THERE ARE VARIOUS causes of newspaper dyspepsia this autumn. According to what you read there’s high taxes, crap weather, crappier teenagers or (for takers of the Daily Express) the continuing failure to nail Prince Philip in the Diana murder case. In my case my bad mood has been created by falling heroes. This goes back to a couple of weeks ago when the Tate Britain Lecture was given by Armando Iannucci, who is as brainy and thoughtful as Stephen Fry . . .

Long ago, complained Iannucci, politicians used to speak to us properly, the media used to subject their every action to forensic scrutiny and broadcast culture was so robust that people were happy to get their information from the news. Now politicians say stupid or mendacious things, the press (as over Iraq) doesn’t pull them up on it, and it has left a gap. And “I find myself stepping into that gap. Not just me, but many other humorists, satirists, comics, artists, people who . . . feel compelled to analyse that logic because no one else will.”

Actually I will. Alice Miles will. Matthew Parris will. But onwards. Armando — “. . . there’s a decreasing pool of ideas and arguments to analyse. There is an emptiness in public argument waiting to be filled. That’s where my lot come in again. If politicians fail to supply politics with content, is it any wonder people turn to other, more entertaining sources?”

It’s hard to know where to begin with this. Should I first wonder at the scale of Iannucci’s delusion, or the very fact of its existence? Do his in-tray and e-mail inbox fill up every day, like mine do, with invitations to public debate or with copies of discussion documents, almost always involving politicians? There are scores of papers and meetings on public health, climate, social services, care of the elderly, prison policy, disability, health rationing, the role of PTCs, the funding of local government, rural regeneration, social exclusion, changes to the curriculum, aid policy and, Armando, so on. Some of it gets on the 24-hour news but most of it, being unpictorial, doesn’t. And none of it seems to involve comedians; there are no invitations to discuss road pricing with Ricky Gervais.

This stuff doesn’t entertain or amuse those looking for quick stimulation. The broadcasters would far rather fill the public arena with comedians. Got a factual programme? Stick a comedian on it and at least you’ll have some jokes.

Having fallen off the Iannucci Winterval card list I might as well now stick it to Alan Bennett, since there’s no way back. You want debate? Try this, from a man I otherwise venerate. In a recent interview, Bennett lays into the Government over top-up fees, an issue on which he says he feels, “passionately political” and over which the Labour Party has “betrayed itself” because he believes that “all students should have the same access to education as I did”.

This is fair enough, I suppose, though Bennett might want to note that far more students have access to higher education than when he was at college. Then, however, comes this: “I don’t claim to know how higher education should be paid for; all I know is that it’s morally wrong to expect students to get into debt.” His interviewer then concludes the piece: “God help the Government if Bennett ever decides to get really political.”

God help them indeed. But God help Bennett first, because then he might have to offer something other than his exeat from responsibility and some view on “how higher education should be paid for”, which might then be compared for both morality and practicality with what those awful politicians have come up with.

My favourite living British playwright is Sir David Hare, who understands — where others don’t — the ambiguities of political existence in a democracy. But not always. Three years ago Sir David put on his play about deaths on the railways, The Permanent Way, and described it as a “painful parable about the badness of British government”. He went on: “The play is really asking: why do politicians not see what is completely obvious to everyone else? And the answer is that it suits them to privatise things, because then they’re able to blame other people when things go wrong.”

Yes, that would be it. But in 2005 there were exactly zero passenger fatalities on British trains. That’s none. So where’s the parable now? Is Sir David likely to do a follow-up in which he discovers the essential goodness of government through the numbers our trains (compared with France and Germany) don’t kill? I look forward to Marcus Brigstocke bringing us a skit on the lack of rail casualties.

Of course, as Iannucci suggests, politics doesn’t sell on TV, and is banished to make way for more comedy and more stuff from playwrights. When writer Sally Wainwright produced a modern version of The Taming of the Shrew for the BBC and suggested setting it in Westminster, she was apparently refused because “nobody was interested in politics”. So then she made the six-part series The Amazing Mrs Pritchard, in which a down-to-earth, Northern, female store-manager ingénue wins an overwhelming election victory on the basis that all professional politicians are liars.

I liked the bit when she discovers that her husband has been money laundering for loan sharks and her press aide tells her that all previous occupants of No 10, except Mrs Thatcher, have had similar “skeletons in the cupboard”. So, a quick quiz: which very close relative of Ted Heath’s, Jim Callaghan’s, John Major’s or Tony Blair’s has ever committed a serious and imprisonable criminal offence?

Am I taking it too seriously, given that no one thinks that Spooks, made by the same company, is just a slightly dramatised reconstruction of real intelligence work. True, but then listen to what the principals claim for the series. Says Sally Wainwright: “During the last election I found that I didn’t really want to vote for anybody because they all seemed as bad as each other.” Says Jane Horrocks (who plays Mrs P): “The script touched a nerve. So many people don’t feel involved any more and find politics so dull that they don’t even bother voting. I haven’t voted at the last two elections, for that reason, which is outrageous” — ie, it’s not outrageous. It was the politicians’ job to make it interesting. By burning Catholics, perhaps.

And the playwrights will undull politics. An MP’s assistant who was asked to help to research the next series of Pritchard discovered that the production team now “wanted a lot of high-paced short conversations that would take place as the cast walk the corridors”.

TV companies, comedians and playwrights seem to think that the best politicians are those who have “high-paced short conversations” because those appeal to popular taste. Comedians, eh? They’re only in it for themselves. As for playwrights, they’re just as bad each other.

No, Armando, satirise yourselves first, and your smug audiences, whose laughter and contempt is never, these days, uncomfortable enough. And that’s because, they think it’s never about them, while actually, in a consumer democracy, it should never really be about anybody else.

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