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

As Bob Hope was to Bob Monkhouse, as Mort Sahl and Tom Lehrer and Lenny Bruce were to the Beyond The Fringe generation (i.e. both icons of American otherness, and an object lesson in just how much might be achieved by British comedians who were willing to study them hard enough), so were Denis Leary and Bill Hicks to the people who saw them at the Edinburgh Festival in 1990-1.

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There were some similarities between the two – both were gravel-dry iconoclasts with beguilingly rough-and-tumble sensibilities – but a fairly general feeling prevailed that had Hicks not hit the ground running first with the cancer material, Leary might have thought twice about following him out of the low-flying helicopter. And even while Hicks was still alive, some people were buffing up a pernicious duality.

Hicks, the story went, was chiselling nobly away at a Platonic ideal of comic integrity, while Leary was ‘just an opportunist’ (like that’s not what all comedians are meant to be). And then, a few years afterwards, Bill Hicks died. Which was tragic. Worse still – in terms of his subsequent apotheosis by comedians (and indie bands) in search of a higher purpose – he died at approximately the same age as Jesus. Denis Leary, meanwhile, bought shares in the MTV version of himself, made some OK films and was seen about town with Liz Hurley a lot.

In a year (1994) when death cast an abnormally long shadow over what are sometimes called the lively arts, Hicks – with River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain – made up a trio of prematurely departed icons who proved that whatever else you might think of the Grim Reaper, he certainly has taste. Their passing left a spiritual hole in the middle of each of their respective fields that was too big to walk around.

While for both Cobain and Phoenix the end was – purposely or otherwise – self-administered, Hicks was different. His act celebrated hedonism; he spoke out in favour of recreational drug use and was a fanatical defender of the right to smoke. Early on in his career, his profligate lifestyle seemed to court the kind of excess-fuelled, rock-star-style premature death which eventually befell his fellow Texan ‘outlaw comic’ Sam Kinison. Yet he finally died of natural causes in the ugly form of pancreatic cancer, having long since given up not only drink and drugs but cigarettes too.

‘The comic is a flame – like Shiva the destroyer,’ Hicks had told the New Yorker critic John Lahr (the same man who made such a meal out of not getting Reeves and Mortimer) in a rather vainglorious moment in 1992. ‘He keeps cutting everything back to the moment.’

Comics are so much of the moment that it is difficult enough to capture what is good about them on TV when they are alive, and harder still for them to sustain an afterlife. Even when they do – as, say, Lenny Bruce has – anyone who didn’t see them perform will often find it hard to remember what was funny about them.

The only hope, as so often, lies in commercial exploitation. ‘It’s Just a Ride’, the tribute film which makes up the first part of the hastily patched-together Channel 4 video Totally Bill Hicks, offers some fascinating insights into Hicks’s life and work. There are revealing interviews with his parents—God-fearing Southerners who ‘couldn’t understand why Bill used the f-word so much’ – and with the geeky friends with whom he used to sneak off to perform at a rough-and-tumble Houston comedy club at the tender age of fifteen.

The affection and envy mingling in the eyes of his fellow professionals speaks volumes about Hicks’s talents (comedians are competitive people after all, not usually given to abasing themselves at the feet of their peers). Eddie Izzard and Sean Hughes represent Hicks’s UK fan club – it could just as easily have been any number of other people – but the most illuminating insight comes from the American comedian, Brett Butler. Hicks’s treacle-voiced fellow Southerner, star of Channel 4’s Grace Under Fire (which was quite funny for a while, until it got all syrupy), observes astutely that ‘For all the talk about Bill being like Hendrix or Dylan or Jim Morrison, it was Jesus he wanted to be’.

These Messianic tendencies are all too apparent as Hicks emerges from tongues of fire on to the Dominion Theatre stage on the last night of his 1992 Revelations tour. But it’s the ordinariness of his appearance which is striking once he’s taken his cowboy hat off – slicked-back hair, button eyes, face like a potato in a stocking – and which throws the brilliance of his performance into even sharper relief.

Bill Hicks’s command of the stage and of his material is so complete that it sometimes seems like he’s using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, even when he isn’t. His intensity – especially when personifying his own libido as the demonic Goat-boy (motto: ‘Let me wear you like a feed bag’) – is almost frightening. Like the preacher he often fancied himself to be, Hicks could be self-righteous and he could hector, but he could also be devastating.

‘Ever noticed’, he muses, ‘how creationists look really unevolved?’ The industrial-strength sarcasm which went down so well in Britain sometimes landed him in trouble in his less sarcastically minded homeland, especially when applied to such notoriously humour-resistant targets as fundamentalist Christianity. In October 1993, when Hicks turned his scorn on anti-abortionists in a routine being recorded for The David Letterman Show—‘These pro-lifers…You ever look at their faces?…[screws up face and assumes bitter, pinched voice] “I’m pro-life”…Boy, they look it, don’t they?’—he became too hot for even the supposedly cutting-edge Letterman to handle.

The fact that the cancelled slot had been recorded in the same theatre where Elvis’s rotating pelvis was deemed unsuitable for The Ed Sullivan Show did nothing to lessen its mythic significance. And when the ensuing censorship furore spurred Hicks on through the rigours of chemotherapy to a final epic bout of creativity – ‘It was like Bill to the tenth power,’ said friend and producer Kevin Booth. ‘He couldn’t be involved in any kind of mundane situation for even a second’ – the foundations of his martyr cult were firmly in place.

It does not diminish what was special about Bill Hicks (in fact it rather underlines it) to say that comedians, as a rule, are meant to be involved in mundane situations. That is what encourages them to think up funny things to say.

‘Two options are open to him,’ Harry Secombe wrote of the aspiring laughter-maker in his preface to Roger Wilmut’s Tony Hancock: Artiste: ‘either he gives them [the crowd] what he wants, or he provides them with what they want. If he takes up the former he is liable to finish up returning to the rice pudding factory from which Hughie Green plucked him.’

You don’t have to subscribe fully to this extreme mechanistic view of the comedian’s proper relationship with his or her audience (after all, as Vic and Bob have shown us, many of their art form’s richest possibilities are bound up in the utter bemusement and confounding of the paying customer) to think that the whole Shiva the Destroyer thing is a bit of a blind alley.

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What the legend of Bill Hicks offers is an excess of mythological armour. And, just as later English monarchs would struggle with the weighty chain-mail of Richard the Lionheart, so other comedians who tried to put on Bill’s heavy suit would generally end up blundering around, bumping into the antique furniture. Take Rob Newman, for instance, cruelly sustained by Hicksian example in the delusion that his post-Newman-and-Baddiel career was actually a heroic one-man struggle against the evils of capitalism.

Denis Leary meanwhile – blessed by destiny with the chance to go on living, with all the failures and compromises that entails – has had a different kind of afterlife. While the bones of Hicks’s ceuvre have subsequently been picked clean by well-meaning vultures, and the endless slew of commemorative videos and live CDs have inevitably become subject to the law of diminishing returns, Leary’s 1992 A&M album, No Cure For Cancer, now stands – from its savage assault on the culture of complaint (built around the healing mantra ‘Shut the fuck up’) to its rabble-rousing redneck anthem, ‘(I’m An) Asshole’ – as a gleaming comic monument.

Untarnished by the oxide of sainthood, it’s both the perfect refutation of late-eighties bullshit and a brutally ironic reversal of the pop culture myth-making’s founding principle of living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse.

5 Constructing the Citadel (#ulink_db3d757d-0a73-50a4-b32b-9bd892e32957)

The comedy edifice needs bricks and mortar, just like any other (in five more parts)

1. The Management

‘They get blamed for things I’ve done’

Stewart Lee

Amid the remorseless expansion of the comedy industry in the late eighties and early nineties, the basic business of just being funny or not being funny gets pushed ever more to one side. A comedy career tends to be publicly defined in terms of material – rather than creative – advance: how much you got paid for your video, how many series you’ve had on Channel 4, how many nights you can sell out at which West End theatre. It is in this context that the small amount of coverage given to the complex art of comedy management will generally be encountered.

Which of us has not felt an involuntary contraction of the bowel muscles on watching some pointless TV showbiz news report and hearing the halfwit holding the microphone say ‘and [insert name of pop-culture phenomenon X, from bingo to pigeon-racing] has become big business’ While such in-depth reportage has probably ensured that at least the names of the three main corporate players in British comedy – Avalon, Off The Kerb and PBJ – will be vaguely familiar to anyone with a passing interest in the field, the extent of the impact they’ve had on their various clienteles may well come as something of a shock.

The contrasting ways in which the workplace cultures of different management companies evolve has had a crucial influence on developing social, creative and ideological divides in the British body comedic. To such an extent that at times you start to wonder if comedy management is an exoskeleton or an endoskeleton.

Like record company bosses and film producers, comedy managers tend to get a very bad press. This is because everyone else – from critics to fans to the artistes themselves – has a vested interest in blaming them for anything that might go wrong in their clients’ careers. As false as the notional opposition between the unsullied innocence of the artist and the deceiving greed of the agent undoubtedly is, people find clinging on to it much easier than asking themselves awkward questions about exactly whose idea it was to do that dreadful advert.

It is much to the managers’ and agents’ credit that you will rarely hear them complain about the resultant sullying of their reputations. Whatever their other differences, they seem to share an innate understanding that it is chiefly by means of this process of ‘automatic guilt by association’ (succinctly formulated by Stewart Lee as ‘They get blamed for things I’ve done’) that they earn their percentage. Thus one form of formal buck acceptance begets another.

Speaking to comedians

(#litres_trial_promo) about their agents, there is very little of the bitching which might be conspicuous in discussions of a similar nature with an actor or author. Perhaps because comedy is such a lonely and competitive business – Off The Kerb boss Addison Cresswell describes its practitioners as ‘the most paranoid group of people I’ve ever met’ – the very existence of an advocate and mentor, however fallible, is something to be grateful for.

(a) Avalon’s testosterone vale

The turning-point in Jenny Eclair’s long slog from waitress to resting comedy actress to Perrier Award-winning comedian seems to have been the moment she moved from the sisterly agency she shared with French and Saunders, Ruby Wax and Sandi Toksvig to the testosterone vale of Avalon (home to Frank Skinner and David Baddiel among others). Talking to her about them in 1995, she seems quite happy to be the lone female on the books of an organization for whose profile the word ‘muscular’ is widely deemed to be an understatement.

‘I adore them,’ she says, ‘because they play the game so well – the reality of going up and down the motorway playing to six people is very mundane, but when the pantomime is done properly…well, I can almost believe the car which is taking me to Manchester this afternoon will be a bullet-proof limo, even though it’ll actually be a Ford Orion.’

For corporate gigs (the dark underbelly of a good comedic living), Avalon even supply her with a bodyguard. ‘The companies concerned are paying quite a lot of money,’ Eclair explains cheerfully, ‘so they want to take your skin off and hang it behind the door.’ This is exactly the sort of malevolent impulse people who have done business with Avalon in the television or publishing industries can sometimes be heard to accuse them of.

Having just lost his proverbial shirt (and quite possibly his actual shirt, too) in a disastrous foray into producing West End musicals, Jon Thoday founded Avalon with former Woolwich Poly entertainments secretary Richard Allen-Turner in 1988. On the basis of Thoday’s experience that ‘theatrical agents always blamed the talent and failed to take responsibility for their own mistakes’, they decided to build up a comedy-management stable based on a very different principle. They set out to be ‘100 per cent on the side of their clients’.

This is the sort of nebulous thing snidey Jay Mohr says in Jerry Maguire when he’s trying to tempt Rod Tidwell away from Tom Cruise, but in Avalon’s case it does actually seem to mean something. ‘There is a kind of ethic that “the act is always right”,’ agrees Stewart Lee, ‘which in one sense is reassuring, but can occasionally be unhelpful…Because the act’ – Lee continues feelingly – ‘is sometimes wrong.’

‘Traditionally,’ Thoday explains, ‘the agent stands in between the artist and whoever they’re making the deal with, but we tend to stand more with our client. We’ve never really worried about the people on the other side of the table, because it’s not them we have a relationship with.’

Is this why the name of Avalon has been known to inspire loathing as well as love? ‘Right from when we first started in 1988, we’ve been very good at spotting talent,’ Thoday insists. ‘The more talented clients you work with, the more often you need to say no to people, and if you’re saying no, there’s no real difference whether you shout or tell them nicely – no one likes to hear it. So I think a certain amount of the bad feeling we’ve experienced over the years has come from the people who would have liked to work with us, but haven’t been able to.’

If you think of British pop’s abundant managerial mythology – from arch teen manipulator Larry Parnes, through Brian Epstein and Led Zeppelin’s Peter Grant, to Malcolm McLaren’s Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle— the relative paucity of human interest in the annals of comedic career guidance was in urgent need of rectification by the late 1980s. And the oft-overlooked sense of mischief embedded in such cornerstones of Avalonian folklore as Thoday enlivening a bad night out at the Hackney Empire by persuading a rival agent to sign a third-rate act (‘I thought it might be funny to recommend the person who was rubbish,’ Thoday remembers unrepentantly, ‘and they were signed the next day’) was at least a first step towards making good that deficit.

The flipside of the gang mentality which Avalon are often accused of fostering is an impressive record of loyalty to such maverick left-field performers as Simon Munnery. The company’s sense of collective embattlement probably dates back to the size of the initial splash they made in the complacent duckpond of the late-eighties UK comedy scene. Even though – or perhaps more accurately, because – the bulk of Avalon’s early signings (Skinner excepted) came from Oxford or Cambridge University backgrounds, they were sufficiently out of step with prevailing alternative dogmas to excite alarm and despondency amongst the doormen of sociopolitical righteousness.

‘Someone like Frank Skinner, who might now be perceived as a cash cow,’ Stewart Lee remembers, ‘signing him was a bold decision when they did it, because no one else wanted to. There was a definite perception when Avalon was starting off that they were the barbarians at the gates. I remember [celebrated pillar of ideological rectitude] Jeremy Hardy writing a column in the Guardian accusing Simon Munnery of being a neo-Nazi,’ he smiles, ‘which was a much less popular option comedically then than it is now.’

Avalon’s institutional machismo is not to everyone’s tastes – the co-ordinated windcheaters traditionally worn by their employees at the Edinburgh Festival causing even the famously mild-mannered Addison Cresswell to mutter darkly about ‘muppets in matching jackets’. And their aggressive style of management has undoubtedly had its casualties on both sides of the deal-making fence, but no one can deny that they have an aesthetic. And British comedy needs as many of those as it can get.

For legal reasons, it seems best to confirm at first hand the veracity of the following anecdote about an Avalon Christmas company outing on the Eurostar. Is it true that on one particular mid-nineties occasion, an enraged Jon Thoday was obliged to complete his journey in the guards van after narrow-minded French officialdom thwarted his attempt to buy a second complete drinks trolley?

‘It wasn’t a trolley,’ growls an affronted Thoday, ‘it was the entire bar.’

(b) Off The Kerb: Mr Cresswell remembers when all this were nobbut fields

Self-confessed Millwall fan Addison Cresswell

(#litres_trial_promo) founded his operation – the longest-established of the three main management empires – in the early eighties. He did it initially ‘for a laugh’ on the grounds that ‘it was better than signing on’. The Comic Strip were touring with French and Saunders at the time, and he put together a rival package for about a fifth of the money under a name thought up by John Hegley.