A Tribute to the Impossibly Uncomfortable Banter of ‘This Week’

It’s the dying hours of a Thursday night, another working week is nearly over and you find yourself in front of the television. Question Time has rumbled to a close, the boom operator’s finally had a chance to rest his arms, the outraged eurosceptics and weird looking students have shuffled out of the town hall and David Dimbleby’s packed away all the chairs. You reach for your third tinnie, give it a rattle and realise there’s barely a dribble left. You consider going to bed, glancing at the time, and move for the remote. It is then that a lilting, irrepressibly smug Scottish accent greets you.

“Evenin’ all!”

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You stop – despite every bone in your body telling you not to – fall back into the sofa and watch. This is This Week. This is where banter comes to die.

This Week has run for the best part of 13 years, introduced as part of a new wave of political programming by the BBC. Headed up by Scottish journalist Andrew Neil, flanked most regularly by Michael Portillo and Alan Johnson, the show likes to think it takes an irreverent, satirical glance at the previous week of international politics. What it actually does is something else entirely. Part of it is robust political interviews and fairly thoughtful discussion of the week’s events. Fine. But in a constant attempt to prove that politics doesn’t have to be boring, the show has also developed a singular and utterly unforgivable strain of banter – no, anti-banter.

Look at the state of this:

I don’t want to make a “your dad” joke. I’m trying so hard. I’m digging so deep into my lived experiences, vocabulary and imagination, desperately seeking anything other than a “your dad” joke, but I can’t find anything. It isn’t there. That clip, up there, is your dad. Look at him, dancing to the techno rave outfit Underworld. Look at him linking Trainspotting to performance enhancing drugs. Look at your dad, taking the form of Michael Portillo, doing that very specific dance move your dad does where he points his fingers into the air and jabs them frantically up and down. This Week is your dad; your dad is This Week.

Every key member of the This Week team are hell-bent on making politics funny, and week in, week out, they fail. Andrew Neil, a man who looks like an illustration from a box of porridge, is not funny. Michael Portillo, the once deputy leader of the Conservative party – a man so boring he presents an entire television programme about trains; a man so boring he’d probably ask you what type of light-bulbs you use in your porch; a man so boring he probably refers to shirts as “snazzy” – is not funny. Alan Johnson, a Labour MP whose memoirs won a Specsavers National Book Award, is not funny. Yet, despite this overwhelming handicap, that’s exactly what they try to be.

Whether tossing about sub-par hashtagged nicknames like Portillo’s #SadManOnATrain, or launching into extensive costumed segments in which The Mirror‘s Kevin Maguire records tenuous, badly-acted links between George Osborne and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, every episode is like a never-ending showreel made by a pub quiz team who reckon they’d be good on Have I Got New For You. Only, for whatever reason, rather than being told they’ve “had enough sherry”, or that the BBC hasn’t really got the budget for a Thunderbirds-based intro, they are seemingly encouraged. The money is found, the costume department get right on it and whatever terrible joke they’ve cooked up is fully realised, like an am-dram group’s rushed autumn production.

And the end result, always, always, always, comes off like this:

You thought there was nothing worse than a — BBC This Week (@bbcthisweek)May 12, 2016

This clip might be peak This Week. The knowing introduction from Neil, the boy in the year above who’s convinced his naive friends to embarrass themselves in school assembly. Listen to them sing. Portillo’s first “my, my” garbled like an ageing turkey. The voice of a man forced to sing ABBA at gunpoint, sputtering “Waterloo” as if his children will be slaughtered if he doesn’t. Not that the other two are any better. Their attempt at performing a short musical skit has the air of three men who have only ever read about the concept of music, but never actually heard it. It is ungodly, and wholly unnatural.

Yet it goes on. Unnoticed, and largely ignored, tucked away in the after-hours of the television schedule, a small group of men who are genetically unfunny continue to try the impossible. Look at them interviewing Annie Nightingale in sunglasses or their “Amarillo” spoof from two general elections ago. Oh, how your dad must have laughed at that one.

Yet, it’s Thursday night, and I’m here again, stinging eyes and a stack of cushions propping up my head. But why? If it’s really that excruciating, why do I keep coming back? Well, perhaps it’s because, for better or for worse, this is British politics. Like it or not, we don’t have an “alt-comedy” commander-in-chief who’s better than most British stand-ups and posts skits on Buzzfeed. Instead, we have a bunch of old blokes making quips about MEP pay packets. We have guest appearances from Nick Ferrari. We have #SadManOnATrain, Michael “Choo-Choo” Portillo. That’s our satire.

But you don’t pick your family, and maybe, when all’s said and done, This Week is my dad too.

Update: This article incorrectly stated that Alan Johnson is a former MP. In fact he is the current MP for Hull West and Hessle. This has been amended.

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