Comic timing
Michael Vestey
How quaint the wave of alternative comedy of the 1980s seems now. It began at the Comedy Store in Soho just two weeks after Margaret Thatcher first became prime minister and was largely an attack on her and her government. That’s why it then seemed to me so utterly predictable and dull and much of it not even funny. Clive Anderson was one of those early stand-up comedians, and in Margaret Thatcher Ha Ha Ha on Radio Four (Saturday) he talked to some of the others about the nature of a movement — for that’s what it was — united by a loathing of the prime minister and her policies. Not quite everyone was a leftist, but right-wing humour wasn’t allowed. One of the comics, Tony Allen, described himself as having a squatter lifestyle, part of an anarcho-libertarian, hippy counter-culture.
Anderson was a lawyer; another, Arnold Brown, was an accountant. Fellow performer Oliver Double thought that when a leader is ‘very dogmatic and powerful and making radical changes to society’ politics came to the fore. He thought Thatcher was ‘nuts’. Alexei Sayle, who came from a communist background, thought she was ‘very ogreish; she made a wonderful target as a very distinctive person. It would have been very different without her.’ Pauline Melville, a feminist comic at the time, said, ‘She was a reactionary old cow, so fair game absolutely.’ Another, Jenny Lecoat, recalled, ‘What was useful was that we had one person that we universally hated so much and that not only all the comedians but most of the audience hated as well, and there’s nothing more effective at bringing an audience together than having a go at somebody we ... hate.’ Ben Elton thought of the 1980s as a confrontational decade, the post-war consensus was ending and there were radical changes taking place. He’d found the politics of the period fascinating. Andy de la Tour was apparently the most determinedly political of them all, even telling a joke about Airey Neave who was murdered by what Anderson called Irish terrorists. The last isn’t a word you normally hear on the radio these days. Usually, the mealymouthed BBC calls them militants, as if they were just a touch on the extreme side. For Melville, it was entirely the politics that motivated her; she had no intention of making a career out of being a comedian. Racist and sexist jokes were outlawed, though clearly they made an exception for Margaret Thatcher, about whom anything could be said. Clearly, some women didn’t count.
The Comedy Store was started by Peter Rosengard, who was in fact an insurance salesman, and the owner of the premises, a strip club, was Don Ward. The idea was to copy the Comedy Store in Los Angeles. Rosengard wanted to create something different and new. Sayle observed that in that atmosphere you had at least to pretend to be left-wing. The irony is that the alternative comedians had driven out the comics who used to make jokes about the motherin-law, and yet, as someone, whose name I didn’t catch, said, Thatcher was ‘always being characterised in rather sexist terms, a bitch and a cow and things like that. She became a sort of left-wing mother-in-law ... ’ Sayle noticed another irony, that the new breed of college-educated comedians also killed off many of the old workingclass comics from the northern clubs.
The Guardian’s comedy critic, William Cook — also, it seems, an historian of British comedy — said, ‘In the end I don’t think the comics ever got to the bottom of what Thatcher was about, why the socalled C2s, Essex man ... were voting for her in big numbers. There was a kind of bewilderment, a blank incomprehension ... How had this woman managed to get so many people to vote for her? I don’t think the comics ever sat down to address this.’ Double believed that before alternative comedy it was commonplace to be casually racist, so ‘it did change the face of light entertainment’. Looking back, de la Tour saw the world in turmoil: ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the gags.’ Anderson, though, couldn’t help wondering if Thatcher had had the last laugh. An entertaining programme, though I must say the jokes recorded at the time now sound utterly feeble, but the audience had laughed because they had wanted to. Thatcher was an affront to their beliefs. No other prime minister has polarised public opinion in such a way, but she was something that much of the country sensed Britain needed to halt the long decline.
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