First viewed : October 1991
I entirely missed the first series of the long-running satirical news quiz in 1990 and first caught it a year later round about the time of Robert Maxwell's death. I became a pretty regular viewer for the next decade. Among many highlights I recall
- Paul Merton skewering Derek Hatton's attempt to re-brand himself as a comedian
- The Tub of lard standing in for Roy Hattersley
- the fake Elton John
- Elvis Costello coming in and finding nothing whatsoever to say
- Piers Morgan coming in to take on Ian Hislop and being completely destroyed, with a little help from Clive Anderson
I have watched it since then but it stopped being appointment TV once Deayton had gone and I'm hardly aware it's on nowadays.
It's certainly never been the same since they sacked Deayton - at the time, I was living just outside London and spending a fair bit of time with people who had connections inside the BBC. The joke was that if sniffing coke and shagging about was a sackable offence, then the Beeb would have to shut down for weeks as they replaced half the staff!
ReplyDeleteThese days, the show's bite has been well and truly neutered: Hislop and Merton come across more as court-appointed jesters.
I hate this show, an odious boys club of - as DC Harrison says - court-appointed jesters. The moment last year when Jo Brand took Hislop to task over how important sexism was was rightly big news in social media and, in an ideal world, the show would have had a serious reboot a'la the Deayton sacking. But the beeb is happy to let it chug along now aiming at the sacrificial lambs the propaganda machine has authorised as fair game for them that week; 'ho ho ho Diane Abbot isn't very good with numbers, Donald Trump's a bit of a loon isn't he? ho ho ho' *yawn* Utterly redundant since the early 00s as you say.
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