When Liz Truss and Joe Lycett turned up to film the first edition of the BBC’s new flagship political interview show, the future prime minister probably expected to be the one making the headlines.
Instead the Daily Mail decided that the real story of Laura Kuenssberg’s interview with Truss was the mocking reaction of comedian Lycett, who marked the end of the Sunday morning chat by shouting, “Woo, you smashed it, Liz!”
Going with the front-page headline “Now BBC comic mocks Liz Truss”, the newspaper relegated the Tory leader’s woolly pledges on energy bills to the inside pages. Instead the Mail focused on Tory fury at how the comic “overshadowed” Truss in front of 1.5 million viewers, all with the connivance of the BBC.
If the arrival of a new prime minister provides an opportunity to reset government policy, then it is also a chance for sections of the media to remind others who is boss. The Mail front page about Lycett coincided with the first official day in the job for Deborah Turness, the new BBC News chief, who has joined after years of government pressure over what “impartiality” should mean for the national broadcaster. The director general, Tim Davie, and the BBC chair, Richard Sharp, also face their annual cross-examination by MPs on the culture select committee on Tuesday – a meeting at which Lycett will suddenly be a central character for daring to mock the incoming prime minister.
One problem for the BBC is the way the government’s criticism of the corporation’s supposed leftwing anti-Tory agenda is seeping out of its current affairs output and into other aspects of its programming. When Davie was appointed as director general, there were a series of briefings about how the corporation’s comedy output had become too anti-Tory, and Nish Kumar’s satirical Mash Report – which repeatedly angered rightwing pundits – was axed shortly afterwards.
This caused one BBC comedy producer to complain that they wanted a greater diversity of political views, but that there simply weren’t enough funny rightwingers to fill the schedules. They said: “Some people aren’t very good. The issue is a shortage of rightwing comics.”
Off the back of the Dyson report on the bungled handling of the BBC’s 1995 Martin Bashir interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, the corporation has already committed to ongoing impartiality reviews of almost all of its content. These will look at how a particular topic is covered across everything from news to children’s output to entertainment – and even comedy.
With the media industry expecting Truss’s government to commit to a review of the BBC licence fee, there are increasingly desperate calls for backing. On Monday night BBC journalist Clive Myrie used the Steve Hewlett memorial lecture to make a direct appeal to the new government. He said the culture secretary – who could still be incumbent Nadine Dorries – must “make a renewed commitment to quality public service broadcasting at the BBC and Channel 4” as it is “too important to be left in the hands of a free market”.
The criticism of Lycett was the second time in two days the Mail family of newspapers had expressed their outrage at comedians mocking those in power. On Sunday, they attacked Have I Got News For You, the show that helped elevate Boris Johnson to national figure status during the 1990s and 2000s, for repeatedly lambasting the prime minister in a special “tribute” edition.
Yet in a sign of the declining importance of the print press, Kuenssberg’s new show has broken with the Sunday political show tradition of having a formal in-depth newspaper review. Instead, the front pages were flashed on screen for a few seconds – meaning the Mail on Sunday headline “BBC Comic’s C-word jibe against PM” was barely visible.
“I genuinely don’t think they’re upset about it,” a deadpan Lycett told Times Radio on Monday, after his intervention had been viewed millions of times on social media. “I spoke to Laura and her team beforehand and they said they wanted to go in a slightly different direction … I suppose they maybe didn’t realise that I’m really rightwing now, I think maybe they thought I was leftwing.”
