All Satirical Passion Spent

June 2008

The exceptions to this rule are the professional satirists who began work in the Sixties. They would have written themselves out of a job if they had committed themselves to a cause. Thus That Was the Week That Was was against the Wilson government as much as the Macmillan government; it had to be or the show would have gone off air. Today Ian Hislop describes his mission as waiting in the hills until the battle is over “then sweeping down and slaughtering the wounded”. This is a commendably unfair attitude for the editor of Private Eye to hold. However, the best satirists are not usually equal-opportunities deriders, but driven by partisan anger. Paradoxically, the successful are often a success because they are political failures: outsiders appalled by the course history has taken. While others accept the new world as it is, they rage against the consensus and scan it obsessively for weaknesses which might prompt the complacent to revolt.

If you were commissioning a satirical series, where would you look for today’s outsiders? Who are the people who loathe everything about the new establishment?

Until recently, Blair’s acceptance of much of what Thatcher had done and his support for Bush kept the ageing Left satirists of the Eighties in work. But Blair has gone now, and it turns out he was nowhere near as Right wing as those who mocked him — myself included — imagined. His administration gave women, ethnic minorities and homosexuals — groups despised for millennia — legal equality, and spent hundreds of billions on public services and relief for the poor. The Tory party no longer quibbles. Just as New Labour once accepted Margaret Thatcher’s settlement, now the new Conservatives have come to terms with Tony Blair’s.

The blending of Blairism and Thatcherism is the new order. Much though I agree with parts of it, I can find and enjoy savage attacks on a spending of public money so vast that Brown has no fiscal tools at his disposal if recession comes, and coruscating assaults on the hypocrisies and injustices allowed by the apparently benign orthodoxy of politically correctness. But I find them in the press, or more often on the Net where libertarian sites are on fire. All television can give us is Headcases.

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ADAMS

June 27th, 2008
1:06 AM

A good article, and I love the magazine so far. To bring up Headcases in this important subject is, I think, irrelevant. It's a small, mistaken programme. It's not the 'New Spitting Image' and only said it was to get some publicity. Let's focus on proper satire. Columnists, stand-ups, sketch-writers and cartoonists. And I think they're doing fine. Rory Bremner, Craig Brown, Matthew Parris, Morland, and there are many others. The limits are always going to be the Brass Eye factor (Daily Mail outrage) and the timidity of Editors in general. And part of that is, yes, don't scare the punters. Or confuse them. However, satirists should speak to everyone. Not just the Westminster Village or 'chattering classes', as they sometimes do now. For example, however bad Ed Balls may be, he is not yet on on the nation's conscience. Yes, one could struggle to expose him every day in a cartoon or column, for example, but if he's not well enough known, he's not well enough known. Full stop. You can work your fingers raw drubbing him every day, but only a "public" story (dodgy political 'initiative', scandal, faux pas... ) will bring him fully to the public's sight. Finally, I believe you are being depressive. Quote: "To call satire a conservative art is another way of saying that it is the art of the defeated." You were the one who called satirists conservative. I disagree. Good ones do not harbour "nostalgia and alarm" but look forward to a less imperfect society. Above all, they sniff a fault a mile off, draw attention to it, but, above all, make sure the punter gets their drift!

Peter

June 10th, 2008
3:06 PM

But Blair has gone now, and it turns out he was nowhere near as Right wing as those who mocked him — myself included — imagined. Yes he was. And your journalism stands up well if read today. Don't give up on us. It is unsurprising that Cameron can easily accept a Blairite settlement and even campaign on the basis of outflanking it on the left!

Neil

June 1st, 2008
1:06 PM

Part of it is possibly that since the hounding of the makers of "Brass Eye", probably the last genuinely biting satire to reach TV, by the regulators and reactionary parts of the media, broadcasters are too scared to show anything too hard-hitting, with the obvious knock on effect on writers no?

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