Britain needs more famous people

Graham Norton can only do so much

Long before Saturday Night Live UK invaded our placid shores, one question haunted television executives and teenage news junkies alike: where is the British Daily Show? Comedian Jon Stewart took a light-entertainment, pop-culture heavy programme and transformed it into a legitimate cultural and political phenomenon. From Monday to Thursday, 42 weeks of the year, Stewart would, as he somewhat disingenuously described, “throw spitballs from the back of the room”.

America has always been weird. But between 1999 and 2015, the years in which Stewart was in the chair, it got infinitely weirder. And The Daily Show was there to chronicle it all: the hanging chads of Florida, the invasion of Iraq, the rise of Barack Obama, the Tea Party and of course Donald Trump. Why couldn’t we have some of that?

It’s not as if the British can’t do political satire or news parodies. We invented the goddamn genre, alongside the rule of law and the tea cosy. Think Yes Minister, The Day Today, Spitting Image and, before its latter-day Simpsons zombie state, Have I Got News for You. And yet, it never quite happened.

Historically, the principal barrier to a Daily Show UK has been, bizarrely enough, legal. When television cameras were first allowed into the House of Commons in 1989¹, there were strict conditions set, one of which was that no extracts could be used in “any light entertainment programme or in a programme of political satire.”

So the BBC’s This Week with Andrew Neil — a not always entirely serious programme — could show extracts, an explicitly satirical show could not.

And while the rule has been quietly relaxed in recent years — the now defunct and not especially funny Mash Report used a clip of a Labour MP attempting to prevent Speaker John Bercow from exiting the chamber during the infamous ‘not a prorogation’ prorogation of Parliament back in 2019 — broadcasters, not least the BBC, remain wary.

The rules have led to some deeply silly moments. Back in 2018, a segment from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which included footage of MPs laughing at Theresa May’s assertion that Britain would be making a smooth exit from the EU, could not be shown to impressionable UK viewers, lest we grow cynical of our political leaders.

And yet, this still isn’t the main reason why Britain doesn’t have a Daily Show. In fact, it’s the same reason why we lack the wider American late-night talk show ecosystem. Sure, Graham Norton and Jonathan Ross, but these are weekly affairs. The answer is simple: Britain does not have enough famous people.