5 minutes with… James Cary: On Culture, Comedy, Conservatism and his Christian faith Published by on

James Cary is a comedy writer, commentator and podcaster whose works includes numerous radio series; sitcom hits Miranda and Bluestone 42; and a number of books, including his latest, The Sacred Art of Joking, about the relationship between comedy and Christianity (available here).

Hi James, firstly thank you for talking to us.

Well, well, well. The biggest Conservative majority since 1987. What do you make of it? Did you ever think Jeremy Corbyn could win?

No-one took anything for granted given Corbyn got pretty close last time. Although what’s interesting is that shift in expectation. Despite the fact that the Conservative Party in 2019 were a hopelessly divided rabble and had fudged Brexit for three years and done very little else to shout about, no-one gave Labour a hope of winning an outright majority. The only chance they were given was a deal with the SNP. And yet Ed Miliband went into his General Election as leader fully expecting to win outright, and everyone was rather flummoxed when they didn’t. But perhaps everyone knew, deep down, that 2017 was as good as it was ever going to get for Corbyn. The opinion polls said it was the person and not the policies. Corbyn and his followers all say they ‘won the debate’, but I wasn’t aware of any actual debate throughout the campaign. And the numbers would suggest that they didn’t win much at all.

You are a highly successful comedy writer. How do you think this result will affect the comedy industry? Do you think it will precipitate any change or will things “carry on as usual”?

There are rumblings about the Tories finally giving the BBC the kicking they’ve been itching to do for years. I’m not sure there’s any great appetite for that. And say what you like about the BBC (and I do!), they commission a lot of comedy and are still the biggest player in town. I would hope this would mean that the folks running the BBC would realise that perhaps there’s more appetite out there for traditional mainstream comedy, but the numbers of viewers for repeats of Dads Army should have done that already so I don’t quite see what’s going to change there as a result of the general election win for the Tories.

Do you agree that our cultural institutions have now moved too far away from the people who fund them – i.e. the ordinary voter?

Isn’t it one of those rules of life that all institutions drift to the left unless they’ve been specifically set up to remain on the right? There’s something in that, but it seems to have been the case for decades if not centuries. There’s always that tension between these institutions, the paying public and artists that people want to be comforted with nostalgia, but they don’t want the same old thing. Every cultural advance (if you can call our culture progress, which is highly dubious) is something old with something new added. You can’t move too fast, or if you do, no-one will come with you. You may be recognised as a genius after your death, but where did that get you when you were trying to pay your mortgage? I think the best diagnosis of all these issues have been nicely summed up in David Goodhart’s excellent book The Road To Somewhere, which highlights how those with certain more liberal, Remainer values are a minority, but seem to hold all of the power, and have access to the cultural levers. The internet has, to some extent blown that apart, but gatekeepers don’t give up that easily.

As a Christian, how does your religion interact with your work, and your politics?

My faith is central to everything. It’s not just the operating system, it’s the source code and the firmware. On a good day, anyway. In a way, I think to think it gives me a different perspective from other writers, although it normally makes me wince whenever Christian faith is portrayed on television, and it’s clear that the actor, writer and director have no clue what they’re talking about, and are basing their portrayal on other second hand TV portrayals.

How my faith interacts with my politics is trickier because there are plenty of sensible and faithful Christians on all sides of the political spectrum. But my faith, and reading of the Bible, would make be very suspicious about human nature, and the corrupting influence of power. Leaders of any kind in the Bible seldom do a decent job. King David had a guy killed, Moses was a murderer, Noah got drunk and exposed himself and Solomon had hundreds of wives. And they were all the good guys. So I’m often surprised when Christians are happy to give politicians more and more when that tends to end very badly. And that Christians don’t believe in heaven on earth, and that history teaches that those who try to build utopia normally ended up stacking bodies in the streets. Is that a little dark? Perhaps. But read any history of any society where utopians take hold and it gets very ugly very fast. Or just read Orwell.

I think it’s fair to say you’re ‘not a Socialist’. Do you find that a problem in the comedy industry? Do you think we need a bit of a “cultural rebalance”, not just in the BBC, but across our wider cultural landscape?

If you work in comedy and the writing industry there is a general assumption that you are on the left, and people are surprised, although I wonder if everyone’s quite as woke as they appear to be. There’s so little incentive to put your head above the parapet, as people are discovering now Laurence Fox has said some things – that don’t seem terribly controversial – that actors are really not supposed to say. Maybe he could have said them with a little more grace, but we’re all different and we can’t all be GK Chesterton. He’s very much the standard for me.

How do you think the Left will react to their loss?

I hope that they react well enough to be a decent opposition and hold the government to account. And to make the government worry about losing the next election. But not well enough to actually win the next election. Unless the next Labour Prime Minister is Ed Balls. I could probably live with that.

As we’re a Conservative site, we always ask this question. Which Tory politician – or figure – do you most admire, and why?

I could talk about Wilberforce and all his amazing work, not least because he’s a Christian, but I’m not sure he was a Tory as we’d now see it in. And in some ways, given his ‘interventionist’ ideas, he would not have seemed conservative to some at the time. So despite being a Leaver myself, and Ken Clarke being an ardent remainer, I’ve always loved Ken Clarke’s cheerful tone and relaxed confident. You miss that kind of person when they’re gone. Are they all gone? Why is it that politicians all seem more electable when they leave politics?

Thank you, James!

James Cary was talking to Tim Dawson.

Follow James on twitter here: @ThatJamesCary, @sitcomgeek

And Tim here: @Tim_R_Dawson