Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (50 page)

Given these successes, it was surprising that critics devoted so much ink to grumbling about the decline of the television play. The charge had some validity if defined so narrowly as to focus
purely on the one-off dramas – often concerned with contemporary social issues – that during the 1970s had been showcased by the BBC’s Plays for Today. The Play for Today format
ended in 1984, its theatre-style stage sets looking dated compared with the more realistic production techniques ushered in by
Brideshead
. The lamentations were, in any case, misplaced. Far
from dying during the eighties, the television play expanded into multi-episode serials (which, hour for hour, were more cost-effective to produce) or was given the full cinematic treatment through
Channel 4’s Film on Four commissions. If the balance between confronting serious subjects and providing mere entertainment
tipped towards the latter, the quality of the
former stood comparison with the best of the previous decade, as Alan Bleasdale’s
Boys from the Blackstuff
attested.
^EN20
Nor did
increasingly sophisticated technical expertise invariably sideline an emphasis on quality scripts. Devoid of any artifice beyond the actor looking into the camera as if it were a trusted friend,
Alan Bennett’s dramatic monologues exemplified the triumph of the spoken word over visual effects. What became Bennett’s
Talking Heads
series in 1988 actually began six years
earlier with Patricia Routledge’s performance in
A Woman of No Importance
.
Talking Heads
’ themes of loneliness and loss were conveyed either in Bennett’s own
mournful tones or those of actresses who conveyed the playwright’s particular talent for giving voice to women disappointed by life.

In contrast, drama was less successful at exploring the strong female role model that – despite leading feminists’ scorn for her – the prime minister embodied in politics. It
was not until 1990, the year of Thatcher’s fall, that

Thames Television finally got round to producing a sitcom,
No Job for a Lady
, about a new female MP in the man’s world of Westminster. It succeeded neither as comedy nor as
commentary. Despite the advances made by women in the seventies, television still preferred to feature strong women from the 1940s. Set in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp,
Tenko
(1981–5) proved a success despite the initial fears of BBC programmers that an all-female lead cast (looking necessarily bedraggled) would not draw a sufficiently broad audience. The series
was devised by Lavinia Warner and co-written by Jill Hymen, who, between drafting scripts for
Howard’s Way
, repeated the resilient women in wartime formula for LWT’s drama series
about female secret agents,
Wish Me Luck
(1987–9). It could not be said that the corporation led by example. In 1985, only 8 per cent of BBC departmental heads and senior producers
were female and only 14 per cent of mid-evening programmes featured female lead characters.
⁵⁴
Although the BBC did mount an ambitious adaptation of
Fay Weldon’s
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
, in which a wife wreaks revenge on her adulterous husband and his romantic novelist lover, generally the decade’s most prominent
women on television were either news presenters or, increasingly, comediennes like Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders and Victoria Wood.

During the early eighties, comedy was heavily stratified between two different approaches to making people laugh. Mainstream acts cracking timeless and – apart from those wearisomely
perpetuating racial stereotypes – mostly inoffensive jokes about human relationships suddenly had competition from ‘alternative comedy’, which was edgier and less concerned with
following the sort of time-honoured comic structure that inevitably concluded in a
punchline. In particular, alternative comedy was more than happy to cause offence and was
concerned to address, rather than ignore, contemporary socio-political issues. This movement’s graduating academy was the Comedy Store, which opened in London in 1979. Offering a live venue
for stand-up and an audience merciless in rooting out performers likely to be disabled by stage-fright, the Comedy Store’s formula spawned imitators across the country. Among the comedians
most committed to stand-up as a protest against all forms of conservatism was Ben Elton, whose radical political agenda could scarcely have differed more from that of his uncle, Geoffrey Elton, at
the time Cambridge’s Regius Professor of Modern History. Having studied at Manchester, Ben Elton was, like so many alternative comedians of the period, a product of university but not of
Oxbridge. This generation was thus distinct both from the comic innovators of the previous decade, like the Oxbridge-educated Monty Python team, and from a new brand of adult humour emanating from
the depressed housing estates of Tyneside. The latter’s new testament was
Viz
, which started off as a cheaply produced comic-strip magazine sustained by money its creator, Chris
Donald, had invested from the enterprise allowance scheme which the government had established to offer funds to unemployed people trying to set up their own businesses. Where archetypal
alternative comedians had a limited range of political targets – Thatcher representing the bull’s eye – in a brand of left-wing invective that became known, confusingly, as
‘right-on’,
Viz
’s lack of political and cultural discernment was truly anarchic. Resembling the
Beano
, but with Geordie dialect and expletives, it mocked those that
the ‘right-on’ comedians did not care to touch:
Viz
’s regular cast of ridiculous characters included a humourless lesbian feminist campaigner called Millie Tant and a
couple of man-hungry nightclub-goers called The Fat Slags. By 1989, the magazine was selling a million copies per issue.

A rude and crude adult comic on this scale was unprecedented –
Viz
’s circulation reached more than ten times that managed even at the peak of
Oz
’s notoriety in
the early seventies – and it soon spurred many inferior imitators. Meanwhile, alternative comedy seemed more like the natural progression from the satire boom of the 1960s, replacing the
whimsy of that period with angry diatribes and drawing from a pool of talent that stretched beyond those who already knew each other from term time on the banks of the Cam or Isis. For all this,
the Oxbridge graduate satirists were far from falling out of fashion. Among the familiar names in British entertainment during the eighties were such ex-Cambridge Footlights luminaries as Emma
Thompson, Clive Anderson, Griff Rhys Jones, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, and Oxford Revue alumni Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith and Richard Curtis. Joined by the Australian comedienne Pamela Stephenson,
Atkinson, Smith and Rhys Jones became the stars of
Not the Nine O’Clock News
, a
fast-paced BBC 2 sketch show mixing topical satire with traditional comic
material. Produced by John Lloyd and Sean Hardie,
Not the Nine o’Clock News
(whose working title had, revealingly, been
Sacred Cows
) survived an indifferent first series in 1979
to become over the following three years a cult programme, spawning best-selling spin-off books and record albums. Lloyd’s intention was that his comic foursome would go on to become the new
Pythons. Atkinson, however, wanted to move on with ideas of his own, finding even greater success as the lead in four series of
Blackadder
between 1983 and 1989, a historical romp from the
Middle Ages to the First World War, which Lloyd produced and Atkinson wrote in collaboration with Richard Curtis and Ben Elton. Besides performing in their own two-man show, Rhys Jones and Smith
formed a production company, TalkBack, which created many of the most popular comedies of the following decade and eventually merged with Thames Television – in itself an extraordinary
affirmation of the business of laughter.

What was remarkable was less the achievements of all these new approaches to comedy than the resilience of traditional mainstream family entertainment in the face of the challenge. The
television ratings battle was still regularly won by comedy shows that had started in the seventies and shown little inclination to develop over time. Never straying from its cosy, middle-class,
suburban setting,
Terry and June
, which had begun as
Happy Ever After
in 1974, kept its ten-million-strong audience through to its final series in 1987. Having started their run in
1971, Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker –
The Two Ronnies
– continued to serve up light double-entendre and sing songs in fancy dress until finally bidding goodnight from one
another in 1987. While the alternative comedy circuit railed against Thatcher,
The Two Ronnies
offered a gentle spoof serial,
The Worm that Turned
(1980), in which a nation of
downtrodden men is subjugated by a female police state run from fortress-like headquarters in ‘Barbara Castle’ by a blonde bombshell – ‘a woman with an iron will and
underwear to match’ (played by Diana Dors). Whether this was a satire on Thatcher or feminism, or merely an excuse to feature leggy girls goose-stepping in leather hot pants, was left to the
viewers’ imagination. Whichever way, it was very popular. It was not the only example of slapstick fascism. Having co-created
Dad’s Army
fourteen years earlier, David Croft came
up with further wartime capers, albeit relocated to occupied France, in
’Allo ’Allo
in 1982 with both the Germans and the Resistance inheriting the amiable incompetence of
Captain Mainwaring’s platoon. The gulf between the approach to humour promoted by the Comedy Store and that being scripted by David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd (who were also responsible for the
holiday camp sitcom
Hi Di Hi!
) could be summed up in one of the recurring themes of
’Allo ’Allo
, where copies of a stolen painting,
The Fallen Madonna with the Big
Boobies
, were rolled up in an ill-concealed sausage.

Contrary to some expectations, the spirit of variety was not entirely snuffed out by the sudden deaths of Tommy Cooper and Eric Morecambe within weeks of each other in
1984. Its endurance owed much to Russ Abbott and the double acts Little and Large and Cannon and Ball. When, in 1980, Tommy Cannon and Bobby Ball appeared at the 3,200-seat Blackpool Opera House,
their two shows a day were sold out for eighteen weeks. End-of-the-pier humour it might have been, but the duo were in such demand that ITV commissioned ten series from them between 1979 and 1990,
which attracted audience figures of fifteen million.
⁵⁵
With such appeal, Cannon and Ball could reasonably claim to have inherited the mantle of
Morecambe and Wise as the most enduring successes of British comedy in the eighties. They did so without smut, profanity or topicality. For all the energy and cultural significance of the
alternative comedians and their anti-establishment jibes, it seemed that predominantly working-class audiences still mostly preferred the apolitical, non-divisive humour of slapstick and
mother-in-law jokes. More pointedly still, some who did like a bit of socio-political comment opted for the far from ‘right-on’ observations of Jim Davidson, Freddie Starr and even
(though he was no longer deemed fit for television) Bernard Manning.

The Thatcher era, with its readily identifiable and easily caricatured politicians, could scarcely have escaped the satirists’ attention whatever the input of the alternative comedy scene.
In the ITV series
The New Statesman
, Rik Mayall’s portrayal of Alan B’Stard, a pathologically amoral Conservative MP, was launched three months after Thatcher won her third term
in 1987. Although a comic grotesque, B’Stard seemed to represent everything that was assumed to be venal and arrogant about young right-wing politicians, interpreting their leader’s
gospel of self-reliance as an excuse to do as they pleased. From the moment of its launch in 1984, the most innovative and successful television political satire was ITV’s
Spitting
Image
, a technically accomplished puppet show, which mercilessly parodied Britain’s leading politicians, royal family and celebrities, while also taking particular relish in exposing the
supposed brainlessness of President Reagan. The latex puppets created by Peter Fluck and Roger Law were undoubtedly an appropriate means of satirizing a House of Commons whose raucous and vitriolic
exchanges retained the pugnacious temper of a Punch and Judy show. For its first three years,
Spitting Image
was produced by John Lloyd, fresh from
Not the Nine O’Clock News
,
who later reflected: ‘I can’t remember in my lifetime a government that was disliked as much, so certainly it came at the right time.’
⁵⁶
Donning men’s suits and chomping on Churchillian cigars, the wild-eyed Thatcher was shown as determined and demented. Her closest Cabinet supporter, Norman Tebbit,
appeared as a skinhead hooligan, violently enforcing her will. Whatever the intention, it was certainly debatable
whether portraying the prime minister and her henchman as
brutal, ruthless and strong-willed was as damaging to their reputations as depicting their opponents as gormless and incompetent buffoons. The Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, was represented as a
vacuous windbag, while the puppet of his deputy, Roy Hattersley, constantly sprayed spittle from its mouth when speaking. The Alliance was treated equally disrespectfully: the Liberal leader, David
Steel, so loathed being depicted as a tiny head protruding from the breast-pocket of a dominant and vain David Owen that he even discussed with Owen what measures they might take to avoid
reinforcing the popular impression.
⁵⁷
In contrast, the masculine depiction of Thatcher only pandered to the well-worn joke that she was the only man
in the Cabinet. Perhaps the most famous sketch involved her taking her colleagues out to dinner. Having chosen raw steak for herself, she replies to the waitress’s enquiry ‘And what
about the vegetables?’ by gazing at her Cabinet and announcing: ‘Oh, they’ll have the same as me.’