Whatever happened to red nose day?
And doing something funny for money
This video of Andy Burnham wanly dancing to True Faith by the New Order has given me some much-needed reinvigoration after three months of feeling depressed about ‘UK’ politics. Nobody could watch that video, even the most credulous of Britpoppers, and believe that Burnham is capturing some sort of national mood. It is clear from his own lack of enthusiasm that he knows that he cannot pull of the kayfabe of taking the country back to the 1990s culturally or spiritually.
It was notable too that this year that political attention paid to the World Cup in Britain was at a very low ebb. There was some stir made about Sir Keir Starmer staying on for if England won, and his final Prime Minister’s questions had a few searching references to it, I count only one tweet from the past week from Andy Burnham about the game. This is extraordinary from a man who, as culture secretary, tried to part nationalise premier league football saying that money had ‘poisoned our national game’. We are a long way away from Boris being hounded by the press for failing to attend the ‘Lionesses’ Euros victory in person.
The raw audience figures bear this out as well. During the 2021 Euros final 31 million people ‘tuned in’ to watch England play Italy. For England Argentina last week this cratered to a humiliating 24 million – this also being lower than in 2018 World Cup when England also crashed out into fourth place. It was, anecdotally, far, far harder to find a pub in which to watch the games in London than it was in in 2021.
Burnham wants to win the next election by ‘bringing back hope’. He is also planning for defeat by devolving power away from Westminster, such that Reform winning a general election will not change the country meaningfully. But ‘bringing back hope’ is Burnham’s version of ‘Make America Great Again’, it is his reactionary promise to take the country back to the 1990s.
Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again, by taking the United States back to the 1980s, is in and of itself a fine promise. America by many objective metrics peaked in the 1980s, in 1985 the American economy accounted for 32.74% of global GDP. The worst humiliation at the hands of the Middle East America had stopped. Reagan was by no means a perfect President, in many respects he was one of the worst, but 1980s America works as a stand in for a stronger economy, less indulgence abroad and fewer Hispanics, the original promise of 2016.
It was a period, and a place, with much more esteem than the Britain which Burnham is trying to recreate. It would be wrong to give a specific decade to where Burnham wants to take the country. He opposes Thatcher on the one hand, which would imply that he wants to take us back to the 1970s, but his music tastes mostly date the 1980s and 1990s. It is not a flavouring of social democracy but a feeling that right is besting wrong and that the communities are getting the respect they deserve, and that all of us get to join in.
The Britain that Burnham wants to go back to is one where music, football and generic celebrity capture the heart of the nation and produce a wave of sentimentality which he can crest. That was politics as it worked during the New Labour period. Blair spent much of his first term in government courting celebrities in Chequers, as disclosures in the mid 2000s revealed, he used his grace and favour home to host hundreds of ‘stars’ including Stephen Fry, Elton John, Bob Geldof, Emma Thompson, Helen Mirren, Trevor Nunn, Prunella Scales and of course, with grim inevitability, Sir Jimmy Savile.
My cautious case for optimism is that Burnham is trying to invoke spirits which no longer, and can no longer exist. The output of celebrity culture, the metric by which we might judge how much relevance these people still have is charity fundraising work. Jimmy Savile, Britain’s first Disc Jockey who, in his own words, was ‘the very first in the whole world to run a dance to records’ was the author of 20th century British celebrity culture, having more or less invented popular music and then dominated broadcasting for decades.
Outside of this work he pursued fundraising for charity with the same bloody-minded vigour that Napoleon pursued his conquests of Continental Europe. A day did not pass by in his life without him participating in some marathon or charity dinner to raise money for his various causes including Stoke-Mandeville. Such was Savile’s enthusiasm for charity work that our very own King Charles enlisted Savile to invite guests to Kensington Palace on his behalf following a ‘telethon’ (a televised charity fundraiser).
When I was a child, growing up in the shadow of Sir Jimmy, I remember well how pervasive ‘charity’ was. The crap was constantly rammed down your throat, we even had the begging bowl sent round our school for tins of food following the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia. The worst of it by far was something called ‘Red Nose day’, an episode of our history – as with Pakistani grooming gangs – which I’m loathe to share with international audiences but share we must. Every year, in March usually, children of primary school age would be made to wear a foam red ball on their nose, and the TV would be full of ‘national treasures’ doing comedy shows to raise money to end child poverty.
It was a sort of show of power on behalf of the Masons, intended to humiliate you with your impotence. This was the Britain of Tony Christie and Peter Kay performing ‘Is this the way to Amarillo’ and Jamie Oliver’s In Your Face and of course David ‘big boy’ Walliams. Tony Blair even appeared as himself in a 2006 sketch with Catherine Tate.
Between 1988, the year that Comic Relief started, and 2011, the real value of yearly donations quadrupled from £41m to £160m. Then, beginning in 2011, year on year donations fall sharply. By 2023 they have fallen, in real terms, to below where it was in 1988. Last year it only managed to raise a poxy £33m.
There are a number of theories we could posit for why Comic Relief has fallen apart. It could be the rise of the internet and the fall of terrestrial television. It could be, per Lobe, that in a ‘low trust’ society less money is set aside for charitable causes. Perhaps it’s the algorithms. I find the fact that 2011 is the precise turning point very strange indeed, as this was also the year that:
The pillars of Burnhamism – Footy, Music and Celebrity – are very much decayed from where they were during the New Labour years. I do not think it is possible for Andy Burnham to recreate ‘Madchester’ and so I do not think it is possible for him to recreate the ‘hope’ and thereby capitalise on the reactionary nostalgia that he is trying to tap into. Because the World of Yesterday - of the nation being obsessed with fiddlers and footy players and following their every move and listening to which politician they endorse – those days are over.
