Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office. Ben Thompson
a fair summation.’
Similarly for Marber, snatched from comedic oblivion and plunged into a very competitive arena wherein people were liable at any moment to bring up the fact that he had ‘once done an act with a panda’, it is easy to see how a friendship with the brazenly successful Coogan made sense. What no one could really have predicted was that the complex personal and professional dynamic which developed between the two men would produce some of the boldest and most enduring comedy of the nineties.
The On The Hour ice pack commences its break-up
Before On The Hour makes its triumphant transfer to the small screen as The Day Today, internal tensions within the group ensure that there is already a breakaway faction. Exactly what happened to cause this split has been the source of much speculation, and hopefully the following account will clear up any misunderstandings. (While these events lack the gory trappings of Jacobean tragedy, the extent to which they still loom large in the minds of the participants – a full decade later – confirms that wounded pride can take longer to heal than all but the most savage dagger scar.)
Stewart Lee’s side of the story
‘The reason we ended up not being involved in the TV series,’ Lee explains, ‘is that we didn’t think we were being offered a fair deal. We wrote about 20 per cent of the first series. I don’t think that would be an exaggeration – probably someone on the internet would know what the exact proportion was. And when it went to telly we were offered thirteen minutes a week, but as we felt we’d set the tone for some of the characters, we asked for less money and less minutes, but a share in the future of the show.’
With Iannucci reluctant to give up this degree of control, a stalemate rapidly develops. Lee and Herring go off to make their own Radio 4 and Radio 1 shows, Lionel Nimrod’s Inexplicable World and Fist of Fun, and when On The Hour is released as a BBC audio-cassette (and later on CD), their contributions have been surgically removed by Iannucci.
‘There might have been an argument about us wanting to get paid three hundred pounds instead of two hundred for it going to CD,’ Lee says phlegmatically, ‘but basically Armando edited us out to prove a point. I don’t hold it against him, really.’
Like a pair of latter-day Trotskys, snipped out of the photo of triumphant Bolshevik revolutionaries on the balcony with Iannucci’s Stalinist Stanley knife, there is little Lee and Herring can do but put a brave face on life in comedic exile (and keep an eye out for shifty-looking individuals carrying ice-picks).
‘I was about twenty-three at the time,’ Lee remembers, affecting an indulgent air. ‘Most of the other people involved in On The Hour were in their late twenties and I remember feeling quite sympathetic and thinking, They’ve got to take what they’re offered because otherwise they’ve missed the boat.’
So why do his and Herring’s live shows at the Edinburgh Festival a year or so later feature the latter delivering repeated savage blows to the head of a balloon likeness of ‘the playwright Patrick Marber’?
Lee laughs: ‘We were only annoyed with Marber because he came to the whole thing quite late, and he seemed to be the most delighted of anyone at the idea of us being forced out of the picture.’
Patrick Marber’s side of the story
‘I’ve been under siege by them for years, really,’ Marber says, rather forlornly, of his erstwhile colleagues, ‘but I’ve never responded up to now.’ He pauses. ‘I think they’re of the view that I plotted to get them sacked.’
Presumably he doesn’t intend to take this opportunity to confirm the truth of that accusation?
Marber laughs, perhaps a little nervously. ‘In the summer of ‘92, me, Lee and Herring, Steve and Simon Munnery did a show in Edinburgh called The Dumb Show, which didn’t really work. When we all got in a room together, we just didn’t hit it off. And some time after that, they fell out with Armando, and that was it, really. The irony of it is that I thought their material was absolutely fantastic – you would always feel excited on On The Hour when something they had written came in…’ Marber pauses. ‘I suppose they’re maintaining that on some level they invented Alan Partridge?’
He sounds slightly surprised at the news that they haven’t done this – at least not in my hearing.
‘They did write the first piece of material,’ Marber explains. ‘Armando asked Steve to perform it and this generic sports voice came out – sort of Elton Welsby, sort of Jim Rosenthal. Then Steve came up with the name and Alan was born, but I think it would definitely be fair to say that Alan Partridge wouldn’t have happened had Lee and Herring not written the original sketch.’ As to the scale and grandeur of the oak that will grow from this particular comedic acorn, though, only destiny can decree it.
Knowing him, knowing them
In its original Radio 4 incarnation, the On The Hour offshoot Knowing Me, Knowing You – wherein Alan Partridge, sports-desk incompetent and all-round loose cannon, is misguidedly given his own chat show—is an instant comedy landmark. As inhabited by Coogan, the hapless but ever emphatic Partridge goes beyond straightforward caricature into the realms of immortal comic characterization.
Alan will pursue a metaphor until it turns and fights like a wild animal at bay, and in his own freedom from shame there can sometimes be discerned a form of primal innocence. When he hits a child prodigy, or informs a recently freed hostage that their time in captivity was equivalent to watching 9,000 episodes of Inspector Morse – ‘it doesn’t sound so bad when you put it that way’ – he seems in some strange way to strike a blow for everyone who has ever felt hemmed in by the constraints of conventional etiquette.54
Part of what makes Knowing Me, Knowing You special is the precision of its cultural references. ‘It’s about fine judgements,’ Coogan insists, ‘making the right choice of a name or a word without being obvious, but also without disappearing up your own arse.’ While the time and trouble Coogan and his writing partners invest in getting details right – from Alan’s car (a Ford Scorpio) to the exact layout of his East Anglian home turf – pay off on their own account, the laughs which accompany brand recognition are easily come by. The real greatness of the show comes in achieving a level of emotional acuity that matches and even surpasses that of the product placement.
It would not be unreasonable to assume that a good deal of Alan Partridge’s remarkable intensity comes from Coogan’s own pre-Partridge fears that his life might be vanishing down the toilet of middle-rank showbiz.
‘It was that,’ admits an impassioned Coogan, ‘it was…Impressions are just a facility – something I can do…I hated being a known quantity. If people really want to annoy me, they still say, “Oh look, it’s Steve Coogan – top TV impressionist”.’
There’s a great moment in a radio episode of Knowing Me, Knowing You, where Alan encounters top TV impressionist Steve Thomson, played by Marber (who while he modestly insists that he is ‘not in the same league as Steve as a performer’ contributes a series of beautifully judged supporting characters to radio and TV series alike). ‘I want to be funny, but with dignity,’ begs Steve. ‘Do your Frank Spencer,’ Alan whispers malevolently.
No disrespect is intended to Marber’s later career as an award-winning dramatist in saying that nothing in his subsequent canon surpasses the acuity of some of these exchanges. The happy knack of translating your own personal anxieties and hang-ups into subtle but brilliantly accessible comedy is given to very few comedy writing partnerships, and at this point Coogan and Marber seem to have it in spades.
‘Certainly in Knowing Me, Knowing You in general, I tend to play the characters who try to usurp Alan’s status,’ Marber admits. ‘I’d like to write something