New Labour inspired a golden age of political comedy. William Cook looks to satire’s future
Although few will mourn Gordon Brown’s departure, his drawn-out demise should be a source of sadness for comedy aficionados, be they red, yellow or blue. For New Labour’s most unlikely legacy was to inspire a renaissance in political comedy. It may have ended with a disgruntled whimper rather than a bang, but for anyone with a taste for satire these were 13 golden years.
When Tony Blair first swept into Downing Street in 1997, a lot of left-wing comics seemed bemused. They’d been attacking the Tories for 18 years. Now that the Labour landslide they’d yearned for had happened, they didn’t quite know what to do. ‘We were scuppered,’ admitted Paul Thorne, a stand-up comic at London’s top comedy club, The Comedy Store, recalling the wave of euphoria that greeted New Labour’s triumph. Yet it didn’t take these comics too long to get their second wind. Cracking jokes about John Major and Tory sleaze had become far too easy. Faced with a more elusive foe, political comedy became more sophisticated, and on the stand-up circuit satirical comedians found a new lease of life. Left-wing comics like Mark Thomas and Mark Steel (who now writes a column for the Independent) acquired a sense of betrayal that sharpened their acerbic wit.
What starts in the comedy clubs soon finds its way on to the airwaves, and this improbable revival quickly filtered down to TV. Chris Morris’s masterful Brass Eye, broadcast in the last months of the Major era, had anticipated this brave new style of satire — darker and more malevolent than anything that had come before. It’s no coincidence that Spitting Image finally ran out of steam when John and Norma moved out of Downing Street and Tony and Cherie moved in. Looking back today, those pantomime puppets seem as tame and harmless as an old-fashioned Punch & Judy show. Under Labour, shows like Have I Got News For You became more astute and successful, winning promotion to BBC1 from BBC2.
Today, BBC2’s Mock the Week is far smarter than any panel show from the Thatcher or Major years, but the apotheosis of New Labour comedy was The Thick of It, Armando Iannucci’s brilliant depiction of backroom spin. With its obsession with media management (and a wonderfully foul-mouthed Peter Capaldi) this sublime show would surely never have happened if Alastair Campbell or Peter Mandelson had never come to power.
Ironically, it was Margaret Thatcher who had inspired the previous new wave of political comedy in this country. The Comedy Store opened (above a Soho strip club) just a fortnight after she became PM. Yet although ‘alternative’ comics like Ben Elton made their names lambasting her, in the new comedy clubs and then on TV, these attacks soon descended into trite abuse. Most of the jokes about her were just as banal as the old mother-in-law gags that had preceded them, as Mrs T became a politically correct Aunt Sally. Conviction politicians are bad for satire. Whether you’re for them or against them, there’s nothing funny about a crusade. The trouble was, for most comedians, Mrs Thatcher was too big a target. You either loved her or hated her, and the comedy was crude and clumsy either way. There was no friction, no creative tension. Most of these right-on comics had always hated her, and so had their right-on fans.
Under John Major comedy became, if anything, even tamer. If Mrs Thatcher was too big a target, Mr Major was too small. After Black Wednesday he was a dead man walking, and fair-minded Britons don’t really relish kicking a man when he’s already down. It was easy to see why lots of stand-ups abandoned politics altogether. Preaching to the converted is never a good basis for subtle comedy, and comics had nothing to push against when the whole country already knew that it was time for him to go.
New Labour, conversely, was a godsend for clever comics. The smoke and mirrors of the Blair regime forced them to raise their game. Blair was as slippery as an eel, always keeping his opponents guessing, which brought out the best in impressionists like Rory Bremner. Bremner was never better than when he was mimicking this ‘pretty straight kinda guy’. His Gordon Brown was similarly nuanced, hinting at the man beneath the mask.
So what was it about New Labour that made it such a rich comic canvas? Well, humour is about the gap between appearance and reality, and with its preoccupation with style over substance, New Labour was a classic case in point. With the Tories, what you saw was what you got, but New Labour was about how things appeared (especially on TV or in the papers) rather than how they really were. Stand-up comic Lee Hurst summed it up on the night Blair won his first landslide, as he sat in The Comedy Store after the election-night show and watched the Labour gains come flooding in. ‘With the Tories, you knew what you’d got,’ he observed, ‘but these people, they’re pretending to be something they’re not.’ He was right, more or less, and that was what made New Labour so funny. Brown simply wasn’t as good an actor as Blair, which is why he came unstuck. Blair could play the part, whichever part was required of him, which is why he remains a comic figure, while Brown became a tragic one.
So what does the future hold for political comedy, now we’re in the uncharted waters of a coalition government? Well, it’s not much consolation, but at least the next few months of uncertainty will probably be far more fun for satirists than a big fat Conservative majority. After all, Mrs Thatcher’s favourite sitcom, Yes Minister, was inspired by a speech given by Labour’s Barbara Castle, and conceived amid the mundane chaos of the Lib-Lab Pact.
The best jokes in Yes Minister are generally about Sir Humphrey deflating Jim Hacker’s great expectations. Were Paul Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne still with us, they’d surely be vastly entertained by the way all three parties ended up with their hopes of greatness dashed. Talking to those comics at The Comedy Store, I was intrigued that their most memorable night wasn’t the Labour landslide of 1997, but the narrow Tory victory of 1992, after everyone had predicted a win for Labour. ‘Actually, this isn’t a bad result,’ reflected one of the left-wing stand-ups performing at the Store that evening as the Conservatives held Basildon, signalling the end of Kinnock’s dreams of glory, ‘because it gives us five more years of taking the piss.’ Tory wags, take note.
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