And You Have The Satire That Is Taken From Actors In The South And Taken From Writers In The North, Put Together In The Same Studio, And Then It Is Mixed Together With Formal Experimentation, And It Comes Out As Gapecast

It goes without saying that the COVID-19 pandemic has affected people socially in lots of different ways.  Some have put together a full schedule of evening Zoom calls of friends and family, others have eschewed this merry-go-round in favour of throwing themselves into their interests.  I’ve done a lot of gaming and got big into mahjong.  And a couple of folks out there decided to put together an outlandish audio drama series which ridicules the mores of the UK’s parliamentary and media landscapes in a way that uses obscene humour and constant formal experimentation to undercut accepted notions of what political comedy can be.  I’m very glad they did, as it’s been one of the best discoveries I’ve made during this godawful period in human history.

Gapecast is an offshoot of cult podcast Reel Politik, which combines political commentary with film and music criticism from an unashamedly hard-left, Corbynite standpoint.  RP host Jack Frayne-Reid plays the main character, a grotesque version of the former Labour MP for Ilford South and staunch Jeremy Corbyn critic, Mike Gapes.  Gapes is (or was) a veteran backbencher from the centrist “Trot-bashing” wing of Labour with a strong line in pro-NATO, pro-EU, anti-Russian interventionist foreign policy, who in recent years has found himself memed into a figure of fun by the Very Online Left as a result of a bizarre parliamentary speech in which he talked about milk being taken from the cows in the south and the cows in the north, after which it is mixed together with whiskey and subsequently comes out as Bailey’s.  (I think he was trying to make an analogy about Brexit, but I’ve honestly no idea.)  Early episodes were based around a series of demented monologues in which Gapes talked about political issues of the day, offered a guided tour of his home and detailed his upbringing, but the show’s remit soon expanded to incorporate a whole cast of characters.  The most important of these are Richard Miller, award-winning data journalist turned Gapes election agent and general dogsbody, and Jimothy Baker, an investigative reporter for the local newspaper.  These two are voiced by Gapecast’s lead writer, a pseudonymous figure who has gone by a number of online aliases but who is best known for their now-deleted Twitter account “Farage’s Fucked Face” (FFF for short).  While the characters are very different – Miller is a grimy figure who spends his time mired in the Dark Web and has a number of unsettling sexual fetishes, whereas Baker comes across as something of a naïf – their roles in Gapecast’s plot and the schemes of its titular protagonist both reflect Reel Politik’s preoccupation with the ways in which the news media, particularly liberal publications like the Guardian and the Observer, dovetailed with tenured centrist politicians such as Gapes to forestall and ultimately defeat the radical change embodied by the Corbyn movement.  Further to this end, fictionalised versions of other RP bêtes noires crop up throughout the show’s run, including but not limited to the politicians Chris Leslie and Wes Streeting, opinion columnists John Rentoul and John Harris, and particularly vociferously anti-Corbyn celebrities such as J.K. Rowling and Eddie Marsan.

Let me be clear: I’m not just a fan of Gapecast because I enjoy its use of Left Twitter in-jokes and I’m good friends with the head writer.  Don’t get me wrong, that helps, and it’s certainly easy to make fun of Gapes, with his nasal voice, bumptious rhetoric and ridiculous name.  But if all the show had to offer was jokes about milk, it would have got old quite quickly.  Gapecast’s complex and allusive imagined world succeeds in deconstructing and mocking the political tendencies of the UK in a way that other comedy broadcasts such as Have I Got News For You and Spitting Image struggle to do, because these shows long ago ceased to function as the kind of politically committed outsider art Gapecast entails, if indeed they ever held this status at all.

I’m sceptical of the argument that satire should “punch up” to be considered as such; after all, as people much more knowledgeable about the form than I have observed, there is a tradition of conservative satire that stretches back at least as far as Juvenal.  But I do believe that political satire should fundamentally sit in diametric opposition to that which it purports to critique.  In 2013 the novelist Jonathan Coe observed how, in an episode of Have I Got News For You from the late 90s, the probing questioning of one of the panel show’s team captains, Private Eye editor Ian Hislop, was undercut by the funny quips of his opposite number, the improv comedian Paul Merton.  The comic tenor introduced by Merton, argued Coe, served to let off the hook the young politician – one Boris Johnson – who Hislop was grilling over accusations that he had tried to arrange an assault on a nosy journalist.  Johnson later guest hosted the show, and his (admittedly amusing) stints doing so have been widely credited with putting him in the public eye to the extent that he became a cult figure not just among politics-watchers but sections of the general public, a platform he has now ridden all the way to 10 Downing Street.  Ask yourself: if HIGNFY functioned remotely well as satire, would MPs be queueing up to appear on it?

The same goes for the recently resurrected puppet show Spitting Image, fondly remembered in the UK for its original run from 1984 to 1996, despite the fact that only about 10% of the sketches (if that) were actually funny.  It seems like the original crew at least realised that satire cannot become a national institution if it is to retain its power to skewer its targets; supposedly one member of the writing team realised the series was finished when Radio 1 DJ Chris Evans offered to voice his own puppet.  The relaunched Spitting Image – resurrected precisely because of this institutional status – seems not to have heeded this lesson, choosing to depict Johnson as a bumbling oaf: the exact same persona he himself has carefully constructed and used very cleverly to mask a hard-right politics that many people would have found much less palatable had it not come from someone so ostensibly charming and harmless.  Multiple members of the Cabinet tweeted their delight that the show had decided to immortalise them in puppet form: as with Have I Got News For You, it is clear that politicians, far from running scared of this kind of television, actually welcome the particular kind of consequence-free mockery that the new Spitting Image embodies.  As Juliet Jacques asks, how do you satirise people who are fundamentally unembarrassable in a country where most of the media shows no interest in holding them to account for their deleterious actions?

Gapecast dodges this question of co-optation in a number of ways.  Firstly, it’s made on a much smaller scale and disseminated to a much smaller audience.  I doubt its primary target even knows it exists.  Which is probably for the best, as the content is much more scabrous than the establishment satires of the BBC and ITV, frequently verging upon the mean-spirited.  The writers-cum-performers have no interest whatsoever in trying to humanise Mike Gapes, and the show, with its monstrous version of the former MP, can in one sense be characterised as a very elaborate act of revenge for his frequent robust anti-Left interventions during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.  More important, though, is the fact that, while outwardly avuncular and occasionally somewhat witty, Gapes absolutely cannot take a joke at the expense of himself or his hawkish neoliberal politics (as might be the case for you if your every online utterance was met with a tidal wave of people making jokes about milk).  If he started listening to Gapecast he’d call 999 by the end of the first episode, or at the very least fire off a series of tweets about “Trot scum”.  And this is, in my view, at least in part because he’d recognise the truth at the heart of the show’s bizarre portrayal of him.

In case you’re not familiar with UK politics, most seats in our parliament are considered unlikely to switch from one party to the other at any given general election.  What is more, there is no US-style primary mechanism whereby open challenges to incumbents from within their own party are a regular part of the system (and even the mere suggestion that local party members may be moving to deselect a disliked MP to prevent them from running again are invariably met with cries of “Stalinism!” from the media, at least when it’s the Labour Left trying to mount the challenge).  As such, if you get selected as your party’s candidate in the right constituency, being an MP is a job for life if you want it, and this applies in urban Labour seats like Ilford South just as much as it does in the safest Conservative rural boroughs.  Labour representatives in these areas, knowing that they have long since ceased to be accountable to ordinary voters on account of their party’s local dominance, and that they won’t be deselected as long as they don’t participate in outright criminal activity, are free to engage in all sorts of objectionable behaviour that runs counter to the stated aims and values of their movement.  Witness Birkenhead’s Frank Field, who spent 40 years engaging in the sort of socially conservative rhetoric with regard to single parents and “problem families” that was a bit hardline even for Tony Blair.  Witness Kate Hoey, Labour MP for Fox Hunting and Ulster Unionism.  Gapes, while not nearly as right-wing as these two, certainly felt sufficiently emboldened by his huge majority to spend a large proportion of the last five years working to undermine his own party’s leader and wreck Labour’s chances of getting elected, even going so far as to publicly quit the organisation in the end.  To quote the football manager Alan Pardew, “when you’re the king you can do anything”.

The fictional Gapes’ character alters from episode to episode depending on the needs of the plot, lurching from almost Illuminatus-like political operator to the Napoleon of Crime to the kind of mad, power-drained monarch you find in the worlds of the Dark Souls games, but the multifarious facets of his persona are all united by an outsize ego that there is much evidence to suggest his real-life counterpart shares.  Gapes Prime is forever at great pains to affirm that the result in Ilford South in the 2017 general election, in which his majority increased from 19,777 to 31,647, was not down to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour significantly outperforming expectations in England – and particularly in London – but arose from the great personal mandate he enjoyed as a result of his many years as a hard-working and effective representative of the local community.  (Strangely, many of the same MPs who made this argument at the time were only too pleased to lay the blame for the mass loss of Labour seats in the north of England two years later at the feet of Corbyn and Corbyn alone.  Curious.)  In Gapecast, Michael John Gapes is not just a respected politician who enjoys the love and admiration of his constituents but a venal tyrant who would make the Medicis blush, living in opulence at the “MP’s Mansion” and enjoying the services of a murderous gang known as the Gape Goons who act as a kind of secret police on his behalf.  In the hands of FFF and Frayne-Reid, Ilford South, which only exists in real life as an artificial boundary demarcation for the purposes of elections, becomes its own fiefdom distinct from the rest of London.  The alternate reality of the show, which started airing after the 2019 general election in which Gapes, having quit the Labour Party, lost his seat with 7.3% of the vote (proving that his personal mandate was maybe not quite as strong as he thought), sees its star remaining as MP-for-life, a crazed dictator ruling a decaying, dystopian city-state.  Gapecast’s protagonist ultimately functions as a symbol of a broken politics in which accountability for MPs in safe seats is distinctly optional.  The show, by literalising the petty kingdom one such figure constructed around his own monumental self-regard during his tenure in the House of Commons, performs a vital service in pricking the pomposity of such politicians who – as Gapes’ trouncing in 2019 demonstrates – would be absolutely nothing without a red rosette pinned to their chests and the party machine behind them.

The formal elements of Gapecast do much to buttress the carnivalesque, outrageous nature of its setting, lead character and humour.  Political comedy in the UK has tended to fall into a few staid categories: sketch- and impression-based revues like Spitting Image, the panel show (viz. Have I Got News For You), the sitcom set in the corridors of power (Yes, Minister and The Thick of It), and standup sets that tend to devolve into lamely earnest hectoring when not delivered with the obvious passion and ideological commitment of an Alexei Sayle or a Josie Long.  Gapecast’s form, however, is simply uncategorisable.  Each episode is structurally, tonally and thematically different from the last, often offering a sustained pastiche of an existing work (well-known or obscure).  A cooking show parody might be followed by a repurposed version of Bob Dylan’s sixteen-minute epic about the JFK assassination, “Murder Most Foul” (sung, of course, in the voice of Mike Gapes).  You could just as easily stumble across a Guy Ritchie-style East End gangster caper as a farcical story that recalls Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, in which Richard Miller and Jimothy Baker (who have exactly the same voice, owing to FFF’s self-admitted inability to do accents) get into all sorts of misunderstandings with Gapes and his body double, Kevin Narrows.  For my money, the show’s peak of invention and mirth is “Gapefest: A Weekend of Music and Milk”: a three-part mockumentary presented by Baker, which details the events that transpire when Gapes’ self-titled music festival in Ilford South descends into a maelstrom of bad tribute acts, illegal data harvesting, Altamont-style violence, fire, drugs, death and, most nightmarishly of all, a five-hour Jimmy Buffett headline set.  Some extended riffs do risk becoming impenetrable for those not fully au fait with Left Twitter running gags, who might consequently not be aware of the milquetoast Guardian columnist Rafael Behr’s 2006 musings on why shoes aren’t shaped like feet (which form the core of Episode 15), but this denseness and allusive fictioneering is as integral a part of the Gapeverse as the habitually menacing soundscapes Frayne-Reid weaves into the final edit.

Indeed, this fictional world is so vast that at times it has seeped out into our reality.  Twitter accounts purporting to be Richard Miller and Jimothy Baker have existed at one time or another, and a series of in-character tweets in which Miller claimed to be performing a spot of postal vote fraud on behalf of his boss even made it to a Daily Mail video in which the former Channel 4 journalist Michael Crick questioned Gapes about the provenance of these claims.  Hilariously, not only did the video’s screenshots of the offending tweets pixelate the face of “Miller” to preserve his privacy, but if you watch the footage you can see that Crick doesn’t appear at first to completely buy Gapes’ explanation that the account wasn’t associated with his campaign.  (The Richard Miller account was subsequently banned, which you really have to say was fair enough.)  This just goes to show that, for all that the big movers and shakers within politics and the media claim to be able to spot “fake news” when they see it, they don’t seem to be very good at telling when people are having them on.  Last year, in a particularly on-the-nose example of the new political humour devouring the old guard, Have I Got News For You itself was hoodwinked by a tweet from the official account of fictional football club Streatham Rovers (run by the pioneering parafictioneer Trevor Bastard), complaining that the opposition had numbered their team’s shirts so that, when ordered from 1 to 11, the first letters of their names spelled out “SRFC ARE SHIT”.  HIGNFY’s writers not only failed to recognise this as a joke but included a segment laughing at this apparent chicanery within an episode of the show.  One can only assume that the concept of an expanded universe centred around an imaginary non-league football team and incorporating numerous (equally fictional) Twitter personalities of varying political bents would simply not occur to the average panel show grunt, focused as they are on one-liners about how Diane Abbott can’t count and Boris Johnson’s hair is silly.

And really, this is why comedy like Gapecast does such a good job of assailing its targets.  We live in an age in which it is becoming increasingly clear that the intertwined media and political ecosystems are corrupted beyond repair.  Not only does the Conservative Party control the levers of government, aided by its Fleet Street friends, but it is increasingly seeking – despite all its pious claims to support “free speech” – to circumscribe the limits of acceptable discourse.  It is abetted in this by a Labour Party once again firmly in the hands of its centrist wing and consequently terrified of appearing remotely radical or unpatriotic; the irony is that if Mike Gapes had just hung on for a few more months of Corbyn’s leadership and not quit, he’d still be the unassailable incumbent MP his fictionalised counterpart in Gapecast is.  Politicians within this climate are happy to suffer the mild ridicule of a Spitting Image or Have I Got News For You because these forms of mockery are accepted parts of the national discourse, and their tame, scripted barbs are as nothing compared with the iron grip the political right enjoys on the discourse as a whole.  Just as Tom Whyman has argued that bombarding the replies of professional right-wing contrarian Brendan O’Neill with absurd photoshops of his massive forehead are in fact the perfect response to his nonsense, in that they refuse to give him the rise he is clearly looking for and instead paint him as someone literally unworthy of your respect or mental effort, the grotesque, offensive, formally experimental and genuinely original Gapecast makes clear that the best way to damage pompous political panjandrums through humour is by refusing to do so not only on their terms but on the commonly delimited terms of satire itself.