Post by Teddy Bear on Oct 10, 2009 17:53:43 GMT
An excellent article from Simon Heffer at the Telegraph about how the BBC mindset has neutralised any attempt to create a true comedy show.
The last paragraph really encapsulates it
It makes me realise that my wife is right when she says, as she often does, that once you get past the age of 40, there isn't really anything on the BBC for you. Except Gardeners' World, of course: and we should make the most of that until someone realises how much it discriminates against those who don't have gardens, and who might feel humiliated by the lack of one
The last paragraph really encapsulates it
It makes me realise that my wife is right when she says, as she often does, that once you get past the age of 40, there isn't really anything on the BBC for you. Except Gardeners' World, of course: and we should make the most of that until someone realises how much it discriminates against those who don't have gardens, and who might feel humiliated by the lack of one
BBC plans for TV comedy are no laughing matter
The BBC's guidelines for comedy will make all the jokes we actually find funny unacceptable, says Simon Heffer.
By Simon Heffer
Published: 6:26PM BST 10 Oct 2009
I can't remember when I last sat down and watched, from beginning to end, a BBC situation comedy. It was possibly over 20 years ago, and it was probably Blackadder. I have accidentally, since, come across moments from more contemporary offerings, but they have really been just moments: the quality of what is served up sees to that.
I once chanced upon one that was so dire in every respect it was hard to believe anyone but the irremediably tragic could possibly be watching it. The characters were two-dimensional and bore no resemblance to anyone I knew, or indeed to anyone anyone else might know. Inevitably, the script was appalling; appalling precisely because what appeared to be funny wasn't.
Seth Rogen: the new hero of comedyI realised, later on, that this was because all the things that people really make jokes about in their everyday lives were not deemed suitable for the never-never land of BBC comedy. There seems to be an idealised, sanitised world of "comedy" that BBC bigwigs deem should exist, and everything they turn out must fit that mould.
Now these scarcely funny things are destined to become unfunnier still, since the BBC has decreed that its comedies are not to be "unduly intimidatory, humiliating, intrusive, aggressive or derogatory". That's the end of that, then. John Howard Davies, who used to run BBC comedy, pointed out that this is the sort of absurdity that happens when a committee decides guidelines. An individual exercising editorial judgment is far preferable, especially if that individual has been chosen because of his or her connection with the real world, and what makes people laugh in it.
I have occasionally thought that I used to find programmes put out by the BBC funny because I was so much younger when I saw them, and that they were not, by the perhaps more objective standards of middle age, funny at all. However, watching re-runs of old comedy programmes, I realise I was wrong: they were, plainly and simply, very funny. The famous Fawlty Towers episode in which Basil insults the Germans fails every one of the new guidelines. It is racist, intimidating, humiliating, mocks Spaniards, Germans, and the mentally ill, and commits other offences too numerous to mention. It is also dementedly funny, even after repeated viewings over more than 30 years.
Comedy used, of course, to be able to make certain assumptions: among them was a shared social experience and a common sense of humour born out of that and a common culture. The BBC has its own view of what the things-in-common today are, and, in its obsession with "diversity", there are very few of them.
The new guidelines were prompted by the idiotic moment when Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand rang up an elderly actor – the same intimidated Spaniard from Fawlty Towers – and mocked him over the carnal behaviour of his granddaughter. We all know that no wide-ranging guidelines were necessary in response to this: just the simple editorial application of the rules of good taste. Yet the "committee" so correctly derided by Mr Howard Davies has seized the opportunity to issue draconian new rules about a large number of things that cannot now appear in any comedy.
They have been attacked as absurd, and I do not wish or need to add to the obloquy. Perhaps it is best simply to observe that, after 70 or so years of influencing and shaping the definition of the national sense of humour, the BBC now seems to have forfeited its ability to do that. As a result, our sense of humour will have to carry on being forged in other ways, as it was before the BBC brought us ITMA, the Goons, Round the Horne, Monty Python and the rest: in the workplace, in the home, by the written word, in pubs, in clubs, in theatres, indeed, in every place where real human beings meet each other and make conversation.
All the funniest things the BBC ever did were based on some sort of humiliation: usually, self-humiliation. I don't just mean Fawlty Towers: I think of my desert island sitcom, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, which ran ragged a middle-aged man, played exquisitely by Leonard Rossiter, who wanted to have an affair with his secretary and thought his mother-in-law was a hippopotamus. Or Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, in which Frank Spencer – like Reggie Perrin and Basil Fawlty, one of the great comic creations – was humiliated (quite often aggressively, with lashings of intimidation) in almost every episode. Nobody who watched it took it very seriously; everybody who watched it recognised the type. Such creations remind us that the only way, sometimes, to cope with aspects of life that are irritating, depressing or infuriating is to magnify their absurdity by means that will sometimes verge upon the cruel, and then laugh at them.
It seems the BBC is trying to nationalise our sense of humour. Previously, it was something that people bought into voluntarily, and from which they dined à la carte. Now, it is to be codified by self-appointed arbiters of the genre, and there will be no choice on the menu.
This will, of course, divorce it from what happens in the lives of the millions of people whom the BBC expect to watch their programmes. The thought and diversity police themselves will absolutely love it, not because it will make them laugh, but because they can sit contentedly at the end of any programme that they have so vetted in the smug certainty that, because of its absence of rough humour, it hasn't made anybody else laugh either.
I don't know what, indeed, there will be left for us to chortle at. White, middle-aged, middle-class, heterosexual males (rather like Reggie Perrin) seem to be safe, but that may change in the next set of guidelines, as the censors realise that they have feelings, too. I sometimes fear I smell the future when I hear some of the ghastly Radio 4 "comedy" broadcast before The Archers in the evening, where some foghorn-voiced clown comes on and in his mock-prole tones bellows out phrases like "Margaret Thatcher" and "George W Bush", which seem guaranteed to get the teenagers in the studio audience hooting hysterically.
It makes me realise that my wife is right when she says, as she often does, that once you get past the age of 40, there isn't really anything on the BBC for you. Except Gardeners' World, of course: and we should make the most of that until someone realises how much it discriminates against those who don't have gardens, and who might feel humiliated by the lack of one
The BBC's guidelines for comedy will make all the jokes we actually find funny unacceptable, says Simon Heffer.
By Simon Heffer
Published: 6:26PM BST 10 Oct 2009
I can't remember when I last sat down and watched, from beginning to end, a BBC situation comedy. It was possibly over 20 years ago, and it was probably Blackadder. I have accidentally, since, come across moments from more contemporary offerings, but they have really been just moments: the quality of what is served up sees to that.
I once chanced upon one that was so dire in every respect it was hard to believe anyone but the irremediably tragic could possibly be watching it. The characters were two-dimensional and bore no resemblance to anyone I knew, or indeed to anyone anyone else might know. Inevitably, the script was appalling; appalling precisely because what appeared to be funny wasn't.
Seth Rogen: the new hero of comedyI realised, later on, that this was because all the things that people really make jokes about in their everyday lives were not deemed suitable for the never-never land of BBC comedy. There seems to be an idealised, sanitised world of "comedy" that BBC bigwigs deem should exist, and everything they turn out must fit that mould.
Now these scarcely funny things are destined to become unfunnier still, since the BBC has decreed that its comedies are not to be "unduly intimidatory, humiliating, intrusive, aggressive or derogatory". That's the end of that, then. John Howard Davies, who used to run BBC comedy, pointed out that this is the sort of absurdity that happens when a committee decides guidelines. An individual exercising editorial judgment is far preferable, especially if that individual has been chosen because of his or her connection with the real world, and what makes people laugh in it.
I have occasionally thought that I used to find programmes put out by the BBC funny because I was so much younger when I saw them, and that they were not, by the perhaps more objective standards of middle age, funny at all. However, watching re-runs of old comedy programmes, I realise I was wrong: they were, plainly and simply, very funny. The famous Fawlty Towers episode in which Basil insults the Germans fails every one of the new guidelines. It is racist, intimidating, humiliating, mocks Spaniards, Germans, and the mentally ill, and commits other offences too numerous to mention. It is also dementedly funny, even after repeated viewings over more than 30 years.
Comedy used, of course, to be able to make certain assumptions: among them was a shared social experience and a common sense of humour born out of that and a common culture. The BBC has its own view of what the things-in-common today are, and, in its obsession with "diversity", there are very few of them.
The new guidelines were prompted by the idiotic moment when Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand rang up an elderly actor – the same intimidated Spaniard from Fawlty Towers – and mocked him over the carnal behaviour of his granddaughter. We all know that no wide-ranging guidelines were necessary in response to this: just the simple editorial application of the rules of good taste. Yet the "committee" so correctly derided by Mr Howard Davies has seized the opportunity to issue draconian new rules about a large number of things that cannot now appear in any comedy.
They have been attacked as absurd, and I do not wish or need to add to the obloquy. Perhaps it is best simply to observe that, after 70 or so years of influencing and shaping the definition of the national sense of humour, the BBC now seems to have forfeited its ability to do that. As a result, our sense of humour will have to carry on being forged in other ways, as it was before the BBC brought us ITMA, the Goons, Round the Horne, Monty Python and the rest: in the workplace, in the home, by the written word, in pubs, in clubs, in theatres, indeed, in every place where real human beings meet each other and make conversation.
All the funniest things the BBC ever did were based on some sort of humiliation: usually, self-humiliation. I don't just mean Fawlty Towers: I think of my desert island sitcom, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, which ran ragged a middle-aged man, played exquisitely by Leonard Rossiter, who wanted to have an affair with his secretary and thought his mother-in-law was a hippopotamus. Or Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, in which Frank Spencer – like Reggie Perrin and Basil Fawlty, one of the great comic creations – was humiliated (quite often aggressively, with lashings of intimidation) in almost every episode. Nobody who watched it took it very seriously; everybody who watched it recognised the type. Such creations remind us that the only way, sometimes, to cope with aspects of life that are irritating, depressing or infuriating is to magnify their absurdity by means that will sometimes verge upon the cruel, and then laugh at them.
It seems the BBC is trying to nationalise our sense of humour. Previously, it was something that people bought into voluntarily, and from which they dined à la carte. Now, it is to be codified by self-appointed arbiters of the genre, and there will be no choice on the menu.
This will, of course, divorce it from what happens in the lives of the millions of people whom the BBC expect to watch their programmes. The thought and diversity police themselves will absolutely love it, not because it will make them laugh, but because they can sit contentedly at the end of any programme that they have so vetted in the smug certainty that, because of its absence of rough humour, it hasn't made anybody else laugh either.
I don't know what, indeed, there will be left for us to chortle at. White, middle-aged, middle-class, heterosexual males (rather like Reggie Perrin) seem to be safe, but that may change in the next set of guidelines, as the censors realise that they have feelings, too. I sometimes fear I smell the future when I hear some of the ghastly Radio 4 "comedy" broadcast before The Archers in the evening, where some foghorn-voiced clown comes on and in his mock-prole tones bellows out phrases like "Margaret Thatcher" and "George W Bush", which seem guaranteed to get the teenagers in the studio audience hooting hysterically.
It makes me realise that my wife is right when she says, as she often does, that once you get past the age of 40, there isn't really anything on the BBC for you. Except Gardeners' World, of course: and we should make the most of that until someone realises how much it discriminates against those who don't have gardens, and who might feel humiliated by the lack of one