Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office. Ben Thompson
(every comedy professional’s favourite aftershave) and demonstrates – once and for all – to your parents and peers that you have made something of yourself. On the downside, if it’s going to be done properly, it involves long months – and ideally years – of solitary toil, with very few breaks for everyone to gather around and tell you how talented you are.
Ben Elton has cunningly circumnavigated this problem by designing a computer program which enables you to write a ‘novel’ in three and a half hours, with the help of a copy of the Mail on Sunday and a specially trained marmoset. But for those of his profession who are too conscientious to use this demonic piece of software, there are still, it seems, almost insurmountable obstacles to be overcome.
Sometimes, people who work in the publishing industry get together over a frugal lunch of dry crackers and Sunny D to discuss what their reaction would be if a comedy agent ever approached them to see if they were interested in a client’s forthcoming fictional endeavour, and then revealed that the comedian concerned was planning to actually complete the book before signing the big money deal. All are agreed that they would be very surprised.
In short, trying to get a comedian to go about writing a novel in the right spirit of speculative humility is like using a teasmade to make toast. It’s just not something their mental circuits are wired up for.
At this point, the example of Rob Newman modestly presents itself.
‘It’s good to see a graduate making something of himself for a change,’ observes a rough and ready individual in the queue for complimentary tickets outside the Royal Festival Hall in October 1994. ‘Normally they just do fuck all and live off the state.’
The most interesting thing about Newman and Baddiel as a double act (which continues to be interesting about them long after their ways have parted) is that they have never been ashamed to wear their educations on their sleeves in front of a mass audience (Gary Bushell is in the audience tonight, and it takes a powerful cultural force to get him into the Royal Festival Hall).
In this context, writing a novel was the perfect next step for Robert (né Rob) Newman. While his debut literary effort, Dependence Day, is never going to be taught in schools, it’s not nearly as embarrassing as his detractors might have wished it. And if, in Newman’s attempt to cultivate a literary mien on a promotional budget of Naomi Campbell proportions, there is a hint of having his cake and eating it, well, what would you want to do with a cake other than to eat it?
There is a slightly awkward moment just before he dances onstage at the South Bank, however, when it looks as if the scrum of people trying to get autographs from his former comedy partner (now in the audience) aren’t going to sit down in time. But as soon as they do, it quickly becomes clear that Newman’s gone-to-bed eyes have not lost the power to bore into young women’s—uh—hearts. Few other performers in the distinguished history of this venue can have had ‘There’s a bra on the stage for you’ shouted at them.
Everything seems to be in place for the whole enterprise to be a huge success before it even starts – the launch party for the video of the show will take place immediately afterwards – and that, in terms of Newman’s attempt to rebrand himself as a literary figure, is really the problem. The dividing line between a recycled stand-up set, supposedly spontaneous chat-show patter and long-labouredover literary conceit is simply not clear enough. The temptation to drift from one to the other just seems too strong for the star of tonight’s show to resist.80
When Newman repeats a routine that he did, pretty much word for word, on The Danny Baker Show the Saturday before [historical note: for a brief period in the mid-1990s, Danny Baker had his own chat show on BBC1], there is some uneasy shifting in the crowd. It’s a typically convoluted flight of fancy (at least I hope it’s a flight of fancy) about walking the streets of London as a woman in order to write a book about it. This story deconstructs itself so thoroughly that by the end virtually nothing remains, and the audience is left with the sort of profound feeling of dissatisfaction which will be familiar to anyone who has read Eric Morecambe’s Mr Lonely.
Morecambe’s novel – first published in 1979 – is the story of Sid Lewis, a popular northern comedian ‘whose Christmas shows are watched by thirty five million people’. Its cover is illustrated with a photo of someone who is presumably meant to be Sid, holding his NHS specs in a disturbingly Eric Morecambe-like manner. Its contents will come as a rude shock to anyone who thought the novel-as-thinly-veiled-semi-autobiographical-vanityproject was a cultural innovation of the 1990s.
Mr Lonely’s hero – a none too subtle amalgam of Morecambe himself and his own inspiration, Birmingham comedy legend Sid Field – has ‘the gentle approach of the late Arthur Haynes, yet, at times, the coarseness and strength of Jimmy Wheeler’. Only the book’s absurd ending strikes a perversely resonant note (if anyone is reading it currently, please look away, as the surprise is about to be ruined) when disaster strikes for the unfortunate Mr Lewis at his moment of ultimate validation. Making a drunken but triumphant exit from the big showbiz award ceremony which has just proclaimed him the people’s favourite light entertainer, he is involved in a fatal collision with a skidding taxi and impaled on his own newly won trophy.81
3. The Edinburgh Festival: Homage to Caledonia
‘It’s like a Butlins for comedians’
Addison Cresswell
The Edinburgh Festival’s Perrier Award is sometimes dubbed ‘The Comedy Oscar’—perhaps because the people who deserve to win one don’t always seem to do so. But behind the annual carbonated product-placement hoopla lurks a unique and fascinating institution, where creative and not-so-creative currents come together in a manner reminiscent of the different tidal streams merging beneath southern Africa’s Cape Point.
On the one hand there is a prodigious bacchanal – ‘It’s like a Butlins for comedians,’ exults Addison Cresswell. ‘Three weeks with your own people!’ – degenerate enough to make even the diehard hedonists of the rock ‘n’ roll circuit jealous. To those in that decadent sphere who have never experienced it, you might say: ‘Imagine if Glastonbury lasted a month…And it was indoors. With no Healing Field.’
At the same time, the Edinburgh Festival also provides an unprecedented opportunity for career advancement. Highly polished London club sets which no one might see in a year will suddenly be scrutinized by every parasite in the sordid world of TV production – up north on expenses to pay their annual homage to Caledonia. This unique compression of the national media also offers immense creative possibilities to those who are bold enough to take them.
Steve Coogan is happy to admit to ‘quite cynically using Edinburgh as a showcase’ for his Patrick Marber-assisted change of direction, when winning the Perrier Award in 1992. But for others whose talents would prove less easily susceptible to commercial application, the festival’s semi-captive audience makes it the ideal arena in which to try to imagine themselves a career in the most creative way possible.82
Those who were lucky enough to experience the full-scale Cecil B. De Mille version of Simon Munnery’s Nietzschean cabaret Club Zarathustra in August 1996 – a show dedicated to the cause of insulting not so much its audience’s intelligence as the very fibre of their being – will never forget the majesty of what they saw.83 The yoke of shame lying upon the shoulders of whichever Channel 4 executive it was who decided not to commission a series from the TV pilot which ensued will be just as hard to shake off.84
By throwing together performers and audience in a confined space in an atmosphere of barely suppressed hysteria, the Edinburgh Festival churns up some fascinating etiquette quandaries, such as how to behave when the person who elbows you sharply to one side in their eagerness to get to the bar turns