Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office

It is in one of Lee’s solo routines that the work of the School of Linguistic Exactitude finds arguably its most complete expression. Billing himself as ‘the third most theoretically rigorous comedian in Britain’ (heaven knows who numbers one and two are), he analyses the body language of a picture postcard featuring two kittens and a dog playing the piano. ‘Perhaps’, he surmises, ‘that kitten had a much more formal musical training.’

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the On The Hour barricades, the Coogan-Marber relationship finds another vehicle for self-exploration (as if Knowing Me, Knowing You was not sufficient outlet) in the form of Paul and Pauline, a.k.a The Sacred Calfs. It is a measure of Marber’s moderating influence on Coogan’s occasional cheeseball tendencies that when the duo first met, the latter was already doing a Paul Calf-type character, but at that stage he was called ‘Duncan Disorderly’.

Leading psychoanalysts have inevitably looked to Coogan’s childhood for the roots of the meticulously observed Mancunian brother and sister – he the hard-drinking, student-phobic City fan, she the indomitable slapper – who would eventually become Alan Partridge’s main rivals in his character pantheon. Coogan himself has done nothing to dissuade them: ‘Do you remember those football colouring books?’ he asks in 1995. ‘I remember colouring in George Best and Bobby Charlton and then getting to the Manchester City players and putting lipstick and earrings on them to make them look like girls.’

The way the characters actually develop (Paul having made his TV début on a show Coogan recorded for Granada with John Thomson and Caroline Aherne) is defined by Jonathan Ross’s Saturday Zoo, where Coogan, Marber and soon to be Fast Show luminary Simon Day are employed to be ‘sketch actors’. Having had a sketch cut in the first week, ‘because it was crap’, and seen Marber summarily fired (though retained by him in a vague directorial capacity) Coogan decides to go ‘for his big gun’.

‘There was no intention of having Paul Calf on Saturday Zoo at first,’ Marber remembers. ‘Steve was saving him for his own special.’ After a few weeks, when the rough-as-dogs-and-proud-of-it Calf is obviously going down a storm, his shy and retiring sister Pauline follows him into the spotlight. However happy – ‘disturbingly sexy’ even, in Marber’s words – he ultimately looks as Pauline Calf, Coogan still ‘takes some persuading’ that this is the right direction for him to move in on TV. ‘It’ll work,’ Marber remembers himself arguing. ‘You can be a woman.’

With her dirty laugh and all-consuming desire to have sex with Patrick Swayze, Pauline is a comic creation so exuberant that she positively juts out of the screen. ‘Tits first,’ she counsels potential suitors, ‘I’m not a slag.’

The relationship between her gruffly genial philistine of a brother and his slightly pretentious but basically well-meaning student friend Roland – played, with a suitably apologetic air, by Marber – is such an inch-perfect representation of the class-based complexities of the Coogan-Marber friendship (with both parties moved one rung down the social ladder) that when Pauline and Roland tie the knot, well, it’s almost too perfect.

One of the most significant if rarely remembered segments of The Day Today (in fact, with hindsight you might say that it sets the pattern for most of the next decade’s most popular and influential shows) is ‘The Bureau’, a pioneering docusoap-style minidrama set in the emotionally overheated surroundings of a tiny bureau de change. Paul and Pauline Calf pick up this prophetic marker and their subsequent starring vehicles – a Video Diary and the aforementioned Wedding Video respectively—prove to be the ideal means for Coogan and co-writers Marber and Henry Normal to explore the nascent phenomenon of reality TV.

(#litres_trial_promo)

Even in its formative Video Diary stage, what people will one day call Factual Entertainment Programming is already having an invigorating effect on the schedules. Watching someone you don’t know moaning about the day they’ve had for a couple of minutes before Newsnight can be informative as well as therapeutic. And even if sometimes it’s neither, well, maybe the tedium is the message.

As if appreciating this, Coogan and co.’s use of the video-diary format is all the more deft for not being explicitly satirical. They opt instead to exploit the medium’s huge potential for richness of character development and well-observed detail (Paul Calf’s diagonally striped sheet and duvet set springs to mind) to reflect the way the ever-increasing likelihood of seeing our lives replayed on the small screen might change the way we live them.

Last but definitely not least among The Day Today diaspora, how does Chris Morris, the Dark Lord Sauron of the On The Hour saga, fare out on his own in the world? Having already emphasized the self-contained nature of his contribution by letting the surviving cast members make Knowing Me, Knowing You without him, it’s no surprise that he continues to plough his own furrow with singular intensity.

The development of what tomorrow’s media-studies students will no doubt refer to as The Chris Morris Method – cloaking oneself in the robes of broadcasting authority, then leading unwitting accomplices into a nightmare world of absurdist humiliation – continues at breakneck pace.

‘The first thing you do is try and decontextualize everything so you make nonsense,’ observes the usually reclusive Morris in the aforementioned Independent on Sunday interview. ‘But then I just started thinking it would be a bit more of a challenge to get people to talk this rubbish without actually editing…The risk of somebody just saying “You’re talking bollocks” is huge…but it really gets your adrenalin going.’

While Morris’s quest for new stimuli to his adrenal gland will lead him down ever more dangerous pathways – not least shouting ‘Christ’s fat cock’ at Cliff Richard and announcing the death of a still very much alive Michael Heseltine on his understandably short-lived Radio 1 show – his most significant moment prior to the protracted unveiling of Brass Eye in 1996-7 comes in a much more low-key setting. The five ten-minute interviews Morris records with an ailing Peter Cook under the rather off-putting title of Why Bother? sidle on to the Radio 4 airwaves with a minimum of fuss in 1994, but they contain some of the finest work either man has ever produced.

These almost entirely improvised encounters between Morris (in his cocksure interviewer guise) and Cook’s patrician alter ego Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling work brilliantly on several different levels: as a clash of comedy titans, a passing on of the baton and a strangely touching farewell. ‘The next time we’ll want to interview you,’ Morris snarls with a superficial abruptness which stomps off around the houses and comes back as tender regret, ‘you’ll probably be dead.’

There’s often an edge of sadism to the Chris Morris Method: ‘If somebody knows there’s something awful going on but doesn’t know how to escape and is constricted from doing so by good manners,’ he has been heard to exult, ‘it degenerates into a siege, whereby you fling ghastly suggestion after ghastly suggestion at them.’ When Morris is pitted against a worthy adversary such as Cook, however, real fireworks can result. Listening to this sublimely well-matched pairing discuss the discovery of a fossilized nine-month-old Christ, it is sometimes hard to believe what you are hearing.

As Streeb-Greebling dissembles magisterially in response to Morris’s increasingly malign sallies – ‘I’ve been distorted, I’ve been misrepresented and I’ve been quoted accurately, which is worst of all’ – deeper historical connections between the generations begin to reveal themselves. Literally minutes of innocent amusement can be had from assigning each of On The Hour’s leading lights to a suitable counterpart from the early sixties satire boom. (Morris is Cook, Coogan is Dudley Moore, Marber is Jonathan Miller, Iannucci is David Frost and…Oh dear Lord, please make it stop.)

Still more intriguingly, the overweening arrogance of Morris’s preening media archetype actually has its roots in Cook and co.’s pioneering experiment with irreverence. That supercilious, know-it-all demeanour – you might call it the all-seeing sneer – so prevalent in the British media of the late twentieth century, from the Guardian’s ‘Pass Notes’ column to Kirsty Wark’s attitude to the arts, was originally defined by that first wave of bold young satirists, tweaking the nose of the early sixties powers that were.

Who was notorious That Was The Week That Was provocateur Bernard Levin (being rude to diplomats or addressing an audience of farmers as ‘peasants’), if not the spiritual father of Morris’s Day Today anchorman? And once the traditions of social and political deference which so deadened British cultural life prior to the sixties had been broken down, what was to stop those who had achieved that goal becoming a new ruling class, every bit as entrenched and invulnerable as their predecessors?

By a choice irony, the satirists themselves were among the first to notice this happening. Especially when pop’s unwashed hordes – The Beatles, David Bailey, Jean Shrimpton, people who hadn’t evenbeen to university – barged rudely through behind them, widening the modest breach they’d made in the walls of public propriety into a yawning chasm, and treading on quite a few elegantly shod toes in the process. In his impassioned 1969 tract The Neophiliacs, Private Eye founder Christopher Booker fulminated loud and long against ‘this new aristocracy’ of ‘photographers, dress-designers and Beat Musicians’, which was a bit like a former member of The Clash writing a book about the pernicious impact of Two Tone.

Whether the graduates of the New School of Linguistic Exactitude will ever have cause to make similarly curmudgeonly expressions of regret about those who follow in their wake, only time will tell. One thing that is certain is that the Cook-Frost generation had to stretch their own canvases. Away from the rarefied world of groundbreaking BBC satire, the comedians of the nineties work in a white space of pretty much unrestricted magnitude. And liberty on such a grand scale can sometimes be its own limitation.

4 The Great Mythological Armour Shortage of 1993-4 (#ulink_53f4b43f-7076-5d49-85bb-07092dc3a9f9)

Parts One to Five

One

‘Comedy naturally wears itself out – destroys the very food on which it lives’

William Hazlitt

What must it feel like to be a comedian on national television telling a joke which you know that not all, but a good proportion of the audience will have heard before? Not just because it’s an old joke – after all, jokes, like tunes, are something there can only be a certain number of – but because you yourself told it on a different show a couple of weeks previously. Maybe twice.

Paul Merton is on Des O’Connor’s couch in the autumn of 1993. For many comics, Des is the perfect foil – not so much a sympathetic interrogator as a craven one – but the antagonism upon which Merton thrives is not a part of his repertoire. So Merton is telling the joke about someone going into a newsagent’s and asking if they’ve got a copy of Psychic News. The punchline – ‘You tell me’ – has already been a palpable hit on Have I Got News for You, on Merton’s own television show and throughout his successful live tour.

But this evening Merton doesn’t look as if he has the stomach for the delivery. Trying to say the line as if it’s just come to him seems to be making him miserable. Not showbiz Paul Merton miserable – grouchy, curmudgeonly and all those other ‘-lys’ that make him so entertaining on the radio – just the plain, common or garden kind. He forces the punchline out eventually, but his body seems to be trying to stop him. The message in his eyes reads: ‘Why me?’

This might not have been exactly what William Hazlitt, the nineteenth-century stand-up essayist, meant when he wrote: ‘Comedy naturally wears itself out – destroys the very food on which it lives’, but the point still stands. When the occupation of ‘joke-teller’ was on a par with, say, ‘juggler’ or ‘optometrist’ in terms of social significance, the issue was simple: the only imperative in the recycling of your own or other people’s material was not to get caught.

There is a perfecdy respectable comic tradition of unapologetic repetition.

(#litres_trial_promo) It dates back beyond Morecambe and Wise (who learned their trade in the variety halls at a time when ‘an original joke was a rare treat’) to Sigmund Freud, who was so sympathetic to the old joke transaction that he even designed an equation to represent it in a therapeutic light.

(#litres_trial_promo)

For the new breed of TV-career-driven, magazine-cover, advert-icon comedians which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, things were much more complicated. The same medium that brought them success changed the very nature of their calling.

Everybody thinks of comedy as essentially a ‘live’ phenomenon, but all too often seeing favourite performers in the flesh is now less of an experience than seeing them on television. You’ve seen the show, you’ve heard the jokes, now shell out to experience them all over again without being able to make yourself a cup of tea. And then buy the live video.

An unprecedentedly large phalanx of big-name, alternative-gone-mainstream comedians set off around the Civics and Regals of the land in the autumn of 1993. In Paul Merton’s footsteps followed Steve Coogan, Lenny Henry, Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson, Ben Elton, Jack Dee, Newman and Baddiel. All had to face the recycling dilemma, and it wouldn’t really be fair to blame them for taking the easy way out. They are, after all, only human.

New material takes months to write. And comedy agents are renowned for their heroic efforts to make boxing promoters look scrupulous, forcing wet-behind-the-ears comedy novices out on two-hundred-date tours before they’ve had a chance to drink their Perrier Awards.

The mass live audience which television brings makes different demands anyway; if you don’t recycle your greatest hits onstage, you might get lynched. It must be a bizarre and perversely unsettling sensation for those who learned their trade fighting for survival on small stages in front of demanding crowds, to find themselves suddenly in front of several thousand people and able to do no wrong. The air of unreality which so often hangs over large-scale live comedy events stems from the 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’.

(#litres_trial_promo)

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.

(#litres_trial_promo)

‘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,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.