Anything for a laugh

FOR all of us in Television Land, keeping Xmas Merry took nerve, dedication and the mirth-making resources of practically every stand-up comedian who ever graduated from Butlin’s, Clacton.

One after the other or two at a time they were levered up to be laughed at: Stanley Baxter, Dick Emery, Mike Yarwood, Benny Hill, the two Ronnies, Morecambe and Wise. Larger groups arrived briskly by bicycle (the Goodies) or just shambled on and started doing allegedly risible things (the Carry On team). It was a precipitation of clowns, a propagation of buffoons, a great patriotic moot of capering zanies. The screen teemed with invitations to let it all hang down. Nationwide, from the edge of the scarp to the fold of the vale and from the slope of the croft to the flatlands of the fen, millions upon millions of viewers must have felt it incumbent on them to yowl for Britain.

Working against this determination to flop back in the sofa and bust a gut were the restricted schedules, the all-pervading sense that the next booze-centred candied apricot might be the last one Western Civilisation would ever send your way, and — swamping the system like a glass of warm Moët and Chandon ingested after one’s hangover has already started — a shower of the world’s unfunniest funny movies. Even at the best of times, a few frames of a mega-budget bummer like Casino Royale (BBC1’s gift to Boxing Day) would petrify the unwary viewer more thoroughly than being locked up alone with the Gorgon. But to cop a face-full of that dreck when already reeling from the effects of a three-day binge was to experience a total wipe-out. Dahlia Lavi and Ursula Andress snaking around in crimplene threads through clouds of dry ice! Legions of dopey dolly-birds in pink boots firing prop sub-machine guns! Cameo appearances by crappy stars! Nothing! .007 recurring!

On the drama side of things, the flicks were in with a chance. Telly productions like BBC2’s The Fox (eheu fugaces, Postume — they’re already remaking ‘Kes’) couldn’t hold a tuning fork to the resonance of the old Sam Goldwyn/William Wyler Wuthering Heights (same channel), in which Olivier, across a century and against all the odds, incarnated the Romantic dream at its most intoxicating. At Christmas you want the screen to rain extremes — brilliant pictures for fogged eyes. A few of the comic films were all right (The Odd Couple is a duff movie but good Lemmon and classic Matthau, and Modern Times was making its small-screen premiere), but generally it was up to the regular telly jokers to dispel — or at least help lighten — the throb of dread pulsing at the axis of this year’s Christmas spirit.

Stanley Baxter was the first of the major talents to strut his stuff, back at the end of the previous week when the schedules hadn’t yet been granted their Yuletide relaxation. (Sunday night on BBC1, for example, consisted almost entirely of How the West Was Won — a movie as interminably toxic as atomic waste — capped with Christmas Music from Lincoln as a daring dessert.) Nevertheless, and showing a concentration never previously manifest, Baxter brought off the best single-act of the festive season: none of the other solo headliners got within a mile of it. Called The Stanley Baxter Big Picture Show (LWT), Baxter’s programme consisted exclusively of movie and TV parodies, and once again his formidable powers of lampoon were aimed mainly at women. As with Benny Hill and Dick Emery, it is almost impossible to keep Baxter out of high heels: he hurdles into drag at the snap of a compact. Unlike them, however, he tries to be specific, and the first encouraging thing about this latest show was the new accuracy with which he zeroed on the target and started throwing in the heavy iron. A perfect top carbon of Joan Bakewell caught her trick of tilting her head to alternate diagonals in order to disguise the fact that she is reading autocue. His Liza Minnelli (‘Gosh, I’m so goash’) dauntingly captured the characteristics with which that enervating soubrette bulldozes an audience — spit-spraying enthusiasm, the energy of an avalanche and a tin inner ear.

But the second, more important, encouraging thing was how Baxter’s few attempts at male caricature moved him away from his safe base in ladies’ lingerie (he has never been as feeble as Danny la Rue, but he has often been as trivial) towards a more demanding stamp of humour. His Edgar Lustgarten investigating the case of people dying ‘as a result of a small, dull object [i.e., a Lustgarten B-picture] coming into contact with the brain’ wrapped the subject up, and his high-pressure Epilogue director (‘I gotta go up a steep flighta stairs and start twiddlin’ tits’) was the king-pin of the best laid-out parody of studio techniques I’ve ever seen.

Mike Yarwood I continue to find devoid of content, but his technique is unapproachable, and one watches devotedly for the sheer fascination of seeing how much be can notice about people. The virtuoso facial control (popping one eye for Hughie Green) is only what shows upfront: even more interesting is the way he can master a whole range of different postures, even when sitting down (e.g., Parky’s let-me-out-of-here non-relaxed crouch). Yarwood did his Clough routine with Jimmy Hill on Match of the Day (BBC1) — only one joke, but terrific style. Came Christmas Day and he had half an hour to himself: just as much style, but only a few more jokes. His imitation of Eric Morecambe’s scream was brilliantly precise, but was equally a distracting reminder that Morecambe and Wise were the very next act on the bill. BBC1, 7.35, Christmas Day — the hottest slot of the lot. Could they still hold the job down?

Could they not. I’ve never seen them on better form and they’ve made at least one household merry enough to get through the winter on a single lump of coal. Rudolf Near-enough, Andre Preview and Lord Oliver all made fleeting appearances to explain why they couldn’t appear, but Vanilla Redgrave was game for the ordeal. Lord Ern of Peterborough (Short-Legged Comedian) (For Services to Literature) said ‘When I’m dancing with her I won’t be looking into her eyes. I’ll be looking straight at her...’ Whereat Eric said ‘Get off, you’re not that short’ Why this kind of thing should be funny from Morecambe and Wise (and writer Eddie Braben), and boring from the Carry On team, is a mystery — a mystery which the latter outfit helped solve by mounting a spectacle called Carry on Christmas (Thames). Here the inner workings of their comic art were revealed with ruthless clarity: a heap of old bra-hooks and perished elastic.

Dick Emery (BBC1) is drag to the roots: when he’s in trousers, he’s resting. I like the way dainty observation erupts into flagrant femme gestures — he flutters an eyebrow, flutes a voice, minces a walk and then suddenly bashes a door open with his hip — but the sketches are just vehicles. Over The Benny Hill Show (Thames) I prefer to draw a veil. Hill once paid me the compliment of parodying me on screen, a favour which precludes my pointing out at any length that his work is deteriorating to the merest self-regard and that if he radiates even an erg more complacency he’ll go off like a pile of radioactive tapioca.

Kula — a Reason for Giving (BBC2) was an exceptionally fine ‘Horizon,’ made by Japanese and showing Pacific islanders voyaging in search of the valueless necklaces and bracelets which they acquire only to give away. Palm-leaf pants, hibiscus in the hair, painted canoes, transparent lagoons and no electricity.

The Observer, 30th December 1973