Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office. Ben Thompson
Alan Bennett on Peter Cook, at the latter’s funeral
In his justly celebrated post-World War II essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, George Orwell subjects a series of badly written paragraphs to in-depth analysis. Some are academic in origin, some are propagandist in intent, but most blur the boundaries between these two supposedly separate fields of human endeavour, contributing to an environment wherein (to repeat the above quote for maximum rhetorical impact) ‘Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse’.
Orwell’s aim in highlighting the widespread use of clichés and jargon49 is not only to highlight the poverty of linguistic expression involved, but also to reveal a more sinister subtext. ‘Such phraseology’, he maintains, ‘is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures.’ He goes on to establish this degraded form of language – saying things in such a way as to conceal the reality behind the words – as a vital component of totalitarianisms of both left and right.
In outlining his response to those who express themselves in such a way, Orwell uses an image which will be familiar to readers of Henri Bergson. When he writes of ‘a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy’, he overlaps with the latter’s idea of the fundamental basis of all human hilarity. But much as George Orwell loved a laugh in his private life, he does not exploit the shortcomings of his linguistic inferiors for specifically comic effect.
On The Hour. because fact into News(s)peak won’t go
By the early nineties, however, the time was right for a group of pushy young showbiz up-and-comers to apply Orwell’s critical vision with merciless rigour, albeit with no higher goal than the provision of top-flight radio entertainment. Needless to say, things have changed a great deal since George’s day. The arbitrary50 dystopian rubicon of 1984 has been crossed with no apparent ill-effects, and with the once forbidding edifice of Soviet Communism lying in ruins, the future of parliamentary democracy seems about as secure as it can be.
Yet the shadow of Newspeak – the wilfully obfuscatory language which Orwell imagined in 1984 as the intellectual mechanism of a coercive state – stalks the airwaves of John Major’s Britain as threateningly as ever before. It does so not in the form of governmental decree, but in the crisply presented guise of contemporary current-affairs journalism.
The unseemly combination of euphemism and self-aggrandizement, the ignorance masquerading as knowledge, the inflation of non-stories into headlines, the prurience disguised as moral concern, the wilful compression of human suffering into unrecognizable shapes: it is these all too familiar features of modernday factual programming that the guerilla radio show On The Hour gets to work on. And by the end of the first five-episode series, in the autumn of 1991, the entire amoral apparatus of contemporary news-gathering has been pretty much dismantled.
The glee with which On The Hour sets about doing this is entirely infectious. Listening to the edition in the second series where Chris Morris hawks a faked tape of Neil Kinnock losing his rag at the Labour Party conference around various tabloid newsdesks, there’s a sense of being part of something genuinely outrageous. Not just because there is swearing involved and it’s on Radio 4, but because Morris’s combination of intellectual audacity and technical mastery of his medium seems so much more than equal to the task in hand.
The impact of this sudden rush of surplus capacity is all the more dramatic, emerging as it does from the butt-end of an apparently unbroken tradition of toothless and self-satisfied radio ‘satire’.
‘If you were reasonably intelligent and starting out your career in ‘89 to ‘90,’ On The Hour writer Stewart Lee remembers, ‘it took about two months to crack the formula of topical comedy as it was then.’
What was it about the established formats of Spitting Image and Weekending (within which Lee and his writing partner Richard Herring had cut their comedic teeth) that seemed so tired?
‘It was just so mechanical – if you’d have called it formulaic, they’d have gone “Yeah, so, what’s your problem?”…We did quite a good parody for On The Hour once about a Radio 4 programme called “It’s Satire Day”, where the characters were trying to compress everything that happened in the world into a Robin Hood sketch format.’
Presumably after ten years or so of Conservative government, there was a strong sense for those – like Lee – who also plied their wares out on the stand-up circuit of attacking things that had already been thoroughly savaged?
‘A lot of the people involved in Radio 4 satire probably voted Tory anyway,’ Lee observes sardonically. ‘But beyond that, a lot of the language available to us had just been really debased – to the point where even the word “satire” had started to really annoy me. Satire just seemed like replacing one thing with another, until after a while you start thinking, Why don’t you just say what the thing itself is?’
Saying what the thing itself is
The original impetus for On The Hour came from producer Armando Iannucci, a slicked-back BBC insider who, having already worked on The Mary Whitehouse Experience and Weekending, presumably knew a thing or two about what he didn’t want. Chris Morris – hell-bent on destroying the radio establishment from within like some fearful computer virus – supplied the maverick element.
Having started out as a news trainee in the not so illustrious surroundings of BBC Radio Cambridge, Morris worked his way up the ladder by unorthodox means. These included a series of legend-building stunts (such as filling a studio with helium in the midst of a live broadcast) and increasingly high-profile sackings and walk-outs from local stations in Bristol, Cambridge and London.51
With the exception of the mercurial Morris, who – then as now – operated more or less as an autonomous city state (‘He sent in completed packages,’ a still-impressed Stewart Lee remembers. ‘We barely ever saw him’), there appeared to be a clear divide between the writers and the performers. Ianucci acted as go-between, fulcrum and pivot, while simultaneously exercising some degree of control over both groupings, and the resulting creative tension seemed to give everyone involved the incentive to stay on top of their respective games.
On The Hour’s, calling card is the bracing precision of its language. The way this holds good throughout all the writing – from Chris Morris’s one-man Jesuit comedy suicide mission to the milder-mannered interjections of Lee and Herring (‘our favourite comedy at the time was Spinal Tap,’ Lee remembers, ‘and we just copied that by imparting lots of really dense information’), to the occasional trenchant contributions of grizzled NME veterans Steven Wells and David Quantick – allied with innovative use of editing and sound, creates an almost overwhelming effect.
A further vital factor in the overall impact of the show, and one all too easily overlooked by insiders as well as outsiders, is the consistency of the performances. ‘I was very conscious that Armando knew exactly what he wanted from us,’ remembers Patrick Marber, one of a six-strong cast alongside Morris, Jewish drama expert David Schneider, Steve Coogan, Doon MacKichan and Rebecca Front (the last two ‘fresh’ from the somewhat debilitating experience of playing the female parts in The Mary Whitehouse Experience). ‘We did have to learn a different way of performing sketches.’
And what was different about it exactly? ‘Armando told us “You’re not allowed to be too funny”.’ For Marber in particular – a somewhat obtrusive presence as co-presenter of Radio 1’s little-lamented first venture into comedy, Hey Rrradio – this simple instruction opened the ivy-covered door to a secret garden of comedic understatement.
Having largely