Political satire is back and firing on all cylinders
People have long been predicting the death of satire. But cometh the hour, cometh the comedy show. We haven’t had a full series of Dead Ringers (Radio 4, Fri/sat) for almost a year, yet just as the country feels like it is sinking back into the kind of headless-chicken chaos not seen in decades, John Culshaw and his team of satirical impressionists made a roaring return, and they were on fire.
Not the fire of righteous anger, or political partisanship. This was the gleeful fire of people who’ve been away for a while and came back to find their barrel brimming with more fish to shoot than they ever dreamt of. The first trout in the firing line was Priti Patel. Reminded that the Prince of Wales reportedly considered her Rwanda policy for asylum seekers “appalling”, her Dead Ringers alter ego responded: “Well, I like a compliment as much as anyone, but appallin’ isn’t nearly bad enough.”
It was the first belly laugh I’ve had in ages. And there were plenty more to come. Nigel Farage drafted in as the government’s new ethics advisor. Donald Trump bewailing his own daughter’s truth-telling. Nicola Sturgeon laying out her best case for Indyref2 in just two words: “Boris Johnson.” And that was just the first five minutes.
Of course, political satire only works when its savagery contains a grain of truth. So “Sir Keir” got an absolute hammering, too, going to absurd lengths to foster a “bad boy” image in the quest to prove he isn’t impenetrably boring. And Angela Rayner bellowing from the sidelines to “Give it some welly, Kier!”
Maybe that’s why impressionism remains such an effective outpost of satire. Because if the writing is sharp enough (it wasn’t being out in the Britbox boondocks that left the revived Spitting Image struggling for a TV audience, it’s just that it wasn’t funny enough) then hearing our politicians’ failings pushed to the point of absurdity in their own voices, brings it home with double the force. And while we’re laughing, there’s still room to hope those being pinioned might see their own failings reflected back at them.
The most biting sketch on the show involved an Old Boris/new Boris volte-face face-off, his “oven-ready” withdrawal agreement enthusiasm contrasted with his equal oratorical certainty that the Protocol he signed off on is now “the worst thing to happen to Northern Ireland since the balaclava.” Savage? Yes. Insensitive? Utterly. Laughable? Painfully so.
Radio drama was, unusually, a blessedly identity politics-free zone this weekend. Perhaps because the two main offerings originated more than a century ago. The more mesmerising was Philip Franks’s (Charley in ITV’S 1990s The Darling Buds of May) adaptation of EM Forster’s extraordinary 1909 short story The Machine Stops (Radio 4, Sunday). Extraordinary because it was written when light bulbs were still a novelty yet predicted everything from the ipad, internet and climate disaster to the Zoom-induced alienation that afflicted so many of us in lockdown.
Simon Scardifield’s Maupassant’s Confessions of a Hedonist (Radio 3, Sun) betrayed its late 19th-century origins more but was still a seamless stitching together of some Maupassant short stories into a modern tale of an author’s efforts to stave off insanity by writing seductive stories for the barista who brings him coffee every day.
Forster said he wrote his tale as a “counterblast” to HG Wells’s more optimistic visions of a machinedominated future. His imagined world was certainly bleak. More extreme than many a dystopian sci-fi vision that came after, with humanity confined to hive-like homes, communicating via screens and having nothing to do but indulge their intellectual faculties.
In the century since it was written, the story – of machines concluding humans are redundant, and one brave soul, Kuno (Tok Stephen), attempting to save the day – has lost much of its originality. But this adaptation stayed true to its anti-romantic message. Told through the blinkered eyes of his mother (Tamsin Greig), her horror, when the system she believes in turned against her, was palpable. As sci-fi dramas go, perhaps not the most surprising but, as a prescient curiosity brought vividly to life by Greig’s superb performance, well worth it.
The Maupassant was a less troubling tale, despite the author’s (Elliot Cowan) louche fictions taking barista Tilly (Holli Dempsey) down some dark pathways. But she was too smart in the end, and, unlike Forster’s pessimism, the ending offered a ray of hope – in literature’s horizon-widening powers and in youth’s ability to forge a new path away from the decrepitude of the present. A preferable note to finish on.