Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office. Ben Thompson
with an ailing Peter Cook under the rather off-putting title of Why Bother? sidle on to the Radio 4 airwaves with a minimum of fuss in 1994, but they contain some of the finest work either man has ever produced.
These almost entirely improvised encounters between Morris (in his cocksure interviewer guise) and Cook’s patrician alter ego Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling work brilliantly on several different levels: as a clash of comedy titans, a passing on of the baton and a strangely touching farewell. ‘The next time we’ll want to interview you,’ Morris snarls with a superficial abruptness which stomps off around the houses and comes back as tender regret, ‘you’ll probably be dead.’
There’s often an edge of sadism to the Chris Morris Method: ‘If somebody knows there’s something awful going on but doesn’t know how to escape and is constricted from doing so by good manners,’ he has been heard to exult, ‘it degenerates into a siege, whereby you fling ghastly suggestion after ghastly suggestion at them.’ When Morris is pitted against a worthy adversary such as Cook, however, real fireworks can result. Listening to this sublimely well-matched pairing discuss the discovery of a fossilized nine-month-old Christ, it is sometimes hard to believe what you are hearing.
As Streeb-Greebling dissembles magisterially in response to Morris’s increasingly malign sallies – ‘I’ve been distorted, I’ve been misrepresented and I’ve been quoted accurately, which is worst of all’ – deeper historical connections between the generations begin to reveal themselves. Literally minutes of innocent amusement can be had from assigning each of On The Hour’s leading lights to a suitable counterpart from the early sixties satire boom. (Morris is Cook, Coogan is Dudley Moore, Marber is Jonathan Miller, Iannucci is David Frost and…Oh dear Lord, please make it stop.)
Still more intriguingly, the overweening arrogance of Morris’s preening media archetype actually has its roots in Cook and co.’s pioneering experiment with irreverence. That supercilious, know-it-all demeanour – you might call it the all-seeing sneer – so prevalent in the British media of the late twentieth century, from the Guardian’s ‘Pass Notes’ column to Kirsty Wark’s attitude to the arts, was originally defined by that first wave of bold young satirists, tweaking the nose of the early sixties powers that were.
Who was notorious That Was The Week That Was provocateur Bernard Levin (being rude to diplomats or addressing an audience of farmers as ‘peasants’), if not the spiritual father of Morris’s Day Today anchorman? And once the traditions of social and political deference which so deadened British cultural life prior to the sixties had been broken down, what was to stop those who had achieved that goal becoming a new ruling class, every bit as entrenched and invulnerable as their predecessors?
By a choice irony, the satirists themselves were among the first to notice this happening. Especially when pop’s unwashed hordes – The Beatles, David Bailey, Jean Shrimpton, people who hadn’t even been to university – barged rudely through behind them, widening the modest breach they’d made in the walls of public propriety into a yawning chasm, and treading on quite a few elegantly shod toes in the process. In his impassioned 1969 tract The Neophiliacs, Private Eye founder Christopher Booker fulminated loud and long against ‘this new aristocracy’ of ‘photographers, dress-designers and Beat Musicians’, which was a bit like a former member of The Clash writing a book about the pernicious impact of Two Tone.
Whether the graduates of the New School of Linguistic Exactitude will ever have cause to make similarly curmudgeonly expressions of regret about those who follow in their wake, only time will tell. One thing that is certain is that the Cook-Frost generation had to stretch their own canvases. Away from the rarefied world of groundbreaking BBC satire, the comedians of the nineties work in a white space of pretty much unrestricted magnitude. And liberty on such a grand scale can sometimes be its own limitation.
4 The Great Mythological Armour Shortage of 1993-4
Parts One to Five
One
‘Comedy naturally wears itself out – destroys the very food on which it lives’
William Hazlitt
What must it feel like to be a comedian on national television telling a joke which you know that not all, but a good proportion of the audience will have heard before? Not just because it’s an old joke – after all, jokes, like tunes, are something there can only be a certain number of – but because you yourself told it on a different show a couple of weeks previously. Maybe twice.
Paul Merton is on Des O’Connor’s couch in the autumn of 1993. For many comics, Des is the perfect foil – not so much a sympathetic interrogator as a craven one – but the antagonism upon which Merton thrives is not a part of his repertoire. So Merton is telling the joke about someone going into a newsagent’s and asking if they’ve got a copy of Psychic News. The punchline – ‘You tell me’ – has already been a palpable hit on Have I Got News for You, on Merton’s own television show and throughout his successful live tour.
But this evening Merton doesn’t look as if he has the stomach for the delivery. Trying to say the line as if it’s just come to him seems to be making him miserable. Not showbiz Paul Merton miserable – grouchy, curmudgeonly and all those other ‘-lys’ that make him so entertaining on the radio – just the plain, common or garden kind. He forces the punchline out eventually, but his body seems to be trying to stop him. The message in his eyes reads: ‘Why me?’
This might not have been exactly what William Hazlitt, the nineteenth-century stand-up essayist, meant when he wrote: ‘Comedy naturally wears itself out – destroys the very food on which it lives’, but the point still stands. When the occupation of ‘joke-teller’ was on a par with, say, ‘juggler’ or ‘optometrist’ in terms of social significance, the issue was simple: the only imperative in the recycling of your own or other people’s material was not to get caught.
There is a perfecdy respectable comic tradition of unapologetic repetition.59 It dates back beyond Morecambe and Wise (who learned their trade in the variety halls at a time when ‘an original joke was a rare treat’) to Sigmund Freud, who was so sympathetic to the old joke transaction that he even designed an equation to represent it in a therapeutic light.60
For the new breed of TV-career-driven, magazine-cover, advert-icon comedians which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, things were much more complicated. The same medium that brought them success changed the very nature of their calling.
Everybody thinks of comedy as essentially a ‘live’ phenomenon, but all too often seeing favourite performers in the flesh is now less of an experience than seeing them on television. You’ve seen the show, you’ve heard the jokes, now shell out to experience them all over again without being able to make yourself a cup of tea. And then buy the live video.
An unprecedentedly large phalanx of big-name, alternative-gone-mainstream comedians set off around the Civics and Regals of the land in the autumn of 1993. In Paul Merton’s footsteps followed Steve Coogan, Lenny Henry, Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson, Ben Elton, Jack Dee, Newman and Baddiel. All had to face the recycling dilemma, and it wouldn’t really be fair to blame them for taking the easy way out. They are, after all, only human.
New material takes months to write. And comedy agents are renowned for their heroic efforts to make boxing promoters look scrupulous, forcing wet-behind-the-ears comedy novices out on two-hundred-date tours before they’ve had a chance to drink their Perrier Awards.
The mass live audience which television brings makes different demands anyway; if you don’t recycle your greatest hits onstage, you might get lynched. It must be a bizarre and perversely unsettling sensation for those who learned their trade fighting for survival on small stages in front of demanding crowds, to find