Читать книгу Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office - Ben Thompson, Ben Thompson - Страница 15

There’s a great bit in Graham McCann’s 1998 biography of More-cambe and Wise where, as a means of establishing the weight of expectation resting upon his subjects’ disastrous 1954 small-screen début Running Wild (the one which caused the People’s television critic to pen the somewhat premature epitaph ‘Definition of the week. “TV”: the box in which they buried Eric and Ernie’), the author outlines the other entertainment on offer on Britain’s only small-screen channel on the night Morecambe and Wise staked their first claim on the medium. Bear in mind that this was a time when, in McCann’s suitably austere phrase, ‘Hours of viewing, like public drinking, were limited in the interests of temperance’. Thus, the early evening newsreel was followed by the rather Reevesian-sounding Coracle Carnival (with its exciting coverage of people paddling up and down a river in Roman-style boats). Then came that eternal televisual staple, ‘Association Football’ (Aldershot versus the Army), followed by Gravelhanger, a drama so bad it made Heartbeat look like a mouth-watering prospect. The ill-fated Running Wild was next up, before the evening reached a somewhat anti-climactic conclusion with a discussion of the situation in Indo-China, followed by the national anthem.

There would seem to be plenty of ammunition here for those who claim that the now unthinkably large audiences often cited as evidence of the superiority of previous generations of TV were actually just a result of there not being anything else on. Yet Running Wild got dreadful viewing figures with no competition, while more than half the nation would watch Morecambe and Wise Christmas shows a couple of decades later when it had two (count them, two) other channels to choose from.

Anyway, to extend the reach of McCann’s licensed-premises-based viewing metaphor, British TV at the start of the 1990s had left behind the old Scottish Highlands and Islands Keep the Lord’s Day Special scenario, but was still a long way shy of the non-stop twenty-four-hour lock-in that would be the digital epoch. In short, this was an era of limited Sunday opening and the occasional late-night extension.

What we really need to help us understand the dramatic impact of Vic Reeves Big Night Out is some kind of contemporary record of 1990’s primitive entertainment landscape. A diary, say, of a whole week’s worth of British sitcoms in that last grim Thatcherite winter…Thank goodness I kept one!²²

Friday, 21 February

‘Allo ‘Allo

This failsafe blend of Carry On-style innuendo and hoary World War II stereotype has entered the national subconscious at such a high level that it’s hard to know what to think about it. Except that the catch-phrase ‘Listen very carefully, I will say this only once’ will be remembered long after ‘Alb ‘Allo’s source material – late-seventies BBC drama series Secret Army – has faded from the collective memory. And that the only way to truly grasp this show’s ethical daring is to imagine the likely tabloid reaction to a French TV network essaying a comedy series about the humorous experiences of British prisoners in a Japanese POW camp.

Watching

Once the impact of its punkily downbeat theme tune (‘It was boredom at first sight, he was no one’s Mr Right’) has worn off, this amiable chunk of Scouse whimsy actually puts together its clichéd ingredients (interfering mother and put-upon only son) in a modestly charming way. Tonight, chirpy Brenda and her lovably gormless motor mechanic boyfriend Malcolm indulged in a bit of furtive courting aboard a friend’s beached pleasure craft, and were surprised when the tide came in and they had to be rescued by a lifeboat. Malcolm’s last line – ‘Nothing ever happens’ – made the influence of Samuel Beckett even more explicit than it was already.

Home To Roost

It’s hard to believe that this depressing rubbish with John Thaw and Reece Dinsdale in it is actually churned out by the same writer (Eric Chappell) who brought us the immortal Rising Damp. And yet, it is.

Colin’s Sandwich

Even those who have never previously harboured warm feelings towards Mel Smith have to admit that this is quite good. The prevailing mood of world-weary cynicism recalls the great early days of Shelley, and by working through its desire to use the word ‘buttocks’ in its opening few moments, tonight’s edition freed itself from that perennial concern to become genuinely humane. The man whose attempts to take control of his own life are constantly thwarted by his own essential decency, yet he can’t help speaking his mind however horrific the situation he has become enmeshed in, is a perennial theme of all great drama, from Hamlet to Ever Decreasing Circles.

Saturday, 22 February

Not traditionally a big night for sitcoms. Luckily, Keith Barron will soon be back on our screens in Haggard.

Sunday, 23 February

You Rang, Milord

Jimmy Perry and David Croft generously stage a benefit night for all their old characters. Lord George and the Honourable Teddy are the same as they were in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, but in different clothes. Paul Shane, Su Pollard and the other one are the same as they were in Hi-de-Hi but in different clothes. The air raid warden in Dad’s Army is the same as he was in Dad’s Army but in different clothes. The story is Upstairs Downstairs-style class war but played for laughs, which ought to have been a winning formula, but unaccountably – despite the plentiful opportunities for whisky watering and chamber pots – the whole thing looks a bit tired. In a footnote of modest historical interest, the comedy lesbian is played by one Katherine Rabett, who – had the cookie of royal libido crumbled a little differently – could quite easily have ended up as the Duchess of York.

The Two Of Us

Disgusting piece of Thatcherite slop in which ‘Ashley’ and ‘Elaine’ (played by Nicholas Lyndhurst – unwisely striving to shrug off the sacred mantle of Rodney in Only Fools and Horses— and the evocatively named Janet Dibley) are a wildly unappealing upwardly mobile couple, currently endeavouring to become entrepreneurs by running a pizza joint in the evenings. Any kind of manual work in a sitcom like this is, it must be remembered, side-splittingly hilarious. ‘I wanted a leather-topped desk and a BMW, not a tin of olives and a moped,’ Ashley moaned tonight to great audience hilarity. As if all this, another interfering mother and (this is the modern world after all) a businessman with a mobile phone weren’t enough, this week’s episode also found room for a cameo appearance from Simon Schatzberger, deeply loathed star of the ‘French polisher?…It’s just possible you could save my life’ Yellow Pages ad.

Monday, 24 February

Desmond’s

The fact that the only other non-white character in this entire week of British sitcom is a woman in the dentist’s waiting room in Thursday’s début edition of One Foot in the Grave gives some indication of the burden of representation Trix Worrell’s Peck-ham Rye barber’s shop comedy has to carry. In these circumstances, occasional lapses into the all-singing all-dancing tendencies of The Cosby Show are probably understandable. The comedy African is quite funny, too.

Tuesday, 25 February

Chelmsford 123

In which Jimmy Mulville shows that he still has some way to go before he can truly be considered the Tim Brooke Taylor of his generation.

After Henry

For reasons known only to themselves, ITV considered the return of After Henry an event of sufficient significance to merit the front page of the TV Times.23 In truth it is slightly better scripted than most of its rivals in the hegemonic middle-class-parents-cope-with-grown-up-children-and-demanding-mother genre, but when Prunella Scales says ‘After Henry confirms my theory that all the best comedy is based on pain’, she really is not kidding.

Porridge

Manna from heaven. In tonight’s repeated episode, ‘Poetic Justice’, the magistrate responsible for Fletcher’s incarceration found himself behind bars for bribery and corruption and sharing a cell with the man he sentenced. ‘How do you think I feel,’ he demands in a fine example of the celebrated Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais technique of natural justice through paradox, ‘being sent down by a crook like me?’

Wednesday, 26 February

By some completely unprecedented scheduling oversight, there are at present no British sitcoms on a Wednesday evening, but it cannot be very long before someone chooses a common saying in everyday use, cuts off its second half (Too Many Cooks…A Stitch in Time…It’s an Ill Wind…), finds a comedy location – motorway service station, taxidermists, baked bean factory – adds an interfering mother, someone with a car phone, and three grown-up children, and remembers that trousers are funny, and there we’ll have it. ITV, 8.30 p.m., and June Whitfield’s our uncle.

Thursday, 27 February

May To December

Anton Rodgers, the poor man’s William Gaunt, plays the middle-aged solicitor who is – horror of horrors, call out the militia and phone D. H. Lawrence – going out with someone quite a lot younger than him. Worse still, her name is Zoe Angel…and as for the comedy cockney secretary and her hilarious marijuana plant, let us draw a discreet veil over her (and it). It would be all too easy at this point to lament the passing of a halcyon epoch of situation comedy, but the harsh truth is that for every Steptoe…there has probably always been a Mind Your Language.

One Foot in the Grave

David Renwick’s suburban revenge comedy is the rarest of contemporary phenomena – an entertaining new sitcom with funny jokes in it. Victor Meldrew (played by the excellent Richard Wilson of Only When I Laugh and Tutti Frutti renown) is an irascible retired security guard who vents his considerable spleen on children, men with walking sticks, and toilet rolls whose perforations don’t coincide. Tonight he was in hospital with unexplained stomach pains and found himself having his pubic hair shaved by an escaped lunatic called Mr Brocklebank. Later on, when asked by a passing Conservative candidate for his vote in a forthcoming by-election, he gestured towards his genital region and proclaimed ‘I’d sooner stick it in a pan of boiling chip fat’. Last, and perhaps best of all, came this explanation for chronic insomnia: ‘How can I go to sleep?’ Meldrew wonders. ‘Every time I nod off, I have this hideous dream that I’m imprisoned in a lunatic asylum and Arthur Askey is singing underneath the window.’

At this point, the journal ends. But as well as showing just how desperately Vic Reeves Big Night Out was needed, and beyond the eerily prophetic resonance of Victor Meldrew’s dream,²⁴ this grainy snapshot of life before reality TV can also – with the aid of hindsight’s high-powered microscope – be seen to reveal a small-screen comedy world in a fascinating state of flux.

The exhaustion of the classic British sitcom form is made all the more apparent by the grisly spectacle of seventies behemoths trading on past glories. And the advent of One Foot in the Grave – arguably the last in the Dad’s Army/Fawlty Towers/Only Fools and Horses family line of generation-crossing mass-audience sitcoms²⁵ – only further reinforces this sense of transience and impending extinction.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the demographic scale, a lot of the bright young things of what someone with no regard for mythic nomenclature might term the Not the Nine O’Clock News generation were finding that their own performing careers were running out of steam a little earlier than might have been expected. By cunningly diverting their substantial remaining energies into the brave new world of independent production, the Jimmy Mulvilles, Mel Smiths (no one else liked Colin’s Sandwich as much as I did) and Griff Rhys Joneses of the world would snatch success from the jaws of failure via the new empires of Talkback and Hat Trick.²⁶