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

Sunday, 23 February

You Rang, Milord

Jimmy Perry and David Croft generously stage a benefit night for all their old characters. Lord George and the Honourable Teddy are the same as they were in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, but in different clothes. Paul Shane, Su Pollard and the other one are the same as they were in Hi-de-Hi but in different clothes. The air raid warden in Dad’s Army is the same as he was in Dad’s Army but in different clothes. The story is Upstairs Downstairs-style class war but played for laughs, which ought to have been a winning formula, but unaccountably – despite the plentiful opportunities for whisky watering and chamber pots – the whole thing looks a bit tired. In a footnote of modest historical interest, the comedy lesbian is played by one Katherine Rabett, who – had the cookie of royal libido crumbled a little differently – could quite easily have ended up as the Duchess of York.

The Two Of Us

Disgusting piece of Thatcherite slop in which ‘Ashley’ and ‘Elaine’ (played by Nicholas Lyndhurst – unwisely striving to shrug off the sacred mantle of Rodney in Only Fools and Horses— and the evocatively named Janet Dibley) are a wildly unappealing upwardly mobile couple, currently endeavouring to become entrepreneurs by running a pizza joint in the evenings. Any kind of manual work in a sitcom like this is, it must be remembered, side-splittingly hilarious. ‘I wanted a leather-topped desk and a BMW, not a tin of olives and a moped,’ Ashley moaned tonight to great audience hilarity. As if all this, another interfering mother and (this is the modern world after all) a businessman with a mobile phone weren’t enough, this week’s episode also found room for a cameo appearance from Simon Schatzberger, deeply loathed star of the ‘French polisher?…It’s just possible you could save my life’ Yellow Pages ad.

Monday, 24 February

Desmond’s

The fact that the only other non-white character in this entire week of British sitcom is a woman in the dentist’s waiting room in Thursday’s début edition of One Foot in the Grave gives some indication of the burden of representation Trix Worrell’s Peck-ham Rye barber’s shop comedy has to carry. In these circumstances, occasional lapses into the all-singing all-dancing tendencies of The Cosby Show are probably understandable. The comedy African is quite funny, too.

Tuesday, 25 February

Chelmsford 123

In which Jimmy Mulville shows that he still has some way to go before he can truly be considered the Tim Brooke Taylor of his generation.

After Henry

For reasons known only to themselves, ITV considered the return of After Henry an event of sufficient significance to merit the front page of the TV Times.23 In truth it is slightly better scripted than most of its rivals in the hegemonic middle-class-parents-cope-with-grown-up-children-and-demanding-mother genre, but when Prunella Scales says ‘After Henry confirms my theory that all the best comedy is based on pain’, she really is not kidding.

Porridge

Manna from heaven. In tonight’s repeated episode, ‘Poetic Justice’, the magistrate responsible for Fletcher’s incarceration found himself behind bars for bribery and corruption and sharing a cell with the man he sentenced. ‘How do you think I feel,’ he demands in a fine example of the celebrated Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais technique of natural justice through paradox, ‘being sent down by a crook like me?’

Wednesday, 26 February

By some completely unprecedented scheduling oversight, there are at present no British sitcoms on a Wednesday evening, but it cannot be very long before someone chooses a common saying in everyday use, cuts off its second half (Too Many Cooks…A Stitch in Time…It’s an Ill Wind…), finds a comedy location – motorway service station, taxidermists, baked bean factory – adds an interfering mother, someone with a car phone, and three grown-up children, and remembers that trousers are funny, and there we’ll have it. ITV, 8.30 p.m., and June Whitfield’s our uncle.

Thursday, 27 February

May To December

Anton Rodgers, the poor man’s William Gaunt, plays the middle-aged solicitor who is – horror of horrors, call out the militia and phone D. H. Lawrence – going out with someone quite a lot younger than him. Worse still, her name is Zoe Angel…and as for the comedy cockney secretary and her hilarious marijuana plant, let us draw a discreet veil over her (and it). It would be all too easy at this point to lament the passing of a halcyon epoch of situation comedy, but the harsh truth is that for every Steptoe…there has probably always been a Mind Your Language.

One Foot in the Grave

David Renwick’s suburban revenge comedy is the rarest of contemporary phenomena – an entertaining new sitcom with funny jokes in it. Victor Meldrew (played by the excellent Richard Wilson of Only When I Laugh and Tutti Frutti renown) is an irascible retired security guard who vents his considerable spleen on children, men with walking sticks, and toilet rolls whose perforations don’t coincide. Tonight he was in hospital with unexplained stomach pains and found himself having his pubic hair shaved by an escaped lunatic called Mr Brocklebank. Later on, when asked by a passing Conservative candidate for his vote in a forthcoming by-election, he gestured towards his genital region and proclaimed ‘I’d sooner stick it in a pan of boiling chip fat’. Last, and perhaps best of all, came this explanation for chronic insomnia: ‘How can I go to sleep?’ Meldrew wonders. ‘Every time I nod off, I have this hideous dream that I’m imprisoned in a lunatic asylum and Arthur Askey is singing underneath the window.’

At this point, the journal ends. But as well as showing just how desperately Vic Reeves Big Night Out was needed, and beyond the eerily prophetic resonance of Victor Meldrew’s dream,24 this grainy snapshot of life before reality TV can also – with the aid of hindsight’s high-powered microscope – be seen to reveal a small-screen comedy world in a fascinating state of flux.

The exhaustion of the classic British sitcom form is made all the more apparent by the grisly spectacle of seventies behemoths trading on past glories. And the advent of One Foot in the Grave – arguably the last in the Dad’s Army/Fawlty Towers/Only Fools and Horses family line of generation-crossing mass-audience sitcoms25 – only further reinforces this sense of transience and impending extinction.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the demographic scale, a lot of the bright young things of what someone with no regard for mythic nomenclature might term the Not the Nine O’Clock News generation were finding that their own performing careers were running out of steam a little earlier than might have been expected. By cunningly diverting their substantial remaining energies into the brave new world of independent production, the Jimmy Mulvilles, Mel Smiths (no one else liked Colin’s Sandwich as much as I did) and Griff Rhys Joneses of the world would snatch success from the jaws of failure via the new empires of Talkback and Hat Trick.26

1. Getting Chiggy with it

‘I remember going down and seeing them at the Deptford Albany,’ says Reeves and Mortimer’s manager Caroline Chignell – universally known as ‘Chiggy’ – of her first sighting of her future clients, ‘and thinking, Oh my God! It was just so different from anything else…Vic and Bob didn’t really come out of the comedy world: what they were doing seemed to be referring more to art and pop traditions. There was a real feeling of a community of artists around them. Yet at the same time, their act seemed to involve all the sorts of things that would make your dad laugh, but done in a really contemporary way.’

In manned space flight, the last-minute pre-launch stages are always especially fraught. And so it proved with the Reeves and Mortimer despot/democrat trajectory, as the little matter of successfully translating their uniquely deranged equilibrium to TV was very far from being a done deal.

‘There was obviously some irony involved when Vic claimed to be “Britain’s top light entertainer”,’ Chiggy remembers, ‘but he believed it too – and he looked it when he wore a white suit.’

Vic’s early televisual forays on Jonathan Ross’s Last Resort were greeted with a reaction most fairly characterized as general bemusement, but looking back now, there were portents of the greatness to come. When he painted pictures of guests (including punk svengali Malcolm McLaren) on china plates as ‘Lesley Cooper, street artist’, a couple of prescient reprobates ran down out of the audience to steal them. And Vic’s attempts at adding a much-needed touch of class to an ill-fated village-fête-themed show as the bucolic Silas Cloudharvest elicited at least one memorable reaction. (‘I was talking to one of the prop guys afterwards,’ Jonathan Ross remembers fondly, ‘and he said “That farmer was shit: if he hadn’t had that cucumber flute, he’d have died on his arse”.’)

There were, Chiggy remembers, ‘a lot of people sniffing about’ in south-east London in the very late eighties. Whether or not BBC2’s Alan Yentob and Channel 4’s Michael Grade actually did go and see the Big Night Out at Deptford Albany on the same evening in an epic battle for control of the future of British comedy,27 it was the latter (via Ross’s production company, Channel X) who ended up signing the deal.

After an embarrassing episode when Ross and Reeves went to the BBC boss’s house only to find out that he actually wanted Vic to be the host of a new series of Juke Box Jury (a job which his friend and fellow scion of the South London biker underground Jools Holland was happy to take in his stead), it was never really going to be otherwise. The demon Yentob would get his man in the end. But for the moment, everything had turned out for the best. When the Big Night Out finally transferred to TV, the particular circumstances of a newly established independent production company making a show for a young channel would facilitate a level of freedom that a more firmly established institution could never have permitted.28

‘The thing that set the tone,’ Chiggy remembers, ‘was Jim’s absolute control of the visual aspect. Something like that would never be allowed to happen now, but it was his and Bob’s vision entirely – all the sets, all the props, all the costumes…The scripts were all drawings [preserved for posterity in the Penguin book Big Night In] – “shell/bottle lamp with patchwork shade”, “Kleenex/ticker tape”. And it was amazing how literally the people making the props took everything: they were so terrified of accidentally putting down an aubergine rather than a cucumber, or making something blue when it needed to be white.’

Vic and Bob seem to have been quite an intimidating proposition at this stage. ‘They had a very small, close-knit group of friends, and you would not dare ever to even guess what was funny and what wasn’t, or you would land yourself in terrible trouble,’ Chiggy concedes. ‘I don’t think it was just me…I think everyone felt that way.’

…Lift off! ‘Twisted movements…little puppets…light breezes blowing gently across the floor’

The cover of the 26 May 1990 issue of the NME has a historic look about it few others of that epoch can match. The music paper (which had adopted Vic and Bob at a time when rock ‘n’ roll hopefuls of a similarly charismatic stamp were distressingly thin on the ground)29 looks forward to the first episode of Vic Reeves Big Night Out on the coming Friday night with a properly inflated sense of occasion.

‘People may well anticipate some jokes of the type normally associated with alternative comedy,’ Vic warns, portentously, ‘but they are going to be disappointed.’ What comes instead will be, he promises, ‘very visual and very aesthetically attractive’. Among the featured attractions, the viewers at home can look forward to ‘twisted movements…little puppets…light breezes blowing gently across the floor’, safe in the assurance that ‘except for sex and politics, everything is covered’.

The big night finally comes. And from the moment Vic walks on with Bob dressed as Isambard Kingdom Brunei and carrying a stuffed alsatian, it’s clear this isn’t going to be your everyday TV comedy experience.

Beginning and ending with a song, the show incorporates not only the marvellous ‘Novelty Island’ talent contest, but also the fearsome and arbitrary Judge Nutmeg, whose Wheel of Justice is the centre of an elaborate ritual of care (‘What do we do with the wheel of justice? Comb its hair!’) and generates a centrifugal force unparalleled in the history of jurisprudence (‘Spin, spin, spin the wheel of justice – see how fast the bastard turns!’).

Reeves, modestly hailed in the opening credits as ‘Britain’s top light entertainer…and singer’, vainly endeavours to keep a grip on the proceedings in his multifarious roles as baffled continuity announcer, lecherous game-show host and super-confident master of ceremonies. The proceedings also benefit from regular interventions by Vic’s bald assistant, Les, who loves spirit levels but has a terrible fear of chives, and top turns such as the astonishing performance-art group, Action Image Exchange. And then there’s the enigmatic Man with the Stick, whose amusing helmet is decorated with cartoons of ‘Spandau Ballet laughing at an orphan who’s fallen off his bike’ or ‘Milli Vanilli trying to create negative gravity in their tights’.

As with The Goons and Monty Python before them, the affection in which Reeves and Mortimer would come to be held by those who find them funny is rivalled only by the confusion and irritation they inspire in those who don’t.30 And this fact of course only serves to intensify the joy of the former happy grouping.

It’s not long before people in every town in Britain are yelping at each other in hurriedly fabricated Darlington accents (slightly softer than conventional Geordie): ‘You wouldn’t! You wouldn’t! You wouldn’t…let it lie.’ Other catch-phrases prove equally infectious – the all-purpose ‘Very poor’, the trip-to-the-barber’s-inspired ‘It’s not what I asked for’, and best of all, with its pay-off delivered in an appropriately gormless voice not a million miles away from Keith Harris’s Orville: ‘I’m naive, me…but happy.’

With characteristic perversity, Vic seems to have been most willing to talk straightforwardly about what he was doing before anyone else knew what he was up to. Certainly he would rarely again be as explicit as he had been over that first Japanese meal with Jonathan Ross. (‘He explained the loose idea of Vic Reeves being simultaneously him and not him,’ Ross remembers wistfully, ‘but I’m sad to say that at the time I didn’t really pay as much attention as I should’ve.’)

Speaking to Vic over the phone at his Deptford office in the middle of the first series, there is certainly no sign of his head being turned by success. Asked as a test of his artistic integrity whether he would ever consider doing a building-society advert, his response is heartwarmingly straightforward: ‘If they’re paying me, I’ll do ‘owt. I’m shameless.’

He is happy to talk about his tailor – Sidney Charles of Deptford High Street (‘I’ve always gone to him, and I will continue to go to him as well’) – but reluctant to be drawn on Jack Hargreaves, Frank Randall, Will Hay, or any of the other big names of bygone variety eras to whom his Big Night Out persona seems to be paying implicit tribute. ‘If I mentioned anyone, I’d be speaking out of turn really, wouldn’t I?’ he demurs, sneakily.

But aren’t he and Bob bored of being compared to Morecambe and Wise all the time?

‘It’s been said. And I suppose if people have spotted it, there must be something there, but without being modest, I think we’re very unique…I don’t think you can really say that we’re like anyone else, or want to be—we just make it up as we go along really.’

Perhaps a little taken aback by the warmth with which the Big Night Out is received, Vic and Bob subsequently seem to delight in erecting a wall of wilful obfuscation between themselves and the outside world. It’s a wall that large sections of the British public seem to delight in swarming over – maybe inspired by the crowds picking up souvenir bits of demolished masonry on the freshly unified streets of Berlin.31

Either way, in the first flush of his fame, Vic Reeves can often be seen riding an antique motorbike round his old Greenwich haunts on scorching summer days, dressed in full biker’s leathers. Within a matter of months, he almost needs a police escort to protect him from the hordes of impressionable teenagers begging him to autograph cooked meat products or pieces of celery.

‘Their popularity rose absolutely from the north,’ Chiggy explains. ‘When they went out on tour after the TV show had been on, they were initially doing pretty small, university-only type gigs, but when they got to the north-east, we literally had to get security.’32

At a less expansive cultural moment, this cult following in their ancestral homeland might have kept itself to itself. But this was the Madchester epoch, and with the rest of the country unprecedentedly susceptible to the charms of northerly enunciation, Vic and Bob soon found themselves exciting – on a national basis – the sort of intense, personally focused teen adulation that the pop stars of that baggily collective pre-Britpop musical moment seemed to have given up a right to.

By December of 1991, in the wake of an autumn repeat, a fantastic New Year special and a second series, a live Big Night Out fills Hammersmith Odeon for weeks on end. As in all the best games of Chinese whispers, a double transfer – from cult, localized live attraction to TV series to big-budget nationwide roadshow – had been enough to completely garble the original message.

If Reeves and Mortimer’s act can fairly be said to be ‘about’ anything (and however sniffy they get when anyone accuses them of being surrealists, Dali and Bunuel’s manifesto that ‘nothing should submit to rational explanation’ sometimes seems to have been written for them), it is about celebrity.

It’s one thing to unravel the macramé of minor television faces, pop stars and brand names in which we all find ourselves entangled and then mix them up again into ever more delicious confusion, but what happens when your own fame becomes a strand of that macramé? The moment of bewilderment which precedes recognition and laughter is one of Vic and Bob’s most precious comedic assets, which is why familiarity could be fatal to them.

At Hammersmith Odeon, Vic and Bob seem rather bored with the Les Facts and the ‘You wouldn’t let it lie’ and ‘What’s on the end of your stick?’ routines, and the parts of the show which are less concerned with ritual and more concerned with invention are by far the most enjoyable. With the Big Night Out now established as perhaps the most original and inspiring of all the generation-welding TV comedies, its perpetrators would have to move on if they wanted to stop their talents congealing like old Ready Brek in the chipped breakfast bowl of the folk memory.

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