Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Communiqué #4

In the year of our lord, 2001, the Daily Mail carried the banner headline – ‘The Sickest TV Show Ever’ – an awkward construction to suit an awkward subject, that of ‘loathed’ broadcaster Christopher Morris’ latest foray into the world of post-watershed outrage. The programme, Brass Eye, a format resurrected from a five year old TV myth and refreshed by a draft from the poisoned paedophile chalice, must have had all the reactionary journalists in the country glued excitably to the edge of their chintz. This was the day when the man, Morris, was set to GO TO FAR and thus give the Tabloid knifemen the opportunity they’d been waiting for.

The original Brass Eye had awoken similar furies, particularly with its item on ‘Cake’ - a made-up drug the size of, well, a cake – featuring the dishonestly procured contributions of such luminaries as Noel Edmonds, Bernard Manning and Bruno Brookes. Much analysis in liberal circles praised the exposing of mindless self-promotion in a celebrity culture prepared to spout any old nonsense, however absurd, in order to tend the borders of its public image. Differing circles, with the Mail as their Locus, were unimpressed. Drugs weren’t funny, they were Evil and that was that

In the Mail of that day, next to an editorial entitled, ‘The Shaming of Channel Four’, was a page devoted to the question: ‘Should Pot Be Legalised? … We pose the question that is dividing Britain’. Although not a hymn to the praises of the weed, the views represented included those of Joan Bakewell (There is an overwhelming case for it’), Fay Weldon (‘Naturally, I’ve tried it myself’) and Alain de Botton (‘I don’t think people who smoke Joints are necessarily going to end up injecting heroin’) in what can only be considered a rational and unhysterical debate. Note the slang, note the flat contradiction in de Botton’s words of the most sacred of anti-dope dogmas, it is all a far cry from the Salem mentality of five short years ago. In the outrage war, it seems, that other country, the past, has been losing its border skirmishes remarkably badly.

And now, predictably, though harmful drugs have become a little less so, there remain forbidden fortresses, because these days: child abuse into humour won’t go.

Now, I am not interested in penning another glib appraisal of the Brass Eye special’s moral merits nor, indeed, in adding to the glut of opinions on free speech vs. taste and decency. This latter debate is as old as speech itself and will not be resolved by kiddie-sex shockers or the resulting shock. In the absence of hope for some general theorem of morality, and in the hope of dealing with this topic as part of that mainstay of opinion, the case-by-case basis, it seems one should look to the past for precedents and draw some conclusions there.

The opinion has been expressed in quality papers (and it is one I share) that Morris is ‘brilliant’. I may go so far as to call him our greatest living satirist. My justification for this contention is quite simple, essentially, it is that no other well-known public figure is prepared to satirise people like Morris does. Yes, Brass Eye pokes fun at gullible celebrities; yes, The Day Today contained mock news stories attacking politicians; and yes, the paedophile issue has been deposited all over the hysterical media. But much more effective and shocking than this is the way that these programmes have brutally and remorselessly satirised you.

Mainstream television satires like Have I Got News For You, Bremner, Bird and Fortune or the defunct Spitting Image all rest (at heart) on jokes about Ann Widdecombe being ugly, and powerful people being dishonest. They create an illusory opposition between normal folk like ‘TV’s Mr. Sex’ Angus Deayton and the villainous, inhuman them. While appreciably amusing, this is poor satire. If the object is to engender a sense of realism by ridiculing and deflating pomposity, then the cosy world of binary oppositions is doomed to fail. It may put a slow puncture in the wheels of the spin machine, but the pomposity of the public is only more bolstered as it laughs from the sidelines at the joker with a pin.

This country remains, for its sins, a democracy. The implication, on the most axiomatic level, is that it’s your fault, you are responsible. If Ann Widdecombe is really too ugly to hold influence, you shouldn’t have chosen her as your representative. As the cry goes up against the lack of choice and them all being the same and it doesn’t make a difference because of business and the voting system is unfair and it’s their fault and so on and so on – take a moment to listen to yourselves, then take some responsibility. The job of the standard TV satirist, reflected in his popularity, is to let you off the hook by creating an illusion of autocracy for you to shelter behind. It is the mission of Chris Morris to remove it.

Of these quotes, the first was published in the year 2001 by the Daily Mail, the second in the year 1808 by its author, Sir Walter Scott.

Scott’s disgust was directed at the work of England’s other great satiriser of humankind, Jonathan Swift, the creator of Gulliver, his travels and, specifically, his voyage to the houynhymms and encounters with ‘yahoos’, an animal substrate of humanity enslaved by civilised horses. The views of Scott and others in Romantic and Victorian England led to the fourth book of the classic saga being purged from nineteenth century editions. This act of literary vandalism reduced the wholly adult fiction to a child’s story – a conception of Swift’s masterwork that endures to this day and prevents him from taking his place among the greats of the popular canon.

Yet reading into Swift’s lesser known works is hugely rewarding. In his verse one finds an unsurpassed mastery of prosaic poetry – including self-deprecating couplets to make Wendy Cope cry with shame (‘In Pope, I cannot read a line/But with a sigh, I wish it mine/When he can in one couplet fix/More Sense than I can do in Six’); In his prose one finds an unsurpassed mastery of argument and imagination; and in his satire one finds, truly, an unsurpassed mastery in mockery of the human animal.

As a template for the excesses of Mr. Morris, we could certainly do a deal worse than Dr. Swift. Like his C21st counterpart, the Dean of Dublin was unafraid to tread the outskirts of the human experience. Works like ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph, Going To Bed’, ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ and, of course, that voyage to the Houynhymms share a desperation to penetrate the balustrades surrounding his species and put on display the seedy, ugly truth behind them. So, his young nymph ‘slips/The Bolsters that supply her Hips/With gentlest Touch she next explores/Her Shankers, Issues, running Sores…’

Many have found misogyny or misanthropy in such attacks, but they make a mistake in assuming disgust to be divorced from compassion. The key to comprehending the intent of Swift’s bilious tirades is in his habit of referring to Homo Sapiens as Animal Rationis Capax, an animal capable of reason. The adjective ‘capable’ contains the perspective of the true satirist in elemental form. The scornful insistence on actuality coupled with the hopeful insistence on promise. Even as Swift describes the repulsive, hirsute pudenda of the Yahoo and compares unfavourably the governments of Europe with the government of horses, he implies a better humanity – the seat of his critical scorn.

This is an elementary point, that claiming imperfection implies the possibility of perfection, but it is often forgotten. Good satire, by nature, can never be intended destructively. We regularly expel piss from ourselves, we consider the expulsion of piss from our bodies a healthy and necessary part of life, so why is it we object when someone else attempts to forcibly take the piss out of us? It is not destructive in the slightest, rather it is a act of love, of purification. ‘Give me your piss!’ cries the satirist, ‘I shall display it in its true nature so that you may never be filled with such stagnant waters again!’.

This is the noblest endeavour of intelligence.

We like Swift now. We read his books. We don’t stick him on the pedestal we reserve for poets and scribblers who took their inspiration, at heart, from saying how great people are - those Romantics and Renaissance writers who worked with enormous ideas like love and passion and honour and duty and barely mentioned pubic hair at all. But, nevertheless, we like him. There is a wall, centuries thick, between his bile and our pH neutral hides. We can say ‘Gosh, he said "shit", how sparklingly modern and witty!’ without once thinking about our own defecation. The generations have come and gone, none of us knew the Dean of Dublin, so he couldn’t have been talking about us, could he?

Well.

He was of course. He’d have been every bit as disgusted, infuriated, maddened and embittered by the behaviour of Animal Rationis Capax Contemporanis for the simple reason that we are all still complete Bastards. A single glance at the Middle East, America, Ireland, Iraq, Brighton, anywhere, will tell you that. We elect politicians, none of whom act in any way different to how we would if it was us, then put up barriers of fake satire so that we can safely chuck our Yahoo shit at them and feel better about our own hideousness. In fact, chucking shit is what we love most. Arabs? Take this! Jews? Get this down yer! Americans? Heads up! We are all walking shit bazookas pumping out steaming warheads of the stuff over anyone and everyone we can. ‘Its not us!’ We scream, its capitalism! Its TV advertising! It’s the blacks / whites / yellows / gays / chauvinists / DWEMs / Patriarchy / women / gays / straights / perverts / pinks / anarchists / conservatives / liberals / PAEDOPHILES! Look at them! You can tell they're to blame, they’re covered in shit!

Paedophiles are the best, because EVERYBODY KNOWS what bastards they are. They mess around with kids, and our animal chimpanzee instincts hold ‘kids’ as high as they do shitchucking.

Kidproctectin’ and Shitchuckin’? In one fell swoop? Man, Paedos are a gift to the worst, most Yahoo-like elements of our nature. They bring out the animal in us, the long streak of rancid yellow piss that always drags us down and stops us from living in peace, harmony, rock'n'roll and infinite love.

It is this piss that Morris wishes to take, not the ‘media’, ‘celebrity’ or ‘TV current affairs reporting’, but your piss. He wants to help you expel it. I say let him, and then say ‘thank you.’