British satire is almost as in as poor health as the society it aims to lampoon. Of late there have been a host of shows purporting to be satirical, politically minded and unafraid of the establishment. In reality they are completely toothless and timid. Take for example the obviously rehearsed and depressingly unfunny Mock The Week, AKA The Frankie Boyle show, or the national institution Have I Got News For You. Anything more potent than this isn’t going to be signed off on when we live in a time where two largely talentless media twats performing a prank call to one of Britain’s most loved racist caricatures can cause a national furore that almost matched the “name and shame” campaign from the News of The World.
If it wasn’t for the output of Chris Morris, the UK would have nothing to show in the way of genuine satire for close to two decades. Across the Atlantic however there are a number of shows that really don’t mind going all out to genuinely expose the foolishness of their targets, while promoting a clearly liberal message. Terrifying to think that the nation that produced The Patriot Act still manages to produce far edgier shows than Great Britain.
And so the latest failure has arrived in the form of the 10 O’Clock Live on Channel 4, a programme that the endless hype machine is hoping will draw comparisons with Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. And it will, but only for comparisons in all the areas where it fell short with this poor debut offering.
The cast consisted of smug one liner man (Jimmy Carr), a shouty festival living blonde joke(Lauren Laverne), grumpy media twat sell-out (Charlie Brooker) and the posh whiney one from Peep Show who has spent an entire career trying to convince that he’s nothing like that character while simultaneously basing all of his schtick around that persona (David Mitchell). This was not a meeting of political minds, nor did it even represent the edgiest offering in British comedy. While you could admire the “have a go attitude” if the cast had actually approached the task in hand with that ethos, instead this was all about fitting their subject matter around already tired routines and what they do best.
Having the only female member of the crew Lauren Laverne as the chair was the first “oh, aren’t we so fucking alternative” signpost, if then she hadn’t been reduced to a pouting pedestrian whose sole contribution was to say “we’re going to have to leave it there” and taking part in a horrifically unfunny and ill conceived sketch. In that sense it conformed to the standard of televised news in the Western world – look pretty and read from the autocue love while the boys get on with the real work. Hardly breaks the mould and makes me wonder why they’d even bothered in the first place since as it appeared as an act of tokenism.
As for Jimmy Carr, I’m not sure how he can feel remotely comfortable trying to reinvent himself as a cutting edge political satirist given that his gurning delivery of his genital fixated one-liners feel so tired it’s like watching footage of Roy Chubby Brown in a “Britains favourite shit comedians” special. He was the principle offender in displaying that all too disappointing eagerness to go for cheap laughs rather than really delivering the killing blow to the sacred cows satire should slaughter. “Johnson Out, Balls In” he sneered before also delivering some jokes about paedophile priests that have been around almost as long as the Catholic Church itself.
Brooker himself was used sparingly. Which on the strength of his non-rehearsed material was something of a blessing. Yet his segments had that sickening sense of self-satisfaction about them in the way they were presented… A scrolling ticker that read “You kids love Charlie Brooker don’t you… Listen to the outrageous things he says” was all that was missing from the screen as Britain’s favourite curmudgeon, in what is fast becoming a habitual practice, rehashed his written material and recycled jokes from past work. Still, what you see is what you get with old Charlie and it’s clear from this showing that he is now all too happy to pander to the idiotic masses that he has made a career supposedly rallying against.
Those same idiotic masses had been crammed into the studio and treated the whole affair as if it were a pantomime. Understandable given the topics chosen for debate and the guests they had on the show. There was no time to get a hold on any sort of argument and in the end they would have been as well served wheeling out mannequins with signs attached to them that read “BANKER” or “TORY, and then inviting the audience to hurl rotting fruit and bags of shit all over them. It would have been as cathartic and ultimately enlightening.
Incredibly the only one to come out of the 10 O’Clock fiasco with any credibility was David Mitchell, who for the first time in his TV career moved away from his character from Peep Show and displayed a combative passion and liberal intelligence at loggerheads with his most famous character. His monologue was the shows highlight, actually feeling like it had the balls to really offer something that hadn’t been said before and unashamedly mocking its subject matter. Take note Brooker.
In the end though, it was a waste of an hour and what was especially disappointing was the way in which the media rallied around it saying it had “potential”. You’d expect The Guardian to back one of its own, but many of the reviews seemed to conclude that even if the show was awful, all the ingredients were there to be successful. When it comes to satire there’s nothing worse than wasted potential… It is an ephemeral form of comedy, one that needs to be urgent and energetic. What we got instead was listless delivery of the same old, same old. Where exactly is the potential in that?