Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office. Ben Thompson
from the bright new dawn of the swinging sixties to the sour fag-end of Thatcherism. At the same time, the dramatic unfolding events of the 1990s and early 2000s will be recounted – wherever possible16 – in the present tense, in the hope of capturing the immediacy with which these developments were initially experienced.
If by these means it were somehow possible to root the glorious comic legacy of this illustrious era in timeless verities of national character and cultural heritage, well, that would certainly be a goal worth aiming at. In his lofty 1946 panegyric The English Sense of Humour, Harold Nicolson describes that most oft-speculated-upon of national attributes (whose ethnic remit is, for the purpose of this volume – and in acknowledgement of the partial success of Tony Blair’s devolutionary reforms – graciously also extended to the Scots, the Welsh and even the Irish) as ‘existing at a level of consciousness between sensation and perception’.
In the hope of getting across how this idea worked, Nicolson came up with a novel illustrative formula. To approximate what he called the ‘simultaneous awareness of doubleness and singleness’ which it entailed, he invited his readers to enjoy for themselves ‘the curious sensation produced when we cross the middle finger over the index and then push the v-shaped aperture up and down the nose’.17
| Dawn of time—1990 | Pre-history |
| Summer 1990 | First series of Vic Reeves Big Night Out |
| Autumn 1990 | Margaret Thatcher resigns |
| Autumn 1991 | First series of Radio 4’s On The Hour |
| Winter 1991-2 | Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait |
| Spring 1992 | John Major leads the Tories to a fourth successive election victory |
| Autumn 1992 | Black Wednesday. Britain withdraws from the European Community Exchange Rate Mechanism in circumstances of unparalleled fiscal humiliation |
| December 1993 | Julian Clary uses the British Comedy Awards’ national live TV platform to slander former Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont in an unexpectedly amusing way. The Exchange Rate Mechanism is not mentioned |
| December 1993 | Newman and Baddiel play Wembley Arena. The Exchange Rate Mechanism is still not mentioned |
| 27 December 1993 | Shooting Stars makes its début as part of a Vic and Bob theme night on BBC2 |
| Winter 1994 | First and only series of The Day Today kick-starts the Alan Partridge small-screen parabola. Chris Morris’s sadistic studio anchor torments Patrick Marber’s hapless economics correspondent Peter O’Hanraha’ Hanrahan over his inability to fully come to terms with the Exchange Rate Mechanism |
| Spring/summer 1994 | Tired of grappling with the intricacies of European Community finance to a soundtrack of newly corporatized US grunge-rock, the British public awards itself a national holiday, as the releases of Blur’s ParkLife and Oasis’s Definitely Maybe coincide with the launch of Loaded magazine to inaugurate an era of rude patriotic vigour and unprecedented cultural self-satisfaction |
| December 1994 | Spike Milligan uses the British Comedy Awards’ national live TV platform to bad-mouth the heir to the throne in a characteristically outrageous manner |
| Spring/summer 1995 | First series of Father Ted. The word ‘Feck’ enters polite vocabulary |
| December 1995 | At the end of his Christmas Special – Knowing Me, Knowing Yule – Alan Partridge is inadvertently responsible for the death of a guest and must contemplate televisual oblivion |
| Summer 1996 | The Wembley crowd’s rendition of Baddiel, Skinner and Lightning Seeds’ maudlin Euro 96 anthem ‘Football’s Coming Home’ marks the high point of the football/comedy/pop/patriotism interface |
| August 1996 | Something wicked this way comes: first sighting of The League of Gentlemen at the Edinburgh Festival |
| 1 May 1997 | New Labour electoral landslide |
| August 1997 | Princess Diana’s death. Among the endless cultural and political ramifications of this epoch-making event, the novel David Baddiel writes about it will pass inexplicably unnoticed |
| Autumn 1997 | I’m Alan Partridge. Swimming boldly against the tide of increasing linguistic diversity, Alan stigmatizes the speech of his well-meaning Geordie retainer as ‘just noise’ |
| Summer 1998 | Frank Skinner marks the low point of the football/ill-suppressed homoerotic hysteria interface by claiming (on a World Cup edition of Fantasy Football League) to have rubbed the bulbous head of the Jules Rimet Trophy against the tip of his penis |
| 31 August 1998 | Reeves and Mortimer’s Families at War pilot picks up the baton of televisual home invasion from Noel’s House Party’s ‘NTV’, but – as if inspired by antics of UK 4 × 100m relay team – drops it before the actual series starts |
| Autumn /winter 1998 | First series of The Royle Family. In a season of good omen for comedic hyper-realism, The Johnny Vegas Television Show also makes an inspired one-off début |
| Christmas 1999 | Ali G’s Alternative Christmas Message proves the unexpected highlight of Britain’s millennium celebrations |
| Winter 2000 | First series of The League of Gentlemen. Still a year to wait until Papa Lazarou’s Pandemonium Carnival, though |
| Easter 2000 | The Royle Family’s Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash unveil their Back Passage to India. The reaction of E. M. Forster’s living relatives can only be guessed at |
| Early summer 2000 | ‘Nasty’ Nick Bateman expelled from Big Brother house for breaking ‘rules’ |
| Autumn 2000 | Brazenly unenvironmental petrol tax protests segue seamlessly but with tragic aptness into the Foot and Mouth crisis. Brass Eye’s ‘Animals’ episode proves horribly prophetic |
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