A quarter of a century later, another political comedy show produced for the BBC – Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It (2005 – present) – portrayed a new political landscape in which the balance of power had shifted decidedly from the quiet, nomenklatura of civil servants, to the loud, bruising communication directors and party spin doctors  now firmly, and swearingly, operating the leavers of powers in which ministers, just as hapless as Hacker but rather less sympathetic, serve as marionettes whose fear of the party’s spin doctors is only superseded by their fear of encounters with common voters (though these voters are often portrayed in a no more sympathetic light than politicians themselves).

Much speculation has surrounded the accuracy of these comedic portrayals of reality of political everyday performances. Jay and Lynn, contemporaries of the last surviving former Conservative minister on the current Tory front bench, Kenneth Clarke, during their studies at Cambridge, have made little secret of the fact that Clarke and his fellow student politicians inspired their portrayal of politicians in Yes, Minister.

Yet, rarely has television fiction been replicated and superseded by actual events as drastically as in Wednesday’s meeting of Prime Minister Gordon Brown with Rochdale-based pensioner Gillian Duffy. Having, seemingly politely, listened to Mrs Duffy’s concerns including what she perceived to be too high numbers of foreigners settling in her neighbourhood, Brown climbed back into the prime ministerial limousine frustratingly quizzing his aides why they had let him meet this, in his words, “bigoted woman” ‑ forgetting that his eager team had previously urged broadcasters to equip him with a radio microphone to record his encounter with ordinary voters – a microphone he was still wearing and that broadcast his words to BBC, ITV and Sky simultaneously. This scene echoing the frequent portrayals of encounters between voters and politicians in The Thick of It almost to the letter. I say almost, as the Facebook site of the show noted that the affair seemed to be a bit of a storm in a teacup, given that the Prime Minister had not even used to the c-word to describe Ms. Duffy.

However, the interplay between political comedy and satire such as The Thick of It and these events are aesthetically and ideologically ambivalent. However painful the exposure to the collapse of front and back regions, that will provide a vivid case study for those of us teaching Erving Goffman’s dramaturgy for many years to come, may have been, however much 24-hour news media leapt upon the incident as breaking news, first opinion polls and some anecdotal evidence indicate that the incident may have had little impact on Brown’s popularity, or to be precise, unpopularity – for satire and comedy have long revealed realities of contemporary politics and thus shaped what Hans-Robert Jauss once called our “horizon of expectation” in a fashion, that yesterday’s events left many viewers and listeners distinctly unsurprised.

In fact, what seemed more surprising than the disingenuous manner in which Mrs. Duffy was first courted for her vote, only to be latter branded a bigot, was the fact that the Prime Minister’s private words revealed a rudiment of political conviction and liberal sentiment assumed to be missing entirely among Britain’s present day political class. At the same time, the subversive play with signifiers at the heart of the consumption of popular culture is equally resorted to by audiences in their reading of (television) news stories that appear to be no less polysemic: as a worker at a waste collection site I visited shortly after yesterday’s news broke proclaimed in equally cheerful as disturbingly sexist manner: “I am a Labour man. What, he was rude to a lady? Well, he has got my vote then!”

Yet, political satire has also, to use Jauss’s Constance School colleague’s Wolfgang Iser’s term, “normalised” our reading of yesterday’s event. The fact that in the interest of spin, many politicians are no longer willing to participate in an actual public discourse with the electorate – in which Brown would have disagreed with the xenophobe tendencies of Mrs Duffy’s line of questioning, rather than commenting dismissively upon on them only retrospectively and in what her wrongly assumed to be in private, barely raises an eyebrow – it is a state of affairs we have long assumed already. Yet, few of us are laughing, as the banality of unsubtle political realities blunts the satirical edge of even the most daring political comedy.