TV and radio are are little boxes full of many kinds of friends: informative friends, entertaining friends, distracting friends, friends who just won’t shut up and go away. In our semi-regular TV re-watch feature, we take this metaphor and chases it into the ground with deadly intent.
Sir Stephen Fry (Uppingham, HMP Pucklechurch) was introduced to Hugh Laurie (Eton) by Dame Emma Thompson (Camden School for Girls) when they were all in Cambridge Footlights. A BBC2 sketch show was inevitable. Also inevitable, given the late-‘80s timing, was the meta nature of the show, with Fry and Laurie acting as TV hosts introducing sketches that frequently satirised the forms and cliches of television. It also featured running characters – including the naive spies Control and Tony, and the self-important businessmen John and Peter – and non-sequitor vox pop catchphrases such as ‘Well, I wouldn’t suck it.’
M’colleague Stephen
The first thing you notice about A Bit of Fry & Laurie is how visually horrible it is. Everyone celebrates the day-glo early ‘80s, all st-st-studio line graphics and primary colours and Memphis design abstraction; we forget the late-’80s slide into greige. The sets for A Bit Of Fry & Laurie are beige, ecru, taupe and ivory, peach and mauve and powder blue. The sitting rooms are full of Laura Ashley slip covers and bamboo effect coffee tables; the offices sport black ash desks with chrome effect desk tidies. The whole thing appears to have been filmed inside one of Frank Bough’s cardigans.
It’s a portrait of insipidly stifling monotony, enforced by public opinion-driven marketing, the right wing press and an increasingly authoritarian government. And within these bland sets, Fry and Laurie perform sketches that make it clear they are absolutely furious about all of it. They imagine a privatised police force run by witless marketeers that provides tiers of service named ‘Super’, ‘Lovely’ and ‘Gorgeous’. The greed-is-good businessmen Peter and John are over-inflated morons, screaming about their Uttoxeter leisure centre as though it were a matter of life and death, DAMMIT! They puncture the banalities of advertising, the mediocrity of mainstream media and the venality of Fleet Street.
The fact that this hectoring is being delivered by a pair of champagne socialist Cambridge graduates with their own TV series on a state sponsored broadcasting channel is, of course, a bit thick. There’s plenty of snobbery here: intellectual snobbery, cultural snobbery and plain old-fashioned class snobbery too. Stephen Fry had a habit of peppering sketches with the unlikely names of English towns and villages: Uttoxeter, Garboldisham, Swindon. These were chosen, one suspects, as much for the snort-worthy nature of such places as for the ludicrousness of their names. Most of those places voted Leave in the Brexit referendum, no doubt fed up with exactly this kind of thing.
But for all that, Fry and Laurie were not entirely wrong in their political diagnosis. You can see both the snottiness and the prescience in a sketch called ‘The Cause’, actually three separate sketches set in the same restaurant. At one table Hugh Laurie plays the hapless Neddy, a well-meaning idiot who has been tricked into planting a bomb by the sinister, possibly far-right conspirator Jack.
WAITER
Good evening, sir.JACK
Good evening. A table for bomb please.WAITER
Excuse me?JACK
(LAUGHING HYSTERICALLY)
A table for one. Sorry ... bit nervous. I've never actually eaten a meal before.
At another table, Hugh’s opinionated executive Stuart is having a post-theatre dinner with his friend Gordon and their wives after seeing a play written by Jeffrey Archer, then at the peak of his popularity.
STUART
I'm going to come right out and say it. To me, Jeffrey Archer is the finest playwright this country's turned out since William Shakespeare.GORDON
That's a hell of a statement, Stu.STUART
Well let me go one further, Gordon. To me, Jeffrey Archer delivers.
It gradually becomes apparent that Stuart has completely failed to follow the plot of the play. In other words, anyone who enjoys anything so popular must be an idiot.
Meanwhile, Stephen Fry is a waiter who discovers to his delight that he is serving a Tory MP who backs deregulation in the name of sweeping away ‘elites’ and offering ‘choice’. Snatching away the silver cutlery, the waiter dumps a massive hessian sack in the politician’s lap.
POLITICIAN
But these are plastic coffee stirrers.STEPHEN
(shouting)
Yes I know, but at least you've got the choice now. I mean they may be complete crap but you've got the choice ... that's what's important, the choice …
Elitist? Certainly. Sneery? Quite a lot. Metropolitan? Mais bein sur. But scrolling listlessly through the Netflix interface, through endless thumbnails of plastic coffee stirrers, searching for something that’s not ‘complete crap’, one begins to suspect it was also alarmingly prescient.
Watched now, especially in the contemporary binge style, the series is a little too full of the self-indulgent echt sesquipedalian ramblings of Stephen Fry: ‘If two broad-shouldered, long-fingered men such as ourselves can come independently to the conclusion that the morning they are currently experiencing is one of a goodness, then one of a goodness it must assuredly be.’ Lots of the sketches purport to be making fun of pretentious, pseudo-intellectual TV shows, but Fry and Laurie are just as fond of their own intelligence and knowledge as the people they’re satirising.
But then, in 1989 there weren’t very many Stephen Frys on television. Indeed, there’s still only one now. To an 18 year old who desperately wanted to be clever, knowledgeable and witty himself, Fry’s enjoyment of his own intelligence, knowledge and wit was intoxicating. I felt like I had found my people; I absolutely doted on A Bit Of Fry & Laurie, and followed their lead to the extent that I came to regard advertising, marketing and mainstream entertainment as despicable. Which is a shame, because – as Rowan often points out – most of my talents would be extremely well-suited to these fields, and some of these jobs pay quite well. Some people blame their lack of success on their parents, or their education, or their class; but when it comes to finding people to blame for the fact that I’ve never had a proper career, Fry and Laurie are squarely in the frame.
M’colleague Hugh
Let us not forget that Fry & Laurie could be very funny indeed. When executed well the wordplay could be delightful, as in the absolutely perfect ‘Flushed Grollings’ sketch. Fry plays a customer in a hardware store ordering plumbing materials that have increasingly and believably disgusting names. Even if you don’t understand the more outré terms, the sounds of the words are glorious.
Because of that Cambridge/Edinburgh/BBC pipeline Fry & Laurie tend to be a little forgotten when we talk about ‘80s alternative comedy. They certainly coincided with the beginning of the end of one tradition, beginning with Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller, down through Cleese and Chapman and Idle. A tradition that was waning as a new, less Oxbridge one waxed, the BBC lost its broadcasting hegemony, culture broadened, and styles of comedy changed. Inveterate radical Alexei Sayle refused to appear on screen with them on The Young Ones, despite the fact that they were there to satirize themselves as the University Challenge team from ‘Footlights College, Oxbridge’.
I was, of course, being disingenuous earlier when I wrote about my career. I too have performed, ineptly, on the Edinburgh Fringe. I have made a programme in BBC Television Centre, albeit an inept one. And have written sketches for BBC Radio 4 that were also, you know, inept. The BBC, bless them, even sent me on a course to try and make me better at it, but it didn’t take. I could have been a comedy great, if only I’d had the talent. Writing sketch comedy is really hard, which makes it worth noting that Fry and Laurie wrote all of their show themselves. This is not common; it wasn’t true of the contemporaneous sketch show Harry Enfield and Chums (1990), or of Fry and Laurie’s Cambridge/BBC successors Armstrong/Miller and Mitchell/Webb.
And they performed it all too. Which, again, is a lot harder than it looks. Stephen Fry is, of course, excellent at playing Stephen Fry-ish characters; but there’s a reason why Hugh Laurie was, for a time, the highest paid actor on US television. He’s capable of moving seamlessly between upper class twits, hard bitten action heroes and self-important middle management twerps. My favourite performances of his, though, are the weird little monologues he delivers while sitting in the front seat of a car parked in the rain at a service station, sucking on a milkshake and reminiscing about his past. They’re strange little things, full of non sequiturs and wordplay and very few punchlines, but elevated by Laurie’s perfect, off-hand conversational playing.
This was precisely the sort of whimsical, ludicrous thing that delighted me, and that I wasn’t going to get anywhere else. In that late ‘80s world of four TV channels and barely an internet, there weren’t many places to go for entertainment if you didn’t enjoy the beige mainstream. A Bit of Fry and Laurie was an oasis in a sand-coloured wasteland of chat shows, game shows and Railwatch (in which ex-Radio 1 DJ Mike Smith took at look at the changes facing British railways).
And it turned out I was not alone. Over the years, brief references and dropped phrases have activated fellow sleeper agents like codewords whispered on a St James’ Park bench: ‘I have never had an Opal Fruit on me’, ‘Oh Christ, I left the iron on’, ‘Ticket pocket, ticket pocket, ticket pocket’. There are contributors to this newsletter with whom I made friends simply because they knew just what a challenge it was to cut all the hairs on a man’s head.
And that’s got to be better than having a career. Isn’t it?
A Bit Of
When I rewatched them all, the sketch that stood out to me as somehow quintessentially Fry and Laurie was the very last of season one. It begins with Stephen Fry as a slick-haired politician who is reeling off some almost-believable economic measures when he is interrupted by a voice from the audience:
TONY
Aye, but what of the people?
Hugh Laurie, hidden under a ‘lightweight travelling hat’, berates the politician in cod swashbuckling dialogue, accusing him of raising taxes ‘so that your own bathroom may be lined with venison and fine delicacies’. Finally he reveals himself to be Tony ‘of Plymouth’, and swings down to the stage to start a swordfight that spills out into the sets of previous sketches. Finally Tony dives through a window before turning to the camera and delivering the punchline:
‘Or, you could write to your MP.’
It’s not a great punchline, because sketch punchlines rarely are; but the rest of the sketch is a delight. It’s a satire of pointless political debate shows such as the BBC’s Question Time, but it’s also making fun of Errol Flynn movies, the nature of sketch comedy, and the practical details of television making. It plays with the form even as it delights in it and reinvents it: ‘Ah, so the worm has claws!’
You didn’t get that from The Good Life over on BBC1.
Speaking of the Oxbridge / BBC pipeline, there’s some very obvious examples, without whom Fry & Laurie almost certainly wouldn’t have happened.
Their spoof of Robert Robinson’s “style” on ‘Welcome to the Smug Hour’ didn’t appear to require a great shift in approach, especially from Mr Fry. Excellent nonetheless.
“Nish, tussock, flimp and fivepence.”
Same game John, different rules.