‘Curb’ is back — peace returns
Curb Your Enthusiasm (Sky Atlantic)
WHEN a new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm starts, and it turns out to be funny, naturally we celebrate. But at this peculiar time in history, we feel a deeper gratitude than we would usually feel, as a kind of peace descends upon us.
It doesn’t descend for long, and we know it will soon be replaced by our regular moods of revulsion and dismay, but it is still peace, and it is precious.
I believe that in this age of celebrity psychologists defining all the things that are wrong with us, they have missed out on this vital diagnosis — when they are talking about stress, they don’t talk about one of the most powerful forms of it, the stress that comes from watching bad TV programmes and listening to bad radio programmes, not realising how bad they are until we are watching something that is not bad, like Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Only then do we feel this profound sense of peace, and yet it shouldn’t be that profound, it shouldn’t even be all that peaceful. We should be just laughing, and moving on, yet unbeknownst to ourselves we have built up such of a load of stress wanting to enjoy things that are not enjoyable, we devour the work of a man such as Larry David as if he has provided us with a powerful calming remedy — a cure for a malaise which we couldn’t quite identify, until we realised it was everywhere.
It was certainly to be seen in Blond Ambition, a C4 documentary about Boris Johnson which was quietly stressful not because of Boris himself, but because of the people who think he is the most brilliant and amusing man of his generation. Boris can only be Boris, it is his enablers in the media and in politics who are doing all the damage here.
There are few things which can bring on a sense of utter hopelessness quite like those moments when Boris is speaking and the camera turns to show us the person he is speaking to, and we see this expression of fawning adoration.
Nor can we see any way out of the darkness when his friends in journalism and politics are talking about the adventures of Boris with the kind of happiness you’d expect if they were recalling the finest and funniest work of a genius, of Larry David himself.
Boris can thrive only in this environment. If he had been on Brendan O’Connor’s Cutting Edge, which also returned last week, with its own promise of peace, he would have been outshone as a guest by Baz Ashmawy.
As for Jacob Rees-Mogg, who also featured in Blond Ambition describing Boris as “a colossus on the political stage”, he would have been obliterated by Baz, to whom he is comparable only for the fact that they both apparently have six children. Except Rees-Mogg’s sixth is called Sixtus, and we may be sure that Ashmawy’s is not, because he’s better than that.
Not that Rees-Mogg was entirely wrong about Boris being a colossus on the political stage, it’s just that it’s not much of a stage. And it all virtually collapsed at the Tory Conference, which gave us a laugh of course, the sort of laugh we are having a lot these days, the sort which isn’t doing us much good either.
When we are looking at what former Tory MP Matthew Parris calls the “criminal incompetence” of that party, or we’re watching anything with Trump in it, of course we are laughing. But we are feeling nothing but scorn, and so it brings us no peace.
Indeed we had hardly stopped laughing at the letters falling off the slogan behind Theresa May, when that silent wave of stress crept up on us again, as we remembered that these people are not actually appearing in some 1980s sitcom that is now showing in the afternoons on the Gold channel.
They are running the world, and when they go to bed at night, Trump takes over from them.
Larry David doesn’t run anything, he doesn’t even enjoy the peace we feel when we are watching Curb Your Enthusiasm. That heavenly peace.