Juvenal's satire

TV Review

Something very odd happened the other night. The BBC broadcast a little programme about Juvenal, the Roman satirist. There was, as far as I could see, no anniversary to account for this. It didn't introduce a new series or form part of Scorn Night, a festival of vituperation through the ages. Juvenal wasn't even billed as the Ben Elton of the Palatine Hill. Laughter and Loathing (BBC2) had clearly been broadcast simply because someone thought it might interest some of the viewers. There was no excuse for it whatsoever.

It's true that Ian Hislop presented it, rather than some tweeded academic with cigarette ash in his turn-ups - which might be thought to count as shameless popularisation. It's true, too, that there were long sequences in which Stephen Fry wandered about London and Bath, dressed in a toga and sporting a set of classical curls. But Hislop appeared to know what he was talking about (he wasn't just reading the script, he had written it too), and the Fry sections turned out to be useful on two counts, delivering choice extracts of Juvenal's dyspeptic writing and preserving us from the laborious explanation that, actually, he was, you know, like, amazingly relevant for our times.

Even more remarkably, something moderately novel was said about satire, that most dog-eared of cultural subjects. This came courtesy of Auberon Waugh, who bravely ventured the opinion that Juvenal wasn't all that funny any more - whatever prurient thrills he has delivered to countless generations of schoolboys. "The whole art of journalism," he pointed out, "is judging what you can get away with - and that's an entirely contemporary judgement." Perhaps "journalism" was a touch dismissive, but the recognition of satire's perishability was just right. What survives of Juvenal isn't belly laughs but a sense of generalised outrage, the fury of a disappointed man, cut out by the mercenary priorities of a corrupted society (the sense of exclusion was nicely demonstrated by a scene in which Fry hovered unhappily at the edge of a group of Groucho luminaries). To be honest I did laugh out loud once, after the description of parvenus who "rise to the top by that quickest and most popular route - a rich old matron's funnel", but I think the joke was in translation - there was something about "funnel" that made me yelp.

The vocabulary and grammar of comedy is a mysterious matter, which doesn't always lend itself to dissection. Sometimes, though, it's possible to see how a joke is working without it wiping the smile off your face. There was a good example in Preston Front (BBC1), currently one of the week's solidly dependable pleasures. When the new series began, I quibbled a bit about the generalised articulacy of the characters, on the grounds that it wasn't entirely realistic. I've now decided to stop wasting time with pointless fretting. Yes, the tone has shifted slightly, so that the sense of calculated manipulation is greater, but it's still wonderfully inventive. Which brings us back to the example, a line which came at the end of a delicious set-piece in which Hodge's determination to attend his girlfriend Laura's "business dinner" resulted in serial humiliation. It started badly when Greg Scarry (baker made good, number plate B1SKT) mistook him for a waiter, and then got worse by exactly judged degrees. You thought the lowest point had come when Hodge's fake oration of Latin poetry (he strings together plant names) was blown by a woman at the next table. But a little later you cut back to hear Laura saying brightly, "Isn't that an amazing coincidence Hodge - you having a favourite local football team and Greg owning it?". Now, nobody would ever say such a thing - the syntax simply isn't conversational - but Firth's line makes you laugh, at least in part because it plays a knowing game with your expectations.