Steve Coogan is Jim Davidson for the Middle Classes
Signing into Twitter is an act of self harm that often ends in part of your history being lost at the hands of arrogant and cowardly celebrities. I look back at the “before times” and reminisce at just how naive I was.
It’s not that I thought celebrities were fountains of knowledge, rather that those who deal in satire are at least self-aware in their vitriol. After all, if such spite is purely motivated by snobbery, it’s not likely to have much depth. It’s no better than Jim Davidson’s Chalkie White or Olive from On the Buses.
Back of the net!
Like most, I first became aware of Steve Coogan in the early 1990’s through the phenomenal Chris Morris news spoof, The Day Today. His sports presenter Alan Partridge was undoubtedly one of the gems of the show, a brilliantly observed mish-mash of Saturday night variety show host, sports journalist and Radio One DJ. Noel Edmonds meets David Coleman, if you like.
Post 90’s, the character became more than a little tiresome, in large part because it’s hard to laugh at satire mocking a culture that hasn’t existed for decades. Radio One is hideously cool, in that painful way that the BBC thinks “the kids” would enjoy, while the generation that grew up loving Partridge has moved onto Radio 6, seemingly unaware of just how cringy the long line of Mancunian socialists called Mark are.
It used to be said by some that Bernard Manning was not a bigot because he mocked everyone. This is not true, he just mocked all minorities, he rarely joked about overweight bigots. The same, within his own context, can be said of Coogan.
A truly great satirist would mock the cliches that his fellow travellers immerse themselves in, there’s plenty of material to work with. Imagine a 2024 Alan Partridge based on Gary Linekar and Huw Edwards, what shenanigans a perverted, narcissistic, walking dad joke could get up to. Instead, he just churns out more Partridge. That’ll teach Dave Lee Travis!
This is the difference between the 80’s Alternative Comedians and their 90’s equivalents. The 80’s knew how to laugh at themselves, think Rick from the Young Ones, even when they were being a bit insufferable.
The ill-informed and ignorant
In the run up to the 2019 election, Coogan appeared on Channel Four News to advocate for tactical voting. This was no biting satire pointed at the Tories, it was preachy activism. Everyone is entitled to express an opinion, even celebrities, and lord knows the Tories are often loathsome, but this was a self-satisfied lecture, insulting anyone who disagreed.
At one point he was asked the leading question of who Alan Partridge would vote for and, getting carried away while on home turf, he responded “Alan Partridge is ill-informed and ignorant, so therefore he’s a Conservative and Brexiteer”. Just the 17+ million he’s dismissed as beneath him there then. Who exactly is he trying to persuade here?
Building up a head of steam, he ended with the flourish, “I have to say that the reason the Tories don’t invest as much money in education is that they depend on a certain level of ignorance for their support”.
There’s nothing quite like an adolescent conspiracy theory to showcase your devastating insights on matters you clearly haven’t put five seconds of thought into, or at least considered any opposing view on.
The Tories won by a landslide.
Mullets and shoegazers
I don’t think it’s a leap of imagination to suggest that the culture Coogan was mocking with Alan Partridge was a form of old fashioned (by the 90’s) entertainment that was popular with the ageing working classes. So far, so 90’s student . and so what?
There’s no group of people that should be above mockery, despite the anti-artistic statement that considers (and defines) the angle of punches as up or down, then judges its merits on that alone. Put simply, it was funny, never more so than the few series of I’m Alan Partridge, which came later in the 90’s.
But what about Paul Calf? The mullet-headed Spandau Ballet fan who hated Nirvana and liked to get into fights with students? This was as cliched a northern, working class caricature as there is, all kebab house violence, poor fashion and uneducated, alcoholic rage. It’s funny cos he wasn’t into navel gazing self-pity like all the cool kids in 1993, you see?
Then there was Paul Calf’s sister, Pauline, with her 80’s perm and garish makeup. What was the main punchline of this incisive piece of satire? She was a slag, a tart with a heart and yet more out of date fashion tastes. I bet she didn’t even like The Levellers, the idiot.
I’m sure they would have voted Brexit in Coogan’s mind, or perhaps Reform now, ageing and working class (sorry, “ill informed”) as they are. These weren’t characters warmly created from fond memories, they’re cringey, lazy stereotypes. More fromage than homage. Smell my cheese indeed.
Regurgitation and self-harm
So why engage in such dismissive, mean-spirited attacks on half the country? Because we all live in a bubble in 2024 and no bubble is more impenetrable than fame.
Gen X comedians are like Just Stop Oil activists at this point, throwing regurgitated vichyssoise up previously treasured works of art and making it so, unless you agree with them politically, it’s impossible to enjoy.
It’s alienating for a portion of your fans, polarising for the culture and, ultimately, self-harming for the artist. What an anal dirge prat.
Coogan is a genius. The level of insight achieved by his observational comedy is extraordinary. He is also a total prick. Like many others before him, he channels the darker traits of his own personality to create comedic ‘characters’. Who knows? he might even share some of their views before he serves up the sanitised, PC version of himself to the ‘real world’. Indeed, it would seem ‘the real Steve Coogan’ is in ways at least, just as ghastly as Alan Partridge. ‘The Trip’ is a case in point. He and Brydon play a variant of themselves that’s firmly based on their actual personalities. Arguably, Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer take a rather similar approach in their fishing show. The difference is that Mortimer, Whitehouse (and Brydon) reveal a core humanity and kindness that Coogan lacks. All that said, I don’t have a problem with Steve Coogan offending half of the country, just as I have never had a problem with ‘Little Britain’ offending most of it. Do we really have to like the man to admire and enjoy his work? I’m not sure we do.