Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office. Ben Thompson
the knowledge that for the price of listening to them for an hour, their audience could have experienced not one but two troupes of Clydeside puppeteers, they manage not to show it.
It’s not just the barriers which traditionally separate performers from their audience that Edinburgh breaks down. It’s also the ones that keep them apart from each other, and perhaps even more importantly, from their critics. As exhilarating as these new-found proximities are, they can also be dangerous.
Inevitably when a group of already competitive people are thrown together in such pressurized circumstances, the odd fist-fight will result. (The memorable moment when self-destructive Waltham-stow-based misanthrope Ian Cognito decided to launch one verbal tirade too many against erstwhile getaway driver Ricky Grover, and was summarily knocked unconscious for his pains, is just one incident in a rich heritage of drunken feuding.)
Still more poignant is the tragic spectacle of media pundits who go native and – in the erroneous belief that some of Edinburgh’s magic dust will have rubbed off on them – start presenting their own shows about their festival experiences, or the vital role they have played in the evolution of rock journalism.
As incestuous and self-indulgent as all this undoubtedly is, if the Edinburgh deterrent – that you might at any moment have to justify anything you’ve written, in person, to whoever you’ve just written about – could be applied to every corner of the national press, there can be no doubt that standards of accuracy and politeness would greatly improve. (In this connection, it is always instructive to see how uptight London-based features journalists become when their attempts to use the festival as a one-stop shop for a swingeing attack on the apolitical complacency of the comedy circuit are momentarily frustrated by someone like Al Murray or Frank Skinner snatching their notebook and reading out to the crowd all the sarcastic things they have been writing in it.)
To the broader national culture at large, the Edinburgh Festival (especially as mediated through an annual fiesta of nauseatingly self-satisfied BBC2 TV coverage) remains a blight, exuding exactly the same flatulent aura of insulated smugness which London was so notorious for in the pre-Madchester eighties.85 To anyone lucky enough to be in the seat of Scottish government for the magic month of August, however, it feels like the centre of the world.
Which makes it all the more of a shame when, as the bank holiday weekend draws nearer, the Perrier Award – referred to with wry deference in some comedic circles as ‘The Little Bottle of Water’ – casts an ever-longer shadow over the festivities. Especially as the Perrier is no Delphic oracle; it’s just the collective opinion of a couple of people who have won competitions in magazines, the odd resting TV producer and a handful of ambitious journalists (usually with one of Alan Coren’s children prominent among them).
The comedy awards which really matter are the ones on ITV on the first Saturday in December.
4. The British Comedy Awards
‘I’ve been round the back, fisting Norman Lamont’
Julian Clary, British Comedy Awards, 1993
Most of the ever-proliferating number of showbiz prize-giving ceremonies prefer to stay as far away as possible from the essence of the art form they are supposed to be celebrating. But the British Comedy Awards – in its heady blend of acerbic wit, rampant egotism and breath-taking cruelty – is just about as complete a reflection of the world it was created to celebrate as can be contained in a small box in the corner of your living-room.86 And all this at the behest of London Weekend Television, a station renowned – in recent years at least – for its almost complete inability to produce anything like a functional TV comedy programme.
So how did this unlikely paragon of verisimilitude come about?
‘The first year [1990],’ remembers host Jonathan Ross, ‘Michael Parkinson presented the show from the London Palladium, and it died on its arse. The next year…’ he continues, gulping modestly, ‘I guess I needed the money.’
It should be remembered at this point that the Jonathan Ross of the early nineties was a long way from the all-conquering career behemoth of the early years of the twenty-first century. In fact, as things went increasingly awry for him, the Comedy Awards would gradually end up as the only time in the year when – with a little help from its hugely influential scriptwriter Danny Baker87 – you could see Ross on TV at his best.
‘ITV were a little nervous about it,’ he remembers of the show in the first year he took it over, ‘and if you looked at what they did the year before, you could see why. Danny Baker had written this script and it was really verbose but also really bold. I stuck my neck out and insisted we use it, and it sort of snowballed from there. Whenever anyone complains about getting a hard time, we just say “It’s the spirit of the roast” [the roast being an American tradition where everyone gets slagged off and has to pretend they don’t mind] and coming out into that kind of atmosphere seems to help everyone rise to their best potential.’
Why does he think it works so well?
‘It’s quite an interesting thing to do to comedians – to have them coming out for a minute and a half, not knowing what I’m going to be saying to them. They’re kind of a bit on edge and they all want to make an impression, so inevitably they end up pushing things a bit further.’
Sometimes, as in the semi-legendary 1993 case of Julian Clary, they go a little too far. (Clary’s famously outrageous response to Ross’s innocent enquiry as to what he had been up to was that he had been ‘out the back, fisting [fellow awards presenter and former Chancellor of the Exchequer] Norman Lamont’.) While Clary’s coup de theatre earned him the undying respect of 99 per cent of those watching, it certainly didn’t do his chances of filling Bruce Forsyth’s shoes as host of a revitalized Generation Game any favours.
‘But with some people,’ Ross insists (Ricky Gervais and Johnny Vegas in 2001 would presumably be prime examples), ‘you could identify their appearance at the Comedy Awards as the moment where they stepped forward to claim a wider audience.’ Whether or not it’s true that, as Ross contends, ‘you can basically predict how someone’s year’s going to go from the kind of impression they make in that minute and a half, there is no denying that the British Comedy Awards offer the ambitious comedian a stage unlike any other.
From the risky but ultimately triumphant (Gervais making comic capital out of his producer’s wheelchair, or Spike Milligan calling the heir to the throne a ‘little grovelling bastard’ while accepting a lifetime achievement award) to the just plain disastrous (Jerry Springer trying to make a move on Rachel Weisz without knowing that she was someone he was meant to have heard of springs to mind at this point),88 there is an authentic sense of spontaneous high drama about the British Comedy Awards’ most memorable moments. And that is something the Oscars – never mind the BAFTAs – would do well to emulate.
5. Back at comedy base camp
By the mid-1990s, the London Comedy Store – once the spiritual home of alternative comedy – is firmly re-established in new, college-bar-style premises on the other side of Leicester Square. Going there on a random Thursday night at this point is a bit like going to The Cavern three years after The Beatles left, except that in this case the old stars still turn up to perform at the drop of a benefit-collecting hat.
The sense of being part of a living heritage attraction is hardly dispelled by the discovery that half the front row are students from Middlesex University completing their comedy module. Though it is sometimes hard to avoid the feeling that the waters of the London comedy scene have been drastically over-fished, two out of six acts on this particular evening have got something special about them, and that is a pretty heartening percentage.
It’s easy to see how Open Mike contender Ardal O’Hanlon