Why UK television comedy will from now on be shit

When the Weakest Link first came onto our TV screens, my dad made a comment along the lines of 'that will be the death of TV that will'. I wasn't entirely sure what this muttered gobbledygook meant at the time, but I thought it gloomily amusing enough a thought to file it away in my memory banks.

Mrs D-D and I were talking, on the way home from a trip to Iceland earlier today, about the question as to why comedy today is so uninteresting. And although I'm sure this explanation has been mentioned by the pundits before, its not one I'd thought about, and Mrs D-D's proposition is quite simple. More of this in a sec.

Over Christmas I watched On the Buses with my darling family. While the slapstick was crass, the jokes a bit lame (though I liked some of the scenery - where were all the cars? back then) there was something very cheesily inclusive about it. I know people who aren't necessarily carbon copies of Blakey and co, but do share characteristics that would have been easy to caricature in 1972.

And here's the point.

Comedy no longer laughs with people, as On The Buses did, but at people. The BBC wrote comedy that was by and largely about middle class Britain and it was aimed at middle-class Britain. Programmes like Only Fools and Horses were the incredibly successful exceptions to the rule, and they were of Delboy and Rodders, not poking snide fun at them even though the script obvious did on a surface level. ITV made bad comedy. Not bad-bad but that which could pull in advertising rating. Lowest common denominator stuff but, if you've ever written for kiddies, you'll know that this is the hardest audience to please. In the same way that a mass audience had a bullshit detector that bloody well knew when it having the piss taken out of it by some media snob. Media snobs didn't make ITV money. They made programmes which appealed to them. And since societally we weren't half as media savvy as we are now, there weren't the sheer numbers of media snobs in the first place.

When you see those list programmes featuring the 100 worst or most embarrassing TV, Love Thy Neighbour is always mentioned. Now I'm far too young to remember it, though I do remember the Fosters and Mixed Blessings which covered roughly the same ground. LTN is ALWAYS dissed. Always. And the people who diss it probably either a) never watched it because they were having their nappies changed, or b) are, by my definition at least, very middle class. The fact they are now pundits now makes them so at least. What I can say is that my granny loved it. Truly loved it, and she certainly wasn't a racist, at least not by today's definition. She was of Jewish decent and was extremely proud of that. Half her church was non-white and it just wasn't an issue with her. TV is only seen as embarrassing by a generation who eiher didn't get the humour in the first place, or who retrospectively 'get it' and are ashamed of themselves liking it (I used to like Mind Your Language a lot, but would find it cringeingly embarrassing to watch now, so guilty as charged of hypocrisy. Except I'm only writing a no-man-army blog making me the grand total of £ zilch and these pundits are preaching their revisionist bullshit to millions. Which strikes me as more than a little false). It was only with the wonderful, knowing acting of Warren Mitchell as Alf Garnett that racism became acceptable - oooh look at that silly arsehole having a go at those poor niggers - oops, did I say that? - I meant coloureds next door. Isn't he horrible? And aren't we lovely people for putting up with the Johnson's at number 42. Lovely family, lovely family... Weren't we all so fucking ironic little sophisticats?

So what happened to the great bullshit detecting ability of the great British public. Nothing. What happen was that Thatcher appeared and killed the solid "we're all in this shit together" mentality of the British working class and made us compete with each other. For jobs, the a promotion, for housing with the right to buy scheme. Divide. Conquer. Old rules, still works. Comedy-wise you can see the beginnings of the mock the hand that feeds you school of laughmongery with Spitting Image. Now I for one found Spitting Image one of the best comedic expressions there has been. It also unleashed a secret weapon - one that always been in the armoury, just one which had been forgotten about, and its the simplest and yet most devastating one. If you want to bring something down, laugh at it. Politician been sleeping with rent-boy? Who needs scandalous headlines when a few well aimed chops with the fist armed full of jokes can be that more a threat. Politicians set themselves up to be mocked, and for the first time, on a mass scale, we did. Then we turned the bloody tables on ourselves.

After WW2 itself, then rations and large scale austerity, there was a sense of maybe not the class structure as we knew it as dead and buried, but at least of it giving out its last writhing throes. Things could never return to upstairs-downstair pre-war conditions, could they? The white heat of technology, housing for all after the war, very few people, at least as the 60s exploded into life, were in absolute poverty. This would made the class structure dead. This would make us, eventually all equal. What utter and complete rubbish that wee populist dream was, but how much the vast majority believed it. How tasty a morsal it must be been, dangling an inch from our noses. The spirit of optimism may have been in the air, but the spirit of truth wasn't as the 70s its oil crises and winter of discontent made us all draw together round the metaphorical hearth once again as we did when Germany was bombing the bejesus our of land. We all know about Thatcherism's success in whipping away the solid, stolid and at times stultifying bedrock of the working class away. Now we could complete against each other. Now we could own our own house! Now we could be like those suburbanites in Surbiton with their BMWs. Now Romford man could apply market stall ethics to the trading floor. Now we could be free to not giving a flying-f about our neighbour. Set the dogs fighting amongst themselves for what appeared to be tastier scraps - the odd Versace suit, better quality DIY products, bigger widescreen TVs. Compared with the amount the bottom 90 percent earn in this country, what's left to fight over is scraps, despite the air of bling attached them. 10 percent of the wealth, land and profits 'shared' amongst 90 percent of the populace. And the bling looks so sparkly, the rewards for 'success' - read 'most successful shaftage of neighbour' appear so tempting. Doesn't it?

Set in this light, its hardly surprising that we can't do comedy any more. And why Americans are seen as doing it better - America, at least the large middle slice, being more homogenous than the UK's population. How can we laugh at ourselves when not only don't we not know who are 'ourselves' but even when we do, we despise that very body for being so ordinary, so embarrasing, so...crap.

I find myself doing this a lot, so I'm not aiming for holier-than-thou sainthood. I look down on fellow Dagenham-ites. Many of whom work as hard if not harder than me, earn as much, possibly much more money as me, live in the same ticky-tacky house as me and just try and get by, the same as me. I should see the guys round here as my equals because they are, at least that. And the reason I don't is because I don't want to be here - I want to live a lifestyle which doesn't involve an hour's slog into town each way each day, coming back to a pebbledasheed home, stopping off at the supermarket whose front door is surrounded by mong children, then eating the same food, watching the same telly. I'm BETTER than them aren't I? No, of course not.

So getahead mentality kicks in: Soon we'll be mill-yun-airs. Bollox we'll be, but its he same false ethos which was the engine behind Only Fools and Horses has been engraved our our thought processes and our dreams as it was with the fictional Peckhamites. Except, whereas Delboy was laughable but endearing (and hey, he actually did something in a vain attempt to achieve the end, ridiculous as it is) we not only believe, that I that we ought to be doing something better, we're WORTH IT) but many of us believe that this social leap is ours by birthright and we can achieve this jump by doing fuck-all because we're WORTH IT.

And now comedy, and particular the new comedy, reality TV, deprived of good old racism as a weapon, TV does nothing more than take the piss out of everyone else. Who is: FAT. Who is: OLD. Who is: AN ADDICT. Who is: A MONG! Who is: UP TO THEIR EARS IN DEBT. Who is: DISABLED. If telly had more balls and didn't just make a loud noise, the most obvious target is of course: Who is MUSLIM. Basically, anyone who doesn't conform. Which actually is just about everyone. Even the super-rich are fair game. Look at the way the Beckhams have been set up so that they can be shaken down again.

So my dad's comment was right, though he got the order wrong. The Weakest Link can only work in a society which is so competitive that its members feel a need to compete with everyone else. It is not the cause, but merely and indicator of where things have seriously become screwed. The Weakest Link should be a game where you, as the strongest link, try to keep on board the second strongest link until the end of the game, so that you can bank the maximum amount of money. But time and time I've seen the strongest player reject the second strongest link too early because they are a rival, or because they are a woman, or because they don't like the player's bald patch. And maybe that's just a reflection of society in that we sometimes don't see our friends and allies because they are not obviously like us. They might be blind, or stammer, or be a different race, or hang around in a different milieu to us, therefore they are not ONE OF US.

Until the working class becomes united in believing in itself again, by actually recognising its members (most of whom would strongly deny any kind of membership and certainly not with HIM, or HER or Mr Ali from round the corner, the sense of solidarity can never happen and we'll all be at each other's throats battling it out in our own Satre-esque mini hells where we are isolated from one another by fear. Can this coming together happen. No. Its just a dream. Emile Durkheim wrote all about these bitter fruits 120 years ago. And just how right was he.

ITV will continue not to able to make bad but oh-so-funny comedies, we'll all be watching more and more degraded fuckwits on less-reality, more hellyvision-tellyvision and we'll all be harking back to the 70s when comedy was either The Good Life or George and Mildred. And everyone had three channels of shit to choose from and all was well.

On that downbeat note, I'm off to watch some spazbrains swear and some Z-list slebs showing off their general knwledge.

Celebrity Big Brother to you.