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

The Golden Age of British Comedy, from Vic Reeves to The Big Night Out to The Office

Ben Thompson

Introduction

‘Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes. It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilising drug’

The great American humorist James Thurber wrote those words in 1961. More than four decades later, they sum up – with uncanny precision – the hollow feeling inspired by watching a self-satisfied university graduate entertaining a roomful of pissed-up twenty-somethings with bad jokes about Star Trek.

Complacency, escapism, the inability to take anything seriously…These were just a few of the obvious flaws in Britain’s cultural DNA which could be (and often were) laid at the door of an ever-burgeoning comedic community in the last years of the twentieth century. For this was a period during which (in the words of another visiting US wit, Rich Hall) ‘Everyone who didn’t want to lift stuff seemed to become a comedian’; a time when every aspect of the nation’s collective experience – politics, sport, art, literature, religion – seemed at some point to be becoming another branch of light entertainment.

Amid the suited-up hubbub of Jongleurs comedy club in Camden on a Friday night in the mid-1990s, the brutal, even bestial, simplicity of the venue’s motto – ‘Eat, laugh, dance, drink’ – perfectly encapsulated the careless hedonism of the epoch. And yet, if the experience of live stand-up could sometimes seem like a short cut to all that was most objectionable in British public life, on the higher – televisual – plane, comedy also provided a kind of lifeline: maintaining vital contact with some of the noblest and most beleaguered aspects of our cultural heritage in an era of encroaching blandness and conformity.

From Vic Reeves Big Night Out and The Day Today at one end of the period, to The Royle Family and The Office at the other, the best British TV comedy of 1990-2002 not only offered a home to ideas and ideals of community which could no longer find one elsewhere, it also gave us a clearer picture of what was happening to our nation than any other form of artistic endeavour.1 This double-headed vision of comedy – as both prophecy of what’s to come and memorial to what has been lost – might seem a little on the grandiose side, but it is not a view without historical precedent.

‘Successful comedy often anticipates future newsreel coverage’

In Iain Sinclair’s book Lights Out for the Territory, the film-maker Chris Petit reflects on the way an old Dick Emery sketch – in which an explosive device was hidden in a lunchbox on a bus – seemed to contain an eerie premonition of the IRA bombing campaign which began shortly afterwards.

Dancing a strange backwards jig around Petit’s assertion that ‘successful comedy often anticipates future newsreel coverage’, the newsreel footage in 2001’s neurotically self-justificatory Sex Pistols memoir The Filth and The Fury is intercut with clips of olde-English comedic legends such as Max Wall and Tommy Cooper. ‘If you want to know the root core of something, go to the root core,’ John Lydon told Mojo magazine’s Andrew Male in the spring of 2002. ‘Comedians…Shakespeare…that’s English culture.’

More than twenty years before, the man then known as Johnny Rotten had wanted Monty Python’s Graham Chapman to direct the original Sex Pistols film, The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle. But if Lydon is to be believed (which he isn’t always), the group’s manager Malcom McLaren was so disgusted by Chapman’s party trick involving the pub dog, a pint of cider and a certain intimate part of his anatomy, that he gave the job to Julien Temple instead.2

This was one strange cultural linkage which somehow escaped the all-seeing eye of Greil Marcus. Marcus’s landmark 1989 volume Lipstick Traces3 sought to clear away the soil from the roots of punk rock by making ingenious connections between obscure sixteenth-century Dutch heretics and members of the Sex Pistols who happened to have similar names. Within the shared cultures of appreciation which have grown up around pop music (or film, or literature, come to that), such extravagant intellectual conceits are, if not exactly ten-a-penny, certainly far from unheard of. Yet British comedy’s ever-increasing cultural prominence has so far proved resistant to such ambitious interpretations.

One of the main aims of the book you currently hold in your hands is to stop people wondering why no one has ever attempted something similar in the entertainment field which Jethro and Ken Dodd call home. But before we can begin to see if this lofty goal can be achieved, two important questions must be answered.

1. Was the Reeves/Office era really a golden age, and if so, how and why did it come about and what were its exact parameters?

In years to come, the old folk will gather at the seaside. As the coastal waters lap ever closer to the top of the Thames Barrier, the veined and the venerable may be seen pottering up and down the promenade, lost in heated debate about the glory days of their youth.

‘Ah yes,’ one of them will say, sucking meditatively on an olde-English Alcopop drink, ‘the early to mid-1990s: The Day Today, Alan Partridge, Shooting Stars, Paul Calf, The Fast Show, Father Ted…Never again would we have it so good: the attention to detail, the mordant wit: why did those great days ever have to end?’

A contemptuous expostulation from a nearby bench might upgrade this nostalgic monologue into a vicious row. ‘But what of the magical autumn of 2002 – with the third series of The League of Gentlemen, and the second of The Office, I’m Alan Partridge and Phoenix Nights…? Surely this was a vintage the like of which would never be equalled?’

Learned observers of this rose-tinted spectacle might quote Sigmund Freud to the effect that comedy itself is a form of nostalgia, as it attempts to ‘recapture the state of childhood in which we did not know the comic, were incapable of wit and did not need humour to make us happy’.4 Sceptics of a more populist bent will no doubt cite the number of people who used to watch The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special as evidence of a narrowing of both the focus and the range of British comedy in the aftermath of the 1970s heyday of what dewy-eyed nostalgia fiends of an earlier generation like to call ‘One Nation TV’.

Both parties will have a point.

And yet the bald facts of the situation are these. First, that the period which authoritative historical evidence set out in the following pages will prove started with Vic Reeves5 Big Night Out was one wherein comedy and comedians had an unprecedented impact on this nation’s intellectual and emotional life. Secondly, that – without surrendering entirely to the mania for pointless list-making which is the symptom of a culture on the brink of nervous collapse – it would be fair to say that the best ten British TV comedy shows of this era (the other nine being The Day Today, Father Ted, The Fast Show, Shooting Stars, Brass Eye, I’m Alan Partridge, The Royle Family, The League of Gentlemen and The Office .. , with Spaced, Black Books, the funny bits in Smack the Pony, the first series of Big Train and the great lost Paramount Channel sketch series Unnatural Acts pressing hard on their heels, since you asked) not only stand comparison with, but actually overshadow the small-screen landmarks of any previous era.

Far from merely echoing such past glories as Fawlty Towers or That Was The Week That Was, the finest moments of late twentieth-and very early twenty-first-century UK comedy actually represent a worthy culmination of everything that had happened in the preceding fifty years. Not just in terms of evolving comic traditions – from Hancock to Steptoe to The Royle Family; or Spike Milligan to Monty Python to Eddie Izzard – but also with regard to the changing character of the broader culture from which those traditions have emerged.

In the more distant past, it has been possible for astute commentators to discern precise causes of particularly successful periods of comedic endeavour. For example, the golden age of Wilde and Whistler could be ascribed to the healthy state of a late-Victorian Fleet Street which, then still some way short of becoming – in the eloquent estimation of D. B. Wyndham Lewis6 – ‘the sedulous ape of New York tabloidery’, none the less ‘recognised the existence of a small, cultivated, leisured evening newspaper public and strove to meet its taste’. And the aura of celebrity which enveloped the notoriously sharp and combative wit of Alexander Pope in the early 1820s was the product (in the memorable estimation of Dilys Powell)7 not only of the cessation of press censorship but also of ‘a time when the exercise of critical reason was as much applauded as today the eye of a Bradman or the punch of a Louis’.8

Turning to our own mirthful epoch in search of similarly clearsighted explication, readers of Michael Bracewell’s generally estimable The Nineties: When Surface Was Depth will have had to be satisfied with a rather downbeat theory of causation. ‘The country was still watery-eyed and winded’, apparently (and therefore, presumably, in dire need of a good laugh), ‘from being punched below the intellect by the recession of the late eighties.’

Other, somewhat more specific, economic factors suggest themselves. Without diving too deeply at this early stage into the sewage-encrusted gravel pit of media politics, it would be fair to say that the rise of independent production companies in the mid to late 1980s – set in train by changes in the remit of the BBC and the advent of Channel 4 – was a vital precursor to the explosion of comedic creativity in the next decade. The break-up of the mass TV audience with the dawn of the digital era was another essential precondition.

Where comic performers of earlier times might have had to hold on to an eight-figure following to be considered a viable star of the small screen, it was now possible—by the magic of advertisers’ demographics and Friday-night channel-branding entertainment packages – to sustain a major TV career on the basis of an audience of two million.

The expansion of creative extremity and fearlessness thus facilitated would stand a new comedic epoch in good stead. But what were the conditions for membership of this new generation, and how – and against what – would it come to define itself?

The preceding, ‘alternative’ era had kicked off in headily coincidental and clear-cut style, as the opening of former insurance salesman Paul Rosengard’s Soho Comedy Store synchronized helpfully with Margaret Thatcher coming to power. (At the start of William Cook’s 1994 book Ha Bloody Ha: Comedians Talking, it is even suggested – somewhat controversially – that the former of these two historical events might have been of more lasting historical significance.)

The start of the generation currently under consideration is a slightly more staggered affair – less a clean break and more a jagged edge. Paul Whitehouse is part of it, but Harry Enfield isn’t.9 Ben Elton isn’t allowed within sniffing distance, but his erstwhile Friday Night Live colleague Jo Brand is (or was, until she started presenting lame late-night advert-clip TV shows). Patrick Marber, whose late-eighties stand-up persona gave no signal of the sophistication of his later work on The Day Today and Knowing Me Knowing You, With Alan Partridge (let alone his subsequent career as an internationally acclaimed playwright), is definitely included, yet Jennifer Saunders – for all the great leap forward into modernity represented by Absolutely Fabulous – for some reason isn’t.

Don’t ask me why. I don’t make the rules.

One thing which is as clear as Ricky Gervais’s conscience10 is that whatever is particular to the post-alternative epoch begins with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer (readers keen to find out why it ends with The Office are advised to stock up on tinned goods and dry biscuits and sit it out till the conclusion). Throughout their fifteen-year light-entertainment odyssey, this unique pairing have demonstrated an all-the-more-uncanny-for-apparently-being-unconscious propensity for anticipating – in their failures as well as their successes – the future movements of the comedic barometer.

A source of huge delight to their admirers, this laughter-diviners’ gift has not gone unnoticed by their enemies either. In his 2000 short-story collection Barcelona Plates, erstwhile alternative overlord Alexei Sayle ‘created’ a comic double act called Nic and Pob. Nic and Pob are a pair of ‘apparently genial rubbish-talking Northerners’ who live (as Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer almost did, at the time Sayle was writing) in ‘back to back Kentish mansions’.

‘Their arrival on the comedy scene’, asserts that man who himself rose to public prominence at the turn of the previous decade with that fearsome piece of lyrical dialectic ‘Ullo John, Got A New Motor’, ‘had fortunately coincided with the rise of stupidity.’ Never mind poacher-turned-gamekeeper, this is pickpocket-turned-chief-of-police, and the apparent self-awareness of Sayle’s qualifying phrase (‘the public having tired of being shouted at by fat men about things that weren’t their fault as a form of entertainment’) does nothing to dispel the overpowering stench of sour grapes.

Neither does the fact that the ill-intentioned little story which follows is an abysmally sub-Vic-and-Bob farrago of half-assed voodoo ritual and blatant product placement. Still, the notoriously fragrance-conscious Reeves has not been averse to the stink of a spoiled vine in his time (at the height of his mid-nineties pomp, he once imagined himself in later life ‘sitting outside the BBC throwing pieces of coal at newcomers’), and they do say that in comedic circles outright frontal assault comes second only to imitation as the sincerest form of flattery.

Reeves and Mortimer have certainly not wanted for the latter tribute in recent years. Watching the Big Night Out on an ancient video now is like watching a blueprint for the next thirteen years of British TV in the form of a very strange dream. From The All-New Harry Hill Show to I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here!, from the unrepentantly Jackie Milburnesque enunciation of the Big Brother narrator Marcus Bentley to more or less every aspect of the onscreen demeanour of ITV’s new kings of prime-time Ant and Dec,11 it’s all in there. The miraculous thing is that at the same time as being eerily familiar, the show still manages to seem like a transmission from another planet, picked up randomly from the ether.

2. What in the name of Bob Monkhouse’s stolen jokebook does ‘Sunshine on Putty’ mean?

The title Sunshine on Putty originates exactly one hundred years before the first Channel 4 edition of Vic Reeves Big Night Out which marks our story’s official starting-point. The people we have to thank for it are English lesbian literary icons Katherine Bradley and her niece and lover Edith Cooper. This mercurial pairing wrote eleven plays and thirty volumes of poetry together under the coyly macho pen-name of Michael Field (on the grounds – understandable in a Victorian England whose perennially unamused matriarch could not bring herself to accept the existence of Sapphic love – that ‘we have things to say that people will not hear from a woman’s lips’).

Perhaps the best known of these hilariously florid and overblown works is an epic poem about their dog, rejoicing in the title Whym Chow: Flame of Love. The eponymous canine’s real-life role as ‘sex symbol, god made flesh and embodiment of the masculine principle’ was, their biographer Emma Donoghue later noted,12 ‘a heavy burden of meaning for one small dog to bear…Not surprisingly, it went to his head and he became a tyrant.’ On one occasion, when Whym Chow’s foul temper had prevented them from going to the beach, Bradley and Cooper excused him in verse with the classic couplet ‘Bacchic cub, Thou could’st not bear to face the sea’. But, in the immortal words of Ronnie Corbett, I digress.

In the summer of 1890, on meeting the celebrated Irish playwright and novelist George Moore, Bradley and Cooper noted in their diary that his smile was ‘like sunshine on putty’. It is hard to be sure exactly what they meant by this observation, though they probably did not intend it as a compliment. (Moore is one of those tragic whipping boys of destiny – like Sir Geoffrey Howe or Bobby Davro – who seem destined to be remembered chiefly as the butt of other people’s insults.)13

However, if the phrase ‘sunshine on putty’ is dramatically uprooted from its original context and applied with a reckless flourish to the recent history of British comedy, its ambivalence becomes entirely felicitous. On the one hand it evokes a pleasurable sensation – a feeling of warmth and light in a clammy and mutable world – on the other, a specific impact: a sense of helping along a process of coalescence that was already ongoing.

Consider for a moment the almost innumerable ways in which daily life in this country is different now from the way it was at the beginning of the last decade. Who would have predicted in 1990 that within little more than ten years it would be hard to remember what it was like to live under a Tory government (or at least one which called itself that)? Or that the thirsty need no longer dream of pubs that would be open all day, and the hungry could entertain the real possibility of a decent sandwich in almost every town and city in Britain (so long as they had the money to pay the premium for Pret à Manger pine nuts)? Or that Scotland and Wales would have their own parliaments and someone who wasn’t a neo-Nazi might fly the flag of St George on the front of their car? Or that on the days when Sara Cox managed to get out of bed for the breakfast show, you could listen to Radio 1 all day from 7 a.m. till 5.45 p.m. and Jo Whiley would be the only DJ you’d hear who didn’t come from Manchester or Leeds?14 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?