"I won't rest until all of my students have special needs" - why the hell isn't "Doreen" on television?

The face of Modern Britain

"Is satire on television dead?" was one of the headlines on Radio 4's World at One this lunctime. The answer, of course, is yes, unless you count the lame, cowardly, Marxism-by-numbers variety peddled by terminally unfunny libtard bores on any number of "topical" BBC panel shows (this usually boils down to some privately-educated posh boy with a mockney accent pointed out to universal hilarity that David Cameron is posh). The realy interesting question - given how deeply the average Briton despises our current crop of politicians - is, why is it dead? Why is there nobody on our TV screens regularly eviscerating our ridiculous left-liberal politico-media establishment?

I was catching up with the excellent The Sunday Growler blog this morning (here), which this week provides a link to the viral YouTube video, Doreen's Story, a satire about a life-long benefits receipient who has been diagnosed as suffering from Lazy Cow Syndrome ("I'm on loads of drugs - heroin, ecstatcsy, bit of crack at the weekend, but it all helps, don't it?"). I've been thinking about Doreen a lot during the recent brouhaha about the Channel 4 programme, Benefits Street - after all, Gill Jordan, the actress who plays Doreen, managed to capture every enervated welfare-junkie resident in 4'38". I checked online to see whether there have been any more Doreen videos, only to discover a full pilot for a TV series. Here it is:

Why would any British TV commissioner not fight tooth and tail to get something this funny and relevant onto their channel? And yet its creator, David Tristram, has been hawking it around broadcasters without success, and has had to turn it into a play, and is now trying to find the funding for a movie version (read all about it here).

Given the pile of unadulterated ordure masquerading as comedy that gets regularly  shovelled into our living rooms by our major broadcasters, how is it possible for Doreen not to have been snapped up? Unless, of course, the dreary leftists who run television have decided that making fun of the welfare state wouldn't help the cause of getting their beloved Labour Party back into office next year. It would also make caring, sensitive, wobbly-bottomed über-lovey Stephen Fry jolly cross, which would never do, would it, poppets. And, most important of all, the real object of the satire in Doreen isn't really the underclass created by the welfare state - it's this country's left-liberal establishment, of which TV channel commissioners are all prominent members, and they wouldn't want to let their own tribe down, now, would they?

 I'll leave you with the brilliant original video which started it all: