How Britain embraced The Simpsons, an all-American TV show

Mum wouldn’t have Bart Simpson in our house. When, 35 years ago this month, The Simpsons first drifted across the Atlantic and on to UK screens, they brought with them a bad reputation. In the US, Matt Groening’s peerless animation had quickly become a ratings sensation after it debuted in 1989, but it was also a controversy magnet, particularly over its breakout delinquent star. The Simpsons was seen by the more conservative end of the US media as a bad influence on kids (a viewpoint famously echoed by President Ronald Reagan a few years later with his call for American families to be “more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons”). Plenty of US schools banned a massive-selling T-shirt with Bart declaring himself an “underachiever and proud of it, man”.

It’s unclear whether mum had read reports of these T-shirt bans – it’s just as likely that she simply saw The Simpsons as another brash American cartoon import at a time when UK TV was drowning in them (and airing on Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV, to boot). Either way, the show was viewed with suspicion bordering on contempt. It would take a while for its subversive, satirical charms to be recognised.

The informal Simpsons ban in our house eventually lapsed, as it would everywhere else. In 1996, the BBC, which had previously thought so little of the residents of 742 Evergreen Terrace that they cut the early Simpsons shorts out of BBC Two broadcasts of The Tracey Ullman Show, started syndicating the series and the show has been a permanent fixture on our screens ever since, broadcast for about 50 hours a week in the UK (and that’s not including all the time it is viewed on Disney+). Today, it’s a UK television institution, as unshakeable from the schedules as daytime auction shows or downcast detective dramas.

But it hasn’t stopped there. Over the past 35 years, The Simpsons has inveigled itself into just about every corner of British public life, seen everywhere from the Almeida theatre in London to Cerne Abbas in Dorset, and as likely to inspire YBA artists (who have incorporated the show’s “poppy” colours into their exhibitions) as football memes.

If you were feeling bold you may even argue that Britain has taken The Simpsons to its heart even more than the US has. Take Do the Bartman, the hit (and, in retrospect, highly annoying) Simpsons track co-produced by Michael Jackson: it wasn’t released as a single in the US, but was a chart-topping smash in the UK in 1991, a remarkable feat considering the series hadn’t yet appeared on terrestrial TV and the song was left off the Radio 1 playlist.

And, while the US president denigrated the country’s true first family, our own head of government embraced it, with Tony Blair appearing as part of a curious collection of famous Britons (along with Ian McKellen, JK Rowling and Daphne from Frasier) on a 2003 episode where Homer gets locked in the Tower of London for an act of road rage towards Queen Elizabeth II. Blair is still the only serving head of government to have voiced themselves on The Simpsons, a fact that probably says more about his own flair for self-promotion than anything else, though it does underscore the show’s cultural value to self-serving politicians.

To that end, Hansard – the comprehensive record of parliamentary debate – contains numerous mentions of The Simpsons on its vellum prints, with references in debates on everything from atomic energy to universal credit fraud. The first time it was mentioned was in a 1995 Commons debate on the formation of the Welsh Assembly, by, I’m proud to say, a fellow Gwilym, the then MP for Cardiff North, Gwilym Jones; I’m less proud to say that he was a Tory who managed to get the channel The Simpsons aired on wrong. The most recent mention was just a few months ago, in a Commons debate on music education.

At their best, MPs use Simpsons episodes as skilful analogies to real-life woes in their constituencies – such as when Leeds South West and Morley MP Mark Sewards compared a failed proposal for an elevated railway in his city to Lyle Lanley’s monorail scam. But mainly the show is just used for putdowns of those sat on the benches opposite. (MP Chris Bryant: “It seems to me that the Liberal Democrats really are taking to heart the words of Homer Simpson when he said: ‘Weaselling out of things is important to learn. It’s what separates us from the animals – except the weasels.’”)

If the state is fond of The Simpsons, there are fans too in the Anglican church, where sermons consider how Jesus might have dealt with Bart, or the moral value of Homer saying no to his son. Rowan Williams was particularly taken with the show during his time as archbishop of Canterbury, praising it as “on the side of the angels” and “one of the most subtle pieces of propaganda around in the cause of sense, humility and virtue”. (Sadly, despite positive noises, he didn’t manage to make an appearance on the show during his incumbency.)

But there’s one institution that is seemingly impervious to The Simpsons’ charms: the late queen. While Queen Elizabeth happily appeared alongside British cultural figures such as Paddington and James Bond, she left The Simpsons well alone. More of a David Lynch fan, it seems …

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