Delingpole: BBC Axes Worst Comedy Show Evah, The Mash Report

LONDON, ENGLAND - MAY 13: (L-R) Rachel Parris and Nish Kumar pose in the press room at th
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James Delingpole

The BBC has put its worst-ever ‘comedy’ show out of its misery. Finally, after four toe-curlingly unfunny seasons, The Mash Report has been axed.

You probably won’t have watched The Mash Report – almost no one did. That’s because its function (this goes for a lot of BBC contemporary comedy) was not to entertain or amuse, but to reinforce woke values.

Its presenter, Nish Kumar was widely celebrated as the unfunniest man in comedy. This reputation was clinched in December 2019 when he was booed off stage and had a bread roll chucked at him at a charity gig for the Lord’s Taverners.

The audience did not like his lefty student’s union fare of jokes about how dreadful Boris Johnson was, how awful the British Empire was, how stupid Brexit was and how racist his audience was. Still less did they like the bit where he sang the praises of the creature that possibly did more than anyone to delay Brexit – former House of Commons Speaker and non-knight John Bercow. But the BBC kept him on because that’s exactly the sort of comedy material it loves.

Here is a classic Kumar moment, in which, hilariously, he compares No Deal Brexit with deliberately soiling yourself:

When, last summer, the BBC acquired a new chairman Tim Davie he promised to deal with the organisation’s overabundance of left-wing comedy. This is certainly a problem with the BBC. An audit of the BBC’s comedy output last year found that of 364 BBC comedy slots, 268 went to brazenly left-wing comedians while just four went to comics who openly supported Brexit or the Conservative party.

If you believe the Sun newspaper, the axing of The Mash Report represents a glorious victory against the forces of woke by BBC Chairman Tim Davie.

It quotes an unnamed ‘source’ thus:

This will be music to ears of telly fans.
For four series, viewers have sat through Nish’s ‘comedy’ with an undoubted left-wing spin.
Tim promised tough measures — and he has stuck to his guns.

This looks like spin to me, perhaps designed to make the ineffectual Davie look tougher than he is, and to persuade the BBC’s growing number of critics on the right (many of whom are so sick of its bias that they are refusing to pay their license fees) that the institution is capable of reform.

My suspicion is that The Mash Report is merely acting the role of the BBC’s sacrificial lamb: killed, reluctantly, by the BBC not because it was so bad but merely in order to distract from the myriad other BBC lefty comedy programmes which haven’t been scrapped but which are slightly less egregious than The Mash Report.

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