Like most people, I haven’t tuned in to Have I Got News For You for years. But when I heard of a staggering omission in last Friday night’s edition, I just had to see it – or, rather, not see it – with my own eyes. The biggest news story of the week – the momentous ruling by the Supreme Court on the meaning of sex in the Equality Act 2010 – was not covered at all, even obliquely. You’d think that the absurdity of the highest court in the land being called to adjudicate on one of the most basic facts of observable reality – that there are two sexes, and that the words man and woman mean, er, man and woman – would be a rich source of mirth, the kind of glorious nonsense that’s a satirist’s meat and drink. But no. Not a word. Zilch.
There was also no mention of the new weekly record for small boat arrivals, which you’d think was pretty significant
‘We begin with the bigger stories of the week,’ said guest host Katherine Parkinson, as is traditional. These turned out to be steel nationalisation and the bin strike in Birmingham. We also heard about the Blue Origin ‘mission’, gambling on the election date, Liz Truss launching her own app. But the thing everybody was actually talking about? No. That just hung in the air like a vicar’s fart, with everybody pretending it hadn’t happened.
There was also no mention of the new weekly record for small boat arrivals, which you’d think was pretty significant. But that is a similar hot potato, and it is just not done – not quite the correct thing – to raise such matters in polite society.
The regular team captains Ian Hislop and Paul Merton were joined for this edition by journalist Jemima Kelly and comedian Julian Clary. The presence of Clary, a sadly rare sight on TV nowadays, added to the sensation that I was experiencing one of those spooky timeslips, the kind where people turn the corner by Sainsbury’s and run slap bang into Marie Antoinette.
HIGNFY began 35 years ago, after all. Roll back another 35 years and you realise that its continued presence today would be like Muffin The Mule and Gilbert Harding still being on TV in 1990, with Eddie Calvert and Alma Coogan at the top of the charts. The sight of Hislop and Merton still there, still doing the same old jokes from the same old perspective, was disconcerting. It felt as if I’d walked back into my student union bar and found everybody I remembered from 1990 had been sat there ever since, Stone Roses and 808 State t-shirts hanging from their withered bodies.
If this episode tumbled back to 1995, anybody seeing it then would be reassured that Britain in thirty years would still be pretty much the same old place. Clary got away with it because his schtick was always the repetition of one joke, already ancient, and it is even older now, ripened to a fine old age.
‘Wouldn’t it be funny if Alan Titchmarsh was a homosexual’ was joined by other box-fresh, up-to-the-minute material; catchphrases like ‘Answers on a postcard’, and topical jokes about vegetarian restaurants and Antiques Roadshow. Paul Merton is still bringing out his flights of random fancy as if it was the Comedy Store in 1982.
The modern world obviously does get referenced occasionally, viewed through the most predictable lens. Merton reveals that JD Vance’s initials stand for ‘jumbo dickhead’; how brave! You won’t hear that kind of daring anywhere else. Hislop suggested that Donald Trump’s cuts to the funding for barmy, DEI-ridden Harvard means that he is ‘a straightforward fascist’, a tedious remark greeted by an equally tedious round of applause.
HIGNFY is of a piece with the BBC in general, which has spent much of its time since the court ruling on gender falling over itself to talk about the hurt feelings of men who claim to be women, and studiously ignoring the opinions of actual women, including the ones who brought the case.
Did the HIGNFY production team decide against covering the ruling for fear of further upsetting these men? This supposedly most marginalised group in society that can end your career if you don’t swear obeisance to the minutest jot and tittle of their barmy demands. As a consequence, abject terror of often aggressive big lads in wigs is always being dressed up as tastefulness and ‘respectfulness’. Isn’t there something funny about that, worth a little joshing? Apparently not. But you can’t have a topical, satirical TV show that is tongue-tied, awkward, and nervous of saying the wrong thing.
The big irony here is that the BBC, which got its knickers very twisted in the recent Adolescence panic, and is always gnashing its teeth about other people being ‘very online’, is itself beholden to, and petrified of, the extremely digital genderist lobby (among others). The creative class in general is massively skewed to the minority views of progressive internet activists. It is disconnected and siloed, and afraid; and even a naff old show like HIGNFY has had its fangs, such as they ever were, pulled.
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