Tony Hancock

Just put this post about next week's Hancock episodes on a lounge thread but probably more suited here:

Interesting to see they are "resting" A Sunday Afternoon at Home on this occasion - hardly contentious to suggest this is the best radio episode, although I know one person who disagrees. The Wild Man of the Woods, which is on one of the Galton and Simpson-selected Very Best of CDs, is also featured, although it never does very much for me.

And it will be interesting to hear the LP version of The Blood Donor again, especially in the context of the radio recordings. I've read (but never checked) that the timing on the Pye version is far superior to the post-accident TV version.

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With the obvious exception of The Blood Donor (not originally radio) the episodes are among the twelve included in the three vols of The Very Best of Hancock's Half Hour as personally selected for CD by Galton and Simpson. If anyone's interested here are their remaining choices:

A SUNDAY AFTERNOON AT HOME
THE POETRY SOCIETY
SID'S MYSTERY TOURS
THE CONJUROR
THE IMPERSONATOR
THE DIARY
VISITING DAY
THE THREATENING LETTER

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Yes, and editing or not there's even a point on one of those Decca recordings which presumably couldn't be cut out where he says "Hang on, I'll get this out in a minute."

And given that those recordings were several years after the TV versions (as opposed to the Pye Blood Donor recording which was not long after the telly version), I wonder whether agreeing to them was more about money than an overwhelming desire to revisit those Galton and Simpson scripts and work again with the partner he dropped because he didn't want to be seen as a double act?

Touching that in the Sid James Heroes of Comedy TV prog the only bit of interview footage of James has him talking with enormous affection about Hancock and respect for his timing. Interesting, too, to see James not in character in that brief clip: the voice, the manner is different.

Among the lesser-known Hancock books Philip Oakes's memoir is worth seeking out; he cowrote The Punch and Judy Man.

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For me it's A Sunday Afternoon at Home: Hancock complains of "Sitting around all day, waiting for the next lot of grub to come up." Isn't that boredom (or existence itself) in a nutshell?

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I like seeing Tony and Sid in the TV shows on the point of cracking up - so much better than the self-indulgent laughter of some performers today aware they're bound for a blooper show. I often seem to hear Bill Kerr in particular laughing uproariously at Hancock's delivery in the radio shows. At least I assume it's Bill Kerr. Unlike RTH, you never seem to hear Williams's adenoidal laugh in the Hancock shows - maybe he was bitter and twisted about Hancock even then.

There's also a famous gaffe - can't remember which episode - centering around Hancock's pronunciation of "a day in lieu".

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What I meant to add was that while Wild Man of the Woods isn't my favourite episode, listening to the broadcast this morning I'd forgotten how finely tuned the performances were - we're talking concert pitch - and the "Cyril, squid" incident is fairly swiftly dealt with, assuming there were no further edits: these people are focused, at the top of their game.

I tend to favour TH in more domestic settings - so Sunday Afternoon or the Hospital one - but I'd forgotten that even if there is a cartoon element in Wild Man... it's carefully set up: genuine concern from Hattie and the others about what his latest craze will be etc. Much better, in my view, than yesterday's The Last of the McHancocks, which was much more of the "wacky" variety, despite the presence of a genuine Scot to beef things up.

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Haven't read the diaries for a while but he probably thought much of it beneath him - after all, he played the Dauphin in Saint Joan, y'know, as he never tired of mentioning.

The Carry On team seem to have acted as a sort of family for him - and even if pay (and scripts) were lousy they never kicked him out as he felt Hancock did.

Interesting that despite his intellectual pretensions / aspirations he ended up playing the broadest parts in HHH.

Not overly generous in his estimate of colleague common to both teams, Sid James: one diary entry says something like: there wasn't a single actor there apart from Sid James ... Oh, maybe that first part of the sentence is true after all.

According to David Benson a radio version of Williams's diary wasn't allowed to use clips of HHH - so the criticisms in the diary are still felt to be a "live" issue.

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To mention once again the book The Laughtermakers by David Nathan (no, I'm not related and don't have shares in the publishing company, but it is a good read if you can get hold of it), Eric Sykes said something interesting in it re army-induced boredom - namely that having nothing to do in the evenings, no distractions/diversions, forces the violinist to practise his violin, the writer to write etc. So he wasn't speaking about Sunday per se but things like wartime experience or National Service both which, whatever the humiliations or trials heaped on the hapless individual during the day, incidentally created great vacuums of time to fill as the lights came on. Of course, the nothingness EurekaBlitz refers to is pretty inviting too ...

And with regard to Hancock, its two writers had years of time to fill in the sanatorium. Maybe Sunday Afternoon at Home is such a classic because those two individuals are peculiarly well informed about yawning emptiness: they're writing about a common phenomenon and their own experience at the same time.

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Interesting that Father Ted has been one of the few modern sitcoms praised by G & S - isn't that a series about men with far too much time on their hands on an island where every day is Sunday?

I'm personally very fond of the TV sitcom Nightingales by Paul Makin (now on DVD) which is really about security guards with nothing to do (but, as with Father Ted, it slides into surrealism). One particular episode even had (I suspect) a nod to Sunday Afternoon at Home when the two main characters Carter and Bell struggle to fill the time.

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For Ted and Dougal every day's a holiday ... of Obligation. (RC joke. Sorry.)

And you could say that Father Ted is more closely related to the radio Hancock than the striving-for-naturalism TV one.

Someone called Red Dwarf "student flatshare in space" and most sitcoms centre around a family or quasi-family (work colleagues, fellow prisoners or recruits etc). The sense of being in some way trapped increases the pathos and is also handy economically: no changes of location.

And as I type I remember that in Radio Times Clement and La Frenais talking about the obvious trapped element in Porridge talk about the Lift episode of TV Hancock as the perfect example of this in miniature, even though it's rather shorter than a prison sentence or most jobs. You could create a series based on those characters - it would just be a case of finding some other means of forcing them into regular close proximity. The sit of sitcom is almost immaterial: it's just the vessel to hold them. Not sitcom but charactercom, as writer/tutor John Brennan once said. If the characters don't work then nothing else will. (Of course if your lead dies there's a limit to what you can do, as in It Sticks Out Half a Mile.)

I suppose homburg era Hancock is (or was) trapped in Railway Cuttings through the gap between his dreams and his abilities (and Sid's help too, of course - remind you of any rag-and-bone pair?). And Father Ted is of course trapped with the family from Hell because of that little "resting in my account" business ...

And I suppose, finally, that sitcoms offer us reassurance because they're saying we're all variously trapped but hey, we'll all get through - sort of.

In yet another book - a media studies-related one about TV comedy this time - Barry Took, I think, distinguished between Till Death... and Steptoe. (My apologies if I've got this wrong; it may have been Dennis Norden or Frank Muir.) For him, the Alf Garnett show was a howl of rage and pain whereas Steptoe was offering a more gentle lesson. Not blander or emptier but more positive, along the lines of: it's alright, this difficulty, this failure to communicate, we're all in the same boat. Sitcoms, at their best, do what all good drama does, one way or another: reaffirm our common humanity and so give us hope (though I'm happy to settle for a little diversion). A quote I can confidently attribute to Dennis Norden as he's said it in several interviews including that recent Godfather of Comedy interview on 7 is that Steptoe ought to be studied for GCSE (or O Level, as I think he still calls it). There actually was a schools edition of some of the best early scripts worth seeking out as it doesn't overlap with the more commonly available book of seventies scripts. If only they'd used them for the SATS instead of Shakespeare, there wouldn't be all this kerfuffle today. Possibly.

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EurekaBlitz, Re US/UK, Alfred Marks once said Americans love the whipper, the aggressor, and English love the whippee - his explanation for why Hancock (essentially a victim for all his bluster) couldn't have worked in America - though the Hancock character in Heathcote Williams's play Hancock's Last Half Hour (far more interesting than that recent Curse of Comedy effort) blames the retitling of The Rebel in the states: Call Me Genius - which certainly can't have predisposed a new audience to take him to their hearts.

Not sure how far Marks's simple distinction will take us in comparing American and British sitcoms but it's a thought. Wasn't there an attempt by Bil Cosby to do One Foot in the Grave and wasn't it watered down? I'd like to know more about that. And were those changes down to Cosby or the network?

Re being trapped, I do think it applies to sitcoms internationally. Frasier is the family trap: guilt forces Frasier to allow infirm dad to live with him. And what is Larry Sanders but a workplace comedy? You could even say that Seinfeld is a family trap comedy - Jerry and George were schoolfriends so they're lumbered with each other now. Kramer all but lives with Jerry (steals his cereals - now that's family/flatshare in action).

There has to be the trapped thing because characters need to spark badly against each other and if they weren't compelled by the need to earn a living or emotional ties or patriotism or whatever then the obvious question distracting the audience would be: well, why don't you just walk away?

Perhaps (haven't really subjected this to too much scrutiny so may not be that effective as a generalisation) the crucial difference between US and UK is the American characters are allowed some "winner" elements: Frasier has a prestigious job and a genuine ability to help others but cannot help himself and is unable to sustain a relationship outside of family/work.

Regarding which, there's a priceless moment in one Frasier episode which suggests that the emtional hold his family have on him is as deadly as that of Albert on Harold. Having been in a bit of a date "drought", Frasier is frustrated that his dad and Niles don't believe he has finally got a new girlfriend, and circumstances mean that his family never get to see her - by chance she's always left the flat when they happen to return.

Frasier becomes increasingly enraged when they start humouring him, cooing of course they believe in this woman whom they clearly think is a product of his imagination. Eventually Frasier is impelled to take a photograph of her when she is sleeping. The flash wakes her up; she is livid and storms out the flat, past Niles and Martin. Her angry outburst makes clear what to them what Frasier has just done. He turns to them and says: "Well - what do you think of me now?"

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Yes, I did notice the laugh - and did you notice that a scripted reference to KW's acting limitations immediately followed? Maybe that was the start of all the bitterness.

One other pleasing detail today: in the script Sid has a German accent and sings a snatch of Wunderbar from Cole Porter's Kiss Me Kate. Was this a jokey reference by G & S to the fact that James, fresh from South Africa, was actually in the London cast of Kiss Me Kate? I've heard an original cast recording in which he's one of the Brush Up Your Shakespeare singers.

Oh, and erudite - isn't that a kind of adhesive? (copyright Weekending and with renewed apologetic noises to Derek Jameson)

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EurekaBlitz,

"My thoughts, are that although the trapping element appears in American sitcom, it seldom seems to be the predominant aspect, as it can with the British version"

Not sure; you may be right, though perhaps it depends on how you broadly interpret "trapped" - I suppose I basically mean the reason why incompatible characters don't just walk away from each other and it can be as simple as the need to earn a living. Doesn't mean they have to hate each other or be miserable but that there is a tie which binds them to that group of people and forces them to attempt to achieve their aims within the group rather than walking away and finding a nicer group to belong to. Which is handy for continuity of casting.

In my view the Frasier/Martin relationship is the foundation of that show - and that was the way the pilot was set up - but certainly in individual episodes Frasier's vanity, sibling rivalry etc can be to the fore. It's not that Frasier's life has been ruined by Martin but that Martin's advice, wanted or unwanted, is there all the time; and Frasier can't walk away because a) the old man has set up house in his flat and b) Frasier needs his father's approval.

Think the winner / loser thing is a more interesting distinction in US/UK comedies: are American audiences perhaps less willing to accept central characters whose lives are bleak unless those characters have some "winner" elements to soften the effect?

I apologise that this is moving away from strictly BBC 7 matters. Perhaps I should also add that I have never watched an episode of Friends.

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I agree about Fools ... not really working post Peckham but I think in sitcom character and setting are bound up together: yes, they were trapped in a crummy place but they were also trapped with each other and you can't separate the two things.

You say "even though there was at times, a thought of Delboy holding Rodney back, I think the situation to escape from, was their living conditions" but it was the living conditions which brought out (especially in the darker first series) Del's real character, namely the full extent to which he'd be willing to dump on Rodney to save his own neck.

Now that may have come about because poverty made him desperate but it's still who he is: character, as the writing manuals never tire of telling you, is decision under pressure.

So maybe as a general rule we can say that whatever the "trapped" element is it has to be something which sufficiently pressures the characters to reveal themselves.

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EurekaBlitz,

Re Frasier and dad, "You never really see a true struggle - a vigorous striving to escape whatever form of shackle that happens to be in place" - it's there in the pilot (a classic of its kind) but yes, it's considerably softened later. There isn't the viciousness which Steptoe and Son does as standard, and that may be about US/UK sensibilities.

But there's still a struggle going on. Both men want something the other cannot provide: Martin will never get the sports-playing son he can boast about to his cronies at Duke's; Frasier will never have the father who will really appreciate and understand his work and interests. And yet they are bound together. It is a sort of marriage, like Steptoe and Son. (In one episode of Steptoe girlfriend sadly tells Harold, to his great bafflement, that it wouldn't work - he's already married.)

There was one episode where Frasier and Martin, seeing how a girlfriend of Frasier's could excoriate her mother and then be all tears and hugging and feeling better in five minutes, try this out for themselves. To their surprise, the vicious words which come out don't resolve themselves into a hug; all they feel is immense pain at what they've normally kept bottled up being let out. So the suggestion is that those feelings are still there, as they were in the pilot, but damped down.

Incidentally, one of my fave Frasier-dad scenes is when Martin's relationship with the cheerful vulgarian, banjo-playin' Sherry, ends. Frasier meets his dad in a bar and seems to want to reassure him, tell him he'd find someone else. But both men know that at Martin's age that's unlikely (ie next bride: Death) - and eventually, rather than insult his dad with platitudes Frasier does the only thing he can : he pretends to take an interest in watching the sports on TV with his dad. It's a beautiful scene because, for all their differences, they are offering each other something simply in spending time together. And that takes me back to the healing aspect of sitcom.

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Saw an old 60s episode of Steptoe in which Harold was tensely awaiting the arrival of a girlfriend at the house. Albert had put the clock forward an hour so when she arrived an hour late, as Harold thought, he slammed the door on her. Incredible cruelty by Albert but also an old man terrified of being alone.

There's a great line used by one brother to another in the play Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill: "I love your guts." With its suggestion of the more obvious phrase "hate your guts" it seems to sum up that contradictory emotions family members can arouse in each other with particular ease - and not just in sitcoms.

The quasi-family can work just as well if we sense there's a similar amount at stake. Did you see the last ever episode of Larry Sanders? It clearly brought out that the bond between Larry, Artie and that fragile monster, Hank was as intense and filled with loathing and need as any family.

But going back to Steptoe there's a love there too. In, I think the early episode where Albert goes back to Flanders(?) Harold has lots of fun mocking his uniform and rifle but then there's a passage where he talks with sympathy and understanding about his father's experiences returning to Britain from the war.

The well-known secret to what drives Porridge - the idea that if Fletch can score a tiny victory over the system each day then he's "won", even though he's still banged up - is sort of linked to Steptoe. The sarcasm Harold inventively and gleefully heaps on his dad's head is an attempt to claw back some status to make life tolerable when the brute fact is he's still without a partner or any prospects and under his father's thumb.

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I'm beginning to flag, myself. But before I lie down in a darkened room for a bit, maybe I could throw into the mix Drunken Bakers - okay, more a comic strip in Viz magazine than a radio or TV sitcom per se, and I doubt whether any adaptation in either medium could stretch it out to half an hour, but a work of comic genius nonetheless. And quite definitely British: no softening of any "loser" aspects in that series.

Right, egg and chips, mug of cocoa and straight up to bed.

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I love Mice and Men (as does Harold Pinter, incidentally, according to Michael Billington's biog). Yes, Harold and Albert have become dependent on each other - Harold doesn't have the education to break free (=comic delusion; very handy for sitcom) but it's Albert's fault, as he points out on occasion, keeping him off school to go totting. And now it's too late. Like Beckett without the laughs.

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EurekaBlitz,

In Mice and Men, George's constant complaint that he could "live so easy" if it wasn't for Lennie is, you could argue, his equivalent of Harold's sarcasm, ie a momentary seizing of status which ignores the bigger picture - that friendship with this lumbering giant of a man fulfils all his emotional needs. Interesting too that Lennie has a kind of wiliness (wilyness?) and at one point seizes the moral high ground over the matter of having sauce with his beans. If it wasn't for that unfortunate incident at the end which rather kills the chances of a second series you could say Steinbeck had written a sitcom. George, to deflect strangers' curiosity, has even invented a sort family connection with the big guy.

Yes, I agree with what you say about the uneasy balance of love and hate. When it tips too far on the hate side then you've got yourself a tragedy; sitcoms acknowledge the potential for that to happen but sidestep it - just as in real life most of us are able to refrain from acting on those momentarily murderous feelings about the intensely irritating habits of those closest to us.

Status is also an important factor generally in sitcom, by which I mean who comes off best after each exchange. Reading the 70s Steptoe scripts a while back my strongest impression was how often the baton of status actually passed back and forward between the pair over even just a couple of pages, and it goes back to what I've said, possibly in another thread, about the dreamer vs. practical one in most sitcom pairings. The bickering can go on almost endlessly because each side has some vestige of right on his side: Harold is right to dream; Albert is right to want to protect his gullible and sensitive son.

And the trapped bit gives the writers a great freedom: because we as an audience know what Albert is capable of, we're willing to accept the most extravagantly hurtful, virulent stuff pouring out of Harold's mouth because we also know he's a little boy who only has this as his outlet; he can't walk away - he tried and failed in the pilot - or (until that final stage incarnation) kill the source of his misery.

Related to this, I know that Galton and Simpson said later Hancock writers (hey, back on topic!) missed the basic point that you had to surround him with pompous jobsworths or whoever - ie people deserving of his barbs - otherwise he'd simply come over as a buffoon.

Looked at through the prism of tragedy, the situations in Steptoe etc are bleak, but there's something about comedy which makes us - not deny the bleakness but hold it in check, somehow, accept the contradictions, not deny them but not worry about them overmuch and focus on the life-affirming elements. I've always avoided reading too much Samuel Beckett as it seems like Hard Work but I'm vaguely aware that plays like Endgame are the darker side of the same thing. Frank Muir suggests, in the David Nathan book I keep quoting from on this board, that G & S, through seeking laughs, unearthed a lot more because inevitably their work is going to reflect who they are and their concerns, but he goes on to say that it may not have come about had they been writing straight plays (hasn't one or other of them said that they wrote some unreadable socially conscious plays early on?).

So you could see comedy as a kind of gel, or a kind of inert frogspawn, that holds the tadpoles of darker thoughts and actions safely there, suspended, never to burst into frogs of despair.

Frogs of despair... dear oh dear. Goodnight.

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Sorry about my regurgitation there folks ... but I do have a Cliff Richard joke or riddle of sorts to lighten the mood.

Please imagine, for comedic purposes, that Cliff and his band had a roadie named Andrew More. His main job was to ensure that Cliff had time to wind down, alone, after a gig, to which end he would get Hank, Jet and the gang off the premises fairly smartly after the curtain came down after the final encore. (Did I mention it was the fifties?) It was also about their safety: they would be whisked off by Andrew More before the fans came out, then he would wind his way back through the traffic and pick up Cliff, by which time the fans would have dispersed, and chauffeur the star to his hotel. But as I say, his chief task was the speedy spiriting away of Cliff's backing band.

Now my question is this: this roadie-cum-chauffeur was nicknamed, by Cliff and the boys, "Love." Why?

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That's just what I wanted conion to think! You were nearer, Eurekablitz but there may have to be a steward's inquiry - if they have those at Wimbledon.

No, Cliff's roadie got his nickname because after every gig ...

# Love walked right in and drove the Shadows away ... #

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Maybe toads not frogs. Do toads emerge from frogspawn or are they mammals or something? Must be more careful with these amphibious metaphors in future.

And in the case of all those sitcoms (inc Steinbeck's!) those pairings are about need, aren't they? Whether or not the relationships are healthy over the years they have come to depend on each other. They complete each other so they can't let go; neither is a full person without the other. Yes, dreamer and doer - together they make up a more-or-less-functional person, however unhappy on a regular basis that association makes them. I saw a play about the Everly Brothers' split and reunion where they ruefully accepted they were shackled together: the combination of their voices created something bigger and finer than either separately.

Did you see the Warm Champagne episode of One Foot... where Margaret turns down the chance of an affair? She tells the Lothario that Victor is the most sensitive man she knows, which is why she loves him - and why she wants to smash his face in (or words to that effect). And Dorothy, in Men Behaving Badly, ignores a hint Gary may have slept with someone else; she tells Gary "I'm only choosing to believe you because I don't have the time to find a proper boyfriend," which sounds to me like 'Arold's status-boosting sarcasm bit.

Frasier's an interesting case because of Niles (a late addition to the concept suggested by the close resemblance of the actor to a young Kelsey Grammer). It seems to me that in places he acts as the dad, offering advice when it would be implausible to have Martin doing so; at other times he's the dreamer, to be brought back to reality by a combination of Frasier and Martin.

I still think, however, that Frasier and his dad are the central pairing because the contrast between the two of them is more extreme than that between the two brothers. In fact, I've read that Niles is really Frasier mk.1 - ie the super-neurotic shrink in Cheers. The new sitcom's creators realised if Frasier was to be at the centre he'd have to be more three-dimensional than his earlier persona allowed. So you could say it's just another aspect of the same character: "If you ask one, you get the other" - as the brothers are mortified to overhear a partygiver drawl.

It's almost time for the noon repeat of The Blood Donor (on topic again!) but some further thoughts on making-each-other-complete pairings: Likely Lads - Terry's self pity and moaning for the past vs. the possibility that Bob has indeed lost something vital in embracing middle class values. It's a lovely moment at the end of Series One of Whatever Happened to... when it seems in his best man's speech that Terry is graciously renouncing Bob, unselfishly handing him over to a future with Thelma ... lovely for all of ten seconds when it becomes clear it'll be business as usual after the honeymoon.

Right. I'm off.

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Yes, remarkably well slotted in as though part of an actual dialogue. So at a guess - NOT Adrian Juste.

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To quote from today's Hancock (on message yet again!) Well, you can always learn from other people. Let the shipwrecks of others be your seamarks! etc.

But don't the Goons preach against the evils of bunchy spawn?

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Yes, "subcharacter" is a good way of putting it: someone who basically makes life much easier technically for the writers.

He's often the voice of F's conscience, as in the episode where Frasier is almost seduced by daytime TV stardom. I love the ending where Niles indulgently waves him off to what he's promised will be his final broadcast in full Mexican gear atop a donkey: "Vaya con Dios." Frasier even spells out Niles's function: "Thanks, Brother, for keeping me grounded." (Suppose it had to be Niles in that episode because Martin would have thought: "My son's a TV star. What's not to like?")

When Niles needs help himself with Maris's latest excesses or whatever so then he's more of a rounded character, you could say - although the decision not to show Maris onscreen was maybe about realising that Niles had to have a strictly limited function in the programme, serving the Frasier character, not supplanting him, which could be why the Daphne marriage bit was just so wrong - see this website for more on this and other sitcoms deemed to have passed their sell-by dates:

www.jumptheshark.com...

But the main thing with Niles is you've got a character on hand to allow our hero, F, to articulate whatever is on his mind without having to resort to speaking to Eddie or soliloquising: a Horatio to his Hamlet, and a way of getting round the fact that Frasier and his dad don't really speak the same language; the neurotic tics borrowed from Frasier Mk. 1 are funny in themselves but they are also a cunning way of disguising the character's partly functional nature.

Yes, Whatever Happened to ... is definitely about a specific time of social aspiration and that context led to some great comedy. Steptoe too, although I recall reading somewhere that when it came back in the seventies and G & S were asked whether it would be any different they said social changes would have probably passed Harold and Albert by. Haven't watched them enough to answer this question myself but do the 60s episodes feel more rooted in a specific time and place and, if so, are they better?

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Ivor, don't really know Dibley well so can't say for sure. Dawn French's verger sidekick might be the obvious dreamer to the Vicar's practicality but I don't know how big a part she plays week by week. Could it be the whole village sort of constitutes the dreamer for this sitcom ... or could it even be that this theory doesn't fit?

Can anyone help out?

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"Reigns" or "free reign" is a remarkably popular mistake - I blame those spellchecks. As everyone knows, there's no such thing as a free reign.

Reading over this and the current Goon thread it strikes me that a lot of readers might be interested in, and not necessarily know about, the book Spike and Co. Written by Graham McCann, it's about the formation of Associated London Scripts so is about Galton and Simpson, Eric Sykes, Johnny Speight and others as well as Milligan. A very handy one-stop shop for a lot of information about the writers and their creations, and he has a knack for choosing script extracts - like the Steptoe show where Harold dreams of holding a literary soiree with Bertrand Russell would "bustin' a gut to get in."

Like his Morecambe and Wise book, he has a lot of existing published material to draw on, but he still does a good job of it - in fact Eddie Braben used McCann's book as a reference for his own autobiography.

This link will take you to Roger Wilmut's website - he has written about the Goons and Hancock. The site also has running orders for ISIRTA.

home.clara.net/rfwil...

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Hmm - I may have created a rod for my own back with the dreamer/doer thing here ... too late to recant?

Again, Reggie is not one I'm wildly familiar with but poss another case of lead character vs the world? I don't know how prominently wife or secretary or CJ feature. But Reggie must certainly be the Dreamer.

Important, though, to stress that dreamer/doer roles can be fluid: practicality / earthy common sense can shade into dull convention; dreaming can range from ditzy (ditsy?) to visionary. (In the same programme, I mean; your sympathies can shift.)

I'm tempted to wriggle out of it now by wondering whether most, but not, all sitcoms have this pairing at the centre, but poss the "character vs the world" definition covers the rest. That would cover later TV Hancock (on topic yet again!) as well as Reggie.

Some possible pairings: Mainwaring & Wilson; Rigsby & Philip (?); Basil & Sybil; Larry (Sanders) & Artie, with Hank in the Niles role - ie Larry's insecurities given, er, free rein; Jerry (Seinfeld) and George ...

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Blimey, this is getting complicated ... Re the fluidity thing I wasn't speaking of Reggie Perrin in particular. If that series has a definite arc (I know it was based on a novel) maybe that's harder to shoehorn into this generalisation. Maybe if anyone who knows it well enough can help out ...

What I was trying to say actually applied to sitcoms in general, namely that our attitude to either of those dreamer/doer characters can shift during the course of an episode. And a sense of proportion - which we have and the characters lack - is, I think, the key to understanding those changing sympathies.

Take Basil Fawlty. His wish to improve his hotel/clientele is laudable. But his reckless pursuit of his goals combined with an inability to recognise that his own behaviour compounds the problem (punishing the car, not himself) allows us to stand back from him and laugh - but only some of the time. As with Hancock the people around him can be unreasonable: even if Sybil has some half-formed notion of how to interact appropriately with others she is also a shrewish bore.

And the beauty of Whatever Happened to ... is that roles can even be reversed. There's an episode where Terry is doing his son of the soil bit and insulting Bob and Thelma's guests at a dinner party only for Bob and Thelma to take his side at the end: even the upwardly mobile Thelma realised there was something wrong about their guests' vehement denial of their roots.

And wasn't there a Steptoe episode where Albert thinks he's going to get married, not realising it's an old girlfriend of Harold's? So he's the naive one there.

Hmmm ... the more I think about this the more complicated it gets. The sitcom Shelley has just been issued on DVD. Shelley's partner Fran is, I suppose, the practical one, but Shelley's major interactions are with jobsworths etc - the whole unreasonable and unyielding world out there (not unlike late Hancock). Fran is undoubtedly more practical but is hers really the Horatio role a listener and a nodder rather than an equal? In later series Shelley had a buddie (eg David Ryall) but there wasn't a Fran replacement as such. But then again think of the force of Dandy Nichols's interjections in Till Death ... she knew just when and how to deflate Alf.

This post could go on and on so I'm off to do something less demanding ... like watching a sitcom.

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As a footnote to some of the things we discussed earlier on in this thread about US vs UK comedy, I was struck by this comment in today's Guardian by Jeff Garlin, who plays Larry David's agent in Curb Your Enthusiasm:

"'To me, in a way,' he says, 'Curb's a very English show. We think of Fawlty Towers a lot - having a lead character not being inherently likable, that was one of the first shows to embrace that. Britain's the one place where it's been successful, that hasn't surprised me at all.'"

***

If it's the police force "day in lieu" one (see message 25) then I definitely heard it on a BBC tape.

***

On the vinyl front, there is a 70s BBC Enterprises LP called Unique Hancock which features some very well-chosen extracts from the radio shows (not rerecordings or owt). CDs have perhaps made this redundant but the careful selection does remind you of how well written the best of the individual shows are. Can't remember all the shows they came from but includes the Hospital one.

***

Haven't read before about Sid James rejecting him after the Decca recording but it would make perfect sense: I've seen footage, possibly on John Fisher's excellent Heroes of Comedy series, of James praising Hancock's timing to the skies; to see that timing thrown away must have been especially painful.

On a related note, can't remember which Hancock biog this comes from - possibly the Freddie Hancock/David Nathan one - but there is a story about Hancock, in later, post G&S years, being given what he recognised as a good script and determined to make the most of it. He stayed on the wagon during rehearsals but was annoyed to find when the show was being recorded that the director was shooting him in longshot. Hancock insisted on a closeup, but watching a playback he was suddenly presented with painful and irrefutable evidence of how immobile that once expressive face had become through drink. After a long silence, he simply said: "I look like a ----ing frog," and went back to drinking after that show. This moment was used in the William Humble screenplay with Alfred Molina as Hancock.

***

I have just seen (hadn't read anything about it or knew it had been in progress) a new biography of Hancock by ... John Fisher. This should be a good 'un. A very good 'un.

He was behind the excellent Heroes of Comedy series, wrote a very good biog of Tommy Cooper (he worked with him and has had many years of experience in television) and some years ago wrote a book called Funny Way to Be a Hero, looking at Sid Field and many others, writing seriously but not portentously, about the craft.

It's in the shops already - I saw a copy in a major London bookshop which I can't name but it rhymes (in the way that pop composers rhyme these days) with "hors d'oeuvres" and I didn't even want to skim it. I know it will be good.

I'm really glad it's John Fisher and not Graham McCann who has been give or taken this task upon himself. Although McCann's Morecambe and Wise biog is good, and used by Eddie Braben as a reference for his own autobiography, there was so much info published already I felt it rounded up that material but didn't necessarily add huge extra insights. Similarly, with all the Hancock material already around someone who can really make his subject live (as he did Tommy Cooper) is needed. I'd be interest to know whether anyone has read it yet or seen reviews.

Re other books, Philip Oakes's memoir of Hancock is well worth checking out if you can find it (it centres around the making of The Punch and Judy Man which Oakes cowrote with Hancock). All sorts of details, like Hancock's electric razor suddenly bursting forth with a bristle-storm; he hadn't realised you were meant to empty it.

***

"All the familiar, depressing stories are there, but seem, in JFs book to be handled more sensitively and with sympathy" - that sounds like recommendation enough for me, and in keeping with Fisher's other writing.

He dealt very well with Tommy Cooper's death in the Cooper biog, and in painted a convincing picture of a man whose real joy was in pottering about in magic shops, excited by the latest tricks, regardless of their usefulness to the act. The occasionally fraught relationship between TC and his wife also seemed to be placed in perspective rather than simply a series of anecdotes.

I really hated the Joan Le Mesurier autobiography and subsequent Curse of Comedy programme (I know it was only part of the source material) because it seemed such a limited version of the truth. What's the point in focusing on the time when someone is in freefall?

Incidentally, I once had occasion to chat briefly with Jimmy Gilbert at Thames in the eighties and was surprised by his dismissal of Hancock: "A mess playing a mess."

***

He appears to be alive, according to Wikipedia (not a copper-bottomed guarantee, I know).

I saw the Face to Face interview on the big screen at the National Film Theatre in, I think, the 90s as part of a Hancock season. Seeing the sensitivity and fluidity of that face in such close-up, the range of emotions evidently passing over it even in profile and with the limitations of the television picture when recorded, was extraordinary. And course it makes the "frog" incident more painful to think about.

As part of that same NFT season they screened his appearance in The Government Inspector. Don't know how I'd feel now, but I remember at the time being distinctly underwhelmed: it wasn't a bad performance but there was the sense he'd reined himself in too much to avoid accusations of mugging.

I've found a review of the biog by Russell Davies, editor of Kenneth Williams's Diaries (and well known to Radio 7 & 2 listeners for much else).

entertainment.timeso...

Jon Pertwee

Have just listened to this and it does sound like a single talk rather than several edited together. Very enjoyable, although he skates over so many potentially sad and painful moments that you are aware it's very much a polished, anecdote-rich talk. Some of the stories, like the meeting with Eric Barker when JP is in spy mode ("Leave the poor perisher alone!"), are familiar from several radio documentaries, possibly from different occasions.

There's also a rather sad moment when he reveals he turned down the Mainwaring part in Dad's Army: he admits no one could have played it like Arthur Lowe but then says, a little wistfully, that he, JP, could perhaps have added his own twists to the role. And he was second on the Beeb's wishlist for the new Who: Ron Moody was first.

***

A pleasing memory of JP on TV:

On Blankety Blank, Terry Wogan greeted him by saying "And may I say how very pert you're looking?"

To which JP replied: "How very banal of you, Sir."

ITMA

I have listened to the odd episode of ITMA in the past and while I'd hate to purchase a boxed set there is a great curiosity value in hearing it from time to time - there are the seeds of The Goons in there if nothing else ... alright, and one may, perhaps, marvel at how easily pleased wartime audiences were. But the performers are good, and ITMA is referred to so often in books etc about the development radio comedy that a dutiful half hour listen should be seen as a kind of nasty but necessary medicine to cure your ignorance about that period before the golden age of fifties radio comedy. BBC 7 has also rebroadcast one of the army shows Charlie Chester was involved with, and I can only describe it as differently bad - but equally fascinating. Do we have to be saturated with The Goons and Hancock all the time?

***

I heard it too and I do think there may have been some unedited semi-intentional moments of innuendo (if that makes sense), not dwelt on, but presumably used in the first place to help galvanise the audience.

Not certain whether they came from Ted Kavanagh's script, Tommy Handley as a performer wringing what he could out of it, or merely the audience over-excitedly picking up on the possibility of subliminal rudery in a BBC broadcast and Handley responding. Nor can I quote any of the lines, so perhaps I should ask whether other listeners shared this feeling.

Re that edition of the show in general, interesting to hear that some gags didn't appear to get a titter but, as today, the audience responded with applause to jokes perceived as clever. I also noticed there was a lot of wordplay which had no satiric intent but had a kind of musical power, aided by Handley's (and others') shotgun delivery so - a bit like those subliminal innuendoes - presumably the intention is to increase a sense of communal hysteria in the audience. You can certainly see what the Goons borrowed and capitalised on and as many readers will know Milligan took a particular satisfaction in sneaking rudenesses past the producer (Hugh Jampton etc).

***

Certainly what you get in ITMA is something difficult to replicate today: the sense of taking part in an experience shared by the whole nation.

And the lack of Milliganesque bite which dates ITMA is also, I suppose, understandable in the circumstances: sales of Alice in Wonderland apparently experienced something of a boost in World War One, and I suppose the appetite for simple nonsense during times which seem without explanation is an understandable human need, radiating the consoling message that at least we're all in this confusion together.

The time for that edge of cynicism and satire (Goon Show potshots at military incompetence etc) comes later when there is the leisure to reflect. And I haven't researched it, but I would imagine the Goons' original audience would not have been as universal as ITMA's: a sharp fall-off in the older age bracket. Teenagers, ex-servicemen, but not their parents or grandparents. Unless the war unlocked an appetite for cynicism in everyone?

***

This is taken from a current thread on Take It From Here, but it may be useful to paste an extract here as well. It's from a book called The Laughtermakers, published in 1971, by David Nathan. Frank Muir is talking about the extent to which ITMA, TIFH and the Goons are products of their time.

“Good comedy is relevant and local and pinned to a time. … ITMA needed the war. It was nothing before the war, fantastically good during the war and awful after the war. Take It From Here could only have happened after the last war which explains its temporariness. The best post-war show was the Goons, because they brought a new dimension into comedy. .. The Goon Show could have happened after any war. It was not the product of anything apart from Spike Milligan’s near-genius – if not complete genius. It came about through Spike’s – everybody’s – reaction against regimentation. It happened with Lewis Carroll when he threw off the mathematician’s logic. But it’s not only the writing end, it’s the receiving end as well. If Spike had written The Goon Show at any other time it wouldn’t have worked. The audience’s receptivity has to be right for that sort of show, or it doesn’t get off the ground. All the same, the Goons was a far more permanent sort of humour than Take It From Here. It was a far more positive creation. It influenced the whole world of humour.”

***

I was recently reading David Robinson's book on Charlie Chaplin and came across part of a 1909 script from his Fred Karno days which might interest readers of this thread. What's surprising to note is how closely the rhythms match those the ITMA scripts and how easily one can imagine Handley as one of the speakers. This is from a piece called Skating, written by Chaplin's brother Sidney, Karno and J. Hickory Wood. Suppose this either means that ITMA had one foot in the past even before programmes like the Goons made it seem dated or that the cross-talk style is timeless.

"There we stood with our retreat cut off."
"Our what cut off?"
"Our retreat cut off."
"Oh, stop it."
"There we stayed for three days without food or water, think of it, not even a drop of water. What did we do?"
"We drank it neat."
[...]
"How's the world been treating you?"
"Oh, up and down."
"Are you working?"
"Now and then."
"Where are you working?"
"Oh, here and there."
"Do you like it?"
"Well, yes and no."
"What do you work at?"
"Oh, this and that."
"You're always in work, I suppose?"
"Well, in and out."
"Do you work hard? On and off."
"How much do you earn?"
"That and half as much again."
"Who do you work for?"
"Mr So-and-So."
"Well - are you looking for work?"
"I'm afraid to, in case I find it."

***

Ah, I'll never forget the day when a surreptitious cash deal in a farmyard resulted in a meal which was able, for once, to feed our whole family by augmenting the dread Strachey-devised foodstuff: the dish was, of course, coq au snoek.

***

On a more worthy note (I regretted my earlier post within nanoseconds of sending it), if Mr Strachey was associated with food shortages in general then the precise allusion might be to the prewar expectation of an orange in your Christmas stocking.

In the superb Launder and Gilliat film Millions Like Us, which examines the experiences of a varied group of people in wartime (and is recommended as an antidote to Noel Coward's films) there's a caption which reads something like: "An orange is a small reddish-purplish pulpy fruit once common in Britain."

***

There is a handy summary of the film here:

www.screenonline.org...

And one of its most affecting moments also offers a clue about the appeal of ITMA. The film is mostly set in a munitions factory and there is what appears to be genuine location filming in a large works canteen. Without giving too much away, when one character has suffered a tremendous shock she is eased into an awareness of the bigger picture through the communal singing of an old music hall song; gradually, through the example of her workmate, she begins to join in.

I suppose the relentlessness of the catchphrases in ITMA did something similar: it wasn't comedy meant to challenge in the way that the Goons did; it was about offering reassurance, familiarity at a time when it was most needed, and the catchphrases meant that all ages, young and old, had something to hang on to even when the odd bit of wordplay zipped by - though even then the crosstalk style of delivery reached back to the music hall (see earlier post re Charlie Chaplin).

And above all the programme conveys the sense of a communal experience which we can't begin to comprehend today. The most (possibly the only) sensible article I read at the height of Diana-mania was in the Guardian: it suggested that people were responding to a desire to be part of an event bigger than themselves, their own individual needs, and the death of Diana (for an illusory moment anyway) offered the closest experience to that since wartime.

Maybe there's also something about the way the various grotesque characters come and go but Handley remains resolutely centrestage, unfazed by any of them. So he was to radio comedy (literally at the centre of people's homes at the time) what Churchill was to the wider stage at that time, which would explain the impact of Handley's own funeral: both in some way represented the spirit of Britain.

***

Was he also responsible for butter rationing? I recall Russell Davies playing a song by Elsie Carlisle called Please Leave My Butter Alone. And in AA Milne's volume of light verse for adults (he had a considerable career before and after Winnie the Pooh) written in WW2 called Behind (or Between?) the Lines there's a tribute to his much-missed butter:

There is, as must have been observed,
Butter and butter. Mine is salt.
For years my taste has never swerved,
My judgement never been at fault.

Saltless: the unrewarding stare
One gives to jokes one has not seen.
Salted: I take the morning air
As radiant as a May Day Queen.

It ends:

Keep, O keep your vaseline,
Be it ten shillings or a pound -
I give it to the war machine
To make its silly wheels go round.

***

avianenoch, your post brings out something not always considered: that the personal associations we bring are part of the experience. (It doesn't rule out the possibility of critical assessment, in my view - just makes it more interesting and complex.)

I was part of the transistor age so don't have a radio equivalent but was certainly taught to associate watching a certain Midlands-based soap with pleasure by my cunning mother's regular placing of a bowl of hot chicken soup in front of me just as it was about to begin. It was both a privilege (singled out for this special attention, like Laurie Lee, mutatis mutandis, in Cider with Rosie) and a curse (an enduring addiction to the genre).

Radio was never a communal experience in our house so that radio comedy was something I discovered in my teens in the seventies when there was a spate of repeats (and Radio Two was always heavily nostalgiac). I regret missing out on that extra dimension, which I suppose is why the social context of these long-ago broadcasts is now of interest to me. In his autobiography and in several interviews Eric Sykes has referred to the experience of walking down a street on a hot night and hearing his script for Frankie Howerd in Variety Bandbox coming from every single open window and door; sad to think that that - and the hold that ITMA once had over a whole nation - will never happen again.

***

By coincidence I was reading the autobiography of Jessie Matthews, the later Mrs Dale, a few months ago. Can't remember if the circumstances of her taking over the role were gone into in any detail, but her stage and screen career and personal life overall were fairly punishing with various breakdowns - though I think by the time of Mrs Dale her life was on a more even keel. The main thing I remember about her is the kindness she showed a then unknown and nervous Hutch who was the pianist in the Cochran revue One Dam [sic] Thing After Another; he later backed her on several recordings. Ah, Hutch - "One for the teenagers," as Roy Hudd would say. His life - in a recentish biography by Charlotte Breese - is an eye-opener.

***

I'm reviving this thread, on topic, as I have just listened to the final episode of ITMA as broadcast on Bill Oddie's Comedy Controller show. It probably wasn't hugely different from earlier episodes which have cropped up on 7 if you examined it closely - yet it was. All very subjective but I couldn't help thinking the absence of a war did seem to make it sort of pointless, as Frank Muir said in a piece I've quoted earlier on in this thread: silliness which is heartening in the face of something horrible, but not quite beguiling enough on its own. And this episode - he died a few days later - was in 1949.

It was interesting to hear Oddie's take, which was that much early radio comedy felt as though it had simply been transplanted from the halls, without any real effort to change it. He also suggested you could "hear" Handley and others reading, by which I presume he meant either that the performances were too big, or maybe too controlled, for the intimacy of radio.

This sort of fits with the idea that the Goons (which Muir greatly admired, if you can find the earlier post quoting from the book The Laughtermakers) were a real breakthrough because they were conceived for radio - think of the speed of delivery (far more revved-up than ITMA's crosstalk) and the sophistication of those effects. Indeed there are instances of Milligan going down horribly in theatres and Sellers getting his revenge on the audience by coming on and playing a record - all the way through.

Count Arthur Strong

Entertaining enough but does anyone have the same problem as me? I always get distracted trying to work out who is he specifically parodying?

***

I suppose I expected/wanted more specific fifties/sixties showbiz references if that's where he's coming from, a bit like Simon Day's Tommy Cockles character. I can certainly see that he's part of a noble tradition of bumblers. But a big part of the pleasure of Shuttleworth for me is the sense of a whole world of hospices, garden centres (with their newfangled "campuccinos"), fun runs etc. I don't get that sense of a precisely realised world with the Count but maybe I'm looking for the wrong thing.

***

Yes, I get it and by and large I enjoy the show ... there's just that sense, for me, of something not wholly in focus. I want a clearer sense of his world, which will then give a more precise notion of what's at stake for him when he messes up.

***

I do like it ... maybe I need to unshackle myself from expectations. I had trouble with Vic Reeves' Big Night Out an' all, expecting by the decor that this was to be a parody of the old Tom Jones shows made for US consumption.

***

Maybe I haven't been clear - it's not the pleasantness of the character for me; it's about wanting the world he inhabits to be consistent and fully thought out - in other words for the writer to have done his/her/their homework so throughly that as a listener I don't have to be distracted by thinking "That doesn't fit in if this is a spoof of a particular era" or "this is a sudden lurch in tone" or "what exactly is he trying to do here?"

I'm not saying the programme does or doesn't do the above; I need more time. I enjoyed the half an episode I heard today and the processes whereby he grasps the right word eventually work well, but my personal jury is still out on whether he's likely to last and resonate in the way that, for me anyway, John Shuttleworth does (we are all, like John, filling time with meaningless activity, avoiding the bleak thought of "the only end of age").

Of course if you don't like Shuttleworth then there's another argument blasted out of the water.

Comedy can perform a variety of functions: it can heal and inform; it can reassure; it can divert. It can do all these things at once, which is when it gets really good. But if it only diverts, great: a friend who was analysing the structure of a sitcom in some detail went on to mention an episode of Simon Nye's Hardware. It was slipshod and careless by comparison, he said, but by God it made him laugh and he was grateful enough for that. As, most of the time, am I.

I suppose I'm basically saying I need more time to decide whether the Count will go into my personal First Division. I will, however, say that even if you have to stretch matters to describe it as a sitcom I have no doubt, no doubt anywhere at all in any corner of my heart, that in time the comic strip Drunken Bakers in the humorous publication Viz will be regarded as the work of genius it undoubtedly is.

***

Yes, I think that's why I'm not hundred percent sure about him myself. He looks like Gilbert Harding who I associate with the fifties but the name suggests to me the singer Count John McCormack, who was even earlier. He's familiar with the name of Jimmy Clitheroe to judge from the last episode but Clitheroe was around for a long time. He's also like a Harry Worth with the bumblingness but without the benevolence - which I suppose actually means not very much like Harry Worth at all.

A lot of the people in rubbish seventies sitcoms came from a variety background which further confuses the issue. Still, I'm enjoying it and will go on listening.

***

I certainly enjoyed the last Radio 4 episode - there is a pleasure in seeing just what not-quite-right phrase he will reach for and enjoying the warped logic of the associative process ... still not hundred percent sure.

***

Enjoying it but am still trying to work out how I feel about it. With another similar character, the persona created by Harry Worth, he's essentially a well-meaning character who inadvertantly creates mayhem. With the venerable Count I don't really get him as a character other than a vehicle for all those malapropisms as he searches for le mot juste. (I can't do italics.) That is amusing and diverting but I'm not as aware of a character beneath as I am with John Shuttleworth or Harry Worth and that bothers me. With JS, he's boring but you feel that his creator loves and understands him and sees himself in him (I don't know any of this, of course, other than reading that JS was based in part on old men he observed in fancy mice contests and on his own father). In other words, what is behind the Count? And to those who say it's simply funny, so what's the problem? Fine, and it does amuse and divert me. But it's comedy of a second division order, I feel. So why isn't Dave Podmore, not the most profound show in the world, also second division? (Again in my opinion.) Answer: because there is a precisely realised world there; even though I know little about cricket I can make out what is being sent up in minute detail. Yes, maybe in direct interaction with an audience it's different. Though with JS my feeling is an audience dilutes him - hmmm... how would the Count fare in a radio show sans audience (like Shuttleworth and Pod)?

***

"He's Count Arthur Strong, there is no antecedent, he's not mimicking anyone or deconstructing anyone."

At the very least, the performer/writer is drawing on a tradition of comedians who get their words wrong for humorous intent. Hylda Baker springs to mind, though I admit I can't think of anyone who regularly makes quite the same number of associative leaps before alighting on the correct word, so maybe that counts, NPI, as an innovation, though you could also see it simply as an extension of what's gone on before.

I still hesitate about him for reasons mentioned earlier: a) I'm not certain he's part of a precisely realised world and b) other than being a device for the expression of these verbal leaps, what does the character add up to? And these two related factors slightly lessen my enjoyment and immersion. It's about the need for something else between the jokes: a strain of melancholy, perhaps.

I'll be quiet now. I promise.

***

Just when I'd promised to shut up on the subject ... Ok, here goes. I am - usually - amused by the show but something holds me back from really giving in to hilarity in this particular case. And I take this to mean that the writer or performer (same in this case) has omitted something so I'm trying to work out what that might be. So the critical reaction is a way of trying to understand the rumblings in the gut (if that's not too indelicate a metaphor) - but the intestinal tract is where the unease starts.

But I don't know what I can add to what I've said before, which is that I don't think I quite buy the character as a three dimensional creation, and when I feel I'm just being sold gags that isn't enough to take a sitcom to my heart even if it passes a perfectly agreeable half hour. I can understand what some others have said about its being about old age and its attendant annoyances, so maybe it comes down to the irrationalities of individual taste, like the letters I used to read in music papers in the seventies: "How can you say group A are the best ever when it's clear group B are the best?" But all I can say is I "get" the humanity and vulnerability of John Shuttleworth and, whether it's a reasonable reaction or not, I feel more manipulated in the case of the Count and I cannot provide any further arguments to justify this difference.

One coda which was why I returned to this thread in the first place: listening a few minutes ago to The Clitheroe Kid I heard an embarrassed Alfie tell Jimmy's sister something like: "He's just been telling me about your grandfather's windbag - downfall - windup." And Jimmy Clitheroe has been namechecked by the Count, so perhaps there's a direct source of inspiration, though his slightly more extended scrambling after intended words do tickle me.

***

"There is not the time to develop character, and it's not the point anyway, characters should only be sketched out enough to provide jokes!"

Blimey, the Count has, as always, stirred up a lot of debate - especially when I thought I'd retired myself from this thread. Luckily I have nothing more constructive to do with my time.

Anyway, I fundamentally disagree with what you say. Sitcom would be more accurately described as "charactercom" (a term I've already used on another thread, quoting John Brennan): without the character element it's difficult to care. And (again on another thread) I've referred to the relationship at the heart of many sitcoms: Frasier and dad; Harold and Albert; Del Boy and Rodney etc.

I remember seeing the series of sitcom tryouts which Channel 4 used to do at the Riverside Studios in London. Three different shows a night onstage. Very interesting to see them but very few made it to TV.

Two common flaws.

A lot of the would-be shows were telling a single story with a conclusion; entertaining enough as a half hour comedy but lacking the essential materials for further episodes.

The other recurrent mistake was to treat the exercise as solely as a means of cramming half an hour with as many gags as possible at the expense of character, pummelling the audience into exhausted submission, presumably in the hope that someone from Channel 4 would be there that night to pick up on the resultant laff-o-rama.

Even when it appeared to work you could tell which shows were really a kind of confidence trick. And I like to think that Channel 4 executives felt the same (or possibly they just didn't like commissioning shows). I certainly remember on another occasion talking to Mike Bolland, a former major player on Channel 4 and BBC Scotland, and agreeing with him that sitcom had essentially the same rules as drama - plus gags. But the gags had to come out of the characters, and therefore the characters had to be thoroughly understood first.

When, in that famous scene, Basil Fawlty berates the mini with a branch it's funny because he has led himself to this disastrous state of affairs - and even at the supreme moment he has to blame something external rather than admit his own stupidity to himself. It's a slapstick, physical comedy moment but it comes out of Basil's personal inadequacy. The same could be said of many Frasier moments. And the regularly hymned "Don't tell him, Pike!" comes out of Mainwaring's understandable anxiety to protect the "stupid boy".

Yes, I do think that Hancock is more fully rounded than CAS - not simply because we've seen him in a greater variety of situations but because G & S understand about using other characters to illuminate that main character. Galton and Simpson (forgive me for repeating more points I've made elsewhere on this board) said later writers for Hancock got it wrong - he needed to be up against intransigent officialdom for his bluster to appear human and understandable, otherwise he could simply come over as the term they often gave him for others: a buffoon. And I would suggest much the same is true for Victor Meldrew. Victor's actions may compound the problem but it started with a thoughtless workman etc.

Going back to your post, maybe it depends precisely what you mean by "characters should only be sketched out enough to provide jokes", but I read that as you regarding the character being a kind of afterthought, whereas I think knowing the character inside out is the first essential step from which appropriate jokes can then come.

A good recentish example of gags at the expense of character: Frank Skinner's sitcom Shane. I found it quite disturbing (but hypnotic) to watch the way that Skinner (and his scarey sitcom mini-me son) were unrelenting gag machines at the expense of believability and consistency of any sort. Ditto a brief-lived series called Blind Men (I think), with Jesse Birdsall, Sophie Thompson and someone else about two rival salesmen. One line which Ms. Thompson had was along the lines of "If earhairs were explosives you wouldn't have enough to blow your brains out" and it immediately became apparent: Funny Line. The writer has written a Funny Line. Forget about what's going on in the story, just don't let this Funny Line escape. Yes, it was an ITV 1 sitcom (remember them?) but even so.

Simon Nye, by contrast, is a master at bedding down gags in character: in Men Behaving Badly it's clear how the Gary character is feeling with each jokey line he utters. And if Caroline Quentin's character had spoken a line like Sophie Thompson's character you can bet Gary would be ironically clutching his stomach, ie registering that Dorothy had been trying to be clever, to score a point off him. In Nye's best work (not Carrie and Barry) as an audience we're having our cake and eating it, which I think is what sitcoms are meant to do: we're being amused and being carried along in the story as we see the character pursuing his or her goal.

And this doesn't exempt the more surreal examples of the genre. The world of Father Ted, say, has its own logic and rules and in each episode we can believe and accept whatever it is Ted is striving to achieve; even if you examine the supremely strange Nightingales by the late Paul Makin you will find it's clear what the characters want beat by beat, even when the show morphs into a Jacobean revenge tragedy.

Even in something as broadbrush and simple as On the Buses (which I have found myself watching recently with a surprising amount of pleasure) the characters have clear objectives and, dated as the barbs may be there is always some kind of comeback by Blakey or Olive to whatever gag-cum-insult may be hurled at them. According to the show's fanclub website Stephen Lewis even invented a backstory for Blakey - y'know, just like for real drama (just don't ask me to explain the array of dolly birds willing to throw themselves at Reg Varney).

To round off, and to get back more directly to the Count, the actress Irene Vanbrugh worked on the gossamer-light stage comedies of AA Milne in the 1920s. She said something to the effect that the characters appeared to be protected from the world by a veil of gauze, but Milne's writing was such that you felt the characters could rip that gauze down if they wanted. Sitcoms don't need to dig deep into character each week but you need to have a sense, I think, of who the characters are and what they want in order to feel totally immersed. As in straight drama, when that isn't clear then an audience, whether it is able to articulate the lack or not, will be uneasy. Which is how I feel re Count Arthur Strong. It doesn't feel to me like there's a sufficiently thought through backstory, that it may be all gauze - all cleverness. I may be wrong and I will keep listening. I certainly hate it when sentimentality is bolted on like that terrible sitcom with Jasper Carrott and Meera Syall/Nina Wadja, but I don't think it would dilute the comedy for us to get the occasional glimpse into whatever bleaknesses there may be in the Count's life.

Beat. Clears throat.

Erm ... Can I go now?

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Spir-An,

I'll likewise respond to a few points in your post. I can see there are several things I didn't make clear.

One is that in conventional drama the focus is usually on a single person - the protagonist - and that even if other characters are complex their function is primarily to illuminate that central character. The writer/tutor Tim Fountain calls the protagonist the "motorway" and the other characters sliproads. So yes, in drama as in sitcom not everyone can be explored equally or there would a problem with focus. (Not the only way to structure plays but at the theatre I often find that as soon as I have to start asking myself where's the protagonist it's an ominous sign.)

When I talk about knowing all the characters inside out, however, I'm thinking more of the process for the writer rather than the audience. Even if someone has a limited role onscreen in most episodes of a sitcom the writer - and then the actor - needs, I would suggest, a wider sense of what makes them tick.

And that's what I understood from the AA Milne actress's remark about the gauze veil: even if what the characters are saying is trivial there needs to be a sense of something underpinning that, that the outline of a fuller person is somehow there behind the witticisms should the need arise.

And I would suggest this process of exploration is only different in degree (the time available) rather than in kind from conventional drama. It was certainly my experience being present throughout the rehearsal process for a sitcom pilot with one of the writers on hand that the actors asked the same sort of questions about their characters as might have been asked in a stage play.

Against that, however, quite a large chunk of the one week rehearsal time (a complete afternoon) was given up to the perfecting of one small bit of comic business which would only last a few seconds onscreen, so priorities are not quite the same, but that certainly ties in with Mike Bolland's drama-plus-gags idea. To put it as simply as possible, the basic stuff about characters' wants and needs (or objectives and superobjectives) has to be attended to in both forms. Without it, even good actors like Gwen Taylor and Sam Kelly (in the TV sitcom Barbara) plummet. But maybe our disagreement is about what constitutes *detailed* exploration in either case. Less of it in sitcom but it still has to be there.

To move on, when you say "what I was thinking of as an alternative to characters as the focus was the very 'sit' of sitcom: the situation, which potentially supplies a large part of the humour", I don't agree. Del Boy and Rodney could be astronauts but they'd still be Del Boy and Rodney. Mainwaring and Wilson could be running an office, etc. The situation is a means to an end - exposing the characters' follies - but the characters, I believe, come first, though some "sits" are more likely to be conducive to bringing out the characters than others: Ricky Gervais makes the point that Brent needs to be in an authoratitive role as that's the context in which his behaviour - mistakenly seeking affection rather than respect - is supremely inappropriate.

Another point. When you distinguish between comedy drama and sitcom where does that leave something like Frasier or Larry Sanders? Many genuinely painful and poignant moments in both yet I've never heard them described as anything other than sitcoms. And the creators of Frasier made the conscious decision to trust the audience to stay with them for that page and a half when no one was cracking wise.

I do agree with what you say re character development and fleshing out also happening over a long period of time, though this doesn't contradict the importance of intial character exploration by the writer(s). In recent Dad's Army tributes Jimmy Perry has said that Arthur Lowe gradually became Mainwaring and vice versa, and Galton and Simpson seem to have taken bits from Hancock and from themselves etc. And yes, some of it may or may not be conscious: in another thread I have quoted Frank Muir in the book The Laughtermakers saying that because of G & S being who they were, inevitably their attitudes came out in whatever they wrote, consciously or not, and had they tried straight drama it may have been less successful, which is an interesting thought.

But I don't think you can separate out "Be Funny" from exploration of character and I continue to maintain that comedy comes from the central character's failings.

Postscript: Re Count Arthur Strong in particualr, have just read newNigelParkinson's post (message 45) which (sob) makes rather a lot of sense. So please ignore all the above and step well back as this message will self-destruct in five... four.. three...

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Hi Spir-An,

Poss not astronauts but Del and Rodney could be in a variety of situations which could give Del's eye for the main chance an equal pportunity. Even spacewise, I could imagine his conning Rodders out of being the first man on the moon ... But I still say character is primary; it's just a question of finding whatever settings might show that off to best advantage. And re Red Dwarf - someone described it as "student flatshare in space", which I think is true.

Re Safety Catch, have only heard clips. But it sounds like a mismatch - seemed naturalistically played so perhaps tone was wrong if it was intended to have satirical overtones. But Rigor Mortis was about the self-delusion of a number of workmates and could have transferred to any work situation, I feel - the specific setting was a bit of top dressing but it was the working out of the characters' interactions that made it a good series, I feel.

Yes, I think some of the shows you mention are really actual, or glorified, monologues. In the Horrible Hancock Hiatus thread, mostly chewing the fat with Eurkablitz I suggested that that most sitcoms have a central relationship of a dreamer and a doer, a Panza to deflate Quixote, and I think we came to the conclusion that you could also have a situation where the rest of the world is, effectively, that other person, giving the self-deluding protagonist a reality check. Now that could mean that Hancock in the Blood Donor is the same as Count Arthur Strong but what I'd suggest is that if CAS is really indifferent to the world around him then that is a glorified monologue whereas Hancock is actually engaging with that outside world (much as he resents and dislikes most of it). Maybe the crucial thing is you can imagine the Count having the same sort of arguments in his house by himself trying to locate his toothbrush whereas Hancock needs others to allow his own pomposity and bluster to show. That great exchange (in context): "Are you a doctor, then?" / "No, I never really bothered" from the Blood Donor is an example.

I don't agree about sitcoms only risking poignancy when well-established: Frasier (whose pilot is rightly regarded as a classic of the genre) hits the ground up and running with a truly painful moment with Martin. But more generally, I suppose, it's true.

Seems that most sitcoms now have a serial element but there could probably be several subcategories - in other words, the "serial" thing can apply to a whole season in a rather loose way - eg Frasier loses his radio job - or there can be more specific developments episode by episode - though madness lies in more specific categorisation, I suspect.

Okay, think I'm done for today...

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"yes, it is a mishmash of many war-time comedians" - maybe that's what gets me. Those comics seem fully formed in a way that CAS does not.

But I suppose the argument could also be that the writer/creator is deliberately avoiding the warmth which emanated from Rob Wilton, Sandy Powell et al, however ineffectual they were being. I suppose Count Arthur Strong could be said to be a comic character for our times, adrift in a society which doesn't care about him, someone whose cultural references are no longer understood by those around him. Possibly.

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This puts me in mind of a well known newsagents/stationers/booksellers etc with a very common surname such as used to be used by unmarried couples in hotels.

Recently - in the last couple of years, I think - they have started doing a bit of hard sell at the till, shoving large chocolate bars etc at you.

Does anyone find it quite as annoying as I do? Anyway, it took me quite some time to work out an appropriate response and took up a great deal of my waking hours.

My responses, in the event, ranged from a cold "No" to the sloganeering "No to hard sell!" which made me feel, respectively, guilty or overreacting.

The eventual formula I alighted on, which has served me well in the last few months is simply this: "Pass." I commend it to you. It either dumbfounds assistants or, as yesterday, the response is: "Fair enough."

Now, before I descend into Count Arthur's solipsism, I am aware that the assistants are probably obliged to ask this question but I also feel entitled to voice my objection.

Adam Bloom

Overtrailed, yes, but doesn't 7 do that with everything? And they don't even bother to change the trail so it's about an already broadcast episode. Lazy. For me, his brand of neurosis about everyday social interactions is highly agreeable but it's not the sort of programme which gains much in the repeating because so much depends on the initial surprise of the paths he wanders down - I also heard it on 4 and it's only moderately diverting once you know where it's headed. Good sig tune though - Fats Waller's African Ripples I believe. Possibly an allusion to the ripple effect of others' behaviour on him? Or possibly not.

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You're right. I'm humiliated and ashamed. I wanted to correct myself earlier but pride, like some [insert appropriate simile in final draft] prevented me.

Ah (making quick recovery), but maybe the allusion in the theme toon could then be to a handful of keys provided by Mr Bloom to understanding human interaction.

"One never knows, do one?"

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The way to understand Adam Bloom is also the key to enjoying Larry David's persona in Curb Your Enthusiasm: they are doomed, or have elected, to enact to the full the neurotic responses to apparently trivial incidents we normally suppress in ourselves.

If you have never found yourself full of disproportionate rage (or at least irritation) over some misunderstanding in an interaction with a shop assistant or waiter, and found yourself possessed of a strong desire to elaborate further, despite knowing that such a course of acton could only lead to further complications, then I can only salute and envy you.

As a corrective, however, here is an article about taking a more balanced approach to the irritations of daily life, although if he should happen across this message board I would beg Adam Bloom not to read it as it may eat away at his belief in his act, leading to playing smaller and smaller gigs then, finally, unemployment, and then he really would have something to moan about, but it wouldn't be funny as it would be less universal and couldn't therefore be worked up into an effective act for a comeback in some small venue at the Edinburgh fringe and ... anyway, the rest of you can read it, but beware that understanding and tolerance of one's fellow human beings may follow. Personally, I'm trying to resist.

www.guardian.co.uk/b...

Geoffrey Perkins

I first came across his name when listening to The Jason Explanation, a sketch show he produced starring David Jason and Sheila Steafel, on radio in the seventies: when a character had to be named it invariably seemed to be "Perkins". There is an obiturary in the Guardian today, findable here:

www.guardian.co.uk/m...

But the most telling detail comes from Graham Linehan's additional note, reproduced below, which indicates both his foresight and the extent of his influence on Father Ted:

"Geoffrey was the man who found our early Father Ted script, at that time written as a mock-documentary, and suggested we turn it into a sitcom. He was the man who chose the house that became our iconic central location, poring over a pile of location photographs, stabbing it with his finger and saying: 'That's the one.' He also persuaded us to use Neil Hannon's Songs of Love as our theme music.

"This last one was a sticking point for a while. Arthur Matthews and I preferred a song by Neil that would later become A Woman of the World, from the Casanova album. That song was jaunty and silly and to us perfect in that it seemed to be subtly making fun of the form we were working in. 'Why do you want to make fun of your show?' said Geoffrey, finally, looking wounded and worried. 'People will love these characters.'

"I later realised that it was a fork in the road, that discussion, and if we had not travelled the way Geoffrey suggested, we'd have ended up lost - we might never have made it to series three. He gave the show a heart, and gave me, still young, and unsure as to what type of person I should try to become, someone to model myself on. I wish we'd worked together more."

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it is broadcast as part of this series of repeats, The Jason Explanation of Taboos is a particularly good episode, right from the opening seconds, as you will (I hope) hear - I won't give it away. There is also a sketch which takes Victorian prudishness about piano legs as its starting point...

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Not sure whether it's also being discussed elsewhere but here seems a good place to say that the Archive Hour tribute to Geoffrey Perkins was exemplary: a perfect mixture of round table discussion, narration, sound clips, warmth, humour, seriousness. That this was assembled so quickly after his death is a credit to all involved - and the readiness of people to speak is presumably a testament to the affection he inspired.

Right. Pub?

Spike Milligan

Have just seen the new play about Spike Milligan, Surviving Spike, at Edinburgh and thought some members might be interested. Presumably it will tour or transfer to London.

It's based on a book by Norma Farnes, his agent, and I have say to the format of the play is pretty unadventurous - the Norma character narrates throughout, punctuating lots of short episodes where she interacts with Spike. The whole of her time with him, from first meeting to his eventual death, is covered.

The episodic nature means it can be a bit frustrating: a couple of actors cover everyone else - we see, say, one of Spike's mistresses or Norma's husband for about five seconds as Norma in narrator mode refers to them. I'm not saying it's a bad play as a result, but it felt like it could worked as a radio play. But you could also say it's what she saw so it's not trying to be a rounded picture. There's not a spelling out of context or any assessment of the relative merits of his different writings; she just registers relief when he's back on track etc. And you could also argue that the story is in their whole time together so taking a few events and exploring them in more detail wouldn't have done the job. Though there did seem to be an opportunity missed (or tactfully avoided?) when one of Spike's wives tells NF she can't take anymore and and we get no reaction from her at all.

The performances are good and there's a section where Spike is doing a live gig which obviously plays to Barrymore's strengths. Difficult to tell at that point how much was MB and how much Spike but that made it interesting. Mopre generally, he doesn't try to do an impersonation but you do get a sense of the man.

To sum up, if you know Milligan's story already, you won't particularly learn from this play - and the narrative format makes it rather old-fashioned as a piece of writing but if neither of these things matter too much you won't be let down by the central performances of Michael Barrymore and Jill Halfpenny as Norma.

If anyone else is in Edinburgh (apart from my train-announcing nemesis) I'd be interested to know what they thought.

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It's an interesting question why no Curse of Comedy Spike. Too many people (presumably inc Norma Farnes) to block it or deny access to the writings? Too often told a tale? The series seemed to rely on its audience being surprised by the revelations. Spike's status as a national treasure? Too short a time since his death?

Not a series I enjoyed - the Hancock one was particularly bad, emanating from a trashy book. (Read Philip Oakes's short memoir as an antidote.)

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I must read it - the dramatisation seems to have been very selective from your account of the book. One of its limitations as a play was that the Norma/narrator figure had little discernable character of her own other than to be a supertolerant ministering angel. Almost no sense of her own story. I don't know how near or far such a portrayal is to reality but it didn't help the play.

Maybe a further difficulty is that Spike's problems were public knowledge - the element of surprise in the BBC 4 shows to date would not be present. Plus, perhaps, he's simply too well loved, too much of an institution to be knocked down without any qualms from the audience.

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Again I stress I haven't yet read the biography but I do know that one consequence of a death can be that the survivors wrestle for ownership of the narrative - ie the wish to set the record straight, or to retain control of the story, can be a compelling enough force, quite apart from any thought of remuneration.

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When pressed by journalists for his opinion on Mick Jagger, Keith Richards is fond of quoting Zoot Sims's summation of Stan Getz: "He's a great bunch of guys."

I've also read and enjoyed the Humphrey Carpenter book and Spike & Co by Graham McCann - an account of all the ALS writers.

Interesting to see that the stage play borrows its title from John Antrobus's memoir "Surviving Spike Milligan" even though it's based on NF's book and is dramatised by Richard Harris (not the actor but the author of Stepping Out). I skimmed the Antrobus title in a library but can't remember how good or bad it was. Was it absorbed into the play, I wonder?