Cringing at the cliffedge

In 1960, Britain was launched into a new age of political satire. A quartet of irreverent comedians took to the West End to smash the deferential conventions of post-war Britain with their show Beyond the Fringe. Nothing was off the table, with objects of national respect like Christianity, the wartime experience, and political leaders subjected to mockery. On one infamous occasion Peter Cook, who regularly imitated the Prime Minister, spotted him in the audience. He not only performed his usual act, but, imitating Harold Macmillan, described himself as having nothing better to do than watch the callow young comedians “with a stupid great grin spread all over my silly old face”. 

Comedy is often identified — and celebrated — as a catalyst of social change, helping to bring down a fusty old British by puncturing its veneer of reverence and respectability. It’s a tradition often cited by admirers of “Count Binface”, the creation of comedy writer Jonathan Harvey. Describing himself as an “independent space warrior”, Harvey runs for office whenever there’s a high profile by-election as “Count Binface” pledging to nationalize model railways and spend £1 trillion a week on the NHS. His career has now reached its apogee, as major Westminster parties have refused to stand candidates in the Clacton-on-Sea by-election, he has thrown his hat (or his bin anyway) into the ring, potentially leaving voters with a straight choice between Farage and Binface. 

Comedy is responsible for puncturing deference and challenging the establishment, but if you criticise comedians, you’re taking it too seriously

Having (as he sees it) turned the tables on the establishment by calling a by-election before the parliamentary standards committee rules, the establishment has (as they see it) turned the tables right back by simply leaving him to run on his own next to a sentient interstellar garbage can. In this effort they have been cheered on by one Will Dunn, who described Farage’s anti-establishment credentials as “risible” and argued that the true populist candidate was Count Binface. Voters should “show the political class – the entire establishment! – that anyone who considers themselves above the rules can be taken down by a man with a bin on his head.” 

How seriously should we take comedy? There’s a disingenuous double game when it comes to British Comedy Discourse. Comedy is responsible for puncturing deference and challenging the establishment, but if you criticise comedians, you’re taking it too seriously. Comedians are harmless jokers who shouldn’t be bound by moralistic limits around religion, politics and sex, but are also continually engaged in endless puritanical handwringing over “punching down”, and humour that offends minority groups. Political satirists like Private Eye editor Ian Hislop subject audiences to humourless political sermons on a near daily basis, yet are deeply resistant to being treated like any other political commentator. Over in the States, the chief villain with Jon Oliver doing his “I am just silly baby” act whilst running what is effectively Newsnight with fewer gags and zero objectivity. 

Entertain an idea for a moment. What if the answer to how seriously we should take comedy is very seriously indeed? And what if our increasingly unfunny and didactic national comedy culture was not just a symptom, but actually one cause of national decline? 

It’s worth revisiting the founding myth of the modern British comic. Peter Cook’s mockery of Harold Macmillan was not received well at the time. The audience fell silent, and the other comedians on stage were deeply uncomfortable and embarrassed. This was — quite literally — cringeworthy. Nor was Peter Cook especially happy with the legacy or impact of his irreverence, noting at the time that Britain was “in danger of sinking giggling into the sea”. The contrast between the callow young Oxbridge graduates and the prime minister was also extremely striking, and it’s worth noting just how huge the gulf between satire and reality was on this occasion. 

Harold Macmillan was everything we now long for and never get in a political leader. A brilliant student, he volunteered for service in WW1, where he was seriously injured on numerous occasions, spending the last two years of the war in hospital. He spoke out against the Conservative establishment in the 1930s, both over the issue of appeasing the Nazis, and the devastating unemployment affecting his working class constituents in Stockton-on-Tees. During WW2, whilst serving in Churchill’s wartime cabinet as British Minister Resident at Algiers, his plane crashed on the runway and caught fire. After clambering out of the wreck, he dived back into the inferno to pull out a French officer, nearly blinding himself in the process and receiving severe burns. He didn’t mention the incident in his memoirs. Later, he became the most successful housing minister in political history, fulfilling a Conservative pledge to build 300,000 houses a year, hitting the target a year ahead of schedule. In the wake of the Suez crisis Macmillan restabilised the government, and was quickly recognised as a brilliant leader by ministers, dominating cabinet meetings “by sheer superiority of mind and of judgement”. 

As a figure of stuffy establishmentdom, Macmillan, the extremely witty child of an American socialite and grandchild of a Scottish crofter, was an unconvincing casting choice. Far from being a figure of orthodox Tory traditionalism, he was a pragmatic moderniser, who supported decolonisation and oversaw the creation of Britain’s civil nuclear industry.  

Whilst Macmillan in his varied career had a long list of personal and professional failures and foibles, they were often of a kind that might endear him to us. Even faced with the possible collapse of his government (and the reputation of the establishment) over the Profumo affair, in which a cabinet minister had an affair with a 19 year old call girl, he privately quipped that “I was determined that no British government should be brought down by the action of two tarts”. 

The degree of cynicism expressed in the 60s towards the establishment in retrospect looks pretty inexplicable. The old Etonians running the country were highly responsive to public demands for housing, jobs and greater economic and social equality, and pragmatic about the changing realities of Britain’s declining global power and status. The country was getting richer and more equal every year, and Macmillan’s statement that people had never had it so good, looks a matter of simple objective fact. 

What was going on? What were the “angry young men” of the British 50s and 60s so angry about? The idea that they were channeling widespread working class rage turns out to be deeply misleading. The reality is that then, as now, the political satirists were frustrated members of the establishment. A fact that at the time was both evident and openly acknowledged, with Peter Cook opening a comedy club quite literally called “The Establishment”. Cook later claimed of his portrayal of Macmillan that it “was in fact extremely affectionate. I was a great Macmillan fan.” Miller confirms this portrait, later recounting that: “The idea that he had an anarchic, subversive view of society is complete nonsense. He was the most upstanding, traditional upholder of everything English and everything establishment.” 

Yet though downplayed, there is a harshness and an anger to Cook’s performances, dressed in establishment clothing. Miller said of it, “I never knew Peter to be funny in his own voice. He was an interesting, amiable, pleasant, home-counties Tory. Quite suddenly, this other voice would speak through him, and then he would be taken possession of, sometimes for two or three hours at a stretch.”

Where did this mild mannered alumnus of Radley and Cambridge get his anger from? Whilst most Britons really had never had it so good, the same could not be said for the establishment itself. Aristocratic estates were being demolished once a week. But it wasn’t just the landed gentry who had reason to complain. For a significant segment of Britain’s elite, colonial service was a source not only of economic advantage and career advancement, but also of social prestige and meaning. Peter Cook’s father and grandfather had both been colonial administrators, and he had initially planned to become a diplomat, but Britain had, as he joked, “run out of colonies”. 

He was also embittered by his experiences in the public school system, where the cruelty of hypocrisy of older students — like the future Englishman batsman Ted Dexter — left him with a deep sense of injustice that would spill out even decades later in interviews.

According to his first wife, his later slide into alcoholism was driven by this deepseated anger and frustration: “He was a very upright sort of person when I was first with him. At that point he even thought he had a career in the Foreign Office ahead of him, but something started to rot inside. I hear it was drugs too.” 

Miller too had frustrated ambitions. In an interview, he later confessed that “With hindsight, I slightly deplore what I did…It diverted me from what I was intending to do in my medical studies, which was to find out how we work.” 

Frustrated or forestalled idealism was a ticket to entry to the world of public school political satire. Willie Rushton, one of the founders and leading voices of Private Eye, had in common a feeling that British institutions — in his case law and the army, both of which he brushed with — were fundamentally absurd: “The Army is, God bless it, one of the funniest institutions on earth and also a sort of microcosm of the world. It’s split almost perfectly into our class system.”

Rushton himself was a microcosm of public school satire. As well as this familiar trajectory of institutional cynicism, Rushton, like Cook, had become famous for his impression of Macmillan, and like Cook had initially supported the prime minister. And it was this strange fusion of cynicism and frustrated idealism that saw Rushton, 60 years before Count Binface, run as a comedy candidate in a major by-election. Rushton, disgusted by the parachuting of hereditary peer Alex Douglas-Home into the commons to take over the faltering post-Profumo Tory government, contested the Kinross and Western Perthshire seat, running under the slogan “Death to Tories” 

Harvey, as an undergraduate classicist who came up to comedy via the Oxford revue and writing for Have I Got News for You, is very much in this same tradition. 

That political satirists are often insiders upholding convention and consensus shouldn’t shock or outrage us. But what might give us pause is the changing relationship to tradition, popular sentiment and patriotism. Contrary to claims of powerless japery, comedy, and satire especially, have been sharp tools of moral regulation and political disputation since the days of Greek theatre. The British tradition at its early modern height, whether in the magnificently obscene caricatures of Hogarth and Gilray, or the refined comedy of manners of Austen, was distinctly moralistic, on the side of social convention and tradition, but gleefully indifferent to rank. Perhaps the greatest British satirist, Jonathan Swift, was an Anglican clergyman — satirists always doubted fallible human nature, but they didn’t disbelieve in ideals and institutions. 

Yet something different was at work in the ‘60s satire boom. There was much that was very positive and healthy in it. Satire might have helped revitalise a sleepy English elite, or remade Britain’s stodgy class system along more intelligent lines. Papers like Private Eye exposed serious scandals and broke important stories. But at the heart of the endeavour was a growing cynicism and a poisonous self-doubt. British satire indeed shaped the character of an emerging elite, but not always in positive ways. 

We used to be a country which both took itself seriously but relentlessly made fun of itself. Now we’re a country that simply makes fun of itself, and whom nobody takes seriously. There’s all the difference in the world between cracking wise and cracking up. From being a culture with the self confidence and moral seriousness to challenge ourselves to do better, we’ve become one for whom satire is a thin shield between ourselves and humiliation, racing to be self-deprecate before someone else deprecates us first. 

The establishment cringe away from itself often poses as populist, but it’s really the most elitist gesture of all, putting the satirist a cut above all the earnest chumps. Besides the silliness, the quiet despair of the elite often took a much darker form. At the same time the Oxbridge satirists were poking fun at the establishment, the Cambridge Five were worming their way into its heart. Like the comics, they were disgusted by the elite of which they were a member and disappointed by Britain’s reduced role in the world. Between them they betrayed hundreds of people to death and torture, and lastingly damaged Britain’s relationship with America. In their eyes the great internationalist project of Communism outweighed questions of national loyalty. 

Excessive, overly abstract ideals, excessive, unforgiving cynicism about Britain, and simple personal excess, combined in the satirists as much as the spies. But is it possible to betray a country by mockery as much as malice? 

Satire at its best is refreshing, vital, grotesque. It has a capacity for cruelty, but also an odd compassion, with the best impressions emerging out of a kind of sympathy for the subject. Much British satire since the 60s has been of the better sort. But right from the beginning there was a kind of tidal drift, a dark undertow, an edge of nihilism, and it has only grown stronger over time. British satire became a vehicle for national despair and self loathing, a self indulgent glorying in our own crapness, our knowing absurdity — British exceptionalism in negative form. 

‘80s hits like Blackadder and Spitting Image depicted English politics and history in entirely ugly, absurd terms — a legacy taken up by modern series like Horrible Histories and The Thick of It. The issue was not the existence of satirical, even grotesque parodies of our history and politics, it was the extent to which parody came to displace the original as a cultural reference point. There is no modern “Our Island Story” to be enlivened by affectionate mockery, for the most part children begin with the parodic version first and never move beyond its caricatures. Politics itself is becoming a hyper-real self-satirising spectacle that no drama could compete with. Boris Johnson, far from being damaged by Hislop’s ham fisted, sweaty sermonising, was in part elevated to celebrity and political office by his role in Have I Got News For You. In America, audiences go to the Daily Show for news, and watch clips of President Trump if they want a laugh. Comedians and politicians have traded places and in more ways than one, as Farage himself could tell you.

The political satirists are obsessively brutal to their targets in office, but show little capacity to satirise wider society with the raucous rigour of Hogarth. It has been left to political outsiders and edgelords online to do the actual satire, with memes and tropes like the “socialist bob”, the YooKay, and Norf FC. There is no British Michel Houellebecq in the mainstream of satire to take the axe to multiculturalism or the ridiculous, surreal lives so many of us now live. 

Much modern satire, Count Binface included, is ultimately at once distracting and demoralising

Much modern satire, Count Binface included, is ultimately at once distracting and demoralising. It no longer describes reality, which makes it boring and unfunny, and it sets as its target a Britain that no longer exists. Endless bleating that Farage, a man who is regularly booed in parliament, is a member of the establishment is a case in point. You may not like the fact that a public school banker is the leader of a genuine populist movement, but he undoubtedly is. Just as surely, cockwombling Jonathan David Harvey, receiving chuckling interviews on the BBC whilst dressed as a bin, is a member of the establishment.

By refusing to run a candidate in Clacton, and in effect inviting a contest between Farage and a comedy candidate, the main parties — the British establishment — have expressed a total cynicism about British democracy and contempt for ordinary people. You don’t have to like Farage or Reform to see something disgraceful in this naked attempt to turn the democratic process into a farce. In the wake of the murder of Ann Widecombe, who was so often the butt of cruel jokes (and in fairness took them all in good spirit), British politics no longer feels particularly funny — just grotesque.