New Labour inspired a golden age of political comedy. William Cook looks to satire’s future
Although few will mourn Gordon Brown’s departure, his drawn-out demise should be a source of sadness for comedy aficionados, be they red, yellow or blue. For New Labour’s most unlikely legacy was to inspire a renaissance in political comedy. It may have ended with a disgruntled whimper rather than a bang, but for anyone with a taste for satire these were 13 golden years.
When Tony Blair first swept into Downing Street in 1997, a lot of left-wing comics seemed bemused. They’d been attacking the Tories for 18 years. Now that the Labour landslide they’d yearned for had happened, they didn’t quite know what to do. ‘We were scuppered,’ admitted Paul Thorne, a stand-up comic at London’s top comedy club, The Comedy Store, recalling the wave of euphoria that greeted New Labour’s triumph. Yet it didn’t take these comics too long to get their second wind. Cracking jokes about John Major and Tory sleaze had become far too easy. Faced with a more elusive foe, political comedy became more sophisticated, and on the stand-up circuit satirical comedians found a new lease of life. Left-wing comics like Mark Thomas and Mark Steel (who now writes a column for the Independent) acquired a sense of betrayal that sharpened their acerbic wit.
What starts in the comedy clubs soon finds its way on to the airwaves, and this improbable revival quickly filtered down to TV. Chris Morris’s masterful Brass Eye, broadcast in the last months of the Major era, had anticipated this brave new style of satire — darker and more malevolent than anything that had come before. It’s no coincidence that Spitting Image finally ran out of steam when John and Norma moved out of Downing Street and Tony and Cherie moved in.
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