Sad to hear that Tony Slattery has died, and it inevitably prompts a slew of posts, many incorporating clips from the TV show where most of us first encountered him, Whose Line Is It Anyway? This one, for example, which gives us a chance not only to mourn a mercurial talent, but also to gaze back at a time when a major channel would put out a show with the working assumption that a critical mass of the audience would know who William Burroughs and Anthony Burgess might be.

Once again, I just record these observations with little or no comment. One day, they’ll have a place in my magnum opus about cultural assumptions, the bells-and-whistles box set spun off from my MA dissertation. But till then...

I still don’t know for certain what Jerry Sadowitz did or said that was so distressing to (some) members of his audience that his subsequent show was cancelled by the venue, and that makes the whole episode even more annoying. The director of the Pleasance, who announced the ban, said only that his material “is not acceptable and does not align with our values”. It’s probably a stretch to equate Sadowitz’s treatment with what’s happened to Salman Rushdie. Nobody’s tried to kill the comedian, although it must be remembered that a furious Canadian (they exist, apparently), once punched him out on stage for beginning a Montreal gig with a cheery “Hello, moose-fuckers!” That said, the statement does bear some comparison with the Ayatollah’s fatwa, in that the precise nature of the crime was kept vague, thus enabling those disposed to take offence to create ever-increasing levels of imagined ideological transgression in their own heads, without ever feeling obliged to see Sadowitz’s show, or read The Satanic Verses.

There is much generic media mulch sustaining a collective derangement over the death of an old, old man, but one or two useful responses – very few of them originating in Britain, sadly – have appeared. Anthony Lane in the New Yorker, for example, who analyses Philip’s strange social status, half macho action man and half placid househusband (and to some in Vanuatu, of course, a god), wittily but not without sympathy. And while others compile jolly listicles about the Duke’s various sub-Bernard-Manning one-liners (“slitty eyes”, ho ho ho), Lane pulls out one quote that is at once genuinely funny and rather poignant. Called upon to cut the ribbon at a new college building, he declared:

If anyone asks what my degree is in, I suppose I can say, “Wondering what assumptions we can make about what other people should know”. On that note, based on a recent Twitter discussion, I think we can plot the death of Western civilisation as occurring at some point between the first series of the comedy improvisation TV show Whose Line Is It Anyway? in 1988, which involved John Sessions describing a day at the beach in the style of James Joyce and the later shows up to 1999 which, if memory serves right mostly involved Josie Lawrence rapping about parking meters.

And on similar lines, should I find it distressing that, on a recent edition of Richard Osman’s House of Games, Denise van Outen thought that Isaac Newton died in 1952; or that someone at the Telegraph thinks Thelonious Monk a) didn’t die in 1982 and b) played the trumpet?

On the face of it, the Radio 4 show/podcast You’re Dead To Me meets all those cosy Reithian criteria about informing, educating and entertaining. It’s essentially a history lesson for people who think they don’t like history, fronted by Greg Jenner, who has acted as a consultant for the Horrible Histories TV series. The format, however, is closer to the long-running In Our Time; a historical subject (the Mughal Empire, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Victorian Christmas, etc) is on the agenda, with Jenner taking the Melvyn Bragg role of an informed host, asking questions of an expert. (IOT usually offers more than one expert, which sometimes provokes a bit of friction, but the dynamic is similar.)

All good so far, but YDTM introduces a new worm into the apple, in the form of a comic voice. And this, as far as I can work out, illustrates the key difference between the two shows; its assumptions about the listener. With IOT, Bragg is the representative of the audience, someone who may know a bit about the subject matter, or has at least taken the time to glance at the relevant Wikipedia page to acquire a rudimentary foundation upon which the experts can build. In YDTM, although Jenner is fine as a host and the academics are all well-chosen, the voice of the listener is the comic, who may just as well have been pulled in from the street at random.

One egregious example of this is the show about the American emigré performer Josephine Baker; a wise don, Michell Chresfield from the University of Birmingham, is regularly interrupted by the comedian Desiree Burch, whose contribution is essentially half an hour of not knowing, and letting us know it. And she’s not even terribly funny while she’s doing it.

The closest analogy is those unaccountably popular YouTube clips of people listening to a classic song for the first time; we are encouraged to be consumers of their performative ignorance, pretty much the antithesis of Reith. And I’m increasingly worried that You’re Dead To Me is being set up not simply as a variation on In Our Time, but as its replacement.

Oh well, we’ll always have Josephine.

Jamie Reid’s 1977 image of the Queen has gone from iconoclastic to iconic and back again; inevitably for the work of an old Situationist, it’s been détourned and/or recuperated more times than I’ve had hot safety pins. Here’s this morning’s edition of Spanish paper ABC:


To be honest, I don’t know what the classic punk and/or Situationist position on Brexit would have been; probably squatting in the middle, lobbing paving slabs at both sides. John(ny) Rotten/Lydon has reinvented himself as a Faragiste but apparently hasn’t always been that way inclined. And this article by Padraig Reidy (which also hijacks the essence of that 1977 image) points out how the “potential H-bomb” has been reclaimed as an emblem of hope against Brexit by her mortal foes, the liberal chattering classes. It’s another flavour of détournement, I suppose, but a polite one.

Also, not big, not clever from Mark Thomas, but funny:

I know we have to coordinate and organise to fight a no deal Brexit but it can’t hurt to pray for a well timed intervention in the form of an autoerotic accident.

— Mark Thomas (@markthomasinfo) August 29, 2019

PS: Coincidentally, someone has catalogued a letter I wrote to Select magazine (gulp) a quarter of a century ago.

Comedy that brands itself as dark and edgy requires a certain amount of resistance from its consumers to justify its existence, so I’m sure Phoebe Waller-Bridge, creator and star of Fleabag (the second series of which is happening on BBC1) was delighted when several people popped up to declare that miscarriage was not something that should be joked about.


In fact, the miscarriage in the first episode was – apart from its initial shock value, because, no, it’s not something you do expect to happen in a sitcom – more of a McGuffin, setting the stage for a climactic, post-prandial punch-up and developing the awkward relationship between the chaotic Fleabag and her superficially in-control sister. It’s a brave, dangerous show, not least because the central character is a gloriously bloody difficult woman; but it still fits into a classic genre, the British comedy of embarrassment. And now (we’re currently half-way through the series) we’re getting properly self-referential and post-modern, as Fleabag’s droll arch glances and one-liners to camera have been noticed by the sweet, sweary, probably alcoholic Catholic priest (Andrew Scott) she’s determined to shag. If the asides were already Brechtian, the explicit reference to them adds so may layers to the artifice it’s hard to see how she can escape. Verfremdungseffekteffekt, maybe?

Of course, the whole idea of acknowledging the camera’s existence was a key element in the success of The Office, the show that brought Ricky Gervais to most people’s attention. This, however, was in the context of realism, as the cameras were there within the fiction (for the fly-on-the-wall documentary that many of us thought we were watching for the first few minutes of episode one) as well as in reality.


In his new Netflix show, After Life, there are no furtive glances at the camera. The closest we come are the video messages that the terminally-ill Lisa has recorded for her journalist husband Tony (Gervais) and the clips he’s shot of the daft pranks he played on her in happier times. After his death, he declares that the only thing holding his back from suicide is responsibility to look after his dog; the dénouement is [SPOILER ALERT] that, despite his best efforts to become a walking, talking delivery mechanism for toxic abuse, there are plenty more people who love and need him: a new young writer on the local paper he is assigned to mentor; his sad, adoring godson; the amiable sex worker who cleans his house. If the narrative leans towards gloomy neorealism, the setting is defiantly artificial, a pleasant English rural location somewhere between large village and small town, constantly bathed in improbable sunlight, where everything seems to be within walking distance, including the beach. This of course only serves to set Tony’s seething agony in stark relief.

After Life has also prompted complaints, from those who think the nihilistic despair of the recently bereaved shouldn’t be a matter for comedy and, to an extent, I think they’re on steadier ground here, because that is actually what the show is about; where they’re wrong, though is that After Life isn’t in fact a comedy. Sure, calling a 10-year-old schoolyard bully “a tubby little ginger cunt” offers the same sort of transgressive giggle as Fleabag’s gynaecological mishap, but ultimately Gervais’s offering is a tragedy in which funny things are allowed to happen; Waller-Bridge is orchestrating a farce that occasionally throws up tragic moments. (Incidentally, with regard to the language, Netflix seems to be more forgiving than the Beeb; Scott’s priest character was originally meant to refer to his brother as “a cunt” but this had to be changed to something less offensive. So the absent sibling became “a paedophile”. Which is better, apparently.)

I still don’t buy into this notion that we’re in some golden age of TV; it’s simply that more TV is being made, so inevitably there’s more good stuff to be found. Sturgeon’s Law still applies. But Fleabag and After Life are both clearly in the top 10% of that top 10%. As to which is better, I’d just say that while Fleabag dazzles with its wit and sheer devilish attitude, After Life is more like getting a punch in the gut when you least expect it. Fleabag I watch behind barely parted fingers, gasping at its sheer bloody-mindedness; After Life I can barely watch at all, for all the right reasons. Fleabag is a superb piece of Art, while After Life is Life itself.

PS: This just in, via Henry Hitchings on Twitter: Nabokov reference (unreliable narrator?) at the bus stop

A comedian intending to perform at a benefit gig at SOAS has been asked to sign a behavioural agreement form that commits him to abjuring “racism, sexism, classism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia or anti-religion or anti-atheism”. This is [adopts Fotherington-Tomas voice] “to ensure an environment where joy, love and acceptance are reciprocated by all.”

Wouldn’t the only permissible funny thing left be to go on stage and read out that form? 

PS: It sounds as if that’s what he did...

One thing that always perplexed me about Moving Wallpaper/Echo Beach, ITV’s flawed-but-at-least-they-tried essay in comedic postmodernism, was the acting of Hannah Lederer-Alton, who played teenage temptress Abi Marrack. By most objective standards, this was a car-crash of a performance, a masterclass in how not to do it. But within the universe of the entwined shows, we weren’t necessarily watching Hannah Lederer-Alton playing the role of Abi Marrack in Echo Beach; we were watching Hannah Lederer-Alton playing the role of a bad actress called ‘Hannah Lederer-Alton’ who played Abi Marrack in Echo Beach. The crises and weaknesses of the Cornish soap were, in part, the engine that drove Moving Wallpaper, so it’s entirely plausible that the fictional producers would have cast a very bad actress in the role. It’s difficult to judge whether the real Lederer-Alton is in fact a bad actress, or a good actress who once played a bad actress, because after leaving Echo Beach she put her acting career on hold to go to university. She’s studying drama, since you ask.

There is no such get-out clause in Grandma’s House, the new BBC vehicle for Simon Amstell; no framing narrative that tells us that this is a play within a play, and that the actors are playing actors. This is, for the most part, an old-fashioned domestic sitcom with some top-class performers (Rebecca Front, Linda Bassett, Geoffrey Hutchings) being very funny indeed.

Into which set-up ambles Amstell, playing himself, or perhaps a simulacrum of himself. As the show starts, ‘Amstell’ announces to his family that he is giving up his role as presenter on Never Mind The Buzzcocks (which he has in fact done), because he has become tired of its inherent cruelty. Immediately we have a problem; Amstell’s entire career is based on being rude to pop stars – his on-screen mother encapsulates his purpose in life as “you’re a presenter who takes the pisss out of people” – and once he’s given that up for ethical reasons, there’s not a lot left. Certainly not acting ability; Amstell seems to be delivering his lines at the level of a first read-through, while the other actors are already up to speed.

It’s as if Amstell has watched other performers playing comic versions of themselves – Tony Hancock; Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm; Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in A Cock And Bull Story; the various guest stars, especially Les Dennis, in Extras – and tried to have a go himself. (I touched on this a few years ago, when discussing Brydon’s Annually Retentive.) But while those creations are exaggerated versions of the original, for the most part funnier and more flawed, the ‘Amstell’ in Grandma’s House is nicer and less funny than the Satanic choirboy who abused lame rappers for our delectation. When he’s rude to or about people (such as Clive, his mother’s boorish fiancé), he offers up half-hearted sneering, as opposed to the vicious deflation he deployed against the likes of Preston out of the Ordinary Boys.

So why is Amstell in the role? The only thing he seems to provide as a performer is a veneer of knowing metafiction that makes the show seem slightly edgier and more sophisticated than it really is; “I am here in real life!” he whines, when his family insists on playing a recording of his latest show. In fact, the most effective nod to the collision of realities is entirely accidental, coming when ‘Amstell’’s grandfather confides that he might be seriously ill; watching it, we know that the actor Geoffrey Hutchings died between filming and transmission. It’s as if broadcasters don’t believe that 21st-century audiences can cope with comedy that doesn’t knowingly tap its nose or put exaggerated air quotes around itself. You know, those staid, unfunny shows like Porridge and Rising Damp and Steptoe and Son.

Moving Wallpaper needed the parallel universe of Echo Beach to give it validity, to make it about something. When, in the second series, the fake soap was removed from the equation, the overall product was fatally wounded. Grandma’s House is potentially strong enough to survive without its intertextual nodding and winking. The premise is fine, the cast is excellent, many of the lines made me laugh. Is it too late for a reboot, with Amstell’s character replaced by an entirely fictitious creation, who’s resigned from a fictitious job on a fictitious comedy quiz show? Amstell (the real one) co-wrote the show, so he can clearly do funny; on the evidence of this, though, he can’t actually be funny.

Maybe in the second series they can give the part to Hannah Lederer-Alton. By that time, she may have learned to act.

Disquiet has been expressed within the comedic fraternity about the Foster’s Comedy God poll, in which the current sponsors of the Edinburgh Fringe prize ask us to pick the greatest talent from among all those who have ever been nominated for the award (best remembered from the years when it was the Perrier). Most vociferous among the critics has been the excellent Stewart Lee, who pointed out that very few people voting in the poll would have encountered all the nominated acts, which was why, when he first remarked on it, more recent performers such as Michael McIntyre and Russell Howard were in the lead, rather than... well, that’s where things got a bit out of control, as he recounts:

...I chose at random Frank Chickens, the Japanese female performance art duo, as an example of possibly worthy winners who would not get a look in under this illogical and unfair voting system, and the Twitter world has adopted them as a cause. This was never my intention, and I was drunk when I sent the e-mail in a fit of annoyance anyway, but they are now leading the field, and it appears we should embrace them.

The thing is, being roughly the same age as Mr Lee, I do remember Frank Chickens, and while they might not have been my first choice, they are clearly far more amusing than the bland, gittish likes of McIntyre and Howard. So I voted for them. But in doing so, was I actually subverting the poll, or just adding one more page-view’s-worth of credibility to the whole sorry process, and by some weird collision of digital technology and marketing voodoo, making one dull, Australian lager brand appear to be marginally less horrid than another? If Lee hadn’t sent his original drunken diatribe, I probably wouldn’t even have been aware of the poll, and would just have sighed and shrugged when it was announced that McIntyre is the best thing to have come out of Edinburgh since Burke and Hare. Then again, my contempt for the Foster’s effort has been edged aside by another poll, the results of which suggest that the greatest comedy double act of always and forever is Horne and Corden. Although maybe that, in its own vile way, is more subversive than voting for Frank Chickens.

In any case the Foster’s poll only works if you believe the Fringe is defined by the Awards, which is as absurd as the idea that Edinburgh is defined by the Fringe. (Some people believe that it disappears between September and July, like Brigadoon.) Despite the hundreds of thousands of people there, it’s a deliciously solipsistic experience, with each individual creating a remembered Fringe unique and perfect to himself or herself. I had to check on Wikipedia to see who’d won the Perrier in the years when I was there, but I had no trouble in placing the custard doughnuts and chips with salt-an’-sauce, flyers, Bill Hicks in a tent, telling an American tourist that the Scott Monument was named after Terry Scott, flyers, the guy doing a one-man show about King Saul who needed thirty prompts, flyers, Archaos stopping the traffic, sleeping on the floor, gatecrashing the Fringe Parade and hassling Arden and Frost because they were drinking the wrong lager, that Scotsman review (“...unbelievably atrocious”), the rain, putting the review in the flyers, Jerry Sadowitz not getting served in the bar at the Pleasance and that night in 1993 that Margi Clarke got so annoyed with one persistent heckler that after the gig she went out and poured a pint of lager over the wrong woman. Which is the Fringe only as it is through my tired eyes, but is surely more Fringey than Michael McIntyre.

That said, if you’ve never been, and you really want to know what it’s like, listen to this.

PS: Kazuko Hohki of Frank Chickens responds to the brouhaha: “It’s like someone talking about who won the Derby. I don’t care. I am not a comedian.”

Religion, eh? Woooh. Tough one. In response to images of Mohammed in a bear suit being snipped from South Park, artist Molly Norris created this:


but then had a change of heart, which she attempted to explain with this:


Now, the most reductive explanation was that she was scared of decapitation, which was the implied threat that had led the South Park episode to get cut. But it’s all a bit more complex than that. Norris’s whimsically satirical suggestion for a ‘Draw Mohammed Day’ was intended to be a statement of support to the beleaguered South Park creators, and a statement of support for free speech; but inevitably it also attracted a fair share of people who just hate Muslims, which made her feel uncomfortable. So in the end she did this:


I wouldn’t presume to tell Molly Norris what she should and shouldn’t do with her pictures; an artists doesn’t necessarily have any social or moral obligations. But I might point out that it can sometimes be more effective to avoid statements altogether, and just to ask questions. Questions such as: “Why are you scared of cartoons?” for example.

Thanks to Dick Headley for flagging this one up. On vaguely related lines, and to show it isn’t just Muslims who suffer from humour fatigue, here’s Cristina Odone claiming that the BBC has it in for Catholics after she was harangued by a stand-up comedian; and yet the self-same organisation tuts at a different stand-up for comparing Palestine to a cake “being punched to pieces by a very angry Jew”. Now, I’d argue that (leaving aside for the moment the uncomfortable status of the word ‘Jew’, as opposed to ‘Jewish person’) Boyle’s line is worthy of TS Eliot, and a far more successful piece of art than the South Park bear or Norris’s doodles or the shrill hectoring of either Hughes or Odone. And one or two Muslims might agree with me. But does that make it OK?

As I said, tricky one.

Harry Enfield suddenly finds himself reinvented as the Bernard Manning de nos jours:

These days it seems as if every government, every religious body, every charity has someone on the payroll whose sole purpose is to watch the telly, keeping an eye out for stuff by which they might advantageously be offended. The latest culprit is that monster of depravity Harry Enfield, whose show Harry and Paul has aroused the wrath of the Philippine ambassador to the UK, Edgardo Espiritu, with its allegedly racist depiction of a Filipina housemaid...

Full thing here.

From the Telegraph obituary of the extraordinary, irreplaceable, probably-quite-difficult-to-live-with Ken Campbell:


Ken Campbell kept three dogs and was devoted to an African grey parrot which he had bought when his daughter gave him some money to buy a computer. There had been a pet shop next door to the computer showroom. He was, for a time, professor of ventriloquism at Rada.

(And as for the recent local difficulties, all appears to be peaceful this end, although I will update you if anything occurs. Meanwhile, I'm watching a squirrel eat a pomegranate.)