Things Satire Needs – an occasional
series: (1)
Topicality. If
too much time has passed, it ceases to be satire and becomes an easy
sneer with the benefit of hindsight. And “too much time” is not all
that much; the notion of MPs being criminally overpaid may still be
current (especially with the latest proposal to raise their salaries),
but the expenses scandal broke in mid-2009, making it ancient history
as regards this sort of piece.
This is also related to (2)
Potential
for effect. Such effect need not be a real-world result like a
change of law; it may simply be about changing some people’s minds.
There is, frankly, no danger of this here: Dan Patterson and Colin
Swash’s comedy (like the current forms of the leading television series
with which they have long been associated,
Have I Got News For You and
Mock The Week) plays entirely to
our existing prejudices. And quite antique prejudices some of them are,
too: not just “John Prescott is fat” (tedious fact) or “pompous Tory MP
pays dominatrix” (tedious stereotype), but the biggest laugh on press
night was because one character was northern. When an audience feels
they have nothing either to gain (from reform) or to lose (from
challenge to their complacency), satire loses all point.
And the thing is, this is a fine production. Terry Johnson directs with
equal attention to the broad farce and the sardonic one-liners; the
physical business has the kind of precision I normally associate with
Sean Foley as a director. Ben Miller makes an effective linchpin as an
MP whose planned party switch from Labour to Conservative just as the
expenses scandal breaks is endangered by his keen use of said facility;
he embodies pretty much every reported excess, Labour or Tory, in one
portmanteau of greed, culminating in the eponymous anatine structure.
Nancy Carroll is impregnably middle-class as his wife, and Debbie
Chazen makes a wonderful Moscow-mafia housekeeper.
But the material doesn’t begin to deserve it. The vast majority of the
comedy, not just about the expenses matter but taking in passing shots
at pretty much every other political “outrage” of recent years, is
lazier even than a dedicated couch potato. And satire which does not
challenge ends up implicitly reinforcing the values in question, and
that makes this not just poor theatre but pernicious politics.
Written for the Financial
Times.