Sometimes you write something and it has no place anywhere. You either throw it away or post it knowing nobody will read it. After thinking a bit about comedy tonight, I thought to make this one of the latter. A long rant, for which I’m truly sorry to all fans of Little Britain. I needed to get this pretentious bit of nonsense off my chest…

When Top Trumps first appeared in the 1970s, they were the must-have toy for boys of a certain age and temperament. Through them, we discovered a world of useless facts: batting averages, top speeds, pass completion rates, engine torques, and the stopping power of the world’s most popular handguns. All wholesome fun, as we used to say. Then, at some point, the novelty wore off and Top Trumps disappeared from my life. That is, until a day or so ago…

I was sitting on a train rolling through our quickly disappearing English countryside and, for a change, I was not too concerned about the mildly drunk psychopath shouting threatening obscenities from the end of the carriage. This was, after all, British Rail, and mildly drunk psychopaths come with the ticket you buy and the strange smell of urine that emanates from your seat. Besides, I’d already been distracted by what was going on across the aisle where two boys, aged about ten or eleven, had begun to play Top Trumps. This was the first time I’d seen the ‘New’ Top Trumps being played and I was intrigued to see how things had changed since I was a boy. Not that I expected such a winning formula to have altered much. I mean: how can you ruin such a classic game with such simple rules?

Only, it soon become apparent that things had changed and I sat there in mild disbelief as the boys started to compare statistics for ’smelliness’, ‘warts’, and ‘ugliness’. ‘Ah ha!’ thought I, ‘this has to be the “UK Politicians Top Trumps” wherein John Prescott is the Super Trump able to defeat any other card in the pack.’

And I still can’t help but feel that this would be a far better world should I have been proved right.

Instead, it turned out that I was witnessing a game of Top Trumps based around the characters of Little Britain, the BBC’s most popular post-watershed comedy of the last few years, and as was evident in the boys’ enthusiasm for their game, it is a show immensely popular with the young. Yet as I watched the game unfold, I couldn’t help but feel a degree of regret as they demonstrated how well they had memorized the wart indexes and ranks of ’smelliness’ with the same attention to detail with which I had once memorised details of Panzer tanks.

Now, I’m not saying that I grew up in a golden age or that all children should know the specifications of German heavy artillery, most of which I’m happy to have long since forgotten. Nor am I’m saying it didn’t sadden me to see what banal rubbish children are being encouraged to memorise. What shocked me most of all was to witness how the BBC knowingly markets an adult franchise to children.

Of course, at this point you’re more than likely to say: ‘but it’s only Little Britain‘, and I’ll then be forced to admit that I’m firmly of that unbelievably small portion of the nation who think that ‘Little Britain’ is a horrendous product, which alone should make us justified should we decide to withhold our license fees. In fact, I would have to go further to say that I believe it the worst thing that the BBC has produced for a decade or more, or at least since they last went ‘behind the scenes’ with The Krankies. For Little Britain, Auntie Beeb should feel ashamed of herself. Except, of course, Auntie Beeb has been showing worrying signs of senility these last few years. She’s been taking a perverse delight in this sort of thing, as well as filling her purse from the proceeds of such puerile rubbish. I would say all this and more, but by now, I’m feeling thoroughly ashamed of myself for being in such a minority out of touch with the mood of the nation. It leaves me looking over my shoulder, uncomfortably isolated, or at least open to accusations of prudishness.

Prudes usually deny their prudery with the words ‘I’m not a prude but’, so I won’t be trying that tactic, but that’s not to say I even believe myself a prude. I will say in my defence that I worship at the shine of Bill Hicks, Derek and Clive, Larry David, and Richard Prior; men not known for their rare use of an expletive or two. Vulgarity doesn’t offend me, as I believe that comedy should never shy away from difficult subjects. As a satire on greed, Mr. Creosote, in The Meaning of Life, is still one of the funniest things I have ever seen. I do, however, think that prudery is very different to having a moral conscience and I also believe that good comedy (not even great comedy) usually has a moral heart. As Kinky Friedman puts it: ‘one thing about the Kinkster: I never like to say “f***” in front of a C-H-I-L-D if I can avoid it. I won’t do it, and I don’t do it’.

Naturally, the BBC do the best they can to ignore the belief that there are times and places for different types of comedy. On its news website, they still carry a report in which David Walliams responds to a survey of November, last year, that put ‘Little Britain’ at the top of a poll of favourite TV shows among 6 to 16 year-olds. He is reported to have told The Radio Times that although ‘the show’ was ‘not meant’ for children ‘it’s great that they love it’. Which leads me to wonder how that sentiment might sound if we replaced ‘the show’ with a few other things not meant for children. I believe Gary Glitter is currently serving a prison sentence in a Vietnamese jail for holding a somewhat similar point of view.

But this is to digress somewhat from my point… Exposing children to the typical Little Britain diet of bodily fluids and obscenity is only a small part of the reason I hold such a revulsion for the show. In fact, I should probably ignore how much money the BBC makes by selling to children those products unsuitable for children and I should even point out that the BBC rates it for a 15+ audience and only puts it on after the watershed. By defending them in this limited way, I can address my larger concern: that Little Britain is such an oddly intolerant creature in a supposedly tolerant age.

Its ‘humour’ is predicated upon exploiting, demeaning, and ridiculing the least powerful in our society. As Steve Devrell puts it in a piece in The Independent of last year, the show ‘relies heavily on discrimination for its humour. Racial minorities, the overweight, gays, the elderly, transvestites, teenage mothers’. Which, I would add, makes it the natural humour of the playground – both figuratively and literally. Children love it because all its energy is directed into ridiculing individuals who should normally deserve our sympathy. We would do well to use the term ‘bullying’ as we discuss it because it is this childish instinct that it feeds upon. Returning to the issue I had with the New Top Trumps, to rate a character by ’smelliness’ or ‘warts’ is really something I would only associate with the most unpleasant sort of child. And that is what his programme is: a deeply repulsive child who has yet to learn empathy.

And empathy is very important to us. Political correctness wrongly supposes that we can be told what to believe through external guidance and trivial prohibitions. It does not take into account that I cannot be told to like the taste of, let us say, lemon cheesecake. I either like it or I do not. This does not mean I cannot learn to like it, but that can only through a long and protracted program that sets out to give me positive experiences of lemon cheesecake. In the same way, I cannot be told to enjoy holidays in Cornwall, travelling abroad, or the colour yellow. Any kind of heartfelt judgement is, in one way or another, instinctive. It’s why we call such beliefs ‘heartfelt’. They come about only after many experiences convince us that a thing is a certain way. If it were any other way, then we could not be said to ‘believe’.

So, I might want to ‘believe’ in God, but only when I feel this in my being, can I say that I am a true believer. Childhood is the time when we form some of our deepest beliefs and ‘empathy’, or sympathy towards others, is crucial to how we form relationships in our later adult lives. And this is the central disappointment that come from Little Britain. It teaches us all, but especially children, how to browbeat the weak and how to ridicule those that are different. It delights in those things that we tend to push to the fringes of our lives. One cannot help but be reminded of the instances in the twentieth century when ridiculing the minorities was held up as an enjoyment fit for the masses. This is the reason why it leaves behind such a sickening taste.

This is an important distinction, which makes Little Britain’s cruelty different to that of true satire which judiciously ridicules those politicians and celebrities who wish to wield power over us. The sad irony is that while Chris Morris was hounded from our screens for his utterly savage but brilliant Brass Eye, which poked fun out of the crassest of our ‘elite’, Lucas and Walliams are given free reign by the BBC to peddle their degrading product to an audience of children who know no better and will never learn to know better.

The childishness of this type of comedy is nothing new. Lucas/Walliams have been reducing comedy to insult for most of their TV careers. Only a few years ago, Little Britain was known as Pop Profile and was stuck in the late night slot of ITV. It was the sort of show you couldn’t force yourself to watch, even when you were lying awake with toothache. Now that Lucas/Walliams are the biggest things in UK comedy, Pop Profile is seen as seminal. This might make you believe that hindsight reveals ultimate truths, but I don’t really believe it. History is generally written by the victors or those who support the victors, so now, according to the Internet Movie Database, Pop Profile is a comedy classic, with an average rank (8.1) even greater than that of Steptoe and Son (7.9), Ripping Yarns (8.0), or Spike Milligan’s still unrated Q5. Looking across the Pond, 8.1 gives Pop Profile exactly the same score as both Cheers and Frasier and a little higher than MASH (7.8). Now, perhaps these numbers don’t mean anything. At the moment, Lucas/Walliams are bound to rank higher than any comedian whose star has already faded. Yet it does draw us into making a telling comparison.

Lucas/Walliams or Galton/Simpson? An interesting place to draw the battle lines, even if we won’t even try to compare Galton and Simpson’s writing to that found in any one episode of Little Britain. That would be a futile exercise. Besides, this isn’t about the quality of the comedy writing but how we might characterise the motive behind it other than the usual glib suggestion that it is there simply ‘to make us laugh’.

In the case of Steptoe and Son, Galton and Simpson succeeded in making us aware of a better world. It demonstrated that a kind of nobility can found in the suffering of the aspiring underclass. The same message is found in the work of many of the great English comedians: such as Chaplin or Stan Laurel. The other most notable product of the Galton/Simpson partnership was Hancock, a big man in a very small world. Hancock succeeded by mixing his ultimate humiliation with his egoism, but in that struggle, we saw something greater which taught us valuable lessons about our own humility. The same is true of that other BBC favourite, Dad’s Army. Captain George Mainwaring had all the failings of his ordinary upbringing but was also at his best when he took pride in that very ordinariness. When he could not parade in medals won on active service, he marched in the uniform of his day job: the bank manager. You only need think of the late Ronnie Barker, who made a career out of playing wise but common men, in order to see how popular this sentiment in British comedy. In these BBC shows and many more besides, being part of little Britain was a thing to be celebrated, a quality for which we should all be proud.

Compare that with the way Little Britain laboriously ridicules the working classes. Would any other brand of hatred be allowed on the BBC? Political correctness too often defends when it should allow free speech, but in this case, it widely ignores hatred directed towards one of the largest and least influential groups there is. It also ignores the fact that children are being taught to hate in a very powerful way.

That David Walliams was born a ‘Williams’ is perhaps symbolic of the way that Little Britain despises the ordinary, the little, or a very significant part of ‘great’ Britain. Which is why, I suspect, it is such a favourite of the middle classes, the very world out of which Little Britain was born. Lucas is the product of Haberdashers’ Aske’s School for Boys in Hertfordshire, and Walliams attended Reigate Grammar in Surrey. They both attended Bristol University. None of this can be thought of as the same England they now grow very rich by ridiculing.

One of the strange features of Little Britain’s success is, however, that the working classes rarely express outrage at the way they are reviled in the series. It may be that none of us wish to identify with these characters, but there might something more to its popularity than this or the basest wish to hate, ridicule, and impose our values on the weak. The appeal of Little Britain may lie in the fact that we live in culture where everybody is encouraged to be socially mobile. Those that laugh the loudest at Little Britain may do so, not realising that they — or people like them — are the subject of the humour. They might not think of themselves as stuck in ‘class’, but this is merely a perception, not the reality. We still live and move in very large cultural groups, which ironically, is the very reason the show succeeds. As I suppose anybody can be taught (eventually) to love lemon cheesecake, they can also be taught to ‘love’ a show. It’s a matter of repetition and those easily spread memes, such as the catchphrase.

You might ‘know what I mean, nudge, nudge,’ when I say that Monty Python started the love-affair with ‘the catchphrase’, but it was shows like The Fast Show that took it to a new level. As typified by Little Britain, TV comedy in the UK has reached the stage where comedy (if that term still applies) matters much less than the religion of the catchphrase. The catchphrase is the alpha and omega of the sketch and repetition makes it a mantra. Repetitions can be printed on lunch boxes, mugs, t-shirts, and, at the thousandth saying, it becomes a shared cultural item. Its value lies in our all recognising it and sharing with others this moment of recognition. Yet like many such shared experiences, they quickly begin to fade and have to be renewed before the joke wears thin. Because catchphrases aren’t inherently funny, it only takes a matter of weeks before an audience can go from adoration to indifference, wondering what they found amusing in the first place.

This will be the ultimate fate of Little Britain. I’m sure of it. I can only hope that this happens sooner, rather than later, and when people come to their senses, I trust they will then realise the extent by which they were entertaining hated. Perhaps they can then start to teach the children to take their humour more seriously because knowing how and when to laugh is one of the most serious lessons we have had to learn.

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