On paper, it’s enough to send you running for the hills. A show about Brexit – pull on your trainers – a young comedian’s examination of its 60s and 70s origins – lace them tight – via impressions of politicians from that era, and you’re off, racing across the greensward, bug-eyed in horror. “Come back!” people might shout. “The conceit is he wants to rebuild his relationship with his leave-voting mother!” “Never!” you reply, without a second thought. “Never!”
And this, as with so much to do with Brexit, would be wrong. For the show is How Europe Stole My Mum (Channel 4) and it is really, really good. Odd, unexpected, not for everyone, perhaps, any more than any comedy ever is, but fresh, charming and funny. It succeeded in something I had long believed unfeasible: it made me laugh if not exactly about Brexit then in very close proximity to it – an achievement so near to impossible that the mirthful noises emerging from my breast amounted almost to a miracle.
The hour-long mix of impressions, news footage, historiography and scenes between mother and son growing up and on that fateful day in June 2016, is an adaptation of Kieran Hodgson’s comedy award-nominated 2018 Edinburgh fringe show 75. It delved into the vexed politics and the people involved in our entry into the common market to illuminate the even more vexed and vexing current debate around our exit from the EU.
In Huddersfield, young Hodgson and his mother (Liza Tarbuck) enjoy a close relationship, with her greeting his new songs (to help him remember every county town), school prizes and eventual coming-out announcement with equal delight. Then the revelation that she voted leave to his remain (“Funny how we can be so close and yet have such a different stance on a key political issue!” says Mrs Hodgson cheerily. “Still, I don’t expect it will affect our relationship, will it!”) casts a shadow. “You piece of shit, Mum!” he screams. “You racist, chardonnay-sozzled old witch!” It gave me a laugh, but then I live with a leaver so I need one. It was a neat comment on the polarising effect the greatest socio-political event since the war has had on us all in the abstract.
Realising that simplistic labels do none of us any good (“Look at me – I have a husband, but I hate gay people!”), Hodgson headed to the library to research the whole sorry mess. He was aided by a lascivious librarian, played by Harry Enfield, and we headed at pace through miniskirts and Macmillan (“I like having a good time. I once shot a heron. I wish it was still the war”), the Beatles (“We’ve just come back from playing three years in Hamburg for some reason! The Germans are doing really well in the common market – we should join! Even a Norwegian would!”) and the rejection by the French of our first attempt to become part of the gang.
A tour of Hodgson’s Barbara Castle, Tony Benn and Edward Heath impressions, and a celebration of fellow Huddersfield native Harold Wilson’s willingness to compromise (“Are you going to be silly sandwiches, or …?”) and we were in. Hodgson’s erudition meant he was half a step ahead of us all the time, pulling parallels out of history like rabbits out of a hat, but he never left us floundering. Every now and then he gave us a scene of divided political parties punching each others’ lights out, or David Dimbleby leaning madly far back in his chair, and a chance to catch our breath.
Amid the laughs, however, How Europe Stole My Mum provided such a rare non-partisan and long-range perspective that it induced quite an odd emotional response. As best as I can tell – and it took me a long time to unpack it – this was a compound of gratitude for the detachment and intelligence that had gone into it, despair at the lateness of the day and the paucity of such material, and comfort in the knowledge that we have lived through these times before and survived. Or that might come under despair. But to have watched a programme that clarified facts and complicated my feelings about Brexit is one that I can absolutely stan, as I believe the young people who may or may not have been robbed of a future by it say. More of this sort of thing (and of Tarbuck), please.
