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.
