Читать книгу Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office - Ben Thompson, Ben Thompson - Страница 40

‘They get blamed for things I’ve done’

Stewart Lee

Amid the remorseless expansion of the comedy industry in the late eighties and early nineties, the basic business of just being funny or not being funny gets pushed ever more to one side. A comedy career tends to be publicly defined in terms of material – rather than creative – advance: how much you got paid for your video, how many series you’ve had on Channel 4, how many nights you can sell out at which West End theatre. It is in this context that the small amount of coverage given to the complex art of comedy management will generally be encountered.

Which of us has not felt an involuntary contraction of the bowel muscles on watching some pointless TV showbiz news report and hearing the halfwit holding the microphone say ‘and [insert name of pop-culture phenomenon X, from bingo to pigeon-racing] has become big business’ While such in-depth reportage has probably ensured that at least the names of the three main corporate players in British comedy – Avalon, Off The Kerb and PBJ – will be vaguely familiar to anyone with a passing interest in the field, the extent of the impact they’ve had on their various clienteles may well come as something of a shock.

The contrasting ways in which the workplace cultures of different management companies evolve has had a crucial influence on developing social, creative and ideological divides in the British body comedic. To such an extent that at times you start to wonder if comedy management is an exoskeleton or an endoskeleton.

Like record company bosses and film producers, comedy managers tend to get a very bad press. This is because everyone else – from critics to fans to the artistes themselves – has a vested interest in blaming them for anything that might go wrong in their clients’ careers. As false as the notional opposition between the unsullied innocence of the artist and the deceiving greed of the agent undoubtedly is, people find clinging on to it much easier than asking themselves awkward questions about exactly whose idea it was to do that dreadful advert.

It is much to the managers’ and agents’ credit that you will rarely hear them complain about the resultant sullying of their reputations. Whatever their other differences, they seem to share an innate understanding that it is chiefly by means of this process of ‘automatic guilt by association’ (succinctly formulated by Stewart Lee as ‘They get blamed for things I’ve done’) that they earn their percentage. Thus one form of formal buck acceptance begets another.

Speaking to comedians⁷⁵ about their agents, there is very little of the bitching which might be conspicuous in discussions of a similar nature with an actor or author. Perhaps because comedy is such a lonely and competitive business – Off The Kerb boss Addison Cresswell describes its practitioners as ‘the most paranoid group of people I’ve ever met’ – the very existence of an advocate and mentor, however fallible, is something to be grateful for.