It was so much a part of Zürich, along with Jam, The Mighty Boosh, brot, kasse, and living in the Dachstock, Little Britain was part of our every day life. And tonight watching the new series I was really just disgusted and thought what these assholes need is a fucking bat in the face. There’s lethal satire, vindictive black humour, gut-heaving toilet humour, and then there’s just a pack of wankers who are trying to get cheap laughs out of hatred of people who aren’t like them.
One of my favourite blogs, in a solid Zizek-quoting, Socialist Worker “blah blah will be first against the wall when the revolution comes” kinda way, that last year’s big favourite of mine China Mieville occasionally writes for is Lenin’s Tomb, and though in my all-pervasive nihilism I have about as much time for socialism in any form as I do for capitalism (I think I’m reverting to a shitty anarchist …), there’s nothing like a bit of hard-arse polemic to make me have some hope in humanity. So back when I thought Little Britain was kinda alright – after all it’s Dr Who doing the voiceover – and Lenin and Co. really went up to the hilt in an unrestrained assassination I thought, ” … well, maybe, but maybe it’s just humour too, and let’s not get too serious about this”.
That was until tonight and while I was watching this odious piece of crap, I kept on thinking of the post, “Chavs”, and when it got to that really fucking nasty lady-boy ‘skit’, well let’s just make this really clear: if anyone thinks that doing the Little Britain “I’m a laaady’ line around me is somehow funny, original, or bespeaks favourably of your intelligence, and I respond by say, telling you to fuck off back to suburbia you smart arse little middle-class prick, don’t take offense, coz it’s just comedy, right?
If such a woman dyes her hair and pulls it back in a pony tail, this is known either as a ‘Croydon facelift’ or a ‘council house facelift’. If she pushes a pram along, she is a ‘pramface’. This naked and unadorned hatred for the working class could not be made more apparent by adornment, and yet it is accepted because the stilleto knife is coated with the unction of ‘satire’ before slid between the ribs. Poisonous as it is, the main point is that someone who isn’t me is having the piss taken out of them. Shit comics like Jimmy Carr make a living out of that. You can be as vile as you like about fat women, mother-in-laws and even members of your audience, provided it is presented on the prettifying chopping board of irony. ‘Little Britain’, similarly, provides an ‘ironic’ veneer for social resentment (of ‘chavs’, wheelchair layabouts, gays etc), validating the undercurrents of hatred that it purports to satirise.
