On this week’s Now Show Jon Holmes took advantage of Marcus Brigstocke’s absence and actually did a segment mocking climate change alarmism. Hard to believe, I know. A sop to the show’s critics, perhaps?
Another interesting little point. Brigstocke’s replacement for the week was Paul Sinha whose routine was based – with stunning originality – on a Daily Mail article. However, he referred to it only as “a major national newspaper”. Has criticism of lazy right-on comedians using the words “Daily Mail” also hit home?
The story in the Mail was about a naughty word nearly appearing on Channel 4’s Countdown. For Sinha it was an opportunity to use another tiresome comedy cliché, namely the “Have you seen those crazy comments under right-wing newspaper articles?” bit. He riffed off a comment on the Mail’s website from Doreen in Dorset who had written of the near-scandal: “More evidence of how moral standards have fallen in Brown’s Broken Britain.” If you look up the post by “Doreen” you’ll see she also adds: “When will they scrap the awful licence fee TAX?” This is clearly someone taking the piss out of Daily Mail readers. There are other comments like it, such as “Dave” in Maidstone: “Another idiotic waste of taxpayers’ money by Jonathan Ross and the BBC.” One wonders what percentage of comments on the Daily Mail website are actually written by crappy comedians stuck for things to joke about.
A better comedian might have questioned why so many newspapers covered this non-story (Guardian, Telegraph, Sun, Mirror) rather than take the all too familiar – and clearly fake – Daily Mail readers’ comments route.
Talking of profanities and gratuitous sexual innuendos, I see the omnipresent David Mitchell’s image has morphed from witty geek (or geeky wit) into cringe-making embarrassment.
As soon as Billy Connolly noticed that he only needed to swear to earn a laugh, he stopped bothering to think of jokes and just endlessly repeated ‘fuck.’
If David Mitchell is to be on every single BBC programme for the next decade I predict the same torpidity, a compulsion to say ‘masturbate’ and ‘wank’ as frequently as possible on “National Television.” Not predict. You can’t predict what has already happened.
I watched The Bubble.
That’s not the only thing wrong with it; don’t-get-me-started.
Sorry if this looks like a coment from a prude.
I did wonder if the scaremongering column Mitchell wrote for The Observer a few weeks ago had anything to do with a Daily Mail article a few days earlier which said that the Tories have threatened to name BBC stars who earn more than the PM.
Those parts of The Now Show were interesting for both the subject matter and the audience reaction. Listen to the uncertainty in the audience reaction to someone who claims not to believe in Climate Change; the adience would have been happier listening to Marcus Brigstoke’s enviro-rants, but he was apparently off skiing – Did he walk to the slopes?
The Daily Mail is truely dire though. The reason its gets attacked more than the other papers is because the paper isn’t a patch on the others, like the Telegraph for example. If there is a worse paper in the country, i’ll cheese grate my testicles. The Mail has more spin than a Labour government could ever dream of. Its more hypocritical than 2 jags could ever dream of being. It has much more bias than the BBC could ever create. It has more bias than the biased-watchers-of-the-bbc blog. It has more womans coverage than a womans weekly magazine. It has more Suri Cruise than Gary Glitter could dream of. It has more anti-bbc stories than it does facts. To be fair it is more consistent than a Honda . . . however that consistency is being shit. Its more predictable than watching the Titanic movie, which takes some doing. Why would anyone buy the Mail when they can buy the Telegraph? Is it the humour of Littlejohn – giving everything nicknames, using gossip and false statements as facts in what can only possibly be an attempt at dumbing down standards. Is it the articles that use lazy statements seemingly made up, used to make people assume their reading facts rather than just a rehash of something someone read on an internet forum at Mail Towers ie. “our source”, “sources close to the victim” etc etc. Comedians from the right wing happily rip the Mail as much as left wing – its universal mockery of a paper surviving on gossip stories and lies. But then if you’re biased, you’ll probably not realise (or want to admit) that.
I wasn’t defending the Daily Mail, I was commenting on its overuse as a subject by BBC-approved comedians. But then if you’d bothered reading what I’d actually written rather than wasting your time in an unsuccessful search for an amusing analogy you might have realised that.
Grow up