Satire Dies a Death in Hell’s Lounge

Oh god. From behind the wall comes the sound of a ringtone...a rendition of These Boots Were Made For Walking tortured through the John Shuttleworth lens... It sounds terrible and in an ideal world would be followed by some kind of explosion.

Our society is a noisy one and getting noisier, while in the meantime stress levels continues to rise. There is a connection there. We are changing all the time...technology mutates and evolves constantly; it is a bullet that cuts through us all and we all have to chase after it just to stay still.

On the back of this our societal norms are in a state of flux. We do not have the time for the water level to find itself...so by the time we adapt to how to behave in a civilised manner somebody throws a new stone into the pond. We became used to making mobile phone calls in public and have slowly come to find ways of not behaving like smug gobshites, and then new phones come out with hands-free, or videos, or whatever...and everyone behaves like fucked hyenas all over again. The world curses the early adopter and then follows his lead before bowing their heads in shame...and the cycle just keeps repeating.

But that is not what I am trying to write about. Now, somehow I must segue into complaints against television. Hmm...well, both subjects are connected by this idea of how society reacts to something that changes things, at first with an extremism that manifests itself simultaneously in both directions...i.e. hostility from some and love from others...before slowly being adopted by everyday life with its sharper corners filed down. Ideas never seem to be rejected outright...perhaps because the truly dumb concepts disappear before coming to wider notice, unless you work for ITV. If something turns up that is controversial and provokes intelligent debate, the smart money is on the idea staying around and over the years taking its place as a building block for further explorations into the contentious.

So...Channel Four showed a programme on Sunday that looked at television shows that draw complaints. The amount of swearing in the programme means that the programme itself is likely to have logged many complaints.

People react with fury to these things, missing out inconvenient details simply because their anger is a long-held belief that Cannot be Challenged. If a programme is controversial it is shown after the watershed, but people still complain that the scary content was not flagged up. If a programme shown after the watershed with warnings plastered over it like a rash people then complain anyway. This is a strange drop of acid in the televisual well; not the question of why a programme draws complaints, but the question of why the complaints miss the point the show is making. It happens too frequently for comfort and can be normally seen when a programme is satirical.

So why do complaints miss the point with satire? We can split the possible reasons into two categories...one for people who deliberately miss the point and one for those who do it by mistake.

The latter category is easy to dismiss in some ways but do indicate that, however well intentioned, some people take everything at face value. Should we take these people seriously if they become offended, even if we see them as being Wrong?

Well...not really. Fuck them. The world is not a simple place and sometimes we are challenged. Television is no different. If we spoon-fed the country with nothing but face value simplicity we would end up withdrawing so far inward we would disappear into a single point with a pop. And if you are truly so stupid as to believe ‘Til Death Us Do Part is a rallying cry for right-wingers, then you would be generally be too damned stupid to know how to use a telephone to register a complaint anyway.

There are a similar group of people who don’t even watch the show they are criticising...or criticise it in advance because they fear they will not agree with its message. Let us save time by kicking them in the balls with no right of appeal and move on.

Some people know full well that the programme they are criticising is satirical. Some will be complaining on behalf of other people who may not understand, which is a stupid situation and is easy to ignore because you can only take a complaint seriously when a person has taken offence and wishes to complain. Someone who thinks someone completely different may be offended can be laughed at and maybe even killed a bit.

But others are media-savvy. They understand the point that the programme is making and realise that it is the opposite of what they think, which of course is highly embarrassing to them. An intelligent programme making an amusing point about how stupid they are is never going to tickle their funny bone. So they wish to take their revenge. They may, for instance, deliberately take the programme at face value so as to provide them with a reason to complain...which means they are intentionally acting stupid. And this means they can be ignored.

Ah, so we seem to have dismissed all possible complaints about anything outright...right? Of course not, otherwise I would not have phrased the question in that silly knowing manner.

This is where we enter the grey area. Some satire uses strange and unpleasant vehicles to drive their point home...unlike, say, Bremner, Bird and Fortune. They are excellent comedians, but their vehicle is uncontroversial; we are simply laughing at something that flags up a famous person doing something we regard as Wrong. However, much of Chris Morris’s radio and television material has been of such a nature that means it is not the point he is making that is being complained about -- although, as before, this may be the catalyst for complaint when people feel humiliated by the message -- but what he uses to make us laugh in the meantime. We laugh at his list of euphemisms for paedophiles in the Brass Eye special not just because it satirises idiotic tabloid language but because the phrase shrub rocketeer is in itself funny.

That is a mild example of my point and it is easy to think of more extreme examples that result in what may be termed guilty laughter. This is the raw material with which the smarter complainers have a field day. However, we risk plummeting into a full-blown debate about the nature of humour here and that is a matter for philosophy far beyond my own tiny thoughts.

Well, quite, and the temptation here is to say to hell with it and cite something about the ends justifying the means. A little guilty laughter to make a wider point is nothing compared to the damage done by full-on comedy routines about the stupidity of, say, other races. (And note that this is not an issue of political correctness because that term is meaningless and self-satirising. If something is cruel and has innocent victims then it is a Bad Thing.) Yet...and this is where the argument gets stuck in a stupid and tedious eddy with no escape...the idea that a little sin is okay because a big sin is worse does stick in the craw somewhat.

But we must return to the Channel Four show about TV they tried to ban, or risk some kind of absurdist loose-end explosion. The show trod some familiar territory with a voyeur’s eye for swearing, nudity and bad taste...but in one section it listed the three most complained about programmes in British TV history. And out of these I believe that the complaints for two of them have utterly missed the point.

The third most complained about show was Derren Brown’s seance. The complaints missed the point that Brown was debunking the methods of charlatans, instead claiming that the thing was an exercise in evil in its purest form. They seemed to have forgotten that Derren Brown is an illusionist. And that he insisted at the start and at the end of the programme that this was an illusion. So the complaints came across as muddle-headed religious masturbation and were fallacious at best. To hell with them.

The second most complained about show was the episode of Brass Eye mentioned above that covered the subject of paedophilia. The point of the show was that media hysteria about paedophiles was out of control and resulting in acres of insane lies, exaggerated fears and hopeless hypocrisy. The resulting media hysteria, along with a (then) record-breaking complaints postbag, proved nothing but the ability of the media to miss the point (something that is deliberately to play on and whip up fears and sales) and instead claim that we are all sick for, in this case, laughing at the issue of paedophilia.

But we weren’t. We were not laughing at that. The mirror Chris Morris held up to the media’s reaction was funny because it showed them up for the surreally and comically absurd shits that they are when thundering about this or that. Nobody who watched it thought that it is Funny to rape children. Nobody. Nobody.Case dismissed.

Ye gods, this is going on forever. This was supposed to be a short post based around how amusing it is when satire has the ability to make idiots furious...ah, well. Only one more programme to go and we can put this thing to bed.

The most complained about show to date is Jerry Springer – The Opera. Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC, yesterday put his point across about the angry religious reaction to the opera’s showing on BBC2.

”Our duty is not to be swayed by short-run moral panics or claims about this trend or that trend, but rather to consider the issues around broadcast objectively and dispassionately as we can [...] There is sometimes a sense of competitive victimhood, especially in the matter of religion”. – Mark Thompson.

Indeed. And many people complained about the show in advance...which, of course, lets us break out the balls-kicking boots and go a-walloping.

Myself, I enjoyed the show, and I consumed much wine along the way. But there were quite a few people who complained after they had watched the show. In this case I am willing to allow these critics some leniency. At least, some of them...the ones who did not miss any points, the ones who felt their religion was being mocked. This is a valid reason to make your voice heard, no matter what the rest of us think about the concept of religion. It is reality we are dealing with here, and our reality contains a hell of a lot of religion.

Whether the complaints are right and compelling or not is another matter; I happen to believe that the BBC were right to show the show. But in this case the white noise of these complaints cannot be dismissed, and need to be factored in to any serious debate about the programme. Debate keeps us on our toes, and there are usually winners and losers in such circumstances. And in this case the BBC won...but they did not keep a clean sheet and this is why the situation is so interesting.

Although not interesting enough to write another word about it.