tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/uk-comedy-41861/articlesUK comedy – The Conversation2023-01-27T12:21:27Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1985692023-01-27T12:21:27Z2023-01-27T12:21:27ZDeep Fake Neighbour Wars: ITV’s comedy shows how AI can transform popular culture<p>ITVX’s <a href="https://www.itv.com/presscentre/ep1weekweek-04-2024-sat-21-jan-fri-27-jan/deep-fake-neighbour-wars-itvx">Deep Fake Neighbour Wars</a> is the breakthrough in television’s use of artificial intelligence that experts in the cultural use of deepfakes like myself have been waiting for.</p>
<p>In this six-part series, celebrities have apparently invaded our everyday lives. Presented as a reality TV show, we meet suburban neighbours in Catford, south London. Idris Elba (handyman/delivery driver) takes pride in the garden behind his ground-floor flat, until new upstairs tenant Kim Kardashian (bus driver) starts to exercise her right to use the shared space. They recount the story of a dispute that ultimately turns to violence.</p>
<p>In a second storyline set in Southend, Greta Thunberg (single mum) has adopted the sunny coastal Essex town to escape the cold of northern Sweden, until she confronts neighbours Conor McGregor (florist) and Ariana Grande (scaffolder) – Christmas decoration fanatics with a permanent display of noisy, flashing reindeer in front of their bungalow. Cue high drama when Thunberg takes justice into her own hands.</p>
<p>It’s a brilliant play on the mockumentary, a genre that brought us film comedy classics such as This Is Spinal Tap (1984) and Borat (2006, 2020), and TV hits like Parks and Recreation (2006-2015).</p>
<h2>The creative potential of deepfakes</h2>
<p>Deepfakes sound suspicious just from their name, which tells us immediately that we’re being deceived. Many producers now prefer the term “synthetic media” to avoid this connection.</p>
<p>The major ethical issue with deepfakes is the idea that they’re trying to trick us – but this isn’t a problem when they’re used for obvious comedy. </p>
<p>It may look like Idris Elba is living an alternative reality in Catford, but we laugh because we know clearly that this isn’t the real thing. Deepfakes can twist and rejuvenate pop culture through their playfulness, while also challenging us to consider what we accept as real.</p>
<p>As philosopher <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-021-00459-2">Adrienne De Ruiter</a> explains, “deepfake technology and deepfakes are morally suspect, but not inherently morally wrong.”</p>
<p>This year marks a watershed moment for deepfakes. The technology is at a cultural crossroads in which the primary use in its early years – non-consensual pornography – is being overshadowed by the technology’s adoption by mainstream popular culture.</p>
<p>Neighbour Wars follows on from other attempts to use deepfakes in television. In 2020, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyFQPjIrnQE">Channel 4’s Alternative Christmas Message</a> featured Queen Elizabeth II speaking to the nation during the pandemic.</p>
<p>At that time, broadcast deepfakes were made by colossal visual effects (VFX) companies – Channel 4’s Christmas message was made by the UK’s <a href="https://www.framestore.com/work/alternative-queens-speech?language=en">Framestore</a>, which also created the VFX for big movies including <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-witch-treatment-what-dr-stranges-wanda-tells-us-about-representations-of-female-anger-184509">Doctor Strange</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/fantastic-beasts-experts-explain-the-mysterious-real-life-questions-behind-jk-rowlings-magic-tales-107382">Fantastic Beasts</a>.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Sassy Justice, by the makers of South Park, features a deepfake Donald Trump.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Trey Parker and Matt Stone (makers of <a href="https://theconversation.com/dude-south-park-turned-20-how-to-make-an-all-time-classic-by-insulting-everybody-82274">South Park</a>) also tried out deepfakes in 2020. They posted a 15-minute spoof consumer rights programme, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi38HMIvRpGgMJ0Tlm1WYdw">Sassy Justice</a>, on YouTube. Its fictitious host, consumer advocate Fred Sassy, was played by a deepfake Donald Trump.</p>
<p>Sassy Justice was a true forerunner of Deep Fake Neighbour Wars, as it created multiple deepfake celebrities also including Julie Andrews and Mark Zuckerberg. The video’s hokey visual style spoofed low-budget daytime TV and joked with our gullibility, ensuring its audience was always aware of its AI origins.</p>
<h2>‘It’s all the real thing’</h2>
<p>Smaller online content creators have been the main innovators of deepfakes in pop culture. <a href="https://www.corridordigital.com">Corridor Digital</a> was set up by two geeky guys from Minnesota – Sam Gorski and Nico Pueringer – who moved to Los Angeles to produce viral videos.</p>
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<p>When deepfakes emerged, they jumped on the technology and produced a breakout video, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dBiNGufIJw">Keanu Reeves Stops A Robbery</a>, in 2019. As deepfakes expert <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565211030454">Lisa Bode</a> writes, Corridor Digital’s work demonstrated how the technology was “widely available and now affordable, or even free, in the case of open-access deepfake generation face replacement apps like Faceswap”.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsn6cjffsvyOZCZxvGoJxGg">The team’s YouTube channel</a> now features dozens of short deepfake videos, many of them boasting how they can do visual effects better than Hollywood studios.</p>
<p>Chris Ume is a Belgian deepfake creator who stunned the online world in 2022 when he produced short <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwOywe7xLhs&t=87s">videos of Tom Cruise</a> at such a high level of resolution and believability that only the script reassured us they were fake.</p>
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<p>Ume has taken his deepfake expertise into the world of mainstream TV. In August 2020, he entered America’s Got Talent with collaborator Tom Graham. The pair brought singer Daniel Emmet on to the stage and rolled a TV camera directly in front of him. When Emmet began to sing, his image on the massive screen above was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPU0WNUzsBo">deepfaked live into that of Simon Cowell</a> performing You’re The Inspiration.</p>
<p>The delighted audience and judges progressed the act to the show’s final. As with comedy, this use of deepfakes avoided any sense of deception (the real Simon Cowell was sitting with the jury, aghast).</p>
<h2>The future of deepfakes</h2>
<p>The music industry is set to become a rich area for deepfakes, and artists have already begun experimenting with the technology. </p>
<p>Last year, Kendrick Lamar released <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAPUkgeiFVY">The Heart Part 5,</a> with a video using deepfakes to transform him into OJ Simpson, Nipsey Hussle and Kobe Bryant. Lamar’s groundbreaking work was quickly followed by fellow rapper Kanye West adopting deepfakes in his video for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=401hZy6Hipw">Life of the Party</a>.</p>
<p>Like a magician’s act, deepfakes create wonder (and fear) – and like all new technologies, this AI generates a buzz. Deep Fake Neighbour Wars shows that deepfakes don’t need to remain as short online clips; they can now be used to make longform TV content. Expect ITV’s venture to be the tip of the iceberg.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198569/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dominic Lees receives funding for his deepfakes research from the University of Reading’s Impact Acceleration Account, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UK Research and Innovation.</span></em></p>Deepfakes have found their perfect vehicle in comedy – which allows them to be enjoyed without fear of deception.Dominic Lees, Associate Professor in Filmmaking, University of ReadingLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1437112020-08-03T11:59:34Z2020-08-03T11:59:34ZBut is it art? Standup comedy and the quest for cultural credibility<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350609/original/file-20200731-14-yfu9hp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C3%2C1333%2C993&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">In the spotlight: Miriam 'Midge' Maisel in the hit series The Marvellous Mrs Maisel.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon Prime via IMDB</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Arts Council England (ACE) has recently taken the unprecedented step of including comedy as a form of theatre under the terms of the Culture Recovery Fund, part of the emergency response package to help cultural institutions recover from the blow they have taken during the pandemic. But the council has <a href="https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding/CRFgrants#section-4">expressly stated</a> on its website that this was mandated by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and does not mean comedy clubs will be eligible for future ACE funding.</p>
<p>This singling out of comedy clubs once again brings into focus the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2009/nov/03/comedy-funded-arts-council">disdain that the ACE has displayed for standup in the past</a> and means now is the perfect time to reassess standup comedy as art.</p>
<p>Standup comedy is not created purely by the performer, but as a collaborative production between the performer, the audience, the venue and the promoter. In the same way a theatre is arranged to support dramatic performance or a gallery is lit to display paintings, so too must a standup comedy gig be presented in such a way that it contextualises the performance to come – the iconic image of the single microphone on a stand in a spotlight is evocative of standup comedy without anything needing to be said. </p>
<p>Unlike many other art forms, standup performance is more akin to a reactive conversation, albeit with laughter and other reactions forming the bulk of the audience response. And, in turn, this instant audience critique often shapes the unfolding production as the performer reacts. Finally, it is the job of the promoter and compère, through advertising the gig to designing the line-up of the show and the introducing of the artists, to create an atmosphere that the standup comedy can flourish in.</p>
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<p>At first glance a performance may seem fleeting and inconsequential, something that will only be remembered by the audience that witnessed it. But, for the comedian, each performance shapes and recontextualises their set ready for the next gig. A standup comedian may work on a routine for years, honing and shaping each line, each joke and each pause with every performance. So each gig creates something unique that is tied inexorably to the people and place who witnessed it. </p>
<p>A gig is not just a venue, but all the contextual understanding that goes into making it a space to present comedy and support critique. An audience is not just a collection of strangers, but a collective who are guided through previous experience or through a skilled compère what to expect from a standup comedy gig and how to constructively critique the performers. </p>
<h2>No laughing matter</h2>
<p>When viewed as a collection of creative spaces for the production and critique of comedy, the vitality and energy of the circuit becomes visible – not just as a way for comedians to make a living but as part of the very fabric of standup comedy itself. The lifeline provided by the Culture Renewal Fund means that more clubs will survive, that less collective experience will be lost from the circuit as a whole.</p>
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<p>But a lot will depend on what happens in the next few months. An emergency survey by the recently founded <a href="https://livecomedyassociation.co.uk/emergency-survey-report">Live Comedy Association</a> found that 58% of the industry rely on live comedy for more than 50% of their annual income and that 57% have already lost 50% of their personal income. Further, 59% of comedians said they would need to leave the industry in the next six months if live events <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53609467">continue to be unfeasible</a>. </p>
<p>This loss would be massive for the circuit, not just on a personal level but in terms of lost experience. Learning standup comedy relies on mentoring – when you are starting out there is very little external to the comedy circuit to guide you, no equivalent of a drama school and only two universities offering undergraduate degrees in comedy writing and performance. The only people who can tell you why comedy is done the way it is are the people who do it, day in and day out.</p>
<h2>Grand tradition</h2>
<p>Standup comedy in its present incarnation has been part of the British cultural zeitgeist for more than 50 years. It has <a href="https://kar.kent.ac.uk/60313/4/Comedy%20Studies%20note%20on%20the%20term%20%2527stand-up%20comedy%2527%20%281%29.pdf">evolved from music-hall singers, front-cloth comics and variety acts</a> of the early 20th century to the performers who travelled the often politically divergent circuits of working men’s clubs, folk clubs and London standup comedy clubs of the seventies. </p>
<p>This was then transformed with the alternative comedy boom of the 80s, the lad-culture drenched 90s and was colonised through panel shows which became the mainstay of TV schedules of the noughties, most recently spawning the sprawling DIY scene of the last decade. Here we’ve seen amateur, professional and experimental acts alike welcomed and encouraged by gigs created by fellow comedians not for profit, but to provide the most important resource of all – stage time, the five to ten minutes where the standup comedian creates and hones their art. </p>
<p>Standup comedy will survive. The current restrictions brought by the pandemic are breeding technical innovation through virtual performances that are accessible to anyone with internet access. Now is the ideal time to invest artistic credibility in something that is a fundamental fixture of British life and a very broad church. Invest now in “art for arts sake” to ensure the future of standup comedy, for all our sakes.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143711/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sebastian Bloomfield is a member of the Live Comedy Association. </span></em></p>The Arts Council has included comedy clubs in its recent emergency rescue package but has said stand-up is not an art form.Sebastian Bloomfield, PhD Candidate, York St John UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1344682020-03-27T16:31:37Z2020-03-27T16:31:37ZFive TV sitcoms to help get you through lockdown<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/323606/original/file-20200327-146719-1vqvyvt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=3%2C7%2C1194%2C664&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Never get's old: dad's Army.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC Pictures</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s a truth frequently acknowledged that laughter is the best medicine (at least when paracetamol isn’t available). A few months after the British government launched the <a href="http://www.socialprescribingacademy.org.uk/">National Academy for Social Prescribing</a> – whose aim is to refer vulnerable people towards <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7601051/Doctors-send-one-million-NHS-patients-singing-gardening-art-classes.html">cultural and community activities</a> to underpin their mental wellbeing – this truth has rarely felt more timely. Art may disturb and challenge us – but it can also console and inspire us in our darkest hours.</p>
<p>There’s something remarkably reassuring about the situation comedy. It embraces a homely nostalgia, an old friend to which we return time and again from the comfort of our couches, a pleasure to share with family and friends. It’s ingrained in our memories – its best lines as easily parroted as those of Monty Python’s parrot sketch. </p>
<p>Sitcoms offer more than the shallow pleasures of schadenfreude, with good humour borne out of resilience and camaraderie. The stubborn humanity of its emphatically ordinary protagonists reminds us of our own heroic capacity, <a href="http://www.love-poems.me.uk/yeats_upon_a_dying_lady.htm">as Yeats supposed</a>, to live in joy and laugh into the face of death.</p>
<p>But such satires upon Armageddon as <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083502/">Whoops Apocalypse</a> or <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4337894/">You, Me and the Apocalypse</a> may not be to everyone’s tastes at this time. I, for one, won’t be sitting down tonight to watch <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3230454/">The Last Man on Earth</a>. My preferred small-screen security blankets tend to be less blunt as to our impending doom.</p>
<p>These aren’t necessarily the greatest sitcoms ever made – though they’re all very fine indeed. I’ve not included Friends, Frasier or Fawlty Towers because, works of genius though they are, they don’t present quite the foil to quotidian suffering or existential angst that these do. I’ve avoided Steptoe and Son because it makes Waiting for Godot seem blithe – and The Good Life and Outnumbered may hit too close to home. </p>
<p>My last two choices deliver reliable family viewing. The first three may provide an antidote to having too much of that.</p>
<h2>Seinfeld (1988-1989)</h2>
<p>The self-styled show about nothing is inevitably about everything. <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098904/">Seinfeld</a> combined Jerry Seinfeld’s relaxed observational comedy with Larry David’s sharper and more anxious perspective upon the daily horrors of life (which we still relish in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0264235/">Curb Your Enthusiasm</a>).</p>
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<p>As I suggested in <a href="https://www.intellectbooks.com/journal-of-popular-television">a recent article</a>, Seinfeld “encompassed the aspirations of Generation X, then in the influential last throes of its youth”. And, in doing so, it addressed the nature of the human condition through its hilarious and sometimes hysterical portrait of the frustration of living in a world plagued by soup Nazis, interminable subway journeys and inescapable multi-storey car parks. </p>
<p>In Elaine and George, we find an everywoman and everyman equal to Leopold and Molly Bloom – those resolutely flawed souls in James Joyce’s Ulysses, struggling with all the impossible optimism of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus">Albert Camus’ Sisyphus</a> against the vicissitudes of modern existence. (We must, Camus finally reminds us, imagine Sisyphus happy.) And for British viewers it’s available for free online from <a href="https://www.channel4.com/programmes/seinfeld">Channel 4</a>.</p>
<h2>Fleabag (2016-2019)</h2>
<p>What new can be said about <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/apr/08/farewell-fleabag-the-most-electrifying-devastating-tv-in-years">Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s comedic tour de force</a>? A surprise international hit, this tragi-comedy doesn’t so much balance pathos and laughter as deliver them both simultaneously in gut-wrenching chunks. </p>
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<p>Yet somehow – despite its unsentimental knowingness – it remains uncompromisingly focused upon its faith in the redeeming quality of love. And it’s all <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p070npjv/fleabag">available for free</a> from the good old BBC.</p>
<h2>The Thick of It (2005-2012)</h2>
<p>This may seem a strangely stoical choice in a time when we must trust our lives to the decisions of politicians. Yet Armando Iannucci’s masterpiece <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0459159/">The Thick of It</a>, even in its foul-mouthed candour as to the hypocrisies of power, remains firmly on the side of cheerful scepticism rather than soulless cynicism.</p>
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<p>There’s something gloriously vital in Malcolm Tucker’s remorseless streams of vitriol and in the resigned but resilient submission of his various victims to their verbal batterings. And there is something curiously life-affirming in the well-intentioned, deluded innocence of all its players – including even the monstrous but ultimately tragic figure of Tucker himself. It is as epic and truthful as War and Peace. (And, again, licence-fee-payers can <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b006qgrd/the-thick-of-it">find it for free</a> on the BBC.)</p>
<h2>Father Ted (1995-1998)</h2>
<p>Graham Linehan has, as I’ve <a href="https://theconversation.com/demise-of-count-arthur-strong-signals-the-end-of-the-family-sitcom-82292">previously suggested</a>, almost single-handedly revived the glories of the family friendly situation comedy. But even more than the incandescent IT Crowd and the sublimely ridiculous Count Arthur Strong, it was this early collaboration with Arthur Mathews which not only sealed his reputation as a master-craftsman of the genre but which has also best stood the test of time.</p>
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<p>The gentle, innocent and truly loving friendship between Dermot Morgan’s Ted and Ardal O'Hanlon’s Dougal – like that between Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy – beautifully counterpoints the utter pandemonium which they repeatedly let loose. </p>
<p>Available from <a href="https://www.channel4.com/programmes/father-ted">Channel 4</a>, it’s a series which, even after multiple viewings, still rewards re-watching, either as a self-indulgent treat or as a joy to savour with your loved ones. That’s the miracle of <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111958/">Father Ted</a>. However absurd things get, Ted make things seem better.</p>
<h2>Dad’s Army (1968-1977)</h2>
<p>As the world crashes down around our ears, let’s not forget that one day, maybe not such a very long time away, someone somewhere will produce a brilliant sitcom about all this. It’s happened before. Launched just 23 years after the end of the second world war, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062552/">Dad’s Army</a> remains the BBC’s most enduringly appealing family comedy. </p>
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<p>A Don Quixote figure maybe, but one who defends the nation against real enemies (and Nazis at that), Arthur Lowe’s Captain Mainwaring may be preposterously pompous but is also fundamentally heroic. (One forgets how often he risks his dignity, reputation and even his life for the sake of his platoon and their noble mission.)</p>
<p>If, as our media and politicians keep telling us, we’re now operating on a war footing, then Jimmy Perry and David Croft’s classic comedy (<a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007tlxv">still playing on the BBC</a>) can still teach us a lot about how we might best keep calm – or at least not panic <em>too much</em> – and carry on.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/134468/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alec Charles does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In times like these, sometimes having a good laugh is the only thing to do.Alec Charles, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of WinchesterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1305142020-01-24T12:18:27Z2020-01-24T12:18:27ZTerry Jones: professional comic, amateur historian, accomplished human being<p>In 2013, Terry Jones said that he wanted to be remembered not for the Life of Brian or the Meaning of Life, but as a children’s book writer and for his “academic stuff”, saying that “those are my best bits”.</p>
<p>As well as being a member of the Monty Python team, Jones – who has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/jan/22/terry-jones-obituary">died at the age of 77</a> – wrote books and articles on Geoffrey Chaucer, attended conferences and made TV shows about medieval life. In 2015, I was lucky enough to share a stage with him in a discussion about Chaucerian biography. Jones’s scholarly work was characterised by his witty questioning of established positions and authority. He wrote from the edges, from a position of irreverence – rather like Chaucer himself.</p>
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<span class="caption">Jones’ first major historical work, published in 1980.</span>
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<p>Jones’s two books on Chaucer both offered revisionary accounts, the first of Chaucer’s texts, the second of his life. <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n07/gabriel-josipovici/imperfect-knight">Chaucer’s Knight: A Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary</a> turned established ideas about the highest-class Canterbury pilgrim and the first and longest Canterbury Tale on their heads. Far from being an ideal character, the Knight was, in Jones’s impassioned and influential argument, a mercenary, a cynical thug, out for hire, willing to fight for all the most disreputable causes in Europe. </p>
<p>More recently, the brilliantly titled <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/nov/15/classics.highereducation">Who Murdered Chaucer?</a> speculated that Chaucer’s political dealings involved him in conspiracy and that he was ultimately the victim of a Lancastrian plot, an argument that fills in some of the blanks of Chaucer’s last years.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/311797/original/file-20200124-81341-14fj0x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/311797/original/file-20200124-81341-14fj0x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311797/original/file-20200124-81341-14fj0x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311797/original/file-20200124-81341-14fj0x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311797/original/file-20200124-81341-14fj0x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1172&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311797/original/file-20200124-81341-14fj0x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1172&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311797/original/file-20200124-81341-14fj0x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1172&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Hailed by historian Peter Ackroyd as ‘a refreshing and engaging book’. Published in 2003.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span>
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<p>Chaucer’s Knight is an important book in the way that it challenges critical orthodoxies. Jones made many critics move away from conservative positions that had long been relatively unexamined. It shifted the discourse around the Knight, and – 40 years after publication – it remains required reading for anyone interested in the Canterbury Tales.</p>
<p>Jones’s approach was historicist. Rather than assuming that the Knight’s battling was praiseworthy, he investigated contemporary accounts of the battles in which the Knight was involved (such as the notorious <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25094410">Battle of Alexandria in 1365)</a>, and explored the nature of the garments that he wore and of the knights that Chaucer knew. </p>
<p>He read Chaucer’s sources and, for a later edition, he used new technology to examine the <a href="https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p15150coll7">Ellesmere manuscript</a> microscopically to see how the Knight’s portrait had been altered – or censored. He suggested that changes had been made to minimise the Knight’s resemblance to Sir John Hawkwood, a notorious mercenary who worked for the Visconti tyrants of Milan.</p>
<h2>His own grail was knowledge</h2>
<p>In both books, one of the things that Jones is interested in is medieval warfare, chivalry and the romance genre itself, the genre of the knight on horseback going on quests and rescuing women. In <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/oct/15/monty-python-and-the-holy-grail-review-rerelease">Monty Python and the Holy Grail</a>, which Jones directed, the fabled bravery of knights is parodied when the Black Knight, having had his arm chopped off, declares that it is just a scratch and that he has “had worse”.</p>
<p>While this is a sort-of parody, it is not, in fact, markedly different from what actually happens in medieval romances. In Thomas Malory’s <a href="https://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/englit/malory/">Le Morte Darthur</a>, for instance, Lancelot fights with one hand tied behind his back.</p>
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<p>The comedy of Jones’s approach to the middle ages in this film lay partly in deliberate anachronism, but also in the juxtaposition of fantasy and realism. The political debate in Monty Python and the Holy Grail between the king and the Marxist peasant is a good example, culminating in the peasant’s declaration that: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government … you can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ‘cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!</p>
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<p>Of course the articulate peasant’s mastery of political discourse is part of the joke. But peasants in the middle ages did rebel against government, question the divine right of kings and think about who should wield power. The joke is less about anachronism than about genre, the juxtaposition of Arthurian fantasy and “real life”. And part of the joke is about how modern readers sometimes take literature too literally, blurring the boundaries between history and fiction, assuming that medieval people actually lived like the characters in Malory’s texts.</p>
<p>One of Jones’ great gifts to scholars of the medieval period, was that he used his fame to dispel myths and to rehabilitate the middle ages. He emphasised that medieval people did not think the Earth was flat and that they were capable of individual self-consciousness and radical innovation. He wrote, in an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2004/feb/08/highereducation.news">editorial for The Guardian’s education section</a>, that: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the medieval world wasn’t a time of stagnation or ignorance. A lot of what we assume to be medieval ignorance is, in fact, our own ignorance about the medieval world.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Beloved amateur</h2>
<p>Jones was not a professional literary critic or historian, but many students and scholars have gained more pleasure and knowledge from his books than they have from the works of “professionals”. He was an amateur in the best sense – not a dilettante, but someone who read and thought about texts because he loved to do so (the word amateur comes from the Latin <em>amare</em> – to love).</p>
<p>He once said that he was glad he had gone to Oxford, because if he had not: “I wouldn’t have met either Mike Palin or Geoffrey Chaucer — and without those two meetings the rest of my life would have been quite different.” Chaucer remained an inspiration for his entire adult life.</p>
<p>Terry Jones cared about history, and many of us know more about history and literature because of his writings. But the fact that he cared is almost as important as his scholarship itself. He showed many people that you can revel in medieval history and literature, that to think about the poetry of the past is the stuff of life itself.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/130514/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marion Turner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Monty Python star was also a highly respected author on Chaucer and the writer of a series of children’s history books.Marion Turner, Associate Professor of English and Tutorial Fellow of Jesus College, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1245932019-12-31T13:27:21Z2019-12-31T13:27:21ZHappy birthday, Mr Bean! Celebrating 30 years of a major comedy character<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/304864/original/file-20191203-67028-qfiw3k.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=638%2C2%2C795%2C745&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Rowan Atkinson's character is as original as ever. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">ITV</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>January 1 1990, Mr Bean debuted on ITV to an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Bean_(Mr._Bean_episode)">audience of 13.45 million</a>. The brainchild of Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis, the pilot episode marked the birth of a major comedy character. </p>
<p>Bean has become so familiar, so comfortably part of our pop-culture tapestry, that it’s easy to miss how striking a creation he is. </p>
<p>At the time, the talented Atkinson was best known for his four incarnations of <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084988/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Blackadder</a>. </p>
<p>After a slapsticky first iteration, Blackadder traded heavily on acidic and acerbic dialogue and Atkinson’s knack for delivering it. Even the most lethargic line delivery (“To you Baldrick, the Renaissance was just something that happened to other people.”) dripped with disdain and venomous wit. </p>
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<p>In sharp contrast, Bean was a largely silent character – arguably the last great predominantly silent comic creation, extending a genealogy including Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harpo Marx and Jacques Tati. </p>
<p>While not to all tastes, Bean is widely recognised and beloved. The absence of dialogue helped the show become a global hit, transcending language and cultural differences to screen in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096657/trivia?item=tr0762242">almost 250 countries</a>. </p>
<p>So what is it that makes Mr Bean such an adored creation?</p>
<h2>A matter of size</h2>
<p>Think of the most iconic images of silent comedy: Lloyd <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEcTjhUN_7U">hanging from a clock tower</a>, Keaton <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfNB2V8CTBU">commandeering trains for the Confederacy</a>, Chaplin body surfing through a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdvEGPt4s0Y">network of oversized mechanical gears</a>. </p>
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<p>Now think of the most iconic Mr Bean vignettes: Bean <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLXty2wzuJg">at the swimming pool</a>, in the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0cZK1c0wpE">dentist’s chair</a>, entertaining a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJQEVYBS5ew">sick child on a plane</a>, eating <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtqpuYvOfHY">lunch at the park</a>. All exquisite comedic scenes, shot on unflattering videotape in familiar environments. </p>
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<p>The smaller sketches hold up stronger on repeat viewing, while more elaborate high jinks — Bean <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDrlalXfxec">playing mini-golf</a> across a whole county, Bean looking after a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juhuydfuQ4c">lost infant at a carnival</a> — have not aged as well and tend to pale in charm and dilute the purity of the concept.</p>
<p>Bean is best when he works on a small scale.</p>
<h2>Child – or alien?</h2>
<p>Mr Bean has a child-like nature. Silent comedy stars typically played moderately functional adults. Even Harpo Marx, the most overtly childlike of them, had <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16ZKTw9FA_o">a predatory edge</a>. </p>
<p>In contrast, Bean is, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20061018071947/http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=2323922005">as Atkinson notes</a>, “a child in a grown man’s body”. </p>
<p>The series’ opening credits, in which Bean falls to the ground with a splat from a spaceship, conjure other possible backstories. Is Bean an abductee returned to Earth minus some crucial grey matter? Or an alien attempting (poorly) to pass for human? </p>
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<h2>Fully formed from the start</h2>
<p>Most of the characteristics that made Bean an indelible creation were introduced in the very first episode.</p>
<p>As he sits for an exam, reads the wrong test paper and attempts to cheat his way through it in the first sketch, we see his <a href="https://film.avclub.com/bean-1798196317">idiot savant status</a> (he does know trigonometry), his competitiveness and compulsive one-upmanship, and his cruel sense of humour.</p>
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<p>In the next sketch, Bean goes to the beach and changes into his bathers in the most complicated way possible. </p>
<p>The sketch introduces Bean’s imbecilic ingenuity — finding inordinately convoluted solutions for basic predicaments — as well as his tendency to generate his own complications and desperation to avoid social humiliation (it is British comedy, after all). </p>
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<p>In the third and best sketch — a tour de force showcasing Atkinson’s rubbery complexion and virtuoso gangly physicality — Bean attends a church service, where he struggles to stay awake and clandestinely eat some candy under the admirably straight and puritanical eye of Richard Briers. </p>
<p>The sketch introduces the motif of Bean attempting to imitate human behaviour and everyday rituals and failing, earning the ire of others in the process.</p>
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<h2>The Bean legacy</h2>
<p>Bean headlined 14 television episodes from 1990–1995, two feature films and an animated series, and appeared in various shorts, sketches and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwzjlmBLfrQ">the 2012 Olympics</a>. </p>
<p>The films and cartoon somewhat diluted the brand, and the character has endured the wear and tear that comes with longevity and cultural omnipresence: parents getting sick of their children watching Bean, adolescents thinking they’re too cool for Bean. </p>
<p>However, Mr Bean’s worldwide audience speaks loudly to the genius of the character and Atkinson’s performance. By returning to this first episode, 30 years on, we can re-experience the birth of this remarkable comic creation.</p>
<p>A line delivered by Groucho Marx in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0023969/">Duck Soup</a> nicely encapsulates the simple core of Bean’s widespread appeal. He “may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you: he really is an idiot”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/124593/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Benjamin Kooyman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Mr Bean made its television debut on January 1 1990. Thirty years on, the pilot episode still captures all that is great about Rowan Atkinson’s character.Benjamin Kooyman, Learning Adviser, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1279802019-11-28T16:03:58Z2019-11-28T16:03:58ZJonathan Miller: man with two brains who straddled the worlds of arts and science<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/304277/original/file-20191128-178135-uubrho.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1%2C0%2C1240%2C929&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Jonathan Miller, still from The Body in Question (1978).</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC Pictures</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Pretty much all the tributes to Jonathan Miller, who <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/nov/27/jonathan-miller-writer-and-director-dies-aged-85">has died aged 85</a>, end up using the term “Renaissance Man” at some point. Miller had a mastery of arts and science that few achieve – he was, at various points, a doctor, an actor, a director, a writer, a darling of the TV chat show circuit and a sculptor.</p>
<p>For many, he will be remembered as one of the dazzling four performers in Beyond the Fringe (along with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett), who launched in 1960 the satire boom which later gave us Monty Python. For others, Miller is known for his major documentary series, The Body in Question (1978), which – literally – opened up the body and – less literally – medical history in much the same way that Kenneth Clark opened up Civilisation for a mass audience. </p>
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<p>But Miller was also known for a remarkable number of pioneering theatre and opera productions, such as the English National Opera’s enduringly popular <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/sep/22/rigoletto-review">“mafia-style” Rigoletto</a>, with its 1950s New York setting. </p>
<p>Miller clearly made a huge difference but how can we define his importance, especially as it was spread across so many fields?</p>
<h2>Two cultures</h2>
<p>Miller’s arts and science background enabled him to cross disciplinary boundaries and make exciting connections. He was the perfect riposte to the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/16/leavis-snow-two-cultures-bust">Two Cultures debate (1959-62)</a> between F.R. Leavis and C.P. Snow, which focused on the lack of conversation between arts and science. If we consider how scholars now embrace interdisciplinarity, we should note that Miller blazed the trail. </p>
<p>Miller should also be viewed as one of the architects of liberal Britain in the post-war period. He rejoiced in being an irreverent free thinker (presenting a <a href="http://www.openculture.com/2012/01/atheism_a_rough_history_of_disbelief.html">television series about his atheism</a>) while saying, on one occasion in a lecture he gave, that censorship was about as ridiculous as adjusting one’s clothing when leaping out of a burning building. Miller paid no regard to traditional ways of presenting a play. His <a href="https://bbashakespeare.warwick.ac.uk/productions/tempest-1970-mermaid-theatre-london">1970 production of The Tempest</a> broke new ground by presenting it as a drama about colonialism – now a standard interpretation.</p>
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<span class="caption">Jonathan Miller, far right, in Beyond the Fringe, 1962, with, from left, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Peter Cook.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Friedman-Abeles, New York</span></span>
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<p>Miller was the product of what <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1978/02/20/archives/tv-last-episode-of-glittering-prizes.html">Frederick Raphael called</a> the “glittering prizes” generation of the 1950s in which Oxbridge-educated graduates, such as theatre director Peter Hall and TV presenter David Frost, moved effortlessly into major posts in the arts and the media. A star turn in the <a href="https://www.cambridgefootlights.org/">Cambridge Footlights</a> led Miller to Beyond the Fringe, which became a huge hit.</p>
<p>He performed in the show while carrying on with his medical training by day, but, having become a doctor, he was soon seduced away to become the producer of the BBC arts programme, Monitor, where his focus on figures like Susan Sontag led to accusations of pretentiousness.</p>
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<p>Private Eye frequently ridiculed him as a “pseud”. This was not helped by his 1966 film of <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01439685.2011.572607">Alice in Wonderland</a>, which dispensed with Lewis Carroll’s wit and interpreted the story as the adolescent dream of a girl on the verge of puberty. </p>
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<p>The popular press wrongly claimed he was deploying Freud to sexualise a children’s story (or creating an “X-certificate Alice”). The ambition of Miller’s version is a rebuke to the more conventional literary adaptations on television today.</p>
<h2>Theatrical trailblazer</h2>
<p>At the <a href="https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/sites/default/files/stagebystage-pt2_early-years.pdf">National Theatre</a> Miller directed Laurence Olivier in The Merchant of Venice (1970), adopting a Victorian setting that brought out the links between capitalism and antisemitism in the play. He quickly gained a reputation for presenting classical plays in the costumes of another period so as to emphasise a particular aspect of them. In fact, most of his productions were presented in period, paying careful attention to the visual culture of which they were a part. </p>
<p>He was influenced by the <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-48790-8_8">social psychologist Erving Goffman</a>, which is why his productions paid careful attention to manners, hand gestures, silences and the varying protocols of conversation.</p>
<p>When he came to direct Eugene O'Neill’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1986/04/29/theater/stage-a-new-long-day-s-journey.html">A Long Day’s Journey into Night with Jack Lemmon (1986)</a>, he notoriously made the very long play run much shorter by having the protagonists frequently speak over each other, imitating speech patterns in ordinary life.</p>
<p>There was a strongly anthropological feel to his productions. Miller’s ability to make intellectual connections made him unusual among modern directors. He once complained to me that Peter Hall (with whom he had a long-running feud) never bothered to read a book. <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v05/n21/dan-jones/sour-notes">Hall, for his part</a>, felt Miller took on the task of directing in the same spirit as if he was writing for the New York Review of Books.</p>
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<p>It was, however, in opera that Miller really made his mark, travelling the world putting on productions for many of the great opera houses. Miller brought <a href="https://standpointmag.co.uk/issues/july-august-2014/features-jonathan-miller-one-man-two-cultures-david-herman/">psychological realism</a> to the operatic stage, insisting that singers also had to act.</p>
<p>Although he directed productions from across the repertoire, he had a love of Mozart as a great musical dramatist. He became a major figure in opening up opera to a wider audience, stripping the form of its exclusivity.</p>
<p>Miller became the producer of part of the BBC Shakespeare series in the early 1980s where he developed effective ways of doing Shakespeare by using the close up for soliloquies and employing contemporary paintings for inspiration. His Taming of the Shrew enjoyed the casting coup of John Cleese as Petruchio. When he took over the Old Vic in 1988, he produced the most intellectually ambitious repertoire that London has seen in a long time. His production of <a href="https://theatricalia.com/play/5kf/bussy-dambois/production/c8f">George Chapman’s Bussy D'Ambois</a> (1603) was probably the first since the 17th century.</p>
<h2>Two minds</h2>
<p>Kate Bassett called her 2012 biography of Miller <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/06/two-minds-jonathan-miller-review">In Two Minds</a>, which captures the split in his life. Miller was haunted by his decision to abandon the medical profession where he had hoped to excel. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/304275/original/file-20191128-178121-qccevm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/304275/original/file-20191128-178121-qccevm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/304275/original/file-20191128-178121-qccevm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/304275/original/file-20191128-178121-qccevm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/304275/original/file-20191128-178121-qccevm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/304275/original/file-20191128-178121-qccevm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/304275/original/file-20191128-178121-qccevm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/304275/original/file-20191128-178121-qccevm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jonathan Miller’s pop-up book, The Human Body.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But his restless intellectual energy was, however, a key part of the arts scene over four decades and he became a major force in making scientific knowledge available (he was happy to produce a <a href="https://www.worldofbooks.com/en-gb/books/jonathan-miller/human-body/GOR001754873?keyword=&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIx5XKrvuM5gIVmK3tCh1tAQrSEAQYASABEgLs9vD_BwE">pop-up book about the body</a> and a book about Darwin in comic book form). </p>
<p>Miller felt he was never truly appreciated in his own country. Yet this was not true – he was hugely admired in Britain. Few did more to excite people about the arts and the sciences or make them confront the world of ideas in an accessible way. For those who grew up with Miller, paying tribute to him is a debt of honour.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/127980/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rohan McWilliam does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Miler halted the terms ‘Renaissance Man’ and ‘polymath’ but was one of the most wide-ranging intellects of his era.Rohan McWilliam, Professor of Modern British History, Anglia Ruskin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1203012019-07-30T14:10:46Z2019-07-30T14:10:46ZCarry On film revival? Britain’s already got slapstick politics<p>There’s been some talk about a revival of the old Carry On film franchise, Britain’s most famous comedy film series. Unsurprisingly, the country’s most famous tabloid, <a href="https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/9401011/carry-on-films-set-for-a-comeback-after-27-years/">The Sun newspaper, was enthusiastic</a> at the prospect – although readers were concerned that modern versions might be too “politically correct”.</p>
<p>“Its like alcohol-free beer”, wrote one commenter, while another said that “as most of the original cast are dead it won’t feel like [a Carry On film] anyway”.</p>
<p>The Carry On series spanned 34 years from Carry On Sergeant in 1958 to the panned Carry on Columbus in 1992. In between, 29 films featuring the cream of UK comedy – featuring names such as Kenneth Williams, Sid James, Hattie Jacques and Barbara Windsor – became staples, known for risque double entendres and cheerful smuttiness.</p>
<p>Writing in The Guardian, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jul/02/carry-on-films-return">Stuart Heritage recently described</a> them as “dirt cheap films that highlight our collective national fear of sexual arousal”. I don’t disagree. Nor with his suggestion that their legacy provided those who use them as reference points with an imagined pre-EU Britain “that Leave voters see when they close their eyes”. They were sexist, racist, homophobic and xenophobic. </p>
<p>Yet, as Heritage’s Guardian colleague <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/04/carry-on-films-working-class-heyday">Fiona Sturges noted</a> in her more equivocal reading of their endurance, “they also highlight much of what we have lost”. She was referring to the way the films highlighted the erosion of traditional social barriers in post World War II Britain and provided critiques of authority and class divisions.</p>
<p>The earliest films: Carry on Sergeant (1958), Nurse (1959), Teacher (1959) and Constable (1960) are also noteworthy as commentaries on post-war British life as lived in relation to public service institutions: the army, the NHS, state schools and the police.</p>
<p>Like Sturges, I wouldn’t dismiss the Carry Ons from British cultural history, or histories of the British film industry. Profitably, they were even <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=QEXpFWr_zgEC&pg=PA51&lpg=PA51&dq=carry+on+nurse+success+in+America&source=bl&ots=IA6rNhbwcu&sig=ACfU3U032OiN4FNaNHLvJ-vTVcE5wYHAOw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiv__D8vNzjAhXcQUEAHR-DDmkQ6AEwG3oECDAQAQ#v=onepage&q=carry%20on%20nurse%20success%20in%20America&f=false">popular in America</a> – Carry On Nurse especially was a barnstorming success with gross profits in the multiple millions.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286055/original/file-20190729-43122-1mtr2rx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286055/original/file-20190729-43122-1mtr2rx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286055/original/file-20190729-43122-1mtr2rx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286055/original/file-20190729-43122-1mtr2rx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286055/original/file-20190729-43122-1mtr2rx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=591&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286055/original/file-20190729-43122-1mtr2rx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=591&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286055/original/file-20190729-43122-1mtr2rx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=591&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Susan Beaumont, Kenneth Connor, and Ann Firbank in a promotional poster for Carry on Nurse (1959).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">IMDB</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Responding to a scathing review of Carry On Constable in The New Statesman in March 1960, its <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-35531309">scriptwriter Norman Hudis</a> addressed the the economic stakes for industry of the financial success of the series (in a piece that is sadly not available online). He believed that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Money at the box-office … is what keeps cinemas open … I truly believe that it is films like this series which will enable the cinema, ultimately, to ‘Carry On’ – perhaps until the day when the standards of intellectual criticism become those of the general public.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Hudis thus defended their populism in economic terms. Meanwhile, in her recent piece, Sturges argued that “in catering to a working-class audience, the Carry On films offered cinema goers a chance to see a version of themselves on screen”.</p>
<h2>Broad appeal</h2>
<p>My analysis of data contained in the <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/education-research/bfi-reuben-library">BFI Reuben Library</a> showed how the early films were received by critics. One of the things that leaps out of those reviews are how many of the comic situations in the films are points of identification for ordinary cinema goers, for example, the depiction of national service in Carry On Sergeant: “Every young sweat doing his service will revel in it.”</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286049/original/file-20190729-43145-j8kwx5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286049/original/file-20190729-43145-j8kwx5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286049/original/file-20190729-43145-j8kwx5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286049/original/file-20190729-43145-j8kwx5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286049/original/file-20190729-43145-j8kwx5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=582&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286049/original/file-20190729-43145-j8kwx5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=582&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286049/original/file-20190729-43145-j8kwx5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=582&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hugely popular in the US.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">WP:NFCC#4</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Regarding the NHS, one reviewer wrote when the film came out: “If you’ve ever been in a hospital ward … Carry on Nurse will have you in stitches.” And regarding state schools a review read: “The staff-room discussions ring as nearly-true as they are meant to.”</p>
<p>A later turn towards parody of different film genres produced the best remembered and least derided films: Carry On Cleo (1964) – which was a send-up of big-budget ancient world historical epics – and Carry On Screaming (1966) – which lampooned horror, particularly the UK’s Hammer series.</p>
<h2>Carry on Changing</h2>
<p>Elsewhere the films continued to respond to UK social change. Carry on Abroad (1972) confronted the “Brits abroad” phenomenon emerging from spiking numbers of Britons taking international holidays in the 1970s, as this became affordable to those previously excluded from such travel by socio-economic circumstance.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286050/original/file-20190729-43104-1p44hfp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286050/original/file-20190729-43104-1p44hfp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286050/original/file-20190729-43104-1p44hfp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286050/original/file-20190729-43104-1p44hfp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286050/original/file-20190729-43104-1p44hfp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286050/original/file-20190729-43104-1p44hfp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286050/original/file-20190729-43104-1p44hfp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Carry on Girls: like an old-fashioned seaside postcard.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">WP:NFCC#4</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Spanish coastal destinations such as the Costa Brava, Blanca and Del Sol became – and remain – hugely popular with British visitors and migrants (ironically, given the political turmoil that has since accompanied inflammatory British discourse about EU migration). Carry On Girls (1973) depicted the corresponding impact of the proliferation of overseas package deals on the economies of British seaside towns that lost their attractiveness as holiday destinations.</p>
<p>Heritage says the films don’t stand up to scrutiny. I disagree. For example, most who have seen one will likely remember the sexual objectification and harassment of female nurses in the hospital-based films. But does everyone remember the nurses collectivising and intervening to protest this treatment in the denouement of Carry On Nurse? Their pushback culminates in the film’s most enduring visual gag, when Wilfred Hyde-White’s nurse-ogling colonel undergoes rectal examination with a daffodil. </p>
<p>As sexual abuse revenge plots go it’s not exactly The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but it’s a moment of anti-patriarchy strike back that has been all too easily forgotten amid the lower-hanging fruit that some people have used to dismiss the film.</p>
<h2>Cultural capital</h2>
<p>A Carry On revival in these polarised times would be ill advised considering some of the sexist and racist attitudes with which the films are associated – some of which have been associated with the prime minister, <a href="https://theconversation.com/racist-jokes-return-but-freedom-of-speech-punchline-falls-flat-101613">Boris Johnson</a>, or his reputed slapstick “Carry On” style. But the place of these films in British film history remains. </p>
<p>In 1999, the <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/five-best-carry-ons-five-worst">British Film Institute</a> programmed “Carry on Chortling”, a season of Carry Ons at London’s National Film Theatre. This included a conference spearheaded by British cinema scholar <a href="http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/1794">Andy Medhurst</a> who did important work contextualising the significance of the films, and was accompanied by the successful “<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/231561.stm">Ooh! What a Carry On</a>” exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image.</p>
<p>The Carry Ons remain significant for how they responded to topical social issues. As Medhurst said: “If you want to find out what a culture thinks about itself, look at what it laughs at.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/120301/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hannah Hamad does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Carry On films have been compared to a Leave voter’s wet dream. But they were more thoughtful and honest than that.Hannah Hamad, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication, Cardiff UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1126302019-02-27T13:44:23Z2019-02-27T13:44:23ZHow Alan Partridge’s return to the BBC reflects the changing media landscape<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261222/original/file-20190227-150688-s57kvc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC WorldWide 2018/Andy Seymour</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Well, nobody died. And with Alan Partridge presenting, that’s always a bonus. A quarter of a century after <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiAeoqg0jlY">accidentally shooting</a> a restaurant critic live on air – and later assaulting a BBC executive <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk-yXi0fIF8">with a turkey</a> (and then a cheese) – the Norwich-based DJ has been given a second stab at mainstream television. </p>
<p>The return to TV presenting came as a stand in co-host of magazine show This Time, alongside the steadying presence of regular presenter Jenny Gresham. Given Partridge’s track record, the results were perhaps as expected. </p>
<p>Once <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Knowing-Me-You-Complete-Radio/dp/B07KW8PTYH">described</a> as a man “in whose hands the inordinately complex becomes essentially simplistic”, his everyman style was surprisingly well suited to the show, which required him to negotiate such varied topics as baby seals, hand hygiene and cyber terrorism. </p>
<p>True, he managed to turn the first item into an apologia for big oil, while getting his environmental disaster facts completely muddled. And his attempt to turn the tables on a disguised hacktivist interviewee by revealing his identity was not quite the big finish he had hoped for. </p>
<p>However the item on the importance of hand washing was largely factually correct, even if Partridge’s comparison between the decreasing effectiveness of continued antibiotic use and the gifting of chocolates to a female spouse was misjudged. In his assistant Lynn’s words – and on Partridge terms – this was a “solid” showing.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/77IZttD_pU8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>So, has the Partridge come home to roost? Or did he simply fly full circle? In many ways, his career represents the uncertain path (some might say the decline in standards) taken by popular media in the 21st century. </p>
<p>He got his television break as sports presenter on the BBC’s current affairs show <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108740/">The Day Today</a> in 1994, and while his competence as a football commentator was questionable (“Shit! Did you see that?”), his enthusiasm was not. </p>
<p>But it was the BBC2 chat show <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108828/">Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge</a> that brought his widest audience (though viewing figures soon declined, leading one critic to describe the show as “moribund” – a charge Partridge robustly denied). </p>
<p>Although KMKYWAP arguably followed the traditional light entertainment path trodden by the likes of Terry Wogan, Russell Harty and Michael Aspel, it could also be seen as representing a new breed: the independent television production. </p>
<p>As a result of the <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/42/contents">1990 Broadcasting Act</a>, broadcasters such as the BBC were now increasingly commissioning content from independent production companies, rather than making them in-house (a process that continues to the present day). </p>
<p>KMKYWAP was made by Partridge’s own company Peartree Productions. When a second series did not materialise – and various pitches, including one for a Norwich-based detective series called Swallow, were not taken up – Peartree was mothballed (though the presenter could have kept it going if he’d been willing to downsize his car to a Mini Metro). </p>
<p>Then in the digital age, Partridge cannily opted to go non-terrestrial, making military-based daytime quiz <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/profile/alan-partridge">Skirmish</a> for the UK Conquest channel. This was the era of cheap, mass-produced content, and Skirmish fit the bill perfectly. </p>
<h2>Television trail blazer</h2>
<p>In later years, Partridge’s career continued to reflect the changing habits of media production and consumption. <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1923623/">Mid Morning Matters</a> (2010-2016) was basically a webcam transmission of his radio show (“sustaining and maintaining our core listenership in an increasingly fragmented marketplace”). </p>
<p>While the first series was online only, the second was made by Sky Atlantic, which also secured rights to Partridge’s award-worthy documentaries, Welcome to the Places of My Life, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8rPBlzCIsc">Scissored Isle</a>, which saw him re-examine his attitudes towards “chav culture”, perform more than competently on a Tesco checkout, and take ecstasy.</p>
<p>As Partridge himself <a href="https://www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2019-02-25/this-time-with-alan-partridge-bbc/">points out in a recent issue</a> of Radio Times magazine, the fact he was no longer regarded as being “on TV” while working (fairly) regularly on these shows made no sense. He writes: “Do people say Netflix shows aren’t on TV? Of course not. They are and so was I.” </p>
<p>However, his return to the BBC on This Time does still represent his chance to make it, in his own words, “back in the big time”. Did he succeed? Well, he was certainly trying hard. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261231/original/file-20190227-150688-ogbkkj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/261231/original/file-20190227-150688-ogbkkj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261231/original/file-20190227-150688-ogbkkj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261231/original/file-20190227-150688-ogbkkj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261231/original/file-20190227-150688-ogbkkj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=481&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261231/original/file-20190227-150688-ogbkkj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=481&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/261231/original/file-20190227-150688-ogbkkj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=481&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Partridge prep.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC Studios/Andy Seymour</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Although Partridge’s occasionally endearing but generally gauche amateurism seemed out of place on the BBC in the 1990s, it is a sign of how times have changed that he now looks quite at home when compared with British TV presenters such as Piers Morgan, Richard Madeley and Dan Walker. </p>
<p>As the first episode ended, following an awkward lift exchange with BBC journalist Emily Maitlis, a successful stint on This Time appears unlikely. Yet as the star has shown over the last 25 years, he is clearly able to adapt to changing circumstances.</p>
<p>The Partridge has bounced back. Again.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/112630/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Hewett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Gauche and awkward, a media star for the 21st century.Richard Hewett, Lecturer in Media Theory, University of SalfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1124542019-02-27T10:04:46Z2019-02-27T10:04:46ZOnly Fools and Horses, Charles Dickens and the precariat, then and now<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260991/original/file-20190226-150698-1uxtpgo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=9%2C14%2C1588%2C1049&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Publicity still for Only Fools and Horses.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">www.onlyfoolsmusical.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s taken them 30 years, but Del Boy and Rodders have made it from Peckham to the West End. After three decades of ducking and weaving – getting by, making a fortune then losing it – the Trotter brothers from the late John Sullivan’s enduringly popular TV sitcom can now be seen in a musical version of Only Fools and Horses at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Based on Sullivan’s writing, his son has adapted the show along with one of its stars, the comedian Paul Whitehouse.</p>
<p>Journalists have had a great time, rediscovering the Derek Trotter lexicon for evaluating the world – the prospect of the show is, of course, “lovely jubbly”, or even “cushty”. There has been praise for the lovingly recreated stage sets of the flat in Nelson Mandela House, Peckham and the Nag’s Head where the brothers and their crew habitually used to drink. </p>
<p>Where the new show seems to score highly is in the mood of nostalgia that it serves, taking audiences back to the decade that both defined and thwarted Del Boy’s leisured millionaire desires: the 1980s – because (as mere “dipsticks” fail to grasp) only fools and horses work. Since the 1980s – and the first major deregulation of the British economy – we’ve developed a new vocabulary for describing the people who end up living in disadvantage: the “precariat”.</p>
<p>The most negative reaction to the new show involves the music: critics have tended to see some of the show’s songs as poor, bolt-on additions. This raises a question: will a musical adaptation dilute the topical edge explored by the original comedy? </p>
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<p>Is it in danger of doing for the 21st-century precariat what Lionel Bart’s Oliver! (1960) did for the orphan pickpocket gangs of the mid-19th century on which Charles Dickens had based Oliver Twist (1837-8) – perhaps trivialising the very real problems they face?</p>
<p>The key figure for exploring this is Charles Dickens. When <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8469698/Only-Fools-and-Horses-creator-John-Sullivan-dies.html">John Sullivan died</a> in 2011, the head of BBC comedy, Mark Freeland, commented that “he was the Dickens of our generation”. Freeland was referring to Sullivan’s undoubted comic genius: it was on display when Del Boy famously fell through the bar, but also in countless instances of superb dialogue. </p>
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<h2>Serious about comedy</h2>
<p>When it comes to Dickens, who is now thought of as a serious writer, we forget the extent to which, when he first came to prominence, he was a master comedy writer. Mr Pickwick and Sam Weller were the leading characters in Pickwick Papers (1836-37), Dickens’s first, breakthrough novel. But they were, in effect, a comic double act – getting into numerous scrapes and escapades as the Pickwick Club travelled around London and southern England (in stage coach rather than a yellow Robin Reliant). </p>
<p>The comparison is valid. In his second novel, Oliver Twist (1837-38), Dickens commented that his art was melodramatic, <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/oliver-twist-a-patchwork-of-genres">like layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon</a>, alternating comedy and tragedy. Then think of the way Sullivan’s could manage transitions of tone in Only Fools and Horses: in one episode, Grandad can have us in fits of laughter as a chandelier crashes to the floor (“A Touch of Glass”). In another, Grandad’s funeral (“Strained Relations”) can be an occasion for reflecting movingly on the complex emotional bonds of family life that shape love and loyalty while constraining opportunities.</p>
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<p>Sullivan strongly identified with Dickens – as Graham McCann has shown in <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8877163/Only-Fools-and-Horses-by-Graham-McCann-review.html">his book on the sources of Sullivan’s hit comedy</a>, the author-to-be was introduced to Dickens as a demotivated secondary modern pupil who was being reared as “factory fodder”. </p>
<p>The attachment to Dickens was further emphasised in Sullivan’s creation (in 2000) of a comedy drama around the character of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2002/mar/20/broadcasting">Wilkins Micawber</a>, an unlikely hero of Dickens’ masterpiece David Copperfield – and a founding member of the precariat, predated only by Dickens’s debtor father and Dickens himself. </p>
<p>Debt in the early 19th century meant prison and the removal of social opportunity. Dickens’s own experience, being taken out of school and put to work in a blacking factory – recorded for the first time in <a href="http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1206733/1/1206733_redacted.pdf">John Forster’s posthumous biography</a> (1872-74) – connects Dickens to precariats across the generations.</p>
<h2>Only fools and writers</h2>
<p>We are accustomed to seeing him as a powerful figure of status – but the early Victorian Dickens was struggling to make his way in a cut-throat world of the rapidly developing culture industries through a mixture of collaboration and intense individual competitiveness. </p>
<p>We think about Lionel Bart’s Oliver! as the leading musical adaptation of Oliver Twist but overlook the fact that when the novel first adapted for the stage in 1838, it was as a melodrama – <a href="https://athomeonthestage.wordpress.com/2013/09/26/playbill-oliver-twist-or-the-parish-boys-progress-davidges-royal-surrey-theatre/">Oliver Twist: Or, The Parish Boy’s Progress</a> – at the Royal Surrey Theatre.</p>
<p>This melodrama, which mixed music with drama, enabled the controversial subject matter – pickpocket gangs, violent crime, prostitution – to get around the <a href="https://blogs.bl.uk/english-and-drama/2016/10/the-lord-chamberlain-regrets-.html">strict codes of theatre regulation</a> that had been in place since the middle of the 18th century. In her brilliant fictional recreation of the event in her neo-Victorian novel, Fingersmith (2002), Sarah Waters portrays little Sue Trinder, a new member of Mrs Sucksby’s pickpocket gang, being taken along to view the lurid performance. And so the spectacle of Oliver Twist is returned to, among others, those precariously positioned communities whose experiences Dickens had written about.</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/feb/18/only-fools-and-horses-musical-plonker-lovely-jubbly">recent piece for The Guardian</a>, Stuart Jeffries reflected on the way in which the original TV Only Fools and Horses has become a surprising hit among BAME viewers, for the way in which it resonated closely with their experiences of communal laughter amidst precarious economic living. The challenge for Only Fools and Horses the Musical will be to open its West End doors to these communities to avoid it merely becoming a post-Brexit nostalgia trip – now that would hardly be cushty.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/112454/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Amigoni does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>John Sullivan, who created Del Boy and Rodney, has been called a modern Dickens – now both their most famous works have been made into musicals.David Amigoni, Professor of Victorian Literature, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Enterprise, Keele UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1072412018-11-23T13:49:41Z2018-11-23T13:49:41ZSpitting Image: the puppet satire that captured Thatcher’s Britain<p>In the time-honoured practice of priceless objects being donated to the curatorial care of scholars for the benefit of posterity, the artist and satirist Roger Law has <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-46143333">donated</a> his Spitting Image archive to Cambridge University library.</p>
<p>For satire, circumstance is all. The obvious disintegration of a ruling order heralded <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/beyondthefringe/">Beyond the Fringe</a>, on stage from 1960, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-15279371">Private Eye</a>, in print from 1961, and <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/twtwtw/">That was The Week That Was</a>, on screen from 1962. TW3, as it was known, lampooned the political class in general and the Conservative government in particular. On the principle that it took one to know one, Oxbridge graduates could perhaps most tellingly challenge the establishment. </p>
<p>The most prominent figure in the scene was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/10/obituaries/peter-cook-madcap-british-performer-dies-at-57.html">Peter Cook</a>, who appointed Roger Law as the resident artist at his Establishment Club. Law also drew for Private Eye, and soon progressed from one to three dimensions in the form of Plasticine caricature, working with cartoonist and caricaturist <a href="http://www.peterfluck.co.uk/about/">Peter Fluck</a>. The pair created models – including <a href="https://www.abebooks.co.uk/9780140031911/Selling-President-Joe-McGinniss-014003191X/plp">Richard Nixon</a> – which adorned many publications, as well as book – and even LP – covers.</p>
<p>It was a curious limitation of the form that those models were only viewed as photographs. The next stage would be animation. It was another curiosity that the increasingly scabrous satirical culture of the 1960s and 1970s had not produced a focused satirical TV programme – as distinct from a comedy show within which satirical elements featured. Circumstance transpired to resolve both.</p>
<h2>Thatcher’s Britain</h2>
<p>In 1981 – in a Britain of mass unemployment, urban rioting, an unpopular prime minister and her programme of deindustrialisation, and a ruinously divided opposition – the graphic designer <a href="http://brief.promaxbda.org/article/martin-lambie-nairn-to-receive-lifetime-achievement-award-at-promaxbda-euro">Martin Lambie-Nair</a> lunched with Fluck and Law and suggested that a puppet satire TV show should be pitched to independent television. The pilot, in June 1983, coincided with Margaret Thatcher’s landslide second election victory.</p>
<p>Central Television commissioned a full series which began the following year, produced, as was much else in 1980s British television comedy, by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2009/apr/11/interview-john-lloyd-comedy-producer">John Lloyd</a>. After two years 15m people were watching.</p>
<p>With Spitting Image Productions achieving <a href="https://procartoonists.org/tag/spitting-image/">an annual turnover of £2m</a>, Luck and Flaw, as they styled themselves, built a studio at Canary Wharf, in the heart of the iconic Thatcherite development of London’s Docklands precinct. Satirical entrepreneurs, Fluck and Law <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-we-took-spitting-image-around-the-world-hw8r69txk">franchised the series around the world</a>, and the fullest entrepreneurial expression of their art came with their range of squeaky dog toys.</p>
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<p>Much in the manner of Monty Python, Spitting Image also diversified into books and music – the Chicken Song, a lampoon of holiday disco earworms, acquired a defictionalised ubiquity all of its own, reaching number one in the charts and being played throughout the summer of 1986.</p>
<h2>Why aren’t I in it?</h2>
<p>As it had been in 1960, much of the appeal was in the breaking of taboos. For reasons of protocol, genuflection, and the <a href="https://www.bl.uk/events/censored-inside-the-lord-chamberlains-office">Lord Chamberlain</a>, the monarch had rarely if ever been depicted on stage, in print, or on screen, in anything but reverential terms. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II was from the outset one of the stars of Spitting Image, although, cognisant perhaps of public attitudes, the royal caricatures were mild of flavour.</p>
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<p>Politicians were the main target. But – as is always the case – rather than being offended they were more concerned if they were overlooked by the show. Just as many had always sought to purchase the newspaper cartoons that lampooned them, so many professed to enjoy their latex manifestation, not least when it served to reinforce their political persona. And, in many cases, Spitting Image’s grotesque puppets established the way they were widely seen by the public. As for Thatcher – dining with ministers in a restaurant, she orders (raw) steak for herself and, when asked about the vegetables, she replied: “They’ll have the same as me.”</p>
<p>One of my cherished schoolboy memories includes the puppet of Janet Street-Porter which was itself so sidesplitting it was not possible – in those pre-streaming days – to hear what it was supposed to be saying, not to mention Jeffrey Archer merrily tapping out his next opus on a typewriter with four keys: C, R, A, and P.</p>
<p>Quality, in a weekly TV satire, was inevitably variable, but one highlight that sticks out was the 1987 general election special, which concluded with a re-enactment of the climax of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDuHXTG3uyY">Cabaret</a>: a fresh-faced member of the Thatcher youth race sings <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReIAna459sg">Tomorrow Belongs to Me</a>, before the leaderene whispers to the viewer “tomorrow belongs to ME.” It did.</p>
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<p>As the Conservative government limped towards its end, so too did Spitting Image. Viewing figures fell such that the 18th series in 1996 was the last, too early for the New Labour government, though not too late for there to be a beaming model of a then-unsullied Tony Blair.</p>
<p>Given its roots, it is eminently appropriate for the Spitting Image archive to be given to Cambridge University, but also for it to be thought of as part of history. <a href="https://rogerlawceramics.com/pages/about-roger">Law</a> is now a ceramicist in Norfolk, <a href="http://www.peterfluck.co.uk/about/">Fluck</a> an artist in Cornwall. Suggestions of reviving the show have not accompanied this flurry of interest – circumstance being all, British politics and public life in 2018 defies satire.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/107241/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martin Farr does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Royals, politicians and pop stars were all fair game for this smash hit show of the 1980s and 1990s.Martin Farr, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary British History, Newcastle UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1036322018-09-24T12:34:47Z2018-09-24T12:34:47ZDenis Norden: elder statesman of gentle comedy forged in heat of World War II<p>Denis Norden, who <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-25738224">died recently</a> aged 96, epitomised a peculiarly British brand of comedy that emerged from a specific time and place. For some years after the end of World War II, while many young people were still being called up for National Service, a generation of talented actors, musicians and comics who had cut their teeth entertaining the troops, were finding their way onto the stage and the airwaves.</p>
<p>Norden, who spent the war as a radio operator, emerged from the RAF as one of the new breed of entertainers who had worked for the gang shows, concert parties, Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) and Combined Services Entertainment (CSE) agencies that brought live shows to the troops. Their job was to provide light relief from immediate circumstances – remind their uniformed audience of home while encouraging the maintenance of a cheery Blitz spirit on the Home Front. Keep calm and carry on was the message. </p>
<p>Men overwhelmingly supplied the comedy for their peers. Female entertainers tended to be established singing stars such as Gracie Fields or “forces sweetheart” cast types like Vera Lynn. The relative lack of female comics meanwhile allowed for an overabundance of men donning drag for comic purposes. </p>
<p>The comedians concentrated on the small, silly and local. Jokes were parochial and daft in tone rather than overtly satirical. The comic voice was political only in so far as it reinforced class hierarchies and social conventions that mirrored services life at the time. Above all, the humour was unashamedly escapist.</p>
<p>After demobilisation, Norden – like many of his contemporaries from services entertainment – went on to dominate the comedy and media industries – bringing the same values and mode of expression to their live, radio, TV and film production work after the war. Former sergeants <a href="http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/1415513/index.html">Cardew Robinson</a> and <a href="https://www.radiorewind.co.uk/radio2/charlie_chester_page.htm">Charlie Chester</a>, for example, found success on the radio, while sergeant <a href="https://www.comedy.co.uk/people/frankie_howerd/features/frankie_howerd_at_100/">Frankie Howerd</a> would go on to work across the media. </p>
<p>Leading aircraftman <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/10590018/Dick-Emery-the-neglected-superstar-of-TV-comedy.html">Dick Emery</a> would eventually become the top TV character comedian of the 1970’s, complete with his pre-Little Britain cross dressing and catchphrases, including the famous: “Ooh you are awful … but I like you.” The generation that entertained the troops continued to make popular comedy as a form of escapism. Norden’s style of presentation, in particular, encapsulated the air of almost throwaway insouciance and stiff upper lip approach that prevailed after the war.</p>
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<h2>From horror to humour</h2>
<p>Indeed, in the light of how little war experiences were directly to affect British Forces comedians’ creativity, it is extraordinary to think of the following parallel events. In 1945, the Italian Jewish writer Primo Levi was liberated from Auschwitz concentration camp. Levi went on to produce the memoir <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/22/primo-levi-auschwitz-if-this-is-a-man-memoir-70-years">If This is a Man</a> – a devastating account of man’s inhumanity to man.</p>
<p>In the same year, Norden – himself Jewish – along with fellow future comedian <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/jul/04/eric-sykes-life-in-clips">Eric Sykes</a>, visited the recently liberated Bergen-Belsen death camp. In stark contrast to Levi’s memoir of suffering, Norden would go on to write the script for “Balham, Gateway to the South” – a parody of a travel documentary that poked gentle fun at a London suburb.</p>
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<p>Both Norden and Sykes – also demobbed from the RAF – would go on to produce some definitive British comedy of the post-World War II period. Norden achieved success as a writer and producer of such shows as BBC Radio’s <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00cf9wv">Take It from Here</a> (1948-1960) which featured the Glums, a resolutely working-class family complete with an array of reassuring catchphrases. Norden’s Balham sketch, incidentally, would later feature the vocal talents of fellow armed forces comedians <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-33610005">Peter Sellers</a> and <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/7547472/Benny-Hill.html">Benny Hill</a>, both of whom would become internationally renowned comedians. Sykes, meantime, would achieve fame in his eponymous domestic sitcoms. </p>
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<h2>Surreal escapism</h2>
<p>The comic voice that continued from armed forces entertainment remained cosy and parochial, adopting the attitude of gentle stoicism of little men against the system. It achieved ultimate expression in the work of Tony Hancock. <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/comedy/features/tony-hancock-50th-anniversary-bbc-comedy-alan-partridge-david-brent-sid-james-a8415241.html">Hancock’s comic style</a> illustrated the archetypal forces comic position of a pugnacious yet resigned persona with something of a make-do-and-mend attitude along with a mutually exclusive respect for – and suspicion of – class distinctions and hierarchies.</p>
<p>The permeation of the silly comedy strand was most evident in the humorous invention of The Goons. Lance bombardiers Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan, along with Peter Sellers, had been forces entertainers and their vein of local surrealism continued to send up British post-war characters in a gently subversive manner, but still using the default escapist tone. </p>
<p>It was not until considerably later that the broadcasting companies reflected more directly on the experiences of servicemen in shows including <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00bfvkd">The Navy Lark</a> (BBC: 1959-77) on radio or <a href="https://www.britishclassiccomedy.co.uk/remembering-an-old-classic-the-army-game">The Army Game</a> (ITV: 1957-61) on television. Jimmy Perry and David Lloyd wrote directly about the concert party experience much later in <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/itainthalfhotmum/">It Ain’t Half Hot Mum</a> (BBC: 1974-1981). </p>
<p>By 1971 Milligan had published his memoir Hitler, My Part in his Downfall. Still no Primo Levi-type text, this was a self-deprecating riff on comic failure with the war used more as a peg upon which to hang surrealist comic observations. </p>
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<p>But then, it is understandable that any all-too real horrors were masked in the later comedy of this breed of entertainers. Future Carry On stalwarts, writer <a href="https://www.carryon.org.uk/talbotrothwell.htm">Talbot Rothwell</a> and actor <a href="https://www.carryon.org.uk/peterbutterworth.htm">Peter Butterworth</a> sang and joked to their fellow prisoners in <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/we-can-thank-the-nazis-for-carry-on-films-5tw5p2qtv">Stalag Luft III</a> to distract the guards from discovering escape tunnels being built. Future Goon <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/bentine-brains-behind-sas-1082289.html">Michael Bentine</a> actually helped liberate Bergsen-Belsen (before Norden and Sykes arrived there). </p>
<h2>Civil service of comedy</h2>
<p>Small wonder, perhaps that these comics would turn to the comfort offered by simple silliness and choose escapism in its truest sense. In rechannelling their comic taste into another kind of “Civil Service of Comedy” after the war, the Forces’ comedians found fictitious outlets that were in contrast to their real experiences.</p>
<p>Norden would go on to become the elder statesmen of the bad pun. Like many of his contemporaries, he started to seem old-fashioned by the 1960s and was replaced, in his turn, by the new generation of university comics in the satire boom. Along with his writing partner Frank Muir, he moved increasingly into nostalgia gigs and other television-friendly formats which allowed for the forces’ comedic attitude of not taking anything too seriously.</p>
<p>In an extraordinary breeding ground of space and time, a very British sense of humour was forged. Perhaps the last of those gentleman-soldier comics whose like we shall not see again, Denis Norden, we salute you.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/103632/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ian Wilkie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Best known these days as the presenter of It’ll Be Alright on the Night, Norden was one of a generation of entertainers who got their start in uniform.Ian Wilkie, Lecturer in Performance, University of SalfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/933782018-03-15T09:47:00Z2018-03-15T09:47:00ZTears: Ken Dodd record outsold everyone but the Beatles in the 1960s<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210519/original/file-20180315-104676-1f3tark.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C56%2C1884%2C1448&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KEN_DODD.jpg">David A Ellis </a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Among all the nostalgic recognition of Ken Dodd’s comic genius following his recent death, it is too easy to overlook the fact that he was also a successful pop singer with no fewer than 18 Top 40 hits to his name, four of which made it into the Top 10. His <a href="http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=13976">1965 release Tears</a> was the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_singles_of_the_1960s_in_the_United_Kingdom">third highest-selling</a> single in the UK across the entire 1960s.</p>
<p>You might want to read that again, slowly. In a decade that produced countless hits for The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley, Tom Jones, Frank Sinatra, Cliff Richard and many more, Ken Dodd’s track outsold them all – except for two songs by The Beatles: She Loves You and I Want to Hold Your Hand, both released in 1963.</p>
<p>There is, of course, a statistical sleight of hand here. Singles released towards the end of a decade have less time to rack up sales within that decade than those that have been available longer. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable achievement, particularly if one considers that singles released before Tears include hits such as It’s Now Or Never by Elvis Presley (1960), It’s Not Unusual by Tom Jones (1965), Can’t Buy Me Love by the Beatles (1964), and so on.</p>
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<p>Why was Tears so successful? Dodd was certainly an accomplished baritone. He sustains a smooth vocal line, pitches the slightly tricky melody accurately, and like other crooners of the time – think Dean Martin or Andy Williams – he uses vibrato effectively. He also has a tasteful approach to portamento – sliding gently between certain pitches to enhance musical feeling. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210507/original/file-20180315-104673-4amjtj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210507/original/file-20180315-104673-4amjtj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210507/original/file-20180315-104673-4amjtj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210507/original/file-20180315-104673-4amjtj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210507/original/file-20180315-104673-4amjtj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210507/original/file-20180315-104673-4amjtj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210507/original/file-20180315-104673-4amjtj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tears of a clown: bigger than Satisfaction or Can’t Buy Me Love.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It is perhaps no coincidence that when Dodd <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009405v#play">appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs</a> in 1990 his musical choices included Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Perry Como – the last of whom he nominated as his overall favourite among his eight discs. These were the singers who he admired – and perhaps to some degree emulated – and their crooning style very much provides the context for his own.</p>
<h2>Music and Meaning</h2>
<p>Is there something about the song itself that also made it particularly popular? The melody is characterised by a descending chromatic line – that is, you couldn’t play it entirely on the white notes of a piano, you’d need some black notes, too. Descending lines of this kind are often associated in classical music with heightened emotional states, especially of grief and sorrow, and particularly if the melodies are coloured by these half-step (semitone) chromatic inflections.</p>
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<p>In Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas (written sometime in the 1680s) Dido’s famous dying lament, When I Am Laid In Earth, is underpinned by a repeating bass line characterised by downward half-steps. Bizet’s well-known <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ_HHRJf0xg">Habanera</a> from his opera Carmen (1875), provides one of the most famous examples of a descending chromatic melody, although here it serves to introduce the title character as a feisty gypsy girl asserting her independence, declaring that: “Love is a rebellious bird that none can tame.” </p>
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<p>In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgr4parx-rU">My Heart Opens to Your Voice</a> (Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix) from Saint-Saëns’ opera Samson and Delilah (1877), Delilah supposedly reveals her love for Samson upon hearing his voice, only to betray him later in the opera. The opening phrase of Dodd’s Tears uses exactly the same descending five-note pattern as the second part of the Saint-Saëns melody. Whether the songwriters <a href="https://www.allmusic.com/artist/frank-capano-mn0001304596">Frank Capano</a> and Billy Uhr were aware of this connection is unknown, but the overlap can be clearly heard.</p>
<figure>
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<p>Tears was first released by the bandleader and singer <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/04/obituaries/rudy-vallee-30-s-singing-idol-and-vagabond-lover-dead.html">Rudy Vallee</a> in 1930, although in its original version it has a waltz-like three beats to the bar feel. Dodd’s version is slower and has the more conventional four beats to the bar – and halfway through the recording (at about 1’38") the entire song modulates up a semitone. This “semitone shift” is relatively common in popular music (less so in classical music) as a way of introducing variety in a piece without introducing new material.</p>
<p>It also heightens tension. Later examples include Michael Jackson’s Man In The Mirror (at about 2’50") or Bon Jovi’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDK9QqIzhwk">Livin’ On A Prayer</a> (at about 3’25") – but there are countless others.</p>
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<h2>Middle of the road</h2>
<p>Looking back, it is tempting to see Tears as something of a watershed moment in British popular music, the final peak of a middle-of-the-road style from singers such as Como, Williams, Val Doonican and others, before that style became overtaken by the inexorable growth of rock and roll and the many popular music styles that followed.</p>
<p>This is not to suggest that these kinds of ballads suddenly disappeared. Light and MOR music continue to have their devotees, and Dodd himself released hit recordings until the early 1980s. But none would have the extraordinary success of Tears.</p>
<p>Whatever the reasons for that success, the fact that a goofy comedian from Liverpool could outsell nearly all UK singers and bands in the 1960s – a prolific decade for British popular music – remains astonishing, almost funny. Tattyfilarious, you might say.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/93378/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephen Cottrell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Liverpool comic scored with the third-highest selling single of the 1960s.Stephen Cottrell, Professor of Music, City, University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/923082018-02-26T09:28:46Z2018-02-26T09:28:46ZThe Louise Reay libel case is no joke for comedians and lovers of comedy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/207495/original/file-20180222-152363-10an29i.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.louisereay.com/comedy">Alexis Dubus</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Stand-up comedian Louise Reay is being <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-43139065">sued by her ex-husband</a> for defamation after she allegedly referred to him in a derogatory manner during her show at the Edinburgh Fringe. </p>
<p>The origin of the dispute arises from a section of Reay’s comedy show “Hard Mode”, whose central theme was, ironically, that of censorship. Performed during their break-up period, Reay is accused of alluding directly to her husband in a contentious manner while also reproducing his image. It is important to the consideration of this case that Reay was also impersonating other “real-life” characters, including Jeremy Clarkson, during her show. </p>
<p>Reay’s defence is that of the comedian’s right to freedom of speech. But her ex-partner claims that portions of her act constituted a public accusation of misconduct against him. The results of the trial will surely have repercussions for all comedians. </p>
<p>On the one hand it is part of the comedian’s job to mine their own experiences and to repackage their own lives and failures for humorous effect. Comedians are expected to make universal capital out of acts of human folly and, in doing this, they often highlight their personal failures in the process. Comedians through the ages have generally been granted a shifting form of comic license. They are supposed to poke fun at authority and to question orthodox thinking. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"964263144683012096"}"></div></p>
<p>Society has long granted comic voices the right to reflect our own frailties back at us. We live in an era where we enjoy our comedy laced with a dash of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/arts/television/larry-david-curb-your-enthusiasm-cringe-comedy.html">awkwardness and tension</a> (just watch a few episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm or The Office for proof of that). Ideally, it comes with an extra side order of offence aimed at those who are believed to be most deserving of being pilloried, as SNL’s <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4373040/SNL-writers-m-scared-Donald-Trump-s-response.html">well-received satirical swipes</a> at the Trump cabinet seem to indicate.</p>
<h2>Courting controversy</h2>
<p>But, on the other hand, in tackling difficult and taboo areas comedians often run the risk of seemingly going too far. Comedians whose material has supposedly crossed into unacceptability at some point include <a href="https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2014/10/07/julian-clary-no-regrets-over-my-infamous-joke-about-norman-lamont/">Julian Clary</a>, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-4306490/Katie-Price-reignites-feud-disgusting-Frankie-Boyle.html">Frankie Boyle</a> and <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/kathy-griffin-donald-trump-beheaded-photo-680953">Kathie Griffin</a>. In each case the comedian underwent a mini trial-by-media. The position that was struck assumed that the comedians had committed a form of excessive verbal violence upon real individuals who were in no position to be able to respond in any like-for-like way.</p>
<p>Blurring of the comic stage articulation with a real persona occurred with <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/remembering-lenny-bruce-and-a-first-amendment-controversy">Lenny Bruce</a> and his infamous conviction for obscenity (followed by a posthumous pardon). More recently <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/10/arts/television/louis-ck-statement.html">Louis C.K.’s</a> sexually predatory comic persona turned out to be far too uncomfortable following allegations of sexual misconduct. Both examples show how the line between joking and questionable self-expression becomes blurred.</p>
<p>Indeed the notion of what Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves call the use of an “<a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-naked-jape-by-jimmy-carr-lucy-greeves-760036.html">ironic stage persona</a>” will doubtless feature in the fall-out discussions which will stem from the Reay case. No one would doubt that Les Dawson’s jokes about his wife or <a href="http://tv.bt.com/tv/tv-news/15-of-les-dawsons-funniest-jokes-a-look-back-at-the-rubber-faced-comedy-icon-11363991114036">mother-in-law</a> or Joan Rivers’ albeit ultimately self-deprecating gags featuring her husband Edgar were examples of affectionate comic exaggeration and caricature. The humour’s basis in any kind of reality never seemed important. Audiences clearly understood that this was a case of “only joking”.</p>
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<h2>A joke is a blunt instrument</h2>
<p>However, as Carr and Greeves also note “a joke is a blunt instrument of communication” and Reay’s experience suggests that comedians may, in future, have to exercise more caution in making the distinction between their joking self and their actual self. In this, comedians will have to rethink ways of separating out yet one more strand in the professionalised act of being. Sociologist John Hewitt notes that “the person has a multiple rather than a single reality … he is one individual and yet many persons”.</p>
<p>Pity the poor comedian. Bringing another level of nuance to the act of public joking and remodelling its ancient conventions will make a very difficult job even harder. In her career, the veteran American comedian <a href="https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/phyllis-diller-and-her-comic-craft/">Phyllis Diller</a> made many gags about her fictional husband, Fang. “Fang is a good loser,” she said. “He lost 11 jobs in one year.”</p>
<p>However, as American comedy promoter Carl Unegbu notes in his book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Comedy-Under-Attack-Golden-Headwinds/dp/1937453294">Comedy Under Attack</a>, shortly before her death, Diller mused on political correctness and said: “I’m a comic. I don’t deal with problems when I’m working … I want people to laugh.” This is the comedian’s default position.</p>
<p>The Reay case is likely to be difficult to rule on. It is the sacred role of the comedian to make people laugh. Their tool is the joke. But if that blunt instrument results in genuine personal injury, the court has to decide who takes the blame. If it can be proved that Reay was indeed joking, the court will have to establish a precedent about an issue which has long been exercising people’s opinions in the ongoing debate about offence versus political correctness in comedy.</p>
<p>Where will the culpability be seen to lie? With the sanctioned joker who hurls the comic insult or with the “over-sensitive” victim who is assumed to lack a sense of humour? Whatever the results, the ruling will contain consequences for the act of making jokes in front of an audience. And that is just not funny.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/92308/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ian Wilkie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>What does it mean for free speech if a comedian is successfully sued by her ex-husband over the material in her act?Ian Wilkie, Lecturer in Performance, University of SalfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/919382018-02-22T12:17:22Z2018-02-22T12:17:22ZCracking jokes: four rules for humour<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/207492/original/file-20180222-152360-1o1lz54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/53384689@N06/4972978130">marycat879</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Humour is a funny thing. Everyone knows what humour is but no-one knows exactly how it works. This is the reason why I decided to write a PhD on the philosophy of humour. Some may see this as an odd mix – after all, philosophy is a weighty discipline and humour a light topic. </p>
<p>But humour is a phenomenon that anthropologists have discovered in every known <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1986.88.3.02a00790/abstract">human culture</a> and the average person laughs around <a href="https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/humr.1999.12.issue-4/humr.1999.12.4.355/humr.1999.12.4.355.xml">17 times</a> a day. Moreover, although primatologists have observed laughter in <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674419131&content=toc">apes</a> (and <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10996405">rats</a>), the mental sophistication required for full-blown humour seems to be exclusively human. Surely this makes it a legitimate topic to furrow a few philosophical brows.</p>
<p>So humour is human – but plenty of us have not perfected the art quite yet. For those still struggling, here are four rules of thumb for being more humorous:</p>
<h2>1. Be playful</h2>
<p>Keeping your audience in a state of play is essential for humour.</p>
<p>Evolutionary biologists have characterised humour as evolving from <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16519138">social play</a> following observations that apes emit vocalisations resembling laughter during playful activities such as tickling, chasing or wrestling. This would explain why humour is fundamentally social and why we are up to <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1439-0310.1989.tb00536.x/abstract">30 times</a> more likely to laugh when in a group.</p>
<p>Consider the following example from Groucho Marx:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I never forget a face. But in your case I’ll make an exception.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/207461/original/file-20180222-152354-19b2fxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/207461/original/file-20180222-152354-19b2fxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207461/original/file-20180222-152354-19b2fxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207461/original/file-20180222-152354-19b2fxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207461/original/file-20180222-152354-19b2fxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207461/original/file-20180222-152354-19b2fxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207461/original/file-20180222-152354-19b2fxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Groucho Marx: still from Room Service (1938).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">RKO Pictures</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This quip may be considered malign and unfunny when taken seriously, but is benign and funny when taken playfully.</p>
<h2>2. Contradict yourself</h2>
<p>Humour usually involves two contradictory interpretations of something. In puns, this can be two interpretations of one word:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Never date a tennis player. Love means nothing to them.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Or two interpretations of a situation:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Claire calls Craig and warns him to be careful driving on the motorway because the radio says there’s a nut driving in the wrong direction. ‘No kidding,’ says Craig. ‘There are hundreds of them!’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Humour can even involve two interpretations of a character, like when Basil Fawlty mistakes an ordinary guest for a hotel inspector:</p>
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<p>Here the audience enjoys the humour of watching scenes unfold under two contradictory interpretations of the baffled guest.</p>
<h2>3. Be illogical</h2>
<p>The contradiction mentioned in Rule 2 is often funnier when reached by an illogical line of reasoning.</p>
<p>Linguists say that humour differs from puzzle-solving in that we are not looking for sense but rather for <a href="https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/13075">nonsense</a>. This might explain the popularity of the Twitter account <a href="https://twitter.com/KidsWriteJokes">Kids Write Jokes</a> which tweets nonsensical jokes created by children and enjoyed by adults. For example:</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"933701768667648000"}"></div></p>
<p>Here the answer is nonsense but we delight in the illogical reasoning. Conversely, the reasoning in humour can be logical but misapplied:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A moron walks into a restaurant and orders a pizza. The waiter asks whether he wants it cut into four slices or eight. ‘Four,’ says the moron. ‘I’m on a diet.’</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>4. Raise arousal</h2>
<p>Research has shown that increasing psychological arousal serves to make things funnier.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/5645597">One study</a> had participants nervously agree to inject a large rat only to discover that it was plastic toy. The results showed that those who were most anxious about injecting the rat were also the most amused by the discovery.</p>
<p>Humour often raises audience arousal by violating expectations or norms. Violating expectations raises arousal through surprise:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Two fish are in a tank. One turns to the other and says ‘Quick, man the guns!’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Whereas violating norms raises arousal through inappropriateness:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A priest in town is accosted by a prostitute. ‘A quickie for twenty pounds?’ she asks. Puzzled, the priest shakes her off. Outside town he meets a nun. ‘Pardon me, sister,’ he asks, ‘but what’s a quickie?’ ‘Twenty pounds,’ she says. ‘Same as in town.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>However, the raising of arousal must not impinge on the play state mentioned in Rule 1. This impingement is what happens when humour is racist, sexist or generally crosses the line.</p>
<p>Of course, simply knowing these four rules is not enough to be funny - just as reading Plato is not enough to lead a rich and meaningful life. But understanding humour is one way of getting to the core of what it is to be human.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Check out our podcast episode <a href="https://theconversation.com/anthill-16-humour-me-82845">Anthill 16: Humour Me</a> where we put some of these rules into practice.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/91938/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alan Roberts is the author of The Philosophy of Humour, published by Palgrave in Spring 2019. (<a href="https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783030143817">https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783030143817</a>)</span></em></p>A philosopher’s take on what makes jokes funny.Alan Roberts, Associate Tutor (Philosophy), University of SussexLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/901952018-01-31T09:32:52Z2018-01-31T09:32:52ZMan Like Mobeen: BBC comedy defies Muslim stereotypes<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203824/original/file-20180129-89582-shcswm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2017/man-like-mobeen">BBC 3</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Comedy has the power to reflect or to challenge mainstream values. Laughing at difference or “otherness” can reinforce damaging social norms, while shared laughter at a flawed or failed system tends to work more subversively. The new BBC comedy, Man Like Mobeen, is a subversive comedy that implicitly challenges ways in which British Muslims have often been badly represented through lazy caricature and stereotyping – as in the terrorist, the submissive hijabi, or the interfering Auntie.</p>
<p>Man Like Mobeen is the brainchild of Guz Khan, who made his mark on the comedy scene through <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9JSGQwAqcA">YouTube videos</a> and stand-up comedy. Khan is a working-class former school teacher from Birmingham. He wrote this show with Andy Milligan, who is best known for writing Ant and Dec’s gags for I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.</p>
<p>The show is set in Khan’s home city, a place that has frequently been the focus of Islamophobic scaremongering. In 2015, it was described by Fox News in the US as a “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jan/11/fox-news-steven-emerson-birmingham-muslims">totally Muslim city</a>” and in 2014 it was the focus of the notorious “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/01/trojan-horse-the-real-story-behind-the-fake-islamic-plot-to-take-over-schools">Operation Trojan Horse</a>” – a “fake news” story about a plot to Islamicise schools.</p>
<p>Khan himself takes centre stage in the show as Mobeen, accompanied by his buffoonish sidekicks Eight (Tez Ilyas) and Nate (Tolu Ogunmefun). Mobeen, 28, single-handedly looks after his teenage sister, Aks (Dùaa Karim), braiding her hair and tending to her needs while bearing the brunt of her sarcastic mockery. This is not your familiar representation of a young Muslim man. </p>
<p>Critics, including Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674048522">have described</a> the ways that Muslims are often “framed” by the media, with recourse to a familiar set of stereotypes. Yet in this show there is no overbearing bigamous patriarch, Islamic Rage boy, blushing hijabi or interfering Auntie in sight. Man Like Mobeen simply does not engage with this series of stereotypes. Instead, the humour derives from its political commentary, tempered by the constant byplay of the main characters and others they come across, as in: “I saw your Mum last week. She still says you’re a dickhead.”</p>
<h2>Approaching taboo</h2>
<p>For psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, laughter is a <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/286585/the-joke-and-its-relation-to-the-unconscious-by-sigmund-freud/9780142437445/">release of psychic energy</a> created through the social repression taken on by the superego. Jokes provide an acceptable means of engaging with subject matter considered taboo in other social contexts and the offensive subject matter is at once voiced and disguised through the gags. </p>
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<p>In the case of British Muslims and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Britain, engagement with racist or Islamophobic sentiments have tended to take one of two forms in comedies. In one, repugnant attitudes are voiced by racist characters, with the apparently intended effect that audiences laugh at the racist not the racism. Yet this is problematic, as audiences can as easily identify with the racism as against it – a phenomenon that critics Sharon Lockyer and Michael Pickering describe as the “<a href="http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781403939425">Alf Garnett syndrome</a>” – after the central character in the 1960s sitcom ‘Til Death Us Do Part. </p>
<p>An alternative is to engage with racist or Islamophobic stereotypes by having them voiced or embodied by ethnic or religious minority characters, effectively legitimising the laughter. This can come across as lazy and conservative – and Khan himself distances himself from the likes of Adil Ray’s Citizen Khan for reiterating the same stereotypes circulating since the 1970s, asking people to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/jan/09/man-like-mobeen-guz-khan-citizen-khan-on-the-buses">“laugh at us rather than laugh with us”</a>. </p>
<p>What Man Like Mobeen does differently is to take structures and systems, rather than individuals, as the primary source of comedy. In the first episode (Bagpuss), Mobeen, Eight and Nate find themselves improbably accosted by armed police. </p>
<p>Nate quickly scarpers, leaving Mobeen to explain why his friend has run off: “If I had to guess, I’d probably say it’s cause he’s black…” The question of Mobeen’s potential racism (in the implicit association between black men and criminality) hangs in the air for a moment before he explains: “Look, officer, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this thing called history, but these situations very rarely work out for the black man.”</p>
<h2>Gentle ribbing</h2>
<p>Khan cites comedians Eddie Murphy and Dave Chappelle as his “<a href="http://metro.co.uk/2017/12/21/man-like-mobeen-star-guz-khan-faith-family-packing-teaching-grow-weed-7166531/">comedy heroes</a>” for their blend of “sharp political comedy” and “outlandish humour” and this influence comes across clearly in the show. Yet the comedy goes further than this in its generosity. </p>
<p>In a particularly poignant scene in the final episode (H-ALTRight), Mobeen is locked in a police van with a racist character, Robbie, who has been preaching Islamophobia to the assembled crowd. Here, the comedy does the kind of straight talking that critics of the liberal left claiming to speak for the putative everyman (Donald Trump or Nigel Farage, for example) suggest never happen. </p>
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<p>The scene in the van allows Robbie openly to voice his questions and fears about Islam – yet the comedy doesn’t render him the butt of the joke at this point through superior laughter or intellectual snobbery. When Robbie suggests that “only the oppressed woman” wants to wear a burqa, Mobeen responds “Oo, Robbie. You dictating femininity to women against their will are ya? You sexist pig” – in a tone more suggestive of brotherly teasing than outright disgust. Mobeen challenges Robbie’s views, yet the colloquial speech and gentle ribbing leave his humanity intact.</p>
<p>It is interesting that, while the show shies away from stereotyping, reviews sometimes find it hard to do so. The Financial Times’ review claims <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/5a224862-e190-11e7-8f9f-de1c2175f5ce">in its subheading</a> that: “Guz Khan stars as a Muslim man trying to shake off suspicions of terrorism.” Mobeen is indeed constantly hounded by the police, but this viewer understood Mobeen’s nefarious activity as being implicitly linked to drugs. When Aks is faced with snitching on a local drug dealer in episode one, she observes sarcastically that “there is one person in the family who don’t get involved in drug dealing”. Mobeen quickly dismisses the implication and changes the subject.</p>
<p>It seems that no matter how shows like Man Like Mobeen attempt to redraw the boundaries for what a comedy about British Muslims might look like, audiences may still be led to interpret it through all-too-familiar frameworks.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/90195/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sarah Ilott does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Guz Khan manages to set up his gags so that we laugh with him, not at him.Sarah Ilott, Lecturer in English Literature and Film, Manchester Metropolitan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/872822017-12-14T11:43:00Z2017-12-14T11:43:00ZThe Marvelous Mrs Maisel might be set in the 1960s but the story is still true for female comedians today<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/199029/original/file-20171213-27565-jb6d6x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Rachel Brosnahan in The Marvelous Mrs Maisel.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B06WD8KP4K/ref=dv_wn_sign_in?ie=UTF8&autoplay=1&">Amazon</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Have you heard the one about what Stewart Lee was wearing at his last gig? Or the one about the gendered material of Ken Dodd? No, neither have I. When it comes to comedy, it’s impossible to shy away from the fact that <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.7227/CST.10.2.8">women have a tougher time</a> of it than men. Female comedians are judged more heavily on their material, but also on their looks, appearance, mothering skills, sexual status … the list goes on.</p>
<p>But not only do women get judged more harshly as performers, they also account for only around <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/03/26/comedy-are-women-funny-lack-female-comedians_n_5028855.html">10% of the industry</a> – with most of the <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/nolanfeeney/2013/07/11/why-arent-there-more-women-on-the-top-earning-comedians-list/#a6978cc62bc2">top gigs</a> and pay packets going to the men.</p>
<p>This discrimination that occurs in the comedy industry is, on one level, a microcosm of what happens in society. So although women are now much more prominent on the comedy circuit, the sad truth is that there is still a long way to go before women get heckled in the same way as men.</p>
<p>That’s why Amazon’s new comedy series, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5788792/">The Marvelous Mrs Maisel</a> – which features a woman with a knack for stand-up – is depressingly brilliant. Depressing because, although the show is set in the 1960s, its observations about the industry are frustratingly relevant to this day. And brilliant because the show’s creator, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0792371/">Amy Sherman-Palladino</a>, has seen there is clearly a growing appetite for women in the funny roles – after a successful showing of its pilot, the show has been picked up for two seasons.</p>
<h2>The female comic</h2>
<p>The US stand-up Amy Schumer <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/may/06/amy-schumer-feminist-comedy-assertion-worth">recently asserted during an award acceptance</a> speech, that the act of being a female comic is in fact an act of feminism since it strongly suggests that a “woman’s comedic voice is as valuable as a man’s”. </p>
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<p>My <a href="http://www.salford.ac.uk/arts-media/arts-media-academics/lisa-moore">own research</a> looks at the “constrained voice” of the female stand up. This is the idea that the female comedy voice is so heavily scrutinised, and has been entrenched in patriarchy to such an extent that the female comic is inhibited and unable to express herself authentically. </p>
<p>In this way, the female comedy performer’s career path is unlikely to be very easy, since she, by the very nature of her act, invalidates cultural norms of respectability and traditional femininity. </p>
<h2>The funny woman</h2>
<p>To try and tackle the inherent sexism in the comedy industry, some time ago <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/feb/08/bbc-comedy-shows-male-panels-female-presence">the BBC banned all-male panel shows</a> – pledging to include one female in each programme. </p>
<p>But such gestures have led to a kind of “spotlight effect” where the elected woman may feel responsible for representing all women – and are then <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/feb/10/one-woman-bbc-tv-comedy-panel-shows?CMP=share_btn_link">potentially scrutinised</a> as “the woman” in a male dominated show.</p>
<p>It can also lead to the female guest in question finding herself part of a tired format that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/28/tv-panel-show-women-comedy-format-gender">relies on heavy editing</a>. This is probably why stories on the comedy circuit of women loathing those gigs are plentiful. </p>
<h2>Women on top</h2>
<p>To stop this from being the case, there needs to be more done to get the numbers, and the ratio of men to women equal in comedy. It wouldn’t be hard; there’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/arts/television/female-comedians-are-confidently-breaking-taste-taboos.html">no shortage of funny women for these shows</a>. </p>
<p>Similarly, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09gzj9n">there needs to be an equal number of women on comedy bills</a>, as well as more female sketch shows and female centred sitcoms commissioned by TV channels. Getting more female directors involved would also help make programmes relevant for the 50.8% of the population who aren’t male.</p>
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<span class="caption">The Marvelous Mrs Maisel is written and directed by Amy Sherman-Palladino who created the Gilmore Girls.</span>
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<p>It is clear then that just like Miriam Maisel in early 1960s New York, many female comedians and comedy fans are still frustratingly waiting for a time when the female comedy performer is judged solely on her ability to make people laugh. </p>
<p>But until then, despite the fact that woman have to work much harder to gain the respect of their audience – and their peers – it is encouraging to see a new generation of <a href="http://whatstrending.com/whats-trending-live/18121-natasha-lyonne-on-how-women-are-taking-over-come">female comedy talent</a> coming up through the ranks to share their voices with the world. Whether it’s a world that’s ready for them yet, though, is another issue.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87282/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lisa Moore does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It can be a tough gig as a female comedian.Lisa Moore, Lecturer in Performance and Media , University of SalfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/831862017-08-30T07:56:13Z2017-08-30T07:56:13ZBen Elton’s wrong – TV sitcoms aren’t dead, they’ve just changed since his day<p>In his recent Ronnie Barker Comedy Lecture, the comedian and writer Ben Elton <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/aug/25/snobbery-is-killing-the-great-british-sitcom-says-ben-elton">lamented that</a>, in the case of the British sitcom, “a great and original television art form is dying”. </p>
<p>Elton claims that the demise is due to two major whammies. The first is commercial. A three-camera sitcom filmed in front of a live studio audience, which is then allowed to grow an audience over several seasons is, simply, no longer economically viable, due to the exponential escalation of its stars’ salaries <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/the-return-of-the-sitcom-2201279.html">in line with its success</a>.</p>
<p>The second killer blow is, Elton claims, due to the “snobbery” of social commentators who reinforce their class-based viewpoints that sitcoms (and laughter tracks) are unworthy of cultural consideration.</p>
<p>Elton’s first charge has much currency. We exist in an era where multiple channels for comedy proliferate and where endless reruns abound. Producers of new sitcoms are fragmented across a variety of networks, while online producers can push out small-scale, inhouse, comedy formats on tiny budgets in the hope of them being picked up and remade for the mainstream. </p>
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<p>So-called reality shows of the <a href="http://uk.businessinsider.com/reality-show-secrets-2016-4?r=US&IR=T">Made In Chelsea/TOWIE</a> school simply appropriate the tropes of sitcom and soap opera to recreate a new, cheap and popular “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2011/jun/01/reality-tv-only-way-essex">structured reality</a>” format. Sitcom has had to adapt to these new forms to fit in with new viewing patterns and appeal to the increasingly individualised and solo consumption of the 21st-century media viewer.</p>
<p>Elton’s second claim, that “snobbery” and an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/jun/29/can-it-why-studio-laughter-has-no-place-in-modern-sitcoms">anti-laughter agenda</a> are precipitating the demise of the sitcom in the UK is less convincing. Commentators’ objections seem more likely to be accusations that new sitcoms are just not particularly funny. </p>
<p>Tastes change – and it may be that what Elton characterises as metropolitan elite condescension is actually more a case of comedy that is no longer seen by its consumers as fit for purpose. <a href="https://theconversation.com/demise-of-count-arthur-strong-signals-the-end-of-the-family-sitcom-82292">Traditional sitcoms</a> may simply no longer chime with modern appetites or hit contemporary funny bones.</p>
<h2>Theatrical tradition</h2>
<p>Arguably, the real problem is that early sitcoms, both here and in the US, drew very heavily on the theatre model. Sitcoms stole freely from classical comic plays – pinching their larger-than-life plots, twists, archetypal characters, central “trickster” figures, class plays, ersatz families, happy endings, the lot. The style of the sitcom was unashamedly theatrical. </p>
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<p>In order to replicate the conditions of theatre experience, the shows were filmed in front of a live studio audience. The audience at home was meant to vicariously experience the communal laughter. The “British television classics” that Elton cites – Dad’s Army, Fawlty Towers and Only Fools and Horses – would all have been largely recognisable in terms of plot, character types and situations to the audience for the <a href="http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/comm/hd_comm.htm">Commedia dell’ arte</a> or to the spectators of a <a href="https://www.usu.edu/markdamen/ClasDram/chapters/141plautus.htm">Plautus comedy</a>. </p>
<p>However, a blanket rejection of theatricality has become endemic in modern visual media. The sitcom, which relies on an acceptance of theatricality in text, characterisation, performance style, plot, resolution and execution, fares badly in the modern eye. It looks phoney, overly fictional, manipulative, old hat. </p>
<p>Recent mainstream sitcoms such as <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2016/10/16/sarah-hadland-miranda-is-coming-back/">Miranda</a> and <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00x98tn">Mrs Brown’s Boys</a> deliberately play up the theatricality of their conceit as a reflexive, knowing gesture to the audience. Viewers, more sophisticated than ever in their understanding of how dramatic manipulations are effected, reject the sheer over-the-topness of traditional sitcom. </p>
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<p>They are, moreover, fully aware that the use of the laughter track (often augmented and central to the old school sitcom) is a manipulation. So, it is audiences, not critics, who reject the falsities that they are served up and who remain unconvinced of the funniness of the formulae.</p>
<h2>Shock of the new</h2>
<p>Along with awareness of the overly staged and formulaic nature of the form, another nail in the coffin of British sitcom has been the renunciation of lazy and formulaic comic tropes (of which Ben Elton himself, ironically, was at the forefront of exploding) when the alternative comedy boom changed everything. Pre-alternative “comic” preoccupations of race, gender, and postcard bawdry were annulled – rendering the themes of many older sitcoms unwatchable.</p>
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<p>Elton notes that the “sea change” came with “the single camera, non audience comedies” and The Office marked a significant transition. Ricky Gervais would also go on to fatally spoof the “classic” sitcom in all its phoniness and cliché in his sitcom-within-a-sitcom <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/organgrinder/2006/sep/22/extrasworkneededricky">When the Wind Blows</a> in Extras.</p>
<p>In a recent piece in The Guardian, critic <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/aug/25/tears-of-clowns-who-are-the-saddest-of-tvs-sad-comedians">Simon Miraudo asks</a> “Who are the saddest of TV’s sad comedians?” He highlights the growth of the cultish, small-scale, downbeat TV sitcom, mentioning <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/mar/15/how-catastrophe-became-even-more-excruciating-tv">Castastrophe</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/aug/05/fleabag-a-hilarious-sitcom-about-terrible-people-and-broken-lives">Fleabag</a> as successful exponents of this different school in the UK.</p>
<p>So, low-key, anti-theatrical sitcoms are currently in vogue. This suggests that, rather than “dying”, the sitcom is merely morphing. At the moment, it is in perfectly good health – perhaps just a little more introverted in style.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83186/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ian Wilkie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In his recent Ronnie Barker Memorial Lecture, the comedian and writer said social media and technology are killing traditional TV comedy. Not so.Ian Wilkie, Lecturer in Performance, University of SalfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/827142017-08-23T09:30:09Z2017-08-23T09:30:09ZActually, we are amused – how the Victorians helped to shape Britain’s unique sense of humour<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/183029/original/file-20170822-30552-el8d22.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">George Vasey, The Philosophy of Laughter and Smiling (1875).</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>You can hear more about the history of Victorian humour in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/anthill-16-humour-me-82845">latest episode of our podcast</a>.</em></p>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="2235" data-image="" data-title="Anthill 16: Humour me" data-size="27792359" data-source="" data-source-url="" data-license="CC BY-ND" data-license-url="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">
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Anthill 16: Humour me.
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<p>Laughter: it’s said to be the best medicine and the cheapest form of therapy. Studies have shown it can help to <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-lowdown-on-laughter-from-boosting-immunity-to-releasing-tension-56568">boost immunity</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-lowdown-on-laughter-from-boosting-immunity-to-releasing-tension-56568">relieve tension</a> and even <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/the-best-medicine_uk_57702a73e4b0232d331e3262">reduce symptoms</a> of anxiety and depression – it seems there’s a lot to be said for having a good old laugh.</p>
<p>The idea of laughter being good for our health has deep roots. It was certainly in wide circulation during the Victorian era, meaning that despite popular stereotypes of this straitlaced century – in which the people and their Queen were terminally “not amused” – laughter was thought of as an essential component of good mental and physical health. </p>
<p>The introduction to the <a href="https://archive.org/details/railwaybookoffun00bris">Railway Book of Fun</a> (because who doesn’t need more fun on a train), which was published in 1875, proclaimed that cheerfulness was a “christian duty” and advised readers to “use all proper means to maintain mental hilarity” if they valued “health and comfort”. It even argued – rather optimistically – that a good sense of humour could help ward off infectious diseases.</p>
<p>Not all Victorians were so keen to loosen their stiff upper lips though. In 1875, a man named George Vasey declared war on laughter. In his book <a href="https://archive.org/details/philosophyoflaug00vase">The Philosophy Of Laughter And Smiling</a> he argued that only “the depraved, the dissipated, and the criminal” were “addicted to uproarious mirth.”</p>
<p>Over the course of 166 pages, he attempted to scientifically prove that laughing was an idiotic, vulgar, and ugly habit enjoyed by empty-headed fools. Laughter distorted the face and, Vasey warned, “often ended fatally” by blocking the passage of air to the lungs. Sensible people, he concluded, “never laugh under any possible circumstances”.</p>
<h2>Laugh and grow fat</h2>
<p>Vasey certainly wasn’t the only Victorian to argue for a new culture of seriousness, but the truth is that these anti-mirth campaigners were swimming against the tide. As Vasey himself admitted, the “immense majority” of his contemporaries held “the habit of laughing in high estimation” and regarded it as “an absolute necessary of life”.</p>
<p>The proverb “laugh and grow fat” <a href="https://archive.org/details/broadgrinsorcure00unse">circulated widely</a> in the 18th and 19th centuries and was usually intended as a recommendation. This link between fatness and health might seem odd to us today. But as one 19th century journalist explained:</p>
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<p>[This was not to suggest] that a mere state of obesity was especially desirable, but rather a wish to rebuke the evil effects upon the physical systems engendered in the persons of those whose lives are made up of fretfulness, of melancholy, and of sour-faced bigotry. </p>
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<p>For advocates of this philosophy, a good sense of humour could even lead to a slap-up meal. Jokes were an important part of Victorian “table-talk” and accomplished raconteurs were sought-after guests at dinner parties. One Victorian writer explained how a skilled and original humorist could “extract venison out of jests, and champagne out of puns”.</p>
<p>For less accomplished comedians, scores of joke books and ready-made “<a href="https://archive.org/details/bookofhumourwitw00londiala">manuals of table-talk</a>” were on sale at Victorian bookstalls.</p>
<h2>Fond of fun</h2>
<p>Just like today, the possession of a good sense of humour was considered an attractive quality by Victorian men and women when seeking a romantic partner. Back then, “<a href="https://twitter.com/DigiVictorian/timelines/876770348926160896">matrimonial advertisements</a>” – the equivalent of a modern day Tinder profile – routinely described their authors as “jolly” and “fond of fun”. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/183011/original/file-20170822-22283-1vu8uep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/183011/original/file-20170822-22283-1vu8uep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=135&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/183011/original/file-20170822-22283-1vu8uep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=135&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/183011/original/file-20170822-22283-1vu8uep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=135&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/183011/original/file-20170822-22283-1vu8uep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=170&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/183011/original/file-20170822-22283-1vu8uep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=170&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/183011/original/file-20170822-22283-1vu8uep.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=170&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Matrimonial advert from ‘Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday’ (1888).</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Some Victorian men even <a href="https://archive.org/stream/gri_33125007799568#page/n167/mode/2up/search/trusting+sex">pretended to have written jokes for Punch magazine</a> in the hope of “ingratiating [themselves] with the fair and trusting sex”.</p>
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<p>A small community of Victorian humorists also managed to earn a living by writing jokes. As one of these professional gag writers put it, he spent his day “turning out jokes as other men would turn out chair-legs”. </p>
<p>The most prolific jesters in the UK and US were reportedly capable of <a href="https://archive.org/stream/ouramericanhumor00mass#page/432/mode/2up">writing 100 new jokes in a day</a> before selling them to the editors of comic magazines like Punch and Fun. These papers circulated widely, and as Vasey begrudgingly explained: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>[The publications] realised princely incomes by their successful efforts in stimulating the pectoral muscles and shaking the diaphragms of their numerous readers.</p>
</blockquote>
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<h2>Private jokes</h2>
<p>While most Victorian joke books limited themselves to respectable humour, racier jokes were, it seems, told in private. The story goes that at one of Punch magazine’s legendary weekly dinner gatherings, political debate about the merits of the then prime minister’s reform bill was abruptly redirected when the journalist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Brooks">Shirley Brooks</a> interjected with a joke: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Q. If you put your head between your legs, what planet do you see? </p>
<p>A. Uranus</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The British novelist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Makepeace_Thackeray">William Thackeray</a> was reportedly consumed with laughter and then proceeded to crack a joke about his own problems with urethral stricture – so much for the link between laughter and good health.</p>
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<p>In short, most Victorians loved to laugh. Despite the best efforts of George Vasey and other champions of seriousness, a vibrant culture of comedy existed in 19th century Britain. And yet, much of this humour has never been studied by historians. Which is why, for the last few years, I’ve been working on a <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-victorians-gave-us-the-christmas-cracker-but-are-also-to-blame-for-the-terrible-jokes-inside-70745">project with the British Library</a> that aims to celebrate this under-appreciated aspect of Victorian life. </p>
<p>We are building an online archive of long-forgotten 19th century jokes. It’s still under construction, but we’ve already begun sharing some of the “best” gags on <a href="https://twitter.com/VictorianHumour">Twitter</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/VictorianHumour">Facebook</a>. </p>
<p>Here are some of my favourites:</p>
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<p>Perhaps George Vasey had a point after all.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82714/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bob Nicholson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Have you heard the one about the Victorian sense of humour?Bob Nicholson, Senior Lecturer in History, Edge Hill UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/822922017-08-14T10:40:17Z2017-08-14T10:40:17ZDemise of Count Arthur Strong signals the end of the family sitcom<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181933/original/file-20170814-24187-vwp82a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dumped after three series: Count Arthur Strong.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC PIctures</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>So, the BBC has decided to <a href="http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2017-08-07/the-bbc-wont-be-making-any-more-count-arthur-strong">cancel</a> its sitcom Count Arthur Strong after three series – presumably in favour of spending its dwindling budget on something more “edgy”. Or perhaps another cooking show? </p>
<p>It’s a sign of the times – the show was developed out of the long-running <a href="http://www.countarthurstrong.com/bbbc/">Radio 4 series</a> created by Steve Delaney in 2005 following the stage success of his monstrous creation, the obscure variety star Count Arthur Strong. The television incarnation was co-authored by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/graham-linehan">Graham Linehan</a>, the genius who had revived the studio-based sitcom in such hits as Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd. It tempted the well-respected Rory Kinnear into its cast. And it was very funny.</p>
<p>But it had also been treated by BBC schedulers with an inconsistency bordering on sabotage. When its third series moved to a mid-evening slot (its first two series having languished post-watershed) it was <a href="http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2017-05-19/is-count-arthur-strong-the-new-family-comedy-the-bbc-is-looking-for">heralded as</a> “the new family comedy the BBC is looking for” – but had then repeatedly lost its spot in <a href="http://www.countarthurstrong.com/no-more-count-arthur-strong-on-bbc-tv-for-now/">weekly schedules</a>.</p>
<p>The count never had the opportunity to develop a regular following – and the show was never repeated. “It was the lack of repeats that killed us,” <a href="https://twitter.com/Glinner">tweeted Linehan</a>. “Might as well’ve just chucked each series down a crevasse.”</p>
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<p>It wasn’t crude, cynical or cruel. Like so many classic sitcoms, its ensemble cast of adorable eccentrics performed its verbal, visual and situational gags before a live studio audience to provide fun and laughter (and the occasional moment of emotional resonance) for all the family. </p>
<p>It wasn’t Peep Show or The Office or Mrs Brown’s Boys. It wasn’t experimental or mockumentary or bawdy. It was just very funny. And the BBC didn’t know what to do with it. Its breadth of appeal no longer aligned with perceptions of comedy’s increasingly niche markets.</p>
<h2>Family appeal</h2>
<p>Its cancellation echoes the demise, 21 years ago, of The Thin Blue Line, Ben Elton’s <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/thethinblueline/">doomed attempt</a> “to restage his beloved Dad’s Army”. Following Elton’s edgier and trendier successes with The Young Ones and Blackadder, The Thin Blue Line had returned British sitcom to its basics, a comedy of character, language and situation in the style of the classics of <a href="http://www.davidcroft.co.uk/">David Croft</a>, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11062341">Jimmy Perry</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/dec/23/jeremy-lloyd">Jeremy Lloyd</a>. </p>
<p>The problem was that Elton’s gentle farce wasn’t what audiences or programmers had expected. Count Arthur Strong was, similarly, too traditional for perceived tastes. Edgy seems better than funny, marginal is sexier than mainstream. Yet social media is abuzz with outrage from the show’s fans. The fictional Count Arthur’s <a href="https://twitter.com/Arthur_Strong">own Twitter feed</a> retweeted a number of such responses.</p>
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<p>Many tweets emphasised the show’s rare inter-generational appeal: “Enjoyed by every generation … the whole family watch … even my mum loves it … good family comedy … the only comedy me, my dad and my grandad all equally crack up to … it got us all together on the sofa chuckling … the only show the whole family sits down and watches together … the first sitcom I and my Dad have laughed about together in years … a comedy which all ages can watch”.</p>
<p>An <a href="https://www.change.org/p/bbc-bbc-commission-a-4th-series-of-count-arthur-strong">online petition</a> has been launched in a bid to reverse the BBC’s decision. At the time of writing it had gathered more than 4,500 signatures in just a few days.</p>
<p>But Linehan is now working – with Sharon Horgan, Diane Morgan and Holly Walsh – on a full series of <a href="http://www.radiotimes.com/tv-programme/e/fb4rbf/motherland--pilot/">Motherland</a>, the continuation of a not-unfunny pilot from the BBC’s otherwise bleak 2016 <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2016/sitcom-season">sitcom season</a> – a series of <a href="https://inews.co.uk/essentials/culture/television/bbcs-catastrophic-landmark-sitcom-season-allowed-happen/">remakes, reboots and pilots</a>, which mostly demonstrated that <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/are-you-being-served-remake-cast-reviews-twitter_uk_57c53a33e4b094071b4c765f">funny’s no longer edgy</a> and that <a href="http://www.cultbox.co.uk/reviews/episodes/home-from-home-sitcom-review-2016">edgy’s rarely funny</a>.</p>
<p>Motherland’s pilot offered a decent blend of jokes and edge. Echoing the tone of Horgan’s sitcom Catastrophe, it <a href="http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-10-06/bbc-orders-a-full-series-of-middle-class-mum-sitcom-motherland">won praise</a> for its “painfully realistic portrayal of the trials and traumas of motherhood”. It was very Channel 4.</p>
<h2>More laughs</h2>
<p>Yet when you’ve assembled such talents as Horgan, Morgan, Walsh and Linehan on one project, you might want more laughs. Laughs enough at least to attract the kind of family audiences which BBC programming has traditionally sustained: from Bruce Forsyth’s Generation Game to Bruce Forsyth’s Strictly Come Dancing; from Mel and Sue in The Great British Bake-Off to Mel and Sue in the rebooted <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-40695631">Generation Game</a> – and anything from David Attenborough and Doctor Who through the ages. These are programmes the family once sat together in front of – and the traditional sitcom once sat at the heart of such programming.</p>
<p>The BBC axed Count Arthur Strong four days after the publication of an <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/02/family-viewing-alive-everyone-watching-different-screen/">Ofcom report</a> on trends in TV viewing which suggested that “watching TV is a solo activity” and that “each member of the family is watching a different programme on a separate screen.” </p>
<p>In the age of box set binges, and of risque reality dating shows such as Naked Attraction and Love Island, that’s unsurprising. What, after all, is there for families to share? Dad’s Army still reruns on Saturdays, but the cancellation of Count Arthur Strong – a show about the joys and absurdities of friendship and family – diminishes such viewing options just slightly further.</p>
<p>The resulting social media furore is about more than the fate of one show. It invokes a nostalgia for a mode of broadcasting with a broader appeal – broadcasting to bring people together in a spirit of renewed social cohesion. This might, of course, be a forlorn hope – but it seems a sincere and not uncommon one.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82292/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alec Charles does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Traditional humour is being pushed off UK screens in favour of ‘edgy’ comedy.Alec Charles, Professor and Head of the School of Arts, University of HullLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.