News and Comic Affairs The audience reception of British Television Political Comedy 1962-2012 Matthew Crowder Royal Holloway, University of London A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Media Arts April 2015 1 Declaration of Authorship I, Matthew Crowder, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. This thesis has not been submitted for a degree, either in the same or different form, to this or any other University. Signed: ______________________ Date: ________________________ 2 Abstract This thesis researches the reception of British television political comedy from 1962 to 2012, exploring the continuities and contrasts in viewers’ definitions, interpretations and evaluations of the genre. Television comedy scholarship has privileged the text but this first in-depth study of British political comedy conceptualises television genre as a cultural category, and adopts the method of qualitative historical reception research to explore the different ways that viewers have written about the genre. Political comedy's reception is dominated by discourses of power, and the genre’s comedic references to news and current affairs are consistently invoked in accounts of its effects upon everyday life. The research highlights viewers’ emotive responses in four case studies that place pleasure and displeasure, cultural distinctions, and social affiliations in their historical contexts, arguing that judgments about political comedy’s value, meaning and social effects are related to hierarchies of aesthetics and taste, and their relationship to public issues defined as socially significant. The chapter on That Was The Week That Was discusses beliefs that irreverent comedy could affect British institutions. Work on Yes, Minister , The New Statesman and The Thick of It highlights the relationships between different definitions of realism, quality, and British political culture. Attitudes to Spitting Image demonstrate how evaluations of satirical value depend upon comedy conforming to highbrow cultural hierarchies. Brass 3 Eye is explored via the moral panics around the trivialization of issues defined as 'serious'. Qualitative historical reception research into television political comedy gives insight into how people categorised and attributed meaning to comedy, politics, public life and the media. It shows how people thought political comedy intervened in British culture, and gives glimpses into the sometimes passionate debates about the definition of television texts, television genres, the medium of television, British political culture, British media culture, and British society itself. 4 Contents Declaration of Authorship..................................................................................................2 Abstract ..............................................................................................................................3 Contents .............................................................................................................................5 List of Illustrations ...........................................................................................................10 Acknowledgments............................................................................................................11 Chapter One Qualitative historical reception research and the cultural classification of British television political comedy .............................................................................................14 I Television, text and power: comedy, genre and audience .........................................17 Comedy and culture .................................................................................................19 Audience ..................................................................................................................29 Genre........................................................................................................................37 II Historical qualitative genre reception research ........................................................45 Defining television political comedy .......................................................................49 Case studies..............................................................................................................51 Reception sources.....................................................................................................57 Letters...................................................................................................................60 Newspapers ..........................................................................................................61 Fan forums ...........................................................................................................63 Internet reviews....................................................................................................64 The ethics of using these sources.............................................................................66 Closing comments and overview .............................................................................69 Chapter Two That Was The Week That Was : Ridiculing the Nation ................................................73 I Satire and its Discontents..........................................................................................73 Using letters from the BBC Written Archive Centre...............................................75 II Not so much their politics, more their way of life...................................................77 5 Hyena howls and a red herring.................................................................................77 Dominant discourses: Politics, Christianity, Smut and Institutions.........................85 Politics..................................................................................................................87 Christianity...........................................................................................................88 Smut and dirt........................................................................................................89 National institutions .............................................................................................90 Offense and the discourse of national attack............................................................91 Young devils and moral panics................................................................................92 Ridicule and the imagined community ....................................................................96 III Bad entertainment: aesthetics and ideology...........................................................99 Novelty and generic expectations ............................................................................99 Defining good entertainment: “uplifting and true” ................................................102 Incompetent entertainment.....................................................................................107 Offensive entertainment.........................................................................................111 Pernicious entertainment........................................................................................113 Novel pleasures and comedy communities............................................................115 IV Nation shall not speak irreverence unto nation....................................................116 The power of television and BBC impartiality ......................................................117 The BBC as national institution.............................................................................119 Changes in broadcasting: Competition, Pilkington and Greene ............................121 V Media power, television and political comedy......................................................129 Chapter Three Sitcom, the Real and Cynicism ...................................................................................134 I Authentic Comedy..................................................................................................134 II Yes Minister and Comic Coherence......................................................................139 The dominance of authenticity in the reception of Yes Minister ...........................140 Defining Yes Minister ’s authenticity......................................................................143 Proposing empirical authenticity............................................................................147 Interpreting and enjoying authenticity ...................................................................150 Yes Minister ’s quality comedy...............................................................................153 6 Interpreting inauthenticity and comedy style.........................................................157 Comic Coherence...................................................................................................163 Comic coherence and British political culture.......................................................168 III The New Statesman and Ideological Coherence..................................................170 Inauthenticity, exaggeration and failure.................................................................171 Low value comedy and Alternative Comedy.........................................................174 Effacing authenticity