Satire came up when I was once at a talk given by Sir Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher’s Chief Press Secretary, during which he cited political satire as “one of five things that have brought this country to its knees”.
When the audience were invited to ask questions, I firstly thanked him for his contribution to my income as a satirist (the audience laughed; Ingham somehow managed to hold back on the guffaws), before enquiring about his thoughts on the quality of the genre in China and North Korea.
There’s a reason dictators populate their jails with journalists and satirists; never mind dissent, even questions and challenging commentary aren’t tolerated. As the West veers ever more to the right, the recent row over the Arts Council of Great Britain’s ‘guidance’ on not subsidising art which contains political statements – following government threats regarding its own funding – exposes the slippery slope even liberal democracies currently find themselves on.
Satire past and present
It wasn’t always like this. During the First Gulf War in 1990, I was a BBC comedy producer; my boss, the head of comedy, asked me to take the helm of Week Ending, Radio 4’s weekly satirical sketch show, for the duration of the conflict.
This was a different kind of BBC from the one we know now, where the Tory-installed management gaily cancel supposedly ‘left-wing’ comedy shows – left, non-right and centre-left, one might say – and I was given free rein to steer the writers to make apposite political points, without which I would have declined the invitation to produce the series, as most of my personal apposite points were against the invasion of Iraq. Even in those days, this was a brave decision by the network, as every other broadcaster in the country removed anything vaguely satirical from the schedules, as if there was a pre-general election purdah.
Satire is freedom of speech
Why is satirical comment important? Freedom of speech is part of the bedrock of a free society. Satire is one of its pillars. But a democracy is only as strong as its democratic institutions. If we’re not able to highlight the overreach of power and ridicule those who abuse their positions, it’s not much of a right, is it?
Satire has a unique attribute in its ability to ‘precision bomb’ (forgive the Gulf War analogy, old habits die hard) the subject matter with a few pithy lines or brush strokes (in the case of cartoons). In contrast to worthy polemic, the essence of the point is instantly evident.
Who can forget Spitting Image’s completely grey John Major puppet, pushing peas around his plate week after week, or David Steel forever sitting in David Owen’s suit pocket? Thatcher herself was lampooned by the show, her overbearing, strong-willed character portrayed at a restaurant table with her ministers, giving her order of steak – “raw” – to the waitress and, on being asked about the vegetables, replying: “They’ll have the same as me.”
Satire has power
If satire didn’t have power, it wouldn’t upset anyone. In Paris in 2015, 12 people were killed, and 11 injured, by two radical Islamists in the abhorrent shootings at Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine. This provoked worldwide outrage.
Naturally, I wasn’t slow in declaring ‘Je Suis Charlie’ in company with millions of others. But interesting accusations soon ensued on social media – was I aware that satire “mocked people for the sake of mocking them”? That satirists “went out of their way to make people mad”? That, as one person put it, although she believed in “everyone’s right to free speech”, she didn’t agree with “how everyone uses that right”, nor did she “support Charlie’s goals or modus operandi”.
A lot more satire-bashing followed, much of it from those who were “whole-heartedly behind freedom of expression”, but who also somehow believed that Charlie Hebdo had brought this bloody rampage on itself.
Would I, as a fellow satirist, have published some of the material that appeared between its covers? No, I wouldn’t. But that’s a difference in style, in sensibility, in choosing, or not, to use a hammer to crack a nut. Though we all write about nuts.
Everyone has the right to be offended
It’s not enough for a society merely to declare it champions freedom of speech, if freedom of speech is not exercised on a regular basis. And if you don’t publish something because someone, somewhere, will be offended, you won’t be publishing anything. Why? Because jihadists, Neo-Nazis, Kim Jong-Un, redheads, left-handed people, Arsenal supporters, will all feel hard done-by at some point.
But that’s tough. Somebody asked me if we have the right to offend people; I replied we have the right to freedom of expression up to the point of hate speech, and that everyone has the right to be offended. Some people took exception to the Daily Star suggesting Liz Truss’s premiership would be outlived by a lettuce. Wherever your political affiliations lie, this patently was not satire; it was a safe bet.
What not to be in 2024
If you still don’t get it, here’s what not to be in 2024 so you don’t upset anyone:
Muslim, non-Muslim, Jewish, non-Jewish, woke, non-woke …
As for satirists and journalists, I’ve compiled a comprehensive list of the topics it appears we are permitted to write about:
Cats (until they learn to read).
As for Bernard Ingham, he did concede there was one piece of satire he approved of – the sketch he wrote for Margaret Thatcher to perform with the cast of Yes Minister, after he’d engineered her appearance at an awards ceremony.
“I could control that,” he said with a smirk.
