Tuesday, 13 June 2006
A few months
ago I attended a lecture by Armando Iannucci at The
Royal Television Society. It was entitled British TV
Comedy: Alive or Dead? I believe it was a condensed
version of a series of lectures he gave at Oxford University.
One of the clips he showed was from an ITV series from
1979 called "End of Part One" (coincidently
starring, among others, Sue Holderness who I have been
working with) and it was one of the funniest things
I have ever seen in my life. There's no point describing
it here because I wont do it justice but suffice to
say it had me screaming and crying with laughter; much
to my embarrassment, surrounded in the lecture theatre
by every high level TV executive known to man. I must
point out that I was not the only person laughing, but
when I find something that amusing I seem to have less
vocal inhibitions than others. How on earth was something
this surreal and hilarious (you'll have to take my word
for it, it was) allowed to be on at 5pm, ITV - the Little
& Large slot for gods sake (yes, I know L&L
were BBC but you know what I mean). Surely people watching
TV at Saturday teatime wouldn't appreciate it?? Hmmm,
what was the point of all this… oh yeah, I know,
I had a dip into my new complete Laurel and Hardy DVD
box set today and was once again reduced to a screaming
mess watching Stan and Ollie, this time clean up a house
to music in "The Music Box". Were things allowed
to be this funny in 1931? I refuse to believe that the
audiences of that era were sophisticated enough to appreciate
every nuance from the legendary duo. Did they really
understand every hapless gesture from Laurel, every
pedantic twitch from Hardy? Of course they did, because
not everyone feels the need to analyse comedy, they
laugh because it's funny. Which begs the question, why
the fuck are people laughing at "My Family"?
