November 4, 2008

Dominic Lawson: The French find our local obsessions simply ridiculous

The need of comedians to be seen tackling taboos has been pushed beyond reason

The Frenchman in the Eurostar lounge threw the international edition of his English newspaper aside and asked me a question I found difficult to answer. "Tell me, when the Americans are about to decide on their President, and the markets are still collapsing, and mass murder is about to take place in the Congo, why is the biggest story in this newspaper about people who don't matter at all?"

Since I have managed to survive without listening to programmes featuring either Jonathan Ross or Russell Brand, my intuitive sympathies were with the puzzled French businessman. Yet somehow I felt obliged to come to the defence of the British press, which in one guise or another has been my employer for almost three decades.

"It's not really a story about these unimportant individuals," I declared. "It's all about a great British institution – the BBC. We care very much about it. It's like a member of the family. We call it Auntie. If these men had done what they did on an obscure satellite channel, no one would be too bothered about it."

"Ah, I see," he said, more out of politeness than satisfaction. What I didn't say was that over the past week in France, as I picked up on world news via the internet, I was astounded to see the escapades of two delayed adolescents dominate the front page of the BBC's own global news site for day after day. If you want an example of the British media's interminable obsession with its own tribulations – to the exclusion of other issues of greater interest to the public – there you have it.

A psychiatrist might even have a field day with the fact that the newspapers most incensed by the behaviour of the BBC in exposing to ridicule an elderly actor and his libertine granddaughter were those whose own contributions to the theatre of cruelty are legion. This, at least, was the argument put to me by one of our most popular television comedians: it was deplorable, he said, that the BBC had sunk to the level of The Sun or The News Of The World.

There is something in that – which presumably is why the BBC has taken condign action against those associated with the broadcast. When a newspaper does something of which we violently disapprove, we are at liberty to cancel our subscription. The same applies to a satellite television broadcaster.

Yet television owners are obliged to continue funding the BBC via the licence fee, with the only alternative being imprisonment. Even governments can be voted out of office by electors dissatisfied with how their taxes are being spent: the BBC, however, continues to wallow serenely in a "Jacuzzi of cash" (as its current director-general used to complain when he was running a commercial television station).

On the other hand, running a broadcaster in such circumstances does have one big drawback. It's not just that it can't please all of the people all of the time: it is impossible to please all the people any of the time. No matter how much the national broadcaster might try to produce a mix of programmes to satisfy all ages and tastes, the licence fee-payer does not exist who believes that his money is spent exactly in the way he would have done so himself, given the choice.

This one, for example, still bridles at the fact that the BBC will not bid against the satellite companies for live cricket, but is prepared to spend hundreds of millions outbidding another terrestrial channel for the so-called sport of Formula 1. Was anyone watching the victory of Lewis Hamilton on Sunday actually able to see what happened at the critical moment, instead of relying on the commentator to persuade him that indistinguishable Car A had just thrillingly overtaken indistinguishable Car B?

In the field of humour – or perhaps that should be "humour" – there is a particular risk of arousing fury in one person with precisely the programme that sends another person into paroxysms of pleasure. This is because so much of what we call comedy is based on saying the unsayable. If it were commonly said, then it would no longer make us laugh. There is a very thin line between shock and laughter; many of the greatest comedians perform this moral high-wire act without a safety net – and occasionally they fall off, sustaining terrible injuries to their reputation.

Having finally heard the Brand-Ross tormenting of Andrew Sachs via YouTube, I am – boringly – among the great majority who found this merely cruel, rather than cruelly funny. The interesting question is why it is that someone such as Russell Brand – Ross is clearly no comedian at all – should have felt the need to go quite so far, other than for the hell of it.

Perhaps this is where the need of comedians to be seen to tackle taboos has been pushed beyond reason by an increasing absence of boundaries to break. When the whole idea of privacy in sexual matters is seen as hopelessly old-fashioned inhibition, how far must an "edgy" comedian think he needs to go in order to startle his young audience into gasps of incredulous laughter? The answer is: a very, very long way indeed – and yet without any restraint, where is the tension that has always tempered true comedy?

These thoughts came to me on my return to the rail services in England, and hearing a young woman talking loudly in her mobile telephone to some lover about her recent examination for a sexually transmitted disease. The other English people in the carriage seemed unsurprised by this casually revolting monologue; but there was a French couple sitting opposite – their Parisian fastidiousness evident in appearance alone – who gazed in palpable astonishment at this unselfconscious exercise in personal debasement.

I would hazard that neither Russell Brand nor Jonathan Ross would have found this episode surprising, entrenched as they are in what is sometimes laughingly known as "youth culture" – after all, if they were not so entrenched, they would not be seen as so commercially valuable by a big media company desperate for access to this section of the market.

Unfortunately for them, what may indeed be acceptable conduct for their target teenage audience is merely rank bad taste for the vast majority of home-owners who pay their BBC salaries.

Some of their supporters complain that comedians on the BBC now face "censorship". This is a laughable objection – and not just because it confuses editing with dictatorship. If they want to try something too sick or outrageous for consumption on the national broadcast network, there will be no shortage of privately owned comedy clubs who would pay generously for their most incontinent outbursts of self-expression.

I realise that in arguing at length about the problems of British humour, I am in danger of committing exactly the same sin of trivialised self-absorption pointed out by the Frenchman in the Eurostar lounge; but when you think about it, this is, au fond – as they say in Paris – an argument about the nature of British life as whole. Somehow, that makes it all the more humiliating.

d.lawson@independent.co.uk [mailto:d.lawson@independent.co.uk]