Ian Hislop has found someone to blame for Have I Got News For You‘s failure to tackle the Supreme Court’s gender ruling: the programme’s editors. After the BBC show ignored the big story of the month on its Easter edition, Hislop launched into a rant on the latest episode – insisting that he had spoken about the subject:
‘A lot of people said Have I Got News For You was pathetic, because last week nobody answered this question (on the gender ruling). It was asked, actually. And I answered it at some length. I gave my views about John Stuart Mill’s clash of different rights and competitive demands on a legal system. And I talked for some time about what I thought was a very rational solution of the two parliamentary acts which the Supreme Court had been asked, and they cut it out.’
So Hislop’s defence is that his answer was cut because it was monumentally boring. You might think that a Supreme Court ruling confirming the obvious fact that the word ‘man’ means ‘man’ and the word woman means ‘woman’ is a ripe subject for a satirist. Not so. It turns out that Hislop, his co-host Paul Merton, and the show’s guests, just couldn’t think of anything funny to say about it.
Hislop’s defence is that his answer was cut because it was monumentally boring
‘It isn’t easy to do this particular subject, as Keir Starmer has found out,’ stammered an unusually flustered-looking Hislop. His teammate, guest Jo Brand, agreed:
‘I think this is a thing that a lot of people wouldn’t want to say anything (about), because it’s a very, sort of, venomous situation, and I think a lot of people are genuinely a bit frightened…no one really wants to get a death threat…’
Death threats from who exactly, Jo? Rabbits? Presbyterians? The Brighouse and Rastrick brass band? Not, I would strongly suspect, from the women who laboured for years at great personal and professional cost to raise the eye-watering sums of cash needed in order to get the highest court in the land to tell us what we all knew when we were two? The death threats, as anybody on the ‘gender critical’ side of this debate can tell you, flow thick and fast – and always from the other side.
The admission of this fear, at long last, is an interesting first step. You’d think it would spark some reflection on the part of the cultural elite, because under our democratic system we are not supposed to be afraid to speak. But the fact people are scared to talk is a sure sign that something is very wrong in Britain.
It was fascinating to see all the varieties of awkwardness and denial on HIGNFY during the discussion on gender. Guest Richard Osman fell silent, with downcast eyes and the kind of terrified ‘please, please talk about something else, anything else’ look I’ve seen so many times in the last decade.
But then again, who can blame Osman? None of us should ever have had to deal with the madness of genderism. It caught comedians, and everybody else, unaware about ten years ago. Very quickly it became dangerous to even question it, let alone poke fun at it.
The irony, of course, is that there has been so much to poke fun at. The rise of genderism – and the doctrine that a man is a woman if he says so and everyone has to go along with it – has been the funniest thing that has happened in current affairs in my lifetime. There is so much rich material here for the satirist.
In the days following the court’s judgment, for example, it’s been hilarious to watch political figures – Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, Green co-leader Carla Denyer, podcast centrist dad Rory Stewart – squirming and obfuscating, appearing to pretend that they simply don’t understand the ruling of the Court. The interim guidance issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission following the ruling is written in Ladybird Book, Year 4-level English. Yet these luminaries are apparently totally foxed by it. Or are they just frightened? Either way, it is agonising, but very amusing, to behold. As the lawyer Dennis Kavanagh remarked on X, ‘We are not debating this movement. We are babysitting it.’
Radio 4’s The News Quiz has similarly been brought to a belated admission of terror, turning their fear of the subject into a joke. It’s a start, I suppose. But then, I can remember Alexei Sayle taking much the same approach to fundamentalist Islam in 1989, at the time of the declaration of the fatwa on Salman Rushdie – and look how that turned out.
It’s unfair maybe to focus on the antics on a flagging old show like HIGNFY. The show’s cowardice is merely a symptom of wider institutional failure. But what is plain to see is that the unwillingness to joke about gender is a class issue. Comedians today seem desperate to cling on to upper middle-class fads, however barmy they happen to be.
In a healthy, functioning democracy, satire should play an important part in the political and cultural ecosystem – yet on genderism, it failed, and failed badly. If supposedly satirical shows like HIGNFY had been firm with this rubbish at the start, the gender madness might not, perhaps, have ripped through our institutions in the way that it did. Hislop and Brand are correct about one thing, at least: scared satirists are not funny, they are pathetic.
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