A solution to the BBC problem – break it in two

Monday’s episode of The Unbelievable Truth, in case you missed it, featured comedians Marcus Brigstocke and Rufus Hound. I did miss it, partly because I read about how Hound thinks David Cameron wants to kill your children, and I just couldn’t face the jokes about the Daily Mail and ‘hoards of Romanians!’

Even Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe has become unbearable. I gave up half-way through the last two episodes I attempted, one of which was entirely about how stupid and neanderthal Ukip are and the other which contained a slot just as big explaining how anyone hostile to further migration from eastern European was simply an idiot and that’s it.

Political comedians are paid to make an amusing point about the absurdity of politics, but almost by definition their arguments have to be one-dimensional, since the wider, more nuanced picture is less funny; admittedly interviewing David Goodhart or Paul Collier about immigration would be less amusing than some half-wit outside a shopping centre, although a comedian could easily poke up fun at the Home Office’s 2004 prediction that between 5-13,000 eastern Europeans would arrive every year; but strangely no one at the BBC ever has.