Why isn't the elitism mocked? asks Liam Mullone

A year ago, Elly Nowell declined her place at Oxford University by writing it a rejection letter. She told the BBC: ‘Oxbridge is a fairly ridiculous and prominent elitist institution, yet it is rarely mocked. Even comedians tend to avoid Oxbridge as a subject.’

Well, a year after she said that, still nothing - from any comic - about Oxford and Cambridge. These invidious institutions, older than slavery and with just as many black people on their committees, stand erect and underided. More than anything else in Britain, Oxbridge is the Old Order, the Institution, the System, the Ancien Regime. No government; even that of Cromwell (who went to Cambridge), was ever radical enough to challenge the authority of these two universities and since we recognised the post of Prime Minister in 1721 all but two who went to a university attended Oxford or Cambridge. The service of the two that didn’t - Neville Chamberlain and Gordon Brown - suggests they were only installed to prove a point.

And now, having drained off all the fat from our starveling educational system since the 14th Century, Oxbridge remains as a glorious paradox that resists all criticism from those whose job it is to prick bubbles and pour scorn on cliques and rouse the rabble and shuck the elites from their shells. Well, fine. I suppose it’s up to me then.

I hate Oxford. And Cambridge. I hate all the people in the comedy industry who ever went to Oxford and Cambridge, even the ones I really like, because they’re everywhere and they always do really well, and they’re the producers of just about everything and they guard every comedy door and you can’t make fun of the System when the System is controlling the fun. I mean, for fuck’s sake, I even had to submit this article to one of them, who told me to rewrite it and make it more interesting.

All of this brings back bad memories and reminds me why I’m not the right person to lead this fight, as my hatred is founded in nothing but flatulence and jealousy. For, alas, I took the Oxbridge exam and failed it. I got an A minus, so the gatekeepers decided (I don’t doubt rightly) that I would be happier among the rock-pool invertebrates of a redbrick, where an A minus puts you first in line for kelp. But I’ve never quite got over THE WAY I failed it.

I remember it to this day. The invigilator said: ‘You may begin.’ You only had to answer one question. So I started to read them all. And so I had already failed, because there were 120 questions. If you read ALL the questions in the Oxbridge English exam, you will fail, because you won’t have enough time left to write a coherent response to any one of them. This is, in essence, the exam. The sort of person that gets into Oxbridge is the sort of person who immediately recognises the idiocy of 120 questions, and elects to answer one of the first five. It’s the sort of person who has an answer, immediately, to a really good heckle.

If I understand this now, I didn’t then. I was 17. My family were descended from Jews, and gypsies, and soldiers, and clergymen, and poachers, and fairground people, and the Irish and, God help me, the French. My grandparents wanted nothing more than to be regarded as normal, and now here was this piece of paper asking me to be exceptional. I was brought up to follow rules, and to read instructions, and to trust in the beneficence of God, and teachers, and the sort of people who set exam questions.

‘They wouldn’t put 120 questions if there wasn’t time to read them,’ I assured myself. Surely, that would just be perverse. The problem was that, although I wanted to get into Oxford more than I had ever wanted anything in my short life, nobody in my family had been to any university, let alone Oxford or Cambridge. Nobody I knew understood what Oxbridge meant, or how Oxbridge people thought. Nobody made it clear to me that, if there was one thing that MI6, and Kim Philby, and the Bullingdon Club, and the Footlights, and Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s chess circle were definitely NOT looking for, it was another pedantic fucker who takes all day to read one page of instructions.

If I had been nursed with the instinctive arrogance to not read exam questions, then I daresay I would be so incredibly self-possessed that I wouldn’t have needed Oxford at all. This is the second Oxbridge paradox. But I DID need Oxford. I needed to be nurtured in the belief that everyone is my inferior and that the world is mine for the taking. As a grounding for the profession of comedy, this kind of training puts a pub-room comedy course some distance in the shade.

So it’s no coincidence that smart people make the best comedians, or that a lot of smart people went to Oxbridge, or that there are so many Oxbridge comedians, or that pretty much all Oxbridge comedians are very good and do reasonably well. I wish I’d been sharpened like them. I’m not sharp. I am knowledgeable, I suppose, which is a far duller, slower and infinitely less useful thing. I am a Commodore Vic 20 with a 40 Terabyte hard drive. Oxbridge demands - and perfects - iPad 4 people connected to an iCloud stuffed with fucking muses. I hate them, because I’d give anything to be like that.

So my problem isn’t with elitism. If we’re not entertained by the elite then we’re left with... well, with Mrs Brown’s Boys, I suppose. And I accept that I’m congenitally dull, in that dullness is handed down through the blood if you accept the statistics (82 per cent of people admitted to Oxford or Cambridge have some family tradition of scholarship there) and poorly primed (the top five private schools send as many students as 2,000 state institutions). As I say, I don’t have a problem - other than envy - with any of that. My problem is simply that no Oxbridge socialist, or wit, or satirist, or free-thinker; no comedic radical; no proponent of a fairer, greener, more equitable and lovelier Britain, from Stephen Fry to Rob Newman; from John Bird to Armando Iannucci, EVER seems to have a pop at the arcane system that begat them.

I have never understood, for instance, why we were supposed to be impressed when Peter Cook (Cambridge, Pembroke) humiliated the PM Harold Macmillan (Oxford, Balliol) at Beyond the Fringe. For the people of Britain it was just another slugfest in the clouds, Olympians v Titans; a toff’s spat, a verbal boat race at an Edinburgh Festival that was, in those days, nothing but a posh boy’s picnic anyway.

There’s no reason why anyone should have a pop at their alma mater, of course. It would be ungrateful apart from anything. But I do dislike the idea of ANYTHING being this stain-proof. It irks me when I see a younger comic I happen to know is an Oxbridge product, grinding away at the usual political saws. David Cameron, he’s just a posh twat isn’t he? And Osborne? What do they know about being normal and common and having a budget and six kids and a leaky roof and a huge gas bill?

Well I’m sorry, but nobody who went to Oxford or Cambridge knows what it’s like to be normal, and such beings have no place pretending they do. Some people, I grant you, go in there normal, but anyone who comes out normal has wasted a massive amount of public money. We paid to make you an apex predator, for fuck’s sake.

Anyone who has strolled those quads, gazed at those spires; punted those bridges for three years knows about three-fifths of fuck all about being normal. And if anyone thinks that ‘normal’ is a purely economic prison, and that they qualify because they lived in a bedsit eating Rice Krispies for six months after leaving Brasenose, then they are more disconnected from normal than the current governmental shower will ever be.

Our tertiary education system is unlike any other in the world. It streams young people as fiercely as an itinerant chicken sorter sending he-chicks to the gas chamber. You can go to Oxford or Cambridge and be successful, or you can go somewhere else. It really doesn’t matter where else you go. Nobody will ever ask to look at your 2:1 from Manchester, or your first from Bristol. These days you’re as well to save your money and just pretend you went to one of these indifferent Blair-buggered battery pens, because nobody gives a fuck.

I was amused by the journalist Ed Cumming, who wrote a piece for the Telegraph last October headlined ‘Why Oxford or Cambridge Might Not be For You’. The fact that he had walked straight out of Cambridge into a job at the Telegraph seemed to utterly escape him, as such things escape most people who see only open doors and opportunity. Try submitting ‘Why Oxford or Cambridge May Not be For You’ with Leicester De Montfort at the top of your CV, dickwad.

This is not to begrudge the well-educated illuminati. It’s just to say that, if you really believe that Britain is ‘unfair’, and that it is your job to point out how it is unfair, and make it LESS unfair, then you might want to start questioning a system of social apartheid that’s as archaic as it is absurd. Even after fees, Oxford loses £12,000 per student because of the time and resources devoted to them. Cambridge loses £220 million a year. Both, like the private schools that feed into them, are registered as tax-exempt charities.

In the end, the taxpayer takes up the slack; something which ought to strike any socialist as perverse when inner-city schools can’t afford to pay their teachers. (Because of Cameron, obvs. He’s just a posh wanker, isn’t he?) Apparently this Oxbridge money sink is because of the ‘fee cap’ that keeps places accessible to anyone. Well, anyone who can stand in front of the head of mathematics and explain the equation for calculating the parabola of a hanging chain. And if some sink-estate orphan can make it to the interview and do that, he deserves a place at Trinity.

Hours have been wasted by boards of governors explaining how ‘inclusive’ Oxbridge is these days. I don’t care. I’m not a socialist. The fact remains that there are only two of these universities, with limited intakes, who funnel off a vastly disproportionate chunk of this country’s educational resources at the punitive expense of every fucker else. It doesn’t bother ME.

But if I was a vaguely liberal, left-leaning Oxbridge comedian who did anti-establishment political stuff, rather than an embittered reject with a 2:1 from... oh, I forget where... then I might feel qualified to have a go.

Published: 7 Feb 2013