The Complete and Utter (Sorta) History
of British Comedy – Part Three: The 1980's
ANARCHY IN THE U.K.
We now take you to a home in north London occupied by four male college students. I'll leave the filthy living conditions to your imagination, but trust me, they're worse than you think. An explosion has just occurred.
Rik: (nonchalantly) Oh no. The front door's exploded.
Mike: Vyvyan!
Rik: Vyvyan!
Vyvyan: Vyvyan! Vyvyan! Vyvyan! Honestly, whenever anything explodes in this house, it's always "Blame Vyvyan!"
Mike: Well who do you suggest we blame?
Rik: THATCHER!
Vyvyan: No...blame whoever rang the front doorbell because they obviously triggered off the bomb I set up.
OK, technically Vyvyan is right, but as the 80s began, nothing summed up the attitude of youthful Britain better than Rik's attitude of BLAME THATCHER!
That was only one of Rik's many digs at the Prime Minister. It was also proof that the pendulum had swung because like everything else in life, comedy tends to be cyclical. The 60s was dominated by political satire and when the government no longer provided sufficient fodder, the 70s spawned more comfortable, middle-class comedies such as The Good Life and To the Manor Born.
Not the Nine O'Clock News
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So the time was ripe for a swing back toward the more angry and political. The opening bullet was fired in 1979 with the savage satire of Not the Nine O'Clock News and this trend would continue throughout much of the next decade.
One of the first great comedies of the 80s was The Young Ones, about those poor college students with the exploding front door. In spite of the now outdated punk ethos and clothing, it still stands the test of time.
Before discussing The Young Ones, however, let's take a step back once more.
Starting in the 60s, British comedy had been dominated by a couple of different groups. First, there was the "Oxbridge Mafia," a group of performers including the Pythons, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and others who had emerged from the rarefied atmosphere of Oxford and Cambridge. Their comedy, although often based on flat-out silliness, was also more intellectual, showing a careful grasp of language and logic.
On the other hand, there was Benny Hill as well as David Croft and his various collaborators. Their humor was something of a throwback to the music hall tradition, with jokes about mother-in-laws, references to women's breasts, and other not-so-subtle sexual innuendo.
THE REVOLUTION BEGINS
Both the Python and Croft styles of comedy would continue to thrive during the 80s. However, their supremacy would be challenged and the comedy world turned on its head when two entrepreneurs named Peter Rosengard and Don Ward opened a small club above a strip joint in London's grimy Soho district. It was called The Comedy Store.
The Comedy Store
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Rosengard, an insurance salesman, hit on the idea for The Comedy Store after going to a similar club during a vacation in Los Angeles. London had nothing like it, so he rented a vacant spot above the strip joint run by Ward. Before long the small club became the virtual epicenter of British comedy.
What set The Comedy Store apart was that it embodied the punk attitude of "anyone can do it." This had already proven successful in the music business with bands that could barely play their instruments climbing the charts. Who cared if you only knew three chords on the guitar? All that mattered was that you meant it - that you believed what you were saying.
And young people at that time had a lot to say. Unemployment was high and racial tensions led to riots in Liverpool and London. Relations with Northern Ireland once again deteriorated causing the IRA to renew their attacks. The division between the poor, industrial north and the wealthier south seemed to grow even greater. And who did the young people blame? Mrs. Thatcher and the conservative government.
The increasing despair led teenagers to believe that there was, to quote the title of a famous punk song, No Future. Without a job to go to and employment opportunities almost non-existent, there wasn't much to do but get into trouble.
Well, not always. An American commentator named Bernard Nossiter hit the nail on the head when he claimed that the bad conditions and unemployment in Britain "masked something far more hopeful - a deliberately creative use of leisure in which the British middle and working class opted for greater freedom from the drudgery of mass automated work and rebelled against the norms of ever-increasing production."
So becoming a musician, a writer, or even a stand-up comic became an increasingly viable career option. And if you wanted to be a stand-up comic, The Comedy Store quickly became known as the place to make your name.
It was far from an easy gig. The small, dank room left virtually no space between the performer and the audience, which heckled ferociously. If things weren't going well, the compere (master of ceremonies) could send you off at any moment using the infamous Comedy Store gong. Surviving five minutes on stage was considered a triumph and those who made it through this boot camp came out tough and seasoned.
At The Comedy Store, experimentation, anarchy and social commentary were encouraged while anything racist, sexist or even slightly resembling a mother-in-law joke was gonged. This new breed of comedy was labeled by the media as "alternative."
Alexei Sayle
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Most of the performers didn't like the label and didn't fit it anyway. Alternative was all about being working class, anti-privilege, politically left wing and politically correct. Alexei Sayle, The Comedy Store's first compere and one of the godfathers of alternative comedy, probably fits the bill the best since his parents were both blue collar and paid up members of the Communist party.
Sayle was an exception. Most of the other Comedy Store originals came from solid middle-class backgrounds. In fact, Ben Elton, who followed Sayle as Comedy Store compere, comes from an extremely distinguished family. His father is a professor at Sussex University and his uncle is a Professor Emeritus at Cambridge University and a Knight of the Realm. Rik Mayall (co-creator and writer of The Young Ones) also comes from an academic family. His father was the head of the drama department at a teacher training college and his mother was a teacher. Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders both came from Royal Air Force families and trained to be teachers. Indeed, French was still teaching when she and Saunders began to perform.
Still, they were young, exuberant and disliked Mrs. Thatcher, so therefore they were "alternative."
Others who cut their teeth at The Store included Clive Anderson (a barrister by trade who went on to host Whose Line Is It Anyway?) plus future Red Dwarf stars Chris Barrie, Hattie Hayridge and Norman Lovett. Over the years stars such as Robin Williams have done sets at the Store while Austin Powers himself, Mike Myers, was an original founding member of The Comedy Store Players, their special improv troupe.
The Comedy Store inspired a major boom in stand-up comedy and its performers soon infiltrated television. One evening a BBC producer named Paul Jackson came to the show and was blown away by what he saw. He knew he had to find a way to transfer the anarchy and energy he saw on that stage to television.
MEET THE YOUNG ONES
After a couple of false starts Jackson succeeded with The Young Ones, a sitcom about four students sharing a house. The Young Ones was rude, surreal, loud and violent yet managed to be consistently hysterical. It was the program that introduced alternative comedy into the mainstream.
The Young Ones
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The Young Ones followed the adventures of Rik the anarchist (Rik Mayall), Neil the hippy (Nigel Planer), Vyvyan the heavy metal freak (Adrian Edmondson) and Mike the cool person (Christopher Ryan.) During the show's twelve episodes tempers flared, front doors exploded, the boys' home was demolished for being a health hazard, and they fought a vampire who claimed to be a driving instructor from South Africa.
Sound exhausting? It was. The energy, attitude and scatological nature of many of the jokes made the show a hit among young people. The scripts were by the show's star Rik Mayall, his then girlfriend Lise Mayer and Ben Elton, who met Mayall while both were attending Manchester University.
Watching the show is like seeing a virtual who's who of future Britcomedy luminaries, many of whom were also Comedy Store regulars. These included Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Chris Barrie, Norman Lovett, Robbie Coltrane, Lenny Henry, Paul Merton, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. (Saunders would later marry Adrian Edmondson, who played the psychotic heavy metaler Vyvyan.) There were also guest appearances by Not the Nine O'Clock News stars Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith as well as Terry Jones from Monty Python.
After two seasons of juvenile chaos the actors and writers decided that they were ready to go on to other things. To make sure they couldn't get roped into another season, an end was put to it by having the boys go off a cliff in a double-decker bus and getting killed in the explosion.
The Young Ones didn't last long, but it was enormously influential. The performances and writing were remarkably assured considering the stars and writers were barely into their twenties. The interesting question is why would the BBC allow a program that insulted Mrs. Thatcher, the police and every other authority figure? A program that trashed such classics as The Good Life and mocked the BBC's attempts at "youth" programming? A program that found time every episode for an appearance by a punk rock band?
The answer is simple. The BBC knew that these were some seriously talented young people and they were afraid of losing them to new rival Channel 4, which began transmission in November of 1982.
Their faith in this talent paid off. For example, Ben Elton would go from working on one classic sitcom - The Young Ones - to another.
THE SOUND OF HOOFBEATS...
Blackadder
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Blackadder brought the alternative sensibility even more squarely into the mainstream. The saga of Edmund Blackadder and his descendants was created by series star Rowan Atkinson and his Oxford University chum Richard Curtis. They had worked together on Not the Nine O'Clock News and then decided to write a vehicle for Atkinson.
One of their inspirations was Fawlty Towers. The classic John Cleese/Connie Booth sitcom was a revelation to Atkinson and Curtis because they realized it was possible to have a successful sitcom with an unlikable main character. You can also see some of the influence in the relationship between Blackadder and Baldrick, which is a bit like that of Fawlty and Manuel.
After dismissing several premises (including one set in a detective agency) they decided on an historical sitcom that became Blackadder. Or as it was known as first, The Black Adder.
Atkinson and Curtis co-wrote the first season, which took place in the late 1400s. It was an elaborate affair full of ornate medieval costumes and extensive location shooting at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland. All of that meant EXPENSE. When the new boss at the BBC decided that there weren't enough laughs to justify the cost, the series appeared to be as dead as King Richard III in the very first episode.
Or was it? Curtis asked Young Ones co-writer Ben Elton to help him resurrect the series, and if it was gags the boss wanted, it was gags he got. Blackdder II began the tale of Edmund and his descendents as most people remember it.
The boss also liked the fact that costs were drastically cut by no more location shoots. Additionally, the second season also brought together the classic cast. There was the wonderful work of Atkinson and Tony Robinson (as Blackadder's whipping boy Baldrick), Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Tim McInnerney and Miranda Richardson, whose hysterical portrait of the Queen could unfortunately last only one season.
Blackadder lasted a total of four seasons during which the characters went through medieval times, the Elizabethan age, the Georgian era and finally World War 1. The series ended on the highest of notes with an extraordinarily poignant final episode.
In 1999 the readers of TV Times magazine chose Blackadder the "show of the millennium" and it was selected to be part of the entertainment at London's Millennium Dome. For this special occasion an additional 30-minute film called Blackadder Back and Forth was made specifically for The Dome. It's a time travel story that ends with Britain being led into the next century by "King" Edmund, his Queen (played by supermodel Kate Moss) and Prime Minister Baldrick. The final words that appear on the screen make reference to another Blackadder adventure coming in 3000. It's just a joke, but we can dream this isn't the end of the saga, can't we?
Before leaving Blackadder, however, we must pay tribute to its unsung hero. Without the contribution of one Howard Goodall the show would not be nearly as memorable as it is. Who's Howard Goodall, you say? Well, if you were an obsessive reader of credits like I am, you'd know that Goodall wrote the ever-hummable Blackadder theme song. He's also responsible for the theme songs to Red Dwarf, The Young Ones, Mr. Bean and many others. Stand up and take a well-deserved bow, sir.
MORE ALTERNATIVE
Meanwhile, the former Young Ones and other Comedy Store regulars were also a busy lot. Edmondson, Mayall and Planer then joined forces with French, Saunders, and Peter Richardson to create a number of short films under the banner of The Comic Strip Presents.
Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders
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Each of the more than thirty Comic Strip Presents films differ completely in style and tone. They include everything from a Spinal Tap-style "mockumentary" about a really bad rock band (Bad News Tour) to a parody of Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns (A Fistful of Traveler's Cheques) and everything in between. The cast in various combinations wrote the films, which were produced from time to time from the early 80s until the late 90s. They proved that these young "alternative" comics were not a fluke, but a force to be reckoned with as writers, directors and actors.
In 1985 Jennifer Saunders played the very mean Granny Fuddle and her four wayward granddaughters in Happy Families, Ben Elton's homage to the Ealing film Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which Sir Alec Guinness played multiple roles. Despite the talent on display and an extraordinarily clever premise, Happy Families was not well received.
Three of The Young Ones (Edmondson, Mayall and Planer) then reunited in 1987 for Filthy, Rich and Catflap a vicious send-up of "light entertainment." Rik Mayall played a very minor celebrity called Richie Rich, who had an entourage consisting of a pathetic drunken wreck of an agent Ralph Filthy (Planer) and a "minder," Edward Catflap (Edmonson), who is as bad as - if not worse - than his charge.
Filthy, Rich and Catflap had the same loud, juvenile tone as The Young Ones but was not as successful despite some classic moments. One was a riotous take-off on celebrity game shows called Oo'er...Sounds a Bit Rude. Richie feels his career will skyrocket with his appearance on this show, but he totally destroys the whole thing and sends the director (Chris Barrie in a great guest spot) into histrionics. Ben Elton also wrote this series, cementing his reputation as one of the hardest-working men in British showbiz.
AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE ALTERNATIVE
Alternative may have been the buzzword, but it was far from the last word in comedy during the 80s. The maestro himself, David Croft, continued to produce shows at an enormously prolific rate during this decade. Are You Being Served? would continue until 1985, and on top of that he debuted a couple of more classics.
Hi-de-Hi! was written with his Dad's Army collaborator Jimmy Perry. It explores a world that is fairly alien to most Americans: that of a typical British holiday camp and the people whose job it is to entertain "holidaymakers."
The series was set in the late 50s, once again allowing for that sense of nostalgia that Croft does best. Star Simon Cadell (David Croft's son-in-law) played Jeffrey Fairbrother, the entertainment director at Maplin's holiday camp. It is his job (and unfortunately, one for which he is not well-suited) to watch over the employees. These include a prankish comic, snobbish ballroom dancers, a Punch and Judy puppeteer who hates children and more.
Hi-de-Hi! ran from 1981-1988 and also starred Su Pollard, Jeffrey Holland and Paul Shane, who later starred in Croft's You Rang, M'Lord? Simon Cadell left after the fourth season and David Griffin (Emmet from Keeping Up Appearances) replaced him as new entertainment director Clive Dempster.)
In 1984, Croft debuted another winner - a wartime comedy called 'Allo 'Allo!, co-written with AYBS? scribe Jeremy Lloyd.
'Allo 'Allo!
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The setting was Nazi-occupied France during WWII and 'Allo 'Allo! contained all the hallmarks of a Croft sitcom. It was a perfectly cast ensemble piece with large doses of slapstick, farce, catchphrases, another fey character similar to Mr. Humphries plus plenty of sight gags and well-endowed women. This time, the theme of well-endowed women even extended to a painting that became an important part of the plot - The Fallen Madonna With The Big Boobies by an artist called Van Clomp.
'Allo 'Allo! starred Gorden Kaye as Rene Artois, café owner and suave ladies man, whose life becomes more complicated than it already is when his café becomes a meeting place for members of the French resistance.
He is helped at the café by the women in his life. Edith, his wife (the wonderful Carmen Silvera), attempts to be a chanteuse, but her bad voice causes customers to use cheese as ear plugs. Rene also lusts after one of the waitresses, Yvette (Vicki Michelle), with whom he is often caught in compromising positions. He always manages to find some lame brained excuse to explain these trysts to Edith and luckily, she buys them.
Also residing at the café is Edith's sickly mother (Rose Hill), who is inconvenienced each time a message comes through from the British since her bed must be raised in order to get to the wireless receiver.
Other regulars included the French resistance fighter Michelle (Kirsten Cooke), who would show up in the oddest places to give Rene messages, always preceded by her catchphrase, "Leesen verrry carefully, I weel zay zis only once..." More laughs came from the mispronunciations supplied by the gendarme Crabtree (Arthur Bostrom), who is supposed to be English but who absolutely mangles the language. "Good moaning" was his most famous catchphrase.
The German bad guys were represented by Herr Flick, his aide-de-campe, the fey Lt. Gruber (who also has something of a crush on Rene), and his ferocious right-hand secretary Helga (Kim Hartman).
Since this program was an equal opportunity offender, however, Croft and Lloyd even had a go at their fellow countrymen in the form of two British airmen who are shown as totally incapable twits.
'Allo 'Allo! reached dizzying heights of silliness, even if the farcical, highly convoluted plots could be a bit hard to follow. Rene would often speak to the camera and offer an explanation/plot update, but it never seemed to help.
'Allo! Allo! isn't as well-known in the States as other Croft sitcoms, but it lasted an incredible 85 episodes. A stage play based on the program had very successful runs in both the UK and Australia.
by Michelle Street, The Insider, March 2002
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