Gareth Roberts

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.

Watching Paris burn at the weekend, it occurred to me that saying ‘I told you so’ was a lot less fun than I thought it would be.  I surprised myself by not emitting a bitter cackle at the viral clip of the young French woman trying unsuccessfully to reason with looters. She is seen repeatedly shouting things like ‘C’est pas la cause!’ (‘This isn’t the cause’) and ‘Pourquoi vous faites ça?’ (‘Why are you doing this?’) and seems incredulous as her world view smashes rudely into reality. It turns out that when all your predictions were gloomy ones there’s not actually much pleasure in them coming true Incidentally, what exactly is ‘La cause’? The media are still, incredibly, referring to the riots as ‘cost-of-living demonstrations’.

The BBC is lopping bits of itself off again. On the amputation list this time around, according to the Gurdian, are the linear versions of channels BBC Three and BBC Scotland. We’ve been here before. BBC Three spent the years between 2016 and 2022 as an internet-only streaming treat. Its return to full TV channel status always seemed a little odd, particularly considering its supposed youth remit. The Guardian reports that its most-watched programme last Tuesday had a grand total of 74,000 viewers. Television is a mass medium; when your show hits figures as low as that, you might as well start hiring a few church halls and scout huts and putting it on there. Similarly, BBC Scotland, which launched in 2019, attracts very few Scots to its live offering.

It is a most disconcerting experience when you encounter somebody who seems fairly normal but then casually remarks that they are from Venus, or that Princess Anne has been following them about in an ice cream van. When this happens at scale, and everybody seems to shrug and accept it, you eventually stop noticing. The current Labour conference, for example, is a concentration of lunacy. Progressivism is a kind of collective hallucination Away from the conference hall itself, the pottiness is always a little more pronounced. This time round, we’ve had backbench barminess like Dame Emily Thornberry’s enthusiasm for the seizure of private property, or Stella Creasy MP demanding the right to silence people who disagree with her.

Younger readers may not believe me, but we used to take the Lib Dems seriously, or at least more seriously. Leaders of the party – Paddy Ashdown, Charles Kennedy, Nick Clegg – were, if not wildly popular or successful, unthinkingly assigned in the public mind to the same bracket of status as the Labour or Tory leaders.   After about 30 years of progressives trashing the nation, and sneering at its heritage and culture, they now expect us to rush lustily to its defence Today’s five-way split in British party politics (six if you count the SNP, seven if you count Restore) is disconcerting in many ways. The flailing of both Labour and the Tories should, in the normal course of things as we understood them, have sent people scurrying to the Lib Dems.

The Piddington result is in. Ninety-two per cent of the voters in the tiny Oxfordshire village have voted to secede from the United Kingdom – 285 yes, 26 no. Why? Because the British government plans to dump hundreds and hundreds of small boat ‘asylum seekers’ in a military base slap bang next to the Piddingtonians.  Of course, this is a symbolic gesture. There is no legal mechanism to actually achieve secession, which is perhaps just as well. As we know, it’s hard enough to get British politicians to acknowledge the results of an official national referendum, let alone a wildcat local one.

‘What have I signed up for?’ wondered contestant Jenny Ryan early in proceedings on ITV’s The Box. It’s a question that might be more germanely asked by the show’s host Gary Lineker. A long time ago, American comedian Fred Allen said that ‘Television is a device that permits people who haven’t anything to do to watch people who can’t do anything’. I always thought this was a harsh judgement. But The Box proves that Allen was simply ahead of his time. This is what Lineker has chosen to do in the downtime when he’s not sharing his thoughts on Israel, or raking in millions from his podcast empire It is a game show – at least I think that’s what it is – fronted by the FA Cup-eared crisp masticator, now retired from his vital work on Match Of The Day.

Ali G: Who Iz I? is set to hit cinema screens next month. The return of this bling-bedecked denizen of the West Staines Massive, first seen on TV in 1998, is a disquieting symptom of our century’s static culture. Back in 1998, it would have been inconceivable for the big new comedy film to have been a revival of TV characters from 1971 – On The Buses or The Liver Birds. Today, along with Ali G, we are also blessed by Alan Partridge and Have I Got News For You, even older comedy institutions. And there are endless reiterations of old shows and formats: Star Trek, Spiderman and similar, Blankety Blank, Bergerac. Mass culture has essentially stopped.

The economic storm clouds continue to gather over Britain. A reckoning of some sort is on its way, possibly a spectacular one. How will we react? Perhaps there are clues to be found in ‘I’m Backing Britain’, the short-lived campaign to gee up the nation back in early 1968. I was born a few months after its brief but memorable moment in the sun; I picked up on the slogan as a child, as one of those things adults said with a wry grin that I didn’t quite understand. But what Britain had in 1968 was a dynamic mass popular culture offering multiple pleasant distractions and more functional institutions.

Do political faces have a ‘use by’ date? Is there a point beyond which even the mugs of politicians that we like start to grate? The recent mini-media hubbub about Nigel Farage’s continuing prominence in British politics has me pondering. Is the time limit on political careers down a lot more to familiarity than anything else? It used to be a pretty accurate rule that certain occupations were flash-in-the-pan affairs. It was rare, for example, for a pop star to remain a big sensation for very long. Even the biggest stars only had about five years tops before their shine wore off and something younger, brighter and shinier turned up. In the same way, hit TV shows would blaze away for a while, and then other shows would take their places. Disposability was a given.

What a strange summer this has turned out to be: no rain and no politics. As we enter what the broadcast media are calling the fifth ‘heatwave’ of the year – a heatwave is what used to be known as a hot day or two – the green, green grass has become yellowy stubble. And the sphere of public life is similarly arid and uncanny. While it’s usual for the party political world to take a breather in the summer months, the unique circumstances of the switch of prime minister just before the rain stopped falling has given summer 2026 a spooky quality. It feels like we’re all in a dream world. And nobody is further in that dream than Andy Burnham, insulated as he is from the usual processes of scrutiny.

A change is as good as a rest, they say. Like many such maxims, this is an insightful observation worn down by overuse. It first appeared in 1857 as both the title and catch of an anonymous poem. But the wisdom of this piece of Victorian doggerel has been demonstrated over the week since Andy Burnham’s coronation. Labour has overtaken Reform in The Spectator’s poll tracker for the first time in almost two years. It’s a very slight lead, well within the margin of error, and varying across the polls, but it’s definitely there. ‘Labour’s comms has been in another league this week compared to what went before.