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

In his justly celebrated post-World War II essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, George Orwell subjects a series of badly written paragraphs to in-depth analysis. Some are academic in origin, some are propagandist in intent, but most blur the boundaries between these two supposedly separate fields of human endeavour, contributing to an environment wherein (to repeat the above quote for maximum rhetorical impact) ‘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’.

Orwell’s aim in highlighting the widespread use of clichés and jargon

(#litres_trial_promo) is not only to highlight the poverty of linguistic expression involved, but also to reveal a more sinister subtext. ‘Such phraseology’, he maintains, ‘is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures.’ He goes on to establish this degraded form of language – saying things in such a way as to conceal the reality behind the words – as a vital component of totalitarianisms of both left and right.

In outlining his response to those who express themselves in such a way, Orwell uses an image which will be familiar to readers of Henri Bergson. When he writes of ‘a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy’, he overlaps with the latter’s idea of the fundamental basis of all human hilarity. But much as George Orwell loved a laugh in his private life, he does not exploit the shortcomings of his linguistic inferiors for specifically comic effect.

On The Hour. because fact into News(s)peak won’t go

By the early nineties, however, the time was right for a group of pushy young showbiz up-and-comers to apply Orwell’s critical vision with merciless rigour, albeit with no higher goal than the provision of top-flight radio entertainment. Needless to say, things have changed a great deal since George’s day. The arbitrary

(#litres_trial_promo) dystopian rubicon of 1984 has been crossed with no apparent ill-effects, and with the once forbidding edifice of Soviet Communism lying in ruins, the future of parliamentary democracy seems about as secure as it can be.

Yet the shadow of Newspeak – the wilfully obfuscatory language which Orwell imagined in 1984 as the intellectual mechanism of a coercive state – stalks the airwaves of John Major’s Britain as threateningly as ever before. It does so not in the form of governmental decree, but in the crisply presented guise of contemporary current-affairs journalism.

The unseemly combination of euphemism and self-aggrandizement, the ignorance masquerading as knowledge, the inflation of non-stories into headlines, the prurience disguised as moral concern, the wilful compression of human suffering into unrecognizable shapes: it is these all too familiar features of modernday factual programming that the guerilla radio show On The Hour gets to work on. And by the end of the first five-episode series, in the autumn of 1991, the entire amoral apparatus of contemporary news-gathering has been pretty much dismantled.

The glee with which On The Hour sets about doing this is entirely infectious. Listening to the edition in the second series where Chris Morris hawks a faked tape of Neil Kinnock losing his rag at the Labour Party conference around various tabloid newsdesks, there’s a sense of being part of something genuinely outrageous. Not just because there is swearing involved and it’s on Radio 4, but because Morris’s combination of intellectual audacity and technical mastery of his medium seems so much more than equal to the task in hand.

The impact of this sudden rush of surplus capacity is all the more dramatic, emerging as it does from the butt-end of an apparently unbroken tradition of toothless and self-satisfied radio ‘satire’.

‘If you were reasonably intelligent and starting out your career in ‘89 to ‘90,’ On The Hour writer Stewart Lee remembers, ‘it took about two months to crack the formula of topical comedy as it was then.’

What was it about the established formats of Spitting Image and Weekending (within which Lee and his writing partner Richard Herring had cut their comedic teeth) that seemed so tired?

‘It was just so mechanical – if you’d have called it formulaic, they’d have gone “Yeah, so, what’s your problem?”…We did quite a good parody for On The Hour once about a Radio 4 programme called “It’s Satire Day”, where the characters were trying to compress everything that happened in the world into a Robin Hood sketch format.’

Presumably after ten years or so of Conservative government, there was a strong sense for those – like Lee – who also plied their wares out on the stand-up circuit of attacking things that had already been thoroughly savaged?

‘A lot of the people involved in Radio 4 satire probably voted Tory anyway,’ Lee observes sardonically. ‘But beyond that, a lot of the language available to us had just been really debased – to the point where even the word “satire” had started to really annoy me. Satire just seemed like replacing one thing with another, until after a while you start thinking, Why don’t you just say what the thing itself is?’

Saying what the thing itself is

The original impetus for On The Hour came from producer Armando Iannucci, a slicked-back BBC insider who, having already worked on The Mary Whitehouse Experience and Weekending, presumably knew a thing or two about what he didn’t want. Chris Morris – hell-bent on destroying the radio establishment from within like some fearful computer virus – supplied the maverick element.

Having started out as a news trainee in the not so illustrious surroundings of BBC Radio Cambridge, Morris worked his way up the ladder by unorthodox means. These included a series of legend-building stunts (such as filling a studio with helium in the midst of a live broadcast) and increasingly high-profile sackings and walk-outs from local stations in Bristol, Cambridge and London.

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With the exception of the mercurial Morris, who – then as now – operated more or less as an autonomous city state (‘He sent in completed packages,’ a still-impressed Stewart Lee remembers. ‘We barely ever saw him’), there appeared to be a clear divide between the writers and the performers. Ianucci acted as go-between, fulcrum and pivot, while simultaneously exercising some degree of control over both groupings, and the resulting creative tension seemed to give everyone involved the incentive to stay on top of their respective games.

On The Hour’s, calling card is the bracing precision of its language. The way this holds good throughout all the writing – from Chris Morris’s one-man Jesuit comedy suicide mission to the milder-mannered interjections of Lee and Herring (‘our favourite comedy at the time was Spinal Tap,’ Lee remembers, ‘and we just copied that by imparting lots of really dense information’), to the occasional trenchant contributions of grizzled NME veterans Steven Wells and David Quantick – allied with innovative use of editing and sound, creates an almost overwhelming effect.

A further vital factor in the overall impact of the show, and one all too easily overlooked by insiders as well as outsiders, is the consistency of the performances. ‘I was very conscious that Armando knew exactly what he wanted from us,’ remembers Patrick Marber, one of a six-strong cast alongside Morris, Jewish drama expert David Schneider, Steve Coogan, Doon MacKichan and Rebecca Front (the last two ‘fresh’ from the somewhat debilitating experience of playing the female parts in The Mary Whitehouse Experience). ‘We did have to learn a different way of performing sketches.’

And what was different about it exactly? ‘Armando told us “You’re not allowed to be too funny”.’ For Marber in particular – a somewhat obtrusive presence as co-presenter of Radio 1’s little-lamented first venture into comedy, Hey Rrradio – this simple instruction opened the ivy-covered door to a secret garden of comedic understatement.

Having largely given up on his rather declamatory (nay Eltonian) stand-up persona, Marber was ‘arsing around in Paris, trying to write a novel and failing’ when he got the call from Iannucci (with whom he’d worked previously on Weekending) in the summer of 1991. Recognizing a good thing when he heard about it, he wasted no time in coming back to London on the coach.

‘I just think he [Iannucci] cast it brilliantly,’ Marber asserts. ‘We all knew each other a little bit, but not too much. We were people who had been around a bit, but not long enough to be bitter, who were young enough to be hungry, but all at a point in our careers where we really needed it to work.’

Beneath the imposingly monolithic surface which results from this cunning manipulation of human resources, On The Hour is riven with intriguing fault-lines. As with its clearest historical parallel – the emergence of the Beyond The Fringe quartet of Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller, and their televisual satellites from That Was The Week That Was, way back in the early sixties – the rapid advent of this new comedic generation entails not only a maelstrom of competing egos, but also a grisly wake of hurt feelings, inter-personal complexity and apparently lifelong antipathies.

When Alan Bennett said at Peter Cook’s funeral that ‘His [Cook’s] one real regret was that he had saved David Frost from drowning’, it was a mistake to think he was speaking entirely in jest. And while the On The Hour story involves nothing quite as inherently dramatic as the moment in 1963 where the talented man who could swim (Cook) prevented the not so talented but very ambitious man (Frost, who had persuaded the BBC to let him star in just the sort of epoch-making TV series which the former individual might have made, had he not been away opening on Broadway) from meeting his end in an American swimming-pool, there is no shortage of human conflict there, either.

Remembering the formative experience of On The Hour ten years afterwards, Steve Coogan says: ‘I’ll never forget the first day I walked in to work on that show…I really felt like I’d found my home.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The impression Coogan means to give by saying that he felt at ease with On The Hour in a way that he never had before is that this was the point at which the yearning to produce high-quality work (which had so far remained implicit rather than explicit in his career) finally found the chance to express itself. ‘I didn’t remember him ever having done anything much good before’ is how Stewart Lee puts it, somewhat more bluntly. And if Coogan had some cause to feel intimidated on finding himself in such acerbic company, he also had his own ways of establishing his status with the group.

‘We were all children at that stage really,’ says Patrick Marber. ‘We certainly didn’t have much experience of success. But Steve was really rich and knew a lot about money – he was just so flash and cool. He had a Mazda MX-5! I realize now that’s a hairdresser’s car, but it didn’t seem that way at the time.’

‘Steve Coogan was earning tens of thousands of pounds from adverts,’ recalls a slightly less bowled-over Stewart Lee, ‘and I remember him saying things like “It’s really nice to be able to do this, as I get loads of money from my voice-over work and this will bring me a new level of respect”.’ A phlegmatic pause ensues. ‘For me and Rich [Herring], it was what we’d always wanted to do and it was also the bulk of our living. For him with his bad Ronnie Corbett impressions, it was the peanuts on top of his Ferrari advertising life!’

Before we can proceed any deeper along the Coogan trail into the On The Hour jungle of behavioural complexity, we need to find out why those particular peanuts meant so much to him.

Steve Coogan in flashback

‘I remember thinking very rationally,’ says Steve Coogan of his fiercely ambitious younger self, ‘I’m eighteen years old now, and all the people in show business who I find entertaining – Rowan Atkinson, John Cleese – they will get older, and there will have to be new people. There are people in sixth forms now who in ten years’ time will be successful and they’re just like me, so why can’t I be one of them?’

No one could accuse this man of lacking focus. As an adolescent, Coogan would drag schoolfriends off the bus to his home in the Manchester suburb of Middleton to force them to enjoy his Monty Python and Not the Nine O’Clock News records. ‘“No, Steve,” they would say, “I don’t want to listen to comedy, I want to go home.’”

Diverting from an apparently pre-ordained course to ‘an all-right sort of white-collar job’, and having been rejected by several fancy London drama schools, Steve Coogan went to Manchester Poly and launched himself into show business. Doing live gigs as an impressionist as a means of getting an Equity card – ‘I just thought, What can I do that other people can’t? and I knew I could do voices’ – Coogan, in his own words, ‘achieved mediocrity very quickly’. He got on TV, did Neil Kinnock and Jeremy Paxman for Spitting Image, sat on Des O’Connor’s sofa and even shook hands with Jimmy Tarbuck on Sunday Night at the London Palladium.

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His voice was – if a momentary slip into the Partridge-esque idiom can be forgiven before Norwich’s most eloquent ambassador has even had a proper name-check – quite literally his fortune. Coogan’s knack for modulating his tone of address to send out just the kind of confident, thrusting message advertisers liked to deliver meant that alongside his straight comedy work there was also a good living to be had from voice-overs, corporate training videos and presentations. While this work brought substantial material rewards, it nevertheless intensified the young Coogan’s apprehension that as quickly as his career was progressing, it was not necessarily moving in the direction he would have wanted.

His fear that he might be becoming, in his own damning phrase, ‘a cut-price Bobby Davro’ was intensified by a harrowing experience at the Edinburgh Festival in 1990. Sharing a flat and a nightly bill with the as yet largely unheralded Frank Skinner, Coogan found himself horribly eclipsed by the latter’s easy way with the crowd.

‘He was very hard-working and very good,’ Coogan remembers. ‘He did twenty minutes at the top of his act unscripted, just chatting to the audience, and I couldn’t do that – I’m someone that has to craft what I do, but Frank can busk it: he’s a natural.’

One year later, Coogan – having opted not to return to the scene of his Edinburgh humiliation – was in a hotel in Rhodes in Greece, ‘doing a sort of holiday rep entertainment for families and getting told off for swearing’. He picked up a newspaper in a hotel box room and read that Skinner had won the festival’s prestigious Perrier Award. ‘It was’, Coogan admits with engaging frankness, ‘probably the most depressing moment of my life.’

At this point, he had already started work on On The Hour and by the time a further twelve months had passed, Coogan would be back in Edinburgh, winning the same award for himself with a new show (performed in conjunction with future Fast Show mainstay John Thomson) featuring more developed comic characters, rather than throwaway impressions. A key influence on this happy reversal of fortune would be Patrick Marber, who not only directed and co-wrote Coogan’s Perrier Award-winning 1992 show, but seems to have played a role in the successful overall redirection of his career not dissimilar to that of Noriyuki ‘Pat’ Morita in the Karate Kid films.

‘For a while it was kind of like a big brother/little brother relationship,’ Coogan remembers. ‘I wouldn’t do anything without asking Patrick what he thought.’

They first met properly in Edinburgh in 1990.

‘Steve was depressed because he was getting annihilated by Frank,’ says Marber, ‘but I did my best to reassure him that he was a funny guy who would have his day.’

On this sympathetic foundation, a friendship was built and Marber soon found himself acting as a ‘kind of mentor…I think at that time I had more confidence in Steve’s talent than he did’.

To say that the high-earning but as yet critically unacclaimed Coogan had a chip on his shoulder at this point might be putting it a little strongly, but there was certainly a salt and vinegar crisp or two up there. And presumably, in terms of On The Hour, his burgeoning alliance with the Oxford-educated Marber must have made for a reassuring buffer zone against an intimidating group of cooler-than-thou, non-mainstream writer-performers from more illustrious educational backgrounds than Manchester Poly? Coogan smiles. ‘I think that’s a fair summation.’

Similarly for Marber, snatched from comedic oblivion and plunged into a very competitive arena wherein people were liable at any moment to bring up the fact that he had ‘once done an act with a panda’, it is easy to see how a friendship with the brazenly successful Coogan made sense. What no one could really have predicted was that the complex personal and professional dynamic which developed between the two men would produce some of the boldest and most enduring comedy of the nineties.

The On The Hour ice pack commences its break-up