If comedy was certainly the “new rock’n’roll”, then Michael McIntyre was, for a scorching second, its Elvis Presley. Throughout the Noughties British comedy increase, when stand-up instantly grew to become fodder for stadium excursions and primetime TV roadshows, there was nobody larger – McIntyre’s inoffensive, observation-led, overwhelmingly middle-class routines took the nation by storm. Reduce to fifteen years later, and the place is he now? Internet hosting savourless recreation present The Wheel on BBC One.

The Wheel – through which McIntyre corrals contestants by way of a quiz, and celeb friends assist them out – was, just some quick years in the past, a key a part of the BBC’s Christmas Day lineup. Now, it’s not even that, as an alternative airing its sequence finale on the markedly much less glitzy night of 21 December. It’s been a fairly bruising fall from grace for McIntyre. He nonetheless performs to huge arenas as a stand-up. He’s nonetheless a family identify. However he’s abjectly absent from the cultural dialog. McIntyre was by no means cool, however now he’s nearly radioactively un-chic, the stand-up equal of a Michael Bublé Christmas advert. However even in his pomp, McIntyre felt like extra of a second than a timeless expertise. The place folks might need watched George Carlin reel off his “seven phrases you possibly can’t say on TV” bit, understanding instinctively this is able to be a routine that may be dissected for many years, I’m unsure anybody was pondering the identical about McIntyre’s “man drawer” shtick. (It’s a drawer the place males put issues.)

In 2009, The Guardian described McIntyre as a “comic for the [David] Cameron age”. It wasn’t a lot that his materials was explicitly large-C Conservative. Fairly the other, in actual fact. McIntyre – who, I ought to say within the curiosity of equity, has voiced one thing of a distaste for current Tory leaderships – has traditionally been resolutely apolitical onstage. This was not some quirk however a central tenet of his enchantment. It was comedy that allowed audiences to flee into the banal, delivered with a form of fizzing self-amusement. Now, although, the Cameron age is lengthy gone, and the UK’s fraught political scenario infects, overtly or not, all reaches of our tradition. We’re in the course of top-down class warfare, and McIntyre was made for peacetime.

Loads of comedians are center class (that’s no inherent purpose for stigma in fact), however few are so loudly, unabashedly I-shop-at-Waitrose-coded as McIntyre. If audiences hadn’t clocked it by his plummy voice alone, they might shortly grasp it by way of his thematic obsessions: the frivolous miniature of the twenty first century bourgeoisie. Marital bugbears, social irks, herbs and spices within the household larder: no topic was too small, no remark too frivolous. His hottest routines had been rooted in a perspective of privilege, heteronormativity and Southernness – assume, as an illustration, his bit the place he gurns his means by way of a Yorkshire accent, marvelling at how somebody within the North would pronounce “The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe”. (As many Northerners identified on the time, his ridiculing of Northern phonetics is not only grim however inaccurate, with McIntyre both misunderstanding or intentionally fudging how phrases are contracted.)

Occasions have moved on, and McIntyre’s materials – whereas clearly a far cry from the kind of problematic jokes of, say, a Roy Chubby Brown – has quietly aged poorly. That he was by no means conventionally alpha-masculine on stage, as an alternative flouncing and strutting and usually tenting it up a bit, disguised the truth that a lot of his materials was very male, and relied on drained, trite cliches about gender roles. His newer routines adhere to this identical tack – his most up-to-date filmed particular broached such matters as “the way to urinate with out waking up your sleeping spouse within the subsequent room”, “adjusting your automobile seat”, and but extra accent mockery.

But it surely’s not simply his materials that has been left behind. To be a star in up to date comedy requires a brand new kind of strategy. Jobbing comedians, even very profitable ones, typically have to keep up a sure presence within the on-line sphere. Take Ricky Gervais, whose incessant self-promotion and culture-war squabbling on X/Twitter has ensured he stays much-discussed, regardless of what many would describe because the tiredness of his act.

For McIntyre, the problem is not only a case of being “offline”, neither is it fully extricable from the datedness of his content material. Somebody like James Acaster, as an illustration, shouldn’t be a very “on-line” comic, however his routines, well timed and agreeable, repeatedly go viral on Twitter or TikTok. McIntyre’s routines, bereft of opinion or prescience, stay unexcavated. Whereas McIntyre nonetheless crops up on telly, all of it feels quite analogue within the age of streaming. As soon as, the measure of a comic’s clout was DVD gross sales – McIntyre raked in additional than £3.5m by way of his ubiquitous stocking-filler discs alone –  however now, Netflix specials are the place the thrill is. McIntyre has launched only one set on the streamer, whereas his extra talked-about contemporaries (folks corresponding to Jimmy Carr or Dave Chappelle) appear to place them out frequently. The times of his Roadshow attracting weekly media consideration are historic historical past.

If you wish to see for your self proof of McIntyre’s slide into cultural irrelevance, then you definitely needn’t look additional than the nation’s burgeoning comedy scene. Go see a dozen up-and-coming stand-ups at a small comedy evening, and you’ll invariably see folks making an attempt to ape the type and improvements of Stewart Lee. It’s been years since I can recall seeing somebody trying to mimic McIntyre. (The one exception being when somebody approximates his peppery bustle across the stage in mockery.)

When the historical past of British comedy is written and pulled aside, there will likely be few names extra vital than McIntyre. To say in any other case is to disregard his immense recognition, his synonymity, for many individuals, with comedy itself. However that’s not routinely a very good factor. He took an artform rooted in outspokenness and riot, and formed it into one thing palatable and feather-light. So mild, in actual fact, that it might have blown away fully.

Michael McIntyre’s ‘The Wheel’ is obtainable to stream on BBC iPlayer