The only things I watched on TV last week (aside from football) were Yes Minister, The Professionals, Gideon’s Way and Rumpole of the Bailey. It would not cross my mind to try something new as I know it would be nothing but a woke lecture produced by talentless halfwits. After the England/Ukraine match when the BBC had its one chance of the year to appeal to me, they advertised a documentary about the NHS! Who in their right minds would be excited to watch that? Result: BBC switched off for another year and I check to see what’s on Talking Pictures TV.
Exactly this woke lecturing by talentless halfwits has killed the reboot of Doctor Who. I found it very funny indeed that the tick-box quota black actor they shoehorned in turned out to be a sex pest himself.
I thought it must be Talking Picture.
Without in anyway gazing through rose tinted spec the the television and films produced prior to the 1980s was different and in many ways much more thoughtful and human than today’s fare. it seems back then the individuals in the industry had ambitions to deliver out put of objective merit
Yep, you only really need ITV4 (Tour de France and Minder) Quest and Talking Pictures TV. The latter recently repeated the excellent Special Branch, which was completely new to me. That series reminded me that most new TV drama is absolute tripe and seems more intent on telling you off than creating suspense.
I lasted five minutes with The Pursuit of Love. Bought the DVD of the old ITV series based on Nancy Mitford’s novels with Judi Dench and Michael Aldridge. Cheaply made, but thoroughly entertaining.
That’s 5 more things than I watched on TV last week. I gave TV up entirely a long while back and, honestly, have not once felt I have missed out on anything. I have Netflix and Amazon Prime and Wondrium and YouTube and podcasts galore – and geez, a day only has a few hours left when I’m not working or sleeping, and there are books and music and children and friends to attend to too. I don’t know any of the shows this piece mentions as having come after The Office, and couldn’t care less. And boy, do I save in stressballs for not being beaten over the head by the BBC and Channel 4!
Last edited 2 years ago by Christopher Gelber
SD
Simon Denis
2 years ago
Interesting. On the matter of “cringe” – it’s a social enforcement mechanism whereas real comedy is a social liberation. Cringe says, “Don’t be like him!” And since “he” – it’s never a she, let alone a she of “diverse” background – is invariably in some way unfashionable or conservative or both, the propaganda element looms large. In another article, Ed West discusses comedy, as in the Life of Brian and the way it rode on old, universal assumptions to provoke laughter. True, those assumptions could also be expressed as disapproval but laughter and disapproval are not the same thing, as the left seems to believe. In fact, they are opposite reactions to the same thing in the light of the same assumptions. Laughter forgives; laughter, ultimately, accepts. Of course, this is where the left gets really hot under the collar – if it still wears a collar (without studs, that is) – for what is there to forgive? Plenty. We all have to forgive each other because we all get on each other’s nerves. Once you’ve laughed at some form of delusion or delusive behaviour, you’ve expressed your sense that it is mistaken or ridiculous and that’s that. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the Life of Brian and humour like it came at a time of genuine relaxation. The laughter enabled the relaxation. Cringing, remember, makes us tense – and so, once again, censorious.
Good point about how real comedy and laughter goes hand-in-hand with forgiving and releasing anger and hostility —- at least transcending it.
DW
D Ward
2 years ago
Theatre has also become “too Woke to watch” – I’m not prepared to pay hard-earned money to be told I “wrong-think”. Unfortunately the people purveying this are subsidised to do so by our elected government.
Julian Farrows
2 years ago
This form of ‘moralizing’ entertainment is worse in the US. It appears not only in popular tv shows, but also in commercials and cartoons. American comedy is perhaps the worst with the likes of John Oliver and Samantha Bee. I barely watch any TV these days; when I do I feel like I’m subjecting myself to thoroughly predictable political propaganda.
Last edited 2 years ago by Julian Farrows
JB
J Bryant
2 years ago
I never much liked The Office because it struck a bit too close to home. I’ve worked in dysfunctional companies with characters like David Brent. And, yes, The Office was often “ungenerous, snarky and sneering.”
Sadly, I suspect the author is right that for the foreseeable future we’ll be bombarded with moralizing TV shows and movies people don’t want to watch. I wonder how long that trend will continue? Will good old economics win out in the end and the studios will tire of producing flops? But if TV and movie producers are now irredeemably woke, who’s left to make genuinely innovative and engaging shows?
I enjoy horror and South Korea has produced many excellent movies over the past decade. Check out “The Wailing” if you’re interested. We may have to look beyond the western world, and tolerate subtitles, for our entertainment in future.
I suspect sources like YouTube will generate the next generation of comedies that people want to watch.
The established MSM will continue to sneer at their output – until they find that their own dreary lectures become increasingly unsaleable by comparison.
eg Comedy Unleashed on YouTube – not for the faint hearted and utterly incorrect, but laugh out loud funny mostly. Sadly off air cos of Covid at the moment, hopefully back after the great unleashing
Some rather good Turkish stuff on Netflix too. I’m enjoying The Gift at the moment. And it’s a view into other quite different cultures
PK
Prashant Kotak
2 years ago
The same has happened to stand-up. For example, I doubt Nish Kumar has ever made an actual pun in his life, and he wouldn’t know a joke if it took a thirty yard run-up and thwacked him on the backside. Something when the least requirement to become a comedian is the ability to create actual comedy.
Where I live, the owner of the main comedy club is now an SNP politician. That’s beyond parody!
At least the alternative comedy lot from the 1980s rented a room from sleazy old Paul Raymond in his noodie theatre.
DG
david.ginsberg
2 years ago
I used to love Me & My Girl as a kid, if I’m right it was London Weekend TV. they had some great programmes, the whole family would sit down to watch the 6 o’clock show every Friday.
BB
Billy Bob
2 years ago
I think Friday Night Dinner is a strange programme to include in this list, as it never struck me as being particularly cringe. It seemed more like the sitcoms of old (without the canned laughter) with an eccentric dad, squabbling kids and mum getting more and more irate at the debacle that’s unfolding. I don’t think it was particularly mean or sneering towards any of the characters involved, or noticed any nudges against wrongthink or the like
Spot on.
Friday Night Dinners is the only sitcom of recent years that bears repeat watching.
The only one that bears watching in the first place, actually.
RIP Paul Ritter.
SR
Stephen Rose
2 years ago
I rather like Friday night dinner, W1A, Motherland, Number 9,Inbetweeners,Green Wing. Family guy keeps me laughing. I go back as far as Steptoe and son, Hancock ‘s half hour, Dad’s Army, all these classics had real pathos. Fawlty Towers was on recently, a show I know off by heart and its still brilliant, pure farce.
Alan Partridge needs to be pensioned off.
Comedy production is just too graduate middle class.Always looking around for confirmation and peer approval. Comedy becomes just another form of instruction, you can hold up a mirror but there has to be some heart. I find that the belly laughs come at the expense of the white working class, This Country, King Gary, no one has a pop at the po faced authoritarians who want to run everything. They seem ripe for satire.
AF
Andrew Fisher
2 years ago
Interesting article, but I’m not really sure why The Office is getting blamed for these cultural changes.
David Brent falls into a long tradition of English comedic characters who are pompous, prejudiced and entirely lacking in self awareness. Despite this in their own estimation, they are humane, progressive and with-it.
The other characters in the show despite their limitations are in fact depicted rather sweetly.
Last edited 2 years ago by Andrew Fisher
TW
Tom Watson
2 years ago
Did Inside No. 9 berate us for Brexit? I didn’t get that.
Assuming he’s referring to the proms episode – OK, admittedly it showed a family gathered to watch the last night of the proms killing an asylum seeker who’d wandered into their garden, and who may or may not have been literally Jesus, so on that level it doesn’t look good. BUT if I recall the brother-in-law of the Brexity, Union Jack-waving host family was a very unsympathetic caricature of the sneering superior Remoaner liberal: on top of “this is just Rocky Horror for the Classic FM set” he revealed he wsa planning to take the house all for himself and his wife when the grandfather died, because he had a DNA test to suggest the Brexity sister was actually half-German. This after his wife had, reached satisfaction on said asylum seeker in the other room and then publicly outed the husband as a homosexual. And it was the confused grandfather who actually stuck the knife in, to the horror of all present. Very far from ‘ignorant Brexit racists would probably kill Jesus if they met him because he’s brown and foreign hur hur.’
For what it’s worth, I thought it was also hinting at the beginnings of a reconciliation between the two halves of the family at the end, engendered by the shared guilt of hiding the murder, a nice (if dark) twist on the scapegoating motif that’s at the heart of the Christian story. But now I’m talking like an insufferable pseud so must leave to start commenting on the Guardian’s culture pages instead.
DM
Dawn McD
2 years ago
I tried to watch one episode of the American version of The Office, and I couldn’t believe anyone wanted to watch “cringe” comedy. It made my skin crawl. I used to watch too much TV, but now I don’t watch any. In the last year or so I saw the last few shows I was hanging on to suddenly drop off a cliff, as their scriptwriters seem to have been replaced by college sophomores with an agenda. When I think about how much my husband and I used to laugh, how many really fun shows were on TV, and how there’s nothing left, I could cry. It feels like the world is dying, or more to the point like someone evil is out there actively trying to destroy everything. We are in a war, just without any actual shooting. Yet.
MM
Melanie Mabey
2 years ago
The year 2000 seems to be a mile stone or tombstone on the way to neo- puritan ascendancy
RS
Richard Scire
2 years ago
I never liked the The Office, either the original or the American version. I didn’t think it was funny, rather it was just mean.
I loved Miranda and I have watched the series several times but I was dissapointed with the American version.
I’d much rather laugh than cringe!
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The only things I watched on TV last week (aside from football) were Yes Minister, The Professionals, Gideon’s Way and Rumpole of the Bailey. It would not cross my mind to try something new as I know it would be nothing but a woke lecture produced by talentless halfwits. After the England/Ukraine match when the BBC had its one chance of the year to appeal to me, they advertised a documentary about the NHS! Who in their right minds would be excited to watch that? Result: BBC switched off for another year and I check to see what’s on Talking Pictures TV.
Exactly this woke lecturing by talentless halfwits has killed the reboot of Doctor Who. I found it very funny indeed that the tick-box quota black actor they shoehorned in turned out to be a sex pest himself.
I thought it must be Talking Picture.
Without in anyway gazing through rose tinted spec the the television and films produced prior to the 1980s was different and in many ways much more thoughtful and human than today’s fare. it seems back then the individuals in the industry had ambitions to deliver out put of objective merit
Yep, you only really need ITV4 (Tour de France and Minder) Quest and Talking Pictures TV. The latter recently repeated the excellent Special Branch, which was completely new to me. That series reminded me that most new TV drama is absolute tripe and seems more intent on telling you off than creating suspense.
I lasted five minutes with The Pursuit of Love. Bought the DVD of the old ITV series based on Nancy Mitford’s novels with Judi Dench and Michael Aldridge. Cheaply made, but thoroughly entertaining.
That’s 5 more things than I watched on TV last week. I gave TV up entirely a long while back and, honestly, have not once felt I have missed out on anything. I have Netflix and Amazon Prime and Wondrium and YouTube and podcasts galore – and geez, a day only has a few hours left when I’m not working or sleeping, and there are books and music and children and friends to attend to too. I don’t know any of the shows this piece mentions as having come after The Office, and couldn’t care less. And boy, do I save in stressballs for not being beaten over the head by the BBC and Channel 4!
Interesting. On the matter of “cringe” – it’s a social enforcement mechanism whereas real comedy is a social liberation. Cringe says, “Don’t be like him!” And since “he” – it’s never a she, let alone a she of “diverse” background – is invariably in some way unfashionable or conservative or both, the propaganda element looms large. In another article, Ed West discusses comedy, as in the Life of Brian and the way it rode on old, universal assumptions to provoke laughter. True, those assumptions could also be expressed as disapproval but laughter and disapproval are not the same thing, as the left seems to believe. In fact, they are opposite reactions to the same thing in the light of the same assumptions. Laughter forgives; laughter, ultimately, accepts. Of course, this is where the left gets really hot under the collar – if it still wears a collar (without studs, that is) – for what is there to forgive? Plenty. We all have to forgive each other because we all get on each other’s nerves. Once you’ve laughed at some form of delusion or delusive behaviour, you’ve expressed your sense that it is mistaken or ridiculous and that’s that. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the Life of Brian and humour like it came at a time of genuine relaxation. The laughter enabled the relaxation. Cringing, remember, makes us tense – and so, once again, censorious.
Good point about how real comedy and laughter goes hand-in-hand with forgiving and releasing anger and hostility —- at least transcending it.
Theatre has also become “too Woke to watch” – I’m not prepared to pay hard-earned money to be told I “wrong-think”. Unfortunately the people purveying this are subsidised to do so by our elected government.
This form of ‘moralizing’ entertainment is worse in the US. It appears not only in popular tv shows, but also in commercials and cartoons. American comedy is perhaps the worst with the likes of John Oliver and Samantha Bee. I barely watch any TV these days; when I do I feel like I’m subjecting myself to thoroughly predictable political propaganda.
I never much liked The Office because it struck a bit too close to home. I’ve worked in dysfunctional companies with characters like David Brent. And, yes, The Office was often “ungenerous, snarky and sneering.”
Sadly, I suspect the author is right that for the foreseeable future we’ll be bombarded with moralizing TV shows and movies people don’t want to watch. I wonder how long that trend will continue? Will good old economics win out in the end and the studios will tire of producing flops? But if TV and movie producers are now irredeemably woke, who’s left to make genuinely innovative and engaging shows?
I enjoy horror and South Korea has produced many excellent movies over the past decade. Check out “The Wailing” if you’re interested. We may have to look beyond the western world, and tolerate subtitles, for our entertainment in future.
I suspect sources like YouTube will generate the next generation of comedies that people want to watch.
The established MSM will continue to sneer at their output – until they find that their own dreary lectures become increasingly unsaleable by comparison.
eg Comedy Unleashed on YouTube – not for the faint hearted and utterly incorrect, but laugh out loud funny mostly. Sadly off air cos of Covid at the moment, hopefully back after the great unleashing
Some rather good Turkish stuff on Netflix too. I’m enjoying The Gift at the moment. And it’s a view into other quite different cultures
The same has happened to stand-up. For example, I doubt Nish Kumar has ever made an actual pun in his life, and he wouldn’t know a joke if it took a thirty yard run-up and thwacked him on the backside. Something when the least requirement to become a comedian is the ability to create actual comedy.
Where I live, the owner of the main comedy club is now an SNP politician. That’s beyond parody!
At least the alternative comedy lot from the 1980s rented a room from sleazy old Paul Raymond in his noodie theatre.
I used to love Me & My Girl as a kid, if I’m right it was London Weekend TV. they had some great programmes, the whole family would sit down to watch the 6 o’clock show every Friday.
I think Friday Night Dinner is a strange programme to include in this list, as it never struck me as being particularly cringe. It seemed more like the sitcoms of old (without the canned laughter) with an eccentric dad, squabbling kids and mum getting more and more irate at the debacle that’s unfolding. I don’t think it was particularly mean or sneering towards any of the characters involved, or noticed any nudges against wrongthink or the like
Spot on.
Friday Night Dinners is the only sitcom of recent years that bears repeat watching.
The only one that bears watching in the first place, actually.
RIP Paul Ritter.
I rather like Friday night dinner, W1A, Motherland, Number 9,Inbetweeners,Green Wing. Family guy keeps me laughing. I go back as far as Steptoe and son, Hancock ‘s half hour, Dad’s Army, all these classics had real pathos. Fawlty Towers was on recently, a show I know off by heart and its still brilliant, pure farce.
Alan Partridge needs to be pensioned off.
Comedy production is just too graduate middle class.Always looking around for confirmation and peer approval. Comedy becomes just another form of instruction, you can hold up a mirror but there has to be some heart. I find that the belly laughs come at the expense of the white working class, This Country, King Gary, no one has a pop at the po faced authoritarians who want to run everything. They seem ripe for satire.
Interesting article, but I’m not really sure why The Office is getting blamed for these cultural changes.
David Brent falls into a long tradition of English comedic characters who are pompous, prejudiced and entirely lacking in self awareness. Despite this in their own estimation, they are humane, progressive and with-it.
The other characters in the show despite their limitations are in fact depicted rather sweetly.
Did Inside No. 9 berate us for Brexit? I didn’t get that.
Assuming he’s referring to the proms episode – OK, admittedly it showed a family gathered to watch the last night of the proms killing an asylum seeker who’d wandered into their garden, and who may or may not have been literally Jesus, so on that level it doesn’t look good. BUT if I recall the brother-in-law of the Brexity, Union Jack-waving host family was a very unsympathetic caricature of the sneering superior Remoaner liberal: on top of “this is just Rocky Horror for the Classic FM set” he revealed he wsa planning to take the house all for himself and his wife when the grandfather died, because he had a DNA test to suggest the Brexity sister was actually half-German. This after his wife had, reached satisfaction on said asylum seeker in the other room and then publicly outed the husband as a homosexual. And it was the confused grandfather who actually stuck the knife in, to the horror of all present. Very far from ‘ignorant Brexit racists would probably kill Jesus if they met him because he’s brown and foreign hur hur.’
For what it’s worth, I thought it was also hinting at the beginnings of a reconciliation between the two halves of the family at the end, engendered by the shared guilt of hiding the murder, a nice (if dark) twist on the scapegoating motif that’s at the heart of the Christian story. But now I’m talking like an insufferable pseud so must leave to start commenting on the Guardian’s culture pages instead.
I tried to watch one episode of the American version of The Office, and I couldn’t believe anyone wanted to watch “cringe” comedy. It made my skin crawl. I used to watch too much TV, but now I don’t watch any. In the last year or so I saw the last few shows I was hanging on to suddenly drop off a cliff, as their scriptwriters seem to have been replaced by college sophomores with an agenda. When I think about how much my husband and I used to laugh, how many really fun shows were on TV, and how there’s nothing left, I could cry. It feels like the world is dying, or more to the point like someone evil is out there actively trying to destroy everything. We are in a war, just without any actual shooting. Yet.
The year 2000 seems to be a mile stone or tombstone on the way to neo- puritan ascendancy
I never liked the The Office, either the original or the American version. I didn’t think it was funny, rather it was just mean.
I loved Miranda and I have watched the series several times but I was dissapointed with the American version.
I’d much rather laugh than cringe!