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

Off The Kerb’s off-the-cuff beginnings were a long way from today’s multi-million-pound concern. Cresswell ‘ran the business for three years with one phone in a basement in Peckham…There were no answering machines, let alone mobiles – it was all 10p’s and phonecards in those days – and it’d take you a couple of days to track anyone down, because whenever you phoned them up they’d always be out…but then it all got serious, and now every fucker has four agents and a style guru to hold their mobile phone for them.’

He seemed to adjust successfully enough to the expansion of commercial opportunities which transformed the industry he had initially got involved with in the hope of ‘drinking himself silly, getting laid and not starting work till one o’clock the next afternoon’, into the bloated careerist enclave that it is today. In fact, in self-consciously presenting his acts as a stable by schooling people like Jack Dee and Lee Evans in the benefits of wearing ‘a fucking smart suit’ made by his own tailor (Eddie in Berwick Street, Soho), Cress-well might be said to have played as big a part as anyone in the professionalization of the unwashed comedy hordes.

‘I’ve always been a bit more rock ‘n’ roll,’ he observes, when asked about the difference between his approach and that of his two rival agencies (though given his acts’ allegiance to the well-cut whistle, perhaps Motown would be a better analogy). ‘I like people who work hard instead of sitting around moaning and waiting for the phone to ring. I never took on acts that didn’t have any bollocks

(#litres_trial_promo)…Mark [Lamarr] is no angel and Lee [Evans] is a bit of a nutter too, on his night.’

There’s a telling moment in William Cook’s Ha Bloody Ha, where Cresswell says that the thing he most disliked about the comedy scene in the early eighties was that it reminded him of ‘everything I hated about college’. He still exudes that peculiarly refined hatred for the products of this country’s higher education system which can only come from years spent within it.

However much the pre-celebrity CVs of his roster might suggest otherwise, the boss of Off The Kerb insists that he does not consider forswearing a university education to be an essential prerequisite for comedic validity.

‘I just feel that if people want to be comedians, they should do their foundation course,’ maintains this diehard advocate of the school of hard knocks, ‘have some glasses thrown at them on a Monday night in Sheffield or something…The amount of fucking arseholes who’ve just come out of Oxford or Cambridge and straight away they’re waltzing round the BBC – honestly, you can’t move up there for those cunts…I think they should be burned at the stake.’

As if realizing that his own eloquence might’ve got the better of him at this point, Cresswell flirts momentarily with the language of conciliation. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he qualifies subtly, ‘comedy can come from anywhere.’

(c) All the way with PBJ

Encountering each other in the corridor of their management company’s Soho Square office, Vic Reeves and Armando Iannucci exchange wary acknowledgements. They do this in the manner of two jungle creatures who don’t explicitly eat each other, but who feel they have to be wary just in case the other one decides to give it a try.

‘You never quite know what to say to them,’ Vic observes afterwards of these chance meetings with his comedy peers and fellow PBJ clients. ‘It’s like the office above the shopfloor where people from various departments bump into each other.’ The idea that they might have a workplace culture of their own is one which takes a bit of getting used to for nineties comedians, most of whom probably grew up in times when the phrase ‘a proper job’ still meant something.

The secret of PBJ’s success – and with a client list including Rowan Atkinson, Lenny Henry and Harry Enfield from the alternative ancien régime, and Vic and Bob, Chris Morris and Eddie Izzard from the next generation, they must be doing something right seems to lie in offering a respite from the relentless push and pull of the comedy marketplace. In contrast to the sharp-suited hustle and bustle of the other two main agencies, PBJ founder Peter Bennett-Jones cultivates the aura of a mildly eccentric English gentleman. And in so far as the enterprise which shares his initials has a mythology, it’s for not having one.

‘Peter had been looking after Rowan [Atkinson] for a couple of years,’ remembers Caroline Chignell of the late-eighties expansion which brought her into the company. ‘There was a real sense of a next generation coming through, but unless we had some kind of definite structure, no one would want to join us.’ She had been out on the road promoting a tour with Harry Enfield when Bennett-Jones asked her to join him. When she expressed doubts about whether she had what it took to make it in comedy management, he described the key attribute necessary as ‘a sense of fair play’, which would probably be some distance away from most people’s best guess, sine qua wow-wise.

‘I’m probably not like most agents,’ she admits apologetically, ‘in that I don’t tend to shout and scream, and I’m not particularly rude. My idea of a good deal is one that gets the best for your client but also makes the person who’s paying you want to come back for more – as that’s the only way you can take other people forward with you in the relationship.’

While this softly-softly approach might sound a bit dull compared with the more frontiersmanlike approach of PBJ’s rival agencies, it’s worth remembering that it’s helped nurture some of the most extreme TV comedy ever produced in this country – from The Day Today and Brass Eye to The League of Gentlemen (who join PBJ after the Edinburgh Festival in 1996). ‘We actively encourage people to take as much time as possible to get things right,’ insists Chiggy, ‘but we are at the behest of the clients. If they turn around and say we need to make some money because we’ve got an enormous tax bill or an expensive divorce to pay for – which does happen sometimes – then there’s not really very much we can do about it.’

2. Diversification

There are two main forms of creative diversification available to the modern comedian, and these will be addressed in, alphabetical order.

(a) Acting

As beguiling as Addison Cresswell’s vision (outlined at the end of chapter 2) of a plague of would-be thespians diminishing the purity of the comedic bloodline undoubtedly is, it is not strictly accurate. For one thing, there is a perfectly respectable tradition of successful comedic career cross-overs. It dates back to Queen Elizabeth l’s favourite jester Dick Tarleton (who moonlighted as a comic actor at James Burbage’s theatre in Shoreditch) and forward to Max Wall’s inspired inhabitation of the plays of Samuel Beckett and Les Dawson’s unforgettable 1990 appearance in La Nona, a thought-provoking TV film (based on an allegorical Argentinian novel of the same title) about a hundred-year-old woman so greedy that she eats her family’s furniture.

Comedians – like rappers – often make very good actors, because their day-job already entails presenting an idealized version of themselves. In the aforementioned Wall and Dawson examples, the genius of the casting was that it referred to attributes they already had – in the former’s case, a certain stone-faced stoicism; in the latter’s, a penchant for appearing in public dressed as a lady and a well-established liking for his dinners – while taking them to places they would never have gone of their own accord.

The challenge for a later generation – constantly besieged as they are by casting agents trying to pep up their callback lists – is to get the balance exactly right between something they are already and something that they definitely aren’t. In the case of Cresswell’s client Lee Evans, this means parlaying his bumbling stage act into a crisply marketable international big-screen persona. In the light of the rejection letter from Opportunity Knocks (which as far as starting at the bottom goes, just about takes the cake) thoughtfully reprinted in the programme for Lee Evans’s West End run at the Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue in 1995, the effective and occasionally inspired big-screen performances Evans delivers in Peter Chesholm’s Funny Bones, the excellent Mouse Hunt and There’s Something About Mary – one of the biggest (and best) Hollywood comedies of the decade – must surely rank as game-raising of the very highest order.

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The comic/thespian transition does not go as smoothly for everyone.

(#litres_trial_promo) But for those who realize that there’s more to establishing your dramatic credentials than doing a couple of months in Art, acting can provide an outside chance of creative rehabilitation, even for those who seem wholly out of the running.

Take Paul Kaye, for example. Just when the damage his celebrity-stalker persona Dennis Pennis had done to standards of behaviour in British public life might seem to have rendered him utterly beyond the pale of respectable society, along comes BBC1’s Friday-night drama Two Thousand Acres Of Sky. In which, by exploiting his eerie resemblance to Marilyn Manson to superbly benign effect as the philosophically inclined new-age wastrel Kenny, Kaye secures an unexpected but entirely heartwarming form of redemption (as well as a series of Woolworths ads and his own entertaining game show).

As for those thespian wannabes so rudely fingered by Addison Cresswell, the case of Steve Coogan’s acting career is a complicated one, which will be dealt with in the fullness of time. As for Alan Davies, after a couple of false starts – notably that thing where he plays a disillusioned timeshare salesman sending home video postcards about his romantic conquests – his performances in Jonathan Creek and especially Bob and Rose eventually mark him out as a first-class comic (and even straight, dramatic) actor.

There is a clip of the younger Davies which always inspires high levels of hilarity when it gets shown on Before They Were Famous programmes. It’s an embarrassing ‘experimental’ student film he made while wearing a long Echo and the Bunnymen-style raincoat. And when you stop and think about what happened to the artistic aspirations of the mid-eighties as they were passed through the mangle of Thatcherite enterprise culture, it is hard to suppress a wry chuckle.

When the acting jobs didn’t come through straight away on first leaving drama college, Davies followed Norman Tebbitt’s advice, got on his bike and looked for work as a stand-up comedian, subsequently earning six-figure sums by making adverts depicting the Abbey National building society as a safe haven from the rigours of capitalism. In this context, the words ‘because life’s complicated enough’ could hardly be more apt.

(b) Writing novels

There is an honourable tradition of comedian turned novelist, too. Yet while it would be quicker to name the nineties comedians who haven’t had novels published than the ones who have, if you were to ask yourself if any of them have written a book anywhere near as wild and personal as Spike Milligan’s Puckoon (which, by some strange and gratifying quirk of popular taste, has somehow sold several million copies) or as grainily insightful as Les Dawson’s A Card for the Clubs, you would have to conclude – regretfully – that they have not.

It is very easy to see what appeals to comedians about the idea of writing fiction. It brings a new brand of kudos (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.

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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.

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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.’