Back in the lads-mag
days, over ten years ago, one of my regular tasks was sitting by the side of our
regular contributor, author Norman Parker, to make his words fit on a Quark
Express page layout. He didn’t trust sub-editors to carry out this simple task –
and rightly so – so we’d sit together and make sure he was satisfied with every
sentence. We’d have to trim a few words or add a line or two, then we’d print
up the piece and Norman would sit in the corner of the office, with his glasses
on, and have a silent read-through. His stories were pretty spectacular, so you
can understand why he wanted to get his published words spot-on. He’d travel
up-river in Colombia and locate cocaine kitchens, things like that – really
dangerous projects.
Norman was – and
probably still is – keen as a Jack Russell, a small bloke, but he exercised at
6am every morning and you could almost sense, by osmosis, the power in his
chest. He was well into his fifties by this point and would often impart advice
and wisdom to the rampaging males on the magazine team, all wrapped in a direct
Ipcress File-era London accent. What
was interesting about Norman was his own rampaging past and deliverance.
In 1970, Norman was sentenced
to life imprisonment for murdering a criminal – or should I say, fellow
criminal. Norman was a figure in London’s underworld in the Sixties, but even before
the murder conviction, he’d served a six-year stretch for manslaughter. Norman
Stanley Fletcher, he wasn’t. Norman served 24 years at Her Majesty’s pleasure,
in a variety of locations, most notably Parkhurst. While incarcerated, he
attempted to escape more times than was sensible, rioted a fair amount and also
went on hunger strike. Norman was not a happy camper.
Realising all this
excessive expenditure of energy was getting him absolutely nowhere, Norman opted
for an alternative survival strategy – education and fitness. He studied hard and
earnt an Open University degree (later, around the time of my tailored
sub-editing sessions, he also got an MA in criminology, although I had to find
that out – he didn’t leak the information). When released from clink in 1994, Norman
mentioned that the one major aspect of British society that had changed was
that everybody had become a comedian. “By this, I mean people have got to have
the last word, the last laugh,” he explained.
This had a profound
effect on me. I realised we were living in an unplanned, unscripted, mediocre sitcom,
where everybody had the starring
comedy role. For the young, office-based Lukes and Joshuas who had entrusted themselves as guardians
of modern humour, wisecracks had become part of conversation structure, and the
more I observed, the more I realised we had a comedy catastrophe on our hands.
The soft-lad gobs***eism
of New Football, with David Baddiel and Frank Skinner as joint-managers, was a
major conduit of this grotesque state of affairs. In fact, I blame Baddiel and
Skinner for many of society’s ills, and strongly suspect that Baddiel’s studenty Mary Whitehouse Experience mob has
irrevocably transformed this nation into a safe refuge for the criminally
unfunny. The term “British comedian” is now something that means “indescribably
dull”. I listen to BBC’s Five Live radio station a fair amount, but on Sunday it’s
been completely upended by masters of the naff wisecrack from the stand-up
world. You should switch off after Tony Livesey.
Our stand-up comedians
are failing miserably at the one job they’re supposed to do, which is to take
comedy forwards. We’ve stalled with humour; our current crop of stand-ups are
like Lukes and Joshuas with a loudhailer. They’re accountants that have
overcome stage fright. Cynically, they’ve discovered that the best way to make
tons of cash is to aim their blank humour at the average bank employee, people
who send links to each other about cats. Today’s comedians give a constant
stream of below-par observational gags powered by a shouty voice and rapid
movement from stage left to stage right. Sweated jokes for a DVD-buying public.
I don’t wish to name
names, but the worst culprits are Marcus Brigstocke, Rufus “It’s Always
Movember” Hound, Michael McIntyre, Jimmy Carr, Dom Joly, Alan Carr, Rhod
Gilbert, Russell Brand, Shappi Khorsandi, Shazia Mirza, Gina Yashere, Lucy
Porter, Sue Perkins, John Bishop, anyone on Mock
The Week, and that self-obsessed, feel-sorry-for-me, I-don’t
care-what-we-talk-about-but-can-we-talk-about-me Humpty, James Corden. It’s as
if they know they’re not funny, but, y’know, what the bloody hell are they
going to do – work for the council? These people that send pictures of cats in
sombreros and Santa hats to each other, they lap up this mediocrity and share it
with other likeminded lost souls. Peter Kay’s had his day, as well. Jokes of
schooldays, Spangles and the past? It’s a very Nineties outlook, that.
The worst of all modern
comedians is that sparkly-eyed soft-soak Jack Whitehall. For him, there ought
to be a Nineteen Eighty-Four-style
disappearing, where not only does he no longer exist, but he never existed. I saw him on The Graham Norton Show last year and he
was slobbering over that leather jacket-wearing, clingfilm-wrapped crooner Michael
Bublé (who looks like a regular in a Coventry nightclub), snuggling up to him like he was in love,
touching his trousers.
“My ideal night these
days,” said Whitehall, “is to go home, run a bath, light some candles, open a
bottle of Shiraz, put on a little bit of this gentleman’s music [Bublé] and
have what I like to refer to as a ‘Bublé bath’.” Is
that it? That’s your big gag for the watching millions on a Friday night? “Bublé bath”? I
couldn’t turn the telly over quick enough. I feel sorry for Whitehall’s girlf,
the actress Gemma Chan. She should have dumped him by telephone live on air – although
she must have a slate loose for dating him in the first place.
The thing is, the Nineties
wasn’t a bad decade for comedy. Father
Ted is the best sitcom ever made, but you also had One Foot In The Grave, Bottom
(which, yes, was an extension of The
Young Ones, but worked), Black Books,
Brass Eye, The Royle Family, The High
Life and Alan Partridge. I like the fact that without swearing, Father Ted could easily be a kids’ TV
programme. There’s no dirt, no muck, and the priests are little more than
children themselves. There’s just epic embarrassment, confusion, danger and
shame, the sort of situations that made Fawlty
Towers such a winner. I prefer the utter absurdist escapism of Father Ted to John Cleese’s long-legged
discomfort; like Harold Steptoe, Ted needed to escape but is thwarted at every
attempt.
Much ground is covered
in a Father Ted episode – The Simpsons is similar in that respect.
Storylines provide a trellis for the vines of dialogue to grow through. It was
the ridiculous conversations that provided Father
Ted’s hilarity, whether the inhabitants of the parochial house were
entering the Eurovision Song Contest with a song called “My Lovely Horse” or getting
lost in the jungle-like surroundings of Ireland’s largest lingerie department.
Ted: “Do you remember
when he [Father Jack] gave you a big kick up the B-O-T-T-Y?”
Dougal: “Hahaha, yeah,
and do you remember that time you were bending over him and he held your nose
so tight that you had to open your mouth and then he dropped a big spider in it,
hahahaha.”
Ted: “No, that wasn't
funny, Dougal. It was funny when he kicked you up the arse, it wasn't funny
when he put the spider in my mouth.”
I’ll never tire of that
scene from “New Jack City”, where Father Jack contracts hairy hands syndrome
(level six out of a maximum of 12). At the Prisoner-inspired
Festival No 6 in Portmeirion this September, I’ll be putting a few questions to
Father Ted director Declan Lowney in
front of a live, deckchair-seated audience. Declan’s also the director of the
new Steve Coogan film Alan Partridge:
Alpha Papa – so I’ll have to get off my B-O-T-T-Y and see that flick before
the Q&A.
I met Declan, briefly,
at Festival No 6 last year, so there’s a linearity at play. He arrived as part
of the extended New Order entourage – his wife’s a friend of New Order’s PR
lady, Jayne. I was in Portmeirion specifically to see the band and our tents
formed a sort of media plaza in our backstage field of mud. Declan failed to
mention his comedy credentials, but he let slip some facts a few months later at
a party hosted by Jayne in Brighton. Over too many glasses of quickly consumed
red, we decided a return to Festival No 6 ought to be attempted, especially if
we could get in for free. It soon became apparent that the only way to
guarantee a gratis return to that North Wales idyll would be to work for our
passage.
At last year’s Festival
No 6, me and the wife camped together for the first time. She was more keen
than I was; I didn’t fancy the prospect of dew-covered pyjamas every morning.
Critical to our canvas-covered stay would be controlling the toilet problem of
outdoors living. No way was I traversing to the edge of the camp in the dead of
night to expel frothy jets of foaming beer and wine. So we developed “PU1”, a novel
system for the removal and storage of urine (P – p***; U – unit; 1 – the first
in the series). I can’t believe that nobody else has ever tackled this camping
conundrum. Within the warmth of your own tent, you wee into a funnel; this collects
in an old ice-cream tub; you then transfer the warm, fragrant trickle into old
milk containers. It’s recycling in action! Very alternative, very festival, and
for a short time, the plastic bottle acts as a “radiator”.
In the mornings at last
year’s Festival No 6, it was my job to traipse to the nearby hotel and deposit
the previous day’s collection into the public toilets (rather than pollute Friesian
pasture). Between us, we were producing six pints of effluent a day. It was
like a military process, but crucially, we’d tamed nature. There was a bit of a
problem on the final morning. I hiked up to the hotel with six pints of p*** in
my backpack – which is really heavy – and just as I was ducking into the
toilets, Gillian Gilbert from New Order leapt in front of me and said, “Oh hi,
did you enjoy the gig last night?”
With my back straining
under the weight of efflux, I had to provide a positive account of The Prisoner-themed New Order performance
from the previous evening. Not easy. Obviously, Gillian had no idea what I was
carrying, otherwise she might have given me the cold shoulder – which I was
already suffering from.
When I mentioned this tricky
tête-à-tête
to Declan, he naturally hijacked the narrative and gave my story an inevitable Father Ted spin. He said that the bottles
had exploded on my back and New Order’s synth-playing, soft-voiced, guitar-playing
mum-of-two was covered in the chilled remnants of lager, red wine and Prosecco.
It became clear that Declan’s brain is hardwired into Father Ted and I suspected that he only listens to the build-up of
stories and always provides a calamitous climax. As for PU1, I remain very
proud of that invention; me and the wife will shortly start work on the
slightly improved, uprated PU2.
