Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office. Ben Thompson
he wrote fondly of his fellow Gunners, ‘even though it took a war to give it to them.’
Spike Milligan, Pauline Scudamore’s fascinating biography, describes the impact of his first wartime posting to Bexhill-on-Sea. Far from alarm at being snatched from home and hearth and prepared for the possibility of violent death, Milligan’s chief response seems to have been one of exultation at unexpectedly rediscovering those senses of space and creative possibility which had been steadily closing down since late adolescence, when his family returned from Burma (where his father had been a noncommissioned officer in the colonial army) to the grim, grey world of pre-war Catford.
Escaping from the pettiness of 1940s south-east London38 into a life of endless new experiences and constant physical danger, he found himself blessed with a dramatically heightened awareness of the world around him. ‘His sense of the ridiculous began to bubble in earnest,’ writes Scudamore of Milligan’s experiences in the North African campaign (so memorably detailed in war memoirs such as Rommel: Gunner Who? and Monty: His Part In My Victory): ‘what had war to do with all this beauty?’
Having got into the battalion concert party by means of his facility with a jazz trumpet, Milligan found himself expanding the element of knockabout banter in his musical performances into anarchic full-scale revue shows such as Stand Easy. In much the same way that Dadaist art had been underpinned by the horrors of the First World War trenches, these early comedic forays were inspired by the madness unfolding around him. ‘It was pure lunacy, no rhyme or reason in it,’ Spike later observed to Scudamore, ‘it was meant to be pointless, just like the war.’
The traumatic experiences under fire which would haunt him for the rest of his life would find a clear therapeutic echo in the regular bomb blasts and deranged sound effects of The Goon Show. ‘By creating a world where explosions hurt no one,’ Goon Show Companion compiler Roger Wilmut wrote sympathetically, ‘he made his own memories of the reality more bearable.’
The impact of wartime experience was not always so explicit. Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe & Son writers Galton and Simpson were originally recruited to the septic ranks of professional comedy scribes from a pneumonia ward. But Tony Hancock, a.k.a. The Lad Himself – the fellow ‘NAAFI comedian’ with whom Spike Milligan would later share a disastrous barge holiday (they couldn’t agree on which pubs to stop at) – never saw any action scarier than the concert party in Bournemouth.
Back in Civvy Street, the ex-soldiers’ battle-hardened irreverence would often rub up uneasily against those stuffy institutions – most notably the BBC – which had yet to reflect the impact of post-war social changes. The Goons, in Milligan’s subsequent assessment, were ‘trying to break into satire’. (They ‘could have beaten the fringe by ten years’, he insisted to Pauline Scudamore, had the producers of the time not ‘all been frightened out of their fucking jobs’.)
Peter Sellers ‘could do any voice of any politician in the land’, Milligan boasted, ‘the Queen included…and that made us lethal’. Yet archaic restrictions on the representation of living people forced them to hide behind such diplomatic formulations as Dinglebee for the prime minister and Lady Bold De Speedswell for the Queen.
The unsympathetic attitude of BBC bureaucrats would drive Milligan up to and, eventually (when the pressure of writing all the Goon Show scripts on his own caused him to attack Peter Sellers with a kitchen knife), over the brink of nervous collapse. However, the next generation of would-be TV satirists would be able to rely – at least in one case – on more sympathetic treatment from the corporation’s top brass. And in this instance, the lapse into military terminology is not inappropriate.
Hugh Greene was their valet
Mary Whitehouse used to credit Graham Greene’s brother, Sir Hugh Greene (Director General of the BBC from 1960 to 1969), with being ‘more responsible than any other single individual’ for what she perceived as the moral decline of that decade. Needless to say, Greene saw things differently. As a foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph he had reported of Hitler’s consolidation of power in 1930s Germany, and his personal experience of the ensuing moral abyss was the foundation of his own vision of the BBC as ‘a symbol of the liberation of the individual imagination’.
He took over determined to ‘clear away a certain amount of accumulated dust from what seemed…at the end of the fifties a rather stuffy institution, out of touch with the young and the rebellious, appealing to a rather narrow section of the public’. But Greene’s conviction that ‘To keep pace with the values of a changing world you have in fact to keep a bit ahead’39 was not going to endear him to everyone. And while it’s one thing to set an agenda, it’s another thing to keep to it.
When daring new programmes like That Was The Week That Was and Till Death Us Do Part prompted howls of protest from the same sections of society that would later fail to be amused by Chris Morris and his very brassy eye, Greene might easily have bowed to public pressure and taken them off the air. The fact that he didn’t40 would have far-reaching consequences. In fact, it is probably fair to say that without Sir Hugh’s steadfast refusal to countenance the objections of West Midlands primary-school teacher Mary Whitehouse and her ‘Clean Up TV campaign, the swinging sixties might never have got off the ground.
Describing Whitehouse and her ‘moral reformers’ as ‘dangerous to the whole quality of life in this country’, Greene did not just regard their activities as inimical to British traditions of freedom, tolerance and adventure. As someone determined to be ‘positively and actively on the side of the values [he] had seen being attacked and turned upside down in the previous decades in so many parts of the world, with the establishment either on the side of reaction against liberal values or too weak to resist their overthrow’, he saw born-again Christian campaigners like the Festival of Light as one step away from the Nazis.
The impact of the 1939-45 conflict on the history of comedy reached far beyond such celebrated post-war landmarks as The Goon Show and Hancock’s Half Hour and into the brave new world of the 1960s. But once you reach a generation of performers who are too young to remember the war at first hand, the situation inevitably changes.
With a very few honourable exceptions (notable alongside Dad’s Army in the annals of comedic self-respect is the last episode of Blackadder Goes Forth), most comedy about wartime written by people who didn’t live through it leaves the viewer with an uncomfortable suspicion that what is really being laughed about is the happy accident of birth which prevented those who are getting the laughs from having to go through this awful experience in real life.
In 2001, the strangely bitter and twisted second series of sketch show Big Train (which left Arthur Mathews – the milder-mannered half of the usually inspired scriptwriting duo Linehan and Mathews – holding the baby after his comedy compadre Graham Linehan decided to strike out on his own) contains a disproportionate amount of this sort of material. Nothing makes even the most left-leaning person yearn for the return of national service41 quite like the sight of a load of easy-living peacetime comic actors getting cheap laughs at the expense of people who risked their lives to fight evil.
What comedians generally say when subjected to this kind of accusation (taking their lead from the much-discussed Beyond The Fringe sketch ‘The Aftermyth of War’) is ‘it’s not actually about the war, it’s about the way the war has been represented’. But this defence is just as specious as Monty Python’s claims that The Life of Brian wasn’t actually taking the piss out of the Bible – ‘Brian was another prophet we made up…blah blah blah…You can see Jesus’s arm in scene 76 and it is treated very respectfully…blah blah blah’ – when everyone knows the fact that it was is the reason why it was funny.
The amazing Let The People Sing