You're having a laugh aren't you?

Forget that whole Band Camp late-review catastrophe, here's some up to the minute commentary. I'm currently watching a programme on BBC 3 that celebrates the great change in British comedy since the Seventies. The show looks at the weak, bigoted mainstream comedy of the seventies and glories in how much better off we are now, since alternative comedy and Vic and Bob's two-man comedy revolution.
It's a neat little show, with some great old clips, despite a cringworthy clip of Ben Elton subbing for Wogan and smarming with Jeffery Archer. Yes, Alternative Comedy was great. Yes, a lot of those seventies dinosaurs needed culling but let's not be too complacent. I can't help worrying that there's been a bit of backsliding of late. Especially given the comedies held up as glowing examples of the current comedy zeitgeist. Yes, we have wonderful surreal, silly comedy like The Mighty Boosh but Leigh Francis(Avid Merrion) desperately needs a new idea after the car-crash that was A Bear's Tail, even if Channel 4 haven't noticed.
More to the point, one of the most successful comedies of recent years, Little Britain is a real cause for concern. Beloved of critics and public alike, is just as bad as british comedy's seventies nadir. Not only is it increasingly unfunny but more and more the show is relying on a cruel humour. It started out as a charming little show, with its whimsical narration and loveable characters like Lou and Andy but increasingly it relies on the grotesque and the offensive. Of course, the targets have changed since the seventies. They don't mock black people or the Irish. However, old incontinent women and the mentally handicapped are now fair game.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not the sort of miserable, humourless, Daily Mail reading little Englandler who starts frothing at the mouth because somebody says 'bloody' before the watershed. I admire the way comics like Ricky Gervais and Chris Morris deal with potentially risky subjects in their comedy. The trouble is that Little Britain is just being lazy and offensive. There are no doubt satirical points to be made about the treatment of the mentally handicapped for example. On Little Britain they just say, "oh look, isn't this woman funny, look, she's pulling up flowers, and pouring tea on the lunch tray and smearing shit on the walls, isn't that hilarious!" I've been reliably informed by people who have spent time in mental health establishments that it isn't funny, at all! So, yeah, Vic and Bob are great and they should be celebrated but to hold them up as the inspiration for Little Britain is really no praise at all.