Politics & Power Quote by Rory Bremner

Nostalgia is doing a lot of quiet work here, but Bremner deploys it like a scalpel, not a scrapbook. The “three channels” line isn’t just scene-setting; it’s a shorthand for a particular kind of social glue: enforced togetherness. By calling TV a “meal,” he frames mass media as something consumed daily and collectively, with all the implications that carries - comfort, routine, and a largely unexamined diet decided by someone else. It’s funny because it’s true, and it’s unsettling because it was true by design.

The subtext is a comedian’s version of media theory: scarcity created a shared national conversation, but also a narrow one. You didn’t “curate” your identity through content; the content helped curate you. That’s why the second sentence lands with that clipped understatement - “this explosion” - doing double duty as marvel and warning. The phrase nods to abundance and fragmentation at once: more choice, more voices, more niches, more outrage, more isolation. A single table has become a food court.

Context matters: Bremner comes out of a tradition of British political satire that relied on a common audience and a common set of references. When everyone watched the same broadcasters, satire could assume a baseline reality - the same ministers, the same scandals, the same clips. In a splintered media landscape, the satirist’s target isn’t just politicians; it’s the loss of a shared stage on which politics used to be legible.