Guest Sketches

Several of my interviewees in the Talking in the Library series first rose to fame through their precocious mastery of the revue sketch, one of the hardest art forms to be good at, although competent mediocrity proliferates always. Through the unexpected boon of YouTube and related flea-market websites, some of the more recently famous names can be observed operating in television sketches, the genre that helped to launch them. Victoria Wood's interview sketch is a prime example. The job-interview sketch has been a standard format since Shakespeare: the surreal interviews in Monty Python's Flying Circus — often featuring John Cleese as the insanely aggressive interviewer — had an ancestry going back through touring variety shows, the Herbert Farjeon West End revues, and music hall since before the time of the young Charles Chaplin. Nor should the long and rich American burlesque tradition be left out. Apart from her unusually fastidious choice of language and power of social observation, Victoria Wood's unique feature was to put her own personality on the line. The applicant in the sketch is embodying, with every shy tremble, the way her creator feels about the world. In short — in very short — it's a brilliant acting job on top of a brilliant writing job, a fully equipped play in the space of a few minutes, a fully rigged tea clipper built inside a bottle.

I'm quite proud of the fact that, while I was a television critic for the Observer in the 1970s, I had sense enough to say that people like Victoria Wood were making the average big-name West End playwright look slipshod. I should also have been able to spot that she would become a formidable playwright herself. She had plenty of motivation. This superb number wouldn't have been the same if Victoria hadn't, like the applicant, been coming out of the North to face a well-entrenched Establishment. It could be said, on the other hand, that Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry, even when just starting off, were the Establishment incarnate. As stars of the Cambridge Footlights, they were in a ready-made context whose written material — I know this from the inside, because for some years I was on the same scene — was all too often overrated. Clever did not always mean funny.

In the case of this faultlessly designed and decorated Thompson/Fry television sketch about the Brownings, however, clever means as funny as you can get. On top of the exquisitely handled cod-elevated language, there is the luxury of watching the pair of them parodying a whole theatrical tradition of camped-up emotion, ice-dancing in a hot-house. It hardly needs saying that such perfect miniature works of art as these sketches are strange things to find lying around in a video junk-yard, but we might as well enjoy them while we can, and any writer, in any genre, who thought he had nothing to learn from exhibitions of craft like these would have to be a dunce.

Victoria Applies Herself

Grow Old Along With Us (no longer available)