If comedy was indeed the “new rock'n'roll”, then Michael McIntyre was, for a hot second, its Elvis Presley. During the Noughties British comedy boom, when stand-up suddenly became fodder for stadium tours and primetime TV roadshows, there was no one bigger – McIntyre’s inoffensive, observation-led, overwhelmingly middle-class routines took the nation by storm. Cut to 15 years later, and where is he now? Hosting savourless game show The Wheel on BBC One.
The Wheel – in which McIntyre corrals contestants through a quiz, and celebrity guests help them out – was, just a few short years ago, a key part of the BBC’s Christmas Day lineup. Now, it’s not even that, instead airing its series finale on the markedly less glitzy evening of 21 December. It’s been a pretty bruising fall from grace for McIntyre. He still performs to big arenas as a stand-up. He’s still a household name. But he’s abjectly absent from the cultural conversation. McIntyre was never cool, but now he’s almost radioactively un-chic, the stand-up equivalent of a Michael Bublé Christmas advert. But even in his pomp, McIntyre felt like more of a moment than a timeless talent. Where people might have watched George Carlin reel off his “seven words you can’t say on TV” bit, knowing instinctively this would be a routine that would be dissected for decades, I’m not sure anyone was thinking the same about McIntyre’s “man drawer” shtick. (It’s a drawer where men put things.)
In 2009, The Guardian described McIntyre as a “comedian for the [David] Cameron age”. It wasn’t so much that his material was explicitly large-C Conservative. Quite the opposite, in fact. McIntyre – who, I should say in the interest of fairness, has voiced something of a distaste for recent Tory leaderships – has historically been resolutely apolitical onstage. This was not some quirk but a central tenet of his appeal. It was comedy that allowed audiences to escape into the banal, delivered with a kind of fizzing self-amusement. Now, though, the Cameron age is long gone, and the UK’s fraught political situation infects, overtly or not, all reaches of our culture. We are in the middle of top-down class warfare, and McIntyre was made for peacetime.
Plenty of comedians are middle class (that’s no inherent reason for stigma of course), but few are so loudly, unabashedly I-shop-at-Waitrose-coded as McIntyre. If audiences hadn’t clocked it by his plummy voice alone, they would quickly grasp it through his thematic obsessions: the frivolous miniature of the 21st century bourgeoisie. Marital bugbears, social irks, herbs and spices in the family larder: no subject was too small, no observation too frivolous. His most popular routines were rooted in a perspective of privilege, heteronormativity and Southernness – think, for instance, his bit where he gurns his way through a Yorkshire accent, marvelling at how someone in the North would pronounce “The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe”. (As many Northerners pointed out at the time, his ridiculing of Northern phonetics is not just grim but inaccurate, with McIntyre either misunderstanding or deliberately fudging how words are contracted.)
Times have moved on, and McIntyre’s material – while obviously a far cry from the sort of problematic jokes of, say, a Roy Chubby Brown – has quietly aged poorly. That he was never conventionally alpha-masculine on stage, instead flouncing and strutting and generally camping it up a bit, disguised the fact that much of his material was very male, and relied on tired, trite cliches about gender roles. His newer routines adhere to this same tack – his most recent filmed special broached such topics as “how to urinate without waking up your sleeping wife in the next room”, “adjusting your car seat”, and yet more accent mockery.
But it’s not just his material that has been left behind. To be a star in contemporary comedy requires a new sort of approach. Jobbing comedians, even very successful ones, often have to maintain a certain presence in the online sphere. Take Ricky Gervais, whose incessant self-promotion and culture-war squabbling on X/Twitter has ensured he remains much-discussed, despite what many would describe as the tiredness of his act.
For McIntyre, the issue is not just a case of being “offline”, nor is it completely extricable from the datedness of his content. Someone like James Acaster, for instance, is not a particularly “online” comedian, but his routines, timely and agreeable, regularly go viral on Twitter or TikTok. McIntyre’s routines, bereft of opinion or prescience, remain unexcavated. While McIntyre still crops up on telly, it all feels rather analogue in the age of streaming. Once, the measure of a comedian’s clout was DVD sales – McIntyre raked in more than £3.5m through his ubiquitous stocking-filler discs alone – but now, Netflix specials are where the buzz is. McIntyre has released just one set on the streamer, while his more talked-about contemporaries (people such as Jimmy Carr or Dave Chappelle) seem to put them out on a regular basis. The days of his Roadshow attracting weekly media attention are ancient history.
If you want to see for yourself proof of McIntyre’s slide into cultural irrelevance, then you needn’t look further than the country’s burgeoning comedy scene. Go see a dozen up-and-coming stand-ups at a small comedy night, and you will invariably see people trying to ape the style and innovations of Stewart Lee. It’s been years since I can recall seeing someone looking to mimic McIntyre. (The only exception being when someone approximates his peppery bustle around the stage in mockery.)
When the history of British comedy is written and pulled apart, there will be few names more significant than McIntyre. To say otherwise is to ignore his immense popularity, his synonymity, for many people, with comedy itself. But that’s not automatically a good thing. He took an artform rooted in outspokenness and rebellion, and shaped it into something palatable and feather-light. So light, in fact, that it may have blown away completely.
Michael McIntyre’s ‘The Wheel’ is available to stream on BBC iPlayer
