Mock the Week: How is this metropolitan leftwing bias | UK News

Mock The Week has left the BBC but the BBC hasn’t left the show. Revived on the TLC channel 4 years after it was axed, the new Mock is longer but in most every other respect it is unchanged – the same faces, the same format, and the same inescapable metropolitan leftwing bias. It took just two minutes for the first anti-Farage joke to come, adopted shortly by a two-minute tirade against Donald Trump from Russell Howard, who included a dig about the US promoting arms to Israel as one of the Donald’s failings. A protracted assault on Reform got here later, and then a weak sight gag suggesting the complete county of Kent was racist, which in flip suggests that the script-writers have no concept Reform’s Linden Kemkaran is the chief of Kent County Council. The closest they received to criticising Labour was one good line about Andy Burnham from Angela Barnes: “King of the North is quite a grandiose title for someone whose main job involves sorting out the bins in Salford”.

They’re not equal alternative satirists, there was nothing on the Greens, or Corbyn’s Your Party tearing itself aside. Rachel Reeves’s hopeless financial cluster-fudge escaped their consideration too, along with Starmer cancelling elections, Miliband’s ruinous eco-policies, and the ever-ludicrous Sadiq Khan. You waited in useless for comedic outrage about Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the brutal homicide of more than 30,000 largely younger, freedom-loving protestors… The US President is still their main villain because that’s straightforward and it’s risk-free and it really works effectively within the smug, virtual-signalling ‘progressive’ echo chamber of the tv industry. Reacting to Sara Pascoe’s playful suggestion that Tory-hating actress Kathy Burke needs to be PM, Howard quipped, at least she’d “stand up to Trump”. Yes because the Donald is a far greater risk to the world than say war-monger Putin, who barely received a point out, or Xi Jinping.

I confess that I loved the collection when it first began. It had more vitality and jokes-per-minutes than Have I Got News For You and panellists like Frankie Boyle introduced an edge of hazard (before he reinvented himself as a revolutionary anti-capitalist, after making hundreds of thousands from capitalism). It’s still received a respectable joke-rate, thanks to 4 hard-grafting script-writers, but not all the gags work. In the opening spherical, responding to “If the answer is 700 billion, what’s the question?” leftwing firebrand Ahir Shah quipped, “Is it the age of consent for a galaxy?” His fellow panellists seemed puzzled but it didn’t boring the gales of enhanced laughter.

Ed Byrne’s reply was “What do our ratings have to reach before someone at the BBC admits they made a mistake?” Probably a lot more than the 1.1million they received at their peak on BBC2.

The bias is inbuilt. Angela Barnes is pro-Labour, Sara Pascoe toured the UK with Jeremy Corbyn, Russell Howard used to specialise in blue jokes until he realised there was a lot more money to made by making a right-on, bleeding-heart social commentary collection for Sky… Byrne at least units out to problem sacred cows on stage, but no person challenges the left’s stranglehold on TV comedy. And yet funnier, more widespread comedians with conservative or libertarian views can be found. Why not strive reserving Simon Evans, Leo Kearse, Lee Hurst, or Brexiteer Dominic Frisby whose comedian songs have had hundreds of thousands of YouTube views? The producers would possibly even think about forgiving former panellist Andrew Lawrence, who was dropped for his pretty correct critique of the show’s failings and would absolutely problem the cosy luvvies’ perception that anybody wanting to stop unlawful immigration is routinely “racist”.

Mock The Week is longer now, operating to an hour with three prolonged advert breaks. But further air-time hasn’t produced further high quality. The makers, Angst Productions, have padded the show out with an unpromising new ingredient, questions from the viewers. The Wheel of News is still just an excuse for two of the panellists to recycle small components of their act.

Pascoe lined IVF and her youngsters, and viewers realized the ruder that means of a cuck chair, which was new to many but hardly news. Sadly, there is no Milton Jones this collection, and in episode one, no Hugh Dennis. Ahir Shah’s favorite recurring joke appears to be he isn’t Romesh, and Barnes appears to suppose it’s okay to body-shame males by recycling a very previous joke about an under-endowed chap, “It’s bit like a penis only smaller”.

The new collection misses out on topicality by being filmed 5 days before its first transmission, so presumably the Mandelson scandal might be next week’s main goal unless Donald Trump mangles another sentence. The closing Things We’d Like To See spherical is still the spotlight, peaking when Rhys James imagined this scene from a romantic novel: “As he pushed down his trousers, her eyes told him everything he needed to know – he would never present MasterChef again.”

TLC is short for The Learning Channel. Here’s what they need to be taught if they need to make Mock The Week unmissable – movie the show nearer to transmission, carry in comedians who don’t sing from the same political tune sheet and carry back host Dara O’Briain’s opening monologue so he has one thing more to do than press his buzzer and make up the scores. Although in equity, I’m still in awe of Dara’s skill to get a chuckle by barely re-wording a joke another person has just told. If that doesn’t work, we may always watch The Muppet Shows – one revived on Disney+, the other reaching contemporary depths of tragi-comedy at PMQs.