'It must be funny, the grown-ups are laughing'

 

Growing up with comedy

It may seem surprising – indeed, it surprised even myself when I realised it – but the first comedies I remember seeing on television were all American: The Dick Van Dyke Show, Car 54, Where Are You, Bewitched, The Beverley Hillbillies. Of contemporary British sitcoms – The Rag Trade, Marriage Lines, Bootsie and Snudge, etc – I have no recollection whatsoever. Was there a reason for this? Were American comedies more plentiful in the early 1960s? Were they scheduled at times when I would have been more likely to see them?

Taking a popular British sitcom of the era as a baseline – Steptoe and Son – we find that, around 1965, it was being shown at a typical timeslot of 8pm: quite late for me as a four-year-old, but hardly post-watershed; by 1965 it was on even earlier (7.30pm) and it is around this time that I first became aware of the series: although I didn’t sit down to watch an episode until much later. Curiously, I remember taking note of the show because it was being promoted on air as the end of an era: the current series was to be the last, a fact which prompted comment from my parents and grandparents. The programme trail – containing clips from the episode Those Magnificent Men and Their Heating Machines – is my earliest memory of this iconic series, and dates, I believe, to a Sunday evening in the autumn of 1965, with the trail promoting the following night’s broadcast.

So, I knew something of Steptoe and Son, but what of, say, Tony Hancock? Like many other series of the very early 60s, Hancock remained well off my personal radar until much later. I have the vaguest recollection of my dad commenting regretfully on his passing in 1968, but the name meant nothing to me at the time. Of ITV’s crop of comedies, the only one I knew at all was Just Jimmy, the televisual vehicle for diminutive Lancashire child impersonator Jimmy Clitheroe, and then only on account of its family-friendly teatime slot on ABC television. Clitheroe was also familiar from Sunday afternoon radio broadcasts; but in spite of the plethora of comedy emanating from the ‘wireless’ at this time, I remained oblivious to almost all of it.

It’s safe to say that, at the age of four or five, I didn’t understand comedy in anything other than in the broadest, slapstick terms. Laurel and Hardy had been broadcast on BBC television since 1947, and their antics were familiar to me from an early age, alongside Bob Monkhouse’s Mad Movies, a weekly showcase for silent-era knockabout comedy from the Mack Sennett stable. But sitcoms?

American imports certainly lay thick on the ground in the early 60s, if only because studios were able to crank them out in such quantity and on film, which lent itself to broadcasting in the UK without the compatibility issues that would dog later, colour VT shows from the States. The Dick Van Dyke Show was very familiar to me, and it had the advantage of a relatively early evening timeslot, having moved from 8.50pm to 7.35pm early in 1964. By May 1966 it could be seen even earlier, at 7.05pm. I must have seen (or sat in front of) plenty of these, although the only things that remain in my memory are his comedy tumble in the opening credits, and his portrait beneath the closing captions. I do, however, remember a kind of warm, happy feeling that this show seemed to exude, although I can’t detect any of this from looking at a sample episode today – the humour is fairly forced, although DVD himself is amusing to watch.

Also around ‘64 or ‘65, I got to see a show with some serious comedy credentials: Car 54, Where Are You came from Bilko creator Nat Hiken, and featured as its leads two comic actors who had both been seen in the Phil Silvers Show – Joe E Ross had memorably portrayed luckless Sgt. Ritzik across three seasons, whilst Fred Gwynn (later to achieve immortality in the role of Herman Munster) had been in two episodes as the preternaturally gifted but downbeat Ed Honegar. Car 54... was, mysteriously, scheduled during children’s programming hours, with a slot at 5.25pm, which explains how I got to see it. I’m not sure I even twigged it was meant to be funny, although the laughter track (a subject I will return to in a future post) must have provided a clue.

Another familiar show from the same era was Bewitched, although this tended to air in a later timeslot, debuting at 8pm in October 1964. Despite this handicap, I’m sure I saw at least the cartoon title sequence at this date, with full episodes coming a little later: by July 1966, Samantha and co had landed in the more kiddy-friendly slot of 7.35pm. Again, I remember the same sense of cosy, domestic warmth that Bewitched gave off. I’m even convinced that I acquired my love of mid-century interiors from watching this and The Dick Van Dyke Show: barring the obligatory big telly, my living room of 2021 could have been set-dressed for a revival of either.

Aside from these few grown-up examples, the place for humour on TV at the age of five or six was cartoons: and with their laughter tracks, Hannah-Barbera’s offerings like Top Cat and The Huckleberry Hound Show were a kind of sitcom for kids. But again, we’re looking at American imports. When, exactly, did British comedy – specifically, the sitcom – arrive in my life?

Aside from the aforementioned Jimmy Citheroe, the earliest example of a British-made situation comedy that I know I watched – and enjoyed – at the time of its first appearance, was Oh Brother! This was a monsatic comedy vehicle for Derek Nimmo, whose slightly effete, fluting-voiced performance struck me as funny at the age of seven (the series debuted as part of the BBC’s autumn season in 1968) but now is beyond endurance. That same autumn, ITV gave us Please, Sir! which quickly became established as a favourite in our house. It was somewhat too old for me, but I could just about relate to the schoolroom setting.

The actual experience of watching comedy as a child is interesting: taking an example like On the Buses, I was immune to most of the smutty innuendo, but I could still appreciate the comic qualities of a character like Inspector Blake. Watching sitcom in childhood was often a case of ‘the grown-ups are laughing, so it must be funny’: even if I didn’t quite get what everyone was laughing at. And, as previously mentioned, there was a feelgood quality to shows like Bewitched that you could still appreciate even if you couldn’t understand the gags.

* * *

By the dawn of the 1970s, American comedies were losing ground on British screens, with the BBC ditching almost all of its examples, the few that survived the cull being relegated to Sunday afternoons (Here’s Lucy) or late nights (Bilko). ITV offered the likes of Nanny and the Professor, but it was deemed kiddie-fare and scheduled accordingly, whilst others, such as Jimmy Stewart’s belated entry into the sitcom arena, were thwarted by regional variations in scheduling. By this time, though, ITV ruled the airwaves as regards home-grown sitcoms, with a slew of what would prove to be enduring titles rolled out from the late 60s through to the mid-70s: On the Buses, Man About the House, Rising Damp, George and Mildred, Father, Dear Father.

The working-class credentials of many of these titles was a clear factor in their popularity. The BBC had rejected On the Buses and seemed reluctant to abandon the decidedly middle-class arena it had carved out for itself in the genre – a trend that can be traced back to the likes of Marriage Lines (1964) and was still in favour by the mid 70s – cf. The Good Life, Butterflies and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Steptoe and Son, of course, was a very notable exception...

Class distinctions didn’t make any difference to me: I was only interested in series that made me laugh. By the age of 10, my tastes were expanding to accommodate the anarchy of Marty Feldman, whose Comedy Machine was a staple of Saturday nights, and Bob Todd’s forgotten lavatorial sitcom In for a Penny. That same year (1971) I discovered The Goodies, which finally breached the gap between the madcap slapstick of cartoons, and the verbal humour of the sitcom. It was a golden age for comedy on television, an era in which considerations of taste and decency were kept at arm’s length, and comedy dampers like political correctness and ‘wokeness’ lay decades distant, allowing us to enjoy unfettered nonsense without any self-righteous finger-wagging. But that was then...

Looked back on, much vintage comedy looks outrageously ill-advised and offensive: and scripts are often lazily reliant on cliché, where they aren’t simply unfunny. But such is the nature of reality: things change, ideas evolve, we move on. Whether modern comedy is still funny or not is a different question entirely, and clearly a matter of personal choice and taste. I just know that much of what I see or hear presented today as comedy (especially anything broadcast post-10pm on Radio 4 Extra) seldom raises a smile and is frequently annoying (cf. John Finnemore).

I’ve found, in fact, that I seek out comedy less and less these days: if only to avoid disappointment, as the advertiser’s cliché goes. Even the older series have lost their sheen, aside from a few notable exceptions – Rising Damp, The Good Life, Ever Decreasing Circles. Yet, if it’s comedy I want to see, I always resort to the DVD player, where I can get to see what is still, for me, television’s outstanding comedy, and the funniest series ever to go before the cameras...

I’ll tell you what it is next time...