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Alison’s Pop Quiz 2 - MP3, 24′25
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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…

 

 

 

 

 

#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.