Norman Lear’s reupholstering of Johnny Speight’s Till Death Us Do Part, which locked central character Archie Bunker in the cellar for a night of drunken self-loathing, with only token appearances by other characters.
The cult of the one- and two-hander holds more weight with writers than audiences, but its role in sitcom craft is considerable. The cult of realism is more problematic. Hancock’s obsessive pursuit of it began with him shedding the unnecessary (trad jokes, wacky situations) and ended with him dropping the necessary (Galton, Simpson). He was not the last performer to lose his comic perspective chasing after a phantom seriousness – conversely, lesser talents have used ostentatious naturalism to bolster feeble scripts. A reviewer in 1960 observed, ‘Mr Hancock teeters on the verge of tragedy: it is only his fine sense of the ridiculous that holds him … on the narrow path of sanity.’84 In the quest for realism, that sense can be fatally neglected.
ITV (Associated-Rediffusion)
TV’s introduces pop to high culture.
I’m looking forward to doing this programme enormously. I’m going to have fun even if nobody else does.
Kingsley Amis, TV Times, 14 October 1962
BY THE 1960S, TV had accepted the necessity of covering pop music, but remained confused as to exactly how to do it. Clueless but game, they tried everything. Ken Dodd flaunted his hip Liverpool connections in Doddy’s Music Box, promising a ‘psychediddylic’ experience for all. BBC2 floated the unforgettably named Gadzooks! It’s All Happening!, which became Gadzooks! It’s the In Crowd! before sanity prevailed, and the title was rationalised to just plain Gadzooks! Producers were not so much going to the hop as caught on it.
In one grand misjudgement, BBC1 replaced its long-running Juke Box Jury with Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman vehicle All Systems Freeman, which placed Fluff behind a gigantic space age console, sporting headphones (both to make the link with his radio DJ role, and to craftily relay producer’s instructions in pre-earpiece days). ‘I shall be sitting at a control panel,’ he said, ‘and not just for the glamour of it, either! If I press a button or throw a switch to bring in tape, film or disc, and nothing happens, I’m going to look a right idiot.’85 It may have been a vestigial memory of Fluff fading in pop acts with his mighty right hand that influenced the world of Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse’s Smashie and Nicey creations decades later.
These were sober affairs alongside Associated-Rediffusion’s decision to hire a literary enfant terrible to cover the scene. Kingsley Amis Goes Pop (‘a title which is still amusing him’) was a fifteen-minute wheeze knocked out after the evening news in which the Lucky Jim author and fellow of Peterhouse College, Cambridge interrogated pop stars in a bewildered and mildly grumpy manner. Amis was no cultural snob – he would go on to write scripts for Z-Cars spin-off Softly, Softly, and in his later years described Terminator 2: Judgment Day as a ‘flawless masterpiece’86 – but rock ’n’ roll was a blind spot. ‘The pop music business is still pretty much a closed book to me,’ Amis admitted. An accredited jazzer, he had little time for rock ’n’ roll’s ‘vapid, monotonous, blaring’87 asininity. (‘Oh fuck the Beatles,’ he once told Philip Larkin. ‘I’d like to push my bum into John L[ennon]’s face for forty-eight hours or so.’88)
Fortunately Amis had the help of his pop-loving teenage sons, Philip and Martin. ‘Some of their records interest me and I have to ask, “Who’s that?”’ He also looked to his offspring for sartorial tips. On their advice, he hosted the show wearing the clothes he arrived in off the street – Terylene, head to toe. This brought a tie-in ad campaign. (‘“My Terylene trousers are **** great!” says Kingsley Amis.’) Thus clad, he began his pop quest in high spirits. ‘Quite honestly, I welcome the chance of meeting these extraordinary pop-singer people.’89
The show started well enough. Cleo Laine was asked about the gulf between jazz and the hit parade, Bernard Cribbins dropped by to explain the craft of the comedy song, and dancehall tycoon Eric Morley explained how a dance craze could be promoted nationwide, before Amis flexed his Terylene slacks for a crack at Morley’s latest fad, the New Madison.
All very amiable, but according to critic Peter Black, Amis the awkwardly groovy dad fell between two stools. ‘Either you go along with pop, getting as much empty unquestioning fun from it as you can,’ he reasoned, ‘or you put up a critic and let him sink his teeth deeply into the rubbish. Mr Amis’s teeth have apparently been drawn and he sits there like a vicar at an orgy.’90 Maybe Amis took this to heart, or maybe he just became bored, but later shows were altogether more frosty affairs. ‘Rubber Ball’ singer Bobby Vee underwent a curmudgeonly grilling. A meeting with Rolf Harris found the ‘Sun Arise’ singer reveal his previously unseen prickly, sarcastic mode. ‘[Amis] must allow for everybody’s taste,’ complained one fan, ‘not embarrass everybody concerned.’91 By the final edition – a chat with Alan Freeman – the gloves were already off in the programme billing. (‘Have DJs too much power in the pop world? Do they encourage “trash”?’)
Television’s first attempt to mix pop and high culture produced intellectual fireworks of the indoor variety. The series was broadcast to Londoners only, and only lasted eight editions of a planned twelve, shown at an ever-later hour of the day. Memoirs and biographies tactfully skirt its very existence. But it could easily have become a family tradition: as Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s career stalled in the mid-1980s, their marketing strategist Paul Morley could have conceived a postmodern film as their swansong along the lines of The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle – to be scripted by Martin Amis.92
THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS (1962–3)
BBC
The establishment-shaking show that used the word ‘bum’ a lot.
Come 6.30, four hours to go before the soft underbelly of society was to be obligingly exposed to the watching millions, and as yet nothing in the quiver save three outrageous puns and a joke about knickers.
Alan Bennett on writing topical comedy, 5 October 1967
THE REVUE THAT HAD led Bennett to that quiet teatime desperation, Beyond the Fringe, is one of the landmarks of twentieth century comedy. As Bennett, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook laid into Macmillan, Churchill and one-legged stuntmen in an apocalyptic basement set, the idea of comedy as a cleansing, angry, youthful force got its first British airing for decades. Many of the older generation hated it, but a surprising number applauded. Even staunch conservative T. S. Eliot gave praise. ‘An amazingly vigorous quartet of young men: their show well produced and fast moving, a mixture of brilliance, juvenility and bad taste,’ he wrote. In spite of reservations, ‘it is pleasant to see this type of entertainment so successful.’93
Success piled
