A 1963 television report on the satire boom by Bryan Magee

Now here's a find: a 1963 report on the satire boom by this blog's hero Bryan Magee.

We see John Bird, Jeremy Geidt, Peter Cook, Bernard Braden, Willie Rushton, Jonathan Miller and Michael Frayn.

I can't recall Braden being discussed as part of the satire boom before, and the most obscure name now is Jeremy Geidt, who is seen in the sketch with John Bird. He went to have an influential career in American theatre and his background was more establishment than that of anyone else in the programme.

Peter Cook is notable bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, while Frank Muir describes Magee as looking like "a bit like a young family doctor in a cough mixture commercial". I'm not sure that Magee's thesis that satire is at once centuries old and a bubble that is about to burst quite hangs together.

Muir is there because this is an off-air recording from a 1992 episode of TV Heaven where he chose the items included.

Thanks to Mario Ricciardi on Bluesky.

A tribute to Neal Ascherson on his 90th birthday

Last October one of my favourite journalists, Neal Ascherson, turned 90. To mark the occasion, he was interviewed by Tim Adams in the Observer:

There are certain writers who seem singled out to bear witness to their times. Neal Ascherson first had a graphic inkling of that fate when he was a small boy in Peterborough, where his father, a naval officer, was stationed at a factory making torpedoes. 

"It would have been the summer of 1940," Ascherson says, "and I was coming back to the village where we lived, from school, on the bus. I must have been seven. This aircraft appeared as I was walking back to our house. Like all small boys I knew my bomber planes and I recognised it as a German Dornier, flying low. I didn’t hear it firing, but my mother did. She was watching for me from a window and almost died of horror. 

"Some fucker in the belly turret of the plane let off some machine gun rounds at me. I was the only person in the whole landscape, a little boy with a school bag. The noise of the engine was so loud I didn’t hear anything, and obviously he missed, but afterwards the trees all along the road had these white scars where the bullets had gone in."

Ascherson is telling me this story, with a characteristic twinkling smile, from his sofa in the tall terrace house near Highbury Fields in north London where he has lived for 40 years with his second wife and fellow journalist, Isabel Hilton. 

The previous night he had celebrated his 90th birthday at the Polish Hearth Club in Kensington where his old friend, the playwright Michael Frayn, a youthful 89, had toasted him as a man of “rare charisma, like a 19th-century romantic hero, with a kind of nobility that has always seemed a kind of human gold standard”. 

Ascherson wears those traits lightly, but you glimpse them all the same. In some ways, that near-miss from the Luftwaffe established the pattern of his life: if European history was happening, he was never far away.

And my graphic? Yes, it was Neal Ascherson who said that and not Tony Benn.

Tom Springfield died 10 days before Judith Durham

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When I chose Cloudy by the Seekers as my music video last Sunday I wrote about their producer Tom Springfield, who also wrote some of the songs they are best known for.

I mentioned that the folk-tinged Springfields, which also included his sister Dusty, were the first British group to have a top 20 hit in the US. And I also mentioned two great pieces of trivia:

• His baptismal name was Dionysius O'Brien (Dusty's was Mary O'Brien)
• Like Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter and Michael Frayn, he was a graduate of the Russian course at the Joint Services School for Linguists.

Today I found out that Tom Springfield was already dead when I wrote about him last weekend. He died on 27 July, some 10 days before Judith Durham.

The news seems to have just broken, so there have been no obituaries in the papers yet. I'll tweet any without a paywall that I see.

The Seekers: Cloudy

As I wrote when paying tribute to Judith Durham, her bandmate from The Seekers, Bruce Woodley, wrote three songs with Paul Simon. (Woodley is on the right of the group as you look at the thumbnail above.)

One of them, Red Rubber Ball, reached number 2 in the US singles chart when recorded by The Cyrkle. That band also recorded Simon and Woodley's I Wish You Could Be Here.

Their third collaboration was Cloudy, which appeared on the Simon and Garfunkel album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, where it was credited to Paul Simon alone.

I love Paul Simon's music more than is decent, but it wasn't a wholly a surprise to read that this had happened.

All three Simon and Woodley compositions were recorded by The Seekers, and here is their take on Cloudy.

If I have a criticism, it's that this version isn't cloudy at all. It's pure sunshine - a reminder of how good Judith Durham's voice was and how good the male members of the group were as instrumentalists and close harmony singers.

The tinkly line on the piano (if that is what is being used) was probably played by Tom Springfield, who had much to do with the group's success as a songwriter and mentor. (His own folk-to-pop group The Springfields were the first British group to have a top 20 hit in the US,)

In writing this I came across two great facts about Tom Springfield (who was Dusty's brother):

• His baptismal name was Dionysius O'Brien
• Like Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter and Michael Frayn, he was a graduate of the Russian course at the Joint Services School for Linguists.

And that's where he came across the Russian folk tune that he turned into The Seekers' best-selling single, The Carnival is Over.

Boris Johnson? Blame Have I Got News for You and Ian Hislop

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It's too hot to write, but I can't let the accession of Boris Johnson pass without saying it is all the fault of Ian Hislop and Have I Got News for You?

You'll have to register with the London Review of Books site to read it all, but back in 2013 the novelist Jonathan Coe wrote an important article while reviewing Harry Mount's The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson.

I am going to do no more than quote a few passage from it and from an article by Steven Fielding to which it points us.

So here is Coe:

When Humphrey Carpenter interviewed the leading lights of the 1960s satire boom for his book That Was Satire, That Was in the late 1990s, he found that what was once youthful enthusiasm had by now curdled into disillusionment. 

One by one, they expressed dismay at the culture of facetious cynicism their work had spawned, their complaints coalescing into a dismal litany of regret. 

John Bird: ‘Everything is a branch of comedy now. Everybody is a comedian. Everything is subversive. And I find that very tiresome.’ 

Barry Humphries: ‘Everyone is being satirical, everything is a send-up. There’s an infuriating frivolity, cynicism and finally a vacuousness.’ 

Christopher Booker: ‘Peter Cook once said, back in the 1960s, “Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea,” and I think we really are doing that now.’

And, says Coe, that observation by Cook was developed into a Beyond the Fringe sketch about a bunch of young, would-be radical journalists who won’t admit they have sold their soul to a rapacious newspaper proprietor:

COOK: Whenever the old man has a cocktail party, there’s about ten of us – young, progressive people – we all gather up the far end of the room and … quite openly, behind our hands, we snigger at him.

BENNETT: Well, I don’t know, that doesn’t seem very much to me.

COOK: A snigger here, a snigger there – it all adds up.

The sketch makes it clear that laughter is not just ineffectual as a form of protest, but that it actually replaces protest.

And if you do seek out the full article you will find that Michael Frayn, in his introduction to the published script of Beyond the Fringe, made the same point at the time.

Over to Steven Fielding:

The idea that a corrupt elite is screwing a noble people is powerful and pervasive and by no means new. It is therefore no surprise that it is reflected in comedy. It is certainly a view of politics that is popular amongst neo-liberals. 

It was at the heart of the popular 1980s situation comedy Yes Minister which repeatedly showed viewers that their political leaders and civil servants were feather-bedding themselves at the tax-payers’ expense. 

This was why Margaret Thatcher loved the series: it expressed her view that, as representative politics was a moral hazard, it should be replaced as far as possible by the market.

Put like that, satire sounds distinctly right wing.

True, as Fielding points out, few comedy writers and performers are neo-liberals and many were disappointed with New Labour.

However, the cumulative effect of the same jokes ridiculing politicians and highlighting their supposed foibles can only further reinforce mistrust in the public realm, a mistrust that some political forces seek to exploit – and neo-liberals are amongst the nicest of those forces. 

Comedy has always relied on stereotypes. There was a time when the Irish were thick; the Scots careful with their money; mothers-in-law fierce and ugly; and the Welsh stole and shagged sheep. The corrupt politician is one such stereotype, one that is neither racist nor sexist and seemingly acceptable to all.

You'll have to read both article and assemble all the pieces of the argument for yourself - it's this damned heat.

But if you do, you will see why the ascension of Boris Johnson is the fault of Ian Hislop and Have I Got News for You?

Later.

Reader's voice: This is all very well, but why is Ian Hislop singled out in the headline?

It's the heat. For Hislop you need to read Martin Kettle:

And what is Hislop's principal message? Week in and week out, it is that most pretty much all politicians are corrupt, deluded, incompetent, second-rate and hypocritical. Hislop's message is delivered with enviable deftness and wit, and very often it is irresistible. But it is also good-naturedly merciless. And extremely repetitive. 

There is never any sign that Hislop allows of exceptions; or that he has a political hero; or even, with the occasional honourable mention for Vince Cable, that there are politicians whom he respects. 

The impression he always gives is that today's politicians are uniformly unworthy of their inheritance, not to be compared with some previous golden age of statesmanlike effectiveness.