fall back on that image full time and see how far they can go with it, the Hamiltons are a classic example, they get their living now from the being famous business, they’re famous for being the Hamiltons so they go on reality TV, game shows, whatever they can get.

RS- what would you attribute the downfall of Spitting Image to?

SW- the formula got tired. The longer we go on with this, the more difficult it is to mount a popular TV show which parodies politicians because they are increasingly remote from the general public, Bremner said this, he’s been practicing doing a number of leading Tories and he realises that most of them can’t go in the show because they’re pretty much unknown. My memory of Spitting Image is that in the final series it was parodying exactly the sort of people who were writing the show itself, a lot of the final puppets were of alternative comics like Skinner and Baddiel. It became hopelessly self referential, and didn’t really speak to politics much at all in the end. The ratings were down and the shock was gone. Most politicians well before it was finished were praying that one day they’d have a puppet, and they all rushed to buy the puppets when the thing broke down. It had become so remote from the original intentions of the creators so it just died on its feet.

RS- On a similar note, why does Have I Got News For You still work and retain its following?

SW- Well, for me it doesn’t so I am speculating here, I think its very tired and self congratulatory, I got so fed up with Deayton reciting these witticisms from an autocue. Was it Edmund Pearce who talked of assembly line satire? To me that’s exactly what it was, I mean I’ve got reservations about Chris Morris, but when you get to that level of familiarity and complacency when you’ve got a harmless parlour game based on the corruption of politicians, then there’s some sort of cultural statement inherent in that which depresses me. There’s a level of acceptance of the duplicity and hypocrisy of politicians, which I find difficult to take, I belong in some age when people got angry about political matters. My own response is that you should have some sort of moral reaction to these things you should be authentically angry and not settle for a laugh and a few pre-cooked witticisms and for that reason I cant really cope with the programme, the reason for its popularity would be that people just like to hear the piss being taken out of politicians and I think also, having gone for 14 series, people are prepared to forget politics altogether and get into the by play between the main players, when Deayton’s private life hit the headlines that was the main concern. Would the banter be as good with someone else in the chair? No one much cares about the satirical side, that’s pretty much a given. People tune in to see these three scoring points off each other and having a laugh and the politics is virtually forgotten and that’s symbolic, nobody really cares about that stuff at all, it’s a bit like religion, there’s no reserved slot for it in the TV of the immediate future, the idea of civic duty is dying and commercial broadcasting which is in many cases narrow casting- niche marketing, whatever people want they can now have- people don’t want politics therefore on the whole they’re not going to get it. HIGNFY is a kind of icon of that post-modern supermarket.

RS- has the audience of today become a lot more tele-literate and politically apathetic, leading to media satire of the conventions of TV?

SW- Yes, any comedian has to know something of what its audience already knows. I remember Jo Brand saying she’d been typecast as this woman who hates men, if she had her own way, her stuff would be a lot more diverse than that, she came on at the comedy store back in the 80s and said something about Gorbachev and everybody said ‘who’? So she has to keep going back to the jokes about men just to get a living, and the writers you’re talking about are no different, just as back in the 50s you had to know something about marital tensions just so you’d get the mother in law jokes. Nowadays you have to know what people are watching so you’re absolutely right. Tele-literacy is replacing other kinds of literacy. I don’t know how much political literacy there was before but what interests me most is the level of permissiveness there is in the whole thing now. We’re not being told anymore as we were in the fifties to respect politicians or the political process, we’re now being told that we can take it or leave it, they’re all a load of tossers anyway.

RS- you mentioned Chris Morris earlier, what to you make of the hypocrisy and tabloid hostility surrounding him and Brass Eye?

SW- I give some credit to Chris Morris but am very angry with him in some ways; on the plus side I think the comedy is very very acute, very funny. Its suitably angry, it has a wonderful level of mockery of things that really should be mocked. But it’s a can of worms. If you were going to look at something specific as Morris is, then you can’t open this can of worms and walk away, and then be surprised that the worms are crawling all over. He raised the very serious matter of paedophilia, and the moral panics that the popular press try to trigger and indeed successfully do trigger, that’s great, but you can’t leave the argument half made, the media have exploited people’s ignorance about paedophilia to a ludicrous extent, but having established that, what else are we going to say? And the answer from Chris Morris is nothing, he’s just a comedian, no one knows what he thinks, he refuses to discuss it and he walks away from the whole thing and people can therefore make of it what they will. So you’ve got opportunist politicians saying this thing should have been banned, even thought they haven’t seen the show. The celebrities themselves responding in a limp way that they have, there was one, Dr Fox, who said fair play to Chris Morris it was a good joke, but that he still didn’t think we should be doing this sort of thing where children are concerned. That’s absolutely not the point. And where is Morris to say so? Ultimately Morris belongs in the same culture that I’ve been talking about, one that rejects politics. He also rejects any kind of public statement, what he’s satirising is public discourse itself, as if public discourse was all bad, and ultimately therefore he has the same route as other satirists, an across the board, damn everything satire that says no politician can be trusted and all public figures are pompous. He just extends that denunciation to include a whole gamete of others, not only do we have the cabinet, but we also have Phil Collins, Gary Lineker, sundry disc jockeys and the rest. What Chris Morris is saying is don’t trust anybody, don’t listen to anybody, just make your own judgement. And I prefer something a bit more politically positive which is something you never get from these satirists. Any kind of political commitment at all is for tossers, and I can’t really accept that.

RS- would you agree that the media has taken the place of politics, in that politicians used to be trusted, and now the media is a far more persuasive tool since exposing politics?

SW- They are all effectively working to that premise, that no-one listens to the PM any more nobody trust politicians they’re all seen as liars, but they do trust newsreaders, albeit that they’re reading clichés off an autocue, that’s what The Day Today was largely about. Morris called it authenticated bollocks, he’s saying look what we’re prepared to believe if it’s annunciated in a suitable newsreaders voice. We can take any manner of nonsense from Trevor McDonald or whoever. To me that’s only half the argument. We acknowledge that the media have become the authentic voices of the 21st century and we’re being told and we agree that we shouldn’t trust them, but then what should we do? If we’re going to make political comedy we should have the politics as well as the comedy. And there’s a kind of abdication in the satire movement right from Frost through to Morris, despite all the good things that they’ve done in between.

END OF INTERVIEW


APPENDIX 2:

Transcript of interview with Jim Shelley
(The Mirror’s ‘Shelleyvision’ TV critic) 23/04/03

Richard Sprenger: Do you think the tele-literacy of today’s society has replaced political literacy, perhaps reflected in satire’s chief targets?

Jim Shelley: Yes I think that's a good point. Since CNN specifically and Sky News in the UK, the media has dominated society and culture and of course politics, so satire surely has to encompass that somehow.

RS: What do you make of Have I Got News For You? Does it still bite or has it become too self-conscious?

JS: Familiarity breeds contempt I suppose. Fame and success tend to breed
Complacency and HIGNFY has got a bit cosier. Viz, Spitting Image. And Viz.

RS: Would you agree that in today’s world politics and politicians have become almost too remote to satirise?

JS: I do agree. Biting satire about, say, the Welsh assembly wouldn't attract many viewers.

RS: What do you Make of Brass Eye and Chris Morris? Is he a misunderstood genius or tasteless cretin?

JS: I think Chris Morris is a very clearly UNDER-stood genius. I understand him virtually totally. The paedophile special was very clearly a parody of the media and celebrity and I had no problem with any of it.

RS: Do you think the best satire has to have ‘shock factor’?

JS: Well shock for shock's sake is irritating and bogus and transparent. Rory
Bremner could do with being a bit more shocking. Shock at least gets people's attention and (might) make them think.

RS: Would you agree that politicians have begun to satirise themselves in the constant fight for a public ‘image’ and celebrity?

JS: Yes- who was it who said that satire became a dead concept when
Henry Kissinger was given the Nobel Peace prize? James Thurber?

RS: How about the future of satire? Do you see more ‘assembly line satire’ like Dead Ringers and Double Take or more controversial stuff like Brass Eye in the schedules?

JS: Brass Eye doesn't seem to HAVE a future. Dead Ringers, Double Take I barely count as satire at all. Bring back Spitting Image? I’m a big fan of
Bo-Selecta, which pushes a lot of envelopes, as they say.

END OF INTERVIEW