Cult british TV comedy

From Reeves and Mortimer to Psychoville

Leon Hunt

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781526102362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This book is the first sustained critical analysis of Cult British TV comedy from 1990 to the present day. The book examines 'post-alternative' comedy as both 'cult' and 'quality' TV, aimed mostly at niche audiences and often possessing a subcultural aura (comedy was famously declared 'the new 'rock'n'roll' in the early '90s). It includes case studies of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer and the sitcom writer Graham Linehan. It examines developments in sketch shows and the emergence of 'dark' and 'cringe' comedy, and considers the politics of 'offence' during a period in which Brass Eye, 'Sachsgate' and Frankie Boyle provoked different kinds of media outrage.Programmes discussed include Vic Reeves Big Night Out, Peep Show, Father Ted, The Mighty Boosh, The Fast Show and Psychoville. Cult British TV Comedy will be of interest to both students and fans of modern TV comedy.

1

From alternative to cult: mapping post-alternative comedy

Putting the ‘post’ into ‘alternative’

What is ‘post-alternative comedy’? The ‘post-’ prefix sometimes signifies an opposition to the term it transforms (as in some versions of post-feminism), but can also imply a more complex relationship, a continuation as well as a break. There is a version of the post-alternative that hinges on a caricaturing of the alternative comedy of the 1980s as self-righteous, ‘politically correct’ at the expense of being funny – the New Musical Express, for example, judged Reeves and Mortimer to be a ‘blessed relief’ from ‘a decade of ear-bashings about dole-queues and diaphragms’ (Kelly 1990: 14), while Graham Linehan would characterize 1980s comedy as ‘violently bad, po-faced and bludgeoning’ (quoted by Rampton 1998: 10). Certainly, some post-alternative comedy has been seen as a backlash against ‘political correctness’ – in tune with the ‘new lad’ culture of the 1990s or the ‘ironic incorrectness’ underpinning some of the humour examined later in the chapter on offence. Perhaps a more significant shift was the rehabilitation of comedy’s roots in variety, music hall and light entertainment – the former ‘mainstream’ that alternative comedy ridiculed for its alleged bland cosiness or reactionary politics, now revisited and reinvented. But there are continuities, too, between the two eras and I will return to this relationship shortly. What the alternative and the post-alternative share is some sense of opposition to a ‘mainstream’ – however that term might be imagined. With that in mind, my approach here is driven by the proposition that ‘alternative’ and ‘post-alternative’ comedy on TV can be seen as both categories of ‘quality TV’ (niche-oriented, requiring some kind of cultural capital) and cult TV (positioned in relation to an increasingly slippery ‘mainstream’).

Roger Wilmut, writing before alternative comedy had really impacted on television, identifies three waves of British comedians in the twentieth century. The first, dominant up to the Second World War but still a significant TV presence well into the 1980s, grew out of music hall and variety (1980: xvii). The second is what he calls the ‘NAAFI comedians’ (ibid.), which included Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Tony Hancock and others. The NAAFI comics signify an important shift in British comedy. According to Harry Secombe, they were ‘more educated … they brought a fresh approach to the whole thing’ (Wilmut 1985: 156). The Goon Show (BBC Home Service 1951–60) is frequently positioned as the progenitor of a tradition of surreal, cultish broadcast comedy that delighted a core audience while frequently mystifying or alienating others who didn’t ‘get’ it. Neale and Krutnik credit NAAFI comedians like Milligan (in particular) and Sellers with starting to deconstruct the conventions of traditional variety comedy (1990: 206). The third wave is what Wilmut calls the ‘university comedians’ (1980: xvii) – the ‘Oxbridge Mafia’ (Ibid.: xxii) would fuel both the ‘satire boom’ of the 1960s and the continuation of surreal British comedy via Monty Python’s Flying Circus (BBC 2 1969–74). Neale and Krutnik suggest that there was also a significant transformation in the audience for comedy during this period. The expansion of higher education created a niche but loyal audience for ‘clever’ comedy that required a degree of cultural capital to enjoy the humour – Monty Python’s audience was ‘a cult audience … and relatively young’ (1990: 207).

The twentieth century would arguably produce two further ‘waves’, the last of which has carried into the first part of the twenty-first. Peter Richardson would describe the Comic Strip performers and writers, rather disingenuously, as ‘intelligent comedy by people who didn’t go to university’ (quoted by Double 1997: 191). In fact, most of the alternative comedians were university educated, albeit not at Oxford or Cambridge – Rik Mayall, Ade Edmondson and Ben Elton were graduates of Manchester University, for example. The ‘erudite middle-class approach of the university wits’ (Wilmut and Rosengard 1989: xiv) was supposedly as much of a bête noir as the mother-in-law jokes of the club comedian. However, this antipathy – seemingly reminiscent of punk’s hatred of progressive rock – was less evident on television, where alt-com and Oxbridge comedy would interact more amicably. Footlights performers Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson would cameo (admittedly as over-privileged toffs from ‘Footlights College, Oxbridge’) in the ‘Bambi’ episode of The Young Ones (BBC 2 1982–84) and both Fry and Laurie would be regulars in the different incarnations of Blackadder (BBC 2/BBC 1 1983–89), a series that can be seen to belong equally to both traditions (its writers Richard Curtis and Ben Elton represented this alliance). Not the Nine O’Clock News (BBC 2 1979–82), manned by Oxbridge graduates Rowan Arkinson, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones, and writer Richard Curtis,¹ had already anticipated some of the characteristics of alt-com. According to producer John Lloyd, its ‘objective was to change what people were allowed to laugh at’ (Musson 2011: 19) while William Cook claims that it ‘liberated TV comedy from the clutches of Dick Emery, Benny Hill and the Two Ronnies’ (1994: 307). One of Not the Nine O’Clock News’s sketches placed the primetime innuendo of the latter double act in the firing line, while Ben Elton’s sniping at Benny Hill’s sexism in interviews has been seen as a contributing factor in ending Hill’s TV career (Hunt 1998: 45). It seemed that generational battle lines were being drawn.

Wilmut and Rosengard offer two slightly different definitions of alternative comedy. The first conforms to its place in popular history as an uncompromising punk-like kick-up-the-arse to British comedy, ‘an alternative to the bland prolefeed of the situation comedies which form the staple diet of television entertainment; and … a rejection of the easy techniques of racist or sexist jokes on which so many mainstream television and club comics rely’ (1989: xiii). As we can see from Not the Nine O’Clock News, this was happening in other areas of British comedy, too. But Wilmut and Rosengard also position alt-com as part of a cyclical history in which each generation must symbolically ‘kill off’ the previous one – thus they define it also as ‘simply a rejection of the preceding fashions in comedy’ (Ibid.). Stephen Armstrong presents 1990s comedy as reacting against the alternative comedy ‘establishment’, but also credits the latter with a more lasting legacy, ‘the creation of savage but inclusive gags [that] contributed to an attitude change across the nation’ (2008: 73). Post-alternative comedy would continue a number of its predecessors’ initiatives. Both Cook (1994: 6) and Double (1997: 260) argue that the most lasting legacy of alternative comedy was the rejection of what Double calls ‘gags with previous owners’. The current concern with ‘joke theft’ is probably not one that would have troubled most pre-1980s comedians – even the more innovative Dave Allen, as Double observes, mixed original observational material with ‘packaged gags’ (ibid.: 140).

Alternative comedy’s place of origin is generally identified as the unruly Comedy Store, situated above a Soho strip club from 1979. The BBC briefly showcased alternative stand-up in the one-off Boom Boom, Out Go The Lights (BBC 2 1980), filmed at the Comedy Store and featuring some performers (like Tony Allen) who didn’t subsequently make the transition to television. But alternative comedy arrived more visibly on television in 1982 – The Comic Strip Presents … Five Go Mad in Dorset was part of Channel 4’s opening night, and The Young Ones would follow on BBC 2 later that year. Some of the characteristics of alternative stand-up have been detected in earlier comedians such as Dave Allen or ‘folk comedians’ like Billy Connolly, Jasper Carrott and Mike Harding (Double 1997: 140; Allen 2002: 81; Lee 2010: 4.) A distinction is sometimes made within alternative comedy between the more politically confrontational ‘alternative cabaret’ performers, of whom only Alexei Sayle really had a significant presence on TV,² and the ‘ex-student drama types’ (Double 1997: 191) who founded the Comic Strip (Mayall, Edmondson, Peter Richardson, Nigel Planer). The fact that the latter achieved greater visibility on TV accounts for there being a less radical shift from the fourth to the fifth wave than is sometimes suggested. Alternative comedy on TV was characterized more by comic actors who could also write than by stand-ups articulating oppositional views, even though Alexei Sayle and Jo Brand are successful examples of the latter. Shiny-suited motormouth Ben Elton ranting about ‘Mrs Thatch’ has become the stereotype of the politically right-on 1980s comedian. If Elton has gone out of critical fashion – which he certainly has – it isn’t always clear whether it’s because his apparent swing to the right betrays an earlier opportunism or because leftist comedy lost its currency in the more apolitical 1990s. Comics like Mayall and Edmondson were ‘political’ more by what they didn’t say than what they did, although French and Saunders could puncture sexism more directly by padding up as two overweight men whose sexual harassment of women on TV would escalate into dry-humping the screen. Sangster and Condon describe Mayall and Edmondson’s later Bottom (BBC 2 1991–95), a slightly more traditional sitcom than The Young Ones,³ as ‘gleefully apolitical and without an agenda’ (2005: 131). Their comic violence, a kind of live action Tom and Jerry, would be re-worked by Reeves and Mortimer, who had been vocally dismissive of the more political alternative comedy.

William Cook sees post-alternative comedy as ‘second generation’ alternative, a continuation rather than a distinct break, a necessary infusion of fresh blood as the original generation was absorbed into mainstream light entertainment (1994: 8). Thompson, who gives rather more weight to the ‘post-ness’ of post-alternative, nevertheless characterizes the fifth generation (as I’m choosing to call them) as marking ‘less a clean break and more a jagged edge’ (2004: xiv). As he polices membership of the post-alternative canon, it’s interesting to see who he makes a point of excluding. The case of Harry Enfield is worth considering in particular (even though, admittedly, he isn’t especially prominent in this book either), given that his collaborator Paul Whitehouse is so central to Thompson’s book while he draws attention to Enfield’s exclusion (Ibid.: xiv).⁴ Enfield came to TV prominence on the same show that made Ben Elton so popular, Saturday Live (Channel 4 1985–87), while at the same time his characters Stavros and Loadsamoney seemed to signal a move away from the politics associated with alternative comedy – an immigrant with a ‘funny’ accent and a character who in some ways anticipates the ‘chav’ character that has been widely criticized in more recent programmes like Little Britain. Enfield was working with Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, who would contribute to Harry Enfield’s Television Programme (BBC 2 1990–92), with Whitehouse also writing for Harry Enfield and Chums (BBC 1 1994–97). His use of catchphrases and recurring character sketches both looked back to programmes like The Dick Emery Show (BBC 1 1963–81) and ahead to The Fast Show, Higson and Whitehouse’s own sketch show, and to Little Britain. Meanwhile, Thompson refers to Alexei Sayle as an ‘erstwhile alternative overlord’ (ibid.: xv) and positions him as the sour backlash against post-alternative comedy for making a thinly veiled attack on Reeves and Mortimer and ‘the rise of stupidity’ in a short story. But while few comics define 1980s alt-com more than Sayle, he had a transitional role to play too. Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews (Father Ted, Big Train) were lead writers, with Sayle himself, on the frequently inspired The All New Alexei Sayle Show (BBC 2 1994–95) and they would make their first stab at sitcom with the ill-fated Sayle vehicle Paris (Channel 4 1994).

If one is searching for evidence of the ‘post’ as a break, then the arrival of Vic Reeves Big Night Out (Channel 4 1990–91) in 1990 and Frank Skinner’s Perrier Award in 1991 can be read as two signs of a climate change in British comedy. The former is central to the re-forging of connections between cult and traditional comedy,⁵ a characteristic also found in Harry Hill. It became popular to find (flattering) similarities between cult performers and their more mainstream predecessors – Reeves and Mortimer/Morecambe and Wise, Lee Evans/Norman Wisdom.⁶ Maverick promoter Malcolm Hardee told William Cook, ‘The right-on political stuff has more or less gone … Now it’s veering towards silly stuff, rather than clever wordy stuff’ (Cook 1994: 280–281). Skinner’s award, on the other hand, was interpreted by some as not so much a turn towards the apolitical as a political backlash, even though he is one of the most technically skilled and quick-witted comics of his generation. Skinner is as scrupulously non-racist as an alternative comedian, but his more unreconstructed take on sexual politics would make him a figurehead in the ‘new lad’ culture that flourished in the 1990s. Michael Bracewell sees the 1990s emphasis on ‘attitude’ – conservative views cloaked in rebellion – as growing out of a ‘new authenticity’, part of the legacy of which was the Loaded magazine culture of football and unreconstructed masculinity (2002: 42). The flipside of this view is to see Skinner et al. as having ‘liberated TV comedy’ (to borrow Cook’s phrase) from the likes of Ben Elton – Jennifer Saunders: Laughing at the 90s (Channel 4 2011) offers ‘silliness’ and an escape from the straitjacket of ‘political correctness’ as the two defining features of 1990s comedy. More recently, Jimmy Carr celebrated this new ‘freedom’ while defending himself against criticisms of a questionable joke about Down’s syndrome – ‘You’ve got a great freedom of speech and you’re allowed to say what you want as a comic, you can do anything you like. It’s a brilliant time to be a comedian’ (quoted by Chipping 2011).

But if comedy was in some ways more polarized in the 1980s – alt-com and its aftermath on the one side, variety performers, club comics and allegedly ‘bland’ sitcoms on the other – the political picture isn’t always as clear as it initially appears. In the same year that alternative comedy, a very London-centred phenomenon, launched at the Comedy Store, the adult comic Viz appeared in Newcastle. Viz shared with alternative comedy a punk sensibility of shock and offence, an ‘underground’ aura (its first issue had a print run of 150), and an oppositional savagery towards a mainstream form – in this ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 From alternative to cult: mapping post-alternative comedy
• 2 Britain’s top light entertainer and singer: Vic Reeves, Bob Mortimer and the cultification of light entertainment
• 3 ‘Careful now’: Graham Linehan – a case study in post-alternative sitcom
• 4 Patchy in places: developments in post-alternative sketch comedy
• 5 Community and intimacy: from laugh track to commentary track
• 6 The ‘Zooniverse’ and other (furnished) comic worlds
• 7 Are you sitting uncomfortably? From ‘cringe’ to ‘dark’ comedy
• 8 Near the knuckle? It nearly took my arm off! British comedy and the ‘new offensiveness’
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index