One of those satisfying moments of news synchronicity happened last weekend. Just as President Trump’s healthcare bill crashed on rocks of its own making, and UK manufacturers were warning Theresa May of impending Brexit disaster, Uber announced it was suspending its driverless car programme after one of its vehicles flipped in Arizona. It is, it turns out, quite useful to have someone behind the wheel who knows what they’re doing; the photograph of that upside down car looked like a pretty spot-on political metaphor.
Politically speaking, we are living in the era of the driverless car or, to put it in internet meme terms, Curb Your Enthusiasm. Larry David’s sitcom is an excruciating examination of the idea that things never quite go to plan, especially when the person making the plan is as self-defeatingly selfish as David. Ever since the morning of 24 June, when Michael Gove and Boris Johnson were photographed looking sick with the horror of victory, followed shortly thereafter by Donald Trump on 9 November looking even worse, a meme has emerged showing TV clips of British and American leaders with Curb’s familiar theme music playing in the background.
Once US presidents defined themselves through their eloquence: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”; “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Now America is captained by a man whose response to questions about his credibility is, “I’m president and you’re not.”
So it makes sense that some of the best political commentary about Trump’s presidency has come not from actual articles which rely on joined-up sentences, but simple internet memes. The Curb one is the best because it so perfectly captures our increasingly absurdist times. So David Davis could claim last May that immigration in post-Brexit Britain would fall to “nearly nought”, but now admits that, actually, EU migrants are essential to British industry. (It’s like that moment in Bridget Jones’ Diary when Bridget realises a calorie isn’t just something that makes you fat but is rather necessary for survival.) Meanwhile, Theresa May has finally become prime minister, only to find that she is dancing to the tune of Nigel Farage, a man who has failed to become an MP seven times. Cue Curb music.
This made me wonder whether all political eras can be summed up by a TV show and, having pondered this important issue, you will be delighted to know that the answer is a resounding yes. Let’s distract ourselves from the current political death spiral by taking a trip through history via the medium of my old box sets:
The Reagan/Thatcher era: Miami Vice
Even in their heyday these looked embarrassingly of their time. Yet they have had astonishingly long tails: all US and UK political relationships are compared with Thatcher and Reagan, and Miami Vice spawned a film franchise and is a deathless fashion reference. There is no escape.
The Clinton/Blair era: Friends
Oh, how excitingly modern this seemed at the time. Nothing, we thought, could possibly make us look back on this special relationship/sitcom with anything other than pride. But decades on, freighted down by political scandals and exhausted reruns, what once seemed so professional now just looks slick. Where once we saw the future, we now see the dying days of a smug and bloated time.
The Blair/Bush era: Lost
OK, so they both had dodgy initial premises, the fratty son of an ex-president with his hanging chads on one side, a bunch of people stuck on a desert island on the other. But we thought we were in a safe pair of hands (respectively, Blair and JJ Abrams), and things started OK. Then it all quickly spun out of control – let’s not even mention the ending – and now no one ever wants to think about it again.
The Cameron era: Downton Abbey
Can you believe people fell for this class-obsessed, posh-crushing, nostalgia-soaked nonsense?
The Obama era: Mad Men
This is gold chip stuff, no question. The highest of high quality, the standard to which everything that comes afterwards will be compared. How amazing, we cried, that a politician and TV show should possess both style and substance! But maybe (she says, in a tiny voice) there was, after all, just a little more of the former than the latter.
