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.
Very true Paul. I forgot to add parentheses around national icons. Where do the BBC get their Have I got News audiences from? Wheel them in after Question Time?
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.
Hislop isn't left-wing, he's left-liberal or 'progressive', to gain membership of a media elite who do the same.
His hatred is basically of himself and the public school/Oxbridge type he typifies. But this loathing is taken out on 'Tories' - classic projection. He's not for anything that many old-style lefties were - just his own advancement and attacking those he's jealous of - above all Johnson. He's also a vicious snob, without a hint of empathy. His comments on Brexit voters and their 'idiocy' show that. But it's tactical - he's married to some dull novelist of ethnic origin, so probably he also has hang-ups about 'racism' and what not.
Whatever; he's not a satirist, at all. Unlike some of the great names from Private Eye's past. What's he ever said, or written, that's funny?
I'm so glad that it's not just me who finds Hislop about as amusing as a solid case of the clap these days, which is all the more sad when you recall that Private Eye used to be funny whereas these days it is simply pathetic. I cancelled my subscription when every week's edition featured yet another lecture desssed up in borrowed clothes from Satire about how wicked Brexit would be. It just got boring - like everything the ruling globalist fascists stand for.
Because let's be truthful, these globalists are not Marxist, they are the epitome of Fascism when you drag out of the old memory banks that Fascism is where multinational corporations who really have no concept of 'Nation States' are running the show. Sounds familiar, doesn't it! And oh, how ironic that it is the demented seal-clapping self-congratulatory leftoids who are clamouruing for ever more fascism to fight, er, fascism (at least according to the usual mouthpiece 'celebs', anyway).
Truly are the inmates running the asylum these days
It's ever thus! Posh blokes from public schools and elite universities taking the piss out of everyone else because they believe they are superior and better than everyone else. Paul Merton is included in the posh bloke set-up because he started out as the joke and now is the perfect pet. There was an episode of Citizen Smith from a hundred years ago where Wolfie has a posh bird for a girlfriend and she invites him along to a posh party. He discovers that the only reason she is his girlfriend is because entry to the posh party involves bringing along a "funny little working class oik" and that's what he is. He ends up putting laxatives in the punch. (Young people reading this - it was a sitcom from before PC and Woke). That attitude sums up why Paul Merton was originally included. It sums up how the metropolitan elite see the rest of us. Bunch of total w*nkers is how I see them.
It's worse than that, far worse. Hislop et al pose as being egalitarian, in the way that Marie Antoinette posed as a shepherdess - whilst claiming 'Tories' are the ones who act all superior and look down. Sometimes true of them, of course - but they'd do it directly, not in the humbug way of the liberal-left.
Champagne Socialists! Only these days without the socialism bit unless just for the plebs. Most of my husband's very posh relatives are Champagne Socialists with trust funds. Indeed, some of them even play at being shepherds and shepherdesses (in between flying off to exotic locations for "well deserved breaks") and some even send their kids to state schools to prove their credentials (with private tuition as and when required).
Yes, I remember - I’m 60! What a comedy genius he was. Whereas Hislop is a dull managerialist who thinks he’s funny. Sort of a David Brent, but in journalism.
I see! Well in those days you’ll probably remember there were some genuinely funny people around - Mohamed Ali, Lennon & Peter Sellers spring to mind…. Life was so different then…
Hislop has taken Private Eye backwards from where it was under Richard Ingrams. From 1963 to 1986 Ingrams showed a broad and up-to-date awareness of who the establishment was, and how it was changing. He steered Private Eye to take no prisoners, on the left or the right. Lefties like Claude Cockburn and Paul Foot were as welcome as right wingers like Christopher Booker and “wet” Tories like Auberon Waugh. Eye under Ingrams went hard after Jeremy Thorpe. Bron even stood in Thorpe’s constituency for the “Dog Lover’s Party”. Even after retiring from Private Eye, Ingrams was the first journalist to dish the dirt on Jimmy Saville.
Hislop, on the other hand, lives in a weird fantasy UK, in which he imagines The Establishment to be pretty much what it was in the world ridiculed by Lytton Strachey in “Eminent Victorians”. All the palpable and obvious targets for satire around him have a mental invisibility cloak. They’re people just like him, so how could he possibly poke fun at them?
Except Ingrams could. Ingrams came from privilege, but that never stopped him attacking his own class.
BTW if you want to see the really unpleasant side of Hislop, watch the HIGNFY episode with Paula Yates.
I recall the Yates one. She begged him to stop bullying her and he said something like: 'Do you think the viewers want me to or the audience?'
He's a cunt, pure and simple.
Good comment on Lytton Strachey - and the windmills Hislop deludes himself he tilts at.
I've never heard him once defend anyone who's weak or vulnerable - say like poor Lucy Connolly. Instead, he attacks those he's jealous of, or can score cheap points against. It's all about him staying on the BBC tit.
I haven’t watched TV in about 9 years. It made me feel unwell. One of the programme’s that made me switch off was Mock The Week. The ignorant smugness was intolerable and it was completely unfunny. One of my two, very short, Substack pieces is about how TV comedians are like jesters in royal courts of old, mocking the monarch’s enemies and opponents. The monarch is now replaced by the “agenda” and the modern audience has replaced the monarch’s court who must be mocked and driven by the fear of being held up and ridiculed and despised if they question anything deemed politically correct.
Another unfunny walking cliché is Hugh Dennis. I saw him perform live at a private function. Droning nasal delivery, every comment involved the phrase "Well, I dunno about you, but....", and the targets were predictable in the extreme. We have the same old class of snobby elitists (He's privately educated, son of a Bishop, degree at Cambridge) ridiculing the plebs.
The only funny thing about him is that he doesn't see this.
I hate stand-up! The only funny one I've ever seen (on recording) was Bernard Manning. It has to be uninhibited and without any playing to the gallery.
I feel I’ve missed out on this . Never read it, or watch any one of those programmes - maybe I’ll watch on iplayer (bbc I take it). I was probably busy watching real life like east Enders , Brookside and Corrie😂can’t wait 🔫
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.
'National Icons'! What an idea - they're shitheads.
Very true Paul. I forgot to add parentheses around national icons. Where do the BBC get their Have I got News audiences from? Wheel them in after Question Time?
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.
Hislop isn't left-wing, he's left-liberal or 'progressive', to gain membership of a media elite who do the same.
His hatred is basically of himself and the public school/Oxbridge type he typifies. But this loathing is taken out on 'Tories' - classic projection. He's not for anything that many old-style lefties were - just his own advancement and attacking those he's jealous of - above all Johnson. He's also a vicious snob, without a hint of empathy. His comments on Brexit voters and their 'idiocy' show that. But it's tactical - he's married to some dull novelist of ethnic origin, so probably he also has hang-ups about 'racism' and what not.
Whatever; he's not a satirist, at all. Unlike some of the great names from Private Eye's past. What's he ever said, or written, that's funny?
I'm so glad that it's not just me who finds Hislop about as amusing as a solid case of the clap these days, which is all the more sad when you recall that Private Eye used to be funny whereas these days it is simply pathetic. I cancelled my subscription when every week's edition featured yet another lecture desssed up in borrowed clothes from Satire about how wicked Brexit would be. It just got boring - like everything the ruling globalist fascists stand for.
Because let's be truthful, these globalists are not Marxist, they are the epitome of Fascism when you drag out of the old memory banks that Fascism is where multinational corporations who really have no concept of 'Nation States' are running the show. Sounds familiar, doesn't it! And oh, how ironic that it is the demented seal-clapping self-congratulatory leftoids who are clamouruing for ever more fascism to fight, er, fascism (at least according to the usual mouthpiece 'celebs', anyway).
Truly are the inmates running the asylum these days
I last read PE decades ago - it was already very 'PC' and so tongue-tied about attacking anything on the left.
Hislop is a real turd - and complete creep. He claims to be a satirist yet works for the state!
Communism and Fascism are pretty similar, really. They both end up with a small group of people controlling the rest and enslaving them.
IndeedDave I agree- both ends of the circle- when you join the ends is exactly the same.
Hislop and Merton, with smirks so polite,
Mock the news and stay safe in the light.
Though they jest and they jibe ,
They're the system's sly scribe,
Puppet rebels who just never incite.
It's ever thus! Posh blokes from public schools and elite universities taking the piss out of everyone else because they believe they are superior and better than everyone else. Paul Merton is included in the posh bloke set-up because he started out as the joke and now is the perfect pet. There was an episode of Citizen Smith from a hundred years ago where Wolfie has a posh bird for a girlfriend and she invites him along to a posh party. He discovers that the only reason she is his girlfriend is because entry to the posh party involves bringing along a "funny little working class oik" and that's what he is. He ends up putting laxatives in the punch. (Young people reading this - it was a sitcom from before PC and Woke). That attitude sums up why Paul Merton was originally included. It sums up how the metropolitan elite see the rest of us. Bunch of total w*nkers is how I see them.
It's worse than that, far worse. Hislop et al pose as being egalitarian, in the way that Marie Antoinette posed as a shepherdess - whilst claiming 'Tories' are the ones who act all superior and look down. Sometimes true of them, of course - but they'd do it directly, not in the humbug way of the liberal-left.
Champagne Socialists! Only these days without the socialism bit unless just for the plebs. Most of my husband's very posh relatives are Champagne Socialists with trust funds. Indeed, some of them even play at being shepherds and shepherdesses (in between flying off to exotic locations for "well deserved breaks") and some even send their kids to state schools to prove their credentials (with private tuition as and when required).
Insufferable!
"In short, Ian Hislop ... "
Now that's comedy.👏🏻👏🏻
Glad someone spotted the pun!
…his very existence probably detracts from the universal sum of laughter available… That’s hilarious Paul 🤣
might be before your time but Peter Cooke used to run Private Eye, those were the days…
Yes, I remember - I’m 60! What a comedy genius he was. Whereas Hislop is a dull managerialist who thinks he’s funny. Sort of a David Brent, but in journalism.
I see! Well in those days you’ll probably remember there were some genuinely funny people around - Mohamed Ali, Lennon & Peter Sellers spring to mind…. Life was so different then…
Hislop has taken Private Eye backwards from where it was under Richard Ingrams. From 1963 to 1986 Ingrams showed a broad and up-to-date awareness of who the establishment was, and how it was changing. He steered Private Eye to take no prisoners, on the left or the right. Lefties like Claude Cockburn and Paul Foot were as welcome as right wingers like Christopher Booker and “wet” Tories like Auberon Waugh. Eye under Ingrams went hard after Jeremy Thorpe. Bron even stood in Thorpe’s constituency for the “Dog Lover’s Party”. Even after retiring from Private Eye, Ingrams was the first journalist to dish the dirt on Jimmy Saville.
Hislop, on the other hand, lives in a weird fantasy UK, in which he imagines The Establishment to be pretty much what it was in the world ridiculed by Lytton Strachey in “Eminent Victorians”. All the palpable and obvious targets for satire around him have a mental invisibility cloak. They’re people just like him, so how could he possibly poke fun at them?
Except Ingrams could. Ingrams came from privilege, but that never stopped him attacking his own class.
BTW if you want to see the really unpleasant side of Hislop, watch the HIGNFY episode with Paula Yates.
I recall the Yates one. She begged him to stop bullying her and he said something like: 'Do you think the viewers want me to or the audience?'
He's a cunt, pure and simple.
Good comment on Lytton Strachey - and the windmills Hislop deludes himself he tilts at.
I've never heard him once defend anyone who's weak or vulnerable - say like poor Lucy Connolly. Instead, he attacks those he's jealous of, or can score cheap points against. It's all about him staying on the BBC tit.
I haven’t watched TV in about 9 years. It made me feel unwell. One of the programme’s that made me switch off was Mock The Week. The ignorant smugness was intolerable and it was completely unfunny. One of my two, very short, Substack pieces is about how TV comedians are like jesters in royal courts of old, mocking the monarch’s enemies and opponents. The monarch is now replaced by the “agenda” and the modern audience has replaced the monarch’s court who must be mocked and driven by the fear of being held up and ridiculed and despised if they question anything deemed politically correct.
Good call - court jesters to this bullshit!
I suspect Hislop & Merton are disciples of Eric Gill.
There is no comedy anywhere. Especially on publicly funded media. It’s cruel, crude and execrable.
Another unfunny walking cliché is Hugh Dennis. I saw him perform live at a private function. Droning nasal delivery, every comment involved the phrase "Well, I dunno about you, but....", and the targets were predictable in the extreme. We have the same old class of snobby elitists (He's privately educated, son of a Bishop, degree at Cambridge) ridiculing the plebs.
The only funny thing about him is that he doesn't see this.
I hate stand-up! The only funny one I've ever seen (on recording) was Bernard Manning. It has to be uninhibited and without any playing to the gallery.
I enjoyed PE for years, but it has lost its edge under Hislop. Maybe a new editor, such as Toby Young, to throw a bit of bile at both parties?
Same editor at PE for 40+ years, who's also had a sinecure at the BBC for that time. Small wonder he's a complacent left-media aristo.
I feel I’ve missed out on this . Never read it, or watch any one of those programmes - maybe I’ll watch on iplayer (bbc I take it). I was probably busy watching real life like east Enders , Brookside and Corrie😂can’t wait 🔫