[D66] The strange death of British satire

[A.OUT]

https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4919/the-strange-death-of-british-satire

The strange death of British satire

Satire today is dominated by a narrow elite. No longer a threat to
authority, it is a means for the establishment to protect itself.

–   By Mark Fisher   –
Monday, 24th August 2015

Satire

Watch one of the BBC’s political programmes – such as the Daily Politics
and This Week, both fronted by Andrew Neil – and you encounter a
particular tone. British television viewers are unlikely to take much
notice of this tone because we take it for granted. Take a step back,
however, and it is really rather curious. These ostensibly serious
programmes are conducted with an air of light mockery, which Neil, with
his perma-smirk and smugly knowing air, personifies. The tone, I
believe, tells us something about the widespread disengagement from
parliamentary politics in England. (The situation in Scotland is now
rather different: the popular mobilisation after the independence
referendum has reversed the trend towards cynicism about politics that
still dominates south of the border.)

Take This Week. The whole show is conducted in a lamely comic style that
it is hard to imagine any sentient creature finding amusing. Guests are
required to dress up in daft costumes and present their arguments in the
form of limp skits, pitched at an audience whose implied level of
intelligence is imbecilic. The atmosphere is matey, informal, and the
overwhelming impression is that nothing much is at stake in any of the
decisions that parliament takes. While Neil’s dog pads about the set,
former Tory leadership candidate Michael Portillo chats on a sofa with
professionally amiable Blairite Alan Johnson – no class antagonism here,
only mild disagreements. Politics appears as a (mostly) gentlemen’s club
where everyone is friends. People from working-class backgrounds, such
as Johnson, can achieve entry to this club, provided they accept its
rules. These rules are never actually stated, but they are very clear.
Parliament is not to be taken too seriously: it is to be treated as a
(boring) soap opera, in which the lead characters are self-serving
individuals who don’t believe in much beyond getting themselves elected.
On no account are any intellectual concepts to be discussed, unless to
be sneered at as pretentious nonsense. It has to be accepted that
nothing very significant will ever change: the basic co-ordinates of
political reality were set in the 1980s, and all we can do is operate
inside them.

If you were designing a programme specifically to put people –
especially young people – off politics, to convince them it is a tedious
waste of time, then you could hardly do better than This Week. The
programme seems to be aimed at literally no one: if you are staying up
late to watch a programme devoted to politics, then presumably you are
pretty serious about politics. Who wants this unfunny froth?

It would be bad enough if this tone of mirthless levity were confined to
This Week, but it increasingly dominates political coverage of all kinds
on the BBC. It thoroughly permeated the BBC’s election-night coverage
this year, which Neil anchored. This trivialising tone is perhaps even
more troubling than the problem of bias (as is well known, former
Murdoch editor Neil was a Thatcher cheerleader; Nick Robinson, the BBC’s
former Political Editor, meanwhile, was President of the Oxford
University Conservative Association). The election-night coverage was
notable for the disconnection between the shock and alarm that many in
the audience felt about an unexpected win for the Conservative Party,
and the guffawing banter of Neil and his associates. Reading out tweets
and sharing gossip, the grinning Laura Kuenssberg, who has recently
replaced Robinson as the BBC’s Political Editor, seemed to treat the
whole evening as a jolly good laugh. Perhaps there isn’t that much at
stake for her – she was, after all, born into immense privilege, the
daughter of an OBE and a CBE, and the granddaughter of a founder and
president of the Royal College of General Practitioners.

But where does this tone – with its strange mixture of the middle-aged
and the adolescent – come from? The quick answer is class background.
The tone of light but relentless ridicule, the pose of not being seen to
take things too seriously, has its roots in the British boarding school.
In an article for the Guardian, Nick Duffell, author of Wounded Leaders:
British Elitism and the Entitlement Illusion (Lone Arrow Press), argued
that, from around the age of seven, boarders are required to adopt a
“pseudo-adult” personality, which results, paradoxically, in their
struggling “to properly mature, since the child who was not allowed to
grow up organically gets stranded, as it were, inside them.”

“Boarding children,” Duffell continues, “invariably construct a survival
personality that endures long after school and operates strategically
... Crucially, they must not look unhappy, childish or foolish – in any
way vulnerable – or they will be bullied by their peers. So they
dissociate from all these qualities, project them out on to others, and
develop duplicitous personalities that are on the run.”

Now that the working-class perspective has been marginalised in the
dominant British media and political culture, we increasingly live
inside the mind of this psychically mutilated adolescent bourgeois male.
Here, ostensible levity conceals deep fear and anxiety; self-mockery is
a kind of homeopathic remedy that is used to ward off the threat of an
annihilating humiliation. You must never appear too much of a swot; you
must never look as if you might like or think anything that isn’t
already socially approved. Even if you haven’t attended boarding school
yourself, you are still required to operate in an emotional atmosphere
set by those who did. Andrew Neil, who came from a working-class
background and attended a grammar school, attained access to the top
table by simulating the mores of the privately educated elite.
Thatcherism depended on the conspicuous success of people like Neil – if
they could make it, so could anyone.

No programme did more to normalise the mode of mandatory light mockery
than Have I Got News for You. In a 2013 essay for the London Review of
Books, “Sinking Giggling into the Sea”, Jonathan Coe positioned Have I
Got News for You in a genealogy of British satire going back to the
1950s. Coe argued that, back then, satire might have posed a threat to
the authority of establishment politicians who expected unthinking
deference from the electorate. Now, however, when politicians are
routinely ridiculed and a weary cynicism is ubiquitous, satire is a
weapon used by the establishment to protect itself.

No one typifies this more than Boris Johnson. Coe points out that
Johnson’s success crucially depended on his appearances – sometimes as
guest presenter – on Have I Got News for You. The atmosphere of
generalised sniggering allowed Johnson to develop his carefully
cultivated, heavily mediated persona of “lovable, self-mocking buffoon”.
The show allows Johnson to present himself as a hail-fellow-well-met
everyman, not a member of an old Etonian elite. In this he has been
abetted by his sometime antagonist Ian Hislop. Hislop always has the
guffawing, self-satisfied air of a prefect who’s caught out some
slightly posher kids stealing from the tuck shop. No matter what the
infraction, Hislop’s response is always a supercilious snigger. While
this snigger might be conceivably appropriate to MPs being caught with
their trousers down, or even with their over-claiming on expenses, it
seems ­grotesquely out of kilter with the kind of systemic corruption
that we now know has occurred over the last thirty years in Britain, in
everything from Hillsborough to the phone hacking scandal to paedophilia
involving major establishment figures – not to mention the behaviours
that led to the financial crash. As the editor of Private Eye, Hislop
has played an important part in exposing these abuses. But on television
his mocker-in-chief persona serves ultimately to neutralise and cover
over the extremity and systematicity of the abuse: one snigger fits all
situations.

Coe’s discussion of Johnson is strikingly similar to the Italian
philosopher Franco Berardi’s analysis of Silvio Berlusconi. Berlusconi’s
popularity, Berardi argued, depended on his “ridiculing of political
rhetoric and its stagnant rituals”. The voters were invited to identify
“with the slightly crazy premier, the rascal prime minister who
resembles them”. Like Johnson, Berlusconi was the fool who occupied the
place of power, disdaining law and rules “in the name of a spontaneous
energy that rules can no longer bridle”.

In the UK, this concept of a “spontaneous energy that rules can no
longer bridle” goes beyond politics in the narrow sense. The populist
right-wing celebration of this energy is surely what kept Jeremy
Clarkson in his job as a presenter of Top Gear for so long, and its
appeal is what must have motivated over a million people to sign a
petition calling for Clarkson to keep his job after he had punched a
producer in the face. The prevailing media culture in the UK allows the
privately educated Clarkson to come off as a plain-speaking man of the
people, bravely saying what he thinks in the face of an oppressive
‘political correctness’ that seeks to muzzle him. The success of Top
Gear is another testament to the power – and, sadly, international
appeal – of the English ruling-class male mentality. Who, more than
Clarkson and his fellow presenters, better exemplifies this bizarre
mixture of the middle-aged and the adolescent? What, after all, is it
safer for a ruling-class adolescent male to like than cars?

Clarkson is just one of a range of British television celebrities who
play the role of pantomime villain; a persona entirely devoid of
compassion for others. Except this is a pantomime with real blood. Take
the former Apprentice star and Sun columnist Katie Hopkins, for
instance. The UN high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al
Hussein, condemned her likening of refugees to “cockroaches” for its
obvious echoes of Nazi rhetoric. Hopkins is allowed to get away with
this because of what we might call the innate postmodernism of the
English ruling class. Both she and Clarkson say hateful things, but with
a twinkle in their eye and their eyebrows ever so slightly raised.

There is an immense complexity at work in this ruling-class mummery. The
humour allows Clarkson and Hopkins to be conduits for a racism that has
very real, very tragic effects, whilst also letting them off the hook.
The humour reassures them, and their audience, that they don’t really
mean it. But the problem is that they don’t have to “mean” it: they help
define the terms of debate, and allow migrants to be dehumanised,
whatever their “true” feelings about the issue might be.

However, Hopkins’s persona was troubled when she appeared on Celebrity
Big Brother earlier this year. While much of the time she stayed in role
as a spiteful, hard-hearted bigot, there were inevitably moments when
the facade cracked, and she could be seen caring for others. While this
increased her popularity – she almost won the show – it was also in
danger of destroying the Katie Hopkins brand.

Most tellingly, her greatest moments of vulnerability came when she was
asked to accept tenderness from others. In order to survive in the harsh
and emotionally retarded world of the English ruling-class male she was
trained for in private school and at Sandhurst, Hopkins has clearly been
required to forgo any public acceptance of warmth or kindness from
others. Sadly, the wearing of such character armour is not now confined
to Hopkins and the rest of the privately educated elite.

Self-educated working-class culture generated some of the best comedy,
music and literature in modern British history. The last 30 years have
seen the bourgeoisie take over not only business and politics, but also
entertainment and culture. In the UK, comedy and music are increasingly
graduate professions, dominated by the privately educated. The
sophistication of working-class culture – which combines laughter,
intelligence and seriousness in complex ways – has been replaced by a
grey bourgeois common sense, where everything comes swathed in a witless
humour. It’s long past time that we stopped sniggering along with the
emotionally damaged bourgeoisie, and learned once again to laugh and
care with the working class.