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

Before On The Hour makes its triumphant transfer to the small screen as The Day Today, internal tensions within the group ensure that there is already a breakaway faction. Exactly what happened to cause this split has been the source of much speculation, and hopefully the following account will clear up any misunderstandings. (While these events lack the gory trappings of Jacobean tragedy, the extent to which they still loom large in the minds of the participants – a full decade later – confirms that wounded pride can take longer to heal than all but the most savage dagger scar.)

Stewart Lee’s side of the story

‘The reason we ended up not being involved in the TV series,’ Lee explains, ‘is that we didn’t think we were being offered a fair deal. We wrote about 20 per cent of the first series. I don’t think that would be an exaggeration – probably someone on the internet would know what the exact proportion was. And when it went to telly we were offered thirteen minutes a week, but as we felt we’d set the tone for some of the characters, we asked for less money and less minutes, but a share in the future of the show.’

With Iannucci reluctant to give up this degree of control, a stalemate rapidly develops. Lee and Herring go off to make their own Radio 4 and Radio 1 shows, Lionel Nimrod’s Inexplicable World and Fist of Fun, and when On The Hour is released as a BBC audio-cassette (and later on CD), their contributions have been surgically removed by Iannucci.

‘There might have been an argument about us wanting to get paid three hundred pounds instead of two hundred for it going to CD,’ Lee says phlegmatically, ‘but basically Armando edited us out to prove a point. I don’t hold it against him, really.’

Like a pair of latter-day Trotskys, snipped out of the photo of triumphant Bolshevik revolutionaries on the balcony with Iannucci’s Stalinist Stanley knife, there is little Lee and Herring can do but put a brave face on life in comedic exile (and keep an eye out for shifty-looking individuals carrying ice-picks).

‘I was about twenty-three at the time,’ Lee remembers, affecting an indulgent air. ‘Most of the other people involved in On The Hour were in their late twenties and I remember feeling quite sympathetic and thinking, They’ve got to take what they’re offered because otherwise they’ve missed the boat.’

So why do his and Herring’s live shows at the Edinburgh Festival a year or so later feature the latter delivering repeated savage blows to the head of a balloon likeness of ‘the playwright Patrick Marber’?

Lee laughs: ‘We were only annoyed with Marber because he came to the whole thing quite late, and he seemed to be the most delighted of anyone at the idea of us being forced out of the picture.’

Patrick Marber’s side of the story

‘I’ve been under siege by them for years, really,’ Marber says, rather forlornly, of his erstwhile colleagues, ‘but I’ve never responded up to now.’ He pauses. ‘I think they’re of the view that I plotted to get them sacked.’

Presumably he doesn’t intend to take this opportunity to confirm the truth of that accusation?

Marber laughs, perhaps a little nervously. ‘In the summer of ‘92, me, Lee and Herring, Steve and Simon Munnery did a show in Edinburgh called The Dumb Show, which didn’t really work. When we all got in a room together, we just didn’t hit it off. And some time after that, they fell out with Armando, and that was it, really. The irony of it is that I thought their material was absolutely fantastic – you would always feel excited on On The Hour when something they had written came in…’ Marber pauses. ‘I suppose they’re maintaining that on some level they invented Alan Partridge?’

He sounds slightly surprised at the news that they haven’t done this – at least not in my hearing.

‘They did write the first piece of material,’ Marber explains. ‘Armando asked Steve to perform it and this generic sports voice came out – sort of Elton Welsby, sort of Jim Rosenthal. Then Steve came up with the name and Alan was born, but I think it would definitely be fair to say that Alan Partridge wouldn’t have happened had Lee and Herring not written the original sketch.’ As to the scale and grandeur of the oak that will grow from this particular comedic acorn, though, only destiny can decree it.

Knowing him, knowing them

In its original Radio 4 incarnation, the On The Hour offshoot Knowing Me, Knowing You – wherein Alan Partridge, sports-desk incompetent and all-round loose cannon, is misguidedly given his own chat show—is an instant comedy landmark. As inhabited by Coogan, the hapless but ever emphatic Partridge goes beyond straightforward caricature into the realms of immortal comic characterization.

Alan will pursue a metaphor until it turns and fights like a wild animal at bay, and in his own freedom from shame there can sometimes be discerned a form of primal innocence. When he hits a child prodigy, or informs a recently freed hostage that their time in captivity was equivalent to watching 9,000 episodes of Inspector Morse – ‘it doesn’t sound so bad when you put it that way’ – he seems in some strange way to strike a blow for everyone who has ever felt hemmed in by the constraints of conventional etiquette.

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Part of what makes Knowing Me, Knowing You special is the precision of its cultural references. ‘It’s about fine judgements,’ Coogan insists, ‘making the right choice of a name or a word without being obvious, but also without disappearing up your own arse.’ While the time and trouble Coogan and his writing partners invest in getting details right – from Alan’s car (a Ford Scorpio) to the exact layout of his East Anglian home turf – pay off on their own account, the laughs which accompany brand recognition are easily come by. The real greatness of the show comes in achieving a level of emotional acuity that matches and even surpasses that of the product placement.

It would not be unreasonable to assume that a good deal of Alan Partridge’s remarkable intensity comes from Coogan’s own pre-Partridge fears that his life might be vanishing down the toilet of middle-rank showbiz.

‘It was that,’ admits an impassioned Coogan, ‘it was…Impressions are just a facility – something I can do…I hated being a known quantity. If people really want to annoy me, they still say, “Oh look, it’s Steve Coogan – top TV impressionist”.’

There’s a great moment in a radio episode of Knowing Me, Knowing You, where Alan encounters top TV impressionist Steve Thomson, played by Marber (who while he modestly insists that he is ‘not in the same league as Steve as a performer’ contributes a series of beautifully judged supporting characters to radio and TV series alike). ‘I want to be funny, but with dignity,’ begs Steve. ‘Do your Frank Spencer,’ Alan whispers malevolently.

No disrespect is intended to Marber’s later career as an award-winning dramatist in saying that nothing in his subsequent canon surpasses the acuity of some of these exchanges. The happy knack of translating your own personal anxieties and hang-ups into subtle but brilliantly accessible comedy is given to very few comedy writing partnerships, and at this point Coogan and Marber seem to have it in spades.

‘Certainly in Knowing Me, Knowing You in general, I tend to play the characters who try to usurp Alan’s status,’ Marber admits. ‘I’d like to write something one day about what it’s like to be “the man behind the man”,’ he continues. ‘When you start off, it’s great – the other guy takes all the pressure – but eventually it’s just not enough. Your ego gets bigger and you want to go and get some of the glory for yourself.’

One of the strange features of this kind of partnership is that (as the career trajectory of Paul Whitehouse will demonstrate even more dramatically) however successfully the person in the subordinate role subsequently defines themselves as a creative individual, they can never quite escape the shadow of their former incarnation.

Watching Marber on TV, winning an Evening Standard Laurence Olivier drama award for his play Dealer’s Choice, the look on his face when he finds out they’ve got Coogan to present it to him might well be described as ‘a picture’. He can laugh at the memory now, though: ‘I think one part of me was thinking it was lovely to be standing there with Steve and it being me getting a prize, and the other part of me was thinking “Couldn’t I have someone legit?’”

A boot of non-fact grinding into the face of news for ever – The Day Today hits the ground running

Remarkably for the work of an ensemble with so little experience of the medium, The Day Today – the exquisitely realized small-screen version of On The Hour which finally reaches BBC2 screens in January 1994 – manages to create a televisual language every bit as perfectly adapted to its target as the radio prototype had been. Iannucci, Morris, Coogan, Marber et al. inflate the familiar visual and verbal tics of the TV newsroom into such magnificently grotesque shapes that they hang in the air above every subsequent ‘legitimate’ broadcast in the manner of gigantic barrage balloons.

Morris’s all-powerful studio overlord presides like some puffed-up Paxmanesque nabob over a sumptuous array of courtiers. As well as Coogan’s marvellous roving sports buffoon, there’s Doon MacKichan’s doyenne of the money markets, Collaterlie Sisters, Schneider’s physically mutable weatherman, Marber’s hapless political correspondent, Peter O’Hanraha’Hanrahan (forever struggling to come to terms with the intricacies of the European Union in the face of Morris’s withering scepticism) and Rebecca Front’s intimidatingly eco-friendly Rosie May, purveyor of that archetypal 1990s informa-hybrid, ‘Enviro-mation’.

It’s the success with which these individual embodiments are cradled within an appropriate stylistic whole that makes The Day Today so devastating. The caffeine-crazed fast-cutting, the invasive close-ups, the ransacked sock-drawer of different film stocks, the priapic graphics; this is the infrastructure of televisual deceit, and to watch it being taken apart piece by piece is at once utterly liberating and a little scary.

But what are the consequences of this act of premeditated destruction? In Mrs Slocombe’s Pussy, his not terribly provocatively entitled memoir of half a lifetime’s television watching, Guardian journalist Stuart Jeffries asserts that The Day Today ‘blew up the TV news and the fragments descended into exactly the same place as before the explosion’. But this is very far from being the truth.

If anyone has any doubts about the way the surreal extrapolations of The Day Today feed back into the mainstream of official news-gathering, there’s a 1995 BBC Learning Zone documentary about TV current affairs which can swiftly dispel them. Footage of arrogant young trainees learning to parcel up their partial interpretations of the world into easily digestible one-minute packages is smoothly intercut with The Day Today’s Rebecca Front analysing the cosmetic rituals of her inspired US reporter, Barbara Wintergreen (‘Your make-up is so thick that you can’t really move your head’). When you factor in a series of anonymous talking heads saying things like ‘the editing is the way you apply the grammar’ in such a way as to leave it unclear whether they’re talking about The Day Today or the actual news (of course the answer is they’re talking about both), it’s hard to believe that the whole programme isn’t a prank devised by Chris Morris himself. Nor is this the end of the overlap between The Day Today’s fiction and TV actuality’s fact.

A whole host of those – from Alan Titchmarsh to Richard Made-ley—who might have been expected to look to their laurels in the wake of Partridge et al.’s brutally well-observed mockery, instead respond by moving in the opposite direction and absorbing it into their day-to-day demeanour.

The idea of an object of satire embracing the more baroque extremities of their own comedic portrayal did not make its début in the nineties. Three decades earlier, in the wake of Peter Cook’s celebrated impression of Harold Macmillan (a tacit relaxation of previously stringent rules regarding the representation of living persons having made the satirically motivated impersonation a much less perilous business than it was in The Goon Show’s day), it was maintained by many that the prime minister began to behave more and more like Cook’s take-off and less and less like his actual self. In this context, the apparent severity of Peter Cook’s oft-quoted response to finding out that Macmillan was in the audience as he performed at his Establishment Club actually cut both ways.

Cook’s apparently rather discourteous (in-character) proclamation – ‘There is nothing I like better than to wander over to Soho and sit there listening to a group of sappy, urgent, vibrant, young satirists with a stupid great grin spread all over my face’ – was an admission of defeat as much as a display of aggression. If the prime minister would actually cross town to hear Cook’s impression of him, that didn’t say much for the amount of pain it caused him.

Accordingly, when the home secretary Henry Brooke – the subject of some of the programme’s most savage attacks – wanted to get That Was The Week That Was taken off the air, Macmillan argued against this precipitate course on the shrewd grounds that it was probably better to be satirized than ignored. In his appreciation of how crucial an attribute being seen to be able to take a joke would become in British public life, the supposedly out-of-step-with-the-times Macmillan actually seems to have been quite a forward-thinker.

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As anyone who has ever laughed at a cruel remark made at their own expense knows, a show of imperviousness to such slights does not guarantee a diminution of their impact. Often – for example, in the poignant and disturbing case of Sammy Davis Jr – it will have quite the opposite effect. While The Day Today’s well-aimed barbs initially seem to bounce straight off the gnarly hide of the British body politic, some of them find their target, causing strange and unforeseen infections of the blood.

Far from confirming the inability of satirical endeavour to affect the way people think, The Day Today’s calculated inhumanity seems to impact upon not only the way world events are presented to us, but also the actual nature of the events themselves. For instance, Tony Blair and George Bush’s campaign to mobilize support for a multilateral attack on Iraq in 2002-3 seems to reflect the long-term influence of The Day Today ‘War Special’ (in which Chris Morris’s demonic anchorman systematically orchestrates the beginning of a global conflict with the help of some snappy editing and a series of provocative effects) at a policy level.

It would be a misunderstanding of the true nature of satire to think that its success or otherwise is measured by the achievement of meaningful change. (As Peter Cook was fond of pointing out, the art form was defined in the cabaret clubs of Weimar Berlin, ‘and see how they stopped the Nazis’.) But even if it was, inspiring the leaders of the Western military-industrial complex to new heights of bellicosity would probably not be the kind of meaningful change those responsible had in mind.

The Day Today diaspora

Perhaps inevitably – given the radical nature of the programme itself and the delicate balance of power within it – there was only one series of The Day Today. But by the end of it, the genie was well and truly out of the botde. Subsequently, old boys and girls of the New School of Linguistic Exactitude swarmed out into the world like graduation day celebrants in an American teen movie, carrying the lessons they’d learned securely in their knapsacks.

For Ianucci, the huge extent of his managerial and catalytic achievements in the course of this three-year period have hobbled some of his later endeavours with a rather disabling sense of self-regard. Furthermore, his decision to venture in front of the camera in the patchy but occasionally revelatory satirical vehicle Friday [then Saturday] Night Armistice is not entirely vindicated (if only because the collective screen presence of the remorselessly untelegenic trio of Iannucci, Schneider and one-time Lee and Herring bit player turned Alan Partridge co-writer Peter Baynham underlines a little too clearly the innate truth behind the programme’s admittedly prophetic style-is-triumphing-over-substance message).

On the upside, his poorly received solo venture The Armando Iannucci Show does contain – in an extended sketch about impoverished Africans getting together to raise money for the British showbiz establishment – perhaps the most devilishly effective reversal of conventional comedic pieties ever seen on TV. And there’s always Alan Partridge to keep him busy.

For MacKichan and Front, life is considerably more difficult. Eleven years with a woman prime minister do not seem to have brought any notable extension of employment possibilities to the distaff component of groundbreaking TV topical revue ensembles. As with That Was The Week That Was’s Eleanor Bron and Not the Nine O’Clock News’s Pamela Stephenson before them, opportunity does not knock as loudly as it might have, and while MacKichan can sometimes

(#litres_trial_promo) be seen presenting teaching-baby-to-swim segments on This Morning, or taking the female supporting role in comedies about vets who don’t really like animals, Front struggles even harder to get out of the background.

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Stewart Lee and Richard Herring shoehorn their penchant for cerebral juvenilia into a classic odd-couple double act. The chainsmoking Lee ruthlessly exploits the sort of dangerous good looks most university-common-room existentialists can only dream about, while his comedy partner – a self-confessed ‘small, fat, middle-class white bloke from Cheddar in Somerset’ – struggles to come to terms with the fact that though he may idolize Ice-T, Ice-T’s dad was not a caravan-owning headmaster called Keith.

The roots of their comedy lie in gentle mockery – ‘Today in Somerset electricity arouses only suspicion, not fear’ – but a high degree of self-awareness is another vital ingredient. ‘You’ve misunderstood the art of simile, haven’t you?’ they chide each other gleefully: ‘What you’ve done is mix up being like something, with being what it actually is.’