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

(#litres_trial_promo) Or that a terrestrial TV programme would exist which would keep a twenty-four-hour watch on a group of wannabe daytime travel-show presenters in the hope that a drunken maverick cockney dental nurse might embark upon an ill-advised sexual adventure?

It would be easy (not to mention quite fun) to go on like this all day, but when it comes to the trickier business of establishing the connection between these almost subliminal changes in the fabric of everyday life and the recent history of British comedy, only a famous French philosopher who sounds like he ought to play for Arsenal can help us.

What Henri Bergson has to say about all this

The French philosopher Henri Bergson’s 1900 intellectual landmark Le Rire – helpfully translated into English as Laughter in 1911 – is most celebrated for its contention that much of what is considered comic can be boìled down to moments where ‘the human reduces itself to the automatic’. In a less frequently quoted passage of the book, Henri makes the seemingly straightforward assertion that ‘to understand laughter we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society’.

‘Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo,’ Bergson notes. ‘It can travel within as wide a circle as you please; the circle remains, none the less, a closed one.’ To illustrate this notion, he uses the example of travellers sharing a joke in a railway carriage while another passenger sits across the aisle, forbidden by basic etiquette from joining in. ‘Had you been one of their company,’ Bergson chuckles, ‘you would have laughed like them.’

Obviously this was before mobile-phone radiation had fatally eroded our conception of personal space in public places, but when you consider the peculiarly modern spectacle of individuals on buses or trains performing virtual stand-up comedy routines into Nokia handsets for the benefit of faraway friends, while flesh and blood audiences of complete strangers sit around them in stony silence, it actually underlines the truth of Bergson’s observation rather than undermining it.

‘However spontaneous it seems,’ Bergson argues, ‘laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry.’ If you could mark the points at which this freemasonry either breaks down or is particularly strong, you would end up with a kind of dot-to-dot relief map of the national subconscious.

Based – as it is – on how much, in terms of ideas or emotions, a performer is able to share with their audience, comedy can teach us a great deal about who is swimming with society’s tide and who is swimming against it. Consider in this regard the following two incidents of live onstage trauma: the first reassuringly trivial, the second rather less so.

Rory Bremner got rid of his original Scottish accent in response to social pressure applied within the English public school system, but soon learned to pick up others in its place. A few years later, after this facility had turned into a career, the BBC’s determination to keep him in a light-entertainment strait-jacket pushed him to Channel 4, where he made a startlingly successful transformation (at least in his own mind) from boyish purveyor of sports commentators and weathermen to diamond-hard political satirist.

Away from the safety of the small screen, however, the construction of appropriate showcases for impressionistic virtuosity can still be a perilous business. In the first flush of his reinvention, amid the plaintive cry of the Essex gulls at the elegant Southend Cliffs Pavilion, Bremner’s inaptly confident ‘Does anybody here listen to Radio 4?’ is met with a fairly crushing silence. What price a dazzling impression of crusty, rugby-obsessed, radio sports eminence Cliff Morgan in the cold, hard world of the east-coast riviera?

The second incident involves Scott Capurro – a raffish, catty, minutely boss-eyed, gay comedian from San Francisco, who briefly set down his picnic blanket on the banks of the British comedy mainstream in the early to mid-nineties. The high point of his career was probably an appearance on Pebble Mill, where Alan Titchmarsh asked him the immortal question ‘So you’re a gay comedian, how do you go down in America?’

The fun in a Capurro live show comes from a consensual over-stepping of the mark. (‘Are you heterosexual?’ he taunts straight audience members. ‘Really? You were the last one I would have expected.’) The edge comes from our – and his – awareness of how easily consensus can turn to conflagration.

At an early live appearance at the Hackney Empire, a gang of rough-looking individuals in the front row begin to get restive about five minutes into Capurro’s set. One of them calls him a ‘faggot’. Capurro says: ‘I want to love you – help me.’ The situation simmers and then gets uglier. People at the back of the crowd start to shout at the people in the front, one of whom gets onstage, grabs the microphone and roars in fury and bewilderment, the scar down the side of his face pulsing eerily, ‘What is it, are you all faggots?’

The rest of the audience shouts ‘Leave! Leave! Leave!’ – at first tentatively, but then with increasing fervour as the Hackney Empire remembers its former status as the home of alternative cabaret. Eventually, the front row gets up and storms off en masse, Capurro’s taunts – ‘He wants me!’, etc – ringing rather half-heartedly in their ears. The violence in the air has hobbled the comedian’s instinctive bravado, but though visibly and understandably shaken, he still manages to have the last word: ‘Oh, I was wrong, it wasn’t the gay thing…It was the Vietnam thing.’

At Last, The Theodore Hook in 1812 Show

In the mid-1960s, when John Cleese and a group of his up-and-coming acquaintances (including the brace of comic colossi who would later be known as The Two Ronnies) were looking for a title for their shiny new topical TV revue, they called it At Last The 1948 Show in a bid to sum up frustration (previously and more vehemently expressed by their non-Oxbridge-educated role model, Spike Milligan) with the slow-moving institutional nature of the BBC.

Any true appreciation of what is or is not golden about the Reeves/Office age will have to avoid overestimating the differences between this and other periods of comedic endeavour. Especially as one of the main creative themes of the period will prove to be reconnection with preceding generations after the supposed ideological breaches of the 1980s.

Consider the brilliant career of nineteenth-century rabble-rouser Theodore Hook, editor of such outspoken publications as John Bull and The Arcadian. A. J. A. Symons’s 1934 biographical essay

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Alongside the mid-stream political horse-swapping of the aforementioned Mr Rory Bremner (‘his power of producing in parody a complete House of Commons debate, imitating one speaker after another…taking off Peel, Palmerston or the Duke [of Wellington] without a moment’s pause’), the eagle-eyed might discern the poker face of Jack Dee (‘his extreme power of keeping a straight face when all his listeners were eclipsed in mirth’), or the institutional subversion of Chris Morris. (Taking up position on an empty cart by the roadside, Hook once posed as an itinerant preacher. Having assembled a suitably rustic audience, the metropolitan mischief-maker ‘suddenly altered the tone of his voice, thundered the most appalling curses at the throng and ran for his life’.)

Even the legendary drinking prowess of Johnny Vegas gets a look in. Symons describes Hook ‘drinking experimental gin and maraschino cocktails by the pint with an American bon vivant, before dining soberly at Lord Canterbury’s where he ascribed his poor appetite to “a biscuit and a glass of sherry rashly taken at luncheon”‘.

This is not to say that life was necessarily richer or more satisfying – comedywise – in the early 1800s, but it is probably worth bearing in mind that the late twentieth century was not the first historical moment at which the professional laughter-maker has loomed large in our culture. The medieval scholar Erasmus disparagingly described the mid-thirteenth century as a time when ‘Fools [i.e. jesters] were so beloved by great men that many could not bear to eat or drink without them, or to be without their company for a single hour’.

The picture of the wearer of cap and bells painted in R. H. Hill’s Tales of the Jesters - ‘Stealing titbits from the kitchen, falling into fits of violent fury without reason, breaking furniture and crockery, fighting with the pages and worst of all giving himself insufferable airs’ – will not be wholly unfamiliar to anyone lucky enough to have spent time with Britain’s turn-of-the-millennium comedic élite.

Elements of unexpected continuity are just as rich a source of fascination in the history of comedy (or, indeed, anything else) as unarguable new departures. To achieve a true understanding of the achievements of the Reeves/Office epoch, it will be necessary to delve deeply into the historical (as well as the comedic) background of the previous half-century – from the victorious memory of the Second World War to the traumatic loss of the British empire; from the bright new dawn of the swinging sixties to the sour fag-end of Thatcherism. At the same time, the dramatic unfolding events of the 1990s and early 2000s will be recounted – wherever possible

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If by these means it were somehow possible to root the glorious comic legacy of this illustrious era in timeless verities of national character and cultural heritage, well, that would certainly be a goal worth aiming at. In his lofty 1946 panegyric The English Sense of Humour, Harold Nicolson describes that most oft-speculated-upon of national attributes (whose ethnic remit is, for the purpose of this volume – and in acknowledgement of the partial success of Tony Blair’s devolutionary reforms – graciously also extended to the Scots, the Welsh and even the Irish) as ‘existing at a level of consciousness between sensation and perception’.

In the hope of getting across how this idea worked, Nicolson came up with a novel illustrative formula. To approximate what he called the ‘simultaneous awareness of doubleness and singleness’ which it entailed, he invited his readers to enjoy for themselves ‘the curious sensation produced when we cross the middle finger over the index and then push the v-shaped aperture up and down the nose’.

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Chronological Timeline (#ulink_25d27171-b1c6-505d-98cb-1830c9e0ff1b)

Part One (#ulink_37f40245-5a35-59a7-b423-8c34e712992a)

1 On the Launchpad (#ulink_b29681c5-c47b-5c08-9df5-41e5bfb9c83b)

The Reeves and Mortimer despot/democrat trajectory is about to commence

‘The present time, together with the past, shall be judged by a great jovialist’

Nostradamus

‘You’ll never guess what I just saw backstage…Nicholas Witchell with a barrage balloon Sellotaped onto his back, trying to convince all these termites that he was their queen’

Vic Reeves

In a late-nineties BBC TV documentary about Steve Martin, the stadium-filling stand-up balloon-folder turned Hollywood leading man recalls looking around him at the angry political comedy which prevailed in his homeland in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam protest era. ‘Hmm,’ Martin remembers his mid-seventies self thinking, ‘all that’s gonna be over soon…and when it is, I’m gonna be right there. And I’m gonna be silly.’

It would not be the act of a madman to imagine Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer making a similar plan in downtown south-east London a decade or so later, with Margaret Thatcher as their Richard Nixon and Ben Elton as their Richard Pryor. If you hadn’t ever spoken to them. But once you’ve listened to them talking about what they do (in this instance, over tea and biscuits at the BBC, at around the same time the Steve Martin documentary goes out) it’s hard to conceive how the massive cultural impact Reeves and Mortimer have had on this country in the past decade or so could possibly have been a matter of prior calculation.

They have always been endearingly incapable of guessing which of their ideas will go down well and which won’t (‘You imagine everyone will like everything when you first think it up,’ Vic muses, ‘then when you actually do it, you think “Oh, maybe not”‘), seeming to clutch to their hearts with especial tenderness those comedic sallies which are greeted with total incomprehension on the part of their audience.

Vic remembers an infamous early appearance at the Montreal Comedy Festival: ‘There were 7,000 people, one of the biggest crowds we’ve ever had, and it was absolute silence for twelve minutes. We went out and we had the lucky carpet with us. The basic joke is Bob comes on and says, “I’ve been having some bad luck.” And I say, “Well, have you got a lucky charm?” And I turn out to have a lucky charm which is too big to carry…’

Vic shakes his head contentedly: ‘You could hear people in the audience saying, “That carpet’s too big” – they just couldn’t accept someone having a twenty-foot roll of carpet for a lucky charm.’

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Bob has similarly fond memories of 1998’s notoriously impenetrable BBC2 series Bang Bang…It’s Reeves & Mortimer. ‘We have this hope,’ Mortimer insists, rather poignantly, ‘that if there’s anyone left bothered about us in fifty years’ time, that will be the one they’ll remember.’

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It seems jokes nobody understands are like pop stars who die young. They never get the chance to let you down.

‘There’s such a thin line between what works and what doesn’t,’ argues long-time Vic and Bob associate and Vic Reeves Big Night Out catalyst Jonathan Ross (while pretending not to care whether any fellow customers have registered his presence in a Soho Star-bucks in the early summer of 2002). ‘It’s all delivery and perception and context. And I think they understand that better than anyone. That’s why they never get beaten down – because they find what they do genuinely funny. That’s what makes them different from what you might call more workmanlike comedians, or some of the sort of stuff I do,’ Ross grins.

‘You sit down and write material which you think people might find funny,’ he continues. ‘Then you try and hone it so they definitely will do, but you’re not living life for yourself. It’s purely work. It was never like that for Vic and Bob, though. They’re not a service industry: even when they’re doing things to pay the rent, they’re still enjoying themselves. And something like that time in Montreal – where they were doing stuff with a miniature Elvis and some monkeys on a plate to a bemused bilingual audience – they just enjoyed the whole experience. For them, it doesn’t represent the death of an act or a step back in a possible career plan, it’s just another funny moment in an already amusing day.’

Reeves and Mortimer used to commemorate the jokes which no one got with a weekly memorial service in the ‘tumbleweed moment’ running gag on Shooting Stars. Now that they themselves are verging on institutional status, it’s hard to remember just how roughly they once rubbed against the comic grain. But when the Big Night Out first appeared – in a succession of (to use Vic’s characteristically art-history-informed adjective) ‘Hogarthian’ south-east London pubs, in the second half of the 1980s – the ideological tyranny of alternative comedy was still at its height.

‘It just didn’t interest me,’ Vic remembers scornfully. ‘I hate being preached to. I can make my own mind up: tell me something new.’ In Vic’s case, something new meant a potent blend of old-fashioned vaudeville and a spirit of the purest comic anarchy.

Consider for a moment the Big Night Out’s warped talent contest ‘Novelty Island’ (in which Mortimer’s increasingly poignant alter ego Graham Lister strives to impress the unfeeling Reeves with a series of doomed variety acts, such as pushing lard through the mouth and nostrils of a picture of Mickey Rourke). Now cast your mind back to its most obvious comedic precursor, ‘Alan Whicker Island’ – a vintage Monty Python sketch about an archipelago inhabited entirely by people who look and behave just like the abrasive TV travel-show presenter turned spokesman for American Express. The fundamental difference between these two comic conceits is that the latter addresses the entertainment apparatus it is attempting to deconstruct from the top down, while the former does so from the bottom up.