Because I Tell a Joke or Two

Comedy, Politics and Social Difference

Stephen Wagg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134794324
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Because I Tell a Joke or Two explores the complex relationship between comedy and the social differences of class, region, age, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and nationhood. It shows how comedy has been used to sustain, challenge and to change power relationships in society. The contributors, who include Stephen Wagg, Mark Simpson, Stephen Small, Paul Wells and Frances Williams, offer readings of comedy genres, texts and performers in Britain, the United States and Australia. The collection also includes an interview with the comedian Jo Brand.
Topics addressed include:
* women in British comedies such as Butterflies and Fawlty Towers
* the life and times of Viz, from Billy the Fish to the Fat Slags
* queer readings of Morecambe and Wise, the male double act
* the Marx brothers and Jewish comedy in the United States
* black radical comedy in Britain
* The Golden Girls, Cheers, Friends and American society.

1: ‘AT EASE, CORPORAL’: Social class and the situation comedy in British television, from the 1950s to the 1990s

Stephen Wagg

‘Ay, and what do you dislike most, then?’ asks Wilfred Pickles. ‘Stuck-up fowk’. Roars of applause. ‘Jolly good! and will you just tell me what you like most?’ Good neighbourly fowk’. Increased applause.‘…and very right too. Give her the money’.

Richard Hoggart, describing a broadcast of Have a Go, a BBC radio show of the 1950s, in The Uses of Literacy.

And with every exaggerated anecdote and every shout of, ‘Go for it my son’, as they gulped another tequila slammer, they were desperate to prove two things. Firstly that they had money, and secondly that they’d made it themselves. They were definitely not old money. Because in Britain history has given us a distorted view of class, we seem to believe that the class we’re from is determined not by your position in society but by your accent and whether you slurp your soup.

Mark Steel It’s Not a Runner Bean…: Dispatches From a Slightly Successful Comedian

This chapter looks historically at the life of the different social classes in British society, as represented in television situation comedy.

The situation comedy is an important, but ambiguous, institution in the pantheon of British popular culture. On the one hand, situation comedies (sitcoms) are a staple of British broadcasting: in any given week, there will be a number of these programmes in the schedules of all the major television channels in the UK and, when one such show has run its course, it will, in the normal course of events, be replaced by another. On the other hand, while some—like Steptoe and Son (which ran from 1962 to 1974), or Fawky Towers (two series: 1975, 1979) attained the status of ‘classic’, bringing regular repeat broadcasts for future generations, very few sitcoms have lived long in the memories of those who watched them. Of the 650 or so situation comedies written for British television since the Second World War, I doubt that many more than 40 or 50 are remembered by many people. Moreover, there is widespread derision for the banality, suburbanism and heavy-handedness perceived in the average British sitcom: the comedian and columnist Jeremy Hardy wrote recently of ‘our feeble sitcoms, based on the premise that a sofa with people sitting on it is in itself funny’ (the Guardian 30 November 1996). That said, both the revered ‘classics’ and the legion of forgotten or derided sitcoms are worth studying.

The ‘classics’ are perhaps most interesting at the level of consumption. This is because they travel across both time and social space: that’s to say, in the domestic television market, they have an appeal that goes well beyond one social class or one age group. They therefore suggest to us something of what we are, as a society, and, within that, some of the more deeply embedded notions of class that might be found in the culture of post-war Britain. One theme I want to explore here is the widely canvassed idea (for example Bowes 1990) that successful sitcom in Britain has almost always hinged on ideas of authenticity and pretension in class identities: one central character may be pompous/aspiring/convinced s/he is better than all this, only to be trumped, time and again, by a doggedly unreconstructed companion.

But it is important also to examine the whole volume of output of situation comedy. The writers of these comedies are, after all, acknowledged for the acuteness of their social observation and were it not for the low kudos accorded both to television and to ‘sitcom’ as a specific form (something noted in relation to the United States by Paul Wells, elsewhere in this book), some of these writers—Ray Gallon and Alan Simpson, Roy Clarke, Derek Waring, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, John Esmonde and Bob Larbey, Vince Powell and Harry Driver, Johnny Speight, Jimmy Perry and David Croft, Carla Lane, Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran—might be recognised as considerable dramatists. This is not to claim the work of these writers as the first rough draft of social class history in Britain, but their work does, I think, bear witness both to objective changes in the class structure of post-war British society and to trends in the culture of different social classes therein.

With these general thoughts in mind, then, I’ll examine situation comedy on British television since its inception, having first clarified some basic matters of origin and definition.

SITUATION COMEDY IN BRITAIN: SOME BACKGROUND

Situation comedies have the following, broadly agreed, characteristics: they invariably come in series (usually of between six and a dozen episodes); they are normally broadcast at peak viewing times (between 7 and 9 pm); they have a core of regular characters, with familiar scenery and sets; they last for 30 minutes, occasionally longer; they have a form of dramatic plot; ordinarily, there is laughter on the sound track, recorded from a studio audience; each programme has a self-contained plot; it is usually made for the home market (although sitcoms are exported to other countries this is often, especially in the case of the United States, in format only); a happy ending is common; it is likely to be repeated (between 50 and 60 situation comedies are nowadays available on British TV in any given week. Of these around two thirds are repeats, the bulk of them on satellite channels); structured jokes are rare; action usually takes place in the British Isles in the present or recent past; and certain writers and producers will tend to specialise in the making of these programmes (see Taylor 1985:15; Bowes 1990).

As a popular cultural form the sitcom, at least in Britain, grew out of the light entertainment provision for BBC Radio in the 1930s. Two influences combined to bring it about: the sketches, derived from music hall and variety, which comedians like Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch began to perform as part of a longer show—their show Band Waggon, first broadcast in 1938, is thus the earliest forerunner of British sitcom proper—and the sitcoms already current on US radio, which BBC executives had heard on visits to the United States.

Radio comedy in Britain boomed during the Second World War, the government having closed all cinemas and theatres, and here the show that gained the greater hold upon the popular imagination was ITMA. ITMA ran from 1939 to 1940 and again from 1942 to 1949. Its title was taken from a headline in the Daily Express (IT’S THAT MAN AGAIN, referring to Hitler) and its concoction of class stereotypes (gin-soaked colonels, screeching cleaning ladies, meddlesome men from ‘the Ministry’), one-liners and funny voices was immensely popular: at its height it had an audience of around 16 million and between 1943 and 1949 there were over 35 shows a year. During its lifetime ITMA maintained the important sitcom traits of regular characters, plots (of a kind) and, at least for a series or so, a stable locale (successively a ship, a seaside resort, a manor house, a far distant country, a Scottish castle and a guest house for tramps).

After the war there was a steady output of radio comedies about the demobilising of the armed forces: in Stand Easy (1946–51) a bunch of soldiers are launched on ‘civvy street’, in Much Binding in the Marsh (1947–54) an RAF station is converted into a country club, with all the airmen now in civilian occupations, and so on. But the trend now was toward domestic comedies, notably Ray’s a Laugh (1949–61), in which the comedian Ted Ray bantered with his fictitious wife, played by Kitty Bluett, and Take it From Here (1948–60), which featured a family called the Glums (Medhurst 1989, Taylor 1994).

There was almost no TV sitcom during the early 1950s, when the BBC still had a monopoly on broadcasting. In fact history records only a couple: Life with the Lyons, based on the real family life of the American couple Ben Lyon and Bebe Daniels, which was on both radio and TV in the early 1950s, and Emney Enterprises (1954–7), written by and starring Fred Emney, whose unvarying comic persona was of a large, inebriated, upper class male, who puffed a cigar and peered through a monocle. One should also include Billy Bunter, the stories of a guilelessly greedy boy at an Edwardian public school: Bunter ran from 1952 to 1962 and was broadcast twice in an evening—not an unusual practice at that time.

Situation comedy on television began to proliferate in the late 1950s, however, a development almost wholly attributable to the introduction of ITV in 1955: in the second half of the decade around 14 sitcoms were generated for BBC television and 18 for ITV companies. At the BBC this involved the transferring to TV of several more existing radio sitcoms.

THE 1950s: NEVER MIND THE BARRACKS

Few of the situation comedies written for television in the 1950s lasted for more than a single run of six episodes, and almost none will be recalled now, except by archivists. Nevertheless, although the programmes are diverse, some of the contours of social class which have tended to define British situation comedy since then were already visible in this decade.

There is, first of all, a general avoidance of working class life. Only Club Night, which was shown on BBC television in 1957 (and ran from 1955 to 1958 on radio) seems to have attempted this. It was set in a Working Men’s Club in the north of England. Here, as so often subsequently, much of the humour derived from the petit bourgeois traits of a central character —in this case, the bossy club treasurer.

Second, sitcom writers and audiences have always favoured the character who is culturally ‘of the people’ but who is formally working on his own account. This character—the tipster, the travelling salesman, the wheeler-and-dealer, and so on—has ducked and dived his way through a myriad of sketches, sitcoms and comedy routines. Max Miller played him on stage and Miller’s jokes fed the popular male fantasy of freedom from domestic surveillance and regular access to sexually available landladies and other ‘girls as do’. The appeal of such a character was that he seemed to serve no master, being free of the constraints either of being employed by others or of the collectivised life of the shop floor. These characters were particularly popular in variety after the Second World War: stand-up comics such as Arthur English (English and Linton, 1986) represented the ‘spiv’ or ‘wide boy’ who flourished during rationing and could always find you a joint of beef or a pair of silk stockings.

In the 1950s these sitcom characters often did their conniving in uniform, reflecting the continuance of conscription in Britain at the time. There were shows such as The Skylarks (BBC, 1958) about a Royal Navy helicopter crew, Tell it to the Marines (Associated-Rediffusion, 1959) and The Army Game (Granada, 1957–61), the latter containing an archetypal wide-boy character (Corporal Springer) to set beside Sergeant Bilko of The Phil Silvers Show, imported from the USA. (Through regular repeats, Bilko remains a favourite with British television audiences, 40 years on and long after it has been forgotten in the United States.)

Elsewhere, similar characters could be found in Educated Evans (BBC, 1957–8), in which Charlie Chester played a Cockney racing tipster (portrayed originally by Miller in a film of 1936) and East Side—West Side (Associated-Rediffusion, 1958), in which Sid James, as his first solo vehicle, plays a Jewish trader in the East End of London.

A variant here was the amiably work-shy—as in Nathaniel Titlark, a poet and son of the soil (BBC, 1956–7) and The Artful Dodger (BBC, 1959), who preferred supporting Manchester City to gainful employment. Similarly Club Night contained a character called ‘The Wacker’, who was always trying to scrounge a drink.

Third, there is also a fondness, especially in the military sitcoms, for an aristocratic stereotype: effete, bumbling and possessed of extremely cumbersome names: The Army Game,for example, threw up officers called ‘Upshot Bagley’ and ‘Geoffrey Gervaise Duckworth’, while The Skylarks offered Vice Admiral Sir Godfrey Wiggin-Fanshawe and Captain Crocker-Dobson. These names are ‘fancy’ and signify ‘toff’: as the writers of ITMA and the forces comedians of the 1950s found, there were many laughs to be had at the expense of the officer class.

Finally, in the formats of TV sitcoms of the 1950s, there is already ample recourse to the media and showbusiness professions: Dear Dotty (BBC, 1954) is set in a women’s magazine; Joan and Leslie (ATV, 1956–8) features the writer of an agony column; in Living it Up (Associated Rediffusion, 1958), Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch run a pirate TV station from the roof of Television House, in the style of their earlier Band Waggon; Don’t Tell Father (Associated-Rediffusion, 1959) is about a screen-writer; in Gert and Daisy (Associated-Rediffusion, 1959), veteran entertainers Elsie and Doris Waters play veteran entertainers now running a theatrical boarding house; and My Husband and I (Associated-Rediffusion, 1956), Our Dora (Granada, 1956–7) and The Two Charlies (BBC, 1959) all featured theatrical folk—the first of these placed at the genteel end of showbusiness (represented by the actress Evelyn Laye and her husband, playing themselves), while the latter two were set in the dying days of that essentially working class entertainment: the variety theatres. Scott Free (BBC, 1957) is about out-of-work actors who become entertainments officers in the fictitious seaside resort of ‘Bogmouth’.

These sitcoms, then, are on the whole not about the interior life of the social classes; few of them are about families, as such, nor do they probe family relationships unduly. Only one sitcom of this period (The Larkins, ATV 1958–60) has a suburban family setting and in another (Abigail and Roger, BBC 1956) an engaged couple never kiss. The sitcoms of this time are more likely to have non-domestic contexts—ordnance depots, boarding houses, private schools, newspaper offices, and so on—and the more successful ones feature characters who, in a comparatively rigid social structure, find some small social space to call their own: crafty wide-boys and duckers and divers doing shady business. The most powerful TV situation comedy of the decade, though, appears to have been generated by a character set deliberately in apposition to these survivors and their ways of getting by: this is the role played by Tony Hancock in Hancock’s Half Hour, which transferred from radio to television in 1956.

TONY HANCOCK AND THE POLITICS OF EAST CHEAM

The bare bones of Hancock’s biography, personal and professional, are well known. Hancock’s Half Hour began on radio in 1954; it ran, with great success, on radio and TV concurrently between 1956 and 1961—by 1960 it was attracting 28 per cent of the adult population, or around half the viewing public (Goodwin 1995:112); in 1961, Hancock dispensed with Sid James, his co-star and foil, and produced a solo sitcom called simply Hancock (BBC, 1961–33), whereupon he parted from his writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. He was unable to repeat the success of his incarnation as ‘Hancock’, descended into alcoholism and killed himself in 1968. The character created by Galton, Simpson and Hancock has endured in a way that none of Hancock’s other work has. There are regular repeats of the shows, sales of cassettes and videos are high and there have been two remakes of the show. One, with actors Arthur Lowe and James Beck taking the parts of Hancock and James respectively, was aborted in 1973 on the death of Beck (Lowe, 1996:132); in the other, in 1994, comedian Paul Merton replayed the solo shows of 1961–3. The scripts have also been redramatised in other languages (Sweeting, 1996). All this establishes Hancock as a popular cultural phenomenon.

The context for the Hancock programmes is in a sense domestic, but makes no concession to social realism. Initially, on radio, he lives or associates with largely unexplained characters played by Hattie Jacques, Kenneth Williams, Bill Kerr and Sid James, the most important, aside from Hancock’s own, being James’s. Later, on TV, he shares with James alone, while, as a private individual, nursing worries that the relationship might be thought ‘poofy’ (Hancock and Nathan 1969:76).

The Hancock character is in many ways the model of a dyspeptic, status-anxious, petit bourgeois suburbanite stomping grumpily about the lower reaches of Middle England. Geographically, he is deliberately placed on the tantalising edge of respectability: the writers take Cheam, a comfortable middle class dormitory area in the South London suburbs and strand Hancock, not only in ‘East Cheam’ (‘East’ in London signifying ‘working class’), but in a road called ‘Railway Cuttings’, houses next to railway lines being the least desirable. Then, in 1961, the character has moved to Earls Court, close enough to the West End of London to give the promise of sophistication but known, nevertheless, for its numerous low rent flats and cheap hotels. ‘Hancock’ has no visible means of support, while ‘James’ is the archetypal Cockney doer of dodgy deals, laughing a sensually raucous laugh and remaining oblivious to Hancock’s pretensions. Hancock’s part, which bears the absurdly grand full name of ‘Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock II’ expresses, as his first posthumous biographer noted, ‘childishness, obstinacy, indignation, rudeness, prejudice, lechery, the abandonment of principles for profit or status, ignorance, arrogance, smugness, ambition, pomposity, stupidity and cunning’ (Hancock and Nathan, 1969:79). These numerous failings are redeemed partly by the character’s recourse to colloquialisms like ‘Stone me!’ and ‘bonkers’, unacceptable lapses for the genuinely aspiring in the 1950s, and, chiefly, by his vulnerability. Ultimately the Hancock ...