Andy Burnham, together with Liverpool mayor Steve Rotherham, appeared on a charity special of Channel 4’s Gogglebox last night. The show began in 2013, but is still going, as all hit TV shows must in this benighted century. The novelty of the format – watching viewers watch TV – is long gone, as the participants inevitably started acting up for the cameras. It may be a false memory, but I’m sure I remember the show being more caustic, a bit sharper. It is now crushingly cosy and twee. So, perfect for our Andy then.
This episode, a fundraiser for Stand Up To Cancer, interspersed the usual TV ephemera with harrowing real life cancer stories. The shoving of cameras into people’s faces to capture tearful reactions is fair enough when collection tins are being rattled, but I’m not sure it’s a very good idea for a sitting Prime Minister to volunteer for it. It feels like another Rubicon being crossed lightly, storing up trouble for the future. Luckily, there were no cameras filming the reaction to Burnham’s reaction from relatives of the victims of the MRSA outbreak during his time as Health Minister. I don’t imagine they were very impressed.
The other celebrities were unrecognizable, because nobody outside politics and sport becomes properly famous anymore. I think I saw Paul Whitehouse, but I have cataracts so I cannot be certain.
If a camera had been watching me watching, they’d have caught me peeping between my fingers every time the show cut back to Burnham and Rotherham in the Number 10 flat. My eyes kept wandering to my shelves searching instinctively for something more palatable and less viscerally disturbing – Pasolini’s Salò maybe, or possibly The Human Centipede.
Because this was Mrs Thatcher on Saturday Superstore all over again. The mystique of high office is not a thing to be thrown away so casually.
But then, after he’d sunk a few beers, Andy surprised me – effing and blinding like Billy-O. ‘Why are there no white faces in the ads?’ he ranted. Then it was ‘I’d give that Nigella a sticky finish’. Reacting to disturbing footage from Paris he shouted encouragement to the riot police: ‘get stuck in Pierre, that’s it, whack him one, right in la bouche’ …
Of course he didn’t.
It was an hour of excruciatingly banal blithering. ‘Could you ever do a cryptic crossword?’ ‘If I went on Strictly. I’d dance to ‘Sit Down’ by James.’ Inevitably, there was a descent into a discussion of pub snacks and old-time winkle sellers. Really!
Indeed, Brand Burnham fits in very well with the slightly creepy cosiness of Gogglebox. Working class people performing warmth for TV cameras have got right up my nose since my working class childhood. The phenomenon is now absolutely intolerable, with its 21st century additions – mirthless laughter, and the exclaiming of OH. MY. GOD! when something very ordinary happens. From the Prime Minister of a very troubled Britain, it is insufferable. But this is Andy all over – ‘sit yourself down, mate, and I’ll put on a brew’, and then promising 2p off things like a green shield stamp advert in 1974.
During the show, I received a text from a friend, who said, ‘Beginning to wonder if Burnham’s chummy, l’m-just-an-ordinary-guy appearances on TikTok, Gogglebox etc aren’t just incompetent trivia but a very deliberate targeting of the sort of people who don’t normally engage with politics, but could be tempted to go to the polling station for the first time in years because he’s likeable and the only politician they ever really see’.
I take his point here. And we can tell from the polls that the strategy is indeed working, on the 4% of people that it’s ever going to work on.
And yes, we are all guilty of carrying on as if things were normal, and pretending it’s just like 1998. But that is not what is needed in a leader at a time of anger and despair.
Watching Burnham’s affable noodling on that sofa, I got a creeping sensation that he genuinely can’t see the reality of Britain in 2026, which is terrifying. There is a rich irony in him taking part in this twaddle on the very same day he advised the public to start stockpiling food and emergency supplies. Is this the way Britain ends – not with a bang, but with a simper?
But yes, for the time being, this normal bloke wheeze is a great strategy for Andy…until the very moment the wheels come off. From which point on, the clips of all this piddling about will haunt him forever.
Comments