Simon Heffer, John Safran, and the need for ritual humiliation in comedy offerings

(Above: John Safran doing a bit of black face for his new show Race Relations).

You quickly realize you must be off in the land of (a) old farts; (b) duffers with a title like major or colonel; or (c) a right wing loon with grudge, when reading some of the suffering emerging from the UK in recent times.

Here's a standard expression of (c) the curmudgeon with a grudge, as found in Simon Heffer's Don't laugh: taste police take aim at cruel jokes, a piece recycled from the UK Telegraph to the antipodes by an SMH anxious to bloatware up the content of its new National Times banner (never mind that you can toddle off to the Tele and imbibe direct, like an internet kleptomaniac).

I can't remember when I last sat down and watched, from beginning to end, a BBC situation comedy. It was possibly 20 years ago, and it was probably Blackadder.

Yes, I once chanced upon a more contemporary offering, but it was so dire it was hard to believe anyone but the irremediably tragic could possibly be watching it.

Now these scarcely funny things are destined to become unfunnier still, since the BBC has decreed that its comedies are not to be ''unduly intimidatory, humiliating, intrusive, aggressive or derogatory''.

Well so much for for the thoughts of someone on contemporary comedy, who's never sat down and watched Extras or The Office. Both of them happened to turn up in the new millenium. You might not like Ricky Gervais, but he achieved the ultimate accolade - a feature film in America. Lordy, international acclaim. So un-British.

Technically of course we have to rule out the Ali G show as being both not quite a sitcom and having been aired on Channel 4, and so Drop the Dead Donkey also bites the dust, and more's the pity we also have to leave aside Dylan Moran in Black Books, another show for 4.

But no matter the side controversy affecting Chris Langham, I had some affection for his six parter with Paul Whitehouse called Help, which lordy, is as recent as 2005 (before Langham shuffled off to the clink for downloading internet porn involving children), and whether you like it or not, you have to thank the Beeb for the crudity Men Behaving Badly, because it revived the show when it was put in a turnaround, and it makes the Heffer timeline cut by airing in the nineties.

Even so, it seems hard to cut Little Britain out of the mix, if only because it's a sketch show which is character-based and even has a vague structure, based on the notion that it's a guide to British society and its institutions.

Whatever, it managed to be offensive, with the ritual comedic humiliations beloved by the British (and if you want a handy check list of British sitcoms of recent times, go here).

Which is important because in the flagellating way of the British, Heffer requires his BBC comedy to contain some sort of humiliation, most likely self-humiliation, but any kind of humiliation at a pinch. Hence his fondness for Fawlty Towers, and Reginald Perrin, but it really is a bit unfair quoting that Fawlty Shakespeare of sitcoms against all future sitcom comers.

But of course Heffer is really only doing a Gilbert and Sullivan routine of the kind beloved of (a) old duffers, which is to mourn how things are now without exception and hopeless, generally because of the presence of the young, while drifting off into a reverie to the good old days. Back when things were different, before the nursing home loomed a trifle large in the consciousness:

Comedy used, of course, to be able to make certain assumptions: among them was a shared social experience and a common sense of humour born out of that and a common culture. The BBC has its own view of what the things-in-common today are, and, in its obsession with ''diversity'', there are very few of them.

Ah Britain, not the same as it used to be old chap, what? This strange new thing diversity, when once upon a time you could crack a joke about curry eaters and everybody would know what it meant (come on back Major Bloodnok, and give us a fart or two, it's hell in here).

The new guidelines were prompted by the idiotic moment when the BBC broadcasters Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand rang up an elderly actor - the same intimidated Spaniard from Fawlty Towers - and mocked him over the carnal behaviour of his granddaughter. We all know that no wide-ranging guidelines were necessary in response to this: just the simple editorial application of the rules of good taste. Yet the ''committee'' so correctly derided by Howard Davies has seized the opportunity to issue draconian new rules about a large number of things that cannot now appear in any comedy.

Well of course here in the antipodes we know all about such guidelines, and funnily enough it was the usual clucks on the right clucking about good taste that got The Chaser in hot water at the ABC, and no doubt the clucks are right now preparing a feast of barnyard cluckery when John Safran shortly hits the airwaves.

That's generally because people who moan about diversity and political correctness really don't have that much taste for comedy that plays it hard, unless of course it's sending up jovial images of fuzzy wuzzies or doing a little black face (and where's the harm in that, and what on earth was all that fuss about, asks the bewildered duffer. All done in good fun, no harm intended).

Anyhoo, back in the UK, such political correctness seems to be exercising Heffer's mind.

I don't know what, indeed, there will be left for us to chortle at.

Don't worry old sausage, old gherkin, we can always chortle at your fear and loathing. Why you manage to sound very Dad's Army about it all, and I fancy that you might even take the lead role of Captain Mainwaring, as if to the manner born:

After 70 or so years of influencing and shaping the definition of the national sense of humour, the BBC now seems to have forfeited its ability to do that. As a result, our sense of humour will have to carry on being forged in other ways, as it was before the BBC brought us the Goons and Monty Python and the rest: in the workplace, in the home, by the written word, in pubs, in clubs, in theatres, indeed, in every place where real human beings meet each other and make conversation.

Fight 'em in the pubs, fight 'em in the streets, fight 'em on the beaches. Like the brave men in Farenheit 451 who manage to learn and recite books. Oh god, as well as warm beer, there'll be a bloody British humorist in any pub you might care to visit to escape the weather. Wait there already is. Damn you BBC, damn you to hell.

What's that? If Chairman Rupert has his way, there won't be a BBC, with its outrageous anti-competitive anti-capitalist ways? And Rupert's idea of a comedy channel is Fox News?

Never mind, the world will be made safe for Heffer, just as it seems a few important white whales will also be safe:

White, middle-aged, middle-class, heterosexual males (rather like Reggie Perrin) seem to be safe, but that may change in the next set of guidelines, as the censors realise that they have feelings, too.

Oh no, white middle-aged middle class heterosexual males have feelings? That kind of radical talk will surely rile the feminists.

It makes me realise that my wife is right when she says that once you get past the age of 40, there isn't really anything on the BBC for you. Except Gardeners' World, of course: and we should make the most of that until someone realises how much it discriminates against those who don't have gardens, and who might feel humiliated by the lack of one.

Had a good grumble dear? Feel better now? Or would you like a cup of tea, and then off to shed to work on spreading fertilizer on the vegetables?

Meanwhile, back on local time, we're now on a countdown to Safran's new show Race Relations, which will launch on the ABC on October 21st. (preview etc here).

Perhaps Heffer can write a guest column for the SMH poo pooing all the fuddy duddy politically correct types who can't see the fun in a little Safran blackface or getting crucified in the Philippines ... because I sense a fine old hoo hah is brewing, and the commentariat columnists are going to have a field day.

By golly, if Heffer steps up to the breach, and explains the importance and benefits of humiliation in comedy, he might just save Miranda the Devine from a heart attack ...

Meantime, allow me to have a little more faith in (a) comedians and (b) young comedians and even (c) young British comedians who end up on the BBC with a pompous committee trying to hold the reins.

It's in the nature of many comedians - heirs to Lenny Bruce or Monty Python or any of a hundred schools of laughter generation - to push the edge, unfold the envelope and otherwise challenge a thousand cliches, and while committees might try to rule, the genuinely funny, deviant and subversive will find a way to an audience, and not via the silly rhetorical devices offered up by the huffing Heffer.

Which is just as well, because you can't rely on Heffer for a decent laugh every day of the week. Role on John Safran, and let's see where subversive comedy stands in a week and a bit's time.

(Below: John Safran getting ready to assault Miranda the Devine's sensibilities).