"There's a show, keeps on annoying me
Late at night, on a Tuesday-eee!
10 0 Clock Live perhaps you've heard
About as entertaining as a turd
Lauren Laverne, she ain't no wit
David Mitchell painfully sarcastic
Charlie Brooker and Jimmy Carr
Proselytising from afar"
(to be sung to the tune of the Littlest Hobo).
Why are you slagging this off? You might ask. Well, stop shouting at me and I'll tell you.
It isn't that Charlie and David aren't funny. Indeed they are very clever, if rather tedious (same shit, different day). Jimmy Carr on the other hand is a pillock; he's another sneering aimless comedian that trades on malaise and indifference - never mind the hypocrisy of satirising tax avoidance while avoiding tax. The less said about Lauren 'am I a comedian yet?' Laverne the better; I've always found her deeply pretentious. She is sup up herself she could use her colon as a handbag.
No, the problem is that this show offers no solutions. I'd rather listen to the People's Assembly and speakers like Owen Jones and Mark Steel (who IS funny) than these tired hacks. You can bet that the 10 0 Clocksters are being paid handsomely for their comfortably delivered and extremely safe satire, just as you can rely on their tedious audience of media students to lap it all up. The whole thing is a vehicle for their egos.
That would be fine if the whole thing went somewhere, but it doesn't. It's just 4 rich white people from comfortable suburbia lecturing us on what it's currently fashionable to bash. They lack the courage of UK Uncut (proper heroes) but seem bred from the same stable. Instead of sitting behind a desk and shouting, Charlie, why not get off your comfortably paid arse and effect some change. Same with the rest of them. Talk is cheap, you are not and you can fuck off. I want solutions, not cheap potshots at easy targets. This is just laziness that breeds more of the malaise Carr and his ilk feed off. Do something, not just 'Barclays avoid tax...that's bad!"
It's self gratification: same with shows like Have I Got News For You. People like Hislop that take the piss out of everyone. That would be fine if he had any answers. But he doesn't so what are we doing? Token MP turns up to engage in a consensual roasting when the show should be something MP's genuinely fear to go on. In more enlightened times this might be ok, but we are not in those times. The society is on fire, people are at each other's throats, and this kind of intellectual masturbation becomes how we appease our turbulence. It's not enough.
I always thought the fact that Jimmy Carr wasn't ostracised when his tax arrangements came to light was evidence that this country is too far gone - so long as you can crack a (scripted) joke, forgiveness is only a laugh away.
ReplyDeleteI never really understood how he could possibly have thought noone would notice or criticise. But he's a popular comic so he can more easily take it on the chin. Having done so the herd thinks "good for him" and now he's popular again - probably even more so for showing some vulnerability. Being a millionaire too helps.
DeleteIt's all stage managed carefully edited faux outrage. I don't remember seeing David Mitchell out on the picket lines.