Harry Hill

So no more TV Burp, which I sad but not as sad as it would be had Harry not lost interest. None of us wants to see him doing a show he is clearly not enjoying, especially if he has to spend most of his free time deliberately watching bad television to produce it. He has other projects planned, and ITV should be grateful for that, frankly, without him do they have any other comedy? How much does the network invest in making people laugh? And I mean actually making people laugh, not just getting delusional people onto talent shows and seeing what laughter derives from them.

Would there be a lot of humour on screen at the moment if it were not for the BBC? I don’t know and can’t know, because we aren’t (yet) in a situation where the BBC isn’t there. All I do know is that without the BBC there would be no Harry Hill, just because of a huge advantage that the BBC does have in that it runs radio stations. Not only runs them, but actually makes structured programmes for them, instead of just stringing together unstructured bits of talking and occasional music. (And I do mean occasional music. I have grim memories of listening to Heart FM against my will. The gaps between songs were huge, made infuriating by the fact that the DJs spent almost all their time promising to play a song soon and telling the listeners how great it was going to be whenever it came. I’m sure this approach is harmful to the nation’s music taste; the overall effect is to make the listener grateful that the DJ has played anything at all. Still, that’s a whole other article.) At the moment I’m writing about comedy.

No-one who heard Harry Hill’s appearances on Radio 4 in the early nineties could have imagined him as a family-friendly light-entertainment star on ITV1. The show was surreal, obscure and full of odd obsessions that only made sense in Harry’s self-contained world. By no stretch of the imagination could Harry have walked straight into his job at ITV and been put on screen at 7.00. There’s no reason why it should have to, of course. You don’t straight away arrest shareholders’ money in a man who says things like ‘Who’s grooming the badgers ready for the badger parade?’ Putting a young unknown Harry Hill on the airwaves was a risk. The BBC however could carefully nurture him, as it did with numerous other future TV successes; The League of Gentlemen, Room 101, Fantasy Football League, Hitchikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. The massively successful Have I Got News For You is basically a radio show with occasional pictures, and there’s nothing wrong with that. There are no grounds to say that the BBC wastes money, it spends money proportionate to the audience it expects. A radio sitcom costs little, nothing much is lost when a poor one is made. When a good one is made,  the corporation has another mass-audience hit in the world.

If anything Harry’s journey is a great metaphor for what happens in the relationship between public and private sectors these days anyway, publicly funded institutions take the risks, private enterprises reap the rewards.