The Fast Show

As we reach the end of Just One More Episode (and, in fact, there are just four more episodes to go of this nonsense) I wanted to dedicate some time to rambling about a very influential show that people don’t seem to talk about anymore.  I’ve mentioned before my passion for sketch shows, both the terrifying highs of jokes that come off well and the dizzying lows set ups that never really pay off (see post on Little Britain), so it’s only right that I touch on The Fast Show before bowing out.  I was recently assailed by an irresistible urge to revisit some of my beloved sketches and managed to track down a handful of episodes downloadable from Sky Comedy.  Sadly, given that series one appeared in 1994, some of the footage looks like it was filmed on Vaseline (but don’t worry, guys, as the adverts that are inserted everywhere are crystal clear HD) but the humour still shines through and I found myself laughing my head off all over again, despite having seen all of it many times before.

These days, my attention span is so much shorter than it used to be, ruined by years of little whatsapps and incoming office work on multiple fronts (emails, calls, instant messages, someone standing next to your desk coughing lightly back in the days of actually working from anywhere but home), so it stands to reason that The Fast Show’s delivery of its very name’s promise (it’s quite fast) has helped to ensure that I’ve only grown fonder of it with age.  Most sketches are fairly rapid, some are even a few seconds and a single sentence.  Perfect if you’re itching to get the next one without delay.  This results in a vast population of characters and scenarios that I could never do justice to here, but my recent viewing has yielded two conclusions.  Firstly, the writers and actors love silliness as much as I do, as each sketch plays out in a parallel universe of messing about.  Secondly, their target is always anything that takes itself too seriously.  Sign me up.

Let’s take, for example, Jazz Club.  I remember only ever waiting patiently for this one to end when I was a child.  The punchlines were buried and subtle and, probably, it was too similar to real programmes at the time.  But it’s proven a revelation this time around.  John Thomson’s compere is unflinchingly earnest in his curation of various jazz musicians’ backstories, delighting in their hilarious-yet-subtle made-up names (hello, Toast Of London), before throwing with real enthusiasm to the stage where something terrible always unfolds, yet with every artist believing they are a heaven-sent gift to the music scene and the world in general, all conveyed through the medium of the rest of the cast messing about.  There’s an interpretative dance where you can just see Caroline Aherne (princess of The Royle Family) having the time of her life, channelling every pretentious performer she’s probably had the displeasure of coming across.  It’s at this point there’s a great moment of self-reference when the amazing Tom Bola and Jack Pot waddle into shot with their creepy dance.  I think about them all the time and have recently taken to whatsapping friends a video of me laughing along to this without any preceding explanation.

The two first appear in a sketch from Chanel 9, the brightly coloured pastiche of foreign telly, set in the scorching hot Republicca Democratia Militaria.  While it feels a bit Brexit-y and jingoistic these days, the sleaze of the presenters, the chaotic unfathomable action of the shows and the superbly coined and indecipherable language are all so well observed that you really do have the impression of having switched on the TV in a Spanish hotel room.  The linguist in me immediately starts decoding to find units of meaning, relishing in each Chris Waddle as much as every sminky pinky.  The awards show must have busted the budget, but it’s the lottery numbers that take me to my favourite farcical territory, with the multisyllabic word for five pushing the very boundaries of credibility, yet still erring on the side of plausibility.

Call me simple, but sometimes the repeatability is exactly what the fragile mind needs in comedy.  I’m going to channel my inner Simon Day with a “someone’s sitting there, mate” at the next opportunity.  I still maintain that every one of Jessie’s Diets and Fashion Tips is superbly written, and brought to life as an individual and unique performance by Mark Williams.  I didn’t even realise my habit of saying “no offence” in a South African accent after something offensive is generated by an Arabella Weir character.  Inevitably, I do need to question how well everything has aged, as it mostly, and shoot me if I am wrong, seems ok.  Upper class superciliousness and affectation seem to be The Fast Show’s target for its most extensive ruthlessness.  A few other lines have become a bit dud as our attitudes have improved, but I think the things we now deem sexist were in fact highlighting our imbalanced expectations from women, from “does my bum look big in this?” to the competent female employees who turn into simpering idiots at the first sight of a man.

I have to mention Paul Whitehouse, even if just to make it clear that my sister and I still whisper to each other “you ain’t seen me, right?” and Charlie Higson as Johnny Nice Painter, because we two siblings still re-enact the moments he finally utters the word black and asks mother why we must stick pins in our eyes.  Even all those years ago, some of the humour is eerily prescient, with Sir Geoffrey Norman MP a spot-on rendering of today’s chinless Tory, refusing to accept any assessment of reality by simply shouting nooooo.  I’d like to end outrageously by claiming The Fast Show invented humour as I now know and love it.  From the crude, such as the couple who have to pause briefly to explain that they’ve “just come” in inopportune circumstances, to the uncanny depiction of my childhood, as shown in the sketch which I now know is called The Hurried Poor, where a family constantly run about with too much luggage while the dad shouts “come on!”, the breadth of The Fast Show is as much a part of its charm as each sketch’s brevity.  I laughed then, and I laugh now.  Which was nice.

Cardinal Burns

After going for broad appeal with last week’s homage to Made In Chelsea, I’ll be taking things in a much more niche direction this week.  Cardinal Burns was a sketch show that ran on e4 in 2012 and then Channel 4 for its second series in 2014.  Why on earth would I be talking about it now?  Well, it too had a sublime parody of scripted reality, which I almost included last week, but instead decided to branch out into its own post this week (see, I do plan).  Secondly, and this takes us back to the niche point around the show, the only other person who loved this show as much as I did is a dear former work colleague whose response to a number of years in the same office as me was to move as far away as possible to Australia.  I’ve got a guilty conscience as he messaged me this week just as I was running out the door to a wedding, so hopefully he reads this and forgives me.

I’ve talked about my love of the sketch show before when covering Little Britain and Come Fly With Me.  Even Bo’ Selecta! has been fondly remembered in this blog (and, after little to no interest from readers at the time, that post has been gathering clicks like nobody’s business and is now my second most popular piece of content – no idea why, or why now).  Every two minutes, you’ve got something new to look at.  It’s either a new set up where you’re wondering what humour will strike next, or we’re given returning characters that are nice and familiar.  If a scene doesn’t work, it’s over before you know it, and if it does, you can chuckle into your microwave meal or Ottolenghi sides, making a mental note to remember the best lines for work tomorrow, safe in the knowledge you’ll have forgotten everything by the time you reach your desk.

Below I’ll run through some of Cardinal Burns’ top characters, but the selection is merely incidental.  Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns, the namesakes of the show in question (though it’s not actually called Cardinal Demri-Burns) have acute skills of observation which they couple with an ability to enact incredibly accurate mimicry.  Each character has a root in the banal and everyday, but the lads’ amplification of behaviours we might otherwise miss, exposing them with comedic acid for the silliness that they are, elevates their scenes and characters to the exact level of wit you need when you only know one other person who watches a show.  My highlights are as follows:

Camp Ghost Hunters

Phil and Jase channel their inner Yvette Fielding from Most Haunted and dive into dark spooky houses in search of the paranormal, accompanied by a film crew.  Their passive-aggressive bickering, “Someone’s a bit tetchy,” soon escalates until they fully miss each and every ghoulie they would otherwise come across among the shadows, which is bound to happen if you’re worried about texts from Steve asking to borrow your juicer, or if you fancy the priest at an exorcism.

Banksy

In real life, it’s universally agreed that Banksy is cool.  But in Cardinal Burns, he is a big old saddo.  He’s agreed to be filmed, but only if he can wear a really naff disguise.  We see him interviewed by local radio or struggling with his satnav, all with underlying currents of casual racism and a deep underestimation of the meaning of his own work.  Things ramp up as he tries to get his stepson on side, but nothing comes close to his announcement that he has taken the last nana from the fruit bowl.

The Office Flirts

Flirting is a huge part in the world of doing business.  People do deals with people they fancy.  I wear skin-tight shirts so nobody realises I have no idea what I’m doing.  In this series of sketches, the culture of flirting is given a Microsoft Outlook approach, with a dreary office temp scheduling quick flirts with various office females, telling them they look nice, which shows his distinct lack of game in this area.  Suddenly, the New Guy enters.  Seb Cardinal with bouffant hair and a leather jacket projects a give-a-shit attitude that has all the girls losing control and giggling coquettishly.  At one point, he parades about on a motorbike.  The original office flirt is impressed and signs up for a masterclass in this artform, but nothing beats New Guy’s departure from each scene, which typically involves punching a random square-on in the face.

Young Dreams

And so to the Made In Chelsea link, but this also has an air of The Hills about it.  Young Dreams is a spoof scripted reality vehicle following three girls, introduced with some saccharine pop music while we get the roll call of the girls.  Cardinal is Rachel, the alpha queen with immaculate hair and pronunciation so affected that you won’t recognise a single vowel.  There’s Olivia, a dogsbody for Rachel who mostly just hides her giant mole, and, lastly, we have Yumi, a Japanese transfer played by Demri-Burns.  All are convincing.  Each segment plays out around some scheme of Rachel’s to do whatever she pleases, typically prefaced with her declaring that “this little fishy is about to” before announcing her self-serving intentions.  Inadvertently, Yumi always manages to ruin everything with some sort of faux pas.  At this point, the emotional music scores in, Rachel storms off, and Yumi is left shouting out in a racially insensitive Japanese accent: “Raaaachel, pleeeeasse.”  I don’t know why this line has stuck with me, but I’m unable to address any Rachel I work with without replicating her emotional whine.

I won’t go on anymore – there’s no time for Vomit Cops and I daren’t describe the Fiery Hawk sketch (where an enthusiastic young actor obediently follows a casting director’s ever more sinister directions) – oh, I just did.  Either way, if you’ve not heard of Cardinal Burns, get to watching it.  It even comes with the epithet of award-winning.  I don’t what awards these are, and I can’t be bothered looking it up, but I can give it my own award: the award for the show that my friend and I really liked.  I hope the chaps turn up working together somewhere else soon (though I did spot Demri-Burns in an episode of Peaky Blinders), but until then, this little fishy is going to have to think of shows that more people have watched (help).

Come Fly With Me

Ten blogposts later, I find myself drawn to Walliams and Lucas again.  This wasn’t planned.  I’m literally episodes away from finishing five series of Netflix’s first big boxset.  Celebrity Big Brother is back on and has, again, given drama more incredible than any scriptwriter could contrive.  We’ve even got more Great British Bake Off on the box.  But suddenly, I saw Come Fly With Me on the Netflix menu and, before I knew it, I had clicked play, devoured a whole episode, enjoyed it more than anything else in recent times, let the next one autoplay, and then, over the next few nights, raced through all six instalments.  Do I have any regrets?  No.  This is exactly how I pictured adult life: feeling guilty about not doing something more interesting while watching old sketch shows I have already seen before.

Come Fly With Me was brought out with huge fuss onto BBC1’s primetime schedule in 2010.  Little Britain had, as I have previously blogged (keep up!), become a cultural phenomenon.  Today, we might know David Walliams as Roald Dahl 2.0, dominating the top ten children’s books on Amazon, allowing me to delight my niece by reading her stories about grandmas that fart and grandads that fart as well (because toilet humour sells), and we might see Matt Lucas…  well, I know he was in Bridesmaids and that was funny.  In fact, the last time I saw him was in a café in central London.  He was wearing quite an interesting hat.  Seated nearby with friends I hadn’t seen for ages, I made sure to be as loud and funny as possible, expecting him to rush over and offer me my own broadcast platform for my incredible comedy.  He actually just rushed past, even though we had left our bags in the way as obstacles for him in a ridiculous attempt to increase our chances of attracting his attention.  Sorry Matt.  But yes, how do you follow up Little Britain?  Well, you basically can’t.

And you especially can’t if, in 2010, you choose to parody a show that was last culturally significant in 2005 (the BBC documentary, Airport).  Sure, airports are lame no matter what the year, but coming along with a mockumentary treatment five years later was never going to get the appreciation it deserved.  But now, with a bit of time and distance, we can look at things differently (even though we will still be outraged by some of the hair and make-up choices used to create the pair’s non-white characters).  The fact is: airports are ridiculous.  You just go there to wait to go somewhere else.  It’s either a work trip you don’t want to be on or a holiday where you can’t wait to get away.  It’s one queue after the other while you haemorrhage cash in a way you never would in real life.  This is because you have entered vacation mode, where Monopoly money flows freely and treats must be procured because you deserve immediate gratification (or you can charge it to expenses).  I’m particularly fond of how panicked my parents’ generation get about going through security, convinced a half-used packet of paracetamol will land them on Indonesia’s death row.  I always like to see how much liquid I sneak into my hand luggage, just to check the scanners.

In conclusion, all this nonsense makes for a great documentary.  There is no worse race in the world than British people abroad, so Airport’s mix of put-upon staff and dreadful, dreadful customers was a winning formula.  All Walliams and Lucas needed to do was make a few tweaks to bring Come Fly With Me to life.  People probably just thought it was a real documentary, what with characters like Jeremy Spake making himself a household name in the original.  I can still hear him urging me to go down to my local Euronics centre, yet I, to this day, have no idea what a local Euronics centre is.  His wide, goateed face would dash about the terminals solving problems and whipping out an impressive command of the Russian language to get stuff done.

Cue Moses Deacon, a Walliams character who surely owes Spake for his genesis.  Instead of being effective, however, he is useless and selfish, if you’ll pardon the pun (because one of his main jokes is asking viewers to pardon puns he hasn’t actually made).  Prancing down a staircase, collecting money for his charity WishWings (of which his gaycations are the main beneficiary) or getting taken for a ride by an elderly lady falsely claiming she has never flown before (Matt Lucas in epic prosthetics), this character deftly brings us into the world of Come Fly With Me’s busy airport.  And that world is nothing if not richly imagined.  And by richly imagined, I mean they have literally come up with three fake airlines that might remind you of real ones:

FlyLo

Garish colours.  Low-cost fares.  Appalling service.  Run by a foreign chap.  Could it be any more easyJet?  There’s Taaj in the ground crew who qualifies each sentence by asking “isn’t it?” and uses the in-terminal transport to try and pick up bitches.  A highlight for me is Liverpudlian Keeley on check in (“Hello, checchh in; Keeley speacchhing”), whose passive aggressive rivalry with Melody never stops either of them taking delight in telling passengers they are too fat to fly or explaining that FlyLo’s Barcelona route in fact lands in Barcelona Shannon, requiring ferry and coach transfers from Ireland to reach Spain, but all in good time for your evening meal, even if that meal is in a few days’ time.  The planes even have pay-as-you-go life jackets.

Our Lady Air

Ryanair doesn’t come away unscathed either.  We meet Fearghal, fulfilling all the air steward stereotypes, not to mention his nine gay brothers (although Finbar is bi).  Willing to give an allergic man peanuts, simply so he can increase his chances of winning Steward of the Year by saving his life, he also has a staunch approach to faiths that aren’t Catholic.

Great British Air

One of the main jokes here is Penny, the snobby first class stewardess who thinks that people in economy are scum.  Having frequently travelled economy, I can confirm this.  Having also travelled in business (not quite first class, and only because I was on standby thanks to a friend) I can also confirm that the staff are snobby.  There’s also the well-observed married couple, Simon and Jackie Trent, who happily let the underlying hatred within their marriage spill out over the in-flight comms system.

Away from the airlines, Peter and Judith Surname are among the best passengers, frequently experiencing holidays from hell which they recount with vivid imagery.  Unfortunate to suffer the disasters that befall them, it’s their plucky British approach to making the best of things that strikes a chord, even if this does lead Judith to BBQ Peter’s leg for sustenance after they survive a plane crash in the Andes.  Even though they are rescued within half an hour.

So, yeah, it will feel dated.  You’ll cringe at characters like Precious Little and the Japanese fans of Martin Clunes.  But for a mindless brain massage after a full day’s rat racing, you can’t beat the minimal attention requirements of a sketch show, particularly one that has layers and layers of familiarity.  You’ll recognise your own awful holiday behaviour.  And, worst of all, you’ll want to book yourself a holiday and perpetuate the cycle of airports being rubbish, and people making shows about them, and then people writing blogposts about them.

Little Britain

Hello and welcome to the fiftieth blogpost spectacular.  Looking back, it’s remarkable I’ve been able to draw this much rambling out of me, and even more remarkable that people have been reading it.  I hope you can appreciate that it’s a rollercoaster each time I press publish on one of these things.  I’ve had posts go wildly popular almost straightaway, like the Love Island one, and I’ve had carefully crafted pieces about hidden gems, like Wild Wild Country, struggle to get much traction.  All I have to ask is that everyone reads everything please.  It’s not worth missing out on my opinions just because you happen not to have seen every series and every episode of Bob’s Burgers.  The good news is that I have, so each post promises the perfect blend of subjective views and overly personal condescension.

But what show is getting this unique treatment for such a landmark milestone on Just One More Episode?  Little Britain.  There are many reasons for this.  The first is that I can’t believe I haven’t covered a sketch show yet.  There’s not really a sketch show I haven’t enjoyed.  You have the dizzying highs of a sketch whose punchlines open your eyes to an elevated form of comedy and you have the terrifying lows of jokes whose flat landings and laboured extractions make you question your will to live.  Constantly whiplashing between such strong sentiments is good for the soul, and it’s better to have a strong reaction than to feel meh about the whole thing and start checking your Whatsapp when you’re barely ten minutes into the appalling second series of Westworld.

The second is that the programme was hugely important in my life.  It was autumn 2003 and I had been packed off to university after seven years in the same school and eighteen years in the same village.  I was not good at meeting new people.  Luckily, my Little Britain DVDs had come with me (yes, DVDS; remember them?  This was the past after all) and rumour soon spread among the first years that I was willing to lend them out.  I was a bit like a Blockbusters of British comedy.  We would watch each episode as if we were discovering a new horizon in laughing out loud.  Then we would compare our impressions of the characters and debate endlessly and aggressively who was better.  Some of these new friends seemed cooler at the time than anyone I had ever come across.  They lived in cities like London and had backpacked through foreign continents, whereas all my stories were about doing the trolleys at Cobham Waitrose.  This BBC comedy united us.

And the third reason is that I recently spotted the show in the Netflix list of programmes that I might like (well done Netflix) and couldn’t resist clicking on it to see if it was a good as I remember and next thing I knew I had worked through all three series at the expense of any of the premium content I was consuming at the time (step aside, The Alienist).  This is where we need to handle Little Britain more carefully, as some of it has not aged that well.  It always trod a fine line, and that line has moved over time.  For example, Emily Howard seems like a harmless character.  She is transgender, but the humour comes from numerous situations where her efforts to pass fall below expectations, exacerbated by her insistence not just on being a lady, but on being a stereotypical lady from a bygone age.  But, all these years later, I have to ask myself if we are just laughing at someone because they are transgender.  In the wokeness of 2018 (with the long way to go that we still have in many of these matters) it’s hard to be sure.

Similarly, Sebastian Love, the prime minister’s aide, is funny because of his badly hidden unrequited love, or are we just laughing at him for being gay?  Daffyd Thomas, the only gay in the village, veers towards a similar sense of uncertainty.  The bad taste doesn’t come from the jokes about rimming, but from the idea that homosexuality is ridiculous and laughable.  On the other hand, we shouldn’t expect single characters to represent whole diverse communities, but it’s good to talk about it, isn’t it?  Having a little chat about contentious issues helps everyone spend more time in a constant panic they are offending someone.  And that’s better than being a bigot.  I think.

From its original home on BBC Three (RIP), Little Britain went from subversive to mega mainstream.  The three series are remembered for their shocking and explicit moments: WI ladies that vomit on minorities, a Fat Fighters group leader spitting on Vanessa Feltz’s face, Bubbles DeVere’s fat suit with flappy tits and a bum crack that spreads realistically on bending over, bitty.  But more than that, it was its quotability that gave it lasting mass appeal.  By 2005 you couldn’t move without someone saying “I want that one” or “yeah but no but yeah nut no.”  Criticism began to stick about its lowest common denominator appeal, relying on catchphrases and offensive willy content to please the great unwashed and the great uneducated, resulting in no great art at all.  “Bring back repeats of Are You Being Served?,” whined the more conservative people, “at least that only had innuendo.”  But had Britain lost its subtlety?

This brings me onto my favourite thing about Little Britain: the lines you don’t remember.  Everything was so well observed, but filtered through a lens of ridiculous absurdity.  Sure, it was quite a chuckle whenever Andy told Lou that he wanted that one, but it was even funnier when Lou would deliver a throwaway line enlightening us on a previous opinion of Andy’s regarding the matter in hand: “And besides, you don't like George Michaels. You said that Jesus to a Child aside, you found his output emotionally vapid.”

Let’s deconstruct an example, with my all-time favourite quotation from Vicky Pollard:

“I know cos we was all down the arcade and Kelly flobbed on Destiny and a bit landed in my hair.  Cos Kelly hates Destiny.  Cos Destiny told Warren that Kelly pads her bra.  It’s true; Nathan reckons he put his hand down there and pulled out a bag of Jelly Tots.”

1.       The names – we immediately imagine the types of people that have names like Destiny

2.       Down the arcade – nothing aspirational ever happened in an arcade, and being down anywhere is the accurate precursor for trouble ensuing

3.       Flobbing – a great piece of British slang that we frankly don’t say enough; we vividly picture it hanging off Vicky’s hair in a big lump

4.       Girls hating each other – remember school, everyone?

5.       Padding a bra – see above

6.       What Nathan reckons – the word of a lad being enough to condemn a young lady’s virtue.  Isn’t the world unfair?

7.       Jelly Tots – oh I forgot about this brand, but thank goodness I am being reminded of it now as its reference is increasing my nostalgia and amusement

Again, are we just laughing at poor people?  Probably.  Sorry.

I’ve already said too much, but I really want to list out some of my most beloved, yet widely underrated characters, so I’m doing it anyway:

Anne and Dr Lawrence

David Walliams in a dress going “eh eh eh” doesn’t sound great on paper, but hearing him answer the phone in a perfectly civilized manner and apologise for being rude before creating havoc is a unique juxtaposition.  But are we just laughing at mental health?  Probably.

Sir Bernard Chumley

Rather than being a national treasure, this retired actor is confined to a council flat with his equally elderly sister, Kitty.  His vile desperation, whether it be for extra Meals on Wheels or for the chance to manhandle aspiring younger men, leads to some harrowingly dark scenes.

Mr Mann and Roy

The concept got done to death, but there was something so simple yet so artistic about this awkward customer and hapless shopkeeper.  I just don’t know if Margaret ever got out of the store room, as she didn’t have any arms or legs.

I’ll stop here.  David Walliams and Matt Lucas, whatever they were making fun of, could turn themselves into such a wide array of believable characters, that each scene felt real despite its absurdity.  The former is now a children’s author whose books I have read to my niece, whilst I once spotted the latter in a café and secretly hoped he had overheard how funny I was being with my friends.  Both are now firmly established in the British comedy hall of fame, and rightly so.  Around 15% of my speech is influenced by the nonsense that they crafted, so it’s only fitting I leave you with a definitive quotation from Tom Baker’s berserk narration of each episode: “Britain, Britain, Britain.”