BBC 'SATIRE' IS NO LAUGHING MATTER
ESPECIALLY 'HAVE I GOT NEWS FOR YOU'
Have I Got News For You is the equivalent of TV folk-rock cabarets in the old DDR, produced by its gruesome regime to mock Capitalism. The unfortunate East Germans were unconvinced, and the ‘comedians’ et al who participated were despised.
Similarly, we're now a country with active political oppression and jailing of dissidents. Co-star ‘satirist’ Ian Hislop has said nothing to condemn this - because he clearly doesn’t object. No wonder the show is so unfunny: somehow, people don't tend to find state propagandists funny.
In short, Hislop - and the BBC - are cheerleaders for the oppressive ‘progressive’ establishment running Britain so cruelly and incompetently. The only joke is how this regime-approved bullfrog claims to be some fearless satirist, holding power to account. His magazine said not a word to criticise the police’s harassment of Alison Pearson. On the contrary, Private Eye claimed she was attention seeking over this attack on journalistic freedom. What a pathetic end to a publication which once fearlessly opposed such mistreatment, before political partiality and narrow self-interest silenced it.
In Stalin's Russia, similar types were laughing with approval at the show-trials, demanding death sentences for Bukharin et al. Then lording it up at meetings of well-paid cultural commissars, whilst the Soviet masses starved and millions languished in the Gulags. Hislop would have fitted in perfectly, fooling himself (but no one else) that he was some sort of dangerous wit.
I once saw the show filmed, in the 1990s. Everything was scripted, including the laughs. Hislop was rude and arrogant towards the audience, behaving like Little Lord Fauntleroy. Merton was just as unfunny, swearing when he messed up his infinitely unamusing and supposedly ad-lib lines.
At the end of the appalling show, they had to go back and re-record the bits with no laughter - of which there were many. Hislop had got almost none: how could he? He's less amusing than root-canal surgery without anaesthetic. Indeed, his very existence probably detracts from the universal sum of laughter available.
I remember the creep turning to us and smirking: 'Enjoying yourselves?' as we endured this - I left, and insisted they let me out. I think the re-recording took at least half an hour and most people stayed like dummies, to be insulted and used for this charade.
The article below explores the pit into which BBC satire has sunk. In such a censorious climate, it’s small wonder the censors themselves are so pitiful at making anyone laugh. Actually, it’s never been very funny; how could it be, with Hislop and Merton:
'HAVE I GOT NEWS FOR YOU' IS SHIT
To round off, here’s a recent ‘stand-up’ from the BBC:
Hahhhhhaaaaaaa hhhaaaaaahh. Allo and give me a clap - no not THE clap, I can get that from Boris Johnson's toothbrush - ahhhhaaaahhhhhhaaa - did anyone here WANT Brexit?
What, with fried or scrambled? Ahhhaaaaahhhhheaaaaaaaaahhhh - get it? They thought it was BREAKFAST!!!!!!!
AND IT WOZ EGGS - BUT NOT THE SORT BORIS FERTILIZES A LOT!!!!!!!!
How's Maggie Thatcher doing these days - DEAD? Ahhhhahhhhhahhha:
DING DONG THE WITCH IS DEAD!
Talk about POLL TAX - HOW ABOUT A POLE UP HER BACKSIDE!
Guess wot? I call the Daily Mail the Daily Heil! It's so right wing, they think Nigel Farage is a LEFTY!!!!!!!
But seriously, wot is it with Liz Truss - sounds like support for a hernia!
Got to give it her, she knew how to.........................crash the economy!!!!!!!
And see those Tories - they got a woman as leader - but I reckon she's erm, well, am I allowed to say it. OK forget that:
AHHHAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHAAAAAAA.
I was at Cambridge - might as well have been Uxbridge, except Boris used to be MP there, and he's a fascist.
Anyone ever had Capri Sun? I tell you who 'as - DONALD TRUMP - HE'S MORE ORANGE THAN IAN PAISLEY!
(audience rushes on and beheads him).
It’s always reassuring when you hear other people confirm your suspicions that national icons like Hislop are really arrogant, smug, superior, condescending pricks. I’ve never found him funny and stopped reading Eye when he took over. Same applies to Merton.
I used to like some old-fashioned hard-left comedians. BBC Radio Four’s old House Trotskyists, Mark Steel and the late Jeremy Hardy, never hid their political preferences. But Hardy in particular was very willing to poke fun at the “People’s Front of Judea” absurdities of his own side. And Steel still goes out of his way to proselytise his strangely genteel take on Revolutionary Communism to elderly Tory audiences in the shires. Alexei Sayle even has his moments. He famously said: “I think, despite all the chaos we create, the famines, the gulags, left-wing people are basically good people. Admittedly left-wing regimes might over time devolve into authoritarian kletpocracies whose autocratic rule is enforced by terror and torture. But we do mean well.” It takes a kind of self awareness to make a joke like that which Hislop is simply incapable of.