Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office. Ben Thompson
confusion and irritation they inspire in those who don’t.30 And this fact of course only serves to intensify the joy of the former happy grouping.
It’s not long before people in every town in Britain are yelping at each other in hurriedly fabricated Darlington accents (slightly softer than conventional Geordie): ‘You wouldn’t! You wouldn’t! You wouldn’t…let it lie.’ Other catch-phrases prove equally infectious – the all-purpose ‘Very poor’, the trip-to-the-barber’s-inspired ‘It’s not what I asked for’, and best of all, with its pay-off delivered in an appropriately gormless voice not a million miles away from Keith Harris’s Orville: ‘I’m naive, me…but happy.’
With characteristic perversity, Vic seems to have been most willing to talk straightforwardly about what he was doing before anyone else knew what he was up to. Certainly he would rarely again be as explicit as he had been over that first Japanese meal with Jonathan Ross. (‘He explained the loose idea of Vic Reeves being simultaneously him and not him,’ Ross remembers wistfully, ‘but I’m sad to say that at the time I didn’t really pay as much attention as I should’ve.’)
Speaking to Vic over the phone at his Deptford office in the middle of the first series, there is certainly no sign of his head being turned by success. Asked as a test of his artistic integrity whether he would ever consider doing a building-society advert, his response is heartwarmingly straightforward: ‘If they’re paying me, I’ll do ‘owt. I’m shameless.’
He is happy to talk about his tailor – Sidney Charles of Deptford High Street (‘I’ve always gone to him, and I will continue to go to him as well’) – but reluctant to be drawn on Jack Hargreaves, Frank Randall, Will Hay, or any of the other big names of bygone variety eras to whom his Big Night Out persona seems to be paying implicit tribute. ‘If I mentioned anyone, I’d be speaking out of turn really, wouldn’t I?’ he demurs, sneakily.
But aren’t he and Bob bored of being compared to Morecambe and Wise all the time?
‘It’s been said. And I suppose if people have spotted it, there must be something there, but without being modest, I think we’re very unique…I don’t think you can really say that we’re like anyone else, or want to be—we just make it up as we go along really.’
Perhaps a little taken aback by the warmth with which the Big Night Out is received, Vic and Bob subsequently seem to delight in erecting a wall of wilful obfuscation between themselves and the outside world. It’s a wall that large sections of the British public seem to delight in swarming over – maybe inspired by the crowds picking up souvenir bits of demolished masonry on the freshly unified streets of Berlin.31
Either way, in the first flush of his fame, Vic Reeves can often be seen riding an antique motorbike round his old Greenwich haunts on scorching summer days, dressed in full biker’s leathers. Within a matter of months, he almost needs a police escort to protect him from the hordes of impressionable teenagers begging him to autograph cooked meat products or pieces of celery.
‘Their popularity rose absolutely from the north,’ Chiggy explains. ‘When they went out on tour after the TV show had been on, they were initially doing pretty small, university-only type gigs, but when they got to the north-east, we literally had to get security.’32
At a less expansive cultural moment, this cult following in their ancestral homeland might have kept itself to itself. But this was the Madchester epoch, and with the rest of the country unprecedentedly susceptible to the charms of northerly enunciation, Vic and Bob soon found themselves exciting – on a national basis – the sort of intense, personally focused teen adulation that the pop stars of that baggily collective pre-Britpop musical moment seemed to have given up a right to.
By December of 1991, in the wake of an autumn repeat, a fantastic New Year special and a second series, a live Big Night Out fills Hammersmith Odeon for weeks on end. As in all the best games of Chinese whispers, a double transfer – from cult, localized live attraction to TV series to big-budget nationwide roadshow – had been enough to completely garble the original message.
If Reeves and Mortimer’s act can fairly be said to be ‘about’ anything (and however sniffy they get when anyone accuses them of being surrealists, Dali and Bunuel’s manifesto that ‘nothing should submit to rational explanation’ sometimes seems to have been written for them), it is about celebrity.
It’s one thing to unravel the macramé of minor television faces, pop stars and brand names in which we all find ourselves entangled and then mix them up again into ever more delicious confusion, but what happens when your own fame becomes a strand of that macramé? The moment of bewilderment which precedes recognition and laughter is one of Vic and Bob’s most precious comedic assets, which is why familiarity could be fatal to them.
At Hammersmith Odeon, Vic and Bob seem rather bored with the Les Facts and the ‘You wouldn’t let it lie’ and ‘What’s on the end of your stick?’ routines, and the parts of the show which are less concerned with ritual and more concerned with invention are by far the most enjoyable. With the Big Night Out now established as perhaps the most original and inspiring of all the generation-welding TV comedies, its perpetrators would have to move on if they wanted to stop their talents congealing like old Ready Brek in the chipped breakfast bowl of the folk memory.
Conflict aftermath and comedic rebirth, from The Goons to Richard and Judy
‘I died for the England I dreamed of, not for the England I know’
Spike Milligan, in anticipation of imminent death
under enemy fire, Italy, 1943
‘With our circuit, people at the beginning tried to separate themselves from the mainstream history of comedy, but in truth, if you go back, there have always been little clumps of young performers who appeared to be different but actually weren’t’
Alan Davies, in his manager’s West End office,
fifty years later
Vic and Bob’s first appearance on This Morning…with Richard and Judy, in the autumn of 1991, is not a huge success. After a few conversational false starts, Vic (to whom the institutional acceptance represented by the booking means a great deal) is finally getting into his stride with an impassioned discourse about his love for Dad’s Army, when Judy interrupts him with an exasperated – and characteristically curt – expostulation of ‘I can’t take any more of this’.
Both parties plainly consider this a very unsatisfactory piece of interaction – referring back to it in anxious tones on subsequent meetings – but for the watcher at home, it is actually much more fun than later, superficially more successful, encounters.
The idea that an up-and-coming Channel 4 comedian should be able to speak sincerely about his love for Captain Mainwaring and Private Pike is simply beyond Finnegan’s comprehension at this point. A couple of years later, she would probably have found it easier to grasp, but life is much more fun when she still doesn’t get it. The excitement of two different worlds colliding with (at least) one side unaware of how much they actually have in common is always far greater than a formal meeting of minds.
One ofthe distressing side-effects of British TV’s ever-increasing self-awareness in the 1990s is a steady decline in the number of arenas in which people can make a joke that everyone isn’t in on. Like school playing fields (also steadily diminishing in number), such open spaces supply a vital service to the community, and certain technical forms of virtuosity cannot be mastered without them.
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