Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office. Ben Thompson
fact that a large section of the crowd have come to pay tribute to an established TV persona rather than to watch someone push back the outer envelope of their art.
Jack Dee’s Channel 4 television show (first broadcast in 1992) complicates things still further by being a stylish distillation of an idealized live comedy experience. Suavely suited professional arrives at club in classic car, scythes through the crowd, is extremely amusing for about twenty-five minutes and then leaves, gracefully acknowledging the applause of the crowd with a modest nod of the head. The idea behind the show’s ‘Bohemia Club’ setting, Dee explains, ‘was to be somewhere Simon Templar might take his best girl for a night out’.61
An actual tour, though, is a different matter. Dee himself is fine – a tidy bundle of compressed malice – but the Hammersmith Apollo, a venue so cavernous that many a seventeen-piece soul orchestra has looked lost in it, is not the best place to see him. There is something fundamentally depressing about the experience of such well-ordered mass sniggering. As if in acknowledgement of this, the crowd’s biggest laugh is reserved for some witless heckler’s oh-so-amusing reference to Dee’s role in a television advertising campaign. Jack’s contempt for this runs deeper even than usual. He seems almost, well, bitter.62
‘It’s not good enough just to be getting a laugh,’ he frets, a few months later. ‘After a while, you start to be fussy about the kind you’re getting…There’s a particular laugh which I really hate,63 which is the one that belongs to people watching television shows.’ What does that mean exactly? ‘That “Ooh no, missus” kind of thing – Carry On-type comedy where you only have to mention knickers and you get this awful “Yo ho ho”. I would do anything to stop that. I’d rather people didn’t laugh at all.’
Two. Variety is the spice of life…except when it isn’t
‘My hair’s got a life of its own,’ says Paul Merton, taking up residence at the London Palladium, in the winter of 1993-4. ‘Last week, I found it in the kitchen making itself an omelette.’
‘Oh excellent,’ exclaims the man in the row behind me, ‘excellent.’ He is still repeating the second half of this (admittedly excellent) joke to himself as Merton, ursine as ever even in a low-slung double-breasted suit, ambles on to the next. The question of why it is that comedy audiences are so easily satisfied has long troubled the philosophers, but Merton’s presence at the top of the bill at this illustrious venue does send out some intriguing signals.
First, Merton – like Jack Dee and Reeves and Mortimer – is trying to clamber over the social and demographic barriers erected around comedy in the ‘alternative’ era. Second, he is cocking a snook at the sense of social inferiority which has always been near the heart of his act – right down to his stage name, taken from the defiantly unfashionable London borough from which he originates – by reconnecting it to the grand variety tradition Tommy Trinder used to embody as the host of Saturday Night at the London Palladium, before he took the piss out of Michael Grade’s scary uncle, Lew, once too often and got consigned to showbiz oblivion.
Early on, the tone – set by the earnest ‘Shhh’ that goes up when the lights go down – is rather too reverent. Merton is at his best when not tied to a script: setting up funny little antipathies and then pursuing them to the ends of the earth. In this grandiose setting, though, his regular stand-up material sounds rather laboured: some of the jokes have been round the block too many times and their deliveryman seems nervous. Merton’s sidekicks – Richard Vranch, unappetizingly (if accurately) billed as ‘the bloke who plays the piano on Whose Line Is It Anyway?’ and Lee Simpson, Julian Clary’s flatmate in Terry and Julian – work hard to bring him out of himself, even to the extent of pulling ‘Hey! What-a-crazy-guy!’-type faces, but can’t quite pull it off.
To make matters worse, a pair of particularly aggressive and unfunny front-row hecklers have been struggling throughout to impair everyone’s enjoyment. Early in the second half of the show, the standard stock reproaches – ‘What paper are you reviewing this for, Exchange & Mart}’ – having failed to secure the compliant silence promised by the wholesale suppliers, Paul Merton suddenly and unexpectedly loses his temper. Not just a flash of cold fury, but a full-scale, eye-popping, forehead-vein-bulge scenario, as he rounds on the would-be scene-stealers with real venom, telling them in no uncertain terms to get out of his face or to expect severe physical consequences.
There’s a moment when this confrontation could go either way, but then the disruptive elements stand up and slink off with the crowd’s jeers ringing in their ears. Merton is plainly embarrassed by his outburst, speaking shamefacedly of ‘having created a marvellous mood for comedy’, but the hecklers’ witlessness has given him something to define himself against, and from that point on, the show never looks back.
There are flashes of real verbal inspiration, but rather unexpectedly, the real highlights of the performance are moments of visual comedy which incorporate the scale and opulence of the venue. When Merton descends from the ceiling on a recalcitrant platform, or contrives an awe-inspiring reconstruction of the Dam Busters using just six fluffy rabbits, you can almost feel the old place relaxing.
Watching Merton present his BBC1 history of the London Palladium (timed, with that rather wearying synchronicity which is such a hallmark of the nineties comedian, to coincide with his shows there), nodding with exaggerated reverence at the feet of great ventriloquists and strong men, some words commonly attributed to the great curmudgeon Alexei Sayle spring to mind. These words are roughly to the effect that the reason music-hall (which bears the same relation to variety as rhythm and blues did to rock and roll: it was fundamentally the same, it just happened first) died out in the first place was that it was rubbish.
The moral force of this statement does not come so much from disrespect for such great acts of yesteryear as Arthur Henderson and His Dancing Combs, as an understanding of the basic principles of evolution. Appreciating the amusing things dinosaurs used to do with their tails should not stop us acknowledging the fact that they are unlikely to stage a successful comeback.
So when, in 1994, the Perrier Award goes to unknown (and horribly unfunny) Australian duo Lano and Woodley for their ‘classical clowning’ and people who think this is a good thing say that variety is coming back and it’s good to see comedy rediscovering its music-hall roots, something is rotten in the state of Edinburgh. Certainly there are very few things more boring than bad stand-up, but one of them is bad variety.
What’s more, comedy has already rediscovered its music-hall roots, and in ways that this brace of Antipodean chancers whose act has its origins in a field of human endeavour whose name must never be spoken (it begins with an ‘m’ and rhymes with ‘crime’) can scarcely even conceive of.
The uncritical embrace of pratfalls and arm-waving is one thing,but comedy which takes into account the reality of the culture it comes from is quite another. When Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer reopened the lines of communication between comedy and vaudeville in the late eighties, they did so in a way that reflected the changes in our entertainment landscape. And most of those who follow through the old showbiz-shaped breach Reeves and Mortimer had made in the national subconscious – Tommy ‘Great days, great days’ Cockles, John Shuttleworth with his Yamaha organ and sole agent Ken Worthington, twenty-year-old Matt Lucas and his monstrous theatrical creation Sir Bernard Chumley – add at least a twist of their own to such blue-plaque heritage source material.
But a passing reacquaintance with the legends of showbiz antiquity will not, in itself, be enough to sustain the comedy newcomer of the nineties. A supplementary form of iconic nutrition is going to be required.
At this point in our story, a grisly shadow is waiting in the wings. It’s one we have done well to ignore until now, but the time has come to call it out into the open.
Three. That whole ‘comedy is the new rock ‘n’ roll’ farrago