u/AllThingsAreReady

Tempers seem frayed, Selby whipped the table with his cue, Higgins' "oh my god", even Robertson was pretty worked up just now.. by his standards. Something in the air maybe. A lot of people I know IRL, including me, seem a little.. fraught and tetchy right now.

The Fast Show, Harry Enfield, Not the Nine O’Clock News, Hugh & Laurie, French & Saunders, Big Train, Victoria Wood, The Two Ronnies, Goodness Gracious Me, Monty Python, Catherine Tate, Mitchell & Webb (I know they tried recently), even Little Britain, although David Walliams is an insufferable prick, but that’s for another rant!.

Those sketch shows did more than just entertain in my opinion. They held up a satirical mirror to society, and pointed out its flaws, flawed personalities, and idiosyncratic foibles. They created characters that were widely identifiable, with character traits - mainly annoying ones - that huge sections of society recognised. 

You can just tell so many comedy characters, in sitcoms as well, are based on a real person or social annoyance that really bugged one of the writers (think the No Offence woman, or Competitive Dad in the Fast Show). By writing it into a show it’s like saying, ‘Am I the only one who finds it infuriating when…’, and by mocking people’s flaws and annoying qualities in a funny, affectionate way, you can draw their attention to them where they might be totally unaware. 

The same thing used to happen on a national, cultural level, and I think it was quite healthy and necessary. And because there was a much more mainstream audience for big shows, the message got through into the collective mind. I remember in the 90s people would watch an episode of Harry Enfield, say, and the next day be quoting Kevin the teenager lines, or bits from Little Britain. They were everywhere. You literally heard it in the streets and in shops, just people quoting lines (“Computer says noo”). Because they were perceptive observations about life in Britain, or voiced things people had already noticed but not articulated in a comedic way.

Now everything’s fragmented, and there are no real sketch shows of that kind. Yes, we have ways of taking the piss out of our own culture, splintered across thousands of memes, on thousands of forums, platforms, divided (like Reddit) by interest, lifestyle, identity, like a cell that’s divided and divided. There is no collective experience of pointing out, lampooning, affectionately or otherwise satirising the hell out of the people who deserve it, because there’s no real collective British culture any more.

But are there still many, many annoying traits of British culture, things we all notice? Irritating people and grating things about life? F**k yes there are. It’s just that now we have no mainstream way of laughing at them, no way of holding up that mirror and saying ‘Look we all find that reaalllly f***ing annoying, so can you stop it please?’

And I think many of the current outlets for national humour have become quite mono-dimensional and dull. If you look at the big British subreddits, for example, it’s basically just the same cheap political memes about ‘flagshaggers’ and Farage repeated over and over again. It’s all just politics, and very little actually about British culture, and standup comedy has followed that to an extent. I feel we’re lacking the good old gentle self-knocking of the sketch show, and it’s a shame. Am I Bovvered? Yes. I miss them, and I think we’re all missing out without them.