The Bluestocking 356: Saturday Night Brexit regrets
who Milligan portrayed in brownface alongside John Bird
Happy Friday!
Ahead of my book THE GENIUS MYTH being published this summer, I’m going to do a few more posts on the craft (and logistics) of writing, because my first attempt went down pretty well here on Substack. Do you have a question about writing? Leave a comment below or hit reply, and I’ll try to answer it.
Helen
Brexit makes me want to sit in a gutter and weep (Sunday Times, £)
Before we reached the tunnel entrance we had to leave the motorway and park up in a gigantic lorry park full of trucks from every conceivable European country. I even met a driver there from Belarus. And got on with him so well that he gave me a hat.
More has been spent in this place on high-visibility jackets than the NHS spent on PPE during Covid. And what was happening? Nothing, as far as I could tell. No lorries were being opened and checked. No dogs were sniffing tyres. We were simply waiting for someone in a cabin to stamp our form. And God did we wait. For two bloody hours.
Still, at least we were then done with the bureaucracy. Oh no we weren’t, because having checked all our equipment out of the UK, we then had to check it all into France. So we got off the train and entered another gigantic lorry park, behind all the artics that had got off the earlier train, and the one before that. And when we reached the booth, the man explained that we’d been in the wrong queue and must follow the orange line to another lorry park a mile away. And we couldn’t find the orange line. And it was raining, and I’d been looking forward to mooching around Bruges that night and now we wouldn’t make it and I wanted to sit down in the gutter and weep.
I have crossed many tricky borders over the years and the paperwork always takes time. Iraq to Turkey took a moment, that’s for sure. And Rwanda into Tanzania was challenging as well. But nothing has ever taken as long as it took us to get from post-Brexit England into France.
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Because Jeremy Clarkson is so Brexit-coded—petrol cars, complaining about elf and safety—it’s easy to forget that he is and always has been a Remainer. That’s partly why I found this column so fascinating: it’s full of populist cracks about small boats and how much he hates Starmer, so it might reach an audience of similarly culturally Brexity people and convince them that the whole project has been a bust.
Talking of which, the Sunday Times also had this very telling quote from Dominic Cummings, architect of Brexit. Asked by Josh Glancy if he thinks that Brexit was “botched” by the Tories, Cummings replies:
“Well, obviously yes, in lots of ways. If you go back to 2016, Remain makes some sense and reasonable people can argue that we should have stayed in. Leave and change things very significantly makes sense. Leave and then just sit there changing nothing is obviously moronic. But that’s where Boris and [Rishi] Sunak ended up taking us. So to that extent it’s obvious the Tories just completely botched it.”
Real Brexit has never been tried!
The Unfunny Man Who Believes in Humor (The Atlantic)
Back in nasty, metallic, cocaine-powered ’90s London, where everyone was standing around talking loudly and competitively in overlit rooms, I would find myself from time to time in the company of comedians. Stand-ups, mainly. They were brilliant, of course, and miserable, of course (because stand-ups have to live with accelerated brains and grotesquely magnified associative powers), and when they got going, the laughs would stack up, bitter, dazzling, progressively more stimulated and rarefied. Until, that is, something truly and originally comedic was said. At which point silence fell, faces straightened, and somebody would gravely observe: “That’s good material.”
For a biography of a man whose business is comedy, Susan Morrison’s Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live is weirdly barren of laughs. Across 600 extremely interesting pages, I LOLed exactly once, and it was at a joke (or what the critic Jesse David Fox calls “a joke-joke”) that the future SNL staffer Alan Zweibel wrote and sold—for $7—to Rodney Dangerfield. Here it is: “Even as an infant I didn’t get any respect. My mother wouldn’t breastfeed me. She said she liked me as a friend.”
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I love James Parker’s writing on humour—his Theo Von profile is still one of my favourite pieces from last year. And here he is on Lorne Michaels, who has been the supremo of Saturday Night Live for 50 (!) years.
James is exactly right that many of the people who work behind the scenes in comedy are serious, even unfunny, themselves—they are so good at tinkering with the mechanics of comedy, perhaps, precisely because they don’t let themselves get carried away by the sheer rolling joy of laughter.
Quick Links
“Now, to be fair to Badenoch, the Telegraph story didn’t reveal the date of the case. To be very slightly less fair to Badenoch, a more careful person, who had been in the Cabinet seven months earlier, might have noted the article’s lack of a date and wondered if there was a way that asking about this might, to use Parliamentary jargon, come back and bite her on the arse.” I talked about how Kemi Badenoch is trapped in an Online Right echo chamber in this week’s Strong Message Here—while across town, she was proving me right. Her PMQs questions this week came from the front pages of the Telegraph and the Mail, and she came a cropper on both of them. (The Critic).
“Over the 1970s, Americans rapidly became much more supportive of gender equality. Departing from the cult of domesticity, families increasingly came to support equal rights at work and in politics, as well as the transformation of intimate relationships. What enabled this remarkable shift? Most Americans encountered feminism indirectly, yet media coverage was overwhelmingly hostile […] Women’s magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and McCall’s made feminism relatable. And they reached a massive audience — 50 million plus. A single issue of McCall’s reached one in four American women! Bam. (Alice Evans, Substack)
Thanks to Matt Muir for this one, from his weekly links roundup Web Curios: a list of TV shows cancelled after one episode. It’s a real puzzler why this one didn’t get picked up: “The Melting Pot (1975): BBC sitcom written by Spike Milligan, who also starred as Mr. Van Gogh, a Pakistani illegal immigrant in London, who Milligan portrayed in brownface alongside John Bird.”
Also from Matt: When They Died, a quiz to test whether you know the dates of celebrity deaths.
“But what [JD] Vance is doing is different. He’s not signaling how good of a person he is. He’s signaling, in a strange way, how bad of a person he is. He’s signaling that he’s ok with racists who explicitly think his children are race-mixed abominations. He’s not doing this to signal virtue. He’s doing it signal vice.” (Jeremiah Johnson, Substack)
Pierce the veil of the BBC’s uncritical coverage, and this is a very difficult case in which I’m not sure the current approach is sustainable (or fair). A woman with no physical problems refuses to leave hospital after 18 months, even when offered a free flat with two carers.
The Studies Show can’t stay away from IQ—here are Stuart and Tom on the grand intellectual battle between JD Vance and Rory Stewart over whether the latter is a 110 or a 130.
“The very thing that had kept me out of these rooms — my rural, working class background and blue collar instincts— was what made me interesting once I got into those rooms. And that’s when the lightbulb went off.” Tony Tost’s advice on how to make your outsider status into an advantage applies to all kinds of creative work (Practical Screenwriting, Substack)
TIL that Tommy Robinson’s first attempt at a pseudonym was Wayne King: “a schoolboy joke he initially got away with in a radio interview”. (BBC)
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On link 6, my first job for a big corporation was working in the call centre for a big insurers workers compensation division
We had a woman we all hated getting calls from, always hostile, always rude and always in the wrong. This was 2004 & she had been on workers comp since 1986 when she sprained her knee. How did a sprained knee lead to 18 years off work you ask? Well by 2004 the official reason she was on workers comp was ‘mental pain & anguish of being unable to work’
This woman didn’t want to work so the mental anguish was a joke, she was over $1.2 million in payments by this time including multiple 6 figure payouts, psychiatric bills, physical therapy, etc. it was a joke
That made it worse was that worker’s comp premiums are based on percentage of salary that were different for different industries (so builders were 15% and sales were 0.6% that kind of thing) so the next call after this awful rorter, you’d get a call from a small businessman in tears because he wanted to grow his business but couldn’t afford to employ the new guy he needed as the workers comp premiums made it impossible, was infuriating that while some ppl were ripping off the system other businesses were being driven to the wall while someone else was being denied a job as the employer couldn’t afford to hire him
One thing it did was make mid-twenties me question my knee-jerk left wing bleeding heart politics when it came to welfare policy
Not really sure how "Vance isn't taking something personally" is somehow a bad thing. Do we really want politics based on "he hurts my feelings"? I think that's honestly where we went wrong, with all the "lived experience" stuff, etc. There are plenty of racists in power who are just smart enough not to advertise it on social media. One can argue whether this guy is really as smart as he claims, based on his social media usage. But otherwise I doubt he's less competent than anyone else in the average federal job.