Ali G: Who Iz I? is set to hit cinema screens next month. The return of this bling-bedecked denizen of the West Staines Massive, first seen on TV in 1998, is a disquieting symptom of our century’s static culture.

Back in 1998, it would have been inconceivable for the big new comedy film to have been a revival of TV characters from 1971 – On The Buses or The Liver Birds. Today, along with Ali G, we are also blessed by Alan Partridge and Have I Got News For You, even older comedy institutions. And there are endless reiterations of old shows and formats: Star Trek, Spiderman and similar, Blankety Blank, Bergerac. Mass culture has essentially stopped.

People outside the entertainment world do not understand how captured it has been by woke

Things were proceeding fairly smoothly until 2012 and the rise of what we still, I’m afraid, have to call woke, because there isn’t a better term for it. Ever since, we have had to rely on the huge and untouchably established stars of the time before – see also Ricky Gervais and JK Rowling – for crumbs of comfort. Gervais’s new animation Alley Cats has been slated, but I rather like it, and it is doing very well. It seems to me that the critics have missed the point; that it is about the way that groups of blokes often talk endless and banal rubbish.

Back to our cultural malaise. It’s not that I blame the progressive middle class for everything that’s gone wrong in Britain, and indeed the entire Western world. That would be ludicrous. I blame them for only 98 per cent of it. Inevitably, the Ali G film is currently the target of an attempted boycott for ‘racism’, despite its one very obvious joke being at the expense of a pathetic white man identifying à la Tim Westwood into black urban culture.

The modern world is too awkward to face; its obvious problems too unsayable. People outside the entertainment world do not understand how captured it has been by woke. Stories abound within the industry, like the woman who walked away from her glittering and highly remunerated TV career because she just couldn’t stand navigating the political nonsense any more. Or a person whom I cannot identify – for the same reason dissidents operated underground in East Germany – that helps run a comedy writing course in which every single person rattles on incessantly about being ‘queer’ and/or ‘neurodiverse’, and is utterly without talent. Only such people even bother to apply and it is all they can write about. As the children of woke, they cannot think outside of its limits. It is what they think comedy, indeed culture and art as a whole, is for.

Most of our institutions, from the police to academia, are similarly riddled, but there is a particularly grim aspect to the infection when it comes to comedy. Dogmatic beliefs are inimical to good writing of any kind, but in comedy they are especially deadly. Of course, not all new comedies are ideologically hidebound; the ones that aren’t operate in a strange, non-specific dream world in which difficult subjects are simply not addressed.

We have seen so much change in this century, and it barely gets mentioned in our culture – except when it is ‘celebrated’. The indelible moral stain of the rape gangs – possibly the worst atrocity ever to occur in these islands – has got barely a mention in our culture. Too much of a hot potato, for which see also the mutilation of children by transgenderism, or the rise of casual progressive antisemitism. Facing these would require progressives to acknowledge their culpability in enabling them, so they are simply not mentioned. There is only terrified silence.

Comedy, in particular, cannot now fulfil vital parts of its social function – to vent steam and foster fellow feeling. Back in the day, comedy operated as a kind of safety rail, expressing, more or less, the median line. It helped to lampoon the ludicrous and lunatic. But nobody dares to tackle such loonies today, because they are untouchably powerful and often running the show, with hordes of activist dingbats who can make life very difficult for their challengers.

This is not a trivial thing: it is not a culture war but a cultural cataclysm. We have been waiting now for a very long time for the death of woke and a brave new wave to sweep it all away. There are occasional sparks of life, but reports of woke’s death have been greatly exaggerated. It took, after all, a good fifty years for culture to rebalance before, during and after the Puritan era of the seventeenth century.

The satellite activity of culture – festivals, publishing shindigs, industry bodies, academia – is still absolutely dominated by ultra-progressive cliques and their claques. The dead hand of Bluesky thinking grips the arts world. We may never emerge from its grip, or at least not with cultural forms that bear a recognisable continuity with what went before.

This is not a trivial thing: it is not a culture war but a cultural cataclysm

We can at least acknowledge the human cost of progressivism to comedy, along with its much wider social cost: the careers that never were, the jokes that were never told, the glue that held us together removed. Without the bonding that comedy provided, we are like one of those cheap old books that you had to handle gently or the pages would flutter themselves loose as you turned them.

It is, of course, not popular to point this out. We cling to the small percentage of good work and the small pockets of resistance. We clamour for the convenient nonsense of Adolescence – middle class boys radicalised into murder by internet incels, a vanishingly rare occurrence in real – and then we get taken by surprise when an incident like the joy riding crash and subsequent gang warfare erupts. Try making a TV drama or comedy about ‘traveller communities’ that isn’t wildly celebratory.

There are great herds of enormous elephants trampling the room. There is so much comic potential in the lunacies of academia, the law, the boiling nonsense of the progressive settlement from immigration to benefit dependence. But why risk all the bother of cracking jokes about any of that? Unfortunately, a gradual accretion of individual acts of avoidance leads to a moribund culture. Welcome back, Ali G.

How to solve it? We just have to go patiently through, however long it takes, and hope that the big film of 2052 is not Ali G in a retirement home.