blogcaa

At the time of writing, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle is in its second week. It’s definitely worth a watch, if only for its valiant attempts to conjure up the spirit of old-style TV stand-up - aiming at Dave Allen At Large although more often hitting Ben Elton’s The Man From Auntie (and that’s intended as a compliment, whether he likes it or not!)

It’s suffered something of a mixed response so far, from die-hard Lee and Herring fans and frowners alike. The main accusation levelled at the show (Mondays 10pm BBC2 - or YouTube thereafter) is that Lee’s chosen targets are often a little on the ‘easy’ side: well-worn media gripes which, although potentially an eyebrow-raiser for your average Dan Brown reader or casual viewer of Ant and Dec, feel somewhat ‘old’ when placed in relation to the ongoing flux of opinions, debates and general hoo-ha which occurs naturally as a by-product of what is still laughably considered by many to be ‘alternative media’. Others disagree. And that is their right. We live in a democracy.

That this discussion is so currently prevalent on TV discussion boards at all raises eyebrows though, particularly considering how difficult it was - just a few short years ago - to convince people that a truly healthy comedy climate would allow comedians to deconstruct, attack and ridicule the very industry which employs them (without them having to constantly look over their shoulders). “Well, I’m sorry,” bleated the reactionaries and would-be comedy hacks, “but that’s just ridiculous. If I worked in an office and suddenly decided to take the piss out of my employers, I’d expect get the sack as a result! And RIGHTLY SO!”

That those self-same, unapologetically (in fact aggressively) ‘non-progressive’ status-quo-gazers appear now to be among those embracing Comedy Vehicle (a few even fanfaring it as proof of the existence of the ‘healthy comedy climate’ they originally cited as unworkable and ridiculous) really should start ringing some serious alarm bells. Fancy watching another ’satirical’, ‘opinionated’ show which targets high-concept, work-safe industry targets and tests well with the Right-Wing? Well, what do you think Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe is there for?

One thing all this has brought home though is just how long it can sometimes take for grass root opinions (about subjects so clearly in need of a kicking) to finally reach a mainstream audience. In the case of ‘Delboy Falling Through The Bar’, which took up a large section of Comedy Vehicle Show 2, about nine years. To illustrate…

The Fall of Delboy: May 2000 - January 2001

As some of you will recall, from April 2000 to September 2001, our original website, Some of the Corpses are Amusing was part of NotBBC. The site gave us an opportunity to finally exorcise all our personal annoyances with the current comedy world and attempt to provide an alternate voice to counter the increasing amount of PR bollocks and skewed attitudes which had begun to twist the genre we adored into something a bit unpleasant. It was probably a lost cause from the beginning, but we figured that even if placing a digital soapbox among the pigeons didn’t actually change the world, at least it wouldn’t just be localised despair. We wouldn’t have to suffer alone!

And, if webmaster Rob’s constant excited phonecalls about increased hitcounts and the subsequent emails we received were to be taken as any indication, it soon became a terrifically popular haunt, not just for comedy fans but also those in the comedy industry itself. David Quantick later described SOTCAA “quite a legendary website - people like Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci secretly read it, living in fear of what it says…” (Quantick Speaks, Resonance 104.4FM, 26/11/02) - and even if that last part was a slight exaggeration, there were still more than enough comedians, producers and journalists (and David Quantick) entering our field of vision to know that it was, overall, a worthwhile venture (whether they were pro, anti, or screaming blue murder and threatening legal action). Our bugbears concerning the malaise of modern comedy weren’t simply consigned to a few faithful forum dwellers but had the potential, through basic osmosis, to air that alternate voice on a higher level.

Around the turn of the century, one particular bugbear involved clip shows. They really got our goat. Not clip shows per se, but the reductive, ever-decreasing nature of what the clip show had become.

“Play it again, until the rocks melt and the seas burn…”

Why, we asked ourselves, did all these comedy compilations unimaginatively showcase exactly the same clips each time. Fawlty Towers = Basil hitting his car; The Two Ronnies = ‘Fork Handles’; Monty Python’s Flying Circus = ‘The Parrot Sketch’. Was it simply a case of lazy researchers reaching for the same paperwork / tape they’d used for the previous clip show? Or was it a deliberate and desperate act on the part of a wounded industry to reduce often complex shows to an easily digestible ’shorthand’ - an attractive thumbnail to get the viewer to click on and view the rest?

Around this time classic comedy channel UK Gold even ran a series of commercials which took this idea to its extreme. Each ad involved the ’shorthand’ clips in question being played in a loop (with a byline which went something like “Classic comedy you can watch again and again and again”). So, Basil Fawlty thrashed his car again and again and again. Captain Mainwaring said “Don’t tell him, Pike” again and again and again. Victor Meldrew picked up a daschund and said “4291?” again and again and again. And Delboy fell through the wine bar again and again and a-fucking-gain.

So, we took the damn piss. It’s what we do. When we’re not writing articles full of opinionated bile, we like it give it some of dat ol’ time parody. And we were quite pleased with this one:

“That’s what you like…”

And man, the response was astonishing. It’s actually difficult, in these post-Woolworths days, to fully convey the sense of stunned awe this send-up received, from insiders and women alike. With one poorly-designed spoof, we succeeded in sending shock waves through the entire BBC. David Jason and Michael Crawford were obliged to make a hasty public apology (over what is now sensitively referred to in hushed tones as ‘Lookdavegate’) and never worked in the industry ever again. BBC Enterprises were forced to change the name of their organisation to BBC Worldwide to avoid the sheer embarrassment we’d caused them. Even the concept of the ‘double video’ soon became obsolete, with DVD - and later Blu-Ray - becoming the preferred format for releasing shite. All this through one simple and painless act of pointing out that the Emperor might have dressed somewhat casually that morning. The media landscape was now irreprably scarred for life. Nothing would ever be the same again…

Well alright, a few people smirked a bit. Maybe. I think some bloke might have sent us a quick email saying it made him laugh so he showed it to a mate at work - and he laughed too. Well, that’s enough, isn’t it?

It turned out to be a slow burner though. The parody clearly influenced at least one person posting on the TV/SOTCAA Forum at the time. The following month, during a thread called BBC Archives and a discussion about the possibility of the BBC making their entire archive public, a reader styling himself ‘PJ’ posted the following:

Yes, it was the same gag, tweezed a bit. But people had noticed. That was good - and the first of many…

On Aug 9, ‘Wsluit Snije’ - evidently inspired by our own attacks on the UK’s favourite listings magazine, took a barbed swipe with a thread called Radio Times: Look What They’re Going To Do Next Week:

On August 13th, ‘Mike Parker’ started a thread called Funniest Comedy Moment Ever??? after the debatable results of an ‘expert panel’ vote on that subject had been published. The Only Fools and Horses ‘chandelier’ scene apparently came out on top of the list on that occasion, with ‘Delboy Falls Through The Bar’ relegated to number two status. Note the ‘I guess it was inevitable’ tone of the latter revelation, suggesting that the situation may have been discussed further on the forum during the previous few weeks but not archived here.

Also note that someone called ‘Joe’ later posts something which suggests that the initial SOTCAA pisstake is still fresh in his mind also:

It certainly opened the floodgates anyway, with others soon joining in and tossing some more parodic firebrands into the hut:

The first ‘TV’s hilarious Del Boy falling through the bar.’ reference from ‘TJ’ there, who also brings it up two days later in a non-comedy-related thread called Best wishes to anyone getting exam results today:

Proof that sarcasm is the best form of wit, if delivered from a passionate heart (or a Liverpudlian man with sideburns). ‘TJ’ also makes a reference to it less than two hours later in a short but sweet thread about The Innes Book Of Records.

“He fell through the bar, Stew, on Only Fools and Horses…”

The popular (and often hilarious) LIVE FORUM SITCOM! Add a line!, thread started on Sept 2 by ‘Mr Griffiths’ gave everyone a chance to take the piss out of the sitcom form - and ‘TJ’ mentions ‘TV’s Hilarious Del Boy Falling Through The Bar’ three times in the space of a week. He also gets annoyed on Sept 5 about the scene being discussed by annoying people on the bus - in an excellent, passionate thread about the bfi’s top 100 tv programmes.

The latter discussion is also interesting for being one of the first dual appearances within a single thread by ‘jason hazeley’ and ‘Unruly Butler’, better known nowadays as half of the team behind The Framley Examiner and contributing writers to That Mitchell and Webb Look. Not that we should necessarily hold that against them…

‘Unruly Butler’ also starts the next thread archived here: Forty years of BBC TV Centre, right?, which covered some then-recently-advertised evening of TV backslapping. Here, he takes it upon himself to remix all the shorthand classic telly moments previously mentioned by others on the site/forum into a kind of random comedy mash-up. He would go on to repeat this gag a few more times on the forum before finally selling it as part of a spoof article the Framley boys contributed to Viz magazine…

‘Unruly Butler’ isn’t the only joke-thief in that thread, however. The delightful ’subbes’ (aah, where is she now?) attempts to pass off the following gaglette…

…as her own work and quickly gets busted by her mate ‘Jo_ham’ who actually penned it! ‘PJ’ is also back to give the whole affair another bashing, while ‘george’ contemplates watching the bar-fall frame-by-frame - with yet more allusions to video ads.

Perhaps ironically, on the same day, we were forced to take SOTCAA offline following a legal complaint concerning our notorious spoof Have I Got News For You transcript. The site didn’t physically return to NotBBC until Dec 12. However, the ‘Delboy falls through the bar’ references continued on the forum, unabated…

A non-comedy-related thread on Sept 13 - These trucking slobs are really making me sick - includes a portrayal, by ‘pleb sheep’, of an ignorant person’s reaction to William Hague’s fuel tax promises (’It’s great! Cheaper Petrol! Vote Tory! Hey, have you seen that clip where Del Boy falls through the bar hatch? That’s the best comedy ever. I’d love to see it again.’) while Sept 21 gives us a hopeful thread from ‘Justin’ about Channel 4’s Next Viewers Poll in which ’sheep’ (who may or may not have also been ‘pleb sheep’ but was certainly ‘Radiator Head Child’s favourite jail sheep) reiterates a point made earlier by ‘MM’ that - as per Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, which often unimaginatively makes the Top 5 of such music polls - the Delboy clip isn’t actually awful in and of itself but you don’t want it force-fed to you quite so often. ‘george’ suggests much the same in the Sept 23 thread about Our Toon (part of C4’s Animation Week) before indulging in a wonderful rant about C4 which Stewart Lee himself really should have delivered nine years ago:

Yes, Channel 4 DID used to be better. It DID. Ironically, the C4 attacked by ‘george’ above was itself far more tolerable than the C4 we currently endure.

Oct 1 and a nice traditional list thread - All-time Favourite Top 10 Sitcoms? - features two Delboy/Bar refs from ‘Al’ and ‘Matthew’ (both pretty anti) while ‘mr lizard’ slips one into a risible pastiche of Chris Morris’ Jam in the opening post of welcome on Oct 5 (a pastiche which features so many obscure site/forum references that, nine years down the line, it’s rendered practically unintelligible to anyone who wasn’t there at the time).

In Oct 9’s Introducing myself… , ‘Boring Shadow’ gives a new forum member a numbered rundown of the current forum gripes, which naturally include:

No, we didn’t have to quote that last bit here - but it’s nice to be reminded that actual comedy fans did enjoy the original site and its anti-PR stance. Eventually however the notion of such a highly-hit forum (read by media insiders on a daily basis) being attached to such a critical, negative and spiteful website would considered a terrible ‘wasted opportunity’ by scummy little would-be writers with hack comedy projects to sell and media ‘networking’ to indulge in…

Sorry, went off on a bit of a tangent there. More, more… Try out your ‘wacky’ characters here!, also on Oct 9, initially a retread of the ‘Live Forum Sitcom’ silliness, with ‘Jon’ indulging in more Delboy-related humour (carrying the mantle of ‘Unruly Butler’s mash-up). Others, including ‘Squidy’ and ‘Steven’ soon join in the fun. The former also indulges in a mini rant as he notes that all the usual ’shorthand’ clips appear in a BBC trailer at the start of a League of Gentlemen video, while the latter alludes to the UK Gold trails mentioned at the top of this article. Not to be outdone, ‘TJ’ returns the following day, posting a thread about The People’s Choice TV Awards and suggesting ‘Del Boy falling through the bar’ as one of the nominations for ‘best clip’. A Paul Ross parody from ‘Sir Frederick Bumfish’ puts the boot in further.

Thread from 1990 on Oct 13 kicked off a slew of fake ‘historical’ discussions created by forum-goers. Several further decades were covered - usually with excitable positive postings about things which later turned out to be rubbish or forgotten. A couple of obvious Delboy/Bar refs there (’Jon’ and ‘TJ’ again), while an anonymous posting to a thread about the Dr Who: Robots of Death DVD on Oct 16, to wit…

…well, that could have been either ‘Jon’ or ‘TJ’, to be honest! ‘TJ’ does however definitely contribute another (very Lionel Nimrod-esque) DelBar gag to Facts you’ve learnt from comedy programmes on Oct 17, the same day that ‘Unruly Butler’ returned to the world of the freefalling Trotter in One Foot In The Grave - The New Series, praising the show under discussion and adding the now obligatory ‘Almost as good as Del Boy falling through the bar. Don’t tell him, Pike.’ ‘Sheep’ also returns to let rip a gratuitous one into the middle of Speaker, a thread otherwise concerning itself with House of Commons tradition, on Oct 23.

It should perhaps be mentioned at this point that there is more than a certain relevancy here in terms of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. It isn’t just a case of assuming Lee might have accidentally strayed onto the board and read some of this stuff. The NotBBC platform also played host to webmaster Rob’s original Lee and Herring website. As such, the duo regularly visited and posted to the TV/SOTCAA forum.

A thread on Oct 28 could, if you were thus inclined, be viewed as a spiritual leyline connecting the whole ongoing affair: Cheap Beeb reusing TMWRNJ props, which discussed the fact that children’s show Live and Kicking had used the puppet of ‘Pliny’ (from This Morning With Richard Not Judy’s ‘Histor’s Eye’) as a prop in the background of some Halloween sketch or other. Soon, the discussion turns to the BBC’s general attitude to prop storage:

Arf. Note ‘PJ’s amusement there, which isn’t a million miles away from the ‘Del Day’ sketch in Comedy Vehicle. Oh, and Joseph ‘alan strang’ Champniss of TV’s famous SOTCAA actually designed the ‘Pliny’ puppet under discussion. Ours is an elastic planet…

A thread about Series 3 The Royle Family, Right, I’m going to talk about The Royle Family down here now on Oct 31 perfectly illustrates the most worrying and far-reaching effects of the ’shorthand’ comedy clip, as ‘Squidy’ quotes a review:

Elsewhere in the thread, ‘Unruly Butler’ continues to convince himself that he’s the overall instigator of the anti-clip show stance while a few anonymous visitors crack some funnies about dropping Denise’s baby through a bar. Also on that day, ‘Ewar Woowar’ starts a thread asking if there was ever a comedy show where you could say It was worse on the radio, leading ‘Justin’ to speculate that Radio 4’s audio-only broadcasts of Only Fools and Horses didn’t work because they lacked a certain visual element…

“…and then Trigger made a face.”

Something decidedly odd occurs at the start of November. Out of the blue, a whole new thread, TV’s Hilarious Del Boy Falling Through The Bar, is devoted to the subject, with all the usual forum suspects chipping in the usual gags. Why, it almost reads like a summary of ‘classic moments’ in itself. Once again we see, in essence, the beginnings of Stewart Lee’s whole eventual take on the subject bubbling away embryonically as the Delboy scene is deconstructed from various angles, often with nightmarish undertones. Perhaps even more curious is the thread on Nov 5 where ‘Unruly Butler’ elects to repost something approaching his original cross-pollenated clip show gag in a thread called The most classic comedy moment ever (BBC). On the same day, someone posting as ‘John Sullivan’ begins a thread called INT. WINE BAR. DAY. and yet more post-modernist deconstruction ensues:

The following day, and a thread called Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha oh my aching sides. suggests the first inklings of a joke being taken a little too far and backfiring on its propagators:

On the same day, ‘Jeanette’ begins a thread called New BBC Pub-Related Sitcom, bringing the TV transfer of World of Pub to everyone’s attention - and including a gag about Chas and Dave falling through the bar. Meanwhile, the next day, a Goodies anniversary-related thread - It may interest you all to know… - from ‘Bean Is A Carrot’ brings forth some Jane Root-related hatred, particularly from ‘TJ’ (still seething about that MPEG).

Cut to Nov 22 and a thread about the BBC Talent finals displays more than a little weariness over the matter:

On the same day, ‘Radiator Head Child’ presents LIVE FORUM TANGENT, in which ‘MM’ alludes to ‘a llama falling through a bar’. Nov 23, and ‘Al’ starts an Only Fools and Horses thread, evidently hoping to avoid the usual annoyances, called Not Del Boy falling through the bar.

Dec 14, SOTCAA are back and now have their own board, away from the TV Forum. The embers of the original Delboy annoyance are dying away in the grate, but are still occasionally poked and prodded - as in this Dangermouse thread where ‘Unruly Butler’ wonders why we don’t get repeats of said cartoon rodent falling through the bar. Dec 18, and a personal observation about The end of this week’s Time Gentlemen Please… leads to a discussion about comedy ideas, the number of basic jokes there actually are, a quote from Alexei Sayle’s Stuff and ‘TJ’ pondering on ‘TV’s Hilarious Jelly Falling Through The Bar’

The final notable thread moves us into Jan 23 2001. Again, inspired by the awfulness of clips shows (of the I Love The 70s ilk), someone pretending to be ‘Kate Thornton’ begins Cartoons that we don’t really remember at all. A page of whimsy for the most part, but ‘Justin’ raises the bar a little (so that a cartoon Delboy can fall through it nicely):

“Burn it into the retina of my eye!”

At which point, it starts to go all quiet on the Delboy Bar front, at least in terms of the forum discussions we have archived here. The allusions and references did continue throughout 2001 however, even after SOTCAA left NotBBC and the lovely ‘Unruly Butler’ seized on the opportunity to put himself forward as its butter-wouldn’t-melt uncritical ‘alternative’. He still remembered to get in a few digs at ‘Delboy falling through the bar’ / ‘Don’t tell him Pike’ every so often though, amidst his covert viralling of Look Around You, Framley Examiner and Dead Ringers.

Eventually, one voice on the board was heard to complain that the ‘constant references to Delboy falling through the bar have now become more of a cliche than the thing itself’. The fact that this one voice belonged to Richard Herring is probably worth pondering over here. Surely this would make its inclusion in a BBC TV show written by his estranged comedy partner eight years after the event even more hackneyed? Or is it simply a case of it becoming such a cliche that, by the old law of Fist of Fun comedy physics, it ‘goes round the back of infinity’ and becomes a relevant target again!

Certainly, when we stuck our initial video ad parody back online in Dec 2001 as part of the lavishly-designed ‘SOTCAA Christmas Book’, one notable quibble from long-time TV/SOTCAA Forum regular ‘Peter O’ (who presumably hadn’t noticed it as part of the original site) showed the strain:

“C’est magnifique, Hooky Street.”

‘Delboy falling through the bar’ is now ‘out there’. It’s no longer a cliche isolated on an internet forum nine years ago. And yet, as with many of the subjects covered in Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, it all amounts to a hill of beans. Although compelling enough to watch, the legacy of understanding why the ‘heavy rotation’ of the clip is so ghastly shouldn’t involve Stewart Lee berating the public for voting it the ‘funniest moment ever’ while writhing around on the floor. As ever, there’s a wider picture to consider.

Media insiders are always the first to indignantly squawk “I think you’ll find there never was a Golden Age Of Comedy” in the face of the ‘moaning minnies’, and yet no-one did more at the turn of the centrury to perpetuate the myth of that ‘Golden Age’ than the TV industry itself with its constant self-fellation, gushing celebrations with Michael Parkinson, talking head shows and repackaging of bite-sized classic clips designed to induce a Pavlovian ‘instant high’ in the undiscerning punter. The BBC genuinely did attempt to ‘bring everything down to their level’.

Having set that level as ‘default’, they then had a little trouble producing new shows which could adequately compete without being PR-spun as ‘instant classics’. The selling tactics as a result become positively schizophrenic. It’s always depressingly amusing to watch an industry so desperate to dismiss supposedly ‘rose-tinted’ viewer memories of the past while simultaneously pushing some ghastly new show as ‘every bit as good as’ some consensus-agreed ‘classic’ from yesteryear - often using the same hyperbolic media language hitherto reserved for watery-eyed retrospectives. When Ricky Gervais blethered on about only making two series of The Office he did so in full knowledge that John Cleese had already said the same (decades later) about Fawlty Towers. When Gervais created - and subsequently covertly sold - The Dance as a ‘classic clip’, he did so knowing full well that it would be repeated ad nauseam.

Mm… Ricky Gervais the ‘comedy salesman’. That opinion took a while to catch on too. Wonder how long it’ll be before some comedian with his own show on BBC2 gets round to doing a routine about it…

What connects Esther Rantzen, The Mary Whitehouse Experience, Garry Bushell, Simon Fanshawe, second-series Absolutely, and the right-wing scum British press? This story, mainly…

On 14 January 1990, BBC1’s long-running consumer programme That’s Life returned for a new series. Esther Rantzen anchored the show as ever, but there was one key difference in the line-up: Doc ‘Ivor Biggun’ Cox had departed, replaced by ‘alternative comedian’ (in the words of the Radio Times) Simon Fanshawe.

Fanshawe was paradoxically both a safe bet and a risk for the show. He’d won the Perrier Award in Edinburgh the previous year, and was - as all such winners generally are, at least in the short term - bankable talent. He was, however, both openly lefty and openly gay - something which made him a vaguely controversial choice for That’s Life’s cocoa-and-slippers Sunday-night audience. Rantzen, however, had apparently been impressed with Fanshawe’s Edinburgh show, and proudly showcased her new acquisition in a specially-recorded trailer. “Typical,” quipped Fanshawe in the clip, “Eastern Europe gets liberation and democracy, and what do we get? A new series of That’s Life.”

On 17 January, The Sun ran an exclusive interview with Fanshawe. ‘The Day I Told My Folks I Was Gay - That’s Life star opens his heart to The Sun’ was the front-page headline, accompanied by a picture of a rictus-grinned Rantzen and Fanshawe. What followed was a brief interview conducted by Robin McGibbon, in which Fanshawe spoke about coming out to his parents and the prejudice he faced as gay comedian. It was, for The Sun, suspiciously free of condemnation or cheap gags, which raised immediate red flags - no doubt Fanshawe complied with the exclusive interview to avoid the paper printing a nasty (and, in Fanshawe’s case, largely pointless) exposé.

The Sun, like any other paper, simply goes where its readers go - the main reason it’s less blatantly homophobic these days is because its readers are less blatantly homophobic. Anyone who has ever researched 1980s editions of the paper will confirm that it’s a very grim read indeed, with gay men being casually referred to as ‘perverts’ and ‘poofters’ in the course of regular news items. 1990, however, catches the Sun in an interesting transition period - the homophobic hypocrisy is still there (on 19 January the paper ran an article by Lord Denning entitled ‘Why We Should Ban Gay Judges’), but the forthright name-calling has been curbed.

Except in Garry Bushell’s TV column, that is. On 7 February, after Fanshawe’s fourth week on air, he delivered his long-sleeved verdict. ‘This media-hyped pygmy,’ he spat, ‘is to humour what Britain’s muslims are to peace, love and understanding.’ A reference to the anti-Rushdie demonstrations the previous year, but a no less offensive comment for that. But it gets worse: ‘The only reason he’s on TV at all is because he’s so fashionably bent,’ he continued, arguing that ‘his kind’ should be left ‘to model handbags and mascara’. He nominated Fanshawe as his Wally of the Week.

Two days later, on 9 February, Fanshawe appeared on BBC1’s Daytime Live and voiced his outrage at the article. “The Sun is completely out of step with the general public and TV audiences,” he told presenter Judi Spiers. “If you gave an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, eventually they’d come up with a copy of the Sun.” This, of course, lit the blue touchpaper: ‘Ooh! Gay Simon Has Bash At Our Bushell’ The Sun jeered the following day, referring to Fanshawe’s ‘tantrum’. The ever-charming Bushell had this to add: ‘If his chat-up lines are as bad as his gags, no wonder he’s a woofter.’

It was a fully-fledged hate campaign, which The Sun milked for all its worth. Accompanying the 10 February article was the shit-stirring sneer ‘DO YOU FIND HIM FUNNY?’ accompanied by a phone number - readers were urged to call up if they were Fanshawe fans. The following week, Bushell scoffed that the line had only received 442 calls. His headline? ‘Proof to the Poof’.

The unfortunate truth, one that all this gruesome homophobia distorts, is that Fanshawe was indeed pretty terrible on That’s Life. Most weeks, he played to near-silence, and - with the show going out live - no editing or dubbing tricks could save him. It was, to be fair, a tough gig - the show was hardly conducive to stand-up in the first place, but the increasingly uncomfortable-looking Fanshawe unfortunately didn’t even possess Doc Cox’s cheek or charm. He was also the target of derision from many of his peers, some of whom felt he had been fast-tracked to a cushy BBC job without ‘doing his time’ on the circuit and that the awarding of the Perrier to a gay comedian was a purely political, ‘right-on’ decision.

During Fanshawe’s tenure, The Mary Whitehouse Experience had been providing far superior comedy fare over on Radio 1. Now in its third series, the show had loosened up considerably since the departure of original producer Bill Dare and, with him, the regular cast and rigid, stripped-and-stranded format of each programme. New producer Armando Iannucci made the shows more editorially inventive and interesting, being unafraid to take decisions based purely on the laughs each item got rather than worrying too much about the intended structure. It had evolved into a show where the listener genuinely had no idea what was coming next.

On 15 February, the team recorded the seventh show in the series at London’s Paris studio. One item in the programme was ‘The Embarrassment Experience’, which contained the following sub-sketch:

This pointed sequence was, however, cut from ‘The Embarrassment Experience’ when the show was broadcast two days later. The Sun, meanwhile, continued with their crusade. On the front page of the 16 February edition, another picture of Rantzen and Fanshawe was accompanied by the teaser headline ‘Make ‘em laugh or you are out, Simon!’. Turning to page three, readers were greeted - alongside the obligatory topless woman - by the headline ‘GET FUNNY, FANNY: Esther warns camp Simon to shape up’. Another ‘exclusive’, this time by TV editor Jim Taylor, the article attempted to paint Rantzen as complicit in the anti-Fanshawe campaign, although it’s fairly clear that her comments were originally conciliatory and feather-smoothing - an act of damage limitation which didn’t pay off:

Curiously, the entire page can be spotted pinned to the wall of a mechanics’ garage during an episode of Absolutely broadcast in October that year. This could just be coincidental - the show was in production at that time (and it was a ‘Page 3′, which fitted the set design) - but it also suggests that the whole Fanshawe affair was becoming something of a backstage in-joke among comedians.

That’s where the story appears to end for The Sun. Bushell quickly found bigger lefties to fry as February wore on, calling Ben Elton’s The Man From Auntie ’smug’ and damning the new series of The Comic Strip Presents… with the ironically Fanshawe-esque simile ‘as funny as a sperm bank at Sellafield’. However, The Mary Whitehouse Experience had more to say. During the 3 March edition (recorded two days beforehand), listeners were treated to the following sketch. Baddiel’s opening line here suggests he was unaware that the previous Fanshawe sketch had been cut:

After a detour mocking Little and Large, Baddiel takes the microphone into the audience:

When Baddiel and Newman appeared on Fanshawe’s Radio 5 chat show Fanshawe On Five on 11 November 1991 to plug The Mary Whitehouse Experience Encyclopedia, this sketch was not mentioned, but Fanshawe was happy to voice his scepticism about their comic abilities:

It was, of course, a different time - an era when comedians felt able to freely criticise other comedians without looking nervously over their shoulders. In one way it’s pleasing that the Mary Whitehouse Experience team tore apart Fanshawe based purely on how unfunny he was, discarding the homophobia which had motivated The Sun’s campaign, but Baddiel talking about the team “throwing our full weight behind The Sun” still leaves something of a sour taste.

The Mary Whitehouse Experience, despite beating with an obviously anti-Tory heart, sometimes bears a right-wing tinge, something which can generally be explained by its historical context - it was one of the first ‘post-alternative’ comedy shows, a programme which attacked right-on values as much as establishment ones. They hated Paul Daniels, but they hated Ben Elton too. Unlike today, pissing off lefties circa 1990 could almost be a refreshingly subversive - rather than a status-quo-maintaining reactionary - stance. Baddiel and Newman’s general backlash against what they viewed as ’straight men putting the world to rights’ in alternative comedy certainly contributed to events and they saw little point or comedic value in defending Fanshawe. In fact, the Fanshawe On Five interview contains quite an illuminating exchange about these two ‘generations’ of comedians, with Fanshawe tackling the duo on their use of the word ‘poof’:

Fanshawe, either through lack of interest or incomprehension, moves swiftly on.

So there you are - the story of Simon Fanshawe on That’s Life there. What a sad and depressing tale it was. Now that the Daily Mail is everyone’s cosy bogeyman of choice, it’s worth reminding ourselves quite how poisonous The Sun can be, even in these supposedly enlightened times. Instead of Bushell attacking muslims, you have Jon Gaunt referring to immigration officers ‘letting in every Tom, Dick and Abdul’. The wording may have become more cautious, but the attitudes remain.

Cyril…

Forty years ago this evening, the Monkees’ extraordinary film Head was given its ‘International Premiere’. By way of a 40^th anniversary tribute to one of our favourite films, we’ll be putting this site together over the next month or so.

http://head.sotcaa.net

Stuff you can look forward to:

Changes:
A 25-page dissection of the original ‘Changes’ shooting script, meticulously denoting any differences between this and the eventual film while also covering background info about the set-ups, characters and obscure cinematic references, not to mention plenty of speculation about rewrites between drafts and theses on Jack Nicholson’s typing skills. The first four pages of this are now online. Now, that may not sound like much…

Hype:
A closer look at the way the original release was trailed and sold - from that eerie image of media guru John Brockman staring silently into the camera to the voice of He-Man clearing up any possible misunderstandings between the Monkees and the Marx Brothers. Also a look at where and when the film was actually released theatrically.

Ratio:
An attempt to finally nail how the film should be seen, which editions show the most visual information and a closer look at what visual tricks the film-makers pulled while filling their canvas on the scratchy journey between camera negative and blurry close-up.

Soundtrack:
A full breakdown of the original musical soundtrack - and a closer look at how Jack Nicholson, as ‘Album Coordinator’, assembled the dialogue sections for the accompanying LP. Plus info on myriad releases and reissues from around the world.

Press:
A collection of previews, reviews, interviews, etc, both contemporaneous and retrospective.

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.