Well, I guess my time hosting a Rorschach test on the telly is almost over: after 17 years, Mock the Week is entering its final series. I thought I was hosting a comedy panel show, the UK’s chosen contrived mechanism to put standup comedians on the telly, rather than just letting them, y’know, do standup. It turns out that I was hosting a Rorschach test for culture warriors, eager to see within the show whatever agenda they wanted; and none of them spotting that it is still only an excuse to get comedians on the telly and that the comedians don’t have, and have never had, an agenda greater than getting a laugh from the studio audience.
If there’s one lesson I draw looking back on it all, it’s this: people have taken our nonsense waaaayyyy too seriously. Some viewers used to watch the show with stopwatches and contact us if we had spoken about one political party for longer than the other, without ever being clear if being spoken about was a good thing or a bad thing. Some jokes just had legs, folks. They ran longer.
