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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…