Laugh?

My old mate Tom Hamilton claims to be “old enough to remember when Rory Bremner was funny”. Well, Tom is only nine months older than I am, and I do wonder whether these people ever were funnier than they are now, or whether we were just younger and easier to amuse. The large amount of “satire” in the early to mid-Nineties was often nothing more than crude abuse.

In particular, as soon as it became clear that John Major was going to go for five years, he and his colleagues were subjected to a nightly torrent of the most hysterical, highly personalised vitriol. How we laughed! But we were very, very young at the time.

Then the 1997 Election came, and it all stopped. It has never started again. Probably, it never will. But is that really any loss?