Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office. Ben Thompson
wary acknowledgements. They do this in the manner of two jungle creatures who don’t explicitly eat each other, but who feel they have to be wary just in case the other one decides to give it a try.
‘You never quite know what to say to them,’ Vic observes afterwards of these chance meetings with his comedy peers and fellow PBJ clients. ‘It’s like the office above the shopfloor where people from various departments bump into each other.’ The idea that they might have a workplace culture of their own is one which takes a bit of getting used to for nineties comedians, most of whom probably grew up in times when the phrase ‘a proper job’ still meant something.
The secret of PBJ’s success – and with a client list including Rowan Atkinson, Lenny Henry and Harry Enfield from the alternative ancien régime, and Vic and Bob, Chris Morris and Eddie Izzard from the next generation, they must be doing something right seems to lie in offering a respite from the relentless push and pull of the comedy marketplace. In contrast to the sharp-suited hustle and bustle of the other two main agencies, PBJ founder Peter Bennett-Jones cultivates the aura of a mildly eccentric English gentleman. And in so far as the enterprise which shares his initials has a mythology, it’s for not having one.
‘Peter had been looking after Rowan [Atkinson] for a couple of years,’ remembers Caroline Chignell of the late-eighties expansion which brought her into the company. ‘There was a real sense of a next generation coming through, but unless we had some kind of definite structure, no one would want to join us.’ She had been out on the road promoting a tour with Harry Enfield when Bennett-Jones asked her to join him. When she expressed doubts about whether she had what it took to make it in comedy management, he described the key attribute necessary as ‘a sense of fair play’, which would probably be some distance away from most people’s best guess, sine qua wow-wise.
‘I’m probably not like most agents,’ she admits apologetically, ‘in that I don’t tend to shout and scream, and I’m not particularly rude. My idea of a good deal is one that gets the best for your client but also makes the person who’s paying you want to come back for more – as that’s the only way you can take other people forward with you in the relationship.’
While this softly-softly approach might sound a bit dull compared with the more frontiersmanlike approach of PBJ’s rival agencies, it’s worth remembering that it’s helped nurture some of the most extreme TV comedy ever produced in this country – from The Day Today and Brass Eye to The League of Gentlemen (who join PBJ after the Edinburgh Festival in 1996). ‘We actively encourage people to take as much time as possible to get things right,’ insists Chiggy, ‘but we are at the behest of the clients. If they turn around and say we need to make some money because we’ve got an enormous tax bill or an expensive divorce to pay for – which does happen sometimes – then there’s not really very much we can do about it.’
2. Diversification
There are two main forms of creative diversification available to the modern comedian, and these will be addressed in, alphabetical order.
(a) Acting
As beguiling as Addison Cresswell’s vision (outlined at the end of chapter 2) of a plague of would-be thespians diminishing the purity of the comedic bloodline undoubtedly is, it is not strictly accurate. For one thing, there is a perfectly respectable tradition of successful comedic career cross-overs. It dates back to Queen Elizabeth l’s favourite jester Dick Tarleton (who moonlighted as a comic actor at James Burbage’s theatre in Shoreditch) and forward to Max Wall’s inspired inhabitation of the plays of Samuel Beckett and Les Dawson’s unforgettable 1990 appearance in La Nona, a thought-provoking TV film (based on an allegorical Argentinian novel of the same title) about a hundred-year-old woman so greedy that she eats her family’s furniture.
Comedians – like rappers – often make very good actors, because their day-job already entails presenting an idealized version of themselves. In the aforementioned Wall and Dawson examples, the genius of the casting was that it referred to attributes they already had – in the former’s case, a certain stone-faced stoicism; in the latter’s, a penchant for appearing in public dressed as a lady and a well-established liking for his dinners – while taking them to places they would never have gone of their own accord.
The challenge for a later generation – constantly besieged as they are by casting agents trying to pep up their callback lists – is to get the balance exactly right between something they are already and something that they definitely aren’t. In the case of Cresswell’s client Lee Evans, this means parlaying his bumbling stage act into a crisply marketable international big-screen persona. In the light of the rejection letter from Opportunity Knocks (which as far as starting at the bottom goes, just about takes the cake) thoughtfully reprinted in the programme for Lee Evans’s West End run at the Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue in 1995, the effective and occasionally inspired big-screen performances Evans delivers in Peter Chesholm’s Funny Bones, the excellent Mouse Hunt and There’s Something About Mary – one of the biggest (and best) Hollywood comedies of the decade – must surely rank as game-raising of the very highest order.78
The comic/thespian transition does not go as smoothly for everyone.79 But for those who realize that there’s more to establishing your dramatic credentials than doing a couple of months in Art, acting can provide an outside chance of creative rehabilitation, even for those who seem wholly out of the running.
Take Paul Kaye, for example. Just when the damage his celebrity-stalker persona Dennis Pennis had done to standards of behaviour in British public life might seem to have rendered him utterly beyond the pale of respectable society, along comes BBC1’s Friday-night drama Two Thousand Acres Of Sky. In which, by exploiting his eerie resemblance to Marilyn Manson to superbly benign effect as the philosophically inclined new-age wastrel Kenny, Kaye secures an unexpected but entirely heartwarming form of redemption (as well as a series of Woolworths ads and his own entertaining game show).
As for those thespian wannabes so rudely fingered by Addison Cresswell, the case of Steve Coogan’s acting career is a complicated one, which will be dealt with in the fullness of time. As for Alan Davies, after a couple of false starts – notably that thing where he plays a disillusioned timeshare salesman sending home video postcards about his romantic conquests – his performances in Jonathan Creek and especially Bob and Rose eventually mark him out as a first-class comic (and even straight, dramatic) actor.
There is a clip of the younger Davies which always inspires high levels of hilarity when it gets shown on Before They Were Famous programmes. It’s an embarrassing ‘experimental’ student film he made while wearing a long Echo and the Bunnymen-style raincoat. And when you stop and think about what happened to the artistic aspirations of the mid-eighties as they were passed through the mangle of Thatcherite enterprise culture, it is hard to suppress a wry chuckle.
When the acting jobs didn’t come through straight away on first leaving drama college, Davies followed Norman Tebbitt’s advice, got on his bike and looked for work as a stand-up comedian, subsequently earning six-figure sums by making adverts depicting the Abbey National building society as a safe haven from the rigours of capitalism. In this context, the words ‘because life’s complicated enough’ could hardly be more apt.
(b) Writing novels
There is an honourable tradition of comedian turned novelist, too. Yet while it would be quicker to name the nineties comedians who haven’t had novels published than the ones who have, if you were to ask yourself if any of them have written a book anywhere near as wild and personal as Spike Milligan’s Puckoon (which, by some strange and gratifying quirk of popular taste, has somehow sold several million copies) or as grainily insightful as Les Dawson’s A Card for the Clubs, you would have to conclude – regretfully – that they have not.
It