Eric & Ernie, Kings of Festive TV (Image: Getty)
We live in strange times. We’re supposed to believe that a car dressed in a doily is award-winning art. That unrecognisable perma-pouting nonentities and auto-tuned wannabes are unmissable talents. And that each fresh crop of bungling political pygmies know what they’re doing. Then there’s the . Is it still fit for purpose? Or is Britain’s senior broadcaster, in the words Sir used to describe the civil service, comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline?
The Corporation’s traditional strengths were its impeccable neutrality, its passion for highbrow drama, like the ground-breaking Play For Today of the 70s and 80s, and its outstanding record in commissioning classic sitcoms and light entertainment shows.
Christmas TV used to feel special, thanks to a long, distinguished list of comedians and comedies that encompasses Morecambe & Wise, The Two Ronnies, Only Fools & Horses, One Foot In The Grave, The Stanley Baxter Show, The Royle Family…and many more.
Sadly, this year’s Yuletide line-up comes with a distinct whiff of “Will this do?”
More than a third of BBC1’s festive shows are repeats, and nearly three-quarters of BBC2’s are. For fresh laughs on Christmas Day, they’re banking on the long-delayed Gavin & Stacey finale at 9pm, with an 11pm episode of Mrs Brown’s Boys episode to titillate tipsy swearing enthusiasts.
Comedy used to be at the heart of the Yuletide schedules now it’s rationed and pushed out to the margins. The one exception is the gentle charm of Wallace & Gromit (not Gregg).
New sitcoms with mass appeal have been thin on the ground for more than a decade, and it’s really not good enough. In these turbulent times, we need escapism and happiness more than ever.
Making viewers sad is easy – all you have to do is watch the news or sit through . Albert Square’s endless litany of misery this Xmas includes drug addiction, alcoholism, suicidal thoughts and Cindy’s big adultery reveal.
Wouldn’t it be more of a surprise if she wasn’t over the side? The club for Walford men who haven’t slept with Cindy is smaller than a Feminists for Gregg Wallace rally.
Making us laugh is a lot harder than re-making old game-shows, but British TV managed if for decades. So what went wrong?
Sadly the have become too obsessed with focus groups, box-ticking and posturing to reverse this soul-sapping decline. They say they are actively looking for new comedies, but it’s never been harder to pitch one. For starters the would-be John Sullivan would have to team up with a production company before they will even deign to look at your script.
Once you manage that, your work will then be perused by some media graduate who probably thinks The Last Leg is cutting edge comedy.
I’m reliably informed that BBC1 are currently only interested ensemble comedies with the cachet that every character is equally developed and given equal screen time. With that approach Fools & Horses would never have got off the ground. Del-Boy was centre-stage from the start, and other characters were only fleshed out as the show grew from a sitcom to a national treasure.
And, by the way, did anyone else think the reconstructed face of Saint Nicholas look like David Jason crossed with Buster Merryfield? How apt. The Trotters were the saviours of many a 90s TV Christmas.
Yes we can still see Del-Boy and co and the other comedy legends I mentioned on repeat-driven channels, but where is their modern-day equivalent? And how can the comedy crisis be fixed?
If Sir Keir were running the Beeb he would no doubt set up a year-long publicly-funded review. In my opinion, the problem needs a Churchillian ‘action this day’ approach. Set up a small team of people with a knowledge of and a love for popular entertainment, let writers pitch directly to them and let them commission a new series of Comedy Playhouse. Then the best pilots go to series.
In other words, take the process out of the hands of bungling birdbrains entirely.
Sticking with publicly financed telly, the week-long cooking of Gregg Wallace’s goose served to distract us from Auntie’s other recent embarrassments which simmered away out of the public gaze.
Rosie Millard stood down as chair of Children In Need, saying that she was “thrown under a bus” for raising concerns over grants given to a scandal-plagued transgender charity.
She wanted Children in Need – the ’s charity for children and disadvantaged youth – to stop funding the tarnished LGBT Youth Scotland whose previous CEO James Rennie was convicted as a ringleader of Scotland’s biggest paedophile network.
Another contributor to their coming-out guide was convicted of crimes against children this year.
Millard also found that the charity was pushing “notions of gender fluidity” in primary schools and questioned their approach on puberty blockers and chest binders.
She said: “I felt this charity was harming children, and Children in Need – the mission for Children in Need – is to support and help children, help them be the best they can be and not harm them.”
Children In Need, who handed them just under half a million quid across 14 years, has now stopped funding them. But Millard quit because she “didn’t have the full support of the board”.
Who on the board thought this was a good thing? The viewing public, who fund the well-meaning but traditionally tedious event, deserve to know.
Other topical embarrassments include their just published, quota-filling 100 Women Of The Year, a list that included ten eco-loons, several women fashionably hostile to , and a transwoman biologist. Guardian readers would no doubt applaud, but the Corporation is funded by the licence fee, a tax on all viewers, and is therefore supposed to be unbiased.
Maybe their ridiculous Verifies mob (cost to us, a mere £3.3million a year) could investigate this ingrained partiality. But no wait. Last month Verify quoted lawyer Dan Neidle, cited as an “independent tax expert” to say the government’s claim that as few as 500 farms would be impacted by Rachel Thieves’s tax changes.
Mr Neidle turned out to be a former Labour Party activist.
Questions have also been raised over their trust of Palestinian journalist Mahmoud Awadeyah associated with the Tasnim News Agency – an Iranian news outlet associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – and heavily partisan social media posts.
This raises two obvious questions: who verifies the Verifiers, and why do the need a £3.3m fact-checking team? Fact-checking is a job for journalists and they already employs more than 5,500 of them. Aren’t they fit for purpose either?
You can’t blame Jacob Rees-Mogg for taking the Discovery+ shilling. The former North Somerset MP, once described as “a haunted Victorian pencil” and “the honourable member for the 17th century”, can now be found starring in Meet The Moggs a kind of Keeping Up With The Kardashians for English toffs, along with his wife Helena and three of their six children.
But there’s nothing here to compete with Kim Kardashian walloping Khloe with her purse. Instead, the saintly Jacob offers insights like “I sleep completely still.” Well, there’s not much room to move in a coffin, you might think. But no, the eccentric JRM reveals, “One sleeps more comfortably in a bigger bed.”
You didn’t get insights like that from Kim, who was also capable of great rages – “I have all the time, all the money, and all of the resources to burn them all to the ****ing ground”, she once fumed. Here we get the Moggster thanking hecklers for their hatred and speaking Latin in his private chapel.
He is of course unfailing polite throughout. The show’s biggest surprise is his droll wife, Helena, who he calls Lady Rees-Mogg, the mother of their six children.
“We had to try five times before we got one who looked like me,” she says. And as they prepare for Jacob to lose his seats, Helena observes, “Other careers are available.”
Hubby already has one, hosting his own show on GB News, but if he needed another income source, he really should have opted for ITV’s jungle. It would have been better-paid, less time-consuming and more entertaining for viewers.
*Rory Bremner once quipped that Mogg doesn’t use autocue at GB News. Instead he has a monk holding up illuminated manuscripts.
*Melanie Sykes said Gregg Wallace’s jokes made her retire from TV. So he’s not all bad, then.
Now porridge adverts have been banned by the Nannies, will ‘food-crimes’ be edited out of old TV shows. We can’t subject small children to shocking scenes of Worzel Gummidge and Aunt Sally tucking in to “a nice slice of cake and a cup of tea” or the Royle Family enjoying “chippy tea Fridays”.
If they can remove the cigarette from Oscar Wilde’s statue what chance is there of repeats of Rock And Chips?
PS. Anyone else remember the scene when Dave told Jim Royle he’d met someone just out of prison at their local Chinese takeaway? “What was he in for, Dave?” asked Jim. “Beef satay and chips,” he replied.
Small joys of TV: the woman who painted her face to look like Ant & Dec (I’m A Celebrity: Unpacked). FA Cup football – livelier and more chaotic than the Prem. Bewitched repeated from the start on Rewind TV. And the Wheeltappers & Shunters Social Club re-running on Talking Pictures TV where, as well as variety turns like Two-Ton Tessie O’Shea and Bernard Manning telling clean gags, you could see meat pies on sale for 10p. Bargain.
Random irritations: Smoggie Queens. Sir attacking political “gimmicks” while staging a launch at Pinewood Studios, the iconic heart of the British film industry. As usual Starmer was flatter than a steamrollered pancake, a clear case of “Lights, camera…inaction”. The laughable dialogue on ’s Black Doves, an odd blend of spy thriller and Love Actually. Disengage brain before watching (although it still tops the latest series of Shetland).