From Ross Noble to Johnny Vegas: Comedians of the Year

The best Christmas TV wasn’t Christmas TV but catching up on a series I hadn't managed to see on its first or subsequent runs. Ross Noble’s Freewheelin reminded me of a kind of television they generally no longer make, except, perhaps, by accident. It is TV straight from the 1980s, when Channel 4 earned its reputation for innovation by simply making room in its schedule for the unexpected.

In Noble’s show, he travels around the UK based on random suggestions made to him via Twitter. In one episode he even travelled as far as visiting St Helens, though I can’t say I recognised the parts he visited. Unlike his visits to other towns, Noble avoided the shopping district. St Helens was portrayed as an utter dump. Perhaps it is, though that will be particularly evident if you choose to look at one derelict shop in some backstreet away from the centre of town.

In a way, it was a bit of a disappointment but not unexpected. This region has a reputation and you don’t often hear people talk about the famous writer, wit, or intellectual from St Helens. In the national psyche, we’re the stuff of twisted rugby players, boxers with flattened senses, and the comedian Johnny Vegas.

Vegas made a welcome appearance in the St Helen’s episode, though I suspect that was down to his friendship with Noble rather than the producer trying to fill the show with celebrities. Unfortunately, they did that also, which was the series’ one failing. The format’s strength is that it actually involved real people in everyday situations which Noble warped with his brand of spontaneous comedy. It’s actually gave a little attention to parts of the county that rarely get included in the TV schedules. Yet I guess it’s unsurprising that even the best show should betrays its ethos by sadly conformed to the usual TV formula of replacing real people with celebrities. Does a tour of the UK always have to involve a stop off at Paul Daniel’s house? It’s as though a tour of the UK couldn’t be complete without involving some luvvie from that other world. I’ve said it before that celebrities ruined Twitter but must they also ruin a TV based around Twitter. It seems that they must.

The other thing I’ve found myself watching over Christmas are Dave’s repeats of Have I Got News For You. In many respects, I agree with people who say its lots its edge and it’s a show that desperately needs a revamp. If it does, I don’t think it need be a huge change. Simply getting rid of the guest presenters would be a step in the right direction. By its very nature, satire is the comedy of the outsider. It’s the stuff of the alternative point of view. It’s why HIGNFY rightly belongs on BBC2 and not on the nation’s main TV channel. Like the alternative Queen’s speech, it should be about standing apart from the herd, directing scorn where scorn will sting. Now on BBC1 and hosted by many of the people it should set out to mock, the show has been co-opted by the establishment and it now rarely bites. Although I don’t like the man’s comedy but perhaps ideal host would be Frankie Boyle simply because he might upset a few people in the process. An even better host would be Stewart Lee, though I doubt if it would be his thing and he probably wouldn’t do it anyway. The problem with so much satire in the UK is that it’s become safely contained within establishment rules, appropriated by the establishment as if to control disenchantment. Gone are the days when politicians would step in to try to stop the broadcast of an episode of Spitting Image. Indeed, it’s a sign of how bad satire has become that I actually miss Spitting Image, which in its later years was itself a twisted version of its former self.

It also reminds me that over Christmas, I watched a biography about David Frost. Among the few things I took away from the show was the degree to which Frost was himself always destined for an establishment role. Although he made his name in satire, he wasn’t by nature satirical or, for that matter, either a writer or performer. The great Peter Cook was said to have resented the way Frost took the Fringe out of theatres and put it on TV.

It’s why I hope Ross Noble remains on the outside of that world. I hope he manages to stay disconnected from the London establishment. I had worried that Johnny Vegas might have become ‘too London’. When Noble met him, he was in a London pub, hundreds of miles away from where his career began in the St Helens Citadel. Then I read about him laying into the establishment at the typically woeful British Comedy Awards. You need to skip to four minutes to get the meat of the business…


Of course, part of this might just have been his usual shtick and I worry that the London set laugh because of the way he says things rather than the things he says. But what he says has real significance to me given I spend most of my days lamenting about the state of comedy writing in the UK.



Is it any surprise that the elected king and queen of British comedy should be Jack Whitehall and Miranda Hart? It makes me even more jaded and I have even less desire to write comedy or drawn cartoons, hence the reason I've spent most of my time over Christmas drawing bad caricatures on my upgraded Note. I don’t think I’ve ever been this frustrated in my own work, when my writing, typified by my Stan book, gets nowhere but two extremely unfunny but establishment figures are lauded as comic geniuses. It sickens me to watch Miranda claim Eric Morecambe as her own, somehow associating her mediocre talent to his unequaled star. I suppose it frustrates me that Johnny Vegas is laughed off as if he’s the eccentric uncle spoiling the party when he’s actually speaking truths from the heart that should be acknowledged as wisdom. If I’ve been critical of Vegas in the past, I suppose it was out of my own sense of frustration that my local area should be associated with the Vegas character. It seemed to play into all the southern prejudices that people around here are uneducated, boorish, and borderline alcoholic. Yet Michael Pennington has more humour talent in his little finger than Whitehall has displayed in his entire career. Whitehall, however, is the son of Michael Whitehall and there you have the truth of the world. So, for that one moment of sublime genius, Vegas wins my vote for comedian of the year. Not that it matters.

What Reason To Believe The Frackers?

If you travel down the west coast of England, on the rail line running from Manchester to North Wales, you’ll eventually pass through a long tunnel just beyond Runcorn East. I suppose in European and World terms, it’s a very short tunnel. Yet it’s uniquely a long tunnel in an otherwise flat part of the country and has the novelty of making your ears go pop. Travel through the tunnel lasts a minute or so and you emerge just before Frodsham where a view to the Mersey Estuary opens up on the right and stretches for miles across the sand banks that fill the wide mouth of the river to the point where the brown fresh waters meet the grey brine of the Irish Sea.

In the distant past, I worked a year at the cable company, BICC, in Helsby, one stop beyond Frodsham. When I was travelling there each day, Helsby station had just won some national awards for being the best kept station in the country and, to my eyes, it deserved the accolades. It was beautifully maintained with richly coloured abundant flower beds and old style railway buildings that looked like they'd been plucked from some episode of Poirot or Sherlock Holmes. Since then, it’s become unstaffed and much of it is boarded up; no doubt a  little money saved but for an incalculable loss of value…

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="384"] Helsby Hill (Wikipedia)[/caption]

Yet Helsby village itself still sits perched on the side of one of the few proper highpoints in the area, rising 370 feet over the surrounding land. Looking up the sheer rock face is dizzying, especially when it’s being climbed as it often is by people providing points of Lyrcra colour against the reddish grey rock. Walk to the top and the view is magnificent, with the misted mountains of Wales visible through the clouds to the west and Liverpool in the distant northwest where the Liver Building stands distinct and often glitters in the sun against the banks of the brown river. Directly to the north, you look across the runways of John Lennon Airport and the movements of planes make if feel like you’re watching a diorama of a functioning airport, perfect down to the infinitesimal scale. On a clear day, it’s an uplifting view and quite unique in that it gives a view of a huge swathe of the north, filled with remarkable things to see. Yet perhaps the most telling view is to be seen if you turn your eyes to the northeast and look at the eyesore of the petro-chemical industry that’s built up around Runcorn and Widnes.

The scale of the chemical works is something to behold and locals I knew would often talk about the problems they’d experienced living near such concentrated industry. I don’t know how true this is but I was told that one leak (chlorine, I think it was) meant the police ordered the residents to stay indoors. It was wise they did. Apparently, the leak even changed the colour of their windows and walls.

I always found it hard to believe that people could live happily with dangerous chemicals just a few gusts away, but then, closer to home, there was Warrington where climbing off the train at Bank Quay station, you would often be subjected to the smell of the soap works, the taste of washing powder on your tongue, and, at its worst, a mild burning sensation in your eyes and nostrils. I grew up in the shadow of a gasholder, when the full tank would block our TV reception, and I played for hours on the local ‘mountains’ which were actually industrial waste from the local vitriol industry which had dump its spoil there. I’m also far more used to the problems of subsidence, being born, raised, and living in one of the most heavily mined areas of the country. There are old local tales of houses being swallowed up in sink holes and my old school was eventually demolished because of subsidence but I remember its later years when the second floor listed so heavily to one side that it made it difficult to walk down parts of the corridor. Of course, as a child, you find that sort of thing funny, walking on something that resembled the walkway into a funhouse. As an adult you realise that the whole place was literally falling down around our ears.

Although tighter environmental laws mean that things have improved dramatically in recent years, having lived or worked in proximity to the chemical industry and mining subsidence, I’m wary of the promises made by the fracking industry and the assurances they give people about its safety. I worry when I hear another high profile head in the fracking debate suggest that shale fracking should be done in the north to save the industry from the kind of protests they’ve seen in the south. Up here, apparently, things are desolate and there isn’t as much to go wrong should deep fracking cause problems at the surface.

It’s odd that southern politicians and business men should talk like this, almost as though repetition of disputed facts make them more likely to be true. Perhaps they mean that protests will be ignored by the southern based media, which is certainly likely and, indeed, probable. The Times recently sacked their northern correspondent as part of cuts. That is clearly what we mean to those in London.

Perhaps they also mean that influential people won’t stand in their way if drilling is conducted beneath the homes of people with less political sway. That is also true. There aren’t that many rich influential land owners with connections to politicians living in these parts. That’s why the landscape around here is littered with examples of what happens when industry is left to tend to its own affairs.

Yet the perception that the north is desolate is one I don’t recognise at all. My experience of travelling between the north and south is that, except for the densely built area around London, there’s far more empty space in the south than there is anywhere in the North West. High up beyond Blackburn and heading towards the Lake District, things might get more desolate but there are huge swathes of southern England where you can also look from the horizon to horizon without seeing more than a few buildings. In the North West, there aren’t that many times you can look to the horizon and see only green. Industrial estates, new housing developments, towns, and villages seem to spread from Blackpool down to Southport, across to Preston, and down to the densely built belt running across the country from Liverpool in the West, through to Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield.

Energy independence is to be welcomed but while I’m not sure we need yet another dirty form of energy, I am positive that if this industry isn’t suitable for the fields of Sussex and the South Downs, then it shouldn’t be suitable for Merseyside, Cheshire,  Lancashire, and Yorkshire, where more than just a few people happen to live. The only case the government could make is that we really are the second class citizens they seem to believe we are.

Not that I suppose our protests would amount to anything. Not give the kind of casual ignorance demonstrated by those in power. Government thinking is rank with easy stereotypes, from their assumptions about immigration, the poor, the unemployed, all the way to their belief that bankers are victimised and underpaid. Or at least that’s how it appears when Lord Howell, George Osborne’s father in law, explained that he didn’t mean to insult the North East by suggesting it was desolate when, in fact, he actually meant to say the North West.

Given he represents a North West constituency, George Osborne’s recent encouragement to the fracking industry might have been a little surprising had he not already demonstrated a wilful disregard for the north. I just hope his constituents remember this the next time they have chance to stick a cross beside to his name as Member of Parliament for Tatton. Wilmslow, within his constituency, is one of the richer areas of the region, home to Alex Ferguson and many top Premiership footballers from City and United. It's strange how all those golf courses were never thought the obvious place to start the search for shale gas...

 

 

 

The Ralph Steadman Effect

Few things give me as much pleasure as Ralph Steadman’s books yet they can also awaken certain feelings of self-loathing in me.

When I was still signing my letters as Stan Madeley, the UK’s top Richard Madeley lookalike, back when I was still hoping to get a second volume of letters published, I would very occasionally write one to some personal hero whose work I genuinely admired. I once wrote to Robert Crumb and sent him a bad parody I’d drawn of one of his Amazonian girls. I walked down the stairs one morning about three weeks later to see a large white A4 envelope sitting on the doormat. The handwritten address was a work of art in itself and almost as good as the drawing Crumb had enclosed: his own version of my version of one of his Amazonians. Days like that made the failures worth it. And there were plenty of failures...

It generally didn't bother me when certain people didn't reply. I've bothered enough big names so that a rejection from Will Gompertz was never going to upset me too much, even if he did get one of my better cartoons. The exception is when a letter happens to be one of the few I've written which were special to me. Those were letters into which I’d usually put real effort, perhaps taken days to get the wording just right. I wrote to Ron Mael of Sparks who completely ignored me, as did Gerald Scarfe both of which were real disappointments. However, many others replied. I have letters from comedy greats such as Bob Newhart and Alan Alda, film greats such as Roman Polanski and Shirley MacLaine. John Landis sent me a CD and Martin Sheen a bag of whistles.

Yet nothing quite matches my Steadman reply. I wrote to him when I was feeling particularly down one day. It was probably after another of the endless rejection emails from ‘Private Eye’ and I was really considering… Well, I might say 'giving' up but I'm not sure that's right. I love to write comedy and I love to cartoon. The thought of doing anything else... Well, I don't go there. Unlike my usual spoof letters, the letter I wrote to Steadman mixed humour in with genuine sentiment. I also sent him a copy of my book which he probably used on his log stove. I didn't expect a reply so I was over the moon when I received a handwritten letter two months later. I felt all kinds of stupid when he told me to sort myself out. Slapped by Steadman! It should be the title of a book… I present the original letter and reply here for the first time. You see before you one of my most treasured possessions. Both pictures are clickable in case you'd like to read them...



But all that is back-story. I’m now sitting here wondering if I can make the STEADman@77 exhibition currently playing to lucky and no-doubt indifferent bastards at the Cartoon Museum in London. I’m itching to go but the small matter of a 400 mile round journey is getting in the way. The obvious answer is: if you really wanted to go, you’d find a way. Perhaps that’s true but the cost of travelling between any two points in this fine country of ours is getting out of hand. I don’t have a car and as much as I love cycling, I don’t think my old Raleigh X1 (and my even older legs) could make it to London and back. The train is pretty quick but it’s well outside the current finances of this humble pen scratcher. That leaves the coach...

My six foot two inch frame does not sit well on National Express coaches for a five hour journey. Leaving Warrington at 6.40AM, I’d apparently arrive in London at 11.40. Assuming the travel sickness hasn’t destroyed my insides by then, I’d have maybe five hours to find the museum, sob and drool over the Steadman exhibition, before I’d have to get the return coach that leaves at 6.30 and arrives home around 11.30. I feel nauseous just thinking about that trip. It was sheer hell the last time I travelled to London by coach but I’m beginning to feel like I’ll have to do it again or never see this exhibition…

When Londoners complain as they occasionally do on the rare occasion that an exhibition opens somewhere in the North, I wish they’d remember the thousands upon thousands of things we don’t get and never will get. Not that there isn’t adequate space to put on an exhibition. We have the damn Tate Liverpool which thrives on the abstracted junk they exhibit to American tourists and bored school kids. Last year they held an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ exhibition which ignored Steadman’s superior version in favour of some graphic design college nonsense. There is plenty of gallery space in Manchester when it’s not being used on some postmodern project that no bugger wants or visits. Would it be too much to hope that a collection by the UK’s most respected illustrators and cartoonists of the late 20th Century might actually travel this far north? I mean, Steadman was born in Wallasey, for Christ sake! A mere fifteen miles from my front door… Get a bloody blue plaque put up there or in in Abergele in North Wales which is where he was brought up and then bring his work up here. I can be in North Wales inside forty minutes...

However, it won't happen. I know I’ll have to overdose on Dramamine in order to pay homage in London. If I wanted to engage in pilgrimage, I’d have bloody well become a Catholic.