In bleak times, Brits could rely on light entertainment to get them through. George Formby and Vera Lynn made the Blitz bearable. Slade and T Rex got people through the three-day week and power cuts of the 1970s. In the good times of the money-in-your-pocket 1990s, we had equally cheery, cheeky media like The Fast Show, The Full Monty, boy bands and Britpop. But nowadays, when the headline news is depressing, low culture has deserted us. Light entertainment takes itself so seriously that it no longer provides any form of escape.
The tediously partisan agit-prop that is today’s The Last Leg offers no such sanctuary
The high-end TV hits that fill our screens are all grim and self-important. Formerly breezy nonsenses like Bad Education or Doctor Who have been retooled to scold us with a rictus-smile. The BBC made a big splash by winning the Christmas ratings war with Wallace and Gromit and Gavin and Stacey; the revival of these ancient brands showed that making good, easy-to-watch TV, is still possible. But sadly such programmes are the exception. What else do we have on TV to make these hard times bearable?
Channel 5 has mounted a valiant rearguard action with The Madame Blanc Mysteries, The Good Ship Murder and All Creatures Great And Small. But most of the time, the junk we get on TV has a thin, played-out quality. Even comedy shows shoehorn in identity lectures and naff diversity homilies, treating viewers as if they were the Year 3 intake.
Take Channel 4’s The Last Leg. The Friday night comedy slot on Channel 4 once provided a reward and a refuge for the weary viewer who had survived another week. But the tediously partisan agit-prop that is today’s The Last Leg offers no such sanctuary. Recent guests soft-soaped on the sofa include Alastair Campbell, Anthony Scaramucci, and – worst of all – Sandi Toksvig. This is nobody sane’s idea of Friday night fun. Campbell getting very gentle pushback when defending Labour’s disability benefits cuts was quite sickmaking, considering the origins of this show.
Maybe pop music is still fun? Don’t be silly. Singer Paloma Faith recently gave us her thoughts on the Middle East. Faith appears to have based her public persona on the episode of Are You Being Served? in which Mrs Slocombe’s skull is struck by a golf ball, and she loses her memory, reverting to a lithping thix year old girl. In her very silly voice, Paloma told protestors outside the Israeli Embassy last week that she: ‘Won’t be thilent until Gatha ith free’. Can’t she stick to singing?
The cinema can’t help either. Even very basic children’s culture – Snow White, Paddington – has been moulded into excruciating progressive claptrap. Kids’ superhero characters have been handed over wholesale to backward adults, as if this pompous pulp contained the meaning of life.
Will things ever change? There’s been much talk of the ‘vibe shift’ of the Donald Trump reelection, and the ‘end of woke’. But the creative industries are the most conformist and most ideologically captured. A flushing out, if it is ever to happen, will take years.
I recall the sheer joy of the late 1980s, when, after years of dull indie and even duller Ben Elton-style ranting about Mrs Thatcher, we suddenly got the explosion of dance music, and the silliness of Reeves and Mortimer. I’ve been waiting for a similar reversion for many years now. The end of woke? Like Christmas in Narnia, it never seems to arrive. There are White Witches everywhere, and no Aslan on the horizon.
To be fair, some politicians seem to have noticed the fun void and are striving to fill it. Ed Davey’s reaction to the country’s imminent collapse was to launch the Lib Dem local election campaign yesterday by puffing about on a hobby horse. But such antics seem more like death throes than signs of life.
The British creative industries are, likewise, now at last beginning to curl up, panting, and shouting ‘I’ve got a gammy leg’. Big-shot director Peter Kosminsky has called for a levy on the streaming giants to help prop up the disintegrating British TV industry. This is desperate stuff. Money has been there to be made all along, if creatives would simply do their one job: entertain. But nobody is willing to provide that service, because we have forgotten how to have fun.
In the meantime, the country gets sillier, and scarier. The daily cascade of outrages – our new five-a-day – continues, from transphobic toddlers, to the banning of ninja knives, to the police turning up mob-handed to arrest mums and dads for mean WhatsApps – or bashing down the doors of Quaker Meeting Houses. Now the Prime Minister is backing showings of Netflix’s depressing Adolescence in schools, for some reason. Haven’t the kids suffered enough?
There is a perpetual rumble of disquiet about mass immigration, sectarianism and economic collapse. But these truths are usually dismissed by the great and the good as simply ‘right-wing talking points’. Meanwhile, steam is building up like in an unattended pressure cooker. A venting, or some form of distraction, is urgently required. We used to rely on TV shows to provide it. Not any more: today they are all bunged up with bunkum.
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