Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office

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Ben Thompson. Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office

Sunshine on Putty

Ben Thompson

Table of Contents

Introduction

‘Successful comedy often anticipates future newsreel coverage’

1. Was the Reeves/Office era really a golden age, and if so, how and why did it come about and what were its exact parameters?

2. What in the name of Bob Monkhouse’s stolen jokebook does ‘Sunshine on Putty’ mean?

What Henri Bergson has to say about all this

At Last, The Theodore Hook in 1812 Show

Chronological Timeline

1 On the Launchpad. The Reeves and Mortimer despot/democrat trajectory is about to commence

3. Primary Ross/Reeves interface

2. Seven days in the sitcom wilderness: ‘Listen very carefully, I will say this only once’

1. Getting Chiggy with it

…Lift off! ‘Twisted movements…little puppets…light breezes blowing gently across the floor’

2 ‘Don’t Mention the War’ Conflict aftermath and comedic rebirth, from The Goons to Richard and Judy

Where there’s armed conflict and the imminent threat of violent death, there’s hope

Goon, but not forgotten

Hugh Greene was their valet

The amazing Let The People Sing dead cow prophecy

‘What did you do in the comedy war, Daddy?’

Another way in which Margaret Thatcher was the mother-in-law of alternative comedy, besides the obvious one

3 Morris, Iannucci, Coogan, Lee, Herring and Marber. a.k.a. The new school of linguistic exactitude

On The Hour. because fact into News(s)peak won’t go

Saying what the thing itself is

Steve Coogan in flashback

The On The Hour ice pack commences its break-up

Stewart Lee’s side of the story

Patrick Marber’s side of the story

Knowing him, knowing them

A boot of non-fact grinding into the face of news for ever – The Day Today hits the ground running

The Day Today diaspora

4 The Great Mythological Armour Shortage of 1993-4. Parts One to Five. One

Two. Variety is the spice of life…except when it isn’t

Three. That whole ‘comedy is the new rock ‘n’ roll’ farrago

Four

Five. Bill Hicks in the afterlife, a.k.a. that whole ‘comedian as martyr’ delusion

5 Constructing the Citadel. The comedy edifice needs bricks and mortar, just like any other (in five more parts) 1. The Management

(a) Avalon’s testosterone vale

(b) Off The Kerb: Mr Cresswell remembers when all this were nobbut fields

(c) All the way with PBJ

2. Diversification

(a) Acting

(b) Writing novels

3. The Edinburgh Festival: Homage to Caledonia

4. The British Comedy Awards

5. Back at comedy base camp

6 The Illusion (or Otherwise) of Spontaneity. Eddie Izzard and Phil Kay play different ‘danger edges’

Never mind the theories of comedic fluidity, where’s the bar?

‘I went out on a limb, and there was no arm there’

The curse of impro(v)

What Eddie did next

7 It’s Frank’s (and Chubby’s and Jo’s and Jenny’s) World. The rest of us just live in it

A. The boys

The Billy Graham of anal sex

Frank Skinner’s heart of darkness

A moral thing

Royston Vasey interlude: making Priapus blush

Terry Wogan’s right-hand man

B. The girls. Jo Brand recognition: ‘I wish things didn’t have to be like this on every level really’

I can see Jenny Eclair, Lee, now the rain has gone

8 ‘Sensation’ or Given that we consume culture with the same hearty appetite with which we might approach a tasty meat or cheese product, why not savour the two pleasures in the same language?

9 A Class of His Own. Paul Whitehouse, The Fast Show, and the poetry of social insecurity

10 Cry Harry for England. Hill, Murray and the absence of empire

The Reeves/Hill Nietzsche divergence, or nailing your colours to Friedrich’s mast

If the mountain shall not go to Mohammed, Mohammed shall go to the mountain… a.k.a. Harry Hill’s TV odyssey

In the next thrilling instalment of Harry Hill’s televisual odyssey, far from being locked in the tower like what he should have been, Harry escapes captivity in a small-screen cell of his own design via the unlikely rope-ladder of tabloid TV journalism…

bing bing bing…Satellite of pub

11 That Would Be an Ecumenical Matter’ Father Ted answers the Irish Question

Stopping and doing the American bit

Returning to that pre-interlude discussion of implicit and explicit sadness as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened…

Another one of those weird flashback-type incidents involving Roseanne, The Simpsons and Seinfeld. If this was happening in Wayne’s World, Mike Myers and Dana Carvey would be wiggling all twenty fingers while raising and lowering their hands and intoning ‘Biddley-do, Biddley-do, Biddley-do’

Returning once more to Father Ted, having learned an important lesson about the universal comedic significance of people in non-metropolitan areas watching Seinfeld

Postscript: Linehan and Mathews in the comedy afterlife

12 The Chat Nexus

Phase 1: Comedians as hosts

Phase 2: Complications ensue, or the biters bit

Phase 3: Shrugging off irony’s shackles

Phase 4: Hosts as hosts

Phase 5: Hosts as comedians

Comedians as hosts (slight return)

13 David Baddiel Syndrome. or The tyranny of obligatory irreverence

Baddiel and Skinner and the post-Hornby mindset

A froth with a saline base

‘A tongue jabbing gingerly at the ashen dent of my anus’

Goodbye England’s rose, hello OK! magazine

‘Hankering after evil in the public mind’

14 Vic Reeves Welcomes Us into His Beautiful Home. And shows us paintings differing markedly from those of Ronnie Wood

Giving the people what they want

15 A Grove of His Own. Steve Coogan fights to maintain his position in Virbius’s gory lineage

16 The Royle We. Caroline Aherne and the comedy of popular sovereignty

The Royal Oui: Where the actual house of Windsor comes into it

17 ‘A Little Bit of Politics’ or Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Elton?

Kilroy woz ‘ere

The Rite of Springer

Michael Moore, Michael Moore, riding through the glen

It’s Tony Blair’s party, and we’ll cry if we want to

Oh, Ben Elton, so much to answer for, or ‘Bo Rhap could not be ignored’

All roads lead to Sir Rhodes

Ali G struggles to preserve the infrastructure of suburban community

18 Morals. Cartoons, Brass Eye, a brief history of swearing and the real-life Mary Whitehouse Experience

Ren & Stimpy. the bastards they really were

Brass Eye: Top this, you Quisling fucks!’

‘Without realness we iz nuffink’

Max Wall, Margaret Thatcher, Les Dawson and the end of shame

19 Equal Opportunities, the Ones that Never Knock. Race and Ali G, sex and Smack the Pony, and Spaced—the final frontier

Jim Davidson’s panto, or the wages of Sinderella is death

The Thea Vidale and Lenny Henry calling-your-mother-a-bitch or not contrast

The man behind the Real McCoy/Goodness Gracious Me Divergence explains exactly where Tony Blair comes into it

A Savage Culture

Female comedy performers who are actually female

Epilogue: Spaced—the final frontier

20 Families at War. The Reeves and Mortimer despot/democrat trajectory reaches its terrifying conclusion

21 The League of Gentlemen. Three character actors no longer in search of an author

22 Ceramics Revue. The Johnny Vegas story

23 Script for a Jester’s Tear. Reality TV and the comedification of the self

1. Reality TV

2. Capitalism

3. Jack Dee and the comedy of consumerist despair

Seinfeld Coda

24 The Office. Yea, though I walk through the Thames Valley of the shadow of death…

25 ‘I Told You I Was Ill’ Spike’s last resting place and Back Passage to India

Eric and Terence’s big adventure

Caroline and Craig’s big adventure

Conclusion

Steve Coogan in ‘Cashback’

Final thoughts

Afterword. Little Britain, BBC3 and the post-Office road map

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

About the Author

Praise

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Отрывок из книги

The Golden Age of British Comedy, from Vic Reeves to The Big Night Out to The Office

Dugas, La Psychologie de rire, 1902

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The picture of the wearer of cap and bells painted in R. H. Hill’s Tales of the Jesters - ‘Stealing titbits from the kitchen, falling into fits of violent fury without reason, breaking furniture and crockery, fighting with the pages and worst of all giving himself insufferable airs’ – will not be wholly unfamiliar to anyone lucky enough to have spent time with Britain’s turn-of-the-millennium comedic élite.

If by these means it were somehow possible to root the glorious comic legacy of this illustrious era in timeless verities of national character and cultural heritage, well, that would certainly be a goal worth aiming at. In his lofty 1946 panegyric The English Sense of Humour, Harold Nicolson describes that most oft-speculated-upon of national attributes (whose ethnic remit is, for the purpose of this volume – and in acknowledgement of the partial success of Tony Blair’s devolutionary reforms – graciously also extended to the Scots, the Welsh and even the Irish) as ‘existing at a level of consciousness between sensation and perception’.

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