The veteran BBC show Have I Got News for You is ‘due to become BBC television’s only satirical comedy show’. This is the likely result of The Ranganation – also a panel show which dissects the week’s news – reportedly being cancelled.
Satire at the BBC has been vanishing alarmingly quickly. Only last week the corporation announced the end of Frankie Boyle’s New World Order, amid dwindling viewership. Mock the Week was cancelled last year, while The Mash Report was put to bed in 2021 (to be revived as Late Night Mash on Dave, only to suffer the double indignity of being cancelled again earlier this month).
This represents something of a crisis, even if a BBC insider told the Times that it was still committed to satire: ‘It is definitely not dead but we need to make room for the fresh, new voices and formats.’ But this entirely misses the point. The BBC doesn’t need a new format – Have I Got News for You and Mock The Week worked just fine only ten years ago. It needs a change of mentality.
Jon Thoday, whose company Avalon is behind ITV’s Spitting Imagereboot (also cancelled recently, surprise), raised fears that the corporation may be wary of the genre because of political pressures: ‘Satire is a really important thing for challenging the status quo and government in a country that should stand for free speech. The BBC, with a history going all the way back to That Was The Week That Was, should be doing it.’
Satire should indeed lampoon those who rule. Except BBC satire has for years shirked this duty. It no longer challenges the establishment – in academia, the civil service, the unelected House of Lords, the BBC itself. It’s instead been a staple of BBC satire to punch down, to mock and deride the conservative, middle-class, Brexit-inclined middle-Englander – hence that punchline which even panellists got bored of parroting: ‘It would be like a headline in the Daily Mail.’ Audiences have themselves become bored of the BBC’s repetitious, relentless belittling of ordinary Britons at the behest of a smug, self-satisfied elite.
In one of the parting episodes for Mock The Week, one panellist, Ed Byrne, lamented in no genteel language the Tories for bringing about that programme’s demise. And he’s right. It had become unashamedly partisan, even luxuriating in its metropolitan bias. The same goes for BBC satire today, and its comedy in general, with the anti-Brexit obsessive Nish Kumar epitomising its carefree detachment from the real world and the ordinary man. BBC Radio 4 comedy has long been a lost cause for this reason, with Simon Evans and Mark Steel (left-wing, but not prole-bashing) being rare exceptions.
The rot started to become evident in 2016, the landmark year the unwashed masses and deplorables voted for Brexit and Donald Trump. You can tell on HIGNFY re-runs on Dave whether it was originally broadcast pre-2016 or post-2016. If it features Hislop making faux-self-deprecating quips about being a ‘Remoaner’, it’s the latter. A similar parlour game can be played on re-runs of Mock The Week. Unrelenting jokes about Nigel Farage, the stupidity of the lumpenproletariat or the number on ‘that bus’? That’ll be post-2016, then.
The only surprise about the report that Have I Got News For You will be the last BBC satire programme is that it wasn’t this show itself that faces the axe. For years a staple, Friday must-watch slice of irreverent, non-partisan satire, it has become a conceited, complacent, bloated dinosaur. Perhaps this is the result of the way in which television viewing habits have become more fissured. Witness the emergence of the unashamedly partisan GB News, and its own answer to HIGNFY – Headliners – featuring the aforementioned Simon Evans, and Leo Kearse and Nick Dixon.
Yet more varied, less obsessed shows can show us that there is nothing wrong whatsoever with the panel format. The problem is with the BBC itself. Satire, real satire, will live on.
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