Horne & Corden

Deborah 13: Servant of God

My Strike

I am not sure whom to congratulate more: my other half on this page, Tim Teeman, for getting the adjective “homophobic” to stick to Horne & Corden after his column on gay bashing on television last week, or the comedians themselves for attracting controversy to an otherwise unremarkable sketch show. Previewing the first episode, Tim was unhappy with Matthew Horne's character Tim Goodall (if there is a joke in the name I've missed it), a gay war reporter on “News 24”. James Corden, playing the grave anchorman in the studio, asks Goodall what is happening in Basra. Goodall, flapping his arms and stroking his peroxide hair, replies it is “mental”: “Honestly, it's all going off. It's nuts.” Asked about the current climate, he says: “It's baking.” He winks when he says our soldiers are being taken good care of and cocks a leg in the air to announce “we're winning”.

Corden and Horne may have won our hearts with subtle performances in Gavin & Stacey, the sitcom on which they met, but subtlety is not their strength here. But is the Tim Goodall sketch actually homophobic? It seems to me that their target is the camp persona, and the question of whether camp is fair game or not is complex. It has been adopted by homosexual men for generations as a form of pre-emptive defence against the nonsensical charge that gay men are effeminate and also as a way of exerting power in social situations through humour. Straight men are often bamboozled by it, sometimes adopting it themselves, sometimes finding it funny because it opens up taboo areas to laughter, sometimes finding it irritating (women seem to have less trouble with it), and sometimes, I fear, beating up those who wear it too blatantly. Yet in the path from Mr Humphries to Mr Norton, camp has become a less fragile, less defensive construct. The time may be coming when we can laugh at it as well as with it - although, it appears, not yet.

Am I over-thinking ? If I am, it is certainly not an allegation you can throw with accuracy at Corden and Horne. Their Tim Goodall skit simply restates one of Susan Sontag's definitions of camp, that it takes trivial things seriously and serious things trivially. Camp, self- obviously, is an inappropriate voice for war reporters, many of whom were and are gay (I know of one famous, although closeted, example). This is humour of incongruity so broad that it would occur only to those who know no other kind - a distinct possibility in Corden and Horne's case given their show's other skits, over which I draw a kindly veil.

The star of the documentary Deborah 13: Servant of God would undoubtedly be horrified by Horne & Corden, but then, as one of ten home-taught children being brought up in rural Dorset without a TV by their evangelical Christian parents, most things horrify her. The film showed the 13-year-old evangelising at the bus stops of Bridport and then accompanying her older brother to Buxton, where he was studying catering and sharing a house with non-believers. At first I hoped that my own prejudices against evangelical Christianity would be challenged by the comparison between the polite and intelligent Deborah and the yobbish, dumb-downed, alco-popped remainder of teenage Britain. Yet everyone she met was courteous to a fault, even as she informed them that they were to be damned for eternity. “I think what she was saying was true,” one sinner from the bus stop averred cautiously, “but I don't think any of us here believe in God.” Deborah worried that people might mistake her for some kind of religious nut. To avoid this, my advice would be to go easy on her current gambit in social situations, telling folk that they are lying, blaspheming, thieving sinners who deserve to go to Hell.

My Strike could have been a decent documentary too. On the 25th anniversary of the miners' strike, it recalled the bad old days when eight million working days a year were lost to industrial action. A fascinating number of its interviewees were strikers turned strike busters, among them Norman Tebbit, Greg Dyke, Peter Snow and even Kelvin MacKenzie. From their perspective of semi-retired affluence, they benevolently patronised their youthful selves, but the quartet all worked in well-paid professions for whom the stakes were low. If you were a woman factory worker at Ford trying to get equal pay with your male colleagues, a footballer on a slave contract that would eventually be declared illegal, or a miner about to lose his job what were you to do? As Anne Scargill, former wife of the miners' leader, said: “What else has the working class got but the right to strike and to demonstrate?” One day someone should take the interviews from the documentary and stitch them together so that they form an argument. Failing that, they might attempt a chronology. This wasn't even a montage. It was a mess.

andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk

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