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

(#litres_trial_promo) quite like the sight of a load of easy-living peacetime comic actors getting cheap laughs at the expense of people who risked their lives to fight evil.

What comedians generally say when subjected to this kind of accusation (taking their lead from the much-discussed Beyond The Fringe sketch ‘The Aftermyth of War’) is ‘it’s not actually about the war, it’s about the way the war has been represented’. But this defence is just as specious as Monty Python’s claims that The Life of Brian wasn’t actually taking the piss out of the Bible – ‘Brian was another prophet we made up…blah blah blah…You can see Jesus’s arm in scene 76 and it is treated very respectfully…blah blah blah’ – when everyone knows the fact that it was is the reason why it was funny.

The amazing Let The People Sing dead cow prophecy

Let The People Sing is not one of celebrated Dad’s Army fan J. B. Priestley’s better-known novels. Written to be serialized over the air by BBC radio before its first publication in book form, it was originally broadcast in instalments, beginning in early 1939 and with later episodes increasingly overshadowed by what someone on a History Channel documentary would probably refer to as ‘the darkening storm-clouds of war’.

The book’s protagonist is an out-of-work English comedian called Tommy Tiverton.

(#litres_trial_promo) Looking back nostalgically to the halcyon days of ‘the vast smoky-coloured caverns of the packed Empires and Palaces’, Tommy yearns for ‘a simple audience, not bedazzled by American speed, sharpness and cynicism, and blind to the richer English drollery of character’. At this stage, the threat to traditional variety is not TV, but that other little box in the corner of the front room, the radio. ‘I like my public to see me,’ Tiverton sniffs poignantly, confronted with the undeniable ascendancy of the catch-phrase-toting warriors of the wireless who will one day inspire some of Paul Whitehouse and The Fast Show team’s least amusing material.

By a set of circumstances too serpentine to go into but involving an IRA bomb and an equestrian statue, Tommy Tiverton finds himself on the run across middle England with Professor Ernst Kronak, an intellectual asylum-seeker from central Europe with a happy knack for working high-flown political and philosophical theories into day-to-day conversation. (‘In a certain limited sense all the English may be said to be anarchist,’ he observes at one point, later ascribing the relative weakness of the English revolutionary tradition to ‘this limited and natural anarchy of the national soul’.)

Priestley, who had talked about the need to shore up morale in the face of the possibility of an imminent conflict (and accordingly seems to have designed the latter stages of Let The People Sing as an explicit call to arms), already seems to be looking to the kind of country that people would want to live in afterwards. ‘Plenty of nice lads ready to go and be killed,’ someone says grimly at one point—of Britain in 1939 – ‘But…that’s being ready to die, not being ready to live.’

The book’s narrative climax hinges on the fate of an underused small-town variety hall which the snobbish local establishment want to turn into a museum (‘Too much of England, I think, is a museum,’ observes Professor Kronak, sternly) and which incoming American-based multinational United Plastics want to incorporate into their sinister mass-production facility. The debate about whether the townsfolk will stand up for their birthright of good spirits and inane singalongs in the face of this twin threat looks forward not only to the war that is about to begin,

(#litres_trial_promo) but also to subsequent debates about globalization and American cultural imperialism.

Things look bad for a while, but in the end the necessary stiffening of communal resolve is effected by that apparently most placid and parochial of domestic institutions: Sunday lunch. Destiny mobilizes ‘the revolutionary force of women who have spent a warmish morning in an undersized kitchen cooking a dinner they do not particularly want to eat themselves’. In these circumstances, the author notes, ‘husbands and children, like so many idiotic passengers invading the engine room, are apt to hear something unpleasant about themselves’.

When the after-effects of such savage tongue-lashings are intensified by digestive disturbance – occasioned by ‘a consignment of badly refrigerated Argentinian beef – the menfolk are finally shaken out of their complacent reverie. ‘Vast edifices of masculine sham’ are seen to crumble, and the town comes together in a patriotic fervour to defend and cherish its heritage of communal entertainment. ‘Like the nation waking from a long sleep’ is how the book’s author describes it.

‘What did you do in the comedy war, Daddy?’

More than four decades later, the Falklands conflict (itself the result of a badly refrigerated Argentinian beef) would be responsible – at least in the fevered minds of Margaret Thatcher and her tabloid-running dogs—for a similar national awakening. But by this time, the heritage of collective jollity in which J. B. Priestley placed such touching faith would have been subject to a dramatic bifurcation.

‘Alternative comedy grew out of punk,’ Jonathan Ross explains, ‘with the same determination to show an older generation “our values are different from yours”. And once you’ve taken a step down that road, there’s really nowhere else to go but to end up saying you don’t respect any of your predecessors’ values, even though in a way that’s unfair.’

Just as John Lydon got in trouble with Malcolm McLaren for admitting he liked Neil Young, so in the pre-Vic-and-Bob era it was very much not the done thing for up-and-coming alternative comics to allude respectfully to their professional forebears. ‘The older comedians became outcasts,’ remembers Ross (who, in his role as honest broker between the generations, would subsequently do as much as any other individual to bridge the ideological and demographic chasm), ‘but they only had themselves to blame. Because, with a few honourable exceptions such as Bob Monkhouse and Des O’Connor, they were very scathing towards the new generation when they should have welcomed it.’

By the time of Ben Elton’s appearance at the 1987 Royal Variety Performance, the new comedy establishment’s take-over seemed to be more or less complete. ‘Five years after the first series of The Young Ones,’ wrote Mick Middles in When You’re Smiling, his excellent short biography of Les Dawson, ‘the walls of an old order seemed to be crumbling.’ And yet the fact that on this particular occasion an old pre-alternative warhorse like Dawson could win one of the best receptions of the night gave a far surer indication of the way things were heading than many a more obvious portent.

Just as the apparent ideological climax that was the introduction of Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax eventually proved to be the beginning of the Iron Lady’s end, so the Comic Strip planting its standard on the ramparts of ancien régime showbiz actually signalled a rearguard action by the battered survivors of earlier times. And not just in terms of influence. (Les Dawson’s magnificently sardonic hosting of mid-period Blankety Blank would later be cited by Vic Reeves as a model for his own demeanour on the Big Night Out.) In the late eighties, northern theatrical impresario Larry Price told Middles, ‘the people who had been all but wiped away by alternative comedy suddenly started coming back…We’d all been told they’d gone for good, but the audiences wouldn’t have it.’

Pantomime bookings went through the roof, and some of those who’d grown fat and lazy on the rich pickings of pre-alternative TV came back with a point to prove. There was something inspiring about the spectacle of battle-scarred comedy campaigners scrapping their way back to social respectability.

Take Bob Monkhouse, for example. (And anyone whose response is ‘I wish you would’ has not read Bob’s fantastic autobiography, Crying with Laughter.) There was no height to which he would not stoop to reclaim his rightful place in the comedic spotlight: going head to head with Frank Skinner on Gag Tag, wiping the floor with his rival panellists on Have I Got News for You, even delivering the following unforgettable killer blow to the unfortunate Bobby Davro on ITV’s An Audience with Bob Monkhouse: ‘You’ll be remembered after Robin Williams has been forgotten…But not until then.’

This rehabilitation of the old-school comic would culminate, a decade or so later, in Phoenix Nights, Peter Kay’s elegiac love-letter to the working men’s club. And in the not-so-edifying spectacle of Bernard Manning’s return to prime-time TV, eating his tea in his Y-fronts on The Entertainers (then, a year or so later – even less edifyingly – being sent to India with a camera crew in tow).

From the easy-going vantage point of the early twenty-first century, the idea of an ideological divide in comedy which actually meant something might seem somewhat elusive. But you wouldn’t have to spend very long in Manning’s Embassy Club to rediscover it.

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Another way in which Margaret Thatcher was the mother-in-law of alternative comedy, besides the obvious one

In the preface to his second fictional endeavour, Whatever Love Means, David Baddiel refers to a special 1990 Time Out magazine screening of the film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. At the question and answer session afterwards, a woman put her hand up and observed that she felt ‘shocked, soiled even’ by the film’s graphic violence, eliciting the harsh if not entirely unmerited reproof from elsewhere in the audience: ‘For fuck’s sake, it’s not called Henry the Elephant, is it?’

Most people would have appreciated the cruel irony of this exchange and then got on with their lives, but David Baddiel decided to make it the cornerstone of a new moral (or, more accurately, amoral) scheme. ‘It was at that point’, he writes, ‘that the 80s fell away, or at least that seriousness fell away.’

The comedian’s initial reaction to this moment of satori – he claims to have ‘laughed for 15 minutes’ – might seem somewhat hysterical, but presumably something about the spectacle of a man humiliating a woman in public must have been especially gratifying to him. Especially following hard on the heels of ninety minutes spent sitting in the dark watching other women being gruesomely murdered.

As such self-consciously uncaring voices as Baddiel’s have grown ever more dominant, it has become increasingly easy to overestimate the height of the intellectual barricades erected during the 1980s. No decade which provided a lucky few with the opportunity to see Jerry Sadowitz at his majestically offensive best can fairly be judged an era of unalloyed moral priggishness. Indeed, far from being an oasis of non-sexist rectitude, the Comedy Store at this time was often little more than, to borrow Jeremy Hardy’s gruesomely memorable phrase, ‘a roomful of people baying to hear the word “cunt”’.

While sympathetic observers such as William Cook have tended to portray alternative comedy as a reaction – or, most neutrally, a counterpoint – to Thatcherism, in fact the relationship between the two was a good deal more complicated than that. For example, Margaret Thatcher was the mother-in-law of alternative comedy not only in providing it with a necessary object of antipathy, but also (further echoing the historic tension between working-class men and their wives’ mothers) by giving it a house to live in.

While her obsession with the deregulation of broadcasting might have originally been designed to intimidate the BBC and open the way for her (then) ally Rupert Murdoch to colonize people’s homes with The Simpsons and Granada Men and Motors, its other end results were the creation of Channel 4 (a place where ambitious young satirists could get together to make a good living by taking the piss out of her) and a changed TV power structure in which competing production companies would compete to satisfy egotistical comedians’ every artistic whim.

It would obviously be foolish to make too explicit a historical comparison between the Second World War and the three governments of Margaret Thatcher (apart from anything else, in the Second World War the good guys won). But in the same way as the traumas and hardships of 1939-45 would underpin the comedic triumphs of Spike Milligan and Tony Hancock, so – by undermining pre-existing social structures and leaving people with a profound sense of cataclysm – the distinctly unfunny Tory governments of the 1980s had also prepared the ground for a rich comedic harvest.

‘For many people,’ wrote Ian Jack, on travelling through northern England in 1987, ‘their link with history – the functions and behaviour, morality and religion of their recent ancestors – has been snapped.’

(#litres_trial_promo) It is against this desolate backdrop that many of the most vital cultural manifestations of the late 1980s – from the reembrace of pre-alternative comedic traditions at one end of the entertainment spectrum to the Acid House movement at the other – can most easily be understood.

What better way to disprove the depressing Thatcherite contention that there was ‘no such thing as society’ than by coming together in a gleeful ecstasy (or lager-fuelled fug) to savour some form of communal jollification? Apart from anything else, it’s what J. B. Priestley would have wanted.

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‘This used to be a picture house,’ says Lee Evans – with his South London showbiz heritage hat on – to a packed Lewisham Odeon in the early nineties. ‘You don’t give a shit, do you?’ Evans’s personification of his audience as a dangerous beast, ready to turn on him at any moment, is not entirely fanciful. Before the alternative circuit began to find his modesty and innocence beguiling, he died a thousand deaths in holiday camps and working men’s clubs. He used to box when he was younger, too, and now he seems to think if he stays in one place for too long – or messes about and tries anything too fancy – the crowd might flatten him.

One shoulder slightly raised in a perpetual half-flinch, Evans doesn’t so much deliver his lines as let them escape, like compressed air released from an over-pumped bike tyre. Perpetually poised just beyond the brink of hysteria, he must duck and dive or die. His comedy is the product of a harsh Thatcherite world, a world entirely without safety nets, which is perhaps one reason why people find watching him simultaneously plummet into the abyss onstage and soar ever skywards in career terms so strangely reassuring.

Like Norman Wisdom (at this point enjoying cult status in Albania) before him, Evans is a highly skilled celebrant of incapacity. And Evans’s awareness that the bottom can call again at any moment is – if anti-scatological pun laws will permit – fundamental to his act. Hence his unusually pointed (and grateful) observation that the unfortunate butts of his jokes – bystanders, burger-eaters and toilet-sweepers – are ‘always the same guy’. Evans pauses. ‘And that was me once.’

‘If there are tears in my eyes, you put them there.’ So says Des O’Connor to Loughton’s ambassador of laughter Alan Davies, who has not punched him in the kidneys, but told him some jokes. If there is a comedy equivalent – in terms of instantaneous constituency broadening – to a band’s first appearance on Top of the Pops, initiation to the fraternity of Des’s sofa is probably it.

(#litres_trial_promo) And Davies certainly looks at home there. His nasal vocal delivery has a hint of Kenneth Williams about it, his eyes dart beneath a curly fringe, picking out the audience’s weak points, and the cackles rise off them like steam from a herd of wet cattle.

A few weeks on from his O’Connor début, the bleary-eyed and unassuming Davies is chain-smoking in his manager’s Regent Street office. There is an old-fashioned show-business ambience, as opposed to the thrusting combativeness of the new comedy establishment: Tony Hancock’s former agent still has an office here, and sitting in another room is Blockbusters’ Bob Holness.

Having graduated from Kent University with a degree in drama in 1988, Davies belongs – alongside Steve Coogan – to that section of the comedy fraternity respectfully referred to by the softly spoken agent Addison Cresswell as ‘fucking wannabe actors who couldn’t get it together to get an Equity card any other way’. Alan’s first steps into the stand-up spotlight coincided with the explosion of comedy clubs in London. And his preference for personal rather than news-based material (belying his background as a teenage Labour Party member – ‘marching and all that’)

(#litres_trial_promo) harmonized usefully with a general depoliticization of the UK comedy scene.

‘With our circuit,’ Davies insists cheerfully, ‘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.’ Whether or not this will also turn out to be true for the next generation – hatching out, even as he speaks, in a scary Aliens-style spawning room – only a daredevil would hazard a guess.

3 Morris, Iannucci, Coogan, Lee, Herring and Marber (#ulink_569e9519-aa8c-5d4e-ad8d-eeb3a022e743)

a.k.a. The new school of linguistic exactitude

‘Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse

George Orwell

‘His one real regret was that he had saved David Frost from drowning…’

Alan Bennett on Peter Cook, at the latter’s funeral