BBC Satire History

BBC Satire History: From That Was The Week That Was to Now

The BBC has a complicated relationship with satire. As a public broadcaster funded by the licence fee and legally required to be impartial, it has institutional reasons to be cautious about comedy that targets politicians, governments, or the establishment. As a broadcaster that has produced some of the finest political satire in the history of the medium, it has largely ignored those reasons. The history of BBC satire is the history of an institution in permanent productive tension with its own constitution.

The Origins: That Was The Week That Was

The first significant moment of BBC political satire was That Was The Week That Was, which ran from 1962 to 1963. Produced by Ned Sherrin and presented by David Frost, it was the first programme to directly and repeatedly mock sitting politicians on British television, and it reached an audience of twelve million. The BBC cancelled it before the 1964 general election on the grounds that it might be politically partial, which was a reasonable concern about a programme whose explicit purpose was to point out that politicians were ridiculous. The BBC Archive preserves surviving episodes. Frost went on to interview Nixon. The BBC went on to cancel other things.

The 1960s and 1970s: The Satire Boom

The cancellation of TW3 did not end the BBC’s relationship with satire. The late 1960s and 1970s produced a range of programmes that operated at various distances from the political: Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969-1974), which satirised institutions and authority through absurdism; Not the Nine O’Clock News (1979-1982), which applied TW3’s topical sketch format to the Thatcher era; and various one-off specials and series that tested the boundaries of what the BBC considered acceptable commentary on public life.

The 1980s: Alternative Comedy and Political Satire

The 1980s saw the emergence of alternative comedy, which brought a more explicitly political voice to British comedy than the preceding generation. Ben Elton’s stand-up, which named Thatcher directly and attacked her government’s policies without metaphor or distance, was a departure from the traditional satirical mode of implication and indirection. The BBC broadcast some of this work while maintaining its official position that it did not broadcast partisan political material, a distinction that required some delicacy to sustain. The Guardian’s BBC comedy archive covers this period extensively.

Yes Minister, Spitting Image and the 1980s Peak

The 1980s were, in retrospect, the peak of British television political satire. Yes Minister (BBC, 1980-1984) and Yes Prime Minister (BBC, 1986-1988) produced the most forensic portrait of political-administrative relations in British television history. Spitting Image, while on ITV rather than the BBC, defined the visual language of political caricature for a generation. The combination of a government that generated extraordinary satirical material and a broadcasting environment that permitted extraordinary satirical response produced a decade of television that has not been matched since.

The 1990s and 2000s: From The Day Today to The Thick of It

The Day Today (BBC Two, 1994) and its descendants introduced a new register to BBC satire: the parody of media form rather than political content. Armando Iannucci’s subsequent work – The Thick of It (BBC Four/BBC Two, 2005-2012) – returned to direct political satire but with a documentary aesthetic that distinguished it from everything that preceded it. The BBC’s willingness to broadcast The Thick of It, which depicted the governing party’s communications operation with sometimes forensic accuracy, reflected an institutional confidence in satire as a legitimate form of public service broadcasting.

The Current Position

The BBC currently broadcasts Have I Got News for You, which has been running since 1990 and remains the most widely watched satirical programme on British television. It also broadcasts various sketch shows and panel programmes that address political and social material. The tension between the BBC’s impartiality requirements and its satire tradition remains unresolved, which is probably the correct outcome: a public broadcaster that was entirely comfortable with sharp political satire would be alarming in one direction, and one that was entirely uncomfortable with it would be alarming in the other. Ofcom’s broadcasting code governs what British broadcasters can say about politics. British satirists have been finding the gaps in it since 1962.