Читать книгу Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office - Ben Thompson, Ben Thompson - Страница 6

In Iain Sinclair’s book Lights Out for the Territory, the film-maker Chris Petit reflects on the way an old Dick Emery sketch – in which an explosive device was hidden in a lunchbox on a bus – seemed to contain an eerie premonition of the IRA bombing campaign which began shortly afterwards.

Dancing a strange backwards jig around Petit’s assertion that ‘successful comedy often anticipates future newsreel coverage’, the newsreel footage in 2001’s neurotically self-justificatory Sex Pistols memoir The Filth and The Fury is intercut with clips of olde-English comedic legends such as Max Wall and Tommy Cooper. ‘If you want to know the root core of something, go to the root core,’ John Lydon told Mojo magazine’s Andrew Male in the spring of 2002. ‘Comedians…Shakespeare…that’s English culture.’

More than twenty years before, the man then known as Johnny Rotten had wanted Monty Python’s Graham Chapman to direct the original Sex Pistols film, The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle. But if Lydon is to be believed (which he isn’t always), the group’s manager Malcom McLaren was so disgusted by Chapman’s party trick involving the pub dog, a pint of cider and a certain intimate part of his anatomy, that he gave the job to Julien Temple instead.²

This was one strange cultural linkage which somehow escaped the all-seeing eye of Greil Marcus. Marcus’s landmark 1989 volume Lipstick Traces3 sought to clear away the soil from the roots of punk rock by making ingenious connections between obscure sixteenth-century Dutch heretics and members of the Sex Pistols who happened to have similar names. Within the shared cultures of appreciation which have grown up around pop music (or film, or literature, come to that), such extravagant intellectual conceits are, if not exactly ten-a-penny, certainly far from unheard of. Yet British comedy’s ever-increasing cultural prominence has so far proved resistant to such ambitious interpretations.

One of the main aims of the book you currently hold in your hands is to stop people wondering why no one has ever attempted something similar in the entertainment field which Jethro and Ken Dodd call home. But before we can begin to see if this lofty goal can be achieved, two important questions must be answered.