a buttery-faced man with a smugly malicious manner

Nick Cohen watched an episode of Mock the Week. Bad idea:

BBC 2 describes the show as satire, but it is not satirical in the usual sense of the word. The chairman, Dara Ó Briain, a buttery-faced man with a smugly malicious manner, presides over panellists without a political idea in their little heads. The viewer can never say, for instance, that Frankie Boyle, the show’s star, hates the thought of a Conservative government and is determined to find the barb that will pierce David Cameron’s defences, or that any of his team-mates are determined to punish Gordon Brown for what he has done to Britain. They do not want to scratch, let alone wound, those with real power over our lives, which is probably why the BBC gives them free rein.

The best way to picture Mock the Week is to imagine six men, with a low-grade but undoubted comic talent, late at night in a pub. Drink has dissolved their inhibitions and each is determined to push the others aside and prove he is top dog. The blatancy of their competitiveness sets them apart from other TV comics. Status anxiety torments performers in all panel games. But you never see Ian Hislop look resentful when Paul Merton comes up with a good joke on Have I Got News for You, or rush out his gags so he can be sure that he can get them on air. No veneer of conviviality hides the contestants’ jealousy on Mock the Week. They don’t laugh at each other’s jokes. They visibly struggle for money and fame as they interrupt each other and race to snatch the microphone in the middle of the studio. As tense and mirthless as saloon-bar fighters in the moment before the first punch is thrown, they will do anything to establish their superiority.

Continues in the same vein, with all the examples drawn from the same short sequence of the same episode, ad infinitum.

That’s what happens when you let a man with no sense of humour and who’s well on his way to having sold out all his youthful leftwing ideals but who still has his Dave Spart reflexes honed to a keen edge criticise comedy shows. He gets it painfully, obviously wrong and will never be aware of how wrong he is, even when you show him why he’s wrong. His amateur hour psycho-analysis, his misreading of motives and emoties, his inability to understand anything but the broadest gag, all speak of a deeply confused mind. It’s fitting that all this is published in Standpoint, which has never show any understanding of culture other than as a vehicle of propaganda.

You wonder why this piece was published there though; was it perhaps intended for Private Eye (see telltale buttering up to Ian Hislop) but rejected?