First there was "Bingate", when a baked alaska allegedly got sabotaged and
"Private Eye" claimed that the Queen herself commented on this black day in
Britain’s history. Now, to make matters even worse, "The Great British Bake
Off" is sinking into a morass of filth. Viewers have complained about the level
of cheap sexual innuendo, with constant references to "soggy bottoms" or,
worse still, Sue Perkins telling the contestants attempting to recreate Mary
Berry’s cherry cake "You have got two hours to pop Mary’s cherry [pause] in
the oven..." And even the sainted Mary herself seemed to have been lured
down into the gutter when she observed that some biscuits had had "a good
forking".
Berry’s fellow judge Paul Hollywood, however, has defended the filth. It’s
just "banter and our whole culture has always been based on it. Carry On films
did it for 30 years and then there were cheeky beach picture postcards. It’s in
our DNA to giggle at ourselves."
It’s possible both sides may be right. A relentless outpouring of puerile smut
being forced down the public’s throat can leave a nasty taste in anyone’s
mouth. But then again, as Hollywood says, we’ve had this stuff forever. As we
have the reaction against it.
The saucy postcard artist Donald McGill, praised in a famous essay by George
Orwell for classic cards like "A Stick of Rock, Cock?" (which, with due
humility, I pastiched when Northern Rock collapsed) was also prosecuted in
1954, aged 80, for breaking the Obscene Publications Act.
The same was true of the Carry On films, once described by the critic Chris
Peachment as Britain’s answer to Luis Bunuel, but which also fell foul of
authority. On the strength of Bernard Bresslaw, in the role of Afghan warlord
"Bundgit Din", shouting at Cardew Robinson playing a fakir, "Fakir! Off!"
"Carry on Up The Khyber" was banned in apartheid-
era South Africa. Both of them can trace a clear line of descent from, among
many other things, the nursery rhyme "I Had A Little Nut Tree", a smutty ditty
about Henry VIII’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon. ("A silver nutmeg"?!?
Oo-er, missus!)
In all these instances, their purpose and potency lies in lowering the tone. And
as a cartoonist I can only applaud. It being every satirist’s job to undermine
the pretension of the powerful, and with high-minded seriousness one of the
most powerful pretensions around, easily the best way to subvert it is to drag
up some of the sweatier, stinkier aspects of being human. Like having a body
which shits and has sex. And if you want something which unites sex and shit,
nothing does it quite as well as food, and thus we return to The Great British
Bake Off.
Anyone familiar with Finbar Saunders in Viz will understand how the mere
mention of the word "melons" reduces Finbar to fits of guffawing "fnaar
fnaars!" By that token, it’s frankly amazing that no one on The Great British
Bake Off has asked the contestants to put something long and red into tarts.
I’m talking about rhubarb, obviously. But there lies the true beauty of cheap
sexual innuendo: it’s both subversive and deniable: the double meaning, the
code cementing the conspiracy of laughter between jester and jestee, means
any filth detected by anyone choosing not to get the joke exists solely in the
filthy minds of the complainant.
The blue comic Max Miller built an entire career out of this. After a joke like
"Walking along a cliff path. Path’s blocked by two beautiful naked women.
Didn’t know whether to come between them or toss meself off" he’d regale
his laughing audience with injured innocence: "You wicked lot. You’re the
sort of people that get me a bad name!" Two centuries earlier Laurence Sterne
wove a lot of "Tristram Shandy" around the same kind of thing, claiming that
anyone who saw in his obsession with noses anything more phallic only had
themselves to blame.
If, therefore, you think puerile smut is demeaning the fundamental gravitas of
"The Great British Bake Off", reflect that "Tristram Shandy" is now
considered Great Literature. But if that’s still not high-minded enough for you,
what about The Guardian? Forgetting the anomalous Fur Cup that often
features in my cartoons (say it with a strong French accent), 25 years ago the
great Posy Simmonds produced the following gag for the Guardian Woman’s
Page: What’s pink and hard first thing in the morning?
Well? The Financial Times Crossword! Honestly, the minds you people have.