Читать книгу Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office - Ben Thompson, Ben Thompson - Страница 8

The title Sunshine on Putty originates exactly one hundred years before the first Channel 4 edition of Vic Reeves Big Night Out which marks our story’s official starting-point. The people we have to thank for it are English lesbian literary icons Katherine Bradley and her niece and lover Edith Cooper. This mercurial pairing wrote eleven plays and thirty volumes of poetry together under the coyly macho pen-name of Michael Field (on the grounds – understandable in a Victorian England whose perennially unamused matriarch could not bring herself to accept the existence of Sapphic love – that ‘we have things to say that people will not hear from a woman’s lips’).

Perhaps the best known of these hilariously florid and overblown works is an epic poem about their dog, rejoicing in the title Whym Chow: Flame of Love. The eponymous canine’s real-life role as ‘sex symbol, god made flesh and embodiment of the masculine principle’ was, their biographer Emma Donoghue later noted,¹² ‘a heavy burden of meaning for one small dog to bear…Not surprisingly, it went to his head and he became a tyrant.’ On one occasion, when Whym Chow’s foul temper had prevented them from going to the beach, Bradley and Cooper excused him in verse with the classic couplet ‘Bacchic cub, Thou could’st not bear to face the sea’. But, in the immortal words of Ronnie Corbett, I digress.

In the summer of 1890, on meeting the celebrated Irish playwright and novelist George Moore, Bradley and Cooper noted in their diary that his smile was ‘like sunshine on putty’. It is hard to be sure exactly what they meant by this observation, though they probably did not intend it as a compliment. (Moore is one of those tragic whipping boys of destiny – like Sir Geoffrey Howe or Bobby Davro – who seem destined to be remembered chiefly as the butt of other people’s insults.)¹³

However, if the phrase ‘sunshine on putty’ is dramatically uprooted from its original context and applied with a reckless flourish to the recent history of British comedy, its ambivalence becomes entirely felicitous. On the one hand it evokes a pleasurable sensation – a feeling of warmth and light in a clammy and mutable world – on the other, a specific impact: a sense of helping along a process of coalescence that was already ongoing.

Consider for a moment the almost innumerable ways in which daily life in this country is different now from the way it was at the beginning of the last decade. Who would have predicted in 1990 that within little more than ten years it would be hard to remember what it was like to live under a Tory government (or at least one which called itself that)? Or that the thirsty need no longer dream of pubs that would be open all day, and the hungry could entertain the real possibility of a decent sandwich in almost every town and city in Britain (so long as they had the money to pay the premium for Pret à Manger pine nuts)? Or that Scotland and Wales would have their own parliaments and someone who wasn’t a neo-Nazi might fly the flag of St George on the front of their car? Or that on the days when Sara Cox managed to get out of bed for the breakfast show, you could listen to Radio 1 all day from 7 a.m. till 5.45 p.m. and Jo Whiley would be the only DJ you’d hear who didn’t come from Manchester or Leeds?¹⁴ Or that a terrestrial TV programme would exist which would keep a twenty-four-hour watch on a group of wannabe daytime travel-show presenters in the hope that a drunken maverick cockney dental nurse might embark upon an ill-advised sexual adventure?

It would be easy (not to mention quite fun) to go on like this all day, but when it comes to the trickier business of establishing the connection between these almost subliminal changes in the fabric of everyday life and the recent history of British comedy, only a famous French philosopher who sounds like he ought to play for Arsenal can help us.