News that a new British show includes an impression of Princess Diana caused a stir. Why? asks Michael Collins. It’s another sign that TV satire is tired and tame
When television’s idea of transgression becomes that of dragging up a man as the ghost of a dead princess you know you’re in trouble, and for all the wrong reasons. But this is the move that recently made British mimic Rory Bremner newsworthy.
In this month’s one-off comedy special My Government and I, Bremner is to resurrect his impression of Princess Diana, with the late “people’s princess” putting in an appearance as a kind of Marley’s ghost, offering Tony Blair advice on how to become the prime minister of people’s hearts. Ah, so that’ll be a satirical stab at touchy, feely New Labour.
It’s a move that may not be quite as desperate as, say, Janet Brown reviving her Mrs Thatcher, but it’s equally redundant as a piece of contemporary satire. No word yet on the thoughts from the palace, but what with the Queen Mother’s fall, and the Queen’s recent investment in Alan McGee’s e-project Poptones, perhaps they’re too preoccupied to comment.
Certainly it would have been considered a tasteless joke when a good part of the country was making the pilgrimage to Kensington Palace in the wake of Diana’s untimely demise But three years on, the swell of emotion has shrunk sufficiently for it to seem, at worst, cheeky. When Bremner made the announcement at a press conference, it was met with some ritual uproar from sections of the press. However, the Windsors as an institution, as a family, have been ludicrous for so long, that to lampoon them, even to the point of bringing out their dead, says more about the ailing state of British satire.
In fact, the Windsors were being laughed at as far back as 1955. The former Punch editor, Malcolm Muggeridge, started the ball rolling by writing about them in a way that had never been attempted before. The piece was entitled Royal Soap Opera. It shocked because it mocked the monarchy, but an even greater shock was that it barely offended any of the queen’s loyal subjects. Almost all the correspondence was favourable.
Fifty years on, the corner from which there has emerged the greatest disapproval over Bremner’s new sketch is within the pages of the Daily Mail. Bremner’s scenario, it’s claimed, could inspire “the outrage of millions”.
Really? The newspaper and Channel Four have become like a bad double act in recent years, with the latter feeding the former lines and the newspaper responding accordingly. It’s all part of this exhausted idea of berating “middle England”. The term itself has become, on the lips of those that use it as derision, as big a clich as anything to emerge from the right.
Meanwhile, British TV satire is stuck in a time warp. Its targets have remained the same for so long that they have become soft and tame. It still works to ground rules laid down in the Sixties, from the birth of Beyond the Fringe and The Establishment Club to That Was the Week That Was.
In hindsight, so much of it seemed to focus on bowler-hatted commuters and military-types with waxed moustaches. This was satire’s shorthand for the enemy, and the enemy was the establishment and the prevailing cultural orthodoxy. But by now, shouldn’t things have moved on a bit more?
Currently, as well as the traditional stomping ground of berating the right, there are some good targets to be had with the implementation of a liberal agenda. The recent points on the concept of Britishness made by the Runnymede Trust, for instance, or the way certain liberal journalists, those adherents of direct action, suddenly employ the rhetoric of the right when anyone protests about paedophiles or oil prices: “Mobs … thugs … philistines … send in the police.”
What has become TV satire’s traditional beat emerged during the early Sixties, when a young, middle-class generation was cited as leading Britain’s cultural revolution. (The revolution was televised in the recent BBC series My Generation, in which we learned how Joan Bakewell and a couple of mates from Oxford and Cambridge changed the world – or at least, their world). They were revolting against their own privileged background, long after said background had got them good contracts at the BBC.
British satire was a chance for posh boys to flash their bums at their mums, and was preoccupied with royals, public schools, Oxbridge. Even in the Eighties, in the hands of Ben Elton, long before he befriended Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber, the satirical routines that kept him in silver suits read like the jottings of a well-connected know-it-all who had spent too long in the student bar.
American satire, on the other hand, from the monologues of Lenny Bruce to South Park, is less selective in its targets. There, it’s open season on everyone. In the current British climate, what sort of reception would greet Bruce walking on stage, and beginning a routine with the words “kikes, niggers” – as he did famously in the 1960s. He would have to first signpost the joke with an explanation that he didn’t really mean it, and perhaps proffer an apology. This was the case with Ali G, who initially was hailed as a concept of genius, because he was so “modern”, because he incorporated so many ingredients from Britain’s contemporary multicultural melting pot.
Suddenly, a group of black comedians complains and white liberals don’t know whether to wipe the smile off their face or read him the Macpherson report. Questions were almost asked in the House. Once it emerged that the joke wasn’t on anyone Jewish, Asian or black, and that the character was supposed to be a white man – probably from middle England and reared on Morris dancing – with the voice of Tim Westwood, it was okay to laugh again. And so the field of vision narrows on the subjects with the potential to be funny. And what are we left with? The ghost of a princess.
If the ghost of Bruce were with us now he would be satirising the very comedians that believe themselves to be at the cutting edge, enjoying their apparent period of transgression. When you read the broadsheet columns, and witness the TV appearances of the likes of Jeremy Hardy and Mark Steele, and their attempts to crowbar their credentials as anti-homophobic, anti-racist males into the material, you end up laughing at them instead of with them. They are reminiscent of the white liberal targeted in Bruce’s most celebrated routine, How to Relax Your Coloured Friends at Parties, whose extreme efforts to prove his kinship with black folk prove excruciating: “Bojangles, boy can he dance. Joe Louis – he’s one helluva fighter.”