No Such Thing As Society

by Andy McSmith

  There were old-boy networks even in this meritocratic world. Ben Elton, who had known Mayall and Edmondson at Manchester University, had his first big break when he was drafted in as a scriptwriter on The Young Ones. Afterwards, he teamed up with Richard Curtis, one of the regular writers from Not the Nine O’Clock News, to create a new vehicle for Rowan Atkinson, whom Curtis had known at Oxford. The producer, again, was John Lloyd. It was an expensively produced film series shot on location in Northumberland called The Black Adder, set in the late fifteenth century in the fictional reign of Richard IV, and broadcast on BBC1 in June and July 1983. The form was the old Jeeves and Wooster joke, with Atkinson playing the cowardly, inept Black Adder, ever reliant on his wise servant, Baldrick, played by Tony Robinson. It did not work. The series was an expensive failure, but somehow, the makers of this turkey persuaded the BBC to let them try again, promising this time that they would produce a more standard sitcom that could be shot in a studio at far less cost. Elton and Curtis also overturned the relationship between the main characters. Now, Blackadder was transported to the Elizabethan era; he was the intelligent one, eternally exasperated by the stupidity of the powerful, while Baldrick was the put-upon little fellow on whom he could vent his frustration. ‘Blackadder II is the only exception to the rules of sycophancy and whimsy which now dominate television comedy,’ one hard-to-please critic reckoned:

  Blackadder II frequently pillories sycophancy. One of the central jokes is the extent to which everybody (except gormless Nursey) kow-tows to the Queen who – contrary to the fond English classroom image, though interestingly in line with modern scholarship – is portrayed as capricious, cruel and deeply insecure. Splendidly played by Miranda Richardson, Elizabeth has about as many good jokes as Blackadder himself.15

  The formula was used for two more series, though it never worked quite so well without Miranda Richardson. Blackadder the Third made a star of Hugh Laurie, playing the idiotic Prince Regent. In Blackadder Goes Forth, the role of brainless boss went to Stephen Fry, as General Melchett. Set in the trenches in the First World War, it invited comparisons and contrasts with ’Allo, ’Allo, one of the most popular comedy series of the late 1980s, which also was unlike anything else that had ever been seen on British television. It supposedly had a historical setting, in Nazi-occupied France, but did not make the least pretence of realism. It was all absurd humour, with characters running across a field disguised as a pantomime cow, or hiding in a piano trying to conceal their presence by singing ‘plinky, plinky, plonk, plonk’ to the tune of ‘Lillee Marleen’. A favourite character was an English spy who supposedly spoke French badly – except that he was actually speaking bad English, greeting people by saying ‘good moaning’. The silliest fools in this charade were the Nazis. Meanwhile, on another channel, Edmund Blackadder spent the fourth series devising desperate schemes to avoid being killed, until he and all the other regular characters, except Melchett, were wiped out in a finale that did not pretend to be funny. ‘Where the jokes in ‘Allo, ‘Allo turn the Nazis into harmless idiots, Curtis and Elton turn the British generals into idiots to show their harmfulness,’16 the critic Mark Lawson observed. An idea of the success of the series can be gained from the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board’s secret weekly report that gave programmes a numerical rating according to how much their audience enjoyed them, rather than the published audience figures. In the week ending 29 October 1989, only two programmes made the Top 20 in both charts; one was the hospital-based soap Casualty, the other was Blackadder Goes Forth.17 Blackadder had the bigger audience, having been watched that week by 12.34m people.18

  With that success to his credit, the next obvious step for Ben Elton was to go in front of the camera. He had tested himself on stage at London’s Comedy Store, where he developed a polemical style, a staccato delivery, and very pronounced views on what was, and what was not, funny. Bodily functions were funny, sexism not. In 1985, he was writing scripts for a show called Saturday Live, for London Weekend Television, when he suggested to its director that he should deliver them himself. The result was another cult comedy show, better known as Friday Night Live after it had been moved forward one night. This show launched the careers of yet another wave of comics, including Jo Brand, Julian Clary and Harry Enfield. It was Elton’s 120-word-a-minute monologues that held the show together. Funny and serious, they were the beginning of what would be a growing phenomenon – the comic as opinion leader. Andrew Collins, a third-year student in 1986, put it thus:

  Ben Elton is my big favourite at the moment. He’s my guiding light. My moral compass. He’s mobilised all the instinctive humanitarian, left-wing feelings that have been brewing up in me since leaving home and given voice to the way I feel deep down inside. I’ve never before been this laid bare with guilt – but good guilt, useful social guilt, practical guilt; not abstract, debilitating girlfriend-induced guilt . . .19

  The comedy was mainly for a university-educated audience. What was being offered at the other end of the market also, coincidentally, took a giant leap upwards in quality in 1982 with the arrival of Minder, which ran from October 1979 to March 1994, and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. A sign of the times was that both these series featured the working-class struggle to make money. The scriptwriters of Steptoe and Son, Till Death Us Do Part or The Likely Lads only occasionally allowed their characters’ needs to earn a living to intrude on the humour, if at all, but hardly an episode of Minder went by without the hero, Terry McCann, being drawn into some dubious money-making scheme dreamt up by the unscrupulous Arthur Daley, played by George Cole. Though McCann, played by Denis Waterman, was an honest character, he was denied an honest living because he had recently been in prison. And the whole point of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, first broadcast in November 1983, was that its cast of anti-heroes had been driven to find work on a German building site because there was none in their native Tyneside. At the time, the show’s biggest star was Jimmy Nail, playing the Germanophobic Oz, though his fellow regulars Kevin Whately and Timothy Spall went on to greater success. Amid the humour, the writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais included a few sharp observations on unemployment and on British attitudes to the Germans.

  Minder’s success meant that the BBC was open to suggestions for a good comedy series about working-class Londoners on the make. John Sullivan, creator of the 1970s sitcom Citizen Smith, had unsuccessfully offered them a treatment for a series about a dodgy street-trader who would sell anything to anybody, but dealt only in cash. He then offered a series about the manager of a rundown football club, which was commissioned and allocated television time, but the controller of BBC1, Bill Cotton, suddenly pulled the plug on it because it clashed with a different project. This left Sullivan with no work and the BBC with an empty slot for a new series. Sullivan and his producer, Ray Butt, repaired for an emergency conference in a pub in the North End Road, during which Sullivan mentioned the rejected treatment. Butt, whose father had worked as a street-trader after leaving the RAF at the end of the war, thought the idea worth reviving. A few weeks later, Sullivan turned up at BBC Television Centre with a draft script for a show called Readies. Butt and the head of comedy, John Howard Davies, liked it and it was quickly expanded into a series.

  The main problems that lay ahead were finding the right actor to play the principal character, Del Trotter, and choosing a new title. Sullivan had an idea that long titles grabbed people’s attention, but no one at a senior level at the BBC knew the expression ‘only fools and horses work’, which beautifully suited the show’s joke that the Trotter brothers worked day and night looking for the break to spare them from ever having to work again. Eventually, Sullivan’s suggestion passed, for want of a better idea. Meanwhile, the lead role was offered first to a comic actor named Enn Reitel and then to Jim Broadbent, who turned it down. Two weeks before filming was to begin, Butt was watching a repeat of an episode of Open All Hours, and saw David Jason play the delivery boy. The idea of giving him a lead role met stiff resistanc
e high up in the BBC, where they feared that it might off end Ronnie Barker, the star of Open All Hours and their greatest comedy asset. Sullivan was also doubtful, though one point in Jason’s favour was that he did not look remotely like Nicholas Lyndhurst, the twenty-year-old former child star already cast as Del’s younger brother, Rodney. One obstacle in Del Trotter’s lifelong search for the easy life is the loss of both parents, which left him with a much younger brother to care for; Sullivan thought it would add poignancy if there was an element of doubt as to whether or not they really had the same father. Jason was shown the script and saw at once that landing this part could lift him out of a lifetime of being a supporting actor who played the elderly and the hopeless. He was hired, and work on the first series began in May 1981. There was a near disaster when Ray Butt, who was supposed to be the producer and director, was hospitalized for three weeks with a slipped disc, but even without him the first episode of Only Fools and Horses, in which Del endeavoured to sell a batch of suitcases that would not open, went out as scheduled in September 1981.

  The series ended in December, having attracted an audience of 7.7m and a pile of letters to the BBC asking what the title meant. With some difficulty, Sullivan persuaded the corporation to commission a second series and allow him to supply a new theme song that explained the title. One episode in the new series had an ending drawn from real life. Sullivan’s father was a plumber and had worked in a house where there were two valuable chandeliers that needed to be temporarily removed so that they would not be damaged by the work on the plumbing. Sullivan senior and his mates were on a ladder waiting to catch the chandelier, but the lad in the room above unscrewed the wrong one, which fell to the ground, shattered and earned all of them the sack. ‘A Touch of Glass’ drew an audience of 10.2m, the highest yet for the show. Even so, the future of the series was looking doubtful even when the second series ended; more people were still watching David Jason in Open All Hours than in Only Fools and Horses. It was only when the second series was repeated in summer 1983 that it suddenly became one of the most popular sitcoms ever broadcast on British television, running to seven series over twelve years. When the cast was brought together again for a Christmas trilogy in 1996, the final episode was watched by 24.3m people. It added new words to everyday language, as Sullivan collected new slang like ‘plonker’ and ‘wally’ and had Delboy popularize them. ‘Wally’ had been around for about eight years, in memory of a dog of that name who got lost during an open-air rock concert,20 but the word entered the mainstream only in 1983, with the publication of a handbook explaining how to be a wally, should you want to be one.21

  It was the accuracy of the observation of working-class life that gave the series its edge. Sullivan said:

  I was sick to death of the kind of comedies I saw on telly which were almost always based in the forties or earlier, with toff s and that sort of tugging-the-forelock, Gor-Bless-You-Guv type of stuff, which didn’t exist. Now we had a modern, vibrant, multi-racial, new London where a lot of working-class guys had suits and a bit of dosh in their pockets, and that was a very different thing. That’s what I wanted to write about.22

  This statement could be taken as applying generally to so much 1980s television comedy: it was funny, because people recognized that, in its way, it was true.

  CHAPTER 8

  WE WORK THE BLACK SEAM

  On Sunday morning, 4 March 1984, every man in the little village of Brampton, near Rotherham, appeared to be heading to the welfare and social club hall, built fifty-nine years earlier, and paid for by 3d. a week contributions from coal miners’ wages. Anyone born in Brampton would have as the backcloth of their childhood the towers and slagheaps of the coal mines. Seeing Pit Lane teeming with miners walking to work for the 4 a.m. shift or emerging at lunchtime to repair to the miners’ club in Knollbeck Road was as fixed in the daily routine as the school bell; the noise of the winding shaft was as familiar as road traffic. Most of the men in the village had known nothing else in their working lives but the furious and occasionally dangerous task of hewing coal hundreds of feet below ground.

  The shift began with the descent into the earth in a metal cage. ‘Most don’t like it,’ a Yorkshire miner recalled. That was understandable; it was dangerous work, with a level of fatal casualties 50 per cent higher than even the construction industry. In 1983, thirty British miners were killed underground. The miner continued:

  They go very quiet on the cage. You find people in there like myself, in an animated discussion just prior to, and then actually stepping on the cage; but then as soon as I know everybody is on it – I always go quiet at that time. Other people make light and tell jokes and carry on and it’s as well they do, because when the cage lift s up off the keps [iron bars holding the cage in place] and you know it’s going to come, at that moment it’s a terrible thing.

  After that alarming descent, there were hours of heavy labour in the surreal atmosphere hundreds of feet below ground.

  Who could understand, coming on a scene like this? Dense dust, heat, water, men rocking and shovelling, sweat pouring off their faces, throwing stones off their shovels, and like demented moles laughing their daft heads off. The furious pace can make it very difficult, because if you’re not keeping up and the stone starts to mount up, when the man in front stops for a minute . . . you’re clearing away the backlog.1

  But it was work, the source of a livelihood, of social cohesion and self-respect. Without Cortonwood Colliery, where 1,000 men were employed, Brampton would lose its economic reason for existing. This was a productive pit, which in 1984 had at least another five years’ life, the miners had been told; some of them had only recently been transferred from less promising sites. But Jack Wake, branch secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), was summoning the men to pass on a message from George Hayes, South Yorkshire director of the National Coal Board (NCB), that Cortonwood was to close.

  Recent research by Francis Beckett and David Hencke has thrown up the intriguing possibility that it was all a mistake. The Coal Board had a closure list, which their chairman Ian MacGregor intended to present to Arthur Scargill, president of the NUM, on 6 March, hoping that the union’s reaction would be a strike ballot, which they might lose. Cortonwood was not on the list.2 George Hayes had misunderstood his instructions and clumsily provoked a strike in an area of the country where the union solidarity was unbroken. Wake was not a militant shop steward in the Scargill mould, but a pragmatic, moderately right-wing local councillor. However, faced with a pit closure, he had no hesitation in admonishing the older miners not to be tempted by the NCB’s recently improved redundancy terms of £1,000 for each year of service, which would allow some of them to dream of more than £30,000 in the bank – a king’s ransom to anyone on working-class wages – but to put the interests of the younger miners first.3 That night, at midnight, a small group of volunteers threw together a makeshift shack at the entrance to Cortonwood pit and declared themselves to be a picket line. The greatest strike in post-war Britain had begun.

  No event in post-war history has divided public opinion in Britain so fiercely as the miners’ strike. For many, it was a moving story of pit villages withstanding great adversity and immense political pressure to defend their communities against cold economic logic and a hostile government. It has inspired more books, documentaries, drama and song than any other industrial dispute in Britain, exceeding even the General Strike of 1926. One example is the very fine track ‘We Work the Black Seam’ on the 1985 album, The Dream of Blue Turtles by Sting, which lamented the ‘economic logic’ that destroyed the mining families’ way of life. There is also Ewan MacColl’s ‘Daddy, What Did You Do in the Strike?’, Pulp’s ‘Last Day of the Miners’ Strike’ and Billy Bragg’s ‘Which Side Are You On?’ The strike forms the background to the highly acclaimed film Billy Elliot, and an episode of the television drama Our Friends in the North, as well as Comic Strip’s spoof of a Hollywood movie, The Strike, in which Peter Richardson play
ed Al Pacino playing Arthur Scargill. There are many more.

  Another version of the story of the miners’ strike is that it was an attempt by an almost insanely ambitious and dictatorial union boss to use the tough young men manning picket lines to taunt the police and defy the will of an elected government – parliamentary democracy versus Arthur Scargill’s thugs. The most powerful evidence deployed in defence of this argument is that during the entire year of the dispute, Scargill wilfully refused to ask his men, through a national ballot, whether or not they wanted to be out on strike. He used union solidarity to try to picket out the non-strikers.

  Elected president of the NUM in 1982 at the age of only forty-three, having won an unprecedented seventy per cent of the votes cast, Scargill was indisputably the most famous and most charismatic union leader of the post-war period. Intelligent, self-educated, strong-willed, a confident television performer and superb platform speaker, he was also intolerant, didactic and difficult to work with or reason with. His friend, Vic Allen, an unreconstructed Stalinist who knew Scargill well, described him as ‘essentially a shy person who projects himself as compensation for his shyness’.4 Scargill socialized, but in contrast to most trade union leaders, he did not drink and did not enjoy trading gossip. He could inspire intense loyalty, but sometimes loyalty turned to bitter enmity, as in the case of Jim Parker, who was constantly at Scargill’s side as his driver and minder for years, but turned against him late in the 1980s. He also evoked a particular fear and loathing in people who did not like militant trade unionists. The Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens told the Commons: ‘Arthur Scargill is a confessed Marxist, surrounded by communist aides and advisers. Even more serious . . . support for Mr Scargill is coming from the Kremlin’.5 The word ‘communist’ was oft en hurled in those days at people who were nothing of the sort, including Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone, but in Scargill’s case it was reasonably accurate. He was a former Young Communist, who transferred to the Labour Party without abandoning the Leninist view of the class struggle, and he had no problem about accepting Soviet aid for the strike. In old age, he was one of the last people in Britain with words of praise for the late Josef Stalin.6