Favourite moment in The New Statesman. Alan B’stard exits a restaurant and finds a one-legged beggar leaning on a stick. “Remember the Falklands, guv?” says the beggar.
“You bet I do,” replies B’stard. “I made a bloody fortune.” And he kicks away the stick.
That won’t read funny on the page but it was ruddy funny on screen – unlike 10 O’Clock Live which must have looked very good on page but was judged to have failed in execution. Channel 4’s satire show, now axed, had everything going for it: strong writers, four of the best comedians in the country, plenty of material courtesy of a government ripe for parody etc. But it fell flat. I actually thought it was often cleverly sharp and the debate-section interesting. But comedy is judged on belly laughs – and Ten O'Clock Live delivered the goods too little too late into its third season. Not that this stopped the live audience braying like hyenas, which might have given the performers a false sense of job security. One often wonders if TV studio audiences are watching something that the home viewer can’t see. Like a live-stream of Ed Miliband eating a four course meal.
Q: what went wrong? A: the producers confused sketch comedy with satire. Knock-about comedy doesn’t always sit well with a serious political message, which meant that Ten O’Clock Live felt like there was a disconnect between the delivery and the material. To make satire work, the performers have to have total commitment to the political message – and the laughter has to arise from anger.
Consider that scene I described above from The New Statesman. The audience isn’t laughing at a beggar being humiliated. They’re laughing in recognition of B’stard’s shameless evil and what it represents: the triumph of amoral Thatcherism. The laughter is a congratulation of the author for having nailed something. And that’s how good satire works:
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1. It has to be aimed at a specific and recognisable target.
2. It has to be angry about its absurdity.
The producers of Ten O’Clock Live seemed to presume that four funny people talking about how funny politics is would be limitlessly funny in itself. Doubtless, they were modelling the format on the insanely successful Daily Show – which does, at face value, seem to be a stand-up comedian firing off one-liners about silly politicians. But what the Brits missed is that when The Daily Show premiered, it was aimed at something very specific and recognisable: the Bush-era media. And it was also informed by a sincere anger: the Bush-era media’s whitewashing of Bush. That was even more obvious in the spin-off Colbert Show, starring Stephen Colbert as a parody of Fox News host Bill O’Reilly and his associated Right-wing blowhards. “I can’t prove it,” says Colbert, gut-checker-in-chief, “but I can say it.”
Well, we can definitively prove that the British are capable of producing great satire. We almost invented it with Beyond the Fringe in the 1960s, perfected it with Eighties shows like Yes, Minister and Spitting Image, and scored a wonderful home run with The Thick of It. The Thick of It is, like the Daily Show, both targeted and angry. Its villain is New Labour, with its mindless politics of spin control - and it was plainly angry at how Blair had reduced a parliamentary democracy to childish farce. Its easy over time to forget how furious some of us really were about that sort of thing – watching the show now, it feels more and more like a comfy sitcom. We were once invited to despise Malcom Tucker, but now he’s flying through space and time like a national treasure.
So the problem with Ten O’Clock Live was that we couldn’t tell what the target was and few of the lines spoken by the performers seemed to come from the heart. There were also too many cooks spoiling the broth. Thirty minutes of David Mitchell, Lauren Laverne or Charlie Brooker by themselves, with complete control over a script tailored to their talents, might have been a hit. Five minutes alone with Jimmy Carr would have been a harder sell – unless cyanide capsules were provided.
The message for TV producers is to be bolder. Politics and comedy are a very awkward mix, and it only works if the message and messenger have a clear idea of what they want to do and if they pursue it with ruthless hilarity. It would also help to aggressively search out new talent rather than relying upon the old draw of as-many-big-names-as-possible. Britain is no less funnier or less politically enraged than it was under Thatcher or Blair. We've just gotten lazier and less willing to take risks.
