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‘The present time, together with the past, shall be judged by a great jovialist’

Nostradamus

‘You’ll never guess what I just saw backstage…Nicholas Witchell with a barrage balloon Sellotaped onto his back, trying to convince all these termites that he was their queen’

Vic Reeves

In a late-nineties BBC TV documentary about Steve Martin, the stadium-filling stand-up balloon-folder turned Hollywood leading man recalls looking around him at the angry political comedy which prevailed in his homeland in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam protest era. ‘Hmm,’ Martin remembers his mid-seventies self thinking, ‘all that’s gonna be over soon…and when it is, I’m gonna be right there. And I’m gonna be silly.’

It would not be the act of a madman to imagine Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer making a similar plan in downtown south-east London a decade or so later, with Margaret Thatcher as their Richard Nixon and Ben Elton as their Richard Pryor. If you hadn’t ever spoken to them. But once you’ve listened to them talking about what they do (in this instance, over tea and biscuits at the BBC, at around the same time the Steve Martin documentary goes out) it’s hard to conceive how the massive cultural impact Reeves and Mortimer have had on this country in the past decade or so could possibly have been a matter of prior calculation.

They have always been endearingly incapable of guessing which of their ideas will go down well and which won’t (‘You imagine everyone will like everything when you first think it up,’ Vic muses, ‘then when you actually do it, you think “Oh, maybe not”‘), seeming to clutch to their hearts with especial tenderness those comedic sallies which are greeted with total incomprehension on the part of their audience.

Vic remembers an infamous early appearance at the Montreal Comedy Festival: ‘There were 7,000 people, one of the biggest crowds we’ve ever had, and it was absolute silence for twelve minutes. We went out and we had the lucky carpet with us. The basic joke is Bob comes on and says, “I’ve been having some bad luck.” And I say, “Well, have you got a lucky charm?” And I turn out to have a lucky charm which is too big to carry…’

Vic shakes his head contentedly: ‘You could hear people in the audience saying, “That carpet’s too big” – they just couldn’t accept someone having a twenty-foot roll of carpet for a lucky charm.’¹⁸

Bob has similarly fond memories of 1998’s notoriously impenetrable BBC2 series Bang Bang…It’s Reeves & Mortimer. ‘We have this hope,’ Mortimer insists, rather poignantly, ‘that if there’s anyone left bothered about us in fifty years’ time, that will be the one they’ll remember.’¹⁹

It seems jokes nobody understands are like pop stars who die young. They never get the chance to let you down.

‘There’s such a thin line between what works and what doesn’t,’ argues long-time Vic and Bob associate and Vic Reeves Big Night Out catalyst Jonathan Ross (while pretending not to care whether any fellow customers have registered his presence in a Soho Star-bucks in the early summer of 2002). ‘It’s all delivery and perception and context. And I think they understand that better than anyone. That’s why they never get beaten down – because they find what they do genuinely funny. That’s what makes them different from what you might call more workmanlike comedians, or some of the sort of stuff I do,’ Ross grins.

‘You sit down and write material which you think people might find funny,’ he continues. ‘Then you try and hone it so they definitely will do, but you’re not living life for yourself. It’s purely work. It was never like that for Vic and Bob, though. They’re not a service industry: even when they’re doing things to pay the rent, they’re still enjoying themselves. And something like that time in Montreal – where they were doing stuff with a miniature Elvis and some monkeys on a plate to a bemused bilingual audience – they just enjoyed the whole experience. For them, it doesn’t represent the death of an act or a step back in a possible career plan, it’s just another funny moment in an already amusing day.’

Reeves and Mortimer used to commemorate the jokes which no one got with a weekly memorial service in the ‘tumbleweed moment’ running gag on Shooting Stars. Now that they themselves are verging on institutional status, it’s hard to remember just how roughly they once rubbed against the comic grain. But when the Big Night Out first appeared – in a succession of (to use Vic’s characteristically art-history-informed adjective) ‘Hogarthian’ south-east London pubs, in the second half of the 1980s – the ideological tyranny of alternative comedy was still at its height.

‘It just didn’t interest me,’ Vic remembers scornfully. ‘I hate being preached to. I can make my own mind up: tell me something new.’ In Vic’s case, something new meant a potent blend of old-fashioned vaudeville and a spirit of the purest comic anarchy.

Consider for a moment the Big Night Out’s warped talent contest ‘Novelty Island’ (in which Mortimer’s increasingly poignant alter ego Graham Lister strives to impress the unfeeling Reeves with a series of doomed variety acts, such as pushing lard through the mouth and nostrils of a picture of Mickey Rourke). Now cast your mind back to its most obvious comedic precursor, ‘Alan Whicker Island’ – a vintage Monty Python sketch about an archipelago inhabited entirely by people who look and behave just like the abrasive TV travel-show presenter turned spokesman for American Express. The fundamental difference between these two comic conceits is that the latter addresses the entertainment apparatus it is attempting to deconstruct from the top down, while the former does so from the bottom up.

This levelling tendency in Vic and Bob’s work is balanced from the first (for example, in the marvellously arbitrary adjudications of the terrifying Judge Nutmeg) with a healthy respect for the comic potential of absolute rule. Their unique ability to combine the insurrectionary fury of the eighteenth-century mob with the icy hauteur of the pre-revolutionary aristocrat is the basis of what rocket scientists of the future will term ‘The Reeves and Mortimer despot/ democrat trajectory’.