Have I Got News For You needs putting out of its misery

Have I Got News For You (HIGNFY), the BBC topical comedy panel show, concluded its 71st series on Friday.

Seventy-one series! Would you believe it? They grow up so fast these days – up, old, senile and decrepit. Once, such an adorable young pup, always full of mischief and teasing play. Now, it’s an old bitch gone in the teeth, to quote that old proto-Restore voter, Ezra Pound. Half blind and snappy and stinking of piss. Come friendly needles and put her down.

Seventy-one used to be my lucky number. I was born at No17, The Cheveralls, Dunstable, but things turned around when we moved to No71, Woodland Drive, St Albans, when I was four. I lived there until I went to university, where I lived at No71 Portswood Rd, Southampton – an area which was in the news recently thanks to the rowdy protests over the police handling of Henry Nowak’s murder. (I blame Nigel Farage.)

I will deem that number powerful and portentous once again if this series of HIGNFY proves to be its last. By default, as I grow older, I tend to value longevity as a virtue in itself, as I do tall trees or war veterans or jars of Marmite. But not HIGNFY. I come not to praise HIGNFY, but to bury a hatchet between its bloodless ears.

This is not, let me be clear, just another in my occasional series on BBC TV topical comedy shows, loosely filed under ‘Would it kill you to platform a right-wing comedian once in a while?’. I wrote in September 2020, in the Guardian, on the value they would bring to BBC comedy, introducing the clash of swordplay in place of the circle jerk. Then, in 2022, I wrote a piece on spiked, defending the existence of a new comedy show, Headliners, on GB News, which hoped to draw its two-strong nightly panel from both sides of the political divide, an aim which it lived up to admirably over the course of its four-year existence.

But the situation with HIGNFY has long since passed that simple remedy, which now would be like prescribing fresh air and exercise for gangrene. A Hislop-ectomy is the very least that would save it now. I would probably advise stripping it back to the title music and the chairs, re-hiring Angus Deayton, and starting again from there.

Hislop. My God. This whole programme has become such a complacent, incontinent little lapdog of the liberal establishment. And it is arranged almost entirely around Hislop’s cherubic poison-dwarf features, a man who physically most resembles a cross between a weevil in a ship’s biscuit and a grub screw in a suit.

Hislop, proving that AI is not the worst kind of slop, was satirised so memorably, so brutally by the Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse sketch, ‘Panel Show’, 12 years ago, that I am amazed he still feels able to leave the house, let alone resume his place in his swivel high chair. Yet there he sits, week after bleeding week, kicking his little feet with malicious delight under the desk like Tweedledum and dispensing contempt and judgement on ‘evil’ straw men, usually Farage or Donald Trump, and whoever has been foolish enough to sit next to Paul Merton. He is like a plump little Nero at the Colosseum, a menacing toddler emperor who is somehow all thumb. Tweedlethumb.

Merton, at the other end, at least has the decency to suggest through his barely animated features that he is painfully aware of how far this thing has overrun its course. Merton, born Paul Martin, took his stage name from the district at the southern end of the Northern Line, which somehow feels horribly apt nowadays. He has boarded a ghost train from which he can never alight. His demeanour suggests an exhausted commuter who has woken up in Morden after midnight, having overshot his stop by about 20 seasons.

Merton was and possibly still is, on his day, one of the great deadpan wits of the past 50 years. But his evident disgust with the whole sorry carnival means that these flashes now come very few and far between. It’s as if the stench of mortality, both format and human, is palpable in his nose.

All of which would be tolerable, were the country otherwise ticking over nicely, and TV satire a luxury good like Tom Lehrer was for affluent middle-class Americans during the prosperous Sixties.

But this country is, to put it mildly, in a pickle. Our lives and the government under which we live have begun to resemble what would to any previous generation have looked like an actual dystopia. And if TV satire is to have any teeth at all, it needs to at least acknowledge that Labour has been in charge for the past two years, rather than a dictatorship led by Liz Truss and a miniature blimp of Donald Trump.

HIGNFY has benefited from the famous boiling-frog phenomenon. We have grown old with them and have not noticed the peeling paint, the creaking pipes and the overwhelming stink of decay.

Ian Hislop, I implore you, leave now, while a single shred of dignity may be salvaged. For all that your spite is ever rampant, you are a man of learning and the faith. You will recognise the charge when I say:

‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing… In the name of God, go! And take your poor exhausted mate with you, too.’

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Staring at the Sun, are on sale here.