Читать книгу Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office - Ben Thompson, Ben Thompson - Страница 16

‘I remember going down and seeing them at the Deptford Albany,’ says Reeves and Mortimer’s manager Caroline Chignell – universally known as ‘Chiggy’ – of her first sighting of her future clients, ‘and thinking, Oh my God! It was just so different from anything else…Vic and Bob didn’t really come out of the comedy world: what they were doing seemed to be referring more to art and pop traditions. There was a real feeling of a community of artists around them. Yet at the same time, their act seemed to involve all the sorts of things that would make your dad laugh, but done in a really contemporary way.’

In manned space flight, the last-minute pre-launch stages are always especially fraught. And so it proved with the Reeves and Mortimer despot/democrat trajectory, as the little matter of successfully translating their uniquely deranged equilibrium to TV was very far from being a done deal.

‘There was obviously some irony involved when Vic claimed to be “Britain’s top light entertainer”,’ Chiggy remembers, ‘but he believed it too – and he looked it when he wore a white suit.’

Vic’s early televisual forays on Jonathan Ross’s Last Resort were greeted with a reaction most fairly characterized as general bemusement, but looking back now, there were portents of the greatness to come. When he painted pictures of guests (including punk svengali Malcolm McLaren) on china plates as ‘Lesley Cooper, street artist’, a couple of prescient reprobates ran down out of the audience to steal them. And Vic’s attempts at adding a much-needed touch of class to an ill-fated village-fête-themed show as the bucolic Silas Cloudharvest elicited at least one memorable reaction. (‘I was talking to one of the prop guys afterwards,’ Jonathan Ross remembers fondly, ‘and he said “That farmer was shit: if he hadn’t had that cucumber flute, he’d have died on his arse”.’)

There were, Chiggy remembers, ‘a lot of people sniffing about’ in south-east London in the very late eighties. Whether or not BBC2’s Alan Yentob and Channel 4’s Michael Grade actually did go and see the Big Night Out at Deptford Albany on the same evening in an epic battle for control of the future of British comedy,²⁷ it was the latter (via Ross’s production company, Channel X) who ended up signing the deal.

After an embarrassing episode when Ross and Reeves went to the BBC boss’s house only to find out that he actually wanted Vic to be the host of a new series of Juke Box Jury (a job which his friend and fellow scion of the South London biker underground Jools Holland was happy to take in his stead), it was never really going to be otherwise. The demon Yentob would get his man in the end. But for the moment, everything had turned out for the best. When the Big Night Out finally transferred to TV, the particular circumstances of a newly established independent production company making a show for a young channel would facilitate a level of freedom that a more firmly established institution could never have permitted.²⁸

‘The thing that set the tone,’ Chiggy remembers, ‘was Jim’s absolute control of the visual aspect. Something like that would never be allowed to happen now, but it was his and Bob’s vision entirely – all the sets, all the props, all the costumes…The scripts were all drawings [preserved for posterity in the Penguin book Big Night In] – “shell/bottle lamp with patchwork shade”, “Kleenex/ticker tape”. And it was amazing how literally the people making the props took everything: they were so terrified of accidentally putting down an aubergine rather than a cucumber, or making something blue when it needed to be white.’

Vic and Bob seem to have been quite an intimidating proposition at this stage. ‘They had a very small, close-knit group of friends, and you would not dare ever to even guess what was funny and what wasn’t, or you would land yourself in terrible trouble,’ Chiggy concedes. ‘I don’t think it was just me…I think everyone felt that way.’