As with Shakespeare, comedy is there to be said not read. I have read many classic comedy transcripts over the years ; The Goon Show, Hancock, Beyond The Fringe, Round The Horne, Not Only But Also, Monty Python, Ripping Yarns, Father Ted, etc. Stripped of their performance context some work better than others. When the theatrical element is absent the material is often reduced to fondly remembered favourite lines and echoes of the tone of voice they were delivered in. What once worked in the spontaneity of the moment rarely retains little more than a nostalgic essence on the page. And why would it be otherwise, given that the thrill of the original utterance has long since disappeared into history? Nuance, mood, accentuation, timing, audience interaction, the dynamics of stage craft are all diminished when translated into cold print. The same goes for the exponents of stand up. Truth tellers and zeitgeist sages from Lenny Bruce to Bill Hicks can often come across as mere ranters when robbed of the sheer physical force of their flesh and blood presence. Recently I read The Very Best of Linda Smith, a compilation of material by the late comedian. Stripped of her distinctively barbed and deadpan delivery the stand-up sets and radio sketches mostly read like agitprop, smug agitprop at that. And then I remembered. This is not a comedian. This is a transcript of what a comedian said in real time under the glare of a spotlight to an audience in varying stages of attentiveness and empathy. Such transcripts strip a well-honed set to its bare semantic bones. Deprived of all the things that make it work on the night it’s merely a printed record of the words uttered. Hansard for quip chroniclers.
II
I remember listening to a Radio Four Tony Hancock tribute in the 1980s where his former colleague Kenneth Williams, in a typically acerbic summary said words to the effect that ‘the trouble with Tony was that he always thought there was somewhere else to go, that there was some deeper meaning behind the comedy’. I’m paraphrasing but probably not by much. The great irony of Williams’ statement was that when I read his own published diaries several years later it was obvious from multiple daily entries that he too clearly thought very deeply about the meaning (or lack of meaning) ‘behind it all’. And although the two men died in very different circumstances, Williams having outlived his former colleague by 20 years, they both took an overdose. Williams’ motives were arguably more ambiguous (according to the coroner at least) than the alcoholically ravaged Hancock but they met the same lonely ending all the same. Tony Hancock and Kenneth Williams were deeply complex men, given to self-loathing and levity in unequal measure and both were ultimately all but consumed by the craft they excelled at, making people laugh. In this respect at least, they were not alone. Tears of a clown syndrome is a commonplace malaise. “But I AM Grock”, and all that.
The thing is, I agree with Williams. I too think there is something behind it all, something deeper than the surface impulse. I am fascinated by the mechanics of comedy and I have long been equally fascinated by the rich philosophical illogic that underpins the urge to laugh. Everything from the base instincts of slapstick (Homer Simpson. “Man fall over. Funny”) to the revelatory unfolding of the great cosmic absurdity of things. All of it brings out something both deep and primal in me. I am fascinated by what makes people laugh and why. Or rather I am fascinated by what makes me laugh and why. I can’t pretend to speak for other people. Comedy is highly subjective and the examination of it is possibly the most pleasurable route I will ever take to soul searching. Other methods are available of course, religion for one, but we were never church goers in my family. Laughter was the one shared communion.
I grew up in a house where Galton and Simpson, Hancock and Bilko were gods. I laughed at the things my parents laughed at. When Albert Steptoe fished a pickled onion out of that tin bath and popped it into his mouth it was the closest I ever came to seeing my mother have a heart attack. We were as a rule, a BBC rather than ITV family, more given to The Likely Lads and The Rag Trade than Bootsy and Snudge and The Army Game but we were equal opportunities laughers. Some of my happiest childhood memories are of sitting by the ‘family hearth’, ie the warm glow of our black and white TV. In my early teens the holy triumvirate of Eric Morecambe, Tommy Cooper and Benny Hill were the only three Englishmen who could make me laugh just by standing there and blinking. (And all three were excellent blinkers.) Both Hill and Cooper disappeared from our screens for a period of about 2 years at the end of the 1960s. That seemed a lifetime to me at the time and I have a clear memory of wondering if either of them would ever be back.
My parents only had a handful of records but the majority of them were comedy or novelty discs. We had My Old Man’s A Dustman and Lively by Lonnie Donegan, and Strawberry Fayre by Anthony Newley (or at least the Woolworths Embassy label cover version) on single. We had just two LPs. The Button Down World of Bob Newhart and Rotaty Diskers with Stanley Unwin. These were comedy grail in our house and were played endlessly. Novelty songs by the likes of Charlie Drake, Terry Scott and Bernard Cribbins filled my Saturday mornings on Children’s Favourites. I would also never underplay the effect of the Barron Nights on my pop consciousness. I found Peter Sellers monologue version of A Hard Day’s Night deeply unfunny, both on the radio and when rendered in that high-backed chair on Top of The Pops. At the time it was because I didn’t get the joke. Later when I did get the joke, I still didn’t find it funny. But I loved the Barron Nights and I did get the joke. The pop parodies they presented on Call Up The Groups and Pop Go The Workers had me in stitches.
Parody is just a grown-up word for piss-take and a lot of my early comedic identity was formed by piss take. Benny Hill and Stanley Baxter’s parodic homage to TV ads and Hollywood films thrilled me. I might not have got all the references, but I instinctively understood the territory. An early epochal sketch for me was Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s Superthunderstingcar, their parody of the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson puppet shows which dominated the early evening TV schedules at the time. I watched (and imitated) Pete and Dud’s stiff jerky movements and chaotic ballet of tangled strings with unbridled joy. The moment where ‘Lady Dorothy’ inelegantly sticks her cigarette holder in her eye, and then relaxes back into her sun lounger, kicking over the tray of drinks as she does so, destroyed any lingering devotion I had to the plotlines and dramatic tension of Thunderbirds and Stingray. From here on in they were legitimate targets. Perhaps everything was. It all begins with being able to see the strings.
My developing sense of mockery was honed during a mid-sixties golden age of self-referential parody. Batman, Get Smart, F Troop, The Munsters, The Adamms Family, Hogan’s Heroes, The Beverly Hillbillies, and numerous other TV shows at the time were all being playful with the conventions of genre. Even Terrytoons cartoons like Astronut and Hanna Barbara’s Flintstones and Snagglepuss would make knowing jokes about the medium they sprung from. I learned to recognise these lampooning elements from a very early age – kids intuitively pick up on the language and conventions of tv very quickly. As Marshall McLuhan once said “youth instinctively understands the new electronic drama, it lives it mythically and in depth.” That’s as true now as it ever was.
III
Because I had such an abysmal record at Grammar School my Mum and Dad were rare attenders of parents evening. My Dad did however go to one in my third year in 1969. The following morning a class mate shuffled up to me after Assembly. “My Dad was talking to your Dad last night” he mumbled in that non-committal way that 14-year-old boys do they talk of the inconsequential. Before I could respond (assuming I was ever going to respond) he said “he said you’re developing a good sense of humour.” This was news to me. And a validation of sorts of something I didn’t even know I had, but was evidently apparent to my Dad.
At Grammar school I was never the class clown. The class irritant perhaps, one of the disruptive back row twats, always pissing about, forever in detention. So rare was my ability to impress a member of staff with my wit I can remember the one time it happened. The Agriculture teacher Mr Huckelsby was dictating lecture notes to us. “How do you spell fertilizer?” I asked. “With a z” he replied. “And where is it?” I responded. Hardly the stuff of Oscar Wilde I know, but not only did this receive an amused smile it clearly went round the Master’s Common Room too and was quoted back at me by my Form Teacher the following day. This is the only time it ever happened, which is why I remember it. On reflection, I suspect there’s another reason I remember it. I knew perfectly well where the z was in fertilizer. I suspect I said it just to get a laugh. Getting a laugh lay much closer to my innate impulses then getting an O level in Agriculture ever did. Nine times out of ten such impulses got me into trouble.
My wit at that age veered between the razor sharp and the reliably imbecilic. I developed a love of imaginative word play, influenced hugely by Stanley Unwin obviously, and honed by John Lennon’s two volumes of surreal nonsense contained in In His Own Write and A Spaniard In The Works. A trendy drama teacher called Mr Cox let me and a class mate act out several of the Lennon sketches during lesson time. We’d perform At The Denis, The Fat Growth On Eric Hearble and The Faulty Bagnose, cackling ourselves stupid at the mangling of language and the glorious incorrectness of it all.
On Sunday lunchtimes I listened to Round The Horne. I loved the show for its genial host, its eccentric ensemble and its sheer verbal bravado. I loved Rambling Syd Rumpo’s suggestive smut and Jules and Sandy’s hysteria. At 11 or 12 I remained blissfully unaware of what lurked behind the Polare. I just thought they were two very silly men. My favourite Round The Horne character though was Gerald Monkshabit. Played by Hugh Paddick, the intrepid Monkshabit would send in his reports via short wave radio from far flung corners of the globe. His transmissions from Antarctica and ‘Zamabili-Land’ would always be blighted by interference which would blot out certain key words. The effect would be to make every innocent utterance seem immeasurably more obscene than it actually was. Indeed, this seemed to be the raison d’etre of the entire show. Naturally, in my early teens this was comedy heaven.
I was always dimly aware of ‘other stuff’ that lay outside my immediate cultural domain, the older grammar school boys who gathered around a small transistor radio at lunchtime to listen to I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again. The older boy in my hometown who let me read his Private Eye and patiently explained the Gerald Nabarro references to me. He also introduced me, via the mag’s occasional flexi-discs to the genius of William Rushton. The fact that said older boy didn’t look unlike a pre-bearded Rushton didn’t go unnoticed by me. My liking for silly voices was arbitrary and selective. I liked it when Round The Horne did it. On I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again it mostly irritated me. Likewise, Peter Cook. For all my subsequent hero worship, his 1965 novelty single Spotty Muldoon left me cold, as did Not Only But Also’s weekly finale, Goodbyee, as did the Goons Ying Tong Song. Boom Ooh Yatata Ta by Morecambe and Wise on the other hand was a comic set piece of sheer genius. I was a proper little Frere Jacques fan of the Round and the comedy of getting it repeatedly wrong amused me. Again, it’s the parody of the form thing. I got the joke. That die was cast very early on.
I warmed to the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band from the moment I saw them on Blue Peter, then still in their trad jazz send up phase. I was an even bigger fan of Do Not Adjust Your Set which featured the Bonzos, and what I didn’t know at the time was half of the future Monty Python crew. John Cleese, on a Python doc a few years back, said of DNAYS “it was the funniest thing on television and no one was watching it.” Excuse me! A nation of 14 and 15 year-old schoolkids were watching it. Never underestimate the cultural impact of that first generation of TV reared kids. Kids like me. We were media savvy in a way that no generation had been before.
Dad had a cracking sense of humour and loved the established greats of comedy but was a notoriously difficult audience to impress. He tolerated my tedious adolescent jokes rather than enjoyed them and the best that could ever be hoped for was an indulgent smile rather than outright laughter. In fact. I’m pretty certain I didn’t make him laugh out loud until I was in my late teens. I can even remember the occasion. It was 1974. My younger sister and a school friend had been to see Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel at the Hammersmith Odeon, chaperoned by the school friend’s Mum. “Apparently they were in tears when they came out” said Mum. “That bad eh?” I muttered from behind my NME. That was the moment. That got the Dad laugh. The first one that landed. Dad and I spent many an hour in front of the telly, bonding over comedy. We disagreed about Python, of course we did. It’s a generational thing. But we shared the same sense of humour about much else. I like to think it was a master and apprentice deal and that Dad was passing on a necessary craft skill down the family line. In 1973 Ronnie Barker got our nod of approval for the episode of Seven of One that became Porridge and for the Two Ronnie’s razor-sharp parody of Colditz. (“More beachballs!”) We also agreed that there was far more to Dick Emery than the ooh you are awful tonky tonk stereotype bestowed upon him retrospectively by reductive dullards. When I came home from college in late October 1976 for the first time since I’d started the second year of my degree. Dad’s first words weren’t ‘how’s the course going?’ or ‘settling into your new digs?’ but ‘are you watching Reggie Perrin boy?’
IV
It was the punk summer of 1977. Me and my mate Steve Gray were sitting in the Kings Arms in Biggleswade having a conversation that was basically willing alternative comedy into life. “It’s still all Beatles fringes humour isn’t it?” said Steve despairingly. I thought ‘Beatles fringes humour’ was a perfect way of summarising the sheer lack of comedy that spoke directly to us or resonated with contemporary cultural life. Steve was spot on in his withering assessment. Mick Jagger was still parodied by clapping the hands to the side of the head, cocking a leg and pursing the lips. Much as the Barron Knights had done a decade earlier when it was still all so fresh and the Rolling Stones were barely two hit records old. Beatles fringes, Mick Jagger’s lips and a headband wearing hippie that still adhered to the Sonny and Cher beatnik template of 1965. That was the sum total of ‘topical’ pop references in TV comedy. Morecambe and Wise, by then in their ITV dotage, were still getting mileage out of Sandy MacPherson and Max Jaffa. By 1977 we had punk music. The jukebox in the Kings Arms was playing it as we spoke. “Punk gave all us working class surrealists somewhere to go” said John Cooper Clarke in what still remains my favourite definition of the movement. And he was right, it did. But where was the new wave comedy to go with it?
Contemporary pop references were so rare in comedy that I can still remember what a thrill it was when Jasper Carrot mentioned in 1978 that he had played gigs with the Pretty Things. No further comedic material was mined from this encounter other than the apparent incongruity of this rugby shirt wearing Brum folkie playing a gig with The Pretty Things. Just saying the name Pretty Things was enough to raise a surprised laugh. When Billy Connolly burst onto British TV screens in 1975 thanks to an appearance on Parkinson, and the airing of that joke, there was little acknowledgement that this was the same Connolly who just a few years earlier had been a member of The Humblebums, a mainstay of John Peel’s Top Gear. Mike Harding aside, comedy and music (not just folk music, any music) seemed to inhabit two different planets. When The Young Ones first aired in 1982 the flat sharing quartet included hippie Neil. Nigel Planner’s character was clearly a stereotype, but after a thousand years of The Two Ronnie’s Jehosophat and Jones we were just grateful to see a hippie caricature at all, particularly one born of the culture and not just some dumb Rowan and Martin type walk on. I’d known people like Neil for years – many of us had. I’d shared a flat in 1975 with a couple of mates. One day we asked a freeloading long haired sofa-crasher called Dave if he wouldn’t mind hoovering while we tidied the place the morning after a party. The fact that he had never used a hoover before in his life became apparent when Dave walked around holding the hoover brush about 4 inches above the carpet. That’s not hoovering, Dave. That’s hovering. Oh, yes, we all knew a Neil. So where was our world? Where was our comedy? Where was our alternative to Beatles fringes and Mick Jagger’s lips?
The truth is, I’d already seen that alternative without even realising it. In Bristol in 1979, when I was in the Glaxo Babies, we’dplayed gigs alongside Shoes For Industry, the musical wing of the experimental multi-media troupe Crystal Theatre. The Crystals featured the young Paul B Davies (a founding member) and for their 1979 Radio Beelzebub Show the equally young and utterly mesmerising Keith Allen. Allen’s portrayal of a tv light entertainer being slowly inhabited by the devil as he does his schmaltzy patter remains one of the most remarkable things I have ever witnesses. It was like watching Jimmy Tarbuck or Mike Yarwood performing, having been spiked with acid half an hour before they went on stage.
The other key prophetic moment happened later that same year when I saw the TV premier of Trevor Griffith’s 1975 play Comedians. When it was written, the Jonathan Pryce character Gethin seemed like an anticipatory punk force of nature – theatrical punk anyway. Ce n'est pas un comédien and all that. In contrast to the rest of the comics who attended the play’s evening class workshop, all stale mannerisms and equally tired material, Gethin captured a prevailing spirit of nihilism that was abroad in the land. He certainly spoke to me, and no doubt he spoke to all the others who sat like me and my mate in pubs and bemoaned our comedic lot. Although we didn’t know it we were the collective unconscious of a new mentality, and indeed the future audience for a comedy that didn’t yet exist.
I saw Comedians again many years later and thought it creaked a little, but then all comedy dates. There’s no reason to assume that a play about comedy, contemporary references and all, would not similarly date. Tony Allen, one of the innovators of alternative comedy, a man who was there before the beginning, was unsparing and unforgiving about Griffith’s play in his 2002 book Attitude. While he accurately describes Gethin as “a believable zeitgeist angry young man…just the sort of man who would be fronting rock bands for the next five years” he has less time for Eddie Waters the old school evening class tutor. He took particular umbrage with Trevor Griffiths’ bolted on didactic comments about the nature of comedy. In his book Tony also praises Keith Allen for his integral role in shaping everything we now understand as alternative comedy. And he reminds us, with something of a jolt in my case, that while Keith Allen was blowing our minds in Bristol in Radio Beelzebub he was also busy electrifying London audiences with the same capacity for comedic shape shifting. Before Alexie Sayle, before Tony Allen, before them all, Keith Allen was giving all us working class surrealists somewhere to go. Keith made his debut at the recently opened Comedy Store on July 8th 1979. I moved to London a month later.
V
By the time The Young Ones started in November 1982 the first recognisable outpourings of an alternative comedy were evident. I’d seen Rik Mayall the year before, upstairs above a pub in Covent Garden. He was bottom of the bill, and sat unselfconscious and unmolested on the ticket table outside as we all filtered in. He did his entire set as Kevin Turvey, the character he was known for on A Kick Up The Eighties. Essentially, he did a much swearier and much funnier version of that. Although there was no sign of Rik the poet yet or indeed sidekick Ade Edmondson, Mayall’s charisma was already evident. Top of the bill that night was a guy called Steve Dixon who also later appeared in the Young Ones (he’s the one who loomed up menacingly and said things like “you won’t catch me with me trousers.”) I still remember his brilliantly sick Bluebird joke from that night. “They finally found Donald Campbell’s body. It came out of a tap in Huddersfield.” Ten years later I found myself working with Steve in the media department in the Adelphi building at Salford University, the same place where undergraduate Peter Kay did the Performing Arts degree which Steve helped pioneer. Steve told scurrilous tales of Manchester flat sharing with Rick and Ade when they were all on the same University course, and of everyone hiding or pretending not to be in when Ben Elton came up the path. And he told us of the night he lost it on stage and decided to give up performing stand up. It wasn’t even the equivalent of the golfer’s yips or the snooker player’s frozen grip. As he put it, one night the gift was there, the next night it just vanished. Forever.
I saw many of the new generation live in the early 90s when they were still young and hungry for it. Long before TV turned them into household names I saw Sean Hughes and Lily Savage at the inaugural Manchester Comedy Festival. I saw Jack Dee when he was genuinely sinister and edgy. I saw Bill Bailey when he was still in the Rubber Bishops. I saw Dylan Moran wander onstage mid-afternoon at Glastonbury and utterly beguile a half empty comedy tent. I saw Eddy Izzard shrink the Lesser Free Trade Hall to the size of an upstairs pub room with his intimacy. Only a year earlier, at an actual upstairs pub room, the Buzz Club in Chorlton I’d seen Izzard arrive late and dazzle the audience with his introductory improvisation on the perils of trying to navigate towards central Manchester from the motorway exit (“getting closer, getting closer, getting further away.”) One night, arriving at the Buzz Club, our taxi nearly ran over Harry Hill. He executed a neat little hop and step onto the pavement just before our reckless driver could clip his heels. Inside the venue Hill greeted us warmly and thanked us for sparing his life. During his set my wife sneezed loudly (my wife is a magnificently loud sneezer) and he incorporated it into his monologue without missing a beat. At a Salford Uni conference around this time, where Janet Street Porter was the guest of honour I mentioned that I’d much rather watch a live comedian work a room these days than a boring rock band. “Comedy is the new rock and roll” JSP replied. A line which was, for better or worse, fast becoming a truism.
When I started freelancing for BBC radio in Manchester I interviewed several comedians, mostly for the Radio Two Arts Show, occasionally for Radio Four’s Kaleidoscope. For Hit The North on Radio 5 I was happy to play straight man to Caroline Ahern, in character as Mrs Merton. Someone phoned up the programme when the interview was going out and asked ‘why have you got this old woman on your show?’ I interviewed Caroline twice at her modest little terraced house in Northenden. She was natural and unaffected, and quite possibly the funniest woman I ever met. She had no side other than a comic one and was completely lacking in showbiz airs and graces. She remarked quite unselfconsciously to me, a stranger, that Steve Coogan and gang had all been round the previous night to watch the first episode of Coogan’s Run. While everyone else laughed uproariously Caroline had found it all a bit so-so. My favourite memory of those encounters is her on her knees on her living room carpet, wreathed in cigarette smoke as she acted out between fits of giggles her favourite Benny Hill sketch which involved Hill, blindfold, judging a largest melon competition. Whenever I think of all the dour and politically correct dullards who have appeared over the years to explain the rules of comedy to me I think back to that moment in Caroline Ahern’s living room.
For the Radio One arts show, the Guest List, at half an hour’s notice I was sent to interview Ken Campbell. The programme producer who was supposed to be interviewing him called in sick. I happened to be in the office and assured him I could wing it. Figuring, quite correctly as it turned out, that Campbell would only require the simplest of prompts to get him talking I set off on the short walk up Oxford Road from the BBC to the Cornerhouse to meet him. My knowledge of Campbell was scant at best, I knew him chiefly for playing the bent lawyer in GF Newman’s Law and Order, and for a few walk-on parts in films. I’d never seen any of his mesmeric stage productions and all I knew about the current one was what was printed on the press release in my hand. I suspect he hardly noticed. I accommodated myself willingly to the precepts of his alternative reality and away we went. He loved talking process and so do I, so it was a dream way to spend an hour. And one point we were discussing performance and sleight of hand. I mentioned that I’d seen Max Wall in the early 80s at an afternoon matinee in the West End. The performance was so sparsely attended that the management urged us all to move nearer to the front and bunch up. I saw a legend, who was well past his prime but still a consummate pro. At one point he did this bit about Churchill’s statue, effortlessly free associating (or so I assumed) about what the old bugger was thinking as he stood there on his plinth in Parliament Square. A year or so later I saw Wall again, on late night Channel 4, performing the same show. And there was the Churchill bit again, word for word. “I’d assumed it was improvised when I saw him” I said to Ken Campbell. “I bet it was once” he replied.
VI
Comedy is the gift I chose to squander. I’ve always been funny but I’ve never written long form funny. I just read the first part of that sentence back to myself in an EL Wisty voice – “I’ve always been funny” – and I insist that you do too. Who in their right mind would say ‘I’ve always been funny’ in a straight voice unless they were utterly humourless? And when I say I’ve never written long form funny I mean of course an entire novel. There’s often been an element of humour in what I write. I’ve written funny for the radio - in my weekly Shrink Rap slot on the Radio One arts show and my alternative history of Manchester pop for Hit The North for instance - and I’ve interviewed lots of comedians for radio and magazine features. I’ve played straight man and feed to everyone from Victor Lewis Smith and Paul Sparkes to Ken Dodd. (I realised within five minutes of meeting Dodd that I was in the presence of genius.) In the early 90s I was a regular guest on Danny Baker’s Morning Edition, holding my own and co-guesting with Frank Skinner among others. I’ve met promoters, agents and club owners (the latter are by far the best source of showbiz gossip.) I’ve sat in plush seats in plush venues and in the kind of smoke kippered working men’s clubs and northern venues that Peter Kay based Phoenix Nights on. All in all, in one capacity or another, I’ve been up close to a lot of comics. I’ve seen the ones who are a bit dour offstage and the ones who are never off. I’ve encountered the ones who have egos that make the average rock messiah seem like Mehar Baba and the ones who are blessed with a humbling and utterly disarming level of charm and humility. But I’ve never done it myself. I’ve never flown solo, so to speak, and certainly not in a novel, not until now.
I’ve always admired the discipline involved in getting up on stage and doing a ‘tidy 20’ in a small club, or the same set night after night on a gruelling 40 date tour. I could never have done that. I lack the intellectual stamina to rehearse something to within an inch of its life and then repeat it time and time again. I’ve been a singer in a band. I’ve addressed packed halls both as an author and as a conference speaker. I’ve spoken to students as a lecturer, and to the nation from behind a studio mic. I was a right little show off in drama revues at Tech and Polytech. I’ve never lacked confidence or suffered from stage fright. But to deliver a set full of funny material to a room full of strangers without a safety net? That’s different. I’ve never been there and I never will. But like musicians who can ‘talk a good album’ I figure that I can talk a good fictional comedian. And now I’ve done just that. Will it work? Or will I get gonged off after 20 pages? We shall see.
