I’ve read and seen far too much already over the past few days, from endless eulogies in the papers through to angry words on the street and in the House of Commons. The truth is I am genuinely shaken by it. Like the Queen Mother, she was one of those figures we all suspected might go on forever, and her shadow was long. With it gone, one of the touchpoints for my personal politics is gone.

I started to think about how I might even begin to parse what has happened: I’m not sad, but I’ll admit I didn’t crack open the champagne personally; I merely drank someone else’s.So in a similar vein, I wanted to write not about her, but about representations of her.

Maggie’s Farm

I’m going to start with one of my favourite political cartoonists. Alongside his later portrayal of her puppeteering Tony Blair, comic artist Steve Bell also focuses on her controlling authority. He wrote a series called Maggie’s Farm which depicted her as completely insane – with trademark wonky eye and multiple exclamation points in her speech.

The comics, which reference Dylan’s song of the same title (which was in itself used as a protest song against Thatcher) were originally published in Time Out from 1979, and, to my eye, probably heavily influenced later depictions.

Spitting Image

The first time I saw Spitting Image I was hooked, probably helped by the fact my parents told me I wasn’t allowed to watch it, and to this day I regret that it has gone off the air. Perhaps it’s because no satire is strong enough to be distinguished from the ridiculous facts of today’s government? Anyway, back to Thatcher.

The depiction of her was grotesque, but no more so than that of any other puppet on the show. That said, it was the nature of the grotesque that interested me.

She was ridiculed for her strength and controlling nature in the form of a horrific headmistress. It’s interesting to note that later John Major was ridiculed for his lack of strength.

But rather than this being portrayed as an essential part of her it was represented in reference to Thatcher as a woman  (note the ongoing references to her as “sir”). Her strength was ridiculed, in part, by presenting it as “unfeminine” and therefore funny or dangerous: a stereotype of women in politics that will no doubt take many years to overturn. As the series moved on she became less and less human, eventually turning into an alien monster.

The Old Iron Woman

Raymond Briggs delivers a rendition of the Falklands War in a way that is moving, vitriolic, frightening and humbling in his 1984 piece The Tin Pot Foreign General and The Old Iron Woman.

What I find particularly interesting here is how her depiction contrasts with that of Spitting Image. Both use the “non-human” references, but whereas the Spitting Image Thatcher is usually either asexual or very masculine, here she is quite the opposite. Guns and victory explosions fire from her breasts as she squats (in high heels, with rounded buttocks and suspenders, no less) over her land and nation in a parody of birth. The conflation of female and war-machine gives rise to a gross, highly sexualised fembot.

The Iron Lady

I returned from holiday just over a year ago to find London distressingly covered in images of Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady, with her icy blue eyes following me all over the place. It haunted me, in much the same way as it did our Rhian Jones (I’ll admit it, I couldn’t bring myself to see the film).

It was the glossiness of the whole thing that threw me, the vogue-ish fashion magazine stylings that worked their hardest to reunite those twin features of “female” and “powerful” which had created such horrors through both Spitting Image and at the pencil of Raymond Briggs. And they succeeded in being very flattering, through a combination of make-up and airbrushing.

Streep is noticeably less wrinkled and more attractively-styled than Thatcher, looking eerily like a better-looking sister. The situation was enhanced by Streep’s own acting ability, and a script which included scenes of feminine domesticity.

What next?

I never knew her. Never met her. I only understood her as a series of images and icons, on the television as a politician and in other representations of her, which are more numerous than I can contain in one article. Buzzfeed, for example, collected a list of songs about her. Like many other dead, famous people, over time she will fade from a real person, who nonetheless was one of the bogeymen of my childhood (alongside the boggle-faced baddie animals in Orm and Cheep) to being almost imaginary, an icon.

To me, she will always be the figurehead for all that is wrong with right wing thinking and the sort of “feminism” that claims it must be feminist if a woman is doing it. Those with opposing politics have put her on a pedestal. Other people will make her into other things.

I doubt we’ve seen the last representation, but I’ll be interested which version of Margaret Thatcher will stand the test of time, and which version we will be faced with next.

I’ve been more or less enjoying Ten O’Clock Live’s exuberant attempt to blend righteous indignation and political analysis with gags about Ed Balls’ surname. Britain’s current political nightmares certainly need and deserve something like it. Inevitably, there’s a lot to criticise: the show can be lightweight and facile, and its concern with playing to a broad audience can lead it to simplify complex issues and treat them in a manner often unhelpfully flippant and glib. Tonal inconsistency exists between its sporadically vicious satirical intent and the soft-soaping it tends to give when interviewing political figures. The much-vaunted live format adds little, the graphics and set make Brass Eye’s intentionally eye-bleeding credits look soothing, and the pace of the initial episode felt frenetic and rushed, as though the show’s producers didn’t trust the audience to pay attention beyond the length of a YouTube viral – although they’d hardly be unique in that.

My main concern, though, is Lauren Laverne, whose involvement I’d been avidly anticipating. Full disclosure: I was a teenage Kenickie fan, and I hoped Laverne, their former singer, would bring some of the arch wit, droll delivery and star-spangled glamour which she used to rock onstage, as well as the stridently socialist principles she used to espouse (in the run-up to the 1997 election, she wrote a politically-conscious column for the NME, and Kenickie repaid Geri Halliwell’s pro-Thatcher drivelling by succinctly denouncing the Spice Girls as ‘Tory scum’). In fairness, over ten years on, that sort of expectation was both naïve and nostalgic. While she wasn’t great, her performance didn’t have me rapt in the slack-jawed horror which appeared to be affecting some reviewers, whose critical responses to the show singled out Laverne, its only female presenter, for her allegedly pointless and tokenistic inclusion and relatively toothless comic chops.

left to right: Mitchell, Laverne, Carr, and Brooker.

A few of these responses betrayed problematic attitudes of their own, seeming unwilling to countenance the idea of a regional-accented blonde with an indie-pop background and glittery eyelids as anything more than eye-candy. The Telegraph’s Ed Cumming, in a review entitled ‘What is the point of Lauren Laverne?’, dismissed her as ‘northern totty’ and declared ‘it’s hard to see what, apart from the sadly obvious, she brings to the table’. The Metro described her as the show’s ‘weak link’ and claimed, less than accurately, that she ‘looked lost and confused when The XX or Mumford and Sons didn’t pop up in the headlines’. Kevin O’Sullivan in the Mirror sneered that ‘Poor token female Lauren Laverne … comes across as a bland bombshell recovering from entirely ­successful comedy bypass surgery’.

While I’m sure her looks and residual indie cred didn’t harm her chances, asserting that Laverne was picked for ‘northern totty duty’, able to engage with little beyond the autocue, seems overly harsh. Apart from an occasional turn on Mock the Week, Laverne’s background is in presenting and live broadcasting on the Culture Show and 6Music, and her anchorwoman role on Ten O’Clock Live is presumably based on her abilities and experience in this arena, rather than that of live comedy. The two require different skillsets and Laverne is an excellent host, introducing and concluding the show, linking pieces, throwing to break and chairing roundtable discussions. That’s what she brings to the table – she’s not a weak link, she’s the link, there to be the viewer’s guide. Unfortunately, her function as this – the show’s secretary, or Mum, or primary-school teacher – means that she’s there less to perform and more to keep the boys in order and to ask them what they think, the opinionless eye of a satirical storm whipped up by her more vocal and dynamic co-presenters.

Lauren Laverne poses for Green Britain Day in June of last year. Photo: Department of Energy & Climate Change Flickr gallery. Shared under Creative Commons licence.

When Laverne does step out of the secretarial role, she’s badly served by her material. The opening show’s skit in which she played an airhead newscaster may have been an attempt to play on the superficially vacuous persona which several reviewers were expecting of her, but its feeble stabs at humour reinforced the image rather than subverting it. The same was true of the recent piece in which she haplessly ‘volunteered’ backstage, a part which could have been taken by one of the male presenters to make the same point – that making public services reliant on ill-informed and inexperienced amateurs is a blatantly bad idea – without the Ditzy Provincial Blonde aspect to which her material seems wedded. Elsewhere, Laverne’s rants on corporate accountability and the Coalition’s selling-short of liberal democracy, while gobsmackingly commendable (and she clearly means it, man), impress more for rhetorical power than comic panache. In the show’s third episode she invoked the spectres of her past by quoting the Manic Street Preachers during a defence of public libraries; I loved the principles behind this piece, but it was annoyingly punctuated by lazy self-deprecating gags – she’s a girl, so she’s looking up what ‘menstruation’ means! And she’s got access to all these books, but she just wants to read something by Katie Price! – which undermined her authority to make the serious points at the sketch’s heart. Again, perhaps the idea was to knowingly play on or subvert the dumb blonde image, but Laverne is alone in resorting, or having to resort, to jokes at her own expense rather than that of the show’s purported targets. Laverne is also a mother who frequently mentions taking her kids to the local library – this angle could have been used to support her case as well as introducing nuance to her persona, but I guess motherhood would have been unsexily out of step with the show’s desired audience. In a comedy catch-22, while I’d like her to be more than the attractive anchorwoman, when she does so the material she’s given seems to reinforce the recommendation that she stick to presenting.

All this says less about Laverne’s own intelligence or ability and more about her frustrating under-use by the show’s writers and producers. To place her in this ‘straight-man’ role, and to have her as the only female, seems surprisingly regressive. We’ve come a long way from women in comedy troupes, notably the Pythons’ ‘glamour stooge’ Carol Cleveland, being little but dollybird foils. The Morris/Iannucci axis of satire particularly excelled at utilising performers like Rebecca Front, Doon Mackichan, and Gina McKee throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

Since Laverne’s position as the show’s lone female exacerbates any criticism she receives, might some of this critical heat simmer down if Ten O’Clock Live featured another woman, in a performing rather than presenting role? There’s no shortage of vocal and opinionated female comics – I can think, before Googling ‘female political comic’, of Natalie Haynes, Shazia Mirza, Jo Brand, and Josie Long – whose participation might be as interesting, amusing and incisive as that of Brooker, Mitchell or Carr. But after all, once we start analysing the show’s diversity beyond gender, it becomes painfully apparent that Laverne’s fellow presenters are three middle-aged, middle-class white Englishmen in suits, all but Brooker Cambridge-educated, with the most diverse thing about them being their haircuts’ degree of aerodynamism. My problems with Laverne are symptomatic of greater problems with the show: while sometimes refreshingly radical in perspective, it’s still small-c conservative in parts.

Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine