BBC 4’s “Frost on Satire” is beyond satire

David Frost is on BBC 4 at the moment, reviewing what he considers to be the landmark satirical TV programmes of the last 50 years – Frost on Satire. What an astonishingly smug and lazy pile of old tat it has proved to be.

It started with the usual tired, endlessly recycled clips from That Was The Week That Was. These yet again demonstrate that David Frost was a useless comic performer: in many ways, he is a ridiculous man, but not in the least bit funny. It moved on to the US version (also fronted by Frosty) which was rapidly pulled from the schedules. Was it, Frost mused,  sacrificed for being too anti-establisment? Probably not, Dave – it just looked painfully unamusing. And most viewers – except for liberal leftists - don’t much like foreigners sneering at their country’s supposed shortcomings.

The review moved on to the 1970s and America’s Saturday Night Live, which launched the careers of Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin. Cue Chevy Chase falling over a lot as Gerald Ford. Ho hum. Producer Lorne Michaels was wheeled on to tell us… well, I can’t remember, to be honest. Chevy Chase was then wheeled on to tell us that everyone on the show was a Democrat of the liberal persuasion (you could have knocked me down with a feather!).

1980s’ Britain and Spitting Image were next up: Normo Tebbs as a leather-clad thug, Thatch beating up her useless cabinet members, David Steel’s tiny twit of a puppet being smacked around by a saturnine David Owen. Producer John Lloyd made fun of the administrators to whom he had to explain the jokes on a weekly basis (I’m not surprised they had trouble figuring out what was supposed to be funny about them). I was reminded just how unfunny and puerile the programme was, and how much of it relied on slapstick (Hattersley spits a lot, Tebbit used a truncheon on Nigel Lawson – that sort of thing). 

The Nineties were represented by Rory Bremner (a bit of whom goes rather a long way).

Then it was back over The Pond for a decko at the massed ranks of Republican-haters spitting venom at George Bush and Sarah Palin (both of whom are, apparently, fantastically stupid and ill-informed). Will Ferrell was interesting on his portrayal of Bush as a somewhat petulant frat boy. There was John Stewart and his Daily Show (no thanks). Tina Fey, who does a good Palin, was interesting on her “weird” accent, which, on reflection, does sound a bit like the characters in Fargo. Then there was the self-styled “bad boy of American satire”, Bill Maher (double no thanks – cosmically laugh-free individual).

The show ended with Frost boasting that, when TW3 was on, a Salvation Army officer had congratulated him on emptying all the pubs on a Saturday night (I wonder how many times Frosty has told that one), leading into a clip from the show featuring Millicent Martin singing a song about racism in Mississippi (brave or what!).

First, a minor issue: why does Frost, who, as far as I know, isn’t an alcoholic, always sound as if he’s just downed seven large Brandy & Benedictines? He sounded perfectly normal (albeit irritatingly nasal) in 1962: but for the last 35 years, he’s given the impression of being constantly on the verge of passing out. 

Second, and far more important, was the enormous elephant in the room that Frost seemed not to have noticed. Apart from Rory Bremner doing a rather good Tony Blair/Alastair Campbell sketch (attacking them from the Left, of course), there was not one single smidgin of satire of any description involving even the teensiest criticsm of any left-wing politician on either side of the Atlantic. Bremner said he enjoyed doing Bill Clinton, and proceeded to do a few lines referring to Clinton’s sex mania – but it was all very affectionate and indulgent  I sat forward expectantly when Frost showed a clip of Bill Maher on Barak Obama’s ludicrous Nobel Peace prize award six months into the job – but it was just an excuse to call George Bush a “cowboy asshole” (the audience almost expired roaring approval at this daring and original line of attack).

It’s hard to blame Frost for the ludicrous political bias in TV satire over the past 50 years: but surely even he, slurring and bewildered, has heard ofSouth Park. Its creators don’t describe the show as satirical, but, along with oodles of sophomoric sexual humour and fart jokes, it contains more genuine attacks on liberal-leftists and their ragbag of causes and obsessions than any other mainstream TV programme (apart from Fox News, of course – but that’s comment, not satire). Rory Bremner mentions that satirists criticizing Islam could be “signing their own death warrants”. South Park’s creators went the whole hog and showed an image of Mohamed (subsequently censored by the broadcaster). Their splendidly sceptical approach to the issue of Global Warming (or the terrible Manbearpig monster, as they call it) have provided some of the most hearteningly anti-establishment TV moments of recent years.

And there’s the rub. When TW3 first appeared, it was poking fun at an establishment that hadn’t had fun poked at it before: yes, most of the material looks pretty lame in hindsight, but it was just the fact that someone was ripping into the government of the day that made the audience laugh, in the way that five-year olds do when they hear words like “bum” or “poo”.

But then Labour got into power in 1964, and stayed there, apart from a disastrous four year spell of the odious Ted Heath as PM, until 1979. Despite 15 years of political idiocy and incompetence from both major parties (and the Liberal leader being charged with ordering a hit on his gay lover), satire practically disappeared from our TV screens. I suspect that’s because the 1970s, in particular, were so terrifyingly awful – we tend to forget that many people believed the country had become ungovernable due to the power of Trade Unions and Labour’s penchant for spending money they didn’t have. 

When Margaret Thatcher got in, satire suddenly came back into vogue, because the true enemies of the liberal left were back in power. The difference this time was that the Left were now in command of the country’s culture. Whatever silly little “here-today-gone-tomorrow” politicians might get up to, the Left had become The Establishment – for instance, they controlled most of the civil service, the education and prison systems, the NHS, TV and radio, and the Arts. Consequently, when satire came roaring back, in the form of Spitting Image, it consisted of the country’s seemingly permanent cultural and public service establishment attacking what it saw as the deranged excesses of an extremist, fundamentalist, far right political sect which, by some bizarre accident – or, more likely, sinister subterfuge - had managed to get itself elected. 

The same thing happened in America when George Bush succeeded that sleazy creep Clinton as President. How dare this Republican twerp win two elections in a row! How dare he fly in the face of the liberal left’s cultural hegemony! Rage, fury – and, of course satire – inevitably followed.

After the election of Obama the satire industry in the US – unable to face the fact that their hero has turned out to be a complete dud - has simply gone on attacking Republicans, as if they were still in power. The right-wing grass roots Tea Party movement and ex-Governor Sarah Palin receives more attention from the liberal left establishment’s satirical poodles than the cosmically inept Obama administration. The message from America’s establishment to plain folks is clear – “don’t get above your raising”.

It’ll be interesting to see how the UK’s “satirists” – who, during Labour’s disastrous thirteen years in power, saved most of their venom for whichever poor sod was currently leading the Tory Party (when, of course, they weren’t attacking Mrs. Thatcher) – react to our new government. The fact that it includes members of a left-wing party must be confusing for the poor dears – but I predict that our craven, line-toeing, Labour-supporting satirists will get their act together within the next twelve months. In the meantime, they can just take the BBC News approach – and pretend that Labour never left office.