Читать книгу Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office - Ben Thompson, Ben Thompson - Страница 17

The cover of the 26 May 1990 issue of the NME has a historic look about it few others of that epoch can match. The music paper (which had adopted Vic and Bob at a time when rock ‘n’ roll hopefuls of a similarly charismatic stamp were distressingly thin on the ground)²⁹ looks forward to the first episode of Vic Reeves Big Night Out on the coming Friday night with a properly inflated sense of occasion.

‘People may well anticipate some jokes of the type normally associated with alternative comedy,’ Vic warns, portentously, ‘but they are going to be disappointed.’ What comes instead will be, he promises, ‘very visual and very aesthetically attractive’. Among the featured attractions, the viewers at home can look forward to ‘twisted movements…little puppets…light breezes blowing gently across the floor’, safe in the assurance that ‘except for sex and politics, everything is covered’.

The big night finally comes. And from the moment Vic walks on with Bob dressed as Isambard Kingdom Brunei and carrying a stuffed alsatian, it’s clear this isn’t going to be your everyday TV comedy experience.

Beginning and ending with a song, the show incorporates not only the marvellous ‘Novelty Island’ talent contest, but also the fearsome and arbitrary Judge Nutmeg, whose Wheel of Justice is the centre of an elaborate ritual of care (‘What do we do with the wheel of justice? Comb its hair!’) and generates a centrifugal force unparalleled in the history of jurisprudence (‘Spin, spin, spin the wheel of justice – see how fast the bastard turns!’).

Reeves, modestly hailed in the opening credits as ‘Britain’s top light entertainer…and singer’, vainly endeavours to keep a grip on the proceedings in his multifarious roles as baffled continuity announcer, lecherous game-show host and super-confident master of ceremonies. The proceedings also benefit from regular interventions by Vic’s bald assistant, Les, who loves spirit levels but has a terrible fear of chives, and top turns such as the astonishing performance-art group, Action Image Exchange. And then there’s the enigmatic Man with the Stick, whose amusing helmet is decorated with cartoons of ‘Spandau Ballet laughing at an orphan who’s fallen off his bike’ or ‘Milli Vanilli trying to create negative gravity in their tights’.

As with The Goons and Monty Python before them, the affection in which Reeves and Mortimer would come to be held by those who find them funny is rivalled only by the confusion and irritation they inspire in those who don’t.³⁰ And this fact of course only serves to intensify the joy of the former happy grouping.

It’s not long before people in every town in Britain are yelping at each other in hurriedly fabricated Darlington accents (slightly softer than conventional Geordie): ‘You wouldn’t! You wouldn’t! You wouldn’t…let it lie.’ Other catch-phrases prove equally infectious – the all-purpose ‘Very poor’, the trip-to-the-barber’s-inspired ‘It’s not what I asked for’, and best of all, with its pay-off delivered in an appropriately gormless voice not a million miles away from Keith Harris’s Orville: ‘I’m naive, me…but happy.’

With characteristic perversity, Vic seems to have been most willing to talk straightforwardly about what he was doing before anyone else knew what he was up to. Certainly he would rarely again be as explicit as he had been over that first Japanese meal with Jonathan Ross. (‘He explained the loose idea of Vic Reeves being simultaneously him and not him,’ Ross remembers wistfully, ‘but I’m sad to say that at the time I didn’t really pay as much attention as I should’ve.’)

Speaking to Vic over the phone at his Deptford office in the middle of the first series, there is certainly no sign of his head being turned by success. Asked as a test of his artistic integrity whether he would ever consider doing a building-society advert, his response is heartwarmingly straightforward: ‘If they’re paying me, I’ll do ‘owt. I’m shameless.’

He is happy to talk about his tailor – Sidney Charles of Deptford High Street (‘I’ve always gone to him, and I will continue to go to him as well’) – but reluctant to be drawn on Jack Hargreaves, Frank Randall, Will Hay, or any of the other big names of bygone variety eras to whom his Big Night Out persona seems to be paying implicit tribute. ‘If I mentioned anyone, I’d be speaking out of turn really, wouldn’t I?’ he demurs, sneakily.

But aren’t he and Bob bored of being compared to Morecambe and Wise all the time?

‘It’s been said. And I suppose if people have spotted it, there must be something there, but without being modest, I think we’re very unique…I don’t think you can really say that we’re like anyone else, or want to be—we just make it up as we go along really.’

Perhaps a little taken aback by the warmth with which the Big Night Out is received, Vic and Bob subsequently seem to delight in erecting a wall of wilful obfuscation between themselves and the outside world. It’s a wall that large sections of the British public seem to delight in swarming over – maybe inspired by the crowds picking up souvenir bits of demolished masonry on the freshly unified streets of Berlin.³¹

Either way, in the first flush of his fame, Vic Reeves can often be seen riding an antique motorbike round his old Greenwich haunts on scorching summer days, dressed in full biker’s leathers. Within a matter of months, he almost needs a police escort to protect him from the hordes of impressionable teenagers begging him to autograph cooked meat products or pieces of celery.

‘Their popularity rose absolutely from the north,’ Chiggy explains. ‘When they went out on tour after the TV show had been on, they were initially doing pretty small, university-only type gigs, but when they got to the north-east, we literally had to get security.’³²

At a less expansive cultural moment, this cult following in their ancestral homeland might have kept itself to itself. But this was the Madchester epoch, and with the rest of the country unprecedentedly susceptible to the charms of northerly enunciation, Vic and Bob soon found themselves exciting – on a national basis – the sort of intense, personally focused teen adulation that the pop stars of that baggily collective pre-Britpop musical moment seemed to have given up a right to.

By December of 1991, in the wake of an autumn repeat, a fantastic New Year special and a second series, a live Big Night Out fills Hammersmith Odeon for weeks on end. As in all the best games of Chinese whispers, a double transfer – from cult, localized live attraction to TV series to big-budget nationwide roadshow – had been enough to completely garble the original message.

If Reeves and Mortimer’s act can fairly be said to be ‘about’ anything (and however sniffy they get when anyone accuses them of being surrealists, Dali and Bunuel’s manifesto that ‘nothing should submit to rational explanation’ sometimes seems to have been written for them), it is about celebrity.

It’s one thing to unravel the macramé of minor television faces, pop stars and brand names in which we all find ourselves entangled and then mix them up again into ever more delicious confusion, but what happens when your own fame becomes a strand of that macramé? The moment of bewilderment which precedes recognition and laughter is one of Vic and Bob’s most precious comedic assets, which is why familiarity could be fatal to them.

At Hammersmith Odeon, Vic and Bob seem rather bored with the Les Facts and the ‘You wouldn’t let it lie’ and ‘What’s on the end of your stick?’ routines, and the parts of the show which are less concerned with ritual and more concerned with invention are by far the most enjoyable. With the Big Night Out now established as perhaps the most original and inspiring of all the generation-welding TV comedies, its perpetrators would have to move on if they wanted to stop their talents congealing like old Ready Brek in the chipped breakfast bowl of the folk memory.