Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office. Ben Thompson
can sometimes be heard to accuse them of.
Having just lost his proverbial shirt (and quite possibly his actual shirt, too) in a disastrous foray into producing West End musicals, Jon Thoday founded Avalon with former Woolwich Poly entertainments secretary Richard Allen-Turner in 1988. On the basis of Thoday’s experience that ‘theatrical agents always blamed the talent and failed to take responsibility for their own mistakes’, they decided to build up a comedy-management stable based on a very different principle. They set out to be ‘100 per cent on the side of their clients’.
This is the sort of nebulous thing snidey Jay Mohr says in Jerry Maguire when he’s trying to tempt Rod Tidwell away from Tom Cruise, but in Avalon’s case it does actually seem to mean something. ‘There is a kind of ethic that “the act is always right”,’ agrees Stewart Lee, ‘which in one sense is reassuring, but can occasionally be unhelpful…Because the act’ – Lee continues feelingly – ‘is sometimes wrong.’
‘Traditionally,’ Thoday explains, ‘the agent stands in between the artist and whoever they’re making the deal with, but we tend to stand more with our client. We’ve never really worried about the people on the other side of the table, because it’s not them we have a relationship with.’
Is this why the name of Avalon has been known to inspire loathing as well as love? ‘Right from when we first started in 1988, we’ve been very good at spotting talent,’ Thoday insists. ‘The more talented clients you work with, the more often you need to say no to people, and if you’re saying no, there’s no real difference whether you shout or tell them nicely – no one likes to hear it. So I think a certain amount of the bad feeling we’ve experienced over the years has come from the people who would have liked to work with us, but haven’t been able to.’
If you think of British pop’s abundant managerial mythology – from arch teen manipulator Larry Parnes, through Brian Epstein and Led Zeppelin’s Peter Grant, to Malcolm McLaren’s Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle— the relative paucity of human interest in the annals of comedic career guidance was in urgent need of rectification by the late 1980s. And the oft-overlooked sense of mischief embedded in such cornerstones of Avalonian folklore as Thoday enlivening a bad night out at the Hackney Empire by persuading a rival agent to sign a third-rate act (‘I thought it might be funny to recommend the person who was rubbish,’ Thoday remembers unrepentantly, ‘and they were signed the next day’) was at least a first step towards making good that deficit.
The flipside of the gang mentality which Avalon are often accused of fostering is an impressive record of loyalty to such maverick left-field performers as Simon Munnery. The company’s sense of collective embattlement probably dates back to the size of the initial splash they made in the complacent duckpond of the late-eighties UK comedy scene. Even though – or perhaps more accurately, because – the bulk of Avalon’s early signings (Skinner excepted) came from Oxford or Cambridge University backgrounds, they were sufficiently out of step with prevailing alternative dogmas to excite alarm and despondency amongst the doormen of sociopolitical righteousness.
‘Someone like Frank Skinner, who might now be perceived as a cash cow,’ Stewart Lee remembers, ‘signing him was a bold decision when they did it, because no one else wanted to. There was a definite perception when Avalon was starting off that they were the barbarians at the gates. I remember [celebrated pillar of ideological rectitude] Jeremy Hardy writing a column in the Guardian accusing Simon Munnery of being a neo-Nazi,’ he smiles, ‘which was a much less popular option comedically then than it is now.’
Avalon’s institutional machismo is not to everyone’s tastes – the co-ordinated windcheaters traditionally worn by their employees at the Edinburgh Festival causing even the famously mild-mannered Addison Cresswell to mutter darkly about ‘muppets in matching jackets’. And their aggressive style of management has undoubtedly had its casualties on both sides of the deal-making fence, but no one can deny that they have an aesthetic. And British comedy needs as many of those as it can get.
For legal reasons, it seems best to confirm at first hand the veracity of the following anecdote about an Avalon Christmas company outing on the Eurostar. Is it true that on one particular mid-nineties occasion, an enraged Jon Thoday was obliged to complete his journey in the guards van after narrow-minded French officialdom thwarted his attempt to buy a second complete drinks trolley?
‘It wasn’t a trolley,’ growls an affronted Thoday, ‘it was the entire bar.’
(b) Off The Kerb: Mr Cresswell remembers when all this were nobbut fields
Self-confessed Millwall fan Addison Cresswell76 founded his operation – the longest-established of the three main management empires – in the early eighties. He did it initially ‘for a laugh’ on the grounds that ‘it was better than signing on’. The Comic Strip were touring with French and Saunders at the time, and he put together a rival package for about a fifth of the money under a name thought up by John Hegley.
Off The Kerb’s off-the-cuff beginnings were a long way from today’s multi-million-pound concern. Cresswell ‘ran the business for three years with one phone in a basement in Peckham…There were no answering machines, let alone mobiles – it was all 10p’s and phonecards in those days – and it’d take you a couple of days to track anyone down, because whenever you phoned them up they’d always be out…but then it all got serious, and now every fucker has four agents and a style guru to hold their mobile phone for them.’
He seemed to adjust successfully enough to the expansion of commercial opportunities which transformed the industry he had initially got involved with in the hope of ‘drinking himself silly, getting laid and not starting work till one o’clock the next afternoon’, into the bloated careerist enclave that it is today. In fact, in self-consciously presenting his acts as a stable by schooling people like Jack Dee and Lee Evans in the benefits of wearing ‘a fucking smart suit’ made by his own tailor (Eddie in Berwick Street, Soho), Cress-well might be said to have played as big a part as anyone in the professionalization of the unwashed comedy hordes.
‘I’ve always been a bit more rock ‘n’ roll,’ he observes, when asked about the difference between his approach and that of his two rival agencies (though given his acts’ allegiance to the well-cut whistle, perhaps Motown would be a better analogy). ‘I like people who work hard instead of sitting around moaning and waiting for the phone to ring. I never took on acts that didn’t have any bollocks77…Mark [Lamarr] is no angel and Lee [Evans] is a bit of a nutter too, on his night.’
There’s a telling moment in William Cook’s Ha Bloody Ha, where Cresswell says that the thing he most disliked about the comedy scene in the early eighties was that it reminded him of ‘everything I hated about college’. He still exudes that peculiarly refined hatred for the products of this country’s higher education system which can only come from years spent within it.
However much the pre-celebrity CVs of his roster might suggest otherwise, the boss of Off The Kerb insists that he does not consider forswearing a university education to be an essential prerequisite for comedic validity.
‘I just feel that if people want to be comedians, they should do their foundation course,’ maintains this diehard advocate of the school of hard knocks, ‘have some glasses thrown at them on a Monday night in Sheffield or something…The amount of fucking arseholes who’ve just come out of Oxford or Cambridge and straight away they’re waltzing round the BBC – honestly, you can’t move up there for those cunts…I think they should be burned at the stake.’
As if realizing that his own eloquence might’ve got the better of him at this point, Cresswell flirts momentarily with the language of conciliation. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he qualifies subtly, ‘comedy can come from anywhere.’
(c) All the way with PBJ
Encountering