Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office. Ben Thompson
of what the success of the show was based on, which was the folk memory of a moment (well, a six-year span of extraordinary hardship and heroism) when Britain found itself to be – in the words of J. B. Priestley – ‘the hope of all that’s best in the world’.
The Second World War was the beginning of modern British comedy. If you got a frigate every time you heard someone say that, then we’d all be admirals. But from Spike Milligan’s war memoirs to Freddie Starr doing his Hitler impression, to old-school Scouse reprobate Stan Boardman wittering on about ‘The Germans’ and their ‘Fokkers’, to Basil Fawlty’s celebrated over-reaction to the presence in his hotel of guests from the land of Beethoven and Goethe, the shadow of that great conflict certainly loomed pretty large over the seventies and eighties comedy landscape.
This was why when Martin Amis said in his book Koba The Dread that people in Britain were happy to laugh at Soviet Communism but not happy to laugh at the Nazis, it seemed as if he must have gone to bed too soon after eating a large portion of strong cheese. A recollection of that spirit of cheery defiance so touchingly embodied in the Dad’s Army theme tune, ‘Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler?’,33 would persist throughout all sections of British society to the very end of the century,34 despite the best attempts of disreputable right-wing forces (from Margaret Thatcher and her Winston Churchill fetish to Fascist groups trying to collect funds by pretending they were intended for war veterans’ hospitals) to co-opt it as their own.35
Gavin Hills—journalistic avatar of that upsurge of compensatory masculinity widely termed ‘New Lad’ – described himself as being part of ‘The Airfix Generation’: ‘Boys who grew up seeing war as something distant and glorious, a playground game’. To be strictly accurate, this was not just one generation (Hills’s considerably older fellow Loaded contributor Vic Reeves recalls growing up making models from kits and painting all the uniforms in paisley colours, and in any case, the ability to see war as something distant and glorious has been a vital weapon in the armoury of recruiting sergeants from the dawn of time) but it is the legitimate province of youth to fancy its own experiences to be unique.
Anyway, Hills was so moved by those images of wartime Britain which were so prevalent (‘like the flickering shadows of a former, more honourable world’) amid the VE Day anniversary celebrations, that he decided to join the Territorial Army.36 Even without being able to consider (as they hadn’t been on TV yet) the alarming examples of Simon Pegg’s crazy friend Mike in Spaced and The Office’s notorious killing machine Gareth Keenan, this seemed a somewhat extreme reaction.
As a first step to getting to grips with the enduring legacy of the Second World War and its long lost sense of common purpose, I felt that going to see two showbiz combat-zone veterans go through their paces looked like a safer bet.
Where there’s armed conflict and the imminent threat of violent death, there’s hope
In the course of about an hour onstage at the Royal Albert Hall in the early nineties, Eltham-born nonagenarian Bob Hope tells approximately twelve jokes. A shorter version of one of them (‘Me, George Burns and a couple of older fellas, we get together every Saturday night and try to get in touch with the living’) will turn up a decade or so later in the course of the first single to be taken from Robbie Williams’s fourth solo album Escapology, but that is not the end of the elder Bob’s contribution to modern show business.
Learning lines was never a priority for this godfather of the autocue (‘What comedian’, Hope is once reported to have asked, ‘is going to give up playing golf for a script?’) and as befits a man who hit puberty before the Russian revolution, most of his material on this occasion has to be fed to him by his piano player. But when he does ‘It’s Delovely’, with his long-suffering wife Dolores singing the first word of each line, there is a flash of that effortless mid-song repartee that once made him and Bing Crosby the coolest men in the world.
Bob Hope was always older than he had a right to be – playing the romantic lead with Natalie Wood and Eva Marie Saint when he should have been their dad – but his audience is younger than anyone would have dreamed. Some are here to see Britain’s own old-fashioned song-and-dance funnyman Brian Conley, who does a lovely turn from Me and My Girl, but then falls victim to a heckler of rare acuity. When Brian asks the audience to suggest impressions for him to do, a mighty voice booms down from the balcony with the following crushing proposal: ‘a comedian’.
Most of the people, however, have come to pay tribute to a pioneer postmodernist, perhaps sensing that without Bob Hope’s Road to…movies (and Son of Paleface), there would have been no Bob Monkhouse and maybe no Farrelly Brothers. Hope’s short, sprightly bursts of stand-up (and sometimes sit-down) comedy are punctuated with long film-clip compilations of past career highlights, projected on to a large screen above the heads of the New Squadronaires Orchestra. His commentary on these is recorded, not live, so there is a weird reality lapse where the real Hope rasp fades into the taped Hope rasp.
Goon, but not forgotten
Using the Beatles (upon whom Milligan, Sellers, Secombe and the man we are about to meet were such a crucial, if neglected, influence) as a template, posterity cut fourth Goon Michael Bentine a deal midway between Ringo Starr’s and Pete Best’s. His substantial contribution to the first three Goon Show radio series might have been largely overlooked, but his 1970s children’s TV series Michael Bentine’s Potty Time would introduce many an impressionable child of a later generation to the madness and grandeur of war (albeit at a comfortably surreal remove, via epic battle scene reconstructions starring a clan of small imaginary creatures called The Potties, and with little bits of sand blown into the air to signify explosions).
In ‘From the Ridiculous to the Paranormal’, an autobiographical one-man show he puts on at the Shaftesbury Avenue Lyric Theatre in the same week as Hope’s Royal Albert Hall date, Bentine refers to being born English as ‘first prize in the lottery of life’. His wartime experiences – after being refused entry to the RAF eleven times on account of his half-Peruvian parentage, Bentine was arrested as a deserter; he then contracted typhoid, typhus and tetanus as a result of a bungled inoculation – suggest otherwise in the strongest possible terms. But Bentine’s capacity for laughing in the face of adversity seems to be more or less infinite. Now suffering from cancer, he describes this as his farewell appearance (which it ultimately turns out to be), yet still leaves the stage with a grin. Goon, but not forgotten.
For those who have grown up thinking of The Goon Show as something Prince Charles likes which has a lot of silly voices in it, the idea that it actually represented a revolutionary overturning of the established order will necessarily take a bit of getting to grips with. But when the historian Peter Hennessy called The Goons ‘a kind of decade-long “other ranks” revenge on the Empire and its officer class’, he was not talking out of his hat. And Observer jazz critic Dave Gelly’s analogy between the impact of Milligan, Bentine and co. and that of the 1951 Festival of Britain was not far off the mark either: ‘The festival laid out the future pattern for architecture, town planning and design…while the Goons set about reducing to rubble the redundant edifice of British imperial smugness.’37
As ex-servicemen united in their hatred of bureaucracy and time-wasting officialdom, the four men honing their act after hours at the Grafton Arms in Victoria’s Strutton Ground in the aftermath of the war had more than just bad memories of unfeeling superior officers in common. First off, being forced to do things you don’t want to do, in a confined space, in company you would not necessarily have chosen, has always been one of the most fertile breeding grounds for comedy (and would continue to be so long after The Goons were demobbed, from Porridge to Father Ted to The Office).
But beyond that, Spike Milligan’s