Post by Teddy Bear on Nov 12, 2015 21:31:08 GMT
Brendan O'Neill at the Telegraph writes an excellent piece on comedy, or lack of it, at the BBC, and focusses specifically on David Mitchell.
The mindset of the left.
The mindset of the left.
Smug, annoying and boring: David Mitchell is a pound shop Stephen Fry
The Peep Show star has gone from edgy social commentator to uniform Lefty bore
By Brendan O'Neill
What is it about British culture that chews up funnymen and spits them out the other end as finger-wagging purveyors of chattering-class orthodoxy?
So many comics have undergone this humour-neutering process. They start off as joke-tellers, pricking social pretensions, and end up as angry enforcers of new social doctrines.
Take David Mitchell. He’s back on our TV screens in the new, and last, series of Peep Show.
First hitting our tellies in 2003, Peep Show is Channel 4’s longest-running sitcom. It’s a wry, sly and sometimes heartfelt piss-take of the self-consciousness of youngish men in an era when youngish men don’t know what they’re for anymore.
Over nine series it has tracked the shenanigans and failings of flatmates Jez (Robert Webb) and Mark (Mitchell), as they’ve moved from being twentysomethings sharing a flat (normal) to being fortysomethings still holed up together (lame).
"It’s like being stuck in a lift with a drunk polytechnic lecturer. He’s a Twitter rant made flesh"
But I’m more interested in what has happened to Mitchell himself during the Peep Show years.
He’s metamorphosed from a side-eyeing, witty observer of the weirdness of 21st-century life into a faux-outraged railer against anyone who doesn’t share his outlook.
It is of course wrong to say “he’s back on our screens” with Peep Show; he’s never bloody off the telly. I think there’s a law somewhere, probably snuck in at the fag-end of the New Labour regime, which says no panel show may go ahead without Mitchell’s mug on it.
QI, Have I Got News For You, Mock the Week, Just a Minute … On all of them, there he is, stroking BBC TWO viewers’ and Radio 4 listeners’ prejudices, giving them their weekly, soul-sustaining dose of anti-Tory gags, banker-bashing and praise for the BBC (a “genius institution”, says Mitchell).
The Independent christened Mitchell the “prince regent of the panel games”. Which is not only an apt description of his omnipresence on these God-awful televised back-patting sessions between people who share exactly the same views and hail from exactly the same dinner-party circuit. It also sums up his demeanour of late, which is haughty, snooty, full of a misplaced sense of intellectual superiority over … well, just about everyone. Especially the usual suspects: Ukip voters, fast-food eaters, etczzz.
There’s no middle-of-the-road, middle-class prejudice Mitchell isn’t happy to parrot, particularly in his column in the Observer. (Remember when comedy was “the new rock’n’roll”? Now they all churn out painfully liberal fare for worthy broadsheets.)
You want sixth-former-style “Tories are evil” stuff? Mitchell’s yer man, arguing that if we are going to ban people who use “inflammatory rhetoric” then we will have to ban David Cameron. Ho ho ho.
How about some Murdochphobia, Rupe being the favoured bête noir of every tabloid-despairing progressive? He’s a “monstrous a–––hole who wants to ruin everything for everyone”, declares Mitchell, daringly.
And of course, no gathering of Guardian readers is complete without tut-tutting over the eating habits of the fat little people, and Mitchell has form here too. Bigging up a study which claimed to show that fast food makes people dumb, he joyfully declared that “consuming crap is actively enthickifying. It’s a thickener, like flour.”
This will be why he’s so much cleverer than the morons he hectors through the magic of TV: he doesn’t eat junk.
On every issue, from man-made climate change (if you are “reasonable and intelligent” you will believe in it, he says) to the paranoid Islington conviction that evil right-wingers want to bury the BBC (“there is a plot to destroy it”, he says), Mitchell now only ever sings from the hymn sheet okayed by the media elite.
And the manner in which he offers up these PC platitudes, in the hope that they will fortify the right-on and re-educate the rest of us, has long lost any comic component.
Whether it’s in his fittingly named Soapbox videos for the Guardian or in his hectoring monologues on the dire and mercifully short-lived 10 O’Clock Live, his delivery has lost its early warmth and sweet uncertainty and is now all shouty sermonising. It’s like being stuck in a lift with a drunk polytechnic lecturer. He’s a Twitter rant made flesh.
"It’s like the British cultural establishment, and especially the Beeb, is a kind of dying star, sucking in fresh, funny people and flattening them into conformist cardboard cutouts of Alan Yentob"
So many British comics have suffered a similar fate. Steve Coogan has turned from genuinely funny man into the boorish demander of state regulation of the low-rent press. Stewart Lee was the darling of edgy leftists yet now openly defends PC (he calls it “institutionalised politeness”). He also writes a column for the Observer, natch. Ben Elton gave us some of the funniest TV shows ever — The Young Ones, Blackadder — but now is a Middle England irritant.
It’s like the British cultural establishment, and especially the Beeb, is a kind of dying star, sucking in fresh, funny people and flattening them into conformist cardboard cutouts of Alan Yentob only with a few knob gags for old time’s sake.
It’s the great irony of the new comedy: it presents itself as the antidote to the prejudiced humour of the Seventies yet it spews out in an increasingly gag-free fashion the new prejudices of a new elite, whether it’s snottiness about junk-food-eaters or sneering at the tabloids.
Mitchell has become a poor man’s Stephen Fry. And if, as someone once said, Fry is a stupid person’s idea of a clever person, what does that say about Mitchell?
The Peep Show star has gone from edgy social commentator to uniform Lefty bore
By Brendan O'Neill
What is it about British culture that chews up funnymen and spits them out the other end as finger-wagging purveyors of chattering-class orthodoxy?
So many comics have undergone this humour-neutering process. They start off as joke-tellers, pricking social pretensions, and end up as angry enforcers of new social doctrines.
Take David Mitchell. He’s back on our TV screens in the new, and last, series of Peep Show.
First hitting our tellies in 2003, Peep Show is Channel 4’s longest-running sitcom. It’s a wry, sly and sometimes heartfelt piss-take of the self-consciousness of youngish men in an era when youngish men don’t know what they’re for anymore.
Over nine series it has tracked the shenanigans and failings of flatmates Jez (Robert Webb) and Mark (Mitchell), as they’ve moved from being twentysomethings sharing a flat (normal) to being fortysomethings still holed up together (lame).
"It’s like being stuck in a lift with a drunk polytechnic lecturer. He’s a Twitter rant made flesh"
But I’m more interested in what has happened to Mitchell himself during the Peep Show years.
He’s metamorphosed from a side-eyeing, witty observer of the weirdness of 21st-century life into a faux-outraged railer against anyone who doesn’t share his outlook.
It is of course wrong to say “he’s back on our screens” with Peep Show; he’s never bloody off the telly. I think there’s a law somewhere, probably snuck in at the fag-end of the New Labour regime, which says no panel show may go ahead without Mitchell’s mug on it.
QI, Have I Got News For You, Mock the Week, Just a Minute … On all of them, there he is, stroking BBC TWO viewers’ and Radio 4 listeners’ prejudices, giving them their weekly, soul-sustaining dose of anti-Tory gags, banker-bashing and praise for the BBC (a “genius institution”, says Mitchell).
The Independent christened Mitchell the “prince regent of the panel games”. Which is not only an apt description of his omnipresence on these God-awful televised back-patting sessions between people who share exactly the same views and hail from exactly the same dinner-party circuit. It also sums up his demeanour of late, which is haughty, snooty, full of a misplaced sense of intellectual superiority over … well, just about everyone. Especially the usual suspects: Ukip voters, fast-food eaters, etczzz.
There’s no middle-of-the-road, middle-class prejudice Mitchell isn’t happy to parrot, particularly in his column in the Observer. (Remember when comedy was “the new rock’n’roll”? Now they all churn out painfully liberal fare for worthy broadsheets.)
You want sixth-former-style “Tories are evil” stuff? Mitchell’s yer man, arguing that if we are going to ban people who use “inflammatory rhetoric” then we will have to ban David Cameron. Ho ho ho.
How about some Murdochphobia, Rupe being the favoured bête noir of every tabloid-despairing progressive? He’s a “monstrous a–––hole who wants to ruin everything for everyone”, declares Mitchell, daringly.
And of course, no gathering of Guardian readers is complete without tut-tutting over the eating habits of the fat little people, and Mitchell has form here too. Bigging up a study which claimed to show that fast food makes people dumb, he joyfully declared that “consuming crap is actively enthickifying. It’s a thickener, like flour.”
This will be why he’s so much cleverer than the morons he hectors through the magic of TV: he doesn’t eat junk.
On every issue, from man-made climate change (if you are “reasonable and intelligent” you will believe in it, he says) to the paranoid Islington conviction that evil right-wingers want to bury the BBC (“there is a plot to destroy it”, he says), Mitchell now only ever sings from the hymn sheet okayed by the media elite.
And the manner in which he offers up these PC platitudes, in the hope that they will fortify the right-on and re-educate the rest of us, has long lost any comic component.
Whether it’s in his fittingly named Soapbox videos for the Guardian or in his hectoring monologues on the dire and mercifully short-lived 10 O’Clock Live, his delivery has lost its early warmth and sweet uncertainty and is now all shouty sermonising. It’s like being stuck in a lift with a drunk polytechnic lecturer. He’s a Twitter rant made flesh.
"It’s like the British cultural establishment, and especially the Beeb, is a kind of dying star, sucking in fresh, funny people and flattening them into conformist cardboard cutouts of Alan Yentob"
So many British comics have suffered a similar fate. Steve Coogan has turned from genuinely funny man into the boorish demander of state regulation of the low-rent press. Stewart Lee was the darling of edgy leftists yet now openly defends PC (he calls it “institutionalised politeness”). He also writes a column for the Observer, natch. Ben Elton gave us some of the funniest TV shows ever — The Young Ones, Blackadder — but now is a Middle England irritant.
It’s like the British cultural establishment, and especially the Beeb, is a kind of dying star, sucking in fresh, funny people and flattening them into conformist cardboard cutouts of Alan Yentob only with a few knob gags for old time’s sake.
It’s the great irony of the new comedy: it presents itself as the antidote to the prejudiced humour of the Seventies yet it spews out in an increasingly gag-free fashion the new prejudices of a new elite, whether it’s snottiness about junk-food-eaters or sneering at the tabloids.
Mitchell has become a poor man’s Stephen Fry. And if, as someone once said, Fry is a stupid person’s idea of a clever person, what does that say about Mitchell?