{"id":3348,"date":"2011-02-16T09:00:09","date_gmt":"2011-02-16T09:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.badreputation.org.uk\/?p=3348"},"modified":"2011-02-16T09:00:09","modified_gmt":"2011-02-16T09:00:09","slug":"ten-o-clock-live-three-men-and-a-little-lady","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/badreputation.org.uk\/2011\/02\/16\/ten-o-clock-live-three-men-and-a-little-lady\/","title":{"rendered":"Ten O’Clock Live: Three Men and a Little Lady?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seen Ten O\u2019Clock Live<\/a><\/strong>, then? …Yeah. Breathlessly billed as Britain\u2019s answer to the Daily Show<\/strong>, a return to the satirical standard set by 1962\u2019s groundbreaking That Was The Week That Was<\/a> <\/strong>and the grand guignol<\/em> glory days of Spitting Image<\/a><\/strong>, with hype like that the show was perhaps doomed to fall short of expectations.<\/p>\n

\"Titlescreen<\/a>I\u2019ve been more or less enjoying Ten O\u2019Clock Live<\/strong>\u2019s exuberant attempt to blend righteous indignation and political analysis with gags about Ed Balls\u2019 surname. Britain\u2019s current political nightmares certainly need and deserve something like it. Inevitably, there\u2019s 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<\/strong>\u2019s intentionally eye-bleeding credits look soothing, and the pace of the initial episode felt frenetic and rushed, as though the show\u2019s producers didn\u2019t trust the audience to pay attention beyond the length of a YouTube viral \u2013 although they\u2019d hardly be unique in that.<\/p>\n

My main concern, though, is Lauren Laverne<\/a>, whose involvement I\u2019d been avidly anticipating.\u00a0Full disclosure: I was a teenage Kenickie<\/strong> fan<\/a>, 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<\/strong>, and Kenickie repaid Geri Halliwell\u2019s pro-Thatcher drivelling by succinctly denouncing the Spice Girls as \u2018Tory scum\u2019). In fairness, over ten years on, that sort of expectation was both na\u00efve and nostalgic. While she wasn\u2019t great, her performance didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\"Promo<\/a>

left to right: Mitchell, Laverne, Carr, and Brooker.<\/p><\/div>\n

A few of these responses betrayed problematic attitudes of their own, seeming\u00a0unwilling to countenance\u00a0the idea of a regional-accented blonde with an indie-pop background and glittery eyelids as anything more than eye-candy. The Telegraph<\/strong>\u2019s Ed Cumming, in a review entitled \u2018What is the point of Lauren Laverne?\u2019<\/a>, dismissed her as \u2018northern totty\u2019 and declared \u2018it\u2019s hard to see what, apart from the sadly obvious, she brings to the table\u2019. The Metro<\/strong><\/a> described her as the show\u2019s \u2018weak link\u2019 and claimed, less than accurately, that she \u2018looked lost and confused when The XX or Mumford and Sons didn\u2019t pop up in the headlines\u2019. Kevin O\u2019Sullivan<\/a> in the Mirror<\/strong> sneered that \u2018Poor token female Lauren Laverne \u2026 comes across as a bland bombshell recovering from entirely \u00adsuccessful comedy bypass surgery\u2019.<\/p>\n

While I\u2019m sure her looks and residual indie cred didn\u2019t harm her chances, asserting that Laverne was picked for \u2018northern totty duty\u2019, able to engage with little beyond the autocue, seems overly harsh. Apart from an occasional turn on Mock the Week<\/strong>, Laverne\u2019s background is in presenting and live broadcasting on the Culture Show <\/strong>and 6Music<\/strong>, and her anchorwoman role on Ten O\u2019Clock Live<\/strong> 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\u2019s what she brings to the table \u2013 she\u2019s not a weak link, she\u2019s the<\/em> link, there to be the viewer\u2019s guide. Unfortunately, her function as this \u2013 the show\u2019s secretary, or Mum, or primary-school teacher \u2013 means that she\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"Photo:<\/a>

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.<\/p><\/div>\n

When Laverne does step out of the secretarial role, she\u2019s badly served by her material. The opening show\u2019s 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 \u2018volunteered\u2019 backstage, a part which could have been taken by one of the male presenters to make the same point \u2013 that making public services reliant on ill-informed and inexperienced amateurs is a blatantly bad idea \u2013 without the Ditzy Provincial Blonde aspect to which her material seems wedded. Elsewhere, Laverne\u2019s rants on corporate accountability and the Coalition\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 she\u2019s a girl, so she\u2019s looking up what \u2018menstruation\u2019 means! And she\u2019s got access to all these books, but she just wants to read something by Katie Price! \u2013 which undermined her authority to make the serious points at the sketch\u2019s 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\u2019s purported targets. Laverne is also a mother who frequently mentions taking her kids to the local library \u2013 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\u2019s desired audience. In a comedy catch-22, while I\u2019d like her to be more than the attractive anchorwoman, when she does so the material she\u2019s given seems to reinforce the recommendation that she stick to presenting.<\/p>\n

All this says less about Laverne\u2019s own intelligence or ability and more about her frustrating under-use by the show\u2019s writers and producers. To place her in this \u2018straight-man\u2019 role, and<\/em> to have her as the only female, seems surprisingly regressive. We\u2019ve come a long way from women in comedy troupes, notably the Pythons\u2019 \u2018glamour stooge\u2019 Carol Cleveland<\/a>, being little but dollybird foils. The Morris<\/a>\/Iannucci<\/a> axis of satire particularly excelled at utilising performers like Rebecca Front, Doon Mackichan, and Gina McKee throughout the 1990s and 2000s.<\/p>\n

Since Laverne\u2019s position as the show\u2019s lone female exacerbates any criticism she receives, might some of this critical heat simmer down if Ten O\u2019Clock Live<\/strong> featured another woman, in a performing rather than presenting role? There\u2019s no shortage of vocal and opinionated female comics \u2013 I can think, before Googling \u2018female political comic\u2019, of Natalie Haynes<\/a>, Shazia Mirza<\/a>, Jo Brand<\/a>, and\u00a0Josie Long<\/a> \u2013 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\u2019s diversity beyond gender, it becomes painfully apparent that Laverne\u2019s 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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n