Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office. Ben Thompson
novels. Written to be serialized over the air by BBC radio before its first publication in book form, it was originally broadcast in instalments, beginning in early 1939 and with later episodes increasingly overshadowed by what someone on a History Channel documentary would probably refer to as ‘the darkening storm-clouds of war’.
The book’s protagonist is an out-of-work English comedian called Tommy Tiverton.42 Looking back nostalgically to the halcyon days of ‘the vast smoky-coloured caverns of the packed Empires and Palaces’, Tommy yearns for ‘a simple audience, not bedazzled by American speed, sharpness and cynicism, and blind to the richer English drollery of character’. At this stage, the threat to traditional variety is not TV, but that other little box in the corner of the front room, the radio. ‘I like my public to see me,’ Tiverton sniffs poignantly, confronted with the undeniable ascendancy of the catch-phrase-toting warriors of the wireless who will one day inspire some of Paul Whitehouse and The Fast Show team’s least amusing material.
By a set of circumstances too serpentine to go into but involving an IRA bomb and an equestrian statue, Tommy Tiverton finds himself on the run across middle England with Professor Ernst Kronak, an intellectual asylum-seeker from central Europe with a happy knack for working high-flown political and philosophical theories into day-to-day conversation. (‘In a certain limited sense all the English may be said to be anarchist,’ he observes at one point, later ascribing the relative weakness of the English revolutionary tradition to ‘this limited and natural anarchy of the national soul’.)
Priestley, who had talked about the need to shore up morale in the face of the possibility of an imminent conflict (and accordingly seems to have designed the latter stages of Let The People Sing as an explicit call to arms), already seems to be looking to the kind of country that people would want to live in afterwards. ‘Plenty of nice lads ready to go and be killed,’ someone says grimly at one point—of Britain in 1939 – ‘But…that’s being ready to die, not being ready to live.’
The book’s narrative climax hinges on the fate of an underused small-town variety hall which the snobbish local establishment want to turn into a museum (‘Too much of England, I think, is a museum,’ observes Professor Kronak, sternly) and which incoming American-based multinational United Plastics want to incorporate into their sinister mass-production facility. The debate about whether the townsfolk will stand up for their birthright of good spirits and inane singalongs in the face of this twin threat looks forward not only to the war that is about to begin,43 but also to subsequent debates about globalization and American cultural imperialism.
Things look bad for a while, but in the end the necessary stiffening of communal resolve is effected by that apparently most placid and parochial of domestic institutions: Sunday lunch. Destiny mobilizes ‘the revolutionary force of women who have spent a warmish morning in an undersized kitchen cooking a dinner they do not particularly want to eat themselves’. In these circumstances, the author notes, ‘husbands and children, like so many idiotic passengers invading the engine room, are apt to hear something unpleasant about themselves’.
When the after-effects of such savage tongue-lashings are intensified by digestive disturbance – occasioned by ‘a consignment of badly refrigerated Argentinian beef – the menfolk are finally shaken out of their complacent reverie. ‘Vast edifices of masculine sham’ are seen to crumble, and the town comes together in a patriotic fervour to defend and cherish its heritage of communal entertainment. ‘Like the nation waking from a long sleep’ is how the book’s author describes it.
‘What did you do in the comedy war, Daddy?’
More than four decades later, the Falklands conflict (itself the result of a badly refrigerated Argentinian beef) would be responsible – at least in the fevered minds of Margaret Thatcher and her tabloid-running dogs—for a similar national awakening. But by this time, the heritage of collective jollity in which J. B. Priestley placed such touching faith would have been subject to a dramatic bifurcation.
‘Alternative comedy grew out of punk,’ Jonathan Ross explains, ‘with the same determination to show an older generation “our values are different from yours”. And once you’ve taken a step down that road, there’s really nowhere else to go but to end up saying you don’t respect any of your predecessors’ values, even though in a way that’s unfair.’
Just as John Lydon got in trouble with Malcolm McLaren for admitting he liked Neil Young, so in the pre-Vic-and-Bob era it was very much not the done thing for up-and-coming alternative comics to allude respectfully to their professional forebears. ‘The older comedians became outcasts,’ remembers Ross (who, in his role as honest broker between the generations, would subsequently do as much as any other individual to bridge the ideological and demographic chasm), ‘but they only had themselves to blame. Because, with a few honourable exceptions such as Bob Monkhouse and Des O’Connor, they were very scathing towards the new generation when they should have welcomed it.’
By the time of Ben Elton’s appearance at the 1987 Royal Variety Performance, the new comedy establishment’s take-over seemed to be more or less complete. ‘Five years after the first series of The Young Ones,’ wrote Mick Middles in When You’re Smiling, his excellent short biography of Les Dawson, ‘the walls of an old order seemed to be crumbling.’ And yet the fact that on this particular occasion an old pre-alternative warhorse like Dawson could win one of the best receptions of the night gave a far surer indication of the way things were heading than many a more obvious portent.
Just as the apparent ideological climax that was the introduction of Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax eventually proved to be the beginning of the Iron Lady’s end, so the Comic Strip planting its standard on the ramparts of ancien régime showbiz actually signalled a rearguard action by the battered survivors of earlier times. And not just in terms of influence. (Les Dawson’s magnificently sardonic hosting of mid-period Blankety Blank would later be cited by Vic Reeves as a model for his own demeanour on the Big Night Out.) In the late eighties, northern theatrical impresario Larry Price told Middles, ‘the people who had been all but wiped away by alternative comedy suddenly started coming back…We’d all been told they’d gone for good, but the audiences wouldn’t have it.’
Pantomime bookings went through the roof, and some of those who’d grown fat and lazy on the rich pickings of pre-alternative TV came back with a point to prove. There was something inspiring about the spectacle of battle-scarred comedy campaigners scrapping their way back to social respectability.
Take Bob Monkhouse, for example. (And anyone whose response is ‘I wish you would’ has not read Bob’s fantastic autobiography, Crying with Laughter.) There was no height to which he would not stoop to reclaim his rightful place in the comedic spotlight: going head to head with Frank Skinner on Gag Tag, wiping the floor with his rival panellists on Have I Got News for You, even delivering the following unforgettable killer blow to the unfortunate Bobby Davro on ITV’s An Audience with Bob Monkhouse: ‘You’ll be remembered after Robin Williams has been forgotten…But not until then.’
This rehabilitation of the old-school comic would culminate, a decade or so later, in Phoenix Nights, Peter Kay’s elegiac love-letter to the working men’s club. And in the not-so-edifying spectacle of Bernard Manning’s return to prime-time TV, eating his tea in his Y-fronts on The Entertainers (then, a year or so later – even less edifyingly – being sent to India with a camera crew in tow).
From the easy-going vantage point of the early twenty-first century, the idea of an ideological divide in comedy which actually meant something might seem somewhat elusive. But you wouldn’t have to spend very long in Manning’s Embassy Club to rediscover it.44
Another way in which Margaret Thatcher was the mother-in-law of alternative comedy, besides the obvious one
In the preface to