#RSS Feed for Politics Blog articles - Telegraph.co.uk [p?c1=2&c2=6035736&cv=2.0&cj=1] Accessibility links * Skip to article * Skip to navigation [telegraph_print_190.gif] Telegraph.co.uk ___________________ Submit Search - enhanced by OpenText Sunday 17 January 2016 * Home * Video * News * World * Sport * Finance * Comment * Culture * Travel * Life * Women * Fashion * Luxury * Tech * Cars * Film * TV * Politics * Investigations * Obits * Education * Science * Earth * Weather * Health * Royal * Celebrity * Defence * Scotland Advertisement 1. Home» 2. News» 3. General election 2015» 4. Politics Blog In this joke of an election, who needs satire? Ideology is dead and politics is now a theatre of personality. No wonder we so often feel as if we are trapped in some surreal episode of The Thick Of It Tim Stanley By Tim Stanley 8:47AM BST 08 Apr 2015 Follow Comments Comments Last night’s Scottish leaders' debate was vastly improved by a man in the audience wearing a false moustache. Acts of absurdity like that are very subversive. It smacks of one man’s protest at the falseness of the occasion. In much the same way that turning up at a funeral dressed a clown tells everyone about what you really thought of the deceased. The only question I want answered is THIS #ScotDebates pic.twitter.com/dAuw0UcyrV — Martyn McLaughlin (@MartynMcL) April 7, 2015 This is turning into a funny election – and Channel 4 is cashing in with Ballot Monkeys, a sitcom to be written and broadcast in the seven days running up to the election. All four of the main parties will be satirised, from Ukip preposterousness to Labour ineptitude. Writers Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin are veterans of political comedy (Drop The Dead Donkey was a brilliant indictment of the Major years) and this TV “event” will doubtless be sharp and well executed. But (and I’m sorry to recycle a cliché here) can art be as good as life? Will a sitcom be capable of matching the subtle, strange humour of the genuine election? In my ongoing quest to work out why Britain struggles to do good political comedy these days, I now wonder if comedy and politics are starting to inhabit the same territory – in ways that compromise both. Comedy, for starters, has gotten above itself. Laughter has a role in society as a subversive force that makes it hard for everyone to proceed with a straight face. The New Statesman punctured Thatcherism; The Thick of It made it hard to read a Labour Party policy brief without pondering its demographic appeal to “quiet bat people”. But since rock stars became stand-ups and their brand of irony became the mood music of the culture, some comedians have started to confuse their routines with revolutionary screeds. IFRAME: https://www.youtube.com/embed/LOj4tC0EasI?enablejsapi=1 Charlie Brooker, Russell Brand and David Mitchell remain funny – very funny. But they are also wealthy middle-class liberals with all the prejudices that entails, and one senses that’s something has snapped in them and that they’ve decided that they’re as-mad-as-hell-and-they’re-not-going-to-take-it-anymore. Reborn as Howard Beale prophets of sly Left-wing wit, they’ve invaded the foreign territory of politics. That’s why Ten O’Clock Live didn’t work: was it a rant, was it a sketch show or was it just Mitchell’s chance to get something off his chest? And it’s why the loquacious ramblings of Russell Brand that once would’ve made us titter now make us groan. Because the mad cockney monkey man clearly thinks he’s on to something, all the while losing that self-awareness – the bathos – that ought to be the essence of a clown’s business. When a man turns up to a centre for destitute asylum seekers in a chauffeured car, he ceases to be a legitimate teller of jokes. He becomes one. • Latest election poll tracker Meanwhile, the politicians are slipping about on banana skins. Because this election isn’t debating serious alternatives on tax and spend (there just isn’t enough money to fight over) and because ideology died twenty years ago (The Thick of It astutely parodied an absence of politics in politics), we’re left fighting about character. And what characters this baroque panto provides. For starters, how many kitchens does Ed Miliband have? One for each meal of the day? And if a photo of a house covered in England flags was found in one of these kitchens, would he sack it? Hell yes. Ukip, of the other hand, is turning into one of those seedy Seventies comedies you catch on ITV3 – a wet t-shirt contest judged by Reg Varney. Not a day goes by that a candidate isn’t thrown out the party for some prejudice or other – including one or two that Ukip appears to have invented. Don’t be entirely surprised if an MEP isn’t caught on Facebook inciting violence against the left handed. Meanwhile, the Lib Dem flush is so busted that even Nick Clegg probably won’t be voting for them in Sheffield. And the Tories, like some homoerotic Tammy Wynette, continue to stand by their chairman. Grant Shapps is so bad at his job that Michael Green would probably say that the first way to get ahead in business would be to sack him. Our glorious leaders are providing so much material, Hamilton and Jenkin will probably find they can just let them speak for themselves. As well as being the last great British satire show, The Thick of It was actually an old fashioned family sitcom. Its laughter lay in strong characters in classic love-hate relationships that made everything from Steptoe and Son to One Foot in the Grave work so well. The political setting was really just scenery. Yes, it provided a plot and contextualised the characters’ actions. But it’s hard to think of one concrete, significant Labour policy that was satirised or one philosophy that was scrutinised. At the end of the second series, when the election was called, what did Malcolm Tucker tell the Labour staff they were fighting for? Their jobs. The Thick of It was perfect political satire for an age in which politics as a moral enterprise is slowly dying. What we’re left with is politics as the theatre of personality. And the personalities are ripe for parody. BREAKING: STV staff made @jackmcafee's dad take off his moustache. #ScotDebates pic.twitter.com/a1lABpen0j — Jamie Ross (@JamieRoss7) April 7, 2015 Which is why moustache man’s presence at the Scottish debate felt so right. He should notch it up though. 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