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

At the same time, the Edinburgh Festival also provides an unprecedented opportunity for career advancement. Highly polished London club sets which no one might see in a year will suddenly be scrutinized by every parasite in the sordid world of TV production – up north on expenses to pay their annual homage to Caledonia. This unique compression of the national media also offers immense creative possibilities to those who are bold enough to take them.

Steve Coogan is happy to admit to ‘quite cynically using Edinburgh as a showcase’ for his Patrick Marber-assisted change of direction, when winning the Perrier Award in 1992. But for others whose talents would prove less easily susceptible to commercial application, the festival’s semi-captive audience makes it the ideal arena in which to try to imagine themselves a career in the most creative way possible.

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Those who were lucky enough to experience the full-scale Cecil B. De Mille version of Simon Munnery’s Nietzschean cabaret Club Zarathustra in August 1996 – a show dedicated to the cause of insulting not so much its audience’s intelligence as the very fibre of their being – will never forget the majesty of what they saw.

(#litres_trial_promo) The yoke of shame lying upon the shoulders of whichever Channel 4 executive it was who decided not to commission a series from the TV pilot which ensued will be just as hard to shake off.

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By throwing together performers and audience in a confined space in an atmosphere of barely suppressed hysteria, the Edinburgh Festival churns up some fascinating etiquette quandaries, such as how to behave when the person who elbows you sharply to one side in their eagerness to get to the bar turns out to be the same person you just paid to make you laugh. Most people seem to handle this quite well, and if comedians are troubled by the knowledge that for the price of listening to them for an hour, their audience could have experienced not one but two troupes of Clydeside puppeteers, they manage not to show it.

It’s not just the barriers which traditionally separate performers from their audience that Edinburgh breaks down. It’s also the ones that keep them apart from each other, and perhaps even more importantly, from their critics. As exhilarating as these new-found proximities are, they can also be dangerous.

Inevitably when a group of already competitive people are thrown together in such pressurized circumstances, the odd fist-fight will result. (The memorable moment when self-destructive Waltham-stow-based misanthrope Ian Cognito decided to launch one verbal tirade too many against erstwhile getaway driver Ricky Grover, and was summarily knocked unconscious for his pains, is just one incident in a rich heritage of drunken feuding.)

Still more poignant is the tragic spectacle of media pundits who go native and – in the erroneous belief that some of Edinburgh’s magic dust will have rubbed off on them – start presenting their own shows about their festival experiences, or the vital role they have played in the evolution of rock journalism.

As incestuous and self-indulgent as all this undoubtedly is, if the Edinburgh deterrent – that you might at any moment have to justify anything you’ve written, in person, to whoever you’ve just written about – could be applied to every corner of the national press, there can be no doubt that standards of accuracy and politeness would greatly improve. (In this connection, it is always instructive to see how uptight London-based features journalists become when their attempts to use the festival as a one-stop shop for a swingeing attack on the apolitical complacency of the comedy circuit are momentarily frustrated by someone like Al Murray or Frank Skinner snatching their notebook and reading out to the crowd all the sarcastic things they have been writing in it.)

To the broader national culture at large, the Edinburgh Festival (especially as mediated through an annual fiesta of nauseatingly self-satisfied BBC2 TV coverage) remains a blight, exuding exactly the same flatulent aura of insulated smugness which London was so notorious for in the pre-Madchester eighties.

(#litres_trial_promo) To anyone lucky enough to be in the seat of Scottish government for the magic month of August, however, it feels like the centre of the world.

Which makes it all the more of a shame when, as the bank holiday weekend draws nearer, the Perrier Award – referred to with wry deference in some comedic circles as ‘The Little Bottle of Water’ – casts an ever-longer shadow over the festivities. Especially as the Perrier is no Delphic oracle; it’s just the collective opinion of a couple of people who have won competitions in magazines, the odd resting TV producer and a handful of ambitious journalists (usually with one of Alan Coren’s children prominent among them).

The comedy awards which really matter are the ones on ITV on the first Saturday in December.

4. The British Comedy Awards

‘I’ve been round the back, fisting Norman Lamont’

Julian Clary, British Comedy Awards, 1993

Most of the ever-proliferating number of showbiz prize-giving ceremonies prefer to stay as far away as possible from the essence of the art form they are supposed to be celebrating. But the British Comedy Awards – in its heady blend of acerbic wit, rampant egotism and breath-taking cruelty – is just about as complete a reflection of the world it was created to celebrate as can be contained in a small box in the corner of your living-room.

(#litres_trial_promo) And all this at the behest of London Weekend Television, a station renowned – in recent years at least – for its almost complete inability to produce anything like a functional TV comedy programme.

So how did this unlikely paragon of verisimilitude come about?

‘The first year [1990],’ remembers host Jonathan Ross, ‘Michael Parkinson presented the show from the London Palladium, and it died on its arse. The next year…’ he continues, gulping modestly, ‘I guess I needed the money.’

It should be remembered at this point that the Jonathan Ross of the early nineties was a long way from the all-conquering career behemoth of the early years of the twenty-first century. In fact, as things went increasingly awry for him, the Comedy Awards would gradually end up as the only time in the year when – with a little help from its hugely influential scriptwriter Danny Baker

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‘ITV were a little nervous about it,’ he remembers of the show in the first year he took it over, ‘and if you looked at what they did the year before, you could see why. Danny Baker had written this script and it was really verbose but also really bold. I stuck my neck out and insisted we use it, and it sort of snowballed from there. Whenever anyone complains about getting a hard time, we just say “It’s the spirit of the roast” [the roast being an American tradition where everyone gets slagged off and has to pretend they don’t mind] and coming out into that kind of atmosphere seems to help everyone rise to their best potential.’

Why does he think it works so well?

‘It’s quite an interesting thing to do to comedians – to have them coming out for a minute and a half, not knowing what I’m going to be saying to them. They’re kind of a bit on edge and they all want to make an impression, so inevitably they end up pushing things a bit further.’

Sometimes, as in the semi-legendary 1993 case of Julian Clary, they go a little too far. (Clary’s famously outrageous response to Ross’s innocent enquiry as to what he had been up to was that he had been ‘out the back, fisting [fellow awards presenter and former Chancellor of the Exchequer] Norman Lamont’.) While Clary’s coup de theatre earned him the undying respect of 99 per cent of those watching, it certainly didn’t do his chances of filling Bruce Forsyth’s shoes as host of a revitalized Generation Game any favours.

‘But with some people,’ Ross insists (Ricky Gervais and Johnny Vegas in 2001 would presumably be prime examples), ‘you could identify their appearance at the Comedy Awards as the moment where they stepped forward to claim a wider audience.’ Whether or not it’s true that, as Ross contends, ‘you can basically predict how someone’s year’s going to go from the kind of impression they make in that minute and a half, there is no denying that the British Comedy Awards offer the ambitious comedian a stage unlike any other.

From the risky but ultimately triumphant (Gervais making comic capital out of his producer’s wheelchair, or Spike Milligan calling the heir to the throne a ‘little grovelling bastard’ while accepting a lifetime achievement award) to the just plain disastrous (Jerry Springer trying to make a move on Rachel Weisz without knowing that she was someone he was meant to have heard of springs to mind at this point),

(#litres_trial_promo) there is an authentic sense of spontaneous high drama about the British Comedy Awards’ most memorable moments. And that is something the Oscars – never mind the BAFTAs – would do well to emulate.

5. Back at comedy base camp

By the mid-1990s, the London Comedy Store – once the spiritual home of alternative comedy – is firmly re-established in new, college-bar-style premises on the other side of Leicester Square. Going there on a random Thursday night at this point is a bit like going to The Cavern three years after The Beatles left, except that in this case the old stars still turn up to perform at the drop of a benefit-collecting hat.

The sense of being part of a living heritage attraction is hardly dispelled by the discovery that half the front row are students from Middlesex University completing their comedy module. Though it is sometimes hard to avoid the feeling that the waters of the London comedy scene have been drastically over-fished, two out of six acts on this particular evening have got something special about them, and that is a pretty heartening percentage.

It’s easy to see how Open Mike contender Ardal O’Hanlon managed to come equal first in the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year contest. Where some Comedy Store regulars just seem to be going through the motions, he is polished and graceful and makes every one of his ten minutes count. There is a beguiling feel of genuine otherworldliness about his reminiscences of a dad who spent all his money on the horses – ‘he bought them hats and scarves and everything’.

Harry Hill is a little further down the comedy conveyor belt at this stage, with one Radio 4 series behind him and a series of short black-and-white films coming up on BBC2. He’s got a distinctive look: rosy cheeks, milk-bottle specs and huge shirt collar sprouting out of the top of his jacket, giving him the appearance of a man with no neck. His act has a lovely rhythm to it. Hill sets up a series of riffs – snatches of Queen lyrics, ways of coping with the lack of services on the M40, his father depriving him of the best cuts of meat by saying they were poisonous – and flits between them with blinking eyes and darting tongue. For now, it’s hard to predict where his headlong comic momentum might take him, but there is a definite hint of lizard, as well as Izzard, in this man’s demeanour.

6 The Illusion (or Otherwise) of Spontaneity (#ulink_cdaf3014-a8a9-518a-985c-1f7f4e0675d9)

Eddie Izzard and Phil Kay play different ‘danger edges’

‘I prefer everyone to know exactly what I’m doing, because that means I’m good at what I can do, rather than what people think I can do’

Eddie Izzard

‘I took some MC squared: it’s great, it’s just like E’

Phil Kay

One of the most striking things about watching Eddie Izzard perform at the Albery Theatre in the winter of 1994, is how much easier it is to keep your mind on his comedy – now that he sports a ruffled shirt and thigh-length Dick Whittington boots – than it used to be when he was crammed into conventionally mannish garb. He just seems so much more physically relaxed for having publicly established himself as a transvestite. Going to see him live a couple of years previously, before the secret of his sartorial leanings was out, Izzard’s body seemed to be struggling to escape from a stone-washed denim prison.

The confidence which comes from commercial and critical success (specifically 1993’s triumphant residency at another West End theatre, the Ambassadors) seems to have made him more disciplined, not less. He hasn’t curbed his rambling, manic digressive style, just tightened up the rhythm slightly. The freshness of Izzard’s comedic menu is remarkable, too, not only for how quickly he rustles it up, but also for the familiarity of its ingredients: advertising; launderettes; the relative suavity of cats and dogs. As served by any other comedian, this would be pretty stale pub fare, but in Eddie’s hands, it’s Michelin-star material.

Izzard’s chief comic gift is the ability to weave vivid mental tapestries out of the dullest strands of quotidian normality: from the infectious rage of a small dog to the joy of turning on in-car heating at exactly the right moment. Only rarely does his fluid wit solidify into quotable shapes (e.g. on the moral dilemmas of supermarket shopping: ‘One jam is made by Nazis out of mud and twigs, the other is made by rabbits out of fruit that agreed to be in it’). But sometimes, when he pulls himself up in mid-flow, there is the same sense you used to get with Robin Williams in his (pre-Hollywood) prime, of the audience racing to catch up with a mind that’s already two blocks ahead of them.

It’s funny talking to Eddie Izzard in person around this time: ‘funny’ in the sense of being held up in the visa-application queue at the border crossing between the kingdoms of ‘Ha Ha’ and ‘Peculiar’. This is not because of anything particular he himself does. He is very quick and open, and if you find yourself lapsing into one of those embarrassingly complicated questions which starts off asking one thing and ends up asking another, he will probably answer both parts, shrugging off any attempt at interrogatory clarification with a friendly but firm ‘I thought I got what you meant’. What hits you about Izzard is just how much those people who really like him – and it’s hard to find anyone who’s seen him perform who doesn’t, at this point – tend to build his speech patterns into their own.

The deliberate pauses that say ‘Ah yes, where was I?’ (like brief suburban station stops to remind you that your train of thought is heading for the seaside). So many people go in for these now – not just other comedians (although there are plenty of these doing it too) but normal human beings – that when talking to the man with whom they originated, it almost feels like he’s been ripped off.

Eddie’s sartorial innovations have been less widely imitated. Today’s look comprises calf-length leather boots, black leggings (which are almost tights), and an emerald blue sweat-top whose buttons fall open, somewhat distractingly, to reveal a silky white shoulder strap. It would be wrong to pay so much attention to the Izzard wardrobe if it didn’t seem expressly designed to be noticed. I saw him in Marks & Spencer on Oxford Street once, wearing a jacket that Tammy Wynette would have thought twice about.

Such chance sightings, or onstage in record-breaking theatrical engagements, are no longer the only way to see Eddie Izzard. He has started to turn up on TV, too, which makes this a crucial passage in his career, as, apart from being a transvestite, the thing he’s been best known for is refusing to appear on television.

After a much hyped but almost entirely disastrous start on Comic Relief, there’s been a disruptively flirtatious and very funny showing on Have I Got News for You, a brisk little star-trip at the British Comedy Awards, a slightly awkward chat show debut on Ruby Wax (‘She said “You can go anywhere you like on the set” and I thought, Oh shit, that’s too much choice’) and then a brutal perfect six on Clive Anderson. On balance, it would be fair to say that the small screen seems to like him.