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Channel 4 recently broadcast School of Comedy, a sketch pilot where all the parts were played by children. Broken comedy with unbroken voices, as it were. Big Train meets Bugsy Malone. Naturally, the gimmick didn’t disguise the grim fare on offer – if anything, the sight of young teenagers doing Minipops-style impressions of Ricky Gervais and Catherine Tate vocal tics made the Comedy Lab experience even more depressing than usual.

 

But it got us thinking. Doesn’t pretty much all comedy these days look like the work of kids?

 

Good comedy, even when it seems crude and infantile, generally has a certain authority to it. It’s made by people who know more about life than you do, or at least it appears that way. It’s made by grown-ups. Grown-ups pretending to be kids, maybe, but grown-ups all the same.

 

The actual age of the performers has nothing to do with it. The characters in Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps are meant to be about the same age as Bob and Terry in The Likely Lads. Pappy’s Fun Club are older than the Beyond the Fringe team in their heyday. It’s all about attitude – an extremely adult show can be the work of extremely young comedians.

 

A textbook example is the first three series of Absolutely, a show which had an unmistakably adult view of the world. The early episodes could be unapologetically silly, but they were also preoccupied with grown-up matters: characters who don’t know how to behave, characters who aren’t quite sure about The Done Thing, characters who want to be left alone, characters who are cursed by the need to be ‘sensible’, characters who are trapped and confused by the real world in all its terror. In some ways, Absolutely presented us with the best of both perspectives: it had a child-like way of viewing adult behaviour (eg, the ‘Perkins’ sketch – incomprehensible business-speak reduced to gibberish), but the angst which inspired it could only have come from writers with receding hairlines.

 

Something went wrong with series four, though. Like the equally disappointing mr don and mr george, the show essentially became Absolutely for Kids. All the anger and other-worldliness was removed and characters were reduced to cut-to-the-joke skeletons of their former selves. It was fun in places, but ultimately pretty slight. Calum Gilhooley had a (ho ho) ‘out of anorak experience’; the Nice Family acquired a portrait of John Major on their wall; the pretentious Europhile couple were re-imagined as two simpletons who covered themselves in shaving foam for no reason. The show had always been silly, but now it was just silly. As the team themselves concede on the DVD commentary, it had all gone a bit Rentaghost.

 

That was 15 years ago, but Rentaghost-comedy has unfortunately become rather more widespread. It’s not simply a case of shows like The IT Crowd and Lab Rats directly resembling children’s sitcoms – it’s more subtle than that, and has started to affect petty much all TV and radio comedy. The Mitchell and Webb team (none more so than their regular co-writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain) are obvious culprits – Mitchell and Webb themselves resemble two adolescents being allowed to perform Fry and Laurie sketches in school assembly, but the attempts at tackling adult themes in Peep Show are just as lightweight. Peep Show attempts to explore the adult world the way Absolutely did, but it ultimately has little to say and shirks from ambiguity or subtlety. The POV/voice-over gimmick is a double-edged sword: it forces the writers to pen proper dialogue rather than lazily rely on awkward silences (resulting in the odd cracking line), but it also means there’s a lot of spoon-feeding going on.

 

Although it’s critically-acclaimed as an example of comedy being in rude health, Peep Show is probably on about the same level as the 90s sitcom Game On – a show which seemed ropey at the time, but, like The Thin Blue Line, Men Behaving Badly and Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation, doesn’t seem quite so bad in this current hellhole. In fact, Game On’s interesting – not only was it one of the last unironically ‘trad’ sitcoms to be aimed at a youth audience (ie, it was shot on three-walled set on videotape because that was the default method, rather than the result of a cynical ‘artistic decision’), it also came from a tradition of dark comedy shows produced in a non-Dark style; it did, after all, have a flat-bound agoraphobic as its central character. Game On is actually more ‘adult’ than Peep Show in a lot of ways, tackling disturbing themes without skimping on the big sitcom laughs. Cocksure, copper-bottomed old-school moments like this:

 

MARTIN:
We can’t even go to the toilet in this flat without each other knowing about it.

 

MANDY:
Oh come on, I don’t think it’s that bad.

 

MATTHEW
(WALKING PAST DOORWAY) I’m just off for a dump, OK?

 

rub shoulders with unsettling storylines about mental instability and a sense of genuine (almost naturalistic) bleakness that remains pretty unmatched. And yes, we’re talking about bloody Game On here. It’s come to that.

 

The difference is even more startling when you compare Peep Show with something that fused (for want of better terms) ‘trad and ‘rad’ to truly exceptional effect – namely, The Young Ones. For some reason, The Young Ones only ever seems to be celebrated as a guilty pleasure, usually along ‘I still find Rik and Ade talking about bottoms hilarious’ lines. It’s rarely given the credit it deserves as an adult sitcom – the strangeness of the humour itself, the density and breadth of its references and in-jokes, the ground-breaking way it subverted sitcom rules while also playing by them, the sheer intelligence of it. The show was written by 23 year olds, and yet it packed a real authoritative punch.

 

There are still scenes in The Young Ones which remain baffling and mysterious over a quarter of a century later – for example, the two men living in the cellar who think they’re on a liferaft (and who suddenly start impersonating Tony Hancock and Sid James halfway through their Beckettian conversation), or the inexplicable psychopath who talks about going to his neighbour’s house to borrow a drill: “You won’t catch me with me trousers!”. Scenes like those are captivating because, while they appear whimsical, they can’t have come from nowhere – they must have meant something to the writers at the time. The fact that we haven’t ‘solved’ their mystery is because Elton/Mayer/Mayall were on a totally different planet to us - as John Peel said of his rapture for The Fall’s Mark E Smith, ‘He clearly knows more about the world than I do’.

 

Graham Linehan attempted a Young Ones-style cutaway in The IT Crowd, where Jen found herself in a Gulag-type wilderness whenever she nipped outside for a cigarette. A reasonable enough bit of comedic business, but - being the 00s - this wasn’t allowed to remain a throwaway gag: it had to be (a) totally unambiguous about what it was spoofing so that all the Big Brother fans could laugh along too, and (b) talked up by critics beforehand as a ‘classic moment’ so that everyone could prepare their responses in advance. It’s a form of officially-endorsed weirdness - it’s OK to include a ‘What the fuck?’ sequence so long as it’s been explained beforehand and it’s blindingly obvious what’s going on. A background gag forced to take centre-stage. Fisher Price comedy in action.

 

So what’s changed? There’s the obvious explanation, and the reason why TV in general is so rotten these days - there’s too much competition (not just from the hundreds of digital channels, but from the countless other way we entertain ourselves in futuristic 2008), which means that everything must be perceived as an instant success in order to survive. And when everything has to be an instant success, the first casualty is anything that’s a bit alienating or weird. In short, we end up being spoonfed more than ever. ‘Here’s the joke, this is the reason why it’s funny, this is the bit where you laugh.’ Throughout the ‘Dark’ ages, comedians were often quick to dismiss the laugh-track as ‘patronising’, but the reaction-shot cutaway (its 00s equivalent) was far more contemptuous of the viewer. The Tim and Dawn romance in The Office was a classic example of spoonfeeding being sold as subtlety.

 

But it doesn’t end there. The competitiveness results in a futile attempt by TV companies to get down with The Kids, to produce ‘content’ that rivals the you-can-be-the-star interactivity of YouTube and FaceBook. What this means is that amateurs start to get taken far too seriously. The likes of Charlie Brooker and Adam Buxton once had the ‘They’re not brilliant, but they’re only producing comedy in their bedrooms for a laugh’ get-out clause, but now seem to be respected as major-league comedy players. Which would be okay if the quality of their comedy had improved since 2001, but even their fans concede that TV Go Home and The Adam and Joe Show remain their respective peaks. In the past, that’s where their careers would have ended – so long, and thanks for all the Star Wars parodies – but today they’re almost regarded as comedy godfathers. Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright pay affectionate homage to zombie and action films, but that’s all they can do - again, this would be fine if that’s where the acclaim ended, if their work was faintly-praised as a bit of B-list fluff, but they’re actually regarded as serious film-makers. How did this happen exactly? They’re kids.

 

The other problem is that this kind of spoonfeeding results in comedians who are only able to spoonfeed others. A quick-fix diet of instant comedy results in a generation of young comedians who are only able to ape comedy shows of the past rather than create their own voice or world. You can already see this in the dismal Pappy’s Fun Club, a sickeningly studied attempt to replicate previous success stories (a bit of Vic and Bob here, a bit of Lee and Herring there, a dash of Harry Hill, a set that reminds people of The Goodies) without a single new idea or reason to exist. Comedy that’s beige in tooth and claw. Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out put old-school variety and alternative comedy into a blender and created something unique; Pappy’s Fun Club just put their favourite DVDs into a blender and end up with a useless plastic mush.

 

As Michael Bywater observed in his excellent diatribe Big Babies, we live in an age of inverted commas, where everything is experienced at a safe and vicarious distance – instead of politics we have ‘politics’, instead of food, we have ‘food’, and instead of comedy we have ‘comedy’. Take this exchange, from a 1976 edition of Man About the House:

 

CHRISSY:
Where did you and Mr Roper go for your honeymoon?

 

MILDRED:
Dunkirk. George has been retreating ever since.

 

A funny joke, and quite a typical one for a mainstream sitcom at that time. But such a gag would have no place in 00s comedy, not only because of fears that the audience wouldn’t get it, and not only because today’s comedy writers have such a minuscule arsenal of reference-points, but because it just carries too much…well, authority. It relies on Chrissy, Mildred and the audience sharing an understanding of an historical allusion. If you don’t know your history, you’re excluded from the gag. These days, the ‘anti-joke’, where a character cannot think of anything witty and this in itself becomes the joke, is far more popular, no doubt because it’s considered more inclusive (ie, less ‘smug’), not to mention easier to write. This recent example, from BBC1’s Would I Lie To You?:

 

LEE MACK:
Where did you go on holiday?

 

OLIVIA COLEMAN:
Cornwall.

 

LEE MACK:

Whereabouts in Cornwall?

 

OLIVIA COLEMAN:

Cornwall…by-the-sea.

 

received a round of applause. Fellow panellist David Mitchell, the ultimate meta-comedian whose whole acts consists of sarcastically deconstructing gags like some kind of Stewart Lee tribute act at the freshers’ ball, found it particularly amusing.

 

One recent show which doesn’t seem to be by/for kids is, ironically, one which spoofs children’s programmes – namely, MTV’s Wonder Showzen. It’s a rare example of a comedy show which still seems to be beamed from another galaxy – yes, it’s possible to identify its influences if you look hard enough, but they’re certainly not worn on the sleeve. The show appears to genuinely tread virgin territory  – there’s a rare sense that you’re eavesdropping on something renegade and counter-cultural. It’s an uncompromising show, one that refuses to explain itself, or come down to ‘our level’. Like the equally brilliant (if patchy) Family Guy, it can inspire a sense of awe; the old ‘I could never have written that line in a million years’ feeling. In contrast to all current British comedy, where any halfway intelligent viewer generally finds themselves re-writing a better script in their head.

 

Which brings us back to Absolutely. What made The Nice Family so captivating was that, in common with Fry and Laurie’s Tony and Control sketches which debuted in the same year, it wasn’t immediately obvious what the joke was. The family, despite their name, weren’t just ‘nice’, and they weren’t just ‘sensible’ – there was something altogether stranger and ambiguous going on behind Jack Docherty’s eyes. Even Father’s voice, which was initially Docherty’s parody of his father’s posh ‘telephone’ accent, seems to develop a life of its own, one which defies explanation but never becomes lazily whimsical. Calum Gilhooley was a similarly ambiguous character – far more complex than the ‘We all know one of those’ idiot/trainspotter stereotype he may initially resemble; there remains something incredibly unsettling about his dead stare - far creepier than anything The League of Gentlemen ever came up with. And yet, despite this, the characters never feel heavy-handed: there’s no sense of ‘Here’s my character, and the reason he’s amusing is…’ or ‘I think you’ll find we’re exploring darker issues here’ – the characters are just odd, and the team credit the viewers with the intelligence to enjoy that oddness. In short, they treat the viewers like adults. It speaks volumes the way certain reactionary comedy fans/writers prefer to celebrate the thin whimsy of mr don and mr george (ie, the stuff they can easily emulate) rather than prime cuts of proper Absolutely. 

 

‘This programme contains adult humour from the start’ is the way most Comedy Labs are introduced. Oh, if only…

 

 

 

 

 

Stupid, ghastly news and near-impossible to fully convey in mere words exactly how we’re feeling today.

By way of a meagre tribute-offering, here’s a wonderful Perkins-heavy episode of Radio Active.

Radio Active - Series 7, Show 5 (26/09/87)
‘Mike Says Here’s A Bit Of Talent’

While going through an ancient backup disc for reference for the And Now, In Colour TV pilot the other week, we found a shitload of old Real Video captures of things previously covered - or intended to be covered - on the site. So while we’re busily preparing the next batch of articles, why not have a gander at them yourself. Some of them are, y’know, quite interesting. Even in the form of a blotchy 320 x 240 picture running at 15 frames per second…

Note: These are all Megaupload links

Not The Nine O’ Clock News - ‘pilot’ show (49.7mb) Or, more accurately, the infamous withdrawn Show 1. For more info on this we refer you to our old article here.

Red Dwarf - Smeg-Ups (rough cut) (51.3mb) A half-hour early assembly of the first Red Dwarf out-takes release, lacking the post-production sound effects and the Kryten linking material (’Link Goes Here’ captions ahoy). As far as we can recall this also boasts a few bits of studio chatter which didn’t make it to either Smeg-Ups or Smeg-Outs. No idea if they feature on the DVDs. Next Week: that elusive ‘Black Guitar’ session tape…

Monty Python at the BAFTAS (11.0mb) As quoted on the old site, the Pythons receive the Michael Balcon Award from Princess Anne. Rather nice. Spot the 80s comedians in the audience.

The Nualas - The Big Shiny Dress Tour (94.7mb) Ahh, remember The Nualas? Remember those angelic harmonies? Remember those odd Beckettian songs? Remember Danny Wallace using his BBC page to sneakily diss the return of their Radio 4 show? Remember that second series eventually not happening and co-writer Nev Fountain becoming very cagey when asked the reasons why? Remember Paul Jackson turning down their TV proposal? Remember Supergirly lowering the bar generally? At the turn of the century The Nualas represented a wee bit of hope - the vaguest inkling of a good attitude prevailing in the comedy industry. This is their one and only video release, from 2000. All 90 minutes of it. Genuinely delightful and silly. Accept no substitutes.

The Beatles - David Frost Show Theme Tune (1.31mb) Quick bit of rushes footage from 1968. Probably on YouTube a dozen times over but it was on the same disc so sod it, here it is. Lovely bit of Macca trying to make a suggestion at the start and then shrinking back as Lennon counts in their rendition of the Frost sig tune.

Dr Scrote - Kitchen Safety (7.25mb) Great clip of Roland Rivron on The Last Resort, C4, 1988-ish. The whole show was coming live from some family’s house that particular week (the studio audience were set up in the street outside watching on monitors). Rivron played Dr Martin Scrote, the show’s resident physician.

The Day Today - pilot additional material (19.4mb) Ah, now, isn’t this the section of the pilot showreel which didn’t make it to the DVD? Includes an alternate ‘Genutainment’, the 999 pisstake without the narration, a brief Business News and a bunch of randomly-scattered Alan Partridge sports commentry.

Going Live - Ade Edmondson (8.93mb) A bit of Ade Edmondson - with daughters in tow - being interviewed by Sarah Greene in the early 90s. Note: Richard O’Brien was also a guest on this particular edition and had dropped hints that he was writing a Rocky Horror sequel (’Revenge of the Old Queen’, incidentally, which never got made). Edmonson had played Brad Majors in a then-recent Rocky stage production - hence Greene’s question about whether he’d appear in the sequel.

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- Joseph -
Seen Graham Linehan’s savage satire of TV critics who attack first episodes of sit-coms? That’ll teach ‘em. I wonder what the gravity’s like on his planet…
17:06:22
15-08-2008

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- Mike -
IT Crowd s3 is in production - that’s all it is. Cue some bollocks publicity stunt about him ‘not having time’ to design the sets, like it’s even slightly his job.
Sent:
18:32:01
15-08-2008
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- Joseph -
We should send in some old copies of Select. Between takes he could re-read all his old articles and remind himself that he used to write like an adult.
Sent:
22:39:01
15-08-2008

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- Joseph -
Ha - just remembered Herring back in ‘99 suggesting that the early Teds weren’t that good: “…but sitcoms need time to develop and settle down” - cut to him writing seven thousand eps of TGP…
Sent:
22:45:35
15-08-2008

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- Mike -
Linehan’s now pretending to be annoyed that news websites have reported his prop-appeal. Cue textbook ‘It was only meant as a joke - now look what I’ve done!’ bullshit.
Sent:
16:05:28
18-08-2008

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- Joseph -
Popper-tastic. Same old same old then - internet saddoes must *never* be trusted, unless we can get them to spread the hype virally. Tell you what, Mike, there’s a distinct lack of ‘charm’ in today’s fake word-of-mouth…
Sent:
16:50:45
18-08-2008

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- Mike -
Cut to Graham on his planet: ‘Thanks for bringing that gravity in, by the way…’
Sent:
16:57:09
18-08-2008

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#1: David Quantick on Derek and Clive
(NME, 25 September 1993 - p26)

Eyebrow, lowbrow…or just Lowenbrau?   OBERGRUMPYFUHRER He wants to be Goering, but being Liberace would be ‘tasteless’. PETER COOK, loveable curmudgeon and comedy doyen, is back, promoting an infamous video of Derek and Clive, the characters he created with Dudley Moore. DAVID QUANTICK undertakes the worst job he’s ever had… ‘We did this video for my company, Peter Cook Productions,’ drawls Peter Cook over a deadly-looking cigarette and a Bucks Fizz. ‘Not a company that did much. About as much as John Birt Productions, in fact…’ So here I am in a Hampstead faded-posho cafe with the great Peter Cook, one of the most important figures in British comedy, the man who went from playing in Beyond the Fringe to starting Private Eye and thence forward through the ’60s and ’70s in splendour - and he is here to promote Derek and Clive Get the Horn, a video redolent of dismalness to the max. Oh well. Let’s talk and Derek and Clive for a bit. Those two warped variants on Pete and Dud have, after all, been very popular. ‘We did them, for fun in ‘73 in New York and we got on to that tape which also included The Troggs Tape - remember that, ‘We need a fucking 12-string’?’ recalls Cook in a West Country bastard accent. ‘There was David Dimbleby and Harold Wilson losing his rag and saying ‘You wouldn’t ask Edward Heath about his yacht’, Orson Welles auditioning for the part of a frozen pea - a number of very funny tracks all on this bootleg cassette. And eventually Chris Blackwell [Island Records founder] put them out on an album.’ There were three Derek and Clive albums, and this film. Cook hadn’t seen Get the Horn until he and director Russell Mulcahy (Highlander, lots of pop vids) got together to edit the copious footage. ‘I was quite shocked, I’d forgotten some of it,’ Cook admits. ‘I don’t play those records for recreation. At my age, you don’t play Derek and Clive in the Vauxhall as a romantic background.’ Or, indeed, for laffs. No one sane can possibly enjoy the awful ‘cunt-kicking’ routine, can they? Cook nods. ‘That’s the most horrible, but on the other hand, you can’t re-edit it to fit in with fashion. It’s like all those Bogart films where he’s smoking…I’m not making the comparison, but it would be foolish to change it because it made you cringe a bit.’ The video is preceded by trailers for equally excellent product by Bernard Manning and Chubby Brown. It is worse. ‘Filth…are we not under the sex education arm?’ laughs Cook and then acknowledges the rampantly unpleasant misogyny of the whole thing. ‘One of the bits that Dudley wrote was this awful scene where I’m with the inflatable doll. I wound up slapping her round the face. It’s an inflatable doll, I’m not slapping a woman. But I’d forgotten I’d done that. When the stripper comes back, she says I’m awful - an actual woman comes in and we’re so embarrassed. Eventually, I remember getting rid of her by doing an impression of the cunt-sucker and strangling her…I edited out the footage where I stab her and put her in a bin-liner and throw her in the canal.’ Stop, our sides have split. How drunk were you when this film was made? Cook looks aghast. ‘Not at all. Not any more than Dudley was drunk in Arthur. A bit of red wine in the control room. They’re very easy characters to portray,’ he says, demonstrating by swearing and mumbling a bit. ‘The number of people who come up to me and go ‘My mates down the pub are funnier than you’ - well, why don’t they do a fucking record instead of talking to me?’ Quite. Moving on to happier topics, it seems Cook is playing a ‘cruel Lord’ in a remake of Black Beauty and has a curious ambition. ‘I’ve always wanted to play an SS officer and I’ve always wanted to drive around in a jewelled tank,’ he drawls, louchely. ‘I’d like to be Goering, going round taking people’s art, going round with this gigantic showbiz tank. I think I’d have silver filigree mirrors and Art Deco… ‘And the uniform. I think he dressed too conservatively,’ says Peter, warming to his topic. ‘He should have veered a little bit towards the Liberace style. I loved Liberace. I saw him at the Palladium. He was wearing tiny little stars-and-stripes shorts and moving about on stage. He said, ‘I can’t dance but you have to admire my audacity’.’ Why not play Liberace then? ‘Well, Liberace…you have to be careful because he’s dead,’ says Cook in an outbreak of tastefulness. ‘And I don’t want to speak ill of the dead.’ ‘Goering’s dead,’ points out photographer and accuracy man Derek Ridgers. ‘I believe he is,’ agrees Cook. ‘I wasn’t speaking ill of him, though, was I?’ We move on, a bit, to talk of Nazi film director Leni Riefenstahl, who Cook doesn’t want to play, and then to ‘Allo ‘Allo. ‘I mean, talk about tasteless,’ says Cook. ‘Occupied France under the Nazis…’ Does Peter Cook have any taste boundaries? ‘I’m not sure I do. As I’ve said before, if I say down to write something to shock - which is a pointless exercise - it would be a lot more tasteless than Derek and Clive,’ he declares. ‘But why shock everybody? Absolutely no interest in doing it. Dudley wrote a sketch on Derek and Clive Come Again where he’s wanking over a picture of his mum and dad, and his mum comes in, and Dudley says, ‘Oh, sorry, mum, the doctor told me I’ve got cancer of the knob and I’ve got to get the pus out’. Shocking. That stretched my limits of shock to the full.’ And there we have it. Follow Peter Cook and his career wherever it may take you, readers, but don’t buy any Derek and Clive videos. FIVE GREAT PETER COOK MOMENTS BEYOND THE FRINGE Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett. Bloody hell, or what? Cambridge Footlights type in Amazingly Funny Shock. PRIVATE EYE There are no other magazines quite like it. ‘I still own it and I still write for it,’ says Cook, who can still be found contributing to The Secret Diary of John Major. BEDAZZLED Dudley Moore is Stanley Moon, lovesick short order chef. Peter Cook is the devil, and bloody sexy with it too. The scene where Cook explains Lucifer’s fall from heaven while sitting on top of a pillar box is without peer in the history of popular theology.     Cig vicious: Pistols fan Cook   NOT ONLY BUT ALSO Not only one of the greatest sketch shows of all time, but also the first programme to take the piss out of Gerry Anderson with the spleen-burstingly funny ‘Superthunderstingcars’ parody. THE SEX PISTOLS Taste, wit and anarchy presented almost weekly when Cook was the strange host of top punk rock TV show Revolver. ‘I liked the Pistols above all the other stuff. I remember accusing Johnny Rotten, who he then was, of nicking a lot of his vocal style from Buddy Holly,’ claims Cook. He also asserts that ‘John Lydon said one of their songs was based almost entirely on that song from Bedazzled where I’m singing ‘I don’t care’ an ‘I’m so plastic’. I don’t know which one, I was too pissed to remember.’

On the same page is Quantick’s review of the Get the Horn video itself:

PETER COOK AND DUDLEY MOORE: Derek and Clive Get the Horn (Polygram) The Derek and Clive LPs, produced originally as private tapes by Cook and Moore, were cult faves in the 1970s, largely - oh, sod it, entirely - because they were crammed with sweating, deviant sexuality and extraordinary offensiveness. They were funny if you were pissed, and sometimes they weren’t even that.     Pete ‘n’ Dud spot Jayne Mansfield and some lobsters.   Derek and Clive Get the Horn is a film from 1978 containing material from Derek and Clive Ad Nauseam, little seen until now for fairly clear reasons. Virtually none of it is funny; Cook and Moore veer from rambling improvisations about school buggery and sex with one’s mother to puerile monologues about giant bogies and thence into the merely unpleasant; one sketch ends in a description of ‘cunt-kicking’ and a song features a chorus about a ‘nigger’ who likes ‘white chicks’. Along the way, Richard Branson appears, a stripper strips, there is an inflatable rubber doll and a ‘drug bust’ by members of the Virgin Records accounts department dressed as policemen. This video is rubbish.

NOTES:

Cook and Quantick appear to be talking at slightly cross-purposes regarding the editing of the film, giving the impression that the material had been edited/re-edited fairly recently. In fact, the 1993 re-issue (and indeed the later DVD incarnation) was identical to the original short-lived 1980 release.

The film had been rejected for cinema distribution by the BBFC on 21 October 1980, and was therefore released on home video instead. At that time, before ‘video nasty’ hysteria took hold, video was an unregulated industry where material did not require the same certification. (By way of enticement rather than revenge, BBFC director James Ferman’s letter of explanation for the film’s rejection was cheekily printed as the blurb on the original VHS box. As a final gag, parts of the letter were scribbled out in thick felt-tip.) Therefore, when Cook talks about how he’d ‘forgotten some it’, it’s possible he was talking about either (a) a recent re-acquaintance with the video itself, or (b) the experience of editing the footage circa 1980. The material, even at that stage, had been in the can for a while: the exact dates of the two Ad Nauseam sessions, only the second of which was filmed for Get the Horn, have never been confirmed, but some biographers claim that Cook’s reference to his friend Keith Moon’s death was a tastelessly topical one. If so, this narrows the recording down to September 1978.

Cook refers to Moore ‘writing’ sketches - since the items in question are clearly improvised, it’s likely he’s referring to Moore coming up with embryonic ideas. The premise of the ‘Mother’ sketch, which opens Get the Horn, has obviously been devised and agreed upon beforehand: ‘Let’s do ‘Mother’…’ the pair are heard to mutter. This not only calls into question the whole ‘Cook was the genius, Moore just sat there corpsing’ canard, it also suggests that Moore’s discomfort with the Derek and Clive project has been over-played. Moore does, after all, seem to be having more fun on Get the Horn than Cook.

Cook also shoots down another popular piece of Derek and Clive mythology - the assertion that the pair were drunk during the sessions. This is something that will probably remain forever ambiguous: Cook was an alcoholic but seldom looked/sounded drunk; Moore, meanwhile, was very good at acting drunk.

Naturally, we disagree with Quantick’s assessment of Derek and Clive, but his refusal to jump on the ‘Peter Cook was a fackin geenyus’ bandwagon (not to mention his reluctance to let crypto-misogyny/racism go unchallenged, no matter how colossal the comedy god) is ultimately quite refreshing. Wouldn’t happen, nowadays, etc. Truly, he was a Martin Cropper for the Slowdive generation.

The Unaired ‘And Now, In Colour’ TV pilot

Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2000 00:29:52 To: SOTCAA From: David Tyler Subject: Re: Reply from SOTCAA: Some Thanks > David, > > Thanks for your kind words re: the Ed Fringe silliness.  Has William > Vandyck read it?  Please pass on our adoration to himself.  We hope > to be running an ‘And Now In Colour’ retro piece on the site soon. > Any words to that effect will be of great help. Aha. Well now. I was approached by Tiger TV many moons ago to produce a pilot of “And Now In Colour” for BBC TV. I’m not sure what Lissa Evans felt about this - she being its then radio producer, and, of course, not only a mate and a good soul, but a future BAFTA winner for producing “Father Ted”s second series, anyway, as I was saying … The BBC gave us 13p to do it with, so we decided to try and shoot the stuck-in-the-Post-Office-Tower episode, but interspersed with a couple of sketches, like the angry jingle singers song (”Rowena”) and the playing bridge/snap sketch. We thought it was dead good, and in truth, a very fair representation of the radio show’s personalities; Mike still playing the grumpy Stephen King-reading cynic, Tim De Jongh (Tim Scott) the child, William the put-upon English anal retentive and Tim Firth the mover and shaker (and indeed, it was Tim F who supplied the narrative strand whilst everyone else wrote the sketches alongside him). The BBC hummed and ha-ad (spelling?) then decided to give us *another* pilot, this time to be transmitted, but demanding a shake-up of the cast. So in stayed Tim De Jongh and William; out went Tim Firth and Mike, who kind of lost interest at that point - not unreasonably. So we cast some other people; you know, relative unknowns like Alistair McGowan and Caroline Aherne, and also Flip Webster, who I’d worked with on Radio 4’s “Live On Arrival”. We called it “It’s A Mad World World World World” after the 60s caper movie “It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World”. Yes, so it was the worst title ever, but not as bad as its working title which was, if I remember correctly, “Half A Sixp”. This time, I managed to get Geoff Posner (my other half at Pozzitive) to direct it, although we weren’t allowed to make it a Pozzitive production, and he was halfway through shooting a Victoria Wood special at the same time. We thought it was fab; it had a very good blues-y sig tune by Absolutely’s best baldie, Monsieur Pete Baikie and a couple of really dead good sketches, like the Late Show spoof on a greeting cards poet and William’s Open University mathematician (yes, I did recognise that photo). And I still have some of the Subbuteo men from the Subbuteo sketch at home, if anyone’s interested … Alas, the then Controller of BBC 2, Michael Jackson thought it was good, but not good enough. In truth, sketch shows were in very bad odour at the time; The Fast Show hadn’t happened, and the assumption was that sketches were pointless dead things best left in the bin. And of course, if you saw “TV To Go”, you might think he was right. Now stop it. So there you go. Any pointless obsessive questions (like “What were the lyrics to the “James Bond theme tune as written by Richard Stilgoe”) are welcome, but I probably won’t remember anything. The truth is, that if you showed the pilot again on BBC 1 today, it would blow most of the current efforts out of the water. And yes, I still think William is a talent waiting to happen. We must find the right vehicle!! Lots of love, dave >Soz about Absolutely comments.  I was in a right old mood that day. Ps you’re forgiven. They still talk to me you know. – David Tyler   > Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 00:04:50 > To: SOTCAA > From: David Tyler > Subject: Oh, things … > > Your Edinburgh preview made me laugh like a pig, even though you > were rude about everyone I’ve ever been friendly with ever. > Do more stuff that funny, and I won’t get cross about you saying I > fucked up Absolutely … > dave > – > David Tyler

 

Postscript: Clips of It’s A Mad World World World World can probably be found on YouTube if you look hard enough and squint a bit. It is indeed fantastic. As for its never-screened precursor, we’ve whacked a crappy old Real Video capture up on Sendspace here. Not exactly a ‘lost classic’ (it was of course much better on the radio) but a nice enough way to kill half an hour.

The Mary Whitehouse Experience - ‘Martin Comes a Cropper’

Reading out and ridiculing a bad review is a dangerous path - get the tone wrong, and you just end up sounding like a bitter drama queen aghast at the idea of people disliking you. If you’re The Mary Whitehouse Experience in 1990, however, you end up with a pretty funny bit of radio.

To refresh your memories, here’s an mp3, and here’s a transcript:

ROB NEWMAN Now we’d just like to take a moment to say a word or two about the continuing saga of Salman Rushdie. This is an affair that has somewhat vanished from the public agenda in recent months, but we - as scriptwriters - would like to say that we can never let ourselves forget that freedom of speech and the opportunity to express one’s personal opinions should never be subject to violence and intimidation. DAVID BADDIEL Having said that, there is a review of The Mary Whitehouse Experience in Saturday’s Times, written by a critic called Martin Cropper, which reads like this: NICK HANCOCK (HIGH COURT JUDGE TYPE VOICE) ‘Quite honestly, the stuff that gets broadcast is, to borrow Bill Bryson’s judicious simile, as thick as pig dribble. A farrago of brain-dead prattle, the opening programme artlessly insulted the likes of Linda McCartney!…and Leon Brittan!…and purported to involve Ian Paisley and Jimmy Savile in some kind of…(SPLUTTERS) sexual lottery! There were contraceptive jokes and cocaine jokes, and queasy injections of social comment à la Ben Elton.’ BADDIEL Quite simply, we would like this man to be shot dead! (BIG AUDIENCE LAUGH, THEN APPLAUSE) Interestingly, the last person to criticise us was Frank Warren 1. And perhaps, for those who don’t feel that strongly about The Mary Whitehouse Experience, we should read out the next paragraph of Martin Cropper’s - that’s Martin Cropper’s - review. HANCOCK ‘…and I’d also like to say that Iran is a shithole…Mohammed is bent…and President Rafsanjani2’s mother, to borrow Bill Bryson’s judicious phrase…does it for money.’ The Mary Whitehouse Experience, Series 3, Show 3 BBC Radio 1, TX: 20/01/90

1. Boxing promoter, victim of a near-fatal shooting in November 1989.
2. Iranian president, 1989-97

Later in the show, during a fake live phone-in segment, Cropper makes another appearance:

BADDIEL And now, to finish the show, we throw the phone lines open. The number to ring is 014287746 and you can phone in on any subject raised by the week’s news or the show so far. HANCOCK Hello, Mary Whitehouse Experience? BADDIEL Hello? HANCOCK Hello… (SMARMY) this is Martin Cropper speaking! I’d just like to say the sketch about me was absolutely brilliant! I feel such an idiot having criticised you in the past. Keep up the good work - ha ha ha! P.S. Would you mind terribly much calling off the Mujahideen? The Mary Whitehouse Experience, Series 3, Show 3 BBC Radio 1, TX: 20/01/90

‘Martin Comes a Cropper’ (its official sketch title in the original script) was included in the third show of Series 3, recorded at The Paris Studios, London, on 16 January 1990 and broadcast the following Saturday. The programme Cropper reviewed was the series-opener on 6 January, and it had been a particularly controversial edition. The ’sexual lottery’ he refers to was in fact a spoof quiz entitled ‘Shag Or Die’, hosted by Baddiel and Alison Goldie (of comedy duo The Weird Sisters - a last-minute stand-in for Jo Brand, the script reveals) in which members of the audience were, on pain of death, forced to declare a sexual preference for various gruesome celebrities. In other words, the team took a childish game hitherto only played in schoolyards and pubs and presented it as an actual gameshow, complete with cheesy quiz music and the gruesome celebrities themselves supposedly participating. Not MWE at its best, and possibly a misjudged item in many ways, but still an enjoyably stupid sequence to end the episode. Listen to it here.

However, it received several complaints. No doubt most of them from listeners who had tuned into the Alan Freeman show three minutes early, but it didn’t matter - the sketch quickly became notorious within the BBC. So much so that the matter was ‘referred upwards’, to none other than BBC Radio’s then-current managing director (and one-time member of the I’m Sorry I’ll Read that Again team) David Hatch.

Hatch was disgusted by the sketch. With surprising prudishness, considering the innuendo-happy anarchy of ISIRTA (ironically a show which had influenced the MWE ensemble-sketches like ‘Murder Weekend’, ‘All Cosy at Home In The Family House’, and, arguably, ‘Shag Or Die’), he ordered producer Bill Dare to physically remove the offending section from the quarter-inch mastertape and have it destroyed. “He didn’t want it on BBC premises any more,” recalled Dare on an edition of Radio 4’s Feedback many years later. Listeners to the Friday-night repeat therefore heard a far shorter version of the episode, as indeed did BBC7 listeners when the station re-ran the series in 2003. The sketch now only survives courtesy of an off-air (but thankfully high-quality) cassette recording.

The ‘Shag Or Die’ episode was Dare’s penultimate show as producer - Armando Iannucci took over from Show 3 (the Martin Cropper edition). However, Dare’s departure was not connected to the incident - Iannucci had already been lined up as the show’s new producer, and had in fact shadowed Dare for the opening two episodes.

What’s curious about Martin Cropper’s review, however, is that - despite being played by Nick Hancock as a Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells type - he doesn’t seem particularly revolted by ‘Shag Or Die’ itself. Unamused, yes, but not offended. Here, published for the first time in 18 years, is that review in full:

There seems little point tuning into a radio show with the rib-nudging title of The Mary Whitehouse Experience (Radio 1) unless one can count on being at least mildly provoked at least once. This third series has been frenetically puffed as the ne plus ultra of bad taste, the show that would turn your average vicar green, and so on. Recorded in the presence of a sycophantic and “live” audience, it goes out fairly late on Saturday evenings, cut in the light of listeners’ complaints. The material that never make the airwaves may well, for all I know, live up to its billing; the stuff that gets broadcast is, to borrow Bill Bryson’s judicious simile, as thick as pig dribble - a farrago of brain-dead prattle. The opening programme artlessly insulted the likes of Linda McCartney and Leon Brittan, and purported to involve Ian Paisley and Jimmy Savile in a kind of sexual lottery; there were contraceptive jokes and cocaine jokes; there were lists of useless Christmas presents (daring!) and queasy injections of social comment à la Ben Elton. This last element gave the game away: the show’s feebleness has less to do with auntie’s blue pencil than with the irredeemable derivativeness of the performers’ take and hence ambitions. Marinaded in a decade’s worth of “alternative” comedy - which has now, pace the limitations of obscenity - become mainstream, they are blinkered by the possibilities of disappointing their audience by doing something intelligent, which would at least be something different. One was forcibly reminded of sitting granite-faced over the unlamented television show O.T.T. and talking bets on exactly when the Tupperware was going to be produced. After this, the funereal whimsy of King Cutler (Radio 3, Thursdays) in which Ivor Cutler and Phyllis King stretch minimalism beyond its breaking point, is refreshing to a degree. (The Times: ‘Review’ supplement, 13 January 1990; p43)

It’s interesting that Cropper refers to the show being ‘cut in the light of listeners’ complaints’ as if this occurred every week. Cropper would, in fact, have submitted his review before the edited repeat was broadcast, suggesting perhaps that the story about Hatch ordering Dare to splice out the tape must have, by that point, spread far beyond the Yorkshire Grey. It’s also interesting that Cropper talks about the show being ‘frenetically puffed’ - since promotion for MWE was practically non-existent at that time, it’s likely he’s referring here to hype within the industry.

Before he began reviewing radio and TV, Cropper had been a fairly notorious theatre critic for The Times, and he no doubt saw himself as an iconoclast rather than a prude. He certainly had no time for hype (he dismissed Hardwicke House as pseudo-shocking along the same lines as he dismissed MWE) or nostalgia (he talked of sitting ’stony-faced’ through the 1987 repeats of Monty Python’s Flying Circus). He also didn’t suffer the older generation gladly - only a week before his MWE review, he had winced at the David Frost vehicle Pull the Other One! then-currently being broadcast on Radio 2. In 1991, he became one of the contributors to Julie Burchill and Toby Young’s anti-old-fart magazine The Modern Review. He was also, as we learn from the MWE review, a fan of Ivor Cutler. So how accurately did Nick Hancock’s frothing-at-the-mouth impression reflect the real Cropper? The team pour scorn on his pomposity (casting him as a male Mary Whitehouse figure, in fact), and yet it’s clear from the full review that Cropper is affecting a ‘Go on, shock me’ stance; complaining not that the show was offensive, but that it wasn’t nearly offensive enough.

Some might argue that such weariness is disingenuous - a classic case of the puritan who unconvincingly claims to find pornography ‘boring’. But note the way the MWE team edit the review - the comment about the Christmas presents sketch is dropped, as indeed are all references to the show being childish, derivative, safe or unfunny, and the words “Quite honestly…” have been erroneously put in Cropper’s mouth. So could it be that the team’s real anger here was - whether they consciously realised it or not - directed less at Cropper, but at the attitude of David Hatch? Or at least at the listeners who had made the original complaints?

Cropper’s inability to differentiate between MWE and Ben Elton must also have hit a raw nerve. Baddiel and Newman often spoke of their distaste for the piety of the ‘alternative comedy’ movement, insisting - as Baddiel did during a Radio Nottingham interview in 1992 - that it was full of “straight-men putting the world to rights”. Elton had also been directly mocked on MWE several times c/o Newman’s brilliant impersonation, the main charge being that his interest in politics was merely a penis substitute.

Cropper’s review is pompous, of course, and his dismissal of MWE, arguably one of the most ground-breaking, refreshing and original radio shows ever broadcast, is as misplaced in hindsight as it was at the time. Any show which gleefully uses the phrase “Mohammed is bent” (a joke about controversy, sure, but an extraordinary line to survive the edit all the same, and - given the humourlessness exhibited by extremist fundamentalists - a genuinely dangerous one) cannot be accused of skimping on the bad taste. However, in 2008, where anything vaguely successful gets automatically cheered along and critics obediently sing from the same one-million-listeners-can’t-be-wrong hymnsheet, it’s hard not to grant Cropper a small amount of respect all the same. How many critics today would write a similarly vicious review about a hotly-tipped bunch of comedians? How many of them would openly shudder at a gushing press release and decide not to play along?

Naturally, the MWE team (and their audience) get the last laugh. But listening to the Martin Cropper sequence - and, to a lesser extent, the ‘Shag Or Die’ sketch - is like visiting another comedy planet entirely. It’s a reminder of a time when radio comedy could genuinely feel spiky and renegade; when there was still a countercultural Sex-Pistols-vs-Bill-Grundy-style ‘us and them’ tension between the old guard and the new; when radio comedy actually felt exciting. These days, ‘a farrago of brain-dead prattle’ is a fitting description of almost everything on the airwaves.

Anyone who celebrates the notion of ‘positivity’ is an imbecile. Yup, that appears to be the gist of this article.

 

There’s a poser which the Guardian’s Rosanna Greenstreet sometimes includes in her weekly Q&A feature. It’s this: ‘What do you consider the most over-rated virtue?’ Lots of interviewees are unsure how to answer this question, but it’s a very good one for those who enjoy a bit of outside-the-box heretical thinking over their Saturday croissants. ‘Pride’ and ‘Piety’ are two popular, if rather dull, answers.

 

However, there’s another p-word that would fit the bill perfectly, and - in the unlikely event that Greenstreet ever strides in our direction brandishing her questionnaire and a couple of leaky biros - we’d offer it gladly. The most over-rated virtue is this: positivity.

 

It’s over-rated because, as a concept, it gets an unaccountably easy ride. It’s assumed to be a virtue, even though it has no real meaning. Or rather, in common with that other pejorative p-word ‘politically-correct’, it has about eight different meanings, and yet it’s invariably used as if it only has one.

 

Stanley Kubrick, an obsessive archivist, had a curious way of dealing with fan mail. He would scribble ‘P’ on the letters which were complimentary about his films and ‘N’ on the ones which weren’t; he would then exhaustively catalogue the two sets of letters in a series of box files. We’re told that, after the release of Eyes Wide Shut, it was possible to reconstruct a brand new version of Paul Hardcastle’s ‘19’. Anyway, what’s curious about Kubrick’s method is that the ‘N’ was not used to denote derision on his part – for the letters which he considered the work of bitter, ignorant, irrelevant or crazy people, he had a third category: ‘C’ for ‘Crank’. With the ‘C’ letters discarded, it seems he afforded the ‘P’ and ‘N’ letters equal respect.

 

Sadly, very few people – neither creatives nor consumers - seem to share Kubrick’s attitude. To many, negativity is a BAD THING per se and not to be encouraged. Even if it’s intelligent, heartfelt or nails a few home truths, negativity is to be mistrusted and avoided. It’s bad-humoured, unsporting, ill-mannered and mean. Criticism is apparently something you should feel guilty, ashamed or furtive about, and it should be used very sparingly. Dissent is a sign of ingratitude. To them, the ‘N’ pile and the ‘Crank’ pile are the same thing.

 

These people are as idiotic as the terms they adopt. They talk of ‘haters’ and ‘naysayers’ and ‘moaning minnies’, and believe that anything which causes them to ‘sit there with a big stupid grin’ on their face must be unconditionally worth celebrating. But there’s an awful lot of them about, and their tiresome commitment to the ‘positivity = good’ fallacy generally goes unchallenged. After all, who wants to spoil their party? Positivity is always good, right?

 

Well, no. Everything has an equal and opposite reaction, as Einstein informed us, and we like to think he was mainly talking about reviews of The IT Crowd there. Positivity and negativity are in fact two sides of the same coin – different, for sure, but one cannot exist without the other. If somebody’s positive about x, they’re negative about the absence of x. And vice versa. The idea of solely being positive (or indeed solely being negative) makes absolutely no sense, except to emoticon-wielding Pollyannas.

 

Espousing ‘positivity’ and denouncing ‘negativity’ is a completely false dichotomy. For a start, it doesn’t address the way superficial positivity can actually be a destructive thing, in that it allows mediocre things to be inappropriately lionised (thus lowering the bar – the ‘It’s not quite as funny as Big Train, but it’s still quite good’ trap). And it doesn’t consider the prospect that apparent ‘negativity’ can open people’s eyes or have a beneficial impact on The Wider Picture. These morons are incapable of thinking counter-intuitively about the positive/negative distinction; they just cannot see beyond their own superficial, short-term need for a quick chuckle-fix.

 

Here’s an analogy. Take the recent campaign by, among others, Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall to stop supermarkets stocking battery-farmed chickens. It’s a great campaign, because it seeks a positive outcome by using apparently negative tactics: they use anger and ridicule, but they do so to (a) expose what’s wrong with a current situation, and (b) remove the public’s blinkers. It’s all about the greater good.

 

But this doesn’t seem to happen when it comes to discussing creative endeavours. The IT Crowd is very much the sitcom equivalent of a battery-farmed chicken, but campaigning against it isn’t encouraged. Those who dislike it are expected to either ignore the programme completely or bloodymindedly search out the least offensive bits. An attitude which wouldn’t go down quite so well at a chicken protest: ‘I’ve decided to stop moaning about chickens and simply eat food I enjoy instead! And anyway, the feathers are quite pretty…’

 

Some will argue that, since the treatment of chickens is an important issue and comedy is pretty trivial, the above comparison is ludicrous. Well, not really. You can, after all, emotively load the question another way and ask ‘What’s more important – art and culture, or the fate of a few stupid birds?’ Also, the idea that trivia doesn’t require serious analysis seems, as a notion, unique to comedy – wine, for example, is every bit as trivial, but a wine critic who simply wrote ‘It tasted nice and got me pissed’ wouldn’t last long on Decanter magazine.

 

However, even allowing for the fact that comedy doesn’t involve literal pain (although anyone who’s seen Lab Rats may disagree on that point), it doesn’t change the validity of the analogy: just because something is trivial doesn’t mean passionate criticism is misjudged or inappropriate. Media twonks they may well be, but Oliver and Fearnley-Whittingstall care about proper food the way some of us care about proper comedy. They’re positive about their negativity.

 

The other difference between chickens and comedy, as the Pollyannas will endlessly remind us, is that the former is objective and the latter is subjective. Well, dur. The trouble is, too many people use the subjectivity of comedy as an excuse to halt the debate and declare it futile. Which is very muddled thinking indeed – after all, the fact that comedy is subjective is surely all the more reason why it should be debated.

 

Internet message boards are full of people who really aren’t interested in discussing anything. Not only that, but they appear genuinely threatened by those who are, and so seek to turn hosepipes onto particularly fiery discussions. Saying ‘Well, I liked it’ after several pages of intense criticism is their usual tactic – the implication that their pissy little non-comment somehow trumps umpteen pages of erudite debate simply because it’s said with a smile. But if positivity is to mean anything, it shouldn’t just mean ‘happy’ or ‘optimistic’ or ‘saying nice things’ – it should mean ‘constructive’. And constructive criticism often involves saying stuff that’s ugly or unpopular. The difference should not be between positive and negative criticism, but between good and bad criticism – in other words, what should matter is how thoughtful or entertaining the analysis is, irrespective of whether it’s a bouquet or a brickbat.

 

There are far too many people who cannot see the difference between a reasoned critique and some lunatic screaming ‘IT WAS SHIT’, or at least they pretend they can’t. So they lump them together and dismiss it all as ‘negativity’. In contrast, they’ll tolerate all manner of incoherent scribblings so long as they praise shows and never bury them. These people aren’t interested in comedy, or in debate – they’re just terrified that one day they might have to do some actual thinking for a change. All the winking emoticons in the world won’t save them.

 

So let’s banish the word ‘positivity’, or at least the idea of positivity as a virtue. It’s not a trait to be proud of, and it only seems to be used by debate-phobics as a reactionary way of keeping everything the same forevermore. If you see a Pollyanna, file them under ‘Crank’.