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

To make matters worse, a pair of particularly aggressive and unfunny front-row hecklers have been struggling throughout to impair everyone’s enjoyment. Early in the second half of the show, the standard stock reproaches – ‘What paper are you reviewing this for, Exchange & Mart}’ – having failed to secure the compliant silence promised by the wholesale suppliers, Paul Merton suddenly and unexpectedly loses his temper. Not just a flash of cold fury, but a full-scale, eye-popping, forehead-vein-bulge scenario, as he rounds on the would-be scene-stealers with real venom, telling them in no uncertain terms to get out of his face or to expect severe physical consequences.

There’s a moment when this confrontation could go either way, but then the disruptive elements stand up and slink off with the crowd’s jeers ringing in their ears. Merton is plainly embarrassed by his outburst, speaking shamefacedly of ‘having created a marvellous mood for comedy’, but the hecklers’ witlessness has given him something to define himself against, and from that point on, the show never looks back.

There are flashes of real verbal inspiration, but rather unexpectedly, the real highlights of the performance are moments of visual comedy which incorporate the scale and opulence of the venue. When Merton descends from the ceiling on a recalcitrant platform, or contrives an awe-inspiring reconstruction of the Dam Busters using just six fluffy rabbits, you can almost feel the old place relaxing.

Watching Merton present his BBC1 history of the London Palladium (timed, with that rather wearying synchronicity which is such a hallmark of the nineties comedian, to coincide with his shows there), nodding with exaggerated reverence at the feet of great ventriloquists and strong men, some words commonly attributed to the great curmudgeon Alexei Sayle spring to mind. These words are roughly to the effect that the reason music-hall (which bears the same relation to variety as rhythm and blues did to rock and roll: it was fundamentally the same, it just happened first) died out in the first place was that it was rubbish.

The moral force of this statement does not come so much from disrespect for such great acts of yesteryear as Arthur Henderson and His Dancing Combs, as an understanding of the basic principles of evolution. Appreciating the amusing things dinosaurs used to do with their tails should not stop us acknowledging the fact that they are unlikely to stage a successful comeback.

So when, in 1994, the Perrier Award goes to unknown (and horribly unfunny) Australian duo Lano and Woodley for their ‘classical clowning’ and people who think this is a good thing say that variety is coming back and it’s good to see comedy rediscovering its music-hall roots, something is rotten in the state of Edinburgh. Certainly there are very few things more boring than bad stand-up, but one of them is bad variety.

What’s more, comedy has already rediscovered its music-hall roots, and in ways that this brace of Antipodean chancers whose act has its origins in a field of human endeavour whose name must never be spoken (it begins with an ‘m’ and rhymes with ‘crime’) can scarcely even conceive of.

The uncritical embrace of pratfalls and arm-waving is one thing,but comedy which takes into account the reality of the culture it comes from is quite another. When Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer reopened the lines of communication between comedy and vaudeville in the late eighties, they did so in a way that reflected the changes in our entertainment landscape. And most of those who follow through the old showbiz-shaped breach Reeves and Mortimer had made in the national subconscious – Tommy ‘Great days, great days’ Cockles, John Shuttleworth with his Yamaha organ and sole agent Ken Worthington, twenty-year-old Matt Lucas and his monstrous theatrical creation Sir Bernard Chumley – add at least a twist of their own to such blue-plaque heritage source material.

But a passing reacquaintance with the legends of showbiz antiquity will not, in itself, be enough to sustain the comedy newcomer of the nineties. A supplementary form of iconic nutrition is going to be required.

At this point in our story, a grisly shadow is waiting in the wings. It’s one we have done well to ignore until now, but the time has come to call it out into the open.

Three. That whole ‘comedy is the new rock ‘n’ roll’ farrago

It’s not just onstage that the comedian’s ever-increasing 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.

Here

(#litres_trial_promo) 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,

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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 Grey Area – which has sold 20,000 copies in hardback alone – a successful one. But that doesn’t mean he is any good at it. In fact, as a writer of verse (and later prose), Sean Hughes has a seemingly unattainable ambition: to make Sandi Toksvig look like a significant literary figure.

How can someone be so perceptive one minute and so totally blind to their own limitations the next? In the broader show-business world, this is known as the Clive James Conundrum.

Taking yourself too seriously is a common flaw among comedians. It only becomes a real problem when it makes you hate your audience. Hughes once threatened to play over-eighteens’ venues only – on tonight’s evidence, he would need to book a bus shelter if he did – and yet at this point seems to maintain an easy, avuncular rapport with his much younger fans.

There’s no reason why he shouldn’t, either, as teenage self-absorption is his major comic staple anyway.

(#litres_trial_promo) And the extension of adolescence from a seven- to a twenty-year span which mysteriously takes place at some point around the turn of the decade

(#litres_trial_promo) only renders Hughes’s distinctive brand of late-twenties bachelor angst (‘How am I ever going to have a kid when I still wake up in the foetal position?’) all the more à la mode.

A year or so later at the London Comedy Festival, however, things seem to have gone a bit sour. Hughes looks increasingly uncomfortable with the tender years of his constituency. His attitude at times seems almost disdainful, as he veers uneasily between talking down to his audience (heaven preserve us from bad impersonations of Damon Albarn – the real thing is difficult enough to cope with) and going wilfully over their heads. One Winston Churchill and Nancy Astor reference is so reluctant to give itself up that a passing police detective inspector has to be called in to talk it down off the roof.

What makes Hughes’s increasingly compulsive underachievement so frustrating is that at his funniest – dissecting dysfunctional family relationships or Dublin lounge décor, for example – he is a truly challenging performer. He has a real talent for undermining the assumptions of shared experience on which so much second-rate comedy is based. ‘Did you ever do that thing’, he asks at one point, in the casual vernacular of a thousand arrested-adolescence nostalgia gags, ‘of feigning serious injury when your dad hit you?’

In happy contrast to Hughes’s ever grouchier generational rank-pulling, Lee and Herring – the mid-nineties’ fifth-form (or even year 10) comedians of choice – prefer to make the most of the youth and supposed impressionability of their target audience.

(#litres_trial_promo) In the course of three series of their Fist of Fun Radio 1 show (one of the few artistic successes of the early years of Matthew Bannister’s regime at what was then Britain’s most-listened-to radio station),

(#litres_trial_promo) this mischievous double act develop a uniquely participatory style of comedy which involves mobilizing listeners en masse to scour the UK for the charity event that raises the least money.

‘The Lee and Herring child army’ – Fist of Fun’s core audience of young people with time on their hands – are also encouraged to deluge unsuspecting local radio personalities with sacks of motiveless fan mail. So how do the twenty-seven-year-old generals of this deadly teenage guerilla force think their footsoldiers feel about them?

‘We’ve got some stalwart fans who are impressed by us,’ insists Richard Herring proudly, ‘but not all that many of them…Mostly, we send people stuff we’ve got lying around in the office and they write back in a slightly ironic way and say, “Oh thanks – I’ve got a piece of rubbish that you’ve touched”.’

Five. Bill Hicks in the afterlife, a.k.a. that whole ‘comedian as martyr’ delusion