Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office. Ben Thompson
this explanation for chronic insomnia: ‘How can I go to sleep?’ Meldrew wonders. ‘Every time I nod off, I have this hideous dream that I’m imprisoned in a lunatic asylum and Arthur Askey is singing underneath the window.’
At this point, the journal ends. But as well as showing just how desperately Vic Reeves Big Night Out was needed, and beyond the eerily prophetic resonance of Victor Meldrew’s dream,24 this grainy snapshot of life before reality TV can also – with the aid of hindsight’s high-powered microscope – be seen to reveal a small-screen comedy world in a fascinating state of flux.
The exhaustion of the classic British sitcom form is made all the more apparent by the grisly spectacle of seventies behemoths trading on past glories. And the advent of One Foot in the Grave – arguably the last in the Dad’s Army/Fawlty Towers/Only Fools and Horses family line of generation-crossing mass-audience sitcoms25 – only further reinforces this sense of transience and impending extinction.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the demographic scale, a lot of the bright young things of what someone with no regard for mythic nomenclature might term the Not the Nine O’Clock News generation were finding that their own performing careers were running out of steam a little earlier than might have been expected. By cunningly diverting their substantial remaining energies into the brave new world of independent production, the Jimmy Mulvilles, Mel Smiths (no one else liked Colin’s Sandwich as much as I did) and Griff Rhys Joneses of the world would snatch success from the jaws of failure via the new empires of Talkback and Hat Trick.26
1. Getting Chiggy with it
‘I remember going down and seeing them at the Deptford Albany,’ says Reeves and Mortimer’s manager Caroline Chignell – universally known as ‘Chiggy’ – of her first sighting of her future clients, ‘and thinking, Oh my God! It was just so different from anything else…Vic and Bob didn’t really come out of the comedy world: what they were doing seemed to be referring more to art and pop traditions. There was a real feeling of a community of artists around them. Yet at the same time, their act seemed to involve all the sorts of things that would make your dad laugh, but done in a really contemporary way.’
In manned space flight, the last-minute pre-launch stages are always especially fraught. And so it proved with the Reeves and Mortimer despot/democrat trajectory, as the little matter of successfully translating their uniquely deranged equilibrium to TV was very far from being a done deal.
‘There was obviously some irony involved when Vic claimed to be “Britain’s top light entertainer”,’ Chiggy remembers, ‘but he believed it too – and he looked it when he wore a white suit.’
Vic’s early televisual forays on Jonathan Ross’s Last Resort were greeted with a reaction most fairly characterized as general bemusement, but looking back now, there were portents of the greatness to come. When he painted pictures of guests (including punk svengali Malcolm McLaren) on china plates as ‘Lesley Cooper, street artist’, a couple of prescient reprobates ran down out of the audience to steal them. And Vic’s attempts at adding a much-needed touch of class to an ill-fated village-fête-themed show as the bucolic Silas Cloudharvest elicited at least one memorable reaction. (‘I was talking to one of the prop guys afterwards,’ Jonathan Ross remembers fondly, ‘and he said “That farmer was shit: if he hadn’t had that cucumber flute, he’d have died on his arse”.’)
There were, Chiggy remembers, ‘a lot of people sniffing about’ in south-east London in the very late eighties. Whether or not BBC2’s Alan Yentob and Channel 4’s Michael Grade actually did go and see the Big Night Out at Deptford Albany on the same evening in an epic battle for control of the future of British comedy,27 it was the latter (via Ross’s production company, Channel X) who ended up signing the deal.
After an embarrassing episode when Ross and Reeves went to the BBC boss’s house only to find out that he actually wanted Vic to be the host of a new series of Juke Box Jury (a job which his friend and fellow scion of the South London biker underground Jools Holland was happy to take in his stead), it was never really going to be otherwise. The demon Yentob would get his man in the end. But for the moment, everything had turned out for the best. When the Big Night Out finally transferred to TV, the particular circumstances of a newly established independent production company making a show for a young channel would facilitate a level of freedom that a more firmly established institution could never have permitted.28
‘The thing that set the tone,’ Chiggy remembers, ‘was Jim’s absolute control of the visual aspect. Something like that would never be allowed to happen now, but it was his and Bob’s vision entirely – all the sets, all the props, all the costumes…The scripts were all drawings [preserved for posterity in the Penguin book Big Night In] – “shell/bottle lamp with patchwork shade”, “Kleenex/ticker tape”. And it was amazing how literally the people making the props took everything: they were so terrified of accidentally putting down an aubergine rather than a cucumber, or making something blue when it needed to be white.’
Vic and Bob seem to have been quite an intimidating proposition at this stage. ‘They had a very small, close-knit group of friends, and you would not dare ever to even guess what was funny and what wasn’t, or you would land yourself in terrible trouble,’ Chiggy concedes. ‘I don’t think it was just me…I think everyone felt that way.’
…Lift off! ‘Twisted movements…little puppets…light breezes blowing gently across the floor’
The cover of the 26 May 1990 issue of the NME has a historic look about it few others of that epoch can match. The music paper (which had adopted Vic and Bob at a time when rock ‘n’ roll hopefuls of a similarly charismatic stamp were distressingly thin on the ground)29 looks forward to the first episode of Vic Reeves Big Night Out on the coming Friday night with a properly inflated sense of occasion.
‘People may well anticipate some jokes of the type normally associated with alternative comedy,’ Vic warns, portentously, ‘but they are going to be disappointed.’ What comes instead will be, he promises, ‘very visual and very aesthetically attractive’. Among the featured attractions, the viewers at home can look forward to ‘twisted movements…little puppets…light breezes blowing gently across the floor’, safe in the assurance that ‘except for sex and politics, everything is covered’.
The big night finally comes. And from the moment Vic walks on with Bob dressed as Isambard Kingdom Brunei and carrying a stuffed alsatian, it’s clear this isn’t going to be your everyday TV comedy experience.
Beginning and ending with a song, the show incorporates not only the marvellous ‘Novelty Island’ talent contest, but also the fearsome and arbitrary Judge Nutmeg, whose Wheel of Justice is the centre of an elaborate ritual of care (‘What do we do with the wheel of justice? Comb its hair!’) and generates a centrifugal force unparalleled in the history of jurisprudence (‘Spin, spin, spin the wheel of justice – see how fast the bastard turns!’).
Reeves, modestly hailed in the opening credits as ‘Britain’s top light entertainer…and singer’, vainly endeavours to keep a grip on the proceedings in his multifarious roles as baffled continuity announcer, lecherous game-show host and super-confident master of ceremonies. The proceedings also benefit from regular interventions by Vic’s bald assistant, Les, who loves spirit levels but has a terrible fear of chives, and top turns such as the astonishing performance-art group, Action Image Exchange. And then there’s the enigmatic Man with the Stick, whose amusing helmet is decorated with cartoons of ‘Spandau Ballet laughing at an orphan who’s fallen off his bike’ or ‘Milli Vanilli trying to create negative gravity in their tights’.
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