THERE’S been a feeble little spurt of satire on TV recently, which is maddening because these anxious times call for a tsunami of the stuff.

My theory as to why satirical TV shows dried up was that politicians had lost all their character.

In the bland age of New Labour, slick PR and the parachuting in of blank-eyed candidates from London, most MPs became obedient, uniform drones. Everyone was on-message. Everyone smiled. Faced with this mass, once a satirist has mocked one, they have mocked them all and then where do they go?

But my opinion has changed.

Now we have monstrosities such as Trump, oddballs like Farage, panto acts like Boris and comic-book characters like Corbyn and his preening, middle-class worshippers who think they’re saving the world because they go glamping in Gloucestershire rather than boozing in Benidorm.

So if zany characters are back in politics, why aren’t we having a glorious satirical renaissance?

I think it’s because of our modern dread of causing offence. Political correctness and tedious identity politics have infantilised us. We’re prickly, hurting, stressed little darlings now, forever dashing off to a safe space when someone goes “boo”.

Of course, we’re not all like that. Most of us live in the real world and can cope with things like rain, tin openers and Heathcliff, but this sensible majority aren’t the ones complaining on Twitter, starting their whining online petitions, or who have worn out the letters

O, U, T, R, A, G and E on their laptop keyboards from all that indignant pounding.

But, as ever, it’s those who shout the loudest who are heard and the mob, with pitchforks made of hashtags, are setting the agenda.

Therefore, some of the colour, vigour and shock is leached from public discourse, and so from TV, particularly from satire or political comedy, which is supposed to be prickly and insulting.

Perhaps there is a thesis waiting to be written on why TV comedy has become gentle to politicians while in real life they can face death and rape threats. Has our nice, toothless satire created a vacuum that the barbaric and ignorant feel compelled to fill?

Last weekend, we were offered some satire in the form of Nigel Farage Gets His Life Back (BBC2, Sunday), a mock fly-on-the-wall documentary following the former Ukip leader last summer after the Brexit vote.

But while Kevin Bishop did a brilliant job in impersonating him, capturing his smoky laugh and smug, smirking glances, the show wasn’t brutal and witty as satire should be. Instead it was oddly affectionate.

We felt sorry for poor Nige. He had secured Brexit and assaulted the Establishment but instead of winning glory and sainthood, he found himself at something of a loose end.

With his life’s ambition done and dusted, he suddenly had nothing to do but sit in the pub or potter around at home doing jigsaws, watching quiz shows and getting angry at local takeaways for not offering stewed cheese and lamb cutlets, the hearty foods of Merrie Olde England.

As he sat in his garden shed waiting for the phone to ring he seemed not like the man who stirred up dangerous xenophobia and division, but rather an old grandfather with nothing to do but wait for dementia. Poor Nige.

But Brexit hasn’t happened yet, and, as one of its key architects, Farage still needs to be scrutinised and evaluated mercilessly.

To dismiss him as a feeble old chap, getting bored and pathetic, is dangerous. With Ukip’s recent antics he could be back as the party’s permanent leader soon and might burrow his way into Brexit negotiations, either publicly or behind the scenes.

He is a man to be watched and to be wary of, not at whom we should poke gentle, affectionate fun.

ON MONDAY, BBC4 had a hefty documentary all about books. It really seemed too good to be true. What’s the catch, I wondered, given that the BBC has long been lukewarm towards books coverage, preferring to saturate its arts channel with endless, tedious and repetitive music shows?

The catch, if you can call it such, was that the programme was as much about feminism as it was about books. Oh BBC4, why are you so shy and skittish about literature?

However, the show wasn’t linked to feminism for trendy, box-ticking reasons. It was a documentary about Virago, the publishing house set up in the 1970s to print neglected books written by women. Virago: Changing The World One Page At A Time (BBC4, Monday) was suitably broadcast on Hallowe’en as it was genuinely quite horrifying at times. Hearing the women speak about the sexism of the 70s gave me quite a jolt.

Today, young Twitter feminists seem to direct so much of their rage at petty things like wolf-whistling, but these women shouldered a burden that cosseted millennials can hardly imagine.

In case there was any doubt, viewers were reminded that a virago is “a war-like woman”, and these publishing pioneers did indeed have to be prepared for battle when they launched the company.

The literary establishment was packed with Oxbridge men who were dismissive of them or plain hostile, with one novelist committing himself in print to calling them “chauvinist sows”.

Of course, we can measure Virago’s success today by the fact it’s not pigeon-holed as a “feminist publisher” – and yet we all know it is, and are glad of it.

It reached the mainstream but didn’t surrendering its brave goal.