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

Spike Milligan, in anticipation of imminent death

under enemy fire, Italy, 1943

‘With our circuit, people at the beginning tried to separate themselves from the mainstream history of comedy, but in truth, if you go back, there have always been little clumps of young performers who appeared to be different but actually weren’t’

Alan Davies, in his manager’s West End office,

fifty years later

Vic and Bob’s first appearance on This Morning…with Richard and Judy, in the autumn of 1991, is not a huge success. After a few conversational false starts, Vic (to whom the institutional acceptance represented by the booking means a great deal) is finally getting into his stride with an impassioned discourse about his love for Dad’s Army, when Judy interrupts him with an exasperated – and characteristically curt – expostulation of ‘I can’t take any more of this’.

Both parties plainly consider this a very unsatisfactory piece of interaction – referring back to it in anxious tones on subsequent meetings – but for the watcher at home, it is actually much more fun than later, superficially more successful, encounters.

The idea that an up-and-coming Channel 4 comedian should be able to speak sincerely about his love for Captain Mainwaring and Private Pike is simply beyond Finnegan’s comprehension at this point. A couple of years later, she would probably have found it easier to grasp, but life is much more fun when she still doesn’t get it. The excitement of two different worlds colliding with (at least) one side unaware of how much they actually have in common is always far greater than a formal meeting of minds.

One ofthe distressing side-effects of British TV’s ever-increasing self-awareness in the 1990s is a steady decline in the number of arenas in which people can make a joke that everyone isn’t in on. Like school playing fields (also steadily diminishing in number), such open spaces supply a vital service to the community, and certain technical forms of virtuosity cannot be mastered without them.

What concerns us at the moment is the thing that Vic and Judy have in common. Beyond a fondness for Dad’s Army itself, it’s a shared appreciation of what the success of the show was based on, which was the folk memory of a moment (well, a six-year span of extraordinary hardship and heroism) when Britain found itself to be – in the words of J. B. Priestley – ‘the hope of all that’s best in the world’.

The Second World War was the beginning of modern British comedy. If you got a frigate every time you heard someone say that, then we’d all be admirals. But from Spike Milligan’s war memoirs to Freddie Starr doing his Hitler impression, to old-school Scouse reprobate Stan Boardman wittering on about ‘The Germans’ and their ‘Fokkers’, to Basil Fawlty’s celebrated over-reaction to the presence in his hotel of guests from the land of Beethoven and Goethe, the shadow of that great conflict certainly loomed pretty large over the seventies and eighties comedy landscape.

This was why when Martin Amis said in his book Koba The Dread that people in Britain were happy to laugh at Soviet Communism but not happy to laugh at the Nazis, it seemed as if he must have gone to bed too soon after eating a large portion of strong cheese. A recollection of that spirit of cheery defiance so touchingly embodied in the Dad’s Army theme tune, ‘Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler?’,

(#litres_trial_promo) would persist throughout all sections of British society to the very end of the century,

(#litres_trial_promo) despite the best attempts of disreputable right-wing forces (from Margaret Thatcher and her Winston Churchill fetish to Fascist groups trying to collect funds by pretending they were intended for war veterans’ hospitals) to co-opt it as their own.

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Gavin Hills—journalistic avatar of that upsurge of compensatory masculinity widely termed ‘New Lad’ – described himself as being part of ‘The Airfix Generation’: ‘Boys who grew up seeing war as something distant and glorious, a playground game’. To be strictly accurate, this was not just one generation (Hills’s considerably older fellow Loaded contributor Vic Reeves recalls growing up making models from kits and painting all the uniforms in paisley colours, and in any case, the ability to see war as something distant and glorious has been a vital weapon in the armoury of recruiting sergeants from the dawn of time) but it is the legitimate province of youth to fancy its own experiences to be unique.

Anyway, Hills was so moved by those images of wartime Britain which were so prevalent (‘like the flickering shadows of a former, more honourable world’) amid the VE Day anniversary celebrations, that he decided to join the Territorial Army.

(#litres_trial_promo) Even without being able to consider (as they hadn’t been on TV yet) the alarming examples of Simon Pegg’s crazy friend Mike in Spaced and The Office’s notorious killing machine Gareth Keenan, this seemed a somewhat extreme reaction.

As a first step to getting to grips with the enduring legacy of the Second World War and its long lost sense of common purpose, I felt that going to see two showbiz combat-zone veterans go through their paces looked like a safer bet.

Where there’s armed conflict and the imminent threat of violent death, there’s hope

In the course of about an hour onstage at the Royal Albert Hall in the early nineties, Eltham-born nonagenarian Bob Hope tells approximately twelve jokes. A shorter version of one of them (‘Me, George Burns and a couple of older fellas, we get together every Saturday night and try to get in touch with the living’) will turn up a decade or so later in the course of the first single to be taken from Robbie Williams’s fourth solo album Escapology, but that is not the end of the elder Bob’s contribution to modern show business.

Learning lines was never a priority for this godfather of the autocue (‘What comedian’, Hope is once reported to have asked, ‘is going to give up playing golf for a script?’) and as befits a man who hit puberty before the Russian revolution, most of his material on this occasion has to be fed to him by his piano player. But when he does ‘It’s Delovely’, with his long-suffering wife Dolores singing the first word of each line, there is a flash of that effortless mid-song repartee that once made him and Bing Crosby the coolest men in the world.

Bob Hope was always older than he had a right to be – playing the romantic lead with Natalie Wood and Eva Marie Saint when he should have been their dad – but his audience is younger than anyone would have dreamed. Some are here to see Britain’s own old-fashioned song-and-dance funnyman Brian Conley, who does a lovely turn from Me and My Girl, but then falls victim to a heckler of rare acuity. When Brian asks the audience to suggest impressions for him to do, a mighty voice booms down from the balcony with the following crushing proposal: ‘a comedian’.

Most of the people, however, have come to pay tribute to a pioneer postmodernist, perhaps sensing that without Bob Hope’s Road to…movies (and Son of Paleface), there would have been no Bob Monkhouse and maybe no Farrelly Brothers. Hope’s short, sprightly bursts of stand-up (and sometimes sit-down) comedy are punctuated with long film-clip compilations of past career highlights, projected on to a large screen above the heads of the New Squadronaires Orchestra. His commentary on these is recorded, not live, so there is a weird reality lapse where the real Hope rasp fades into the taped Hope rasp.

Goon, but not forgotten

Using the Beatles (upon whom Milligan, Sellers, Secombe and the man we are about to meet were such a crucial, if neglected, influence) as a template, posterity cut fourth Goon Michael Bentine a deal midway between Ringo Starr’s and Pete Best’s. His substantial contribution to the first three Goon Show radio series might have been largely overlooked, but his 1970s children’s TV series Michael Bentine’s Potty Time would introduce many an impressionable child of a later generation to the madness and grandeur of war (albeit at a comfortably surreal remove, via epic battle scene reconstructions starring a clan of small imaginary creatures called The Potties, and with little bits of sand blown into the air to signify explosions).

In ‘From the Ridiculous to the Paranormal’, an autobiographical one-man show he puts on at the Shaftesbury Avenue Lyric Theatre in the same week as Hope’s Royal Albert Hall date, Bentine refers to being born English as ‘first prize in the lottery of life’. His wartime experiences – after being refused entry to the RAF eleven times on account of his half-Peruvian parentage, Bentine was arrested as a deserter; he then contracted typhoid, typhus and tetanus as a result of a bungled inoculation – suggest otherwise in the strongest possible terms. But Bentine’s capacity for laughing in the face of adversity seems to be more or less infinite. Now suffering from cancer, he describes this as his farewell appearance (which it ultimately turns out to be), yet still leaves the stage with a grin. Goon, but not forgotten.

For those who have grown up thinking of The Goon Show as something Prince Charles likes which has a lot of silly voices in it, the idea that it actually represented a revolutionary overturning of the established order will necessarily take a bit of getting to grips with. But when the historian Peter Hennessy called The Goons ‘a kind of decade-long “other ranks” revenge on the Empire and its officer class’, he was not talking out of his hat. And Observer jazz critic Dave Gelly’s analogy between the impact of Milligan, Bentine and co. and that of the 1951 Festival of Britain was not far off the mark either: ‘The festival laid out the future pattern for architecture, town planning and design…while the Goons set about reducing to rubble the redundant edifice of British imperial smugness.’

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As ex-servicemen united in their hatred of bureaucracy and time-wasting officialdom, the four men honing their act after hours at the Grafton Arms in Victoria’s Strutton Ground in the aftermath of the war had more than just bad memories of unfeeling superior officers in common. First off, being forced to do things you don’t want to do, in a confined space, in company you would not necessarily have chosen, has always been one of the most fertile breeding grounds for comedy (and would continue to be so long after The Goons were demobbed, from Porridge to Father Ted to The Office).

But beyond that, Spike Milligan’s personal experience of wartime as an expansion of mental as well as physical horizons does not seem to have been an isolated one. ‘Going abroad was a bonus in their lives,’ he wrote fondly of his fellow Gunners, ‘even though it took a war to give it to them.’

Spike Milligan, Pauline Scudamore’s fascinating biography, describes the impact of his first wartime posting to Bexhill-on-Sea. Far from alarm at being snatched from home and hearth and prepared for the possibility of violent death, Milligan’s chief response seems to have been one of exultation at unexpectedly rediscovering those senses of space and creative possibility which had been steadily closing down since late adolescence, when his family returned from Burma (where his father had been a noncommissioned officer in the colonial army) to the grim, grey world of pre-war Catford.

Escaping from the pettiness of 1940s south-east London

(#litres_trial_promo) into a life of endless new experiences and constant physical danger, he found himself blessed with a dramatically heightened awareness of the world around him. ‘His sense of the ridiculous began to bubble in earnest,’ writes Scudamore of Milligan’s experiences in the North African campaign (so memorably detailed in war memoirs such as Rommel: Gunner Who? and Monty: His Part In My Victory): ‘what had war to do with all this beauty?’

Having got into the battalion concert party by means of his facility with a jazz trumpet, Milligan found himself expanding the element of knockabout banter in his musical performances into anarchic full-scale revue shows such as Stand Easy. In much the same way that Dadaist art had been underpinned by the horrors of the First World War trenches, these early comedic forays were inspired by the madness unfolding around him. ‘It was pure lunacy, no rhyme or reason in it,’ Spike later observed to Scudamore, ‘it was meant to be pointless, just like the war.’

The traumatic experiences under fire which would haunt him for the rest of his life would find a clear therapeutic echo in the regular bomb blasts and deranged sound effects of The Goon Show. ‘By creating a world where explosions hurt no one,’ Goon Show Companion compiler Roger Wilmut wrote sympathetically, ‘he made his own memories of the reality more bearable.’

The impact of wartime experience was not always so explicit. Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe & Son writers Galton and Simpson were originally recruited to the septic ranks of professional comedy scribes from a pneumonia ward. But Tony Hancock, a.k.a. The Lad Himself – the fellow ‘NAAFI comedian’ with whom Spike Milligan would later share a disastrous barge holiday (they couldn’t agree on which pubs to stop at) – never saw any action scarier than the concert party in Bournemouth.

Back in Civvy Street, the ex-soldiers’ battle-hardened irreverence would often rub up uneasily against those stuffy institutions – most notably the BBC – which had yet to reflect the impact of post-war social changes. The Goons, in Milligan’s subsequent assessment, were ‘trying to break into satire’. (They ‘could have beaten the fringe by ten years’, he insisted to Pauline Scudamore, had the producers of the time not ‘all been frightened out of their fucking jobs’.)

Peter Sellers ‘could do any voice of any politician in the land’, Milligan boasted, ‘the Queen included…and that made us lethal’. Yet archaic restrictions on the representation of living people forced them to hide behind such diplomatic formulations as Dinglebee for the prime minister and Lady Bold De Speedswell for the Queen.

The unsympathetic attitude of BBC bureaucrats would drive Milligan up to and, eventually (when the pressure of writing all the Goon Show scripts on his own caused him to attack Peter Sellers with a kitchen knife), over the brink of nervous collapse. However, the next generation of would-be TV satirists would be able to rely – at least in one case – on more sympathetic treatment from the corporation’s top brass. And in this instance, the lapse into military terminology is not inappropriate.

Hugh Greene was their valet

Mary Whitehouse used to credit Graham Greene’s brother, Sir Hugh Greene (Director General of the BBC from 1960 to 1969), with being ‘more responsible than any other single individual’ for what she perceived as the moral decline of that decade. Needless to say, Greene saw things differently. As a foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph he had reported of Hitler’s consolidation of power in 1930s Germany, and his personal experience of the ensuing moral abyss was the foundation of his own vision of the BBC as ‘a symbol of the liberation of the individual imagination’.

He took over determined to ‘clear away a certain amount of accumulated dust from what seemed…at the end of the fifties a rather stuffy institution, out of touch with the young and the rebellious, appealing to a rather narrow section of the public’. But Greene’s conviction that ‘To keep pace with the values of a changing world you have in fact to keep a bit ahead’

(#litres_trial_promo) was not going to endear him to everyone. And while it’s one thing to set an agenda, it’s another thing to keep to it.

When daring new programmes like That Was The Week That Was and Till Death Us Do Part prompted howls of protest from the same sections of society that would later fail to be amused by Chris Morris and his very brassy eye, Greene might easily have bowed to public pressure and taken them off the air. The fact that he didn’t

(#litres_trial_promo) would have far-reaching consequences. In fact, it is probably fair to say that without Sir Hugh’s steadfast refusal to countenance the objections of West Midlands primary-school teacher Mary Whitehouse and her ‘Clean Up TV campaign, the swinging sixties might never have got off the ground.

Describing Whitehouse and her ‘moral reformers’ as ‘dangerous to the whole quality of life in this country’, Greene did not just regard their activities as inimical to British traditions of freedom, tolerance and adventure. As someone determined to be ‘positively and actively on the side of the values [he] had seen being attacked and turned upside down in the previous decades in so many parts of the world, with the establishment either on the side of reaction against liberal values or too weak to resist their overthrow’, he saw born-again Christian campaigners like the Festival of Light as one step away from the Nazis.

The impact of the 1939-45 conflict on the history of comedy reached far beyond such celebrated post-war landmarks as The Goon Show and Hancock’s Half Hour and into the brave new world of the 1960s. But once you reach a generation of performers who are too young to remember the war at first hand, the situation inevitably changes.

With a very few honourable exceptions (notable alongside Dad’s Army in the annals of comedic self-respect is the last episode of Blackadder Goes Forth), most comedy about wartime written by people who didn’t live through it leaves the viewer with an uncomfortable suspicion that what is really being laughed about is the happy accident of birth which prevented those who are getting the laughs from having to go through this awful experience in real life.

In 2001, the strangely bitter and twisted second series of sketch show Big Train (which left Arthur Mathews – the milder-mannered half of the usually inspired scriptwriting duo Linehan and Mathews – holding the baby after his comedy compadre Graham Linehan decided to strike out on his own) contains a disproportionate amount of this sort of material. Nothing makes even the most left-leaning person yearn for the return of national service