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Sunshine on Putty: The golden age of British comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office Ben Thompson Fourth Estate, 2004, 459 pp This review first appeared in Third Way, April 2004.
Sunshine on Putty is something of a disappointment, not beause it isn't any good - it is - but because, like your average exorcist, it promises more than it delivers. (Boom boom.) Its subject is British TV comedy from 1990 to 2002, from the advent of Reeves and Mortimer to the second coming of The Office. (For ease of reference, Father Ted's Craggy Island is generously annexed to Britain.) Thompson's claim is that in this 'post-alternative epoch', TV comedy came into a central role in our culture, so that the best of it 'gave us a clearer picture of what was happening to our nation than any other form of artistic endeavour'. Therefore his plan is to analyse comedy in the context of the social and political culture of the 90s, and see what its deep dark truthful mirror reveals about us. It sounds like an interesting exercise well worth doing, and when Thompson sticks to the script it is. The problem is that those moments are well spaced out amid journalistic reports and interviews where Caroline Aherne (co-writer and star of The Royle Family) explains why she did an OK photoshoot or Stewart Lee and Patrick Marber argue about the writing of On the Hour. You repeatedly get the feeling that you are reading articles from a colour supplement, and in fact you are. Thompson has been the Sindie's comedy correspondent and written on the subject for many other newspapers and magzines. Consequently, the book cannot decide whether to be incisive cultural scrutiny or a sunshine home for previously enjoyed journalism, and so it repeatedly wanders off-message. In such a long book there is room for plenty of both, and its 25 chapters tune into every show you could reasonably expect. The fact that even so there are some treasured favourites cruelly neglected only confirms the contention that we are living through a golden age, and if nothing else Thompson should be thanked for celebrating that without the benefit of nostalgia. The book is at its best where Thompson sticks to business in the few chapters devoted to issues rather than individual shows: morality, racial and sexual inequality, 'a little bit of politics'. He considers for example whether political comedy, from Michael Moore to Christopher Morris is anything more than 'politicized egotism', gives a convincingly pessimistic reading of the racial and sexual 'equal opportunities that never knock' and offers moral interogations of Ali G and David Baddiel. He even has some surprisingly good words for Mary Whitehouse, her social commitment and perspicacity. Apart from these though, you have to trawl through pages of 'Bob says wistfully' to find the flashes of thought-provoking insight, which are frustratingly well worth reading when they come. At one point he suggests that the dominance of adult cartoons like The Simpsons are part of a culture of reliving childhood on one's own terms. He argues that Fantasy Football League was part of a cultural shift 'where actually doing things ourselves is no longer deemed as interesting - or important - as responding to other people doing them'. Historically he makes the interesting point that the late 80s dimming of alternative comedy's TV star led a number of performers to divert into starting the independent production companies that so dominated the 90s firmament, their present strength coming from a past weakness. This leads us to Margaret Thatcher, whose shadow probably ought to fall longer across the book than it does. Her reform of television ironically gave birth to both these production companies and Channel 4, but Thompson argues that hers was the hardbitten hand that fed alternative comedy and its progeny in another way too: Thatcherism was the death of shame, and if that applied to yuppies with their amoral aquisitiveness and amusing carphones, why not to comedians swearing about tampons? It's an interesting idea, but I think it's flawed because it conflates economic and moral liberalism, when the two are traditional enemies. Ultimately, despite these interesting contributions, the book fails because such analysis needs to be worked through logically and thoroughly, whereas Thompson falls back on largely irrelevant interviews - whether from a lack of scruples or, more charitably, of judgment. The more convinced you are about his basic contention - that popular comedy bares the soul of the age - the more disappointed you will be with this striptease. |
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