Читать книгу Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office - Ben Thompson, Ben Thompson - Страница 41

The turning-point in Jenny Eclair’s long slog from waitress to resting comedy actress to Perrier Award-winning comedian seems to have been the moment she moved from the sisterly agency she shared with French and Saunders, Ruby Wax and Sandi Toksvig to the testosterone vale of Avalon (home to Frank Skinner and David Baddiel among others). Talking to her about them in 1995, she seems quite happy to be the lone female on the books of an organization for whose profile the word ‘muscular’ is widely deemed to be an understatement.

‘I adore them,’ she says, ‘because they play the game so well – the reality of going up and down the motorway playing to six people is very mundane, but when the pantomime is done properly…well, I can almost believe the car which is taking me to Manchester this afternoon will be a bullet-proof limo, even though it’ll actually be a Ford Orion.’

For corporate gigs (the dark underbelly of a good comedic living), Avalon even supply her with a bodyguard. ‘The companies concerned are paying quite a lot of money,’ Eclair explains cheerfully, ‘so they want to take your skin off and hang it behind the door.’ This is exactly the sort of malevolent impulse people who have done business with Avalon in the television or publishing industries can sometimes be heard to accuse them of.

Having just lost his proverbial shirt (and quite possibly his actual shirt, too) in a disastrous foray into producing West End musicals, Jon Thoday founded Avalon with former Woolwich Poly entertainments secretary Richard Allen-Turner in 1988. On the basis of Thoday’s experience that ‘theatrical agents always blamed the talent and failed to take responsibility for their own mistakes’, they decided to build up a comedy-management stable based on a very different principle. They set out to be ‘100 per cent on the side of their clients’.

This is the sort of nebulous thing snidey Jay Mohr says in Jerry Maguire when he’s trying to tempt Rod Tidwell away from Tom Cruise, but in Avalon’s case it does actually seem to mean something. ‘There is a kind of ethic that “the act is always right”,’ agrees Stewart Lee, ‘which in one sense is reassuring, but can occasionally be unhelpful…Because the act’ – Lee continues feelingly – ‘is sometimes wrong.’

‘Traditionally,’ Thoday explains, ‘the agent stands in between the artist and whoever they’re making the deal with, but we tend to stand more with our client. We’ve never really worried about the people on the other side of the table, because it’s not them we have a relationship with.’

Is this why the name of Avalon has been known to inspire loathing as well as love? ‘Right from when we first started in 1988, we’ve been very good at spotting talent,’ Thoday insists. ‘The more talented clients you work with, the more often you need to say no to people, and if you’re saying no, there’s no real difference whether you shout or tell them nicely – no one likes to hear it. So I think a certain amount of the bad feeling we’ve experienced over the years has come from the people who would have liked to work with us, but haven’t been able to.’

If you think of British pop’s abundant managerial mythology – from arch teen manipulator Larry Parnes, through Brian Epstein and Led Zeppelin’s Peter Grant, to Malcolm McLaren’s Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle— the relative paucity of human interest in the annals of comedic career guidance was in urgent need of rectification by the late 1980s. And the oft-overlooked sense of mischief embedded in such cornerstones of Avalonian folklore as Thoday enlivening a bad night out at the Hackney Empire by persuading a rival agent to sign a third-rate act (‘I thought it might be funny to recommend the person who was rubbish,’ Thoday remembers unrepentantly, ‘and they were signed the next day’) was at least a first step towards making good that deficit.

The flipside of the gang mentality which Avalon are often accused of fostering is an impressive record of loyalty to such maverick left-field performers as Simon Munnery. The company’s sense of collective embattlement probably dates back to the size of the initial splash they made in the complacent duckpond of the late-eighties UK comedy scene. Even though – or perhaps more accurately, because – the bulk of Avalon’s early signings (Skinner excepted) came from Oxford or Cambridge University backgrounds, they were sufficiently out of step with prevailing alternative dogmas to excite alarm and despondency amongst the doormen of sociopolitical righteousness.

‘Someone like Frank Skinner, who might now be perceived as a cash cow,’ Stewart Lee remembers, ‘signing him was a bold decision when they did it, because no one else wanted to. There was a definite perception when Avalon was starting off that they were the barbarians at the gates. I remember [celebrated pillar of ideological rectitude] Jeremy Hardy writing a column in the Guardian accusing Simon Munnery of being a neo-Nazi,’ he smiles, ‘which was a much less popular option comedically then than it is now.’

Avalon’s institutional machismo is not to everyone’s tastes – the co-ordinated windcheaters traditionally worn by their employees at the Edinburgh Festival causing even the famously mild-mannered Addison Cresswell to mutter darkly about ‘muppets in matching jackets’. And their aggressive style of management has undoubtedly had its casualties on both sides of the deal-making fence, but no one can deny that they have an aesthetic. And British comedy needs as many of those as it can get.

For legal reasons, it seems best to confirm at first hand the veracity of the following anecdote about an Avalon Christmas company outing on the Eurostar. Is it true that on one particular mid-nineties occasion, an enraged Jon Thoday was obliged to complete his journey in the guards van after narrow-minded French officialdom thwarted his attempt to buy a second complete drinks trolley?

‘It wasn’t a trolley,’ growls an affronted Thoday, ‘it was the entire bar.’