Funny girls
James Delingpole
There’s a programme I sometimes do on the right-wing guerilla media website 18 Doughty Street which I think you might enjoy. It’s called Culture Clash, presented by Peter Whittle, and it’s a bit like Newsnight Review would be if you took away the pseudery, the left-liberal cant and Ekow Eshun.
Obviously, the production values are a lot ropier than you get on proper TV, and because the guests are generally less media-exposed there’s quite a lot of ‘you know’ and ‘I mean’. But what’s good about it is that everyone feels free to say what they actually think about the films, books and TV programmes they’re reviewing rather than going ‘Heaven help us. We’re on TV! Better take care!’ and subconsciously censoring themselves.
For example, had I been on Newsnight Review, I don’t think I would have said that the reason Daniel Craig is a better James Bond than Sean Connery is that his performance isn’t ruined by the voice in your head going ‘Hairy milkman. Tedious Scottish nationalist’. And I certainly wouldn’t have dared say, as I did on Culture Clash the other week, that chicks can’t do comedy. Do I really mean that? Well, not totally. Miranda Hart (the big one from Hyperdrive) is funny; Tamsin Greig (Black Books) is funny; Jessica Stevenson (Spaced) is funny; Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French when on form are funny; and I know loads and loads of women — Caitlin Moran; Sarah Vine; Sophie Laybourne; my sister... — who are effortlessly, naturally funny, far more so than any men I know.
I still suspect, though, that were you to choose the 50 greatest comedy programmes of all time, from Dad’s Army through League of Gentlemen to The Office and Peep Show, you’d find barely a handful (Ab Fab; erm ... ) in which girls figured prominently. And I’m not sure you can ascribe this totally to the fact that we live in an oppressive, phallocentric society where women are chained to the sink and the nappy-basket while men are free to create.
We’d been invited to review three mainly-women comedies and I didn’t think much of any of them. The first was The Catherine Tate Show, about which I’ve never read anyone say a less than an enthusiastic word but which left me stony-faced.
Compare and contrast Tate’s ‘Am I bovvered?’ schoolgirl with Matt Lucas’s Vicky Pollard (from Little Britain). Both are scarily accurate portraits of out-of-con trol female youth, but whereas ‘Yeah but no but’ Vicky makes you laugh, the Tate creation is just chilling. Maybe it’s in the writing — Tate seems not quite to recognise when a sketch has outstayed its welcome. Maybe it’s that Tate’s genius is as an actor, not a comedian. Maybe it’s just because I’m not a girl, and so unable to supply the necessary sisterly solidarity.
Tittybangbang 2 (BBC3, Thursday) appears to have been commissioned solely on the basis that it’s got lots of women in it, some of whom are very fat. Sample sketch: two maids stand outside a stately home; one sniffs a flower in order to make herself sneeze, blowing lots of dust out of her colleague’s hair; later on, the colleague takes revenge by sneezing back, covering her assailant’s face in dripping snot on which the camera lovingly dwells.
Then there’s Pulling (BBC3, Thursday), the mostly girls series which started very much as it has since gone on with a scene in which our bored heroine distractedly masturbates her fiancé under the bed clothes. There being no tissue paper available, he cleans up by tearing off the leaf of a rubber plant which — tsk tsk typical man — he then chucks down the back of the bed.
This, then, is Pulling’s joke: men are utterly useless — repellant, ugly, either too wet or too macho, stupid, monomaniacal, good only for one thing and not even any good at that; women, meanwhile, have it really so tough — and, frankly, can you blame them when they live in a world with so many men in it? Maybe you need to be female fully to empathise with this vision, but I doubt even girls find the programme that funny, especially given the crudity with which the joke is handled. It’s one of those sitcoms where, for the punchlines to be set up properly, the characters have to behave in a way no one would in real life.
For example, when the schoolteacherwho’s-a-total-slapper plays the ‘Don’t tell me. Let me guess where I met you before’ game with a hunky black man in the supermarket, he has to stand there like a lemon, letting her go into all sorts of lurid detail as to what she thinks she might have done to him before he embarrassedly admits that actually he’s the father of one of the kids in her class.
My guess, as I say, is that both Pulling and Tittybangbang 2 were commissioned at least in part as a PC gesture by the BBC to get more female comedy on TV. The problem with this sort of positive discrimination is it ends up being counterproductive, since all it does is to show up just how vastly superior most comedy done by blokes is.
As someone cleverer than me suggested on Culture Clash, maybe it’s biological. You often hear of men being able to laugh women into bed, but very rarely does it happen the other way round. So maybe the key to men’s general superiority in comedy boils down to the thing that governs almost every aspect of their lives too: sexual desperation.
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