Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office. Ben Thompson
cultural visibility is causing problems by late 1993. On The South Bank Show’s A to Z of Comedy’, Jim Davidson, Billy Connolly and Harry Enfield all agree that one of the hardest things about their job is the lack of a line between who you are and what you do. Facing your audience with just a microphone for protection raises other spectres beyond being bombarded with your own catch-phrases on family walks.
It also makes it hard to maintain the requisite multimedia career assault without feeling somehow personally diminished by it. As public figures, comedians lack the layers of mythological armour which protect actors or pop stars. Their struggles are not embedded in our consciousness in the same way. In short, they suffer from an acute lack of mystique; Dustin Hoffman as Lenny Bruce, Sir Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice, Sally Field in Punchlines - none of these quite make it as role models.64 And it’s hard to have faith in your own showbiz myth when no one really cares about that tricky time you had on your Open Mike début at the Comedy Store.
At this juncture, the nearest thing the post-alternative circuit can boast to an iconic figure is probably Deptford reprobate Malcolm Hardee – formerly promoter of the infamous Tunnel Club in the carbon-monoxide-choked badlands of the Blackwall Tunnel Approach Road – whose autobiography, I Stole Freddie Mercury’s Birthday Cake, published around this time, is as sorry a collection of ill-informed prejudice and warmed-over apocrypha as you could ever wish to read.65
Other than the fact that he once launched an unprovoked physical attack on the comedy critic of the Observer, it is hard to see what Hardee has ever done to earn the seemingly genuine respect and admiration of so many of his peers. Only an art form in pretty bad shape, living legend-wise, would choose to doff its collective cap to a performer whose main claim to fame is his willingness (nay, compulsion) to show off his prodigious testicles in public.
Here66 lie the roots of that other rapidly decaying chestnut – the one about comedy being the new rock and roll. It’s not just ill-informed media commentators who have tended to look to pop stars for their understanding of comedy fame. Comedians do it too. The first visible concession to celebrity made by most up-and-coming laughter-makers is to hang around with as many low-rent indie bands as possible. First Vic and Bob, then Rob Newman, then Mark Lamarr and Sean Hughes; all colonized the music-press gossip columns in the hope of discovering some kind of celebrity structure. The strange thing about this transaction is that, regardless of relative earning power, success of own TV show, etc., it still tends to be the comedians’ eyes that have stars in them.
How many of today’s comic superstars wouldn’t really – in their heart of hearts – prefer to be in a mildly successful rock group? Only a gifted psychic could answer this question. But even the fearsomely focused Eddie Izzard loses sight of the big picture when it comes to music. While Izzard’s willingness to spurn the siren lure of television has played a vital role in establishing him as most people’s idea of the coolest comedian in Britain, if there’s a chance to plug The Wasp Factory (the distinctly not-epoch-making band he manages at this juncture), he’ll be in front of the camera before you can say Andrew Loog Oldham.
Those in the know might point out that he is dating the lead singer, but that’s not all there is to this. It’s as if comedians know that however famous and successful they become, they can never have a pop star’s aura; that ability to create an event simply by their very presence.
When Newman and Baddiel finally emerge from a blizzard of hyperbole to perform to a nearly full Wembley Arena in December of 1993, there is a real sense of a big event. It comes not just from the fans, but from the other comedians in disguise checking out the lay of the land for future engagements (in fact, it is eight years before another dares to attempt it, but then both Eddie Izzard and Lee Evans carry it off in quick succession).
The show itself, with its giant video screens, motorized skateboards and ‘flying’ in a safety harness, works hard to make a virtue of its exaggerated scale. Whether or not Newman and Baddiel’s Wembley Arena performance is the logical culmination of a masterplan to take comedy to the next commercial level, or just a spectacle designed to look big on video,67 it’s certainly a lot more fun than watching them on TV. (In person, even David Baddiel’s compulsive unpleasantness becomes mildly compelling, if only in the context of more than ten thousand people considering it to be entertainment.)
The fact that not many people over twenty-five seem to find them funny makes Newman and Baddiel more interesting rather than less. And the eagerness with which the duo’s younger admirers have taken them to their hearts is not explicable solely in terms of Rob Newman’s sex-god status.
There is something very paternalistic about Newman and Bad-diel’s comedy of recognition – all the ‘you know how it feels when…’s, and the self-conscious youth-cultural name-dropping (Baddiel’s impersonation of Brett Anderson from Suede, for example, is the sort of thing you might expect from an embarrassing supply teacher who is trying too hard to be down with the kids) – and the goodwill it engenders from those a couple of steps down the age ladder is startling. Supportive whoops and cheers greet the end of each sketch, and even portentous extracts from forthcoming novels are roundly cheered.
Several of the wordier sallies seem calculated to go over people’s heads, but in some ways this is the point of them. Rob and David do not need to be as coy about their Cambridge University educations now as they would have had to have been even two or three years before.68
They can flaunt their learning safe in the knowledge that their fans want them to succeed, despite all their obvious advantages. (It’s no accident that their best-loved routine gently mocks the childishness at the heart of so much academic disputation, as the warring academics of History Today descend in the blink of an ear from the lofty heights of intellectual debate to playground taunts of ‘that’s you, that is’.) To a generation raised to see a career as an impossible dream, Newman and Baddiel offer the rare and even inspiring spectacle of young men using their educations to make a living.
Four
‘He lays himself on the line, and we’re not much used to that sort of honesty’
Sean Hughes tour programme, January 1994
There is an armchair centre-stage at Brighton’s Dome Theatre, as Sean Hughes begins a tour that will last the best part of three months. But Hughes – a rheumy-eyed Stan Laurel lookalike with an appealing London-Irish brogue – rarely sits in it, preferring to pace back and forth like an expectant father who would rather not have kept the baby.
His coat-hanger frame is slightly bent, as if his chin were glued to his left shoulder. His jokes have a twist in them, too – turning back to have a gentle smirk at themselves before the punchline is even out of sight. ‘I’m buying a house at the moment so I’ve just had a survey done: 80 per cent of people said I should go ahead’ is a line Steve Martin would not have kicked out of bed at his late-seventies peak.
As Sean forsakes the amiable Garry Shandling-inspired metatextual footling of his Sean’s Show television series for a bombardment of quick-fire gags in the style of Frank Carson, the odd cheap shot does get through. (Why waste time trying to wring laughs out of Linford Christie’s genitalia when you could just as easily join the BNP?)
Hughes’s return to comedy basics must be doubly surprising to anyone devoted enough to have stumped up five pounds for the programme, which presents him as a cardigan-clad visionary of our era. It describes Sean’s battles with Catholicism and his search for his true identity, culminating in a change of name (from John, which is not all that far from Sean, when you stop to think about it). ‘He lays himself on the line,’ apparently, ‘and we’re not much used to that sort of honesty.’
Poetry is a new direction for Sean and, judging by the reception accorded to his recent book The