The Daily Telegraph - Features
‘It’s not too soon to make jokes about the King’
As ‘Mock the Week’ returns for a final series, Dominic Cavendish talks to its defiant host, Dara Ó Briain
It may be back tomorrow, but Mock the Week is also on the way out. This will be the 21st series of the BBC’s topical panel show, which made household names of the likes of Frankie Boyle, Russell Howard and Andy Parsons. Yet this will also, after 17 years, be its final run – a decision revealed last month, and one that apparently surprised the producers.
With the inaugural episode delayed to this week by the mourning period for Queen Elizabeth II – which saw BBC comedy shows largely kept off the schedules – Mock the Week’s last hurrah now coincides with a period of political upheaval in Britain. The challenge, for comedy of this ilk, lies in negotiating such a momentous time – but when it comes to acknowledging the death of an evidently much-loved monarch, can it be satirical business as usual?
In the hot seat for what looks like the trickiest moment in the show’s history is the warm, quick-thinking Irishman, Dara Ó Briain. He has hosted every episode since the 2005 launch, allocating points to rival teams of three panellists each, whose light-hearted challenges include quick-fire gags about hypothetical scenarios and routines making fun of news items. Speaking via Zoom from his London home, having just finished a tour in Canada and about to begin a new one here, Ó Briain, 50, displays the stoic amusement of an old hand. “I don’t want to make us sound like an ambassador to Germany in the 1930s, trying to navigate tensions,” he jokes. “But we’re very aware that the Daily Mail is sitting there, waiting to pen its outrage.”
It’s now 14 years since Mock the Week became embroiled in its biggest scandal, when a Boyle joke about the late Queen resulted in the BBC’s then-director-general, Mark Thompson, being interrogated by Emily Maitlis on Newsnight. Ó Briain maintains that the culture of the show changed after Boyle’s subsequent departure, its boyish shock-joke count waning as tastes changed and the panels’ gender balance shifted. The show has a sense, he insists, of what is acceptable.
“I don’t see any reason why we need to come in with ‘Well, how was that funeral for you?’ But you can draw a distinction between the sad death of a 96-year-old woman versus the accession of the King – you could talk in general terms about the latter. There’s an industry of people who will not accept that, and will regard any sort of comment as an attack on the [late] Queen, but then there’s another group of people going ‘How dare you sidestep it?’”
Ó Briain’s view is that plenty of other topics will, this series, demand to be bandied about. “We still have the end of Johnson, the start of Truss. I think people will be impatient to discuss other things.” Even so, there’s scope for humour on the periphery of the late Queen’s passing. Overzealous corporate deference springs immediately to mind. “Center Parcs is totally in play. And the FA banning things. It‘s the acceptable face of joking about this.” The lying-in-state queue, he suggests, as well. “To me, there’s something mad about joining a line for 30 hours, and doing a walk that’s exhausting at the best of times in order to have one moment.
“People,” he adds, “would rightly go: ‘A joke against Elizabeth II would be wrong right now’.” But would one about the Duke of York be fine? “Probably, yeah.” The corgis? “The corgis are a free hit.”
What about the King, often a figure of fun in the past? Charles was, in fact, the springboard for Ó Briain’s own favourite Mock the Week exchange, a riff about the then-Prince having an official harpist. Won’t our new head of state enjoy a honeymoon period?
Ó Briain laughs. “Honeymoon? He’s 73! It would be weird if it was suddenly a case of ‘you can’t say anything’. People have impersonated him for 50 years. I don’t think you can say ‘it’s too soon’. It’s perfectly reasonable. We don’t live under lèse-majesté. You can make a joke on any topic… But it’s always a case of: who is the joke against? It’s in what you’re saying and how you do it. Making a general rule is a fool’s errand.”
Yet it’s clear to him that there’s a growing tendency towards such rules – something that rankles. “The one thing we have shown ourselves not to be capable of in the last five years is nuance. I think the English are in danger of losing their reputation for having a sense of humour.” He clarifies: “It’s not so much the English as those who claim to speak on their behalf, and are doing so in a way that’s consistently angry and outraged.”
Ó Briain, for instance, defends comedian Joe Lycett, whose sardonic approval of Liz Truss on the first edition of the Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, became front-page news a fortnight ago. “If you book Joe, that’s what you’re going to get. People are precious at the moment. We’re seeing how thin-skinned this generation of politicians are – or that’s the impression they give. The fact is, if you’re in the headlines, you’re the ones we talk about.”
He disputes, too, long-standing grumbles that Mock the Week has been dominated by Left-leaning comedians. “When Blair and Brown were in charge, we did lots about them.” Besides, he says, the show’s format – as much competitive as conversational – mitigates against anyone pushing agendas. Even so, he admits to bias on the issue of Brexit. “While I’m dubious about trying to see a collective intent in seven comedians competing for laughs, I think we got that one totally right. Brexit was a terrible idea, and I’m not obliged to pretend it’s not.”
Perhaps, I suggest, such a stance doomed Mock the Week? The BBC’s present director-general, Tim Davie, has made “impartiality” a watchword, and last year oversaw the axing of fellow satirical show The Mash Report. But Ó Briain isn’t signing up to that theory. “I’m happy to take the [financial] explanation given to me from the BBC at face-value – that they don’t get to make as much stuff as they
used to. They clearly don’t.”
Was Mock the Week just getting tired, then? Not in Ó Briain’s view. “I didn’t think it was time to stop it.” The viewing figures were relatively strong, despite it being held in knee-jerk contempt in some quarters. “I did get upset,” he says, “at the number of articles about culture-war issues that used photos of us as if we were the touchstone.”
Like The Mash Report, which found new life on Dave, and Never Mind the Buzzcocks, reborn on Sky, there may be scope for Mock the Week – which I think is underrated – to be given a reboot elsewhere. But Ó Briain, who says he stopped watching the show years ago (“I got so broken-hearted when individual jokes didn’t go in”), instead lives to perform live stand-up. “If I’m not touring,” he says, “I don’t know who I am.” And demand is high for his stand-up, which better showcases his gift for ad-libs and storytelling. In the case of his new set, So... Where Were We?, he focuses on the search for his Irish biological mother, who had to have him adopted when he was a baby. In the meantime, Ó Briain is “not campaigning” for Mock the Week to carry on elsewhere. He notes wryly that when they revived Buzzcocks on Sky, it was with a new permanent frontman: Greg Davies. “If Mock the Week came back and Davies was hosting it, it wouldn’t have my blessing. If anything, I’d haunt it!”
‘I think the English are in danger of losing their reputation for having a sense of humour’
‘Mock the Week’ returns on BBC Two tomorrow at 10pm. ‘So... Where Were We?’ tours to June 2023; tickets: daraobriain.com