In Defence of Laughter by Ben Elton 

Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen. Fellow turns.  And welcome to BBC Broadcasting House, the epicentre of British popular culture since 1932. Thank you all for coming and in particular thank you to Charlie Barker, Ronnie B’s daughter who is here representing the great man tonight.  Also with us I’m delighted to say we have members the Corbett family. And heartfelt thanks also to Sir David Jason, you can imagine how thrilled I was when the BBC told me that he had agreed to introduce me tonight, he recorded his piece because he’s away filming which is actually good news for me because I wouldn’t have wanted to follow him.

 

What an honour to be asked to give this inaugural Ronnie Barker BBC Comedy lecture and tonight I’m going to use the opportunity to offer some reflections on the art of sit com, a subject that I’m certain would interest the great man himself.

 

I was lucky enough to get to know Ronnie in his final years and in fact we became quite friendly but the first time I met him was not a very happy occasion. I’d been so excited too. I was at my very favourite event of the year. The BBC Light Entertainment Department Christmas Party!  A BBC institution which all who knew it will remember fondly till they crack their final double en tendre and join the great studio audience in the sky.

 

I can’t tell you how thrilled I was on those nights. It’ was the early 80’s! I was young, it was Christmas and I was at the BBC! Not just any old BBC either but the Light Entertainment bit, the bit that was Christmas.  Never mind Carols from Kings and the first ever small screen broadcast of The Great Escape. The LE bit that made Christmas Night with the Stars and the Goodies Panto, all those 70’s sit com specials and above all the Morecambe And Wise Christmas Show, the highlight of my teenage TV year.  

 

It was a black-tie event. Oh yes, dinner jackets were expected in those days, despite the fact that the party was held in an office. The famed ‘hospitality suite’ on Sixth Floor at TV Centre. Which was the same as all the other offices at TV Centre but with the partition walls removed. Same nylon carpet tiles, periodically punctuated with plug sockets. Same low ceiling with those horrible plaster board panels that you can push out to get to the wiring. Same flouro tube lighting, horrible, even made Bob Monkhouse look pasty. Plus, for a seasonal touch, a magnificent display of paper chains and a tinsel Christmas tree in the corner. 

 

There was no Champagne. It was Red, White or Beer with curry served by BBC Dinner Ladies from large tin trays with little flames under them. No tables or chairs, you got a brilliant little clip that went on the side of your plate to hang your glass off. No DJ, no chill out rooms, no scattered cushions or musk scented indoor Yurt. Just a Woolies cassette of Christmas carols and a sofa for the cast of Last Of The Summer Wine. 

 

And everyone in evening dress! Imagine seeing the entire casts of Hi de Hi and Are You Being Served in the full bib and tucker, Sue Pollard and Wendy Richards in floor length evening gowns gliding across the carpet tiles, picking their way through the poppadum crumbs. John Inman in a faultless white DJ fending off anyone drinking Red wine “no thank you”. 

 

Some of my generation went all grumpy and alternative and refused to wear black tie, they weren’t going to kow tow to any posh snob elitism. but I loved it, I think that was the beginning of life long accusations of political hypocrisy “voting Labour and wearing a dinner Jacket to a Christmas party! What a sell-out”. I didn’t care, Christmas started for me when I went to Moss Bros to hire my DJ. I’d walk in a farty little try hard straight out of Uni and I’d walk out James Bond! Well I wasn’t wearing the suit obviously, I had it in a bag but it still felt pretty good let me tell you.

 

All the stars were at that party but The Ron’s were unchallenged as the biggest in the room.  Ronnie C pulling off the impressive feat of being both the biggest and the smallest star in the room, except in the years when the Krankies were invited. The Ron’s always had little clusters round them, Ronnie C’s was very friendly and inclusive but Ronnie B was a bit more aloof. They used to call him ‘The Guvnor’ which I think he rather liked and he’d hold court a bit, the Channel Controllers always gravitated to him. Lots of people did, including Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry and me who were hovering on the edge of the group, just basking in the fact that we were in the same room as Ronnie Barker and he wasn’t on the telly. Anyway, after a little while the great man turned to us and looked us up and down.

All eyes turned with him.

“I like you” he said, looking at Rowan.

“I quite like you” he said pointing at Stephen.

Before finally turning to me and saying “But I don’t like you”.

That was it. No “hello” or anything and completely out of the blue. 

Then he turned his back.

It was a proper moment. Everyone heard, he’d said it quite deliberately. And I was left stood standing in my rented tux looking like a right arse.  

 

As I say I got to know Ronnie later and we laughed about it but it hurt at the time and I tell the story now because it sort of brings me to the point of this little talk. Such as there is one - which there mainly isn’t because comedy almost by definition defies analysis – But comedy does make people angry, very angry, more so than drama or even politics. Look I know these days everybody’s angry about everything, the Internet has made splenetic fury the new tolerance, but comedy provokes disproportionate fury even in our age of outrage. And interestingly one type of comedy provokes the greatest level of fury of all. The real venom is generally reserved for a certain style of comedy which seems to make quite a large proportion of comedy critics, commentators and consumers very angry indeed. The studio based sit com recorded live in front of an audience.  And it is to the defence of that much-maligned art form that I am dedicating this first BBC Ronnie Barker Lecture. The Studio Sit com.  Comedy’s whipping boy. Routinely dismissed as Hackneyed. Old fashioned and terminally naff.  The Cinderella that so rarely gets to go to the Bafta ball.

 

Here’s a clip from the BBC’s most popular current sit com which as any fool knows is Mrs Brown’s Boys

 

CLIP of Mrs Brown’s Boys.

 

And here’s a fair representation of what the critics made of it.

 

Horrible QUOTES about Mrs Brown’s Boys done like What the Papers Say.

 

Mrs Brown’s Boys is the BBC’s biggest comedy hit in years, it gets 11 million viewers in an environment where 4 is considered a triumph. It also won the Radio Times Readers poll for best sit com of the 21st Century. So, whatever you think of it I hope you’ll agree that by commissioning such a show the BBC was doing its job. Recognising that the whole country pays the licence fee and that quality comedy comes in many guises. Because Mrs Brown is quality comedy, not to everyone’s taste of course but what work of art of any value could possibly be to everyone’s taste? It’s an exuberant, superbly executed celebration of what for want of a better word you might call ‘big comedy’. The comedy of the perfect theatrical double take….

 

CLIP of Mrs Brown’s Boys.

 

The shameless prat fall.

 

CLIP of Mrs Brown’s Boys.

 

And of course, the outrageous dooble.

 

CLIP of Mrs Brown’s Boys.

 

A highly talented cast led by an inspired comic star giving an adoring audience a weekly object lesson in big, broad, farcical nonsense. What’s not to respect? But as we have seen the show is afforded very little. Studio based sit com rarely is, at least not in its own day. Oh, it gets respected later, after everyone’s dead, we all know Dad’s Army is a classic now. But when it started the best it got was at best a grudging smile and at worst and angry snarl.

 

QUOTE Dads Army review.

 

Here’s a couple of clips from two of the BBC’s other currently much-loved comedy shows.

 

CLIPS from Miranda and Not Going Out.

 

Miranda and Not Going Out. And here’s a representation of what the reactions to Miranda….

 

QUOTES

 

And Not Going Out….

 

QUOTES

 

Nothing seems to wind people up more than a nice studio sit com. And let me admit at this point that I’ve been guilty of having a go in my own work.

 

CLIP Vivian on The Young Ones ranting about The Good Life.

 

Although actually I hedged my bets on that one.

 

CLIP. Rik on The Young Ones following up about Felicity Kendal.

 

To be honest I regret that riff. I quite liked The Good Life but when you’re young you kick against the establishment don’t you? And The Good Life was beyond massive back then, the Queen herself had attended one of their studio recordings, imagine recording her laughter “we are amused”. Anyway, I had a pop. But as you get older you realise those are real people’s efforts you’re casually denigrating. And you also find out that it hurts. Which is why at this point in the evening I have to declare a personal interest. The truth is that I am not an unbiased witness. This lecture is not objective. In fact, it’s more subjective than a Donald Trump press briefing. Because it might surprise you to learn that I’ve had one or two bad reviews in my time. Here’s a clip from a sit com I did three years ago which starred the incomparable David Haig as a hapless Health and Safety Officer.

 

CLIP The Wright Way.

 

And here’s just a small selection of the universal phalanx of furious abuse that hit it immediately after the first ep was broadcast. 

 

QUOTE ‘utter utter crap’.

 

And believe me, that was one of the better ones. Well maybe it deserved it. Maybe it was that awful. We’ll never know because it disappeared without trace under the weight of the contempt. But just to show you that a massive slagging doesn’t necessarily mean a show has no popular appeal. Here’s a clip from another show I did with David which is still seen on Gold to this day. The Thin Blue Line.

 

CLIP. Couple of TBL  quickies, Gladstone’s cat and Grim Cock up Arse.

 

And here’s a small selection of the absolutely universal slagging it got the next day. 

 

QUOTES. TBL.

 

I’m not complaining, really, I’m not, it comes with the territory and anyway, you’ve got to use the anger haven’t you, build on it. Everybody gets a kicking. The only contemporary review of Shakespeare that survives was a roast. He got called an “Upstart Crow” Here’s me imagining his reaction to getting it.

 

CLIP Will getting a bad review in Upstart Crow.

 

So yes, obviously I am a subjective witness but I am making an objective point. A point that I feel very strongly about because I contend that through a kind of lazy contempt we are in danger of losing something of real value in our culture, something which once the studios and the talent base that support it are lost will never come again. 

 

So. What is it that defines this thing I’m so anxious to defend? What element links The Goodies to Terry and June?. The Young Ones to On The Buses? They are all recorded live in front of an audience. An exercise in which clearly laughter is the desired aim.  Real vocalised laughter, not internalized smirks, not knowing nods. But laughs. Laughs that are recorded and broadcast along with the show. So, is that the problem?  Is it laughter which offends in comedy?  Strangely I think it is.  The principle objection to these comedies is that people are laughing. Why is that? I think it’s because we’re British. 

 

Because the laughter is evidence of effort. The terrible British sin of Going for laughs. Laughs which incidentally will be routinely dismissed as ‘cheap’ and ‘easy’. Laughs which are clear evidence of the greatest comedic crime of all, the crime of Trying to be funny. Because let’s face it, nobody commits a greater sin in the business of comedy than being spotted trying to be funny. But is that really such a despicable ambition? Trying and failing may be a shame but is trying at all so terrible? Surely not. Because without people trying to be funny we’d have had to get along without memories like these….

 

CLIPS. Classic moments of studio sit coms. 

 

Even now, across the years you can feel the joy, the immediacy of a live studio event. A single performance, one of a kind, captured in time.

 

And consider for a moment the extraordinary complexities involved in producing those shows and the rather awe-inspiring community of skills required. Dolly Parton famously said it took a lot of money to make a girl look this cheap, well it takes a lot of skill, talent and dedication and serious money to make a laugh look easy. 

 

Each episode is recorded over the course of a single evening, in two and a half hours in front of a large studio audience.  Five or six cameras all moving and recording simultaneously capturing the flow, the feel and the timing of a theatrical comedy while in a darkened vision suite those six camera feeds are edited in real time as the show is cut together literally as it’s being performed. 

 

And hovering above every scurrying actor is a microphone, whizzing through the air as the players move about the set, deftly controlled by boom operators, sitting high above the throng on wheeled chariots, extending and contracting their long boom arms like dinosaurs going fishing for gags using microphones as bait. Meanwhile their colleagues hidden in the Sound Suite struggle to maintain a balance between the dialogue being recorded and the audience’s laughter which is also being recorded and of course playing in the comedy sound effects which have to be dropped into the live mix with perfect timing.

 

Series of clips of blows and explosions. 

 

Playing in an extended four section fart to accompany Julie Walters Flatulence walk is an art.  A split second out as her hips are easing one out and the laugh would have been lost and Julie would have farted in vain. 

 

And while the Cameras prowl and the dinosaurs fish camera assistants wrangle the great rubber spaghetti of hundreds of meters of cables which cover the floor and cannot be allowed to impede any camera or boom platforms progress. A techy spaghetti in constant danger of overwhelming the gag bolognaise. Costume and Make Up dab and stitch, the Lighting Department tweak and dim. The Art department dress the set and place the props and all live while in the midst of it all the actors struggle to maintain their characters, timing and commitment. Deprived of the glorious freedom of the stage but required to conform to its disciplines, live dialogue, live effects, live and collaborative timing. 

 

And whatever is captured in those few short hours is what gets broadcast. There might be a minute or two of location footage played in for the audience, like when Basil Fawlty beat his car for breaking down….

 

CLIP Fawlty Towers

 

But basically, what is broadcast is a live theatrical show. This produces an atmosphere very different from the type of feel produced when comedy is created filmicly, using a single camera. Most people tend to think the major difference is the absence of an audience but I think of equal significance is the fact that when a scene is recorded on a single camera it is made in pieces, covering first one character and then another. The characters in a mulit camera studio sit com are really talking to each other in real time. I’m not making a value judgement here, I love and have worked in the single camera environment, I’ve directed two comedy feature films. But I am saying that in the live studio recording you are seeing the actors natural timing, in a filmic sit com you are seeing the editor’s interpretation of it. One style is captured fleetingly on the night, the other is assembled painstakingly in an edit suite. 

 

And Oh, what a vast array of craft skill and talent is required to capture those fleeting moments. Edgy and obscure can be done on the fly, ironic minimalism and mockumentary on an iPhone with a crew of one. But it takes a village for Rik to break all the banisters using his bollocks as a battering ram.

 

And of course, all that makes these shows very very expensive. An expense that frankly is easy to duck if you’re just going to get slagged off for doing it anyway. And so, a great and original television art form is dying. It really is. And while there’s nothing we can do about shrinking budgets, fractured audiences and TV companies turning their precious facilities into prime real estate it might help if commentator, critic and columnist alike stopped treating studio sit com with such thoughtless contempt. As if the only comic art of any real value is comedy that pretends it isn’t trying to be funny. 

 

The sea change occurred in the mid 90’s when suddenly it became fashionable to make sit coms filmicly and without an audience. There was some wonderful stuff, no doubt about that. The sublime Royle Family started it although that was something of a crossover as it remained studio bound but without the live laughter. The real watershed moment came with the brilliant and ground breaking The Office. That and many other shows deserved all the plaudits they get but what began as a fantastic, innovative and refreshing style quickly became a kind of comic orthodoxy and the inexplicable side effect was that the studio sit com became overnight a by word for critical contempt. And it’s the laughter that seems to be so hated! Laughter is hugely irritating. 

 

Apparently, people don’t need ‘canned’ laughter ‘telling’ them if something’s funny. Well I am here to lance the boil of the most corrosive myth in comedy. Because that laughter is not blooming canned! Or at least in my entire thirty-six-year personal experience it hasn’t been, it is simply recorded live. Sure, if the editor is using a second take they might use the laughter from the first. But if anything, the laughter generally has to be turned down rather than up. Because studio nights are not cynical. They are fun, exciting, community events. Is it a coincidence that they fell from grace in the aftermath of the 80’s? The decade in which the individual so firmly replaced the community as the social and political focus of the nation. Yes! I’m blaming Thatch!! 

 

Audience’s laughter is a group activity. A collective act. The shared joy that occurs in the recording of a live comedy is real and that joy somehow manages to make its way across the air waves and into people’s living rooms. The country’s biggest popular comic hits have always been accompanied by laughter. They form an abiding and affectionate collective memory. They are part of what it means to be British. And yet as I have shown, the form is routinely dismissed and often despised.

 

It really is a sort of snobbery and I say that reluctantly, fully aware that such a slur is unlikely to make me many friends amongst media commentators. But I make the charge none the less because I think we are discussing nothing less than a prejudice against joy.  Corrosive, destructive and coloured I’m afraid by that ancient British cultural cancer - class. 

 

CLIP The famous Frost and Ronnie’s Class sketch.

 

The British establishment has always been suspicious of popular success. Particularly success that comes from below, through conspicuous effort and obvious ambition. This prejudice has deep roots. The founding fathers of the American economy created their wealth, the original elite in Britain inherited theirs and deeply resented those who tried to share in it, establishing an underlying cultural resentment of hard earned success that astonishingly still seems to play its part in shaping our national character today.

 

And what is a laugh if not evidence of success? If you play for a laugh and you get it, you’ve succeeded. In the US that’s something to celebrate (sometimes I’ll admit with an exuberance which can be a bit irritating. There really is no need to whoop all the time surely?). But the celebration is honest. In America if you do an interview and they ask you what you’re up to, you tell them and people clap. In Britain, you have to pretend you don’t want to mention it. You have to mumble things like “oops. Sorry. Shameless plug No really don’t buy my book, please, I’m sure it’s terrible”.  It is simply not the done thing to be seen to want to succeed. And studio sitcom cannot hide that ambition. It’s needy. It’s saying ‘please like me’ and as such it must be despised.

 

Perhaps you think all I’m suggesting is that ‘simpler’ less complex, less cerebral forms of comedy deserve to be more celebrated. Not at all. Quite the opposite because in fact there’s nothing ‘simple’ or lacking in complexity about the shows I’m discussing at all. In fact, I humbly suggest that behind all that ‘mindless’ laughter often lies human truths as real and revelatory as those explored in any acclaimed drama. That’s why they’re so funny!

 

Consider the strange and unexplained fictional home life of Eric and Ernie which was a sort of mini studio sit com within their variety shows.

 

CLIP. Eric and Ernie in bed.

 

Writer Eddie Braben truly exploring the existential pointlessness of existence. I’m serious. Here are Eric and Ernie passing time together, measuring out their lives not in TS Elliot’s coffee spoons but in mugs of cocoa and wistful reflections on the hopes and dreams of lost youth. For me their circular efforts to pass the time were every bit as inconsequentially bleak and deeply absurd as Vladimir and Estragon’s famous inertia in Waiting For Godot. 

 

CLIP from Waiting for Godot

 

And I think you’ll agree, much funnier. But I doubt writer Eddie Braben who wrote the Morecambe and Wise scripts throughout the 70’s will ever be an A level text. My point is that ‘Big’ apparently ‘silly’ comedy does not preclude big ideas or philosophical revelation you just don’t notice them, which is why they can be funny! Richie and Eddie in Ade Edmondson and Rik Mayall’s 90’s sit com Bottom negotiate the pointless Nihilism of life with every bit as much seedy detail and dark purpose as the characters in a Pinter play but with laughs. 

 

CLIP from Bottom.

 

Consider the forensic clarity of Johnny Speight’s searingly illuminating comic exploration of the mind of the confused, ignorant, ill-informed bigot.

 

CLIP from Till Death Us Do Part.

 

If Galton and Simpson’s sublime Steptoe and Son hadn’t been such high comedy it would have been recognised as high tragedy. For was there ever a more perfect evocation of a mutually destructive emotional interdependency than the relationship between Harold and Albert Steptoe. 

 

CLIP from Steptoe and Son.

 

And consider the depth of perception that Jennifer Saunders brought to the post sixties generational battles in which adults wanted to remain adolescents for ever while their children born into a much less generous society focussed on their adult future.

 

CLIPof Saffy being sad in Ab Fab 

 

In real comedy, proper funny comedy, truth is a given. You don’t notice it, that’s why it’s funny. The depth of human understanding lies behind and within the comedy. The intellectual value of the work is rightly and properly masked by the primal, organic, gut driven instinct to laugh. 

 

Some people don’t get that and what’s more they haven’t been getting it for at least two and a half thousand years! The Ancient Greeks were the first comedy snobs. It was them who decided that there were two muses, comedy and tragedy and tragedy was the important one. Comedy was the low rent, low brow curtain raiser. A few nob gags before the proper serious drama began. Blimey for the people who laid the foundations stones of Western civilisation they could be spectacularly thick. Comedy and tragedy are inadvisable. Ask Charlie Chaplin, Tony Hancock, Eric Sykes and Hattie Jacques or Victoria Wood. And I mean proper comedy. Not grim Pinteresque tragi/comedy, comedy that gets laughs.

 

And yet as we’ve established it’s the laughter which so offends those who seek to analyse comedy, be they amateur or professional. Because laughter leaves the critic out of the loop. Laughter defies argument. The conclusion has already been drawn. You may hate Mrs Brown’s boys but the presence of genuine spontaneous laughter means your hatred is not an objective truth - which we all secretly believe our personal prejudices to be – but merely subjective - a subjective opinion. What critic be they professional or amateur wants to acknowledge that? And so, the dismiss that laughter as ‘cheap’ and ‘easy’.

 

What madness! If art is about exposing and exploring our souls, the essential pettiness, vanity, snobbery, desperation, selfishness, generosity, occasional heroic grandeur and quiet heroism inherent in every human heart then we may find it brilliantly and sympathetically portrayed in a single look from Cpt Mainwaring 

 

CLIP of a Mainwaring look from Dad’s Army “stupid boy”

 

Or a long morning with Victor Meldrew.

 

CLIP. Quick ‘I don’t believe it’ from One Foot in The Grave.

 

A pint with The Likely Lads

 

CLIP of them on Rodney’s social climbing.

 

And as for quiet heroism you can find it at any moment in the company of Frank and Betty Spencer.

 

CLIP of Some Mothers. The car over the cliff.

 

Look. I’m not trying to mount some horrible populist exercise in anti-intellectualism. But I am complaining about intellectual exercises in anti-populism. My claim is that much of what is dismissed as broad comedy is in fact very clever indeed. We just don’t notice how clever it is because really good comedy defies analysis. 

(No Clips here now)

So, what conclusions if any can be drawn as I come to the end of this first Ronnie Barker talk? 

 

Well certainly I’d make plea that when we write about comedy be it in a newspaper or in a tweet we shouldn’t leap to judgement. I don’t think any comedy should be judged on its first outing, particularly a sit com which by its nature is designed for the long haul. I honestly don’t think The Young Ones would survive in today’s critical environment, it was big brash and confrontative and very rough around the edges with as many hits as misses in its gag count. Had Rik, Vivian, Neil and Mike arrived in a world of instant opinions, formed and tweeted while a show is actually still on air I don’t think they’d have been given the grace to grow on people as they did. Imagine if they’d had Twitter on the first night of Hamlet…. Five minutes in. ‘Bored already’…. ‘Oh, get over yourself you Danish bastard’… ‘now there’s a ghost. how lame, Marlowe did ghosts in the Jew of Malta. Plagiarism!!’. 

 

Let’s not be so hard on people who are trying to be funny even if we think they failed. Because if nobody’s allowed to fail then no one will think it’s worth trying and without people trying to be funny. Really really trying we’d never have had 

 

CLIP: Tony Hancock in Blood Donor “Nearly an Armful”

CLIP: Del Boy falling through hatch.

CLIP: Mainwaring saying “Don’t tell him Pike” 

CLIP: Blackadder ‘Bob’

CLIP: Eric and Ernie ‘Ice Cream’

CLIP: Edina and Patsy falling out of cab

CLIP: Miranda in underwear in street

 

But above all tonight I want to speak up for the studio based, laughter filled, live sit com. I certainly think Ronnie B would have approved that the first lecture in his name makes that point. It is not a tired and cheesy format at all. It is a great popular art form, a truly original television art form.  A form which I suggest has created a community of audience, a collective affection and a store of shared memories which is unparalleled in our culture.

 

Well that’s my piece and I’ve said it. The Ronnie B story I started with has got a happy ending by the way. Years later I got to know the great man a little better. My wife and I had become friends with Ronnie C and his wife Anne after I’d asked Ronnie C to do a regular slot on my TV show. In fact, I’m proud to say I wrote him a gag that he kept in his after-dinner routine till his dying gig, about him loving Viagra because it gave him somewhere to hang the tea towel when he was doing the washing up. Well Ronnie C must have told Ronnie B that I was all right because Ronnie B and his wife Joy began inviting me to their annual ‘Party’s at the Mill’. These were magical summer events held at their country mill house with lots of food and drink and an old-style jazz band in straw hats. Ronnie and Joy were so warm and welcoming. These were proper old school show biz bashes, I got the chance to have a nice long chat with David Jason so you can imagine how I loved it. Ronnie did mention our first encounter once or twice and we laughed about it while I basked in the pleasure of his company, still a fan. So, I’ll leave you with a moment from one of Ronnie B’s own studio sit coms. Recorded over forty years ago, many of the people you can hear laughing are like Ronnie long gone but their genuine happy laughter is caught in time and still rings down to us across the years. Here’s Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais incomparable Porridge. 

 

CLIP from Porridge.

 

My name’s Ben Elton Goodnight!