“We don’t mind a bit of banter from our rivals,” said Mark Dolan on GB News, about GB News, last weekend. “I like to think one of the great selling points of this place is that we have a sense of humour and we don’t take ourselves too seriously.” It certainly would be a selling point. We live in censorious times. “You wouldn’t say that about x!” proclaims y, apparently as offended by the pervasive sensitivity to x’s feelings as they are about any specific disparaging remark about themselves.
So, in its mission to break away from the liberal metropolitan broadcasting consensus, GB News would be a refreshing presence if it could strike a tone of humorous self-deprecation, of taking a joke in good humour. That would genuinely be showing, not telling. Never mind moaning about the “culture wars”, start by putting your high horse out to pasture and assuming, like people generally do when they meet in real life, that no one is trying to be horrible.
