Why IS the BBC allowed to feed us an endless diet of PUERILE UNFUNNY Leftie bores?
Once home to comic geniuses like The Two Ronnies, a BBC boss says it would reject Monty Python today for being privileged white men. A.N. WILSON asks ...
COMEDIANS used to be people who saw it as their job to make us laugh. It is a peculiar calling. The great roll call of comics from Max Miller to Ken Dodd, from Tommy Cooper to The Two ronnies, is a tale of oddballs who had this weird, almost indefinable, gift of capturing an audience, and releasing them into laughter.
Ken Dodd’s jokes came like machine gun fire: ‘love is like a set of bagpipes. you don’t know what to do with your hands.’ ‘Did you hear about the Frenchman who makes his own gravy? The Count Of Monte Bisto.’
The Two ronnies offered us double entendres. ‘The toilets at a local police station have been stolen. Police say they have nothing to go on.’ Or, in another ‘news’ item: ‘The search for the man who terrorises nudist camps with a bacon slicer goes on. Inspector lemuel Jones had a tip-off this morning, but hopes to be back on duty tomorrow.’
you would be hard put to guess whether they had any political views — although there was The Two ronnies’ party political broad that cast sketch. It was a parody, a broadcast on behalf of labour, as well as the liberals and Conservatives, in which ronnie Barker, ronnie Corbett and actor Moray Watson played three party leaders all on screen together spouting exactly the same political promises and cliches at the same time.
How very different it is now. Today all the up-and- coming comedians seem less like people wanting to entertain their audiences and more like earnest, foul-mouthed Trotskyites auditioning for parliamentary seats in Jeremy Corbyn’s labour Party.
An indication of how things have changed, how politics now trumps laughter, came when the BBC’s Head of Comedy, Shane Allen, said if a group of white males who had been educated at Oxford or Cambridge came up with a new comedy show, they would not stand a chance of being hired by the BBC.
The corporation would instead choose to hire ‘a diverse range of people who reflect the modern world,’ Allen explained.
There would, in other words, be no Monty Python’s Flying Circus, five of whom were white men from either Cambridge or Oxford. (One of those Monty Python white men, John Cleese, responded by saying Shane Allen should change his job title to the head of social engineering.)
As it happens, to my mind, Monty Python was seldom very funny, but it evidently did have a zany, post-Goon Show appeal. And the closest it came to politics was when one of Margaret Thatcher’s speechwriters adapted its famous dead parrot sketch — ‘This is a late parrot. It is no more. Bereft of life, it has joined the choir invisible...’ — to attack the liberals, which had just changed its yellow bird logo.
Thatcher, not known for her sense of humour, didn’t get the dead parrot joke at all, so the speechwriter showed her a tape of the sketch, made her watch it and persuaded her to put it in a speech. As she walked on stage, she turned to him and asked: ‘This Monty Python — are you sure he’s one of us?’
Every so often, to cheer myself up, I watch old Victoria Wood programmes and rejoice in the range of her humour, the character-based jokes, the wit, her music, and think what we have lost with her passing.
The sense of loss was especially acute when I came across the ghastly Frankie Boyle and his appallingly unfunny BBC2 show New World Order.
For those of you who do not know who Frankie Boyle is, I’ll describe him before getting on to this TV series and what it tells us about the parlous state of British comedy.
Boyle is a Glaswegian loudmouth who made his name with sadistic stand-up shows which consisted of a string of profound obscenity and abuse — abuse of people and of every decent value.
Typical of his ‘ humour’ on stage would be to single out a member of the audience. ‘ And what is it you do?’ he asked one woman. She replied she was an interior designer. ‘There’s some inconsistency in the way you designed the exterior of your face,’ he replied. That’s just not funny, it is simply rude.
Dame Edna Everage likes to insult the audience, but it is done with wit. ‘ Where do you come from?’ Audience member: ‘ Tooting.’ ‘Sorry?’ ‘I said Tooting.’ ‘No,’ says Dame Edna, ‘I’m just sorry for you, living in Tooting.’
Barry Humphries’ character has been making that joke since he began doing stand-up in Melbourne 60 years ago, but it is witty because of the double-take on the word ‘sorry’. Frankie Boyle does not, on this level, even begin to understand what wit or humour are.
BOYLE likes to make audiences’ jaws drop by brutal mockery of suicides, the disabled, sexually transmitted diseases — anything which you would normally consider is ‘just not funny’ is material for him.
One of his most nauseating moments was when he had a go at Katie Price, the ex glamour model once known as Jordan, because she has a disabled son he could make a sexual joke about.
That was eight years ago, but it did nothing to diminish the BBC’s enthusiasm for him. He’s become their comic poster boy. They can’t get enough of him at the corporation, almost certainly because added to his bullying, foul-mouthed manner is an absolutely groan-making left-wing self importance.
His latest show’s format begins with a few minutes of the old Boyle stand-up routine. Although this part, of course, has his hallmark obscenity — meditations, for instance, on multiple rape — it is really a political speech.
It was in one of these rants that he made the claim that Jeremy Corbyn was ‘a real person’. The reason? ‘He has an allotment and you can’t imagine a Tory having an allotment except perhaps to hide an au pair’.
This remark is not a joke, it just seems silly. He claimed in one show that in contrast to the ‘real’ Corbyn, Theresa May was ‘devoid, as we know, of any human quality except tenacity’, before casually describing her as ‘a f***ing monster’.
In the series so far, these showopening speeches have contained Boyle’s reflections on the State of Israel, which are so flagrantly antiJewish they make the toes curl, and on Brexit. He described those who supported Brexit as being like people who had ordered a pizza covered with pigeon excrement which they then wanted to smear all over their faces. I couldn’t see the joke in that either, although bafflingly his audiences rock with laughter.
I personally do not mind what people make jokes about, and if people want to pay to hear this stuff, fair enough. But it is a different matter when it is fed to us by the BBC because then it is us licence-payers, rather than his fans, who are paying for Boyle’s ugly Trot propaganda and filth.
AFTER his stand- up routine in this flagship BBC ‘ comedy’ show, Boyle leads us over to a panel discussion with such ‘ luminaries’ as Miles Jupp, who chairs his own gang of lefties in radio 4’s current affairs programme The News Quiz, and Sara Pascoe, a stand-up comic who likes showing off about the number of her lovers.
In one episode I watched Pascoe say she is a vegan. Boyle asked her whether this meant she doesn’t eat meat. She made a vile sexual joke in response. The filth on Boyle’s New World Order is mostly unprintable.
Of course, Max Miller, Frankie Howerd, Kenneth Williams and Victoria Wood made jokes about sexual and emotional matters, but were funny because they used double entendres. The filth was never explicit but is undoubtedly in the audience’s minds.
Filth aside, what is particularly repugnant about these modern socalled comedians is the way in which they combine their unfunny, unvarnished smut with all their pompous, self-congratulatory, leftie virtue-signalling.
Boyle, Jupp and Dara O’Briain — the lumpy great bully who chairs the panel show Mock the Week, which the BBC tells us takes ‘ a satirical swipe at the news’ — all apparently deplore the ‘ inhumanity’ of the people they dislike politically: the Tories, the State of Israel, President Trump, etc. yet they do so while expressing extremely inhumane views themselves.
This is especially true of Boyle who in one show called for the assassination of President Trump, and who, in a broadcast 12 hours before Prince Harry’s wedding, called for the execution of the royal Family.
He is always yearning for the death of Prince Philip, prompting me to ask — what’s the difference between Frankie Boyle and Prince Philip? Answer, Prince Philip makes genuinely funny jokes — such as, when accompanying the Queen from Westminster Abbey after her coronation, asking her: ‘Where did you get that hat?’
Boyle’s idea of a joke is to say that, if the royal Family wished to organise a memorial for Princess Diana, they should have ‘ a gang bang in a minefield’.
If Boyle were just a disgusting exception in a galaxy of comic talent, it would be pointless to complain about him. But not only do all the other BBC comics, such as Jupp and Graham Norton, queue up to perform with him, they all yearn to be taken seriously as leftwing commentators on the political questions of the day.
All the comic reflections on the week’s news put out by the BBC, whether on The News Quiz, Have I
Got News For You, Mock The Week, or the Now Show, reveal the same boring tendencies — first, not to be funny, and second, to be the standard bearers for extreme Left-wing views.
When such figures as Alan Coren, former editor of Punch, were on The News Quiz many years ago, neither he nor the show were obviously Right-wing or Leftwing. They were simply witty.
But as the BBC became increasingly obsessed with diversity politics and its Leftie agenda, things began to change. Under the chairmanship of Sandi Toksvig and subsequently Jupp, the News Quiz has become a vehicle for smug, unfunny Lefties to whom satire means attacking the Right.
One of Toksvig’s jokes consisted of announcing to her tittering panellists: ‘It is the Tories who have put the “n” into cuts.’ Hilarious. Toksvig was also in the chair when a panellist described the Tory minister Michael Gove as ‘a foetus in a jar... he obviously has no friends and he has a face that makes even the most pacifist people reach for the shovel’. You might say that in Have I Got News For You, there is the token stuff-pot Ian Hislop who is meant to represent old-fashioned views, but he is not really a corrective to the general BBC ethos of the show which is that Right- wing or conservative-minded people are essentially ridiculous.
The agenda of all these other shows is quite clear: abolish the monarchy, ditch Brexit, welcome in the Corbyn era, destroy Christianity.
There is nothing wrong, in a free society, with anyone holding such views, but it seems worse than illjudged, indeed positively sinister, that these opinions are peddled, week in, week out, by a publicservice broadcaster, subsidised by the licence fee-payer, in slots which are meant to be funny.
POLITICIANS frequently make chumps of themselves, and they thoroughly deserve not only our scrutiny, but our mockery.
There used to be biting political satire in the puppet show Spitting Image, for example, which overspilled every border of good taste, depicting the Queen Mother swigging from a gin bottle, Mrs Thatcher as a dominatrix and Norman Tebbit as her leatherclad enforcer.
But that show had two qualities yet to be seen on the News Quiz or Frankie Boyle’s shows: wit, and the brilliant ability to imitate voices. Surely today’s comedians, from the warm safety of their Leftie bunkers, can do better than saying that Michael Gove looks ugly and should be bashed with a shovel.
If the BBC broadcast their Right-wing equivalents — that is, stand-up bores mouthing Rightwing views and obscenity with no particular attempt at wit — there would, quite correctly, be an outcry.
So why is it, then, that the BBC is allowed to feed us an endless but revolting diet of these unamusing, puerile Leftie bores?