1996 and the End of History by David Stubbs

Author:David Stubbs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 1996 and the End of History
ISBN: 9781910924297
Publisher: Repeater Books
Published: 2016-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

4 About Nothing:

Comedy In 1996

On one of those retromaniacal shows that sprang up in abundance at the beginning of the 21st century, in which celebrity talking heads collide with cheesy old TV clips, Wendy Richards (later of EastEnders fame) commented on the Are You Being Served phenomenon. As the affectionately dire clip plays out, cut to Richards saying that, sadly, of course, comedy of this calibre could no longer be made. “That’s because of political correctness”, she diagnosed, with the self-satisfied simper of one who had dared to say the unsayable and the hardly-ever-said.

In fact, the supposed tyranny of political correctness in comedy had been much remarked upon since the early 1990s. It was supposed to have flourished abundantly in the 1980s: a new, austere wave of terror that saw the old, merry aristos of mirth who had graced our screens in the 1970s – the likes of Benny Hill, Bernard Manning, Love Thy Neighbour, etc. – put to the guillotine. When Benny Hill died in 1992, almost simultaneously with Frankie Howerd (another denizen of the old saucy brigade), there was an outpouring of remorse and reproach that alternative comedy and political correctness had hounded these venerable entertainers off their perches. Ben Elton, supposedly the Robespierre of PC, took to the media to pay homage to Hill and to hotly deny that he had ever castigated him as a comedian. Alexei Sayle, The Young Ones co-star and one of the first of the edgy, agitating new comedians to crash to prominence on the “alternative” wave, wrote a column that went so far as to claim Benny Hill’s superiority over the more fashionable Howerd, who had enjoyed a revival very late in his life as a beneficiary of the postmodern irony that was always a part of the alt.com mindset.

Nonetheless, the narrative went thus: after the golden, televisual age of innocence of yore, the 1980s had seen a tyranny of PC comedy, which had more to do with angry, punk-ish iconoclasm and tub-thumping, bucket-shaking belligerence than rib-tickling. And yet it is hard to see where this hegemony was actually located. Granted, go along to a Nicaragua benefit in the late 1980s and you’d have to sit through sets of mirthless belligerence by spikyhaired fugitives from the City Limits ’ listings pages, but these were minor, soon-forgotten figures indeed. Most of the perception of PC dominance seemed to settle around the hapless, tireless figure of Ben Elton. With his dodgy haircut, dubious penchant for Dire Straits (and later, hideously, Queen), he himself was hardly a punk-ish specimen. However, with his scathing, anti-Thatcher stand-up and his involvement in the sitcoms The Young Ones, Filthy Rich & Catflap, and Blackadder, he bore much of the credit (and, for some, the responsibility) for creating a new comedy that was underpinned by a new political and comedic self-consciousness – and which deconstructed the shopworn conventions of light entertainment that had been doing the rounds since practically the music hall days.

That said, no one was better at

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