Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  It is fashionable to knock Tolkien. As with Middlemarch, I haven’t looked inside for years but I’m bored by people who sneer at the Ring Trilogy. It is such a soft target. Also, Auden was a fan and if it was good enough for Auden, it’s good enough for me. If it was good enough for Auden, it’s good enough for anyone. Its essential high seriousness is why I liked it as a twelve-year-old. Bob Dylan said ‘to live outside the law you have to be honest’ and I think to be fantastical you have to be utterly serious. ‘Whimsy’ kills it, shows it up for the silliness it is. Which is why Terry Pratchett and Red Dwarf will never be for me, but I cried when Dr Who lost Rose into that other dimension that time.

  This does mean, though, that there are no good jokes in Tolkien. In fact, there are no jokes at all. But I bet if you asked him he would have said that he had a great sense of humour. And in that he is as English as tea, biscuits, gardening, queuing and thrashing your broken car with a frond before headbutting your Spanish waiter.

  CHAPTER 7

  Beyond a Joke

  A Middle Englishman will admit that he is useless in bed before he’ll confess that he has no sense of humour. He would rather make the boys laugh than the women sing. He will confess to a tin ear, a glass back, a limp upper lip and even limper disappointments downstairs before he will admit to a non-functioning funny bone. You can tell Middle England – in fact, all of England – that it is smug, racist, dull, stupid, ugly, lazy or weak. But what you must not accuse it of is not being able to take a joke.

  Even the phrase ‘sense of humour’ is very Middle English. There is no such thing as a ‘sense of anger’ or ‘sense of sex’. You are simply angry or aroused. I always think the quaint phrase itself, ‘a sense of humour’, means something like ‘I will tolerate laughter as a concept without having the faintest idea what laughter sounds like or how to induce it.’ Having a sense of humour is both revenge of the downtrodden – the skiving, piss-taking employee – and the benison of the powerful, as in the boss or teacher who ‘likes a joke as much as anyone else’. For the English, humour is weapon, crutch, aphrodisiac and social emollient.

  A few years ago, I was browsing on one of the many floors of a Tokyo toyshop. Given the Japanese’s charming but slightly suspect grasp of the English language, it was probably called ‘Robot Death Trilby’ or ‘Land of Coughing!’ Anyway, I found a series of souvenir mugs representing the nations of the world. Beneath the Stars and Stripes on the American mug was the legend: ‘Our American cousins are brave and strong. We love their films and our new friendship!!’ The French one mentioned cooking and clothes. The British one had a Union Jack and a phrase something like: ‘To make us laugh and jolly all day is what our British friends do best.’

  It was both cute and, if you think about it, ever so slightly depressing. The implication was that Britain, the country that had given the world bridges and atomic power and railways, was now a mere sideshow. We had become global jesters, a bit of fun when the serious business of inventing and economic powerhousing was over.

  I exaggerate. A Brit invented the World Wide Web, a Brit designed the iPod – we are still pretty smart cookies when we put our mind to it. And if we are the funniest nation in the world, why didn’t we do The Simpsons? But there is a point here and a nugget of truth. We may still invade and invent. But we are genuinely, even a little smugly, secure in our belief that we are the funniest race on earth.

  This is fascinating; and it’s infuriating. It’s the latter when some pub bore chirps up about the Americans ‘not getting irony’. Like, hello! If you don’t think the Americans get irony, then presumably your telly didn’t get the aforesaid Simpsons, Friends, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Larry Sanders Show, Roseanne, Frasier or Seinfeld and you’ve never heard of Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor or Sarah Silverman. American humour is rich in withering irony whilst, let’s not forget, Britain’s favourite comedy moment is David Jason falling over in a pub.

  We love slapstick. Hot on the heels of David Jason’s barroom pratfall in any list of ‘classic’ comedy clips beloved of Middle England would probably come the Michael Crawford/Frank Spencer famous rollerskating riff from Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em or John Cleese goosestepping his way through the foyer of Fawlty Towers. But Fawlty Towers also reveals another enduring trait of Middle English comedy, particularly TV comedy. The thwarted ambition, conceit and pettiness of the little man which has been making us laugh, perhaps a little uncomfortably, since Malvolio wore crossed yellow garters in the deluded belief they made him look hot.

  The comic song of the disappointed little man rapidly became and remained a staple of our humour. Punch magazine’s very first serial in 1845 was Mrs Caudle’s Curtain Lectures, Douglas Jerrold’s account of a hen-pecked husband looking for respite from his wife, and arguably a Dickensian George and Mildred. Half a century later Punch spawned George Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody and the legendary Charles Pooter, a self-satisfied, humourless middle-manager intent on keeping up appearances but always, to his own exasperation, failing to hit the right note. Echoes of Pooter can be found from Hancock to Basil Fawlty, from Captain Mainwaring to Richard Briers’ Martin in Ever Decreasing Circles and the various satirical portrayals of John Major.

  As English novelist and critic Michael Bracewell has written, ‘The British sitcom of yesteryear is shot through with the troubling conviction – a running theme in sitcom – that the best of life is somehow over, its opportunities botched by circumstances or fate.’ Cleese’s irascible Torquay hotelier is clearly a deeply disappointed man. This is not what he thought life would be. This is not what he thought his hotel would be. He imagined that it – and the guests – would be classier. He despises them both now because at heart he despises himself for how he’s ended up. But he masks this in pomposity, just as Hancock does at 23 Railway Cuttings, just as Rigsby does in Rising Damp, just as young Steptoe does in the flyblown scrapyard and arguably just as David Brent does in The Office.

  For better or worse, The Office has been the most influential British TV comedy of the last decade. It has set the tenor of much that has come after and I say for better or worse because, like Monty Python and Viz, other great English comedy institutions, it has inspired a raft of hugely inferior imitators. Just as Python encouraged the mistaken belief that saying ‘nostril’, ‘ferret’ or ‘Outer Mongolia’ was side splitting, particularly if delivered in a high-pitched squawk, and just as after Viz came a deluge of crude and unfunny comics, so Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s talent has created a climate where embarrassment in and of itself has been seen as a substitute for jokes and where much less talented people than themselves have mildly prospered. It’s a paradigm shift in what Middle England laughs at. Once upon a time witnessing someone’s discomfiture, be it Les Dennis or someone with a built-up shoe, would have seemed a ‘tough watch’, even in drama. Nowadays it’s a comedy staple. What seems to have been forgotten by the imitators is that in The Office the bleakness is leavened by the warmth of a love story, and that most of the people being mocked are essentially jerks and thus deserving of ridicule.

  Which brings us to satire. We like to think that we love satire but what we really like is seeing people made fun of. Have I Got News For You gets more laughs for pointing out that, say, John Prescott is fat or Ann Widdecombe looks weird than for exposing parliamentary corruption or poverty.

  In fact, the poor, as well as the fat and the old, are pretty much the stock Aunt Sallies of most of the radio comedy shows beloved of Middle England today, which, as comedian Rhona Cameron has pointed out, seem to exist to give employment to unfunny posh men. Geordies are fat, old people smell of wee, chavs don’t recycle, George Bush is a bit stupid. It is actually the opposite of genuine satire, be that Swift or Chris Morris, in that it exists not to challenge but to reassure, to leave the listener feeling warmly superior and contented in their politics and worldview. Morris’s Brass Eye specials were genuinely subversive and shocking, blisteringly funny and exposed real hypocrisy. For th
e nearest thing to their wit and intelligence these days, you must look to that irony-free and intellectually lightweight nation much lampooned by our ‘satirists’, the United States of America, and to The Onion and The Daily Show.

  There’s something a little troubling about this because, firstly, one of the cardinal virtues of Middle England, I think, is what J.B. Priestley called ‘the natural kindness and courtesy of the English people’. Secondly, fed too much of this comfort food masquerading as satire, we’re in danger of losing our nose for the blood scent of real humorous subversion. The funniest show to appear on Radio 4 for some years is a spoof phone-in called Down the Line which mocks both the inanity of the medium and the type of opinionated nitwit of every class, creed and race who phones in to such shows. Of course, these were exactly the sort of people who phoned in to the station to complain about the show in their hundreds. They hadn’t realised it was a joke and, naturally, they hadn’t realised that it was them being lampooned. Now the show has to be rather creakingly trailed and billed as ‘a comedy by the creators of The Fast Show’ for the benefit of the humourless, which is a little sad.

  Another thread – often a pink one actually – in the rich tapestry of English humour is sex. It’s there in Chaucer and Shakespeare and Fielding and it thrives still. Indeed for many years holidaying families in Skegness and Bognor would send home a cheery missive to Auntie Maud on the back of an illustration in which a shrivelled, sexually inadequate man recoiled in red-faced horror from the attentions of a rapacious nymphomaniac.

  Punch said of Donald McGill that he was ‘the most popular, hence most eminent English painter of the century’. Not for McGill, though, haywains or horses or even cows in formaldehyde. McGill’s subjects were sexy shop girls, matrons with enormous bosoms, ruddy-faced Scotsmen in kilts, fat women in tight bathing suits and the aforementioned spluttering weeds with their trilby hats and their goggle eyes. At the height of their popularity in the middle of the last century, McGill’s saucy, colourful, comic postcards sold two million a year in Blackpool alone. ‘Saucy’ is how we always refer to them; dirty seems wrong. They are not dirty, they are almost childlike. As George Orwell pointed out in his famous essay, ‘The Art of Donald McGill’: ‘The four leading jokes are nakedness, illegitimate babies, old maids and newly married couples, none of which would seem funny in a really dissolute or even “sophisticated” society.’

  For Orwell, the McGill cards are a sort of inoffensive safety valve for respectable society. ‘They are a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against virtue. They express only one tendency in the human mind, but a tendency which is always there and will find its own outlet, like water. On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time…There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with “voluptuous” figures. He it is who punctures your fine attitudes and urges you to look after Number One, to be unfaithful to your wife, to bilk your debts, and so on and so forth. Whether you allow yourself to be influenced by him is a different question. But it is simply a lie to say that he is not part of you …’

  When the Tories returned to power in 1951, they set about cracking down on the moral turpitude they thought had set in during the Second World War. Committees were set up to judge taste and decency of artwork and literature; 167,000 books were censored. They even turned their attention to old Mr McGill, who they prosecuted under the century-old Obscene Publications Act. McGill, in his eighties, pleaded guilty to avoid imprisonment. He was found guilty and the punishment was a £50 fine and £25 costs. Quite apart from the financial burden to McGill, the result had a devastating consequence on the saucy-postcard industry. Postcards were destroyed and orders were cancelled. With the swinging sixties and a new liberalism abroad, McGill’s postcards seemed a vulgar anachronism and declined in popularity. But their bawdy and essentially good-humoured comic worldview lived on in the TV shows of Benny Hill and the Carry On films, many of which are basically McGill postcards brought to grinning, leering life.

  Interestingly, in an interview for the New York Times, that stalwart of the Carry On films, Jim Dale, pointed out how the saucy postcard is a touchstone of English humour. ‘We are brought up on rude comedy … A four-year-old English boy would go to the seaside and send home to his 84-year-old grandmother what we would call a “dirty” postcard. He might pick out one with a picture of a very fat man standing in the ocean and making a mildly off-colour remark. He would send that to his grandmother, and she would get the joke and laugh at it.’

  In the Carry On movies, Sid James is eternally priapic and lustful, a shabbily rampant version of the British male as also seen in the interminable Confessions movie series of the 1970s as well as On the Buses and The Likely Lads. Call me biased but The Likely Lads I find truthful and skilfully portrayed: their fondness for the girls is what still unites Terry and Bob beneath their different aspirations.

  The other two, conversely, are absolute rubbish. In the Confessions films, Robin Askwith is seen as both sexually voracious and utterly irresistible, at least one of which is hard to countenance. The series represents a kind of anti-James Bond movie in that milkmen and taxi drivers are objects of female lust rather than test pilots or spies, and this is clearly a kind of morale booster for the working-class lads who comprised their audience. Even sociology, though, cannot explain the lasting popularity of On the Buses. It ran for just four years – 1969 to 1973 – though it felt like decades and was about as funny as an outbreak of smallpox. It was incredibly popular, though; one of the dismal movie spin-offs outgrossed Diamonds are Forever. Each week, the ‘humour’ revolved around the efforts of the late Reg Varney, a bus driver, and his mate the conductor, men in advanced middle age it seemed but still living at home, to get young women to snog them in their vehicles whilst parked in obscure locales. Even as I watched this as little more than a child I knew it was weird and wrong. Reg, you’re fifty, I thought. Get a flat of your own and, who knows, maybe Ethel the clippie might even come back to your place for a glass of Blue Nun and some nibbles and, you know, sex.

  Elsewhere in On the Buses lurked another staple of British sex comedy: the lugubrious, joyless husband unwilling or unable to entertain the carnal desires of a still sexual wife. In On the Buses it was Arthur and Olive. In George and Mildred it was, well, George and Mildred obviously, with the former forever disappointing the latter. Variations on this melancholic theme can be seen in Basil and Sybil, Rigsby and Miss Jones, Arkwright and Nurse Gladys Emmanuel and more. Here, you know, the bedroom is either terra incognito or an arctic tundra.

  I don’t really want to think about Terry and June in those terms, though. I don’t really want to think about Terry and June at all. I’m sorry, it’s a softer target than a baby seal pup, but Terry and June blighted many a teenage early evening with its curious, and generally humourless, version of life, which I simply didn’t recognise. Viewed through the refracting prism of the 1970s sitcom, Middle English domestic life involved a dad who went to work with an umbrella and a folded handkerchief in his top pocket, who came home at seven to a Scotch and soda from the decanter and a wife who had spent all day making beef bourgignon in a casserole for when the boss came round for ‘dinner’ that night. As I sat eating my Findus crispy pancakes off my lap, this world of casseroles, rolled umbrellas and decanters may as well have been Papua New Guinea or Neptune. Did anyone live like this? Maybe they did in what the media analyst Andy Medhurst has called the Gnome Zone. In film director David Lynch’s suburbia, as exemplified in the film Blue Velvet, darkness lay beyond the picket fence: kinky sex, oxygen masks, severed ears. In the Gnome Zone, what the respectability masked was mild panic and mishaps: burned soufflés, borrowed golf clubs, putting your back out. Tom and Barbara
Good lived right in the heart of the Gnome Zone but they were somehow different from the Terry and Junes of the London commuter belt. For one, they looked like they actually quite liked each other. They kissed and hugged and stuff; possibly even more. They certainly didn’t do decanters and casseroles unless the former contained peapod Burgundy and the latter lentil bourgignon. Mavericks they may have been, but their address was pure Sitcom Central.

  To get to Surbiton from inner London you take the Basingstoke train from platform 2 at Waterloo. Even that sounds mildly funny. Two American girl tourists actually giggle when they hear Surbiton announced over the tannoy. Does it even ring comical to a teenager from Boise, Idaho? Perhaps they’ve been getting The Good Life on HBO.

  The Good Life, one of the best-loved English TV sitcoms of the 1970s, is the most famous comic celebration of Surbiton. It’s not the only one, though. Back in 1906, Keble Howard wrote The Smiths of Surbiton: A Comedy Without a Plot. Even then, it seems, the suburb had a reputation for amusing dullness. Much later, in the early 1980s, teenage Liverpudlian game programmer Matthew Smith set his hugely successful Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy ZX Spectrum computer games in ‘the caves of Surbiton’, clearly a Scouse joke at the distinctly unadventurous nature of the locale. Liverpool is actually said in the mid-1990s to have considered adopting the slogan: ‘Liverpool – it’s not Surbiton’. Around the same time, John Sessions and Phil Cornwell’s surreal comedy series Stella Street traded on the notion that celebrities like David Bowie, Marlon Brando, Keith Richards and Michael Caine lived on the same banal street in, got it in one, Surbiton.