Television - Andrew Billen on the delirious cleverness of The Simpsons
The famous-name game, "Botticelli", is, as I discovered recently, impossible to play when one participant is your five-year-old niece and another is your 83-year-old father. But fiddle with those age boundaries only slightly and most families could play the game if it were confined to characters in The Simpsons. As it often says on the side of board games, this show is fun for kids from seven to 70.
Actually, I would insist on making that adults from 70 to seven. Children identify with the brattish ten-year-old Bart, but the heart of the series, as its creator, Matt Groening, points out in The Simpsons: America's First Family (Friday 23 June, 6.45pm, BBC2), is Bart's loafish father - the cowardly, incompetent, deluded, greedy consumer of the American Dream, Homer Simpson. When Mark Lawson in the Guardian cited it as a children's programme that appealed to an infantilised adult culture, he got it, for once, exactly wrong. In the US, it was always seen as adult fare (as was The Flintstones 20 years before), scheduled originally by Fox in prime time against the nauseatingly straight Cosby Show, which it overtook in the ratings. Only the merchandising was marketed at children - and a minor theme that recurs on the show is the tackiness of such commercial spin-offs.
I labour the point because, after ten years, it's time we grew up and soberly realised that, in our lifetimes, there is unlikely to be a more sophisticated comedy than The Simpsons. By choosing to schedule its more than ample tribute of documentaries, clips and favourite episodes in three hours straddling the 9pm watershed, BBC2 has showed that it understands well the asset it acquired once Sky had stopped hoarding it.
The freshest slice of Friday evening was Selina Mehta's rare interview with Groening himself, My Wasted Life, in which we learnt not only that his father was called Homer, but also that his mother was a Margaret and his sisters were Lisa and Maggie. Embedded in this family reality in Portland, Oregon, the young Groening watched the family sitcoms of the Fifties and Sixties, such as Leave it to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet, with bemused fascination. He spoke of his sense of betrayal when the local incarnation of Dennis the Menace turned out to be such a wuss. Groening's revenge was to invent a sofa-based sitcom that observed the furniture of the mythical American family - the Simpsons go to church every Sunday and say grace before supper - while completely overturning it.
In the earlier documentary, Mike Skully, the show's producer, summarises the need for The Simpsons' writers to have "a healthy disrespect for everything Americans hold dear". Indeed, its take on capitalism makes Frank Capra look like Milton Friedman, and both Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates have been vilified by name on the show (even though Murdoch owns it). In the Simpsons' universe, as in the real one, the opiate of the people is television; and television, the programme reminds us again and again, is trash. When an episode teeters on profundity and pulls back in favour of a parodic family reconciliation, it does so not to appease the little ones, but to remind us of television's inherent triviality.
It would have been interesting if the two documentaries had thought to mention the one taboo area that the programme does not tackle: race. Apu, the Indian proprietor of the Springfield Kwik-E-Mart, is made fun of; and the only regular African American is the solid white-collar surgeon, Dr Hibbert. But these programmes are not in investigatory mood. We hear nothing about the lack of women writers or the descent from the delirious levels of cleverness we enjoyed in the seventh and eighth series. Nor is anything said about the murder in 1998 of one of the voice-over artists, Phil Hartman, which deprived us of the has-been actor and infomercial compere, Troy McClure, star of They Came to Burgle Carnegie Hall and The Candy Bar that Cleans Teeth. Instead, we are told again and again that The Simpsons is the happiest place to work in the world.
"Simpsons Botticelli", incidentally, would not be a five-round wonder. According to a designer, 15,000 characters have been drawn over the past ten years and, while that must be an exaggeration, the number of named characters certainly runs well into three figures. And that is nothing compared to the numbers involved in bringing the show to air, from the writers, through the Korean slave labour filling in the animated frames by hand (another Simpsons in-joke), to the 35-piece orchestra that produces the soundtrack.
Groening had the idea but, as he says, would no longer get a job even as a Simpsons animator; he simply doesn't draw that well. The jokes, too, have evolved beyond the telegramese nihilism of his Life in Hell comic strips. He may be Fox's Michelangelo, but he employs a studio of craftsmen who are the real heroes. Like the old masters, they have collectively changed their medium for ever. Groening said that he coloured the Simpsons yellow because it made it look as if the TV needed adjusting. Metaphorically speaking, all but the blandest television comedy now bears its ochre tint. The Simpsonite counter-culture has become mainstream pop culture; edgy, irreverent, cynical. That we live in the age of The Simpsons and not Leave it to Beaver should be an occasion of thanksgiving more than once every ten years.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard
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