Book review: David Stubbs (2023) DIFFERENT TIMES: A HISTORY OF BRITISH COMEDY

Different Times is a mammoth compendium, attempting to provide a vertiginous range of snapshots of all of what was going on in British comedy, inevitably gravitating towards television, but there are also judicious references to the stage, radio and film mediums.

The book’s opening wisely focuses on the misuses of comedy by Boris Johnson, a man grotesquely ill-equipped to be a Prime Minister who governed in an inept and corrupt fashion from 2019-22. Stubbs’s thesis is that there has been a tendency for humour to be used to keep power relations squarely as they are, with certain forms of humour ‘sending things up, but keeping us down’. (p.8)

He quotes Billy Connolly at length from a 1970s TV appearance, such a vital perspective that I’ll quote it fully now: ‘The British people are not overtly racist, but given the opportunity they switch on to racism very quickly. You know, they listen to so many broadcasts on the radio about how desperate the situation is with Pakistanis and West Indians flooding into the country – a total lie – and then mohair-suited comedians pouring out racism to the extent that Black comedians are doing it, which I find desperately dangerous. I feel dirty. Comedians play a very important role in society; you should see things that the average guy in the street can’t see and point out the absurdity in something that’s just accepted.’ (pp.233-4)

Connolly wisely explains the responsibility of independent comic writers and performers to observe us, make us laugh at ourselves and steer us away from the baser values and actions. In a time when a Telegraph article (02/12/2023) claimed, notably, that ‘working class’ viewers see the BBC as being too PC, it is vital that British comedians are diverse truth tellers about Britain’s complex realities.

Now, such an ambitious volume can’t help but have its limitations. Several of the gazetteer capsule comments on specific programmes feel like they need deeper exploration – I Didn’t Know You Cared (1975-79) (p.165), Dave Allen at Large (1971-79) (p.165), A Bit of Fry and Laurie (1989-95) (pp.287-8), Rab C. Nesbitt (1988-2014) (p.299) and The Rag Trade (1961-78) (p.205). Furthermore, I feel that Northern comedians Robb Wilton and Frank Randle need more than three sentences between them, given their copious respective influences on Dad’s Army (1968-77), Manchester band The Fall and Gethin Price in Trevor Griffiths’s stage play Comedians (1975).

Such exclusions are clearly inevitable in any book aiming at a vast historical coverage like this. I’d personally have loved to see references to: Attention Scum (2001) and Early Doors (2003-04); the baroque force of Natasia Demetriou as a writer and performer; or, indeed, Him and Her (2010-13) and Mum (2016-19), Stefan Golaszewski’s tremendous duo of sitcoms infused with intelligence and awkwardness. These shows are like refined Ayckbourn and Esmonde and Larbey refracted through a contemporary Mass Observation lens, with an underlying deep warmth.

While Stubbs draws deft attention to Peter Terson’s Play for Today (PfT), The Fishing Party (1972) as a bridge between the wonderful Jane Freeman’s performances in that and in Last of the Summer Wine (1973-2010), he does not even mention Trevor Griffiths’s PfT version of Comedians (1979). This is a gap, as he touches on the vast significance of how comedy arises from and shapes the everyday, in terms of responding to and constructing norms of language and behaviour. This is one of PfT’s most searching dramas, about how what’s behind the jokes is important and who is being targeted, and pointing the way to the Alternative Comedy movement that Stubbs extols. This is an even greater omission given that Stubbs is yet another writer to quote David Nobbs’s brilliant writing of Jimmy’s paranoia in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976-79), a litany which includes PfT at its epicentre (pp.188-9).

Stubbs claims that The Good Life (1975-78) shied away from race; it did not entirely. As, at the close of a series 2 episode, Tom and Barbara effectively mock Margo’s apparent, real racism, drawing it out from her when they claim people with an Asian name are moving in next door to her. Their ‘superior’ liberal stance in regarding this all as a source of uproarious merriment is, of course, just as crass as Margo’s reaction, and is a very telling moment concerning the paradoxes at the heart of 1970s comfort. This elision suggests the difficulty of taking on such a vast terrain within 400 pages, which Andrew Male adroitly demonstrated in Sight and Sound when giving far more detailed, fairer attention to ‘Allo ‘Allo! (1982-92) than Stubbs does here.

I feel that the sections on Peep Show (2003-15) and Ever Decreasing Circles (1984-89) needed exploration of the central relationships, having watched those both again relatively recently. In Dad’s Army, Sergeant Wilson’s lack of concentration and persistence with career paths seems to me to strongly foreshadow that of Paul Ryman in Edmonde and Larbey’s latter comedy.

These minor quibbles aside, Stubbs provides a heartening and well argued historical analysis. Stubbs persuasively claims, via Alexei Monroe, that, for all its evasions of the serious issues of the Second World War, Dad’s Army provides a far less apt path towards Brexit than Are You Being Served? (1972-85), with its episode ‘Camping In’ (04/04/1973) resonating with pinched nostalgic conservatism (p.176). By and large, Stubbs rightly extols the beloved trinity of Dad’s Army, Steptoe and Son (1962-74) and Fawlty Towers (1975-79), while being even more fulsome about Victoria Wood, Reeves and Mortimer and The Royle Family (1998-2012), wherein the family ‘say but don’t say, ‘Here we are, this is who we are. And we shall not be moved.” (p.319).

There are also brilliantly incisive evocations of language and performance: ‘Harold Steptoe’s wonderfully idiosyncratic accent is a comic exaggeration of this tendency, attempting to take flight like a clumsy fowl, in stark contrast to the unapologetic bog-coarseness of his old man’ (p.103). There’s a wonderful judicious section about Laurel and Hardy and also an evocative account of Ealing’s film comedy cycle (1948-55), with an especially vivid, memorable account of its musical underscores. Stubbs advocates for unique talents like Tommy Cooper, all childlike universality, and Les Dawson, especially a memorable passage on Dawson and Roy Barraclough’s Cissy and Ada sketches in Sez Les (1969-76) (p.153). He also points out how so many of the classic British sitcom characters are lads not men, epitomised by Clement and La Freaks sitcoms… (p.186).

There’s a superb vignette about Liz Smith (p.318) which captures some of the essence of a brilliant serio-comic performer who was strongly associated with the Play for Today tradition. Regularly, he alights on pearlers of the absurd, like in the film Carry on Cleo (1964), with the dialogue “Sinister, dexter, sinister, Dexter!” (as in left, right, left, right) (p.114). Stubbs unearths unusual, odd details; like Les Dawson’s novel of a socialist dystopia, A Time Before Genesis (1986) (!) or how the now fairly righteous socialist firebrand Charlotte Church blacked up as a male DJ in the cultural desert of 2006.

The book explicitly celebrates the 1980s Alternative Comedy revolution and how it subtly infused much 1990s comedy which was, on the face of it, far less political. He makes a compelling, cumulative case that the 1990s was a golden mean, reflecting its fairly benign geopolitical temperature, with an unprecedented diversity in the voices and perspectives in comedies like The Day Today, The Fast Show, Father Ted, Goodness Gracious Me and dinnerladies. This moment was replaced by an abyssal decline into crueller comedy in the Noughties, which totally lacked the intellectual precision and absurdism of Chris Morris’s work or the underlying jocularity of many of the aforementioned 1990s shows.

The heart of the book, which was neatly contained in a trailing Guardian article, concerns the move back towards a gentler, more humanistic form of comedy during the 2010s, much of it rooted in diverse places. Detectorists (2014- ) and This Country (2017-20) are the emblems here, plus Derry Girls (2018-22), and Ghosts (2019-23); plus, the skilled dramedies Back to Life (2019-21), Don’t Forget the Driver (2019), In My Skin (2018-21) and The Outlaws (2021- ).

The Stubbs argument about the cruel turn of the 2000s – developing from Jason Okundaye’s 2020 article in Tribune – is compelling but needs a little fleshing out. However, Stubbs does well to draw the links with Reality TV as it developed, which engendered a desensitizing hardness which prepared people for and justified austerity, building on Phil Harrison’s fine book The Age of Static: How TV Explains Modern Britain (2020). In a book rightly extolling the gentleness turn and Hylda Baker (pp.168-170), Different Times is perhaps surprisingly lenient on Russell Brand, an exemplar of the nasty Noughties and its string of lairy chancers who polluted culture well into the next decade: Dapper Laughs, anyone?

There’s an astute reference to how much The Office (2001-03) led the way towards the increased kindness in the 2010s, but oddly no mention of how this is affirmed by Brent’s redemptive actions near its end and his rejection of the toxic masculine Chris “Finchy” Finch. But these are minor gripes, given the broad historical truth that Stubbs is articulating. This book is a more mass market complement to strong academic books about British comedy from Andy Medhurst (2007) and Jürgen Kamm and Birgit Neumann eds. (2016).

The book’s only real limitations are due to its vaulting ambition: there are always going to be some omissions to disappoint everyone. It is, however, a powerfully argued book assessing the waxing and waning of different forms of British comedy over time, which argues boldly for the 1980s-90s era as offering a great improvement, while still paying loving homage to earlier eras. Above all, Stubbs asserts that what lies underneath the jokes matters, rather than simply eliciting laffs. However fitfully, we are making progress towards kindness over cruelty.

Book review: Robert Chapman (2023) EMPIRE OF NORMALITY: Neurodiversity and Capitalism

Exposing the Empire of the “Normal” Mind

Robert Chapman’s book, published by Pluto Press, is a trenchant, clear and maddening read which exposes and challenges the taken for granted assumptions about “normality”. This is expressed by the pathology paradigm through which autism and other neurological differences have been perceived for nearly two centuries.

Movingly, there’s a sense that things weren’t always thus… Before the “clock time” of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, Chapman notes that most societies before the 1800s were sometimes able to accommodate difference rather than judging it against a metrical yardstick, which became the norm due to the great, but also obsessive and decidedly creepy, scientist Francis Galton. Before then – while Chapman does not ignore real discriminations that existed – the focus was on seeing health as ‘a matter of harmony or equilibrium [either] within the individual, or between individual and either the environment or their community.’ Ancient Chinese medicine, Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek and the Ayurvedic tradition in India, while evidently having the limitations of their times, were ‘nothing like the systemic disability segregation’ that came later in the 1800s.

Chapman is measured and critical – if not especially detailed – about the actual record of Communist regimes, chiefly those of Lenin and Stalin, but nevertheless forwards a committed Marxist analysis of how our sense of “normality” and enforced conformism is dictated by capitalism. I am convinced, as clearly, Marxism was not a template or rulebook that the Soviet dictators actually utilised, but rather distorted it and used it for promotional value.

This book builds on Mark Fisher’s crucial insights about people internalising and blaming themselves too much for problems which are actually externally imposed by capitalist realism. Chapman rightly calls it a ‘fascistic fantasy’ to wish away neurodivergent disablement and illness and that we need to accept that they will always exist. Chapman is strong on defining the industrial and human impacts of Fordism, which was a major workplace enforcement of conformism and neurotypicality, as well as creating burnout and boredom. The manipulation of workers and their moulding into ‘man machines’ saw corporations utilising the PR techniques of Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays. Mentions of B.F. Skinner echo the piecemeal behaviourist educational moulding that Laura Tisdall reveals in her excellent book about the 1940s-70s British education system.

There’s a fascinating section where Chapman develops a nuanced critique of the increasing use of prescription drugs from the 1950s and related debates concerning over-medication (pp. 95-96, 105-106), culminating in references to Arlie Russell Hochschild’s work on the ‘Commercialization of Human Feeling’ and C. Wright Mills on the ‘personality market’ (111-112). This reflects on how workplace exploitation in itself created problems that led to alienation and increased reliance on drugs.

Chapman critiques the 1960s Laingian anti-psychiatry movement, which was so easily coopted by right-wing libertarian Thomas Szasz, author of The Myth of Mental Illness (article 1960, book 1961), giving him ammunition to claim that mental illness itself was a ‘myth’. A section on eugenics builds on Adam Pearson and Angela Saini’s BBC documentary Eugenics: Science’s Greatest Scandal and Adam Rutherford’s recent work in exposing this appallingly extant movement that Galton founded. If anyone’s in any doubt about the sway of the ‘autism as damaging’ pathology paradigm, learn how Deborah Barnbaum argued, as recently as 2008, in The Ethics of Autism, ‘that, once prenatal diagnostic technology is capable, there will be a moral obligation to abort autistic foetuses on the grounds that being autistic is inherently incompatible with living a good human life’.

While Chapman follows the typical Marxist pattern of offering rigorous diagnosis of the malady, but not proposing detailed remedies, he does see the major path forward in the work of Peter Sedgwick’s PsychoPolitics (1982), a socialist attempt to recognise mental health illnesses, but seek alternative community organisation beyond the state apparatus. This approach is shared by Franco Basaglia in Italy, Hel Spandler and Mark Cresswell and the West German Socialist Patients Collective. In parallel is a sound account of the Neurodiversity movement which emerged in the 1990s, led by Jim Sinclair, Judy Singer and Harvey Blume; their politics of Neurodiversity has been furthered by Nick Walker and others who’ve contributed to the paradigm shift in the 2010s towards neurodivergence being respected.

Chapman notes significant earlier progress in the late 1970s with the Black Panthers recognising ‘disabled liberation as bound up with collective liberation’. This is a prelude to his necessary and ambitious focus on intersectionality at the end, with many alliances with other groups needed for his proposed neurodivergent Marxism to work. He does not entirely ignore our planetary environment, which has been ransacked and made to fit the needs of capitalist development, whether American, Chinese or European. However, that this really only emerges in the conclusion suggests a fuller book is needed to explore how neurotypical thinking hinders any serious long term ecological action.

This impressive book, with its far-reaching and impressively constructed argument, persuades you that some form of reformed Marxist thinking, combined with other lenses, is vital to begin making the world a better place. Chapman grounds the book with a notably personal introduction which reflects on his own life experiences. There are promising signs in how neurodivergence is being more accepted, but we can’t be complacent: as Chapman argues, we need fewer ‘diversity consultants teaching companies how to exploit more neurodivergent workers’ and more ‘neurodivergent workers organising as neurodivergents to radically change the structures and expectations of the workplace.’ (p.161)

Book review: Laura Tisdall (2020) A PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION? How childhood changed in mid-twentieth-century English and Welsh schools

Laura Tisdall’s book, published by Manchester University Press, is an aptly comprehensive and deeply thought provoking study of postwar British education. Her work is vastly well read and adopts a probing and careful approach to this unwieldy, mammoth field of study.

The book’s conclusion perhaps undersells its final Chapter’s compelling cumulative argument about the exclusion of people whose identities and behaviours were different from the “normal”. But, this is ultimately a very well researched and argued reflection that the so-called “progressive” era of education in the 1960s and 1970s was a longer term 1945-79 cycle. The overall tendency was to valorise the group over the individual, with utilitarian one size fits all approaches, or expedient “what works well enough” teaching. Tisdall reveals that pupils fitting in and conforming with the crowd was fundamentally encouraged in a preparation for the workplace and to produce people for welfare state Britain. It’s surprising in a way that the historiography here doesn’t include Paul Willis on “the lads” and Philip W. Jackson on the “hidden curriculum” as these ideas very much support Tisdall’s argument.

This non-Utopian progressivism, as defined by Tisdall, is persuasively indicated to be a complex mix of social democratic and conservative ideologies. This may have done some good in some places and been responsive to some local needs, but it clearly discriminated against minorities. This followed a 1920s-30s Utopian progressivism which was more radical, but which didn’t get implemented anywhere near as much. Even this non-Utopian progressivism, largely derived from the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget was piecemeal and only partially believed in and implemented itself by teaches, so was always fused with more traditional chalk and talk methods. But then the promotion of group work and the bias towards producing sociable children did clearly mark a change from the 1940s on, compared to what was there before.

Tisdall grasps complexity: the uneven, varying progressions across time rather than discerning simplistic patterns like some Fleet Street hack would. There’s no definitive indication that progressivism failed, as it was only partially tried. Few, if any, deschooling theories were ever implemented in the 1970s. There’s a sense of a conformist middle ground, where mixed classroom teaching methods were used, with enthusiastic or reluctant incorporation of group work, discovery learning and “child-centred learning”, depending on the school. Tisdall pertinently questions of the related moral panic over teenage delinquency, manifested in “blackboard jungle” fictions and also the later 1960s ‘Black Papers’ claims – or myths – linking radical teaching methods with permissiveness. With no evidence, Cyril Burt et al linked what was basically their dislike of student radical longhairs at University, to earlier 1950s “softer” teaching methods in primary school.

There was more a constructive critique offered by those in the mainstream of teaching, which defended some new methods, but also did pave the way for the mixed blessing of the Thatcher era National Curriculum (1988). Tisdall shows the 1970s as the era when teaching unions got much more militant, understandable given the declining status of a very difficult job. She documents the deeper picture: it’s not simply all a reactionary Black Papers juggernaut conquering all before it, though I feel that key figure Cyril Burt’s role over time needs a bit more ideological analysis and unpicking…

The book’s greatest strength is how Tisdall marshals a vast range of evidence of teachers’ experiences and opinions through oral history interviews and a copious range of education related press publications from the times she is analysing.

Now, there could be more on popular culture’s representations. Such as in pop music, TV (e.g. Scene, Grange Hill), literature and film, or how the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’s abstract records were used in classes. The vast area of literature is partially included concerning the Blackboard Jungle myth, and there’s an apt, if brief, citing of Lucy Pearson’s findings about realism. This does get me thinking about the large cohort of Play for Today dramatists who had experienced teaching… Overall, though, this seems an unfair ask, given Tisdall’s focus is squarely on educational history and ethnography, rather than cultural representations.

There could have been more direct evidence of varied people’s memories of teaching styles and approaches in their schooldays, i.e. some interviews and surveys, but also an attention to first-hand diaries, material instances of schoolwork itself and more analysis of documents like individuals’ termly (parents’ evening) reports. The use of HMI reports and other school records is absolutely brilliant, so this would have enabled an even more rounded perspective. this would have assisted the book’s argument, as we do get some crucial findings on people who didn’t fit in, cited via published academic work or reports.

Anyway, this is a fine book, a labour of intensive thought, infused with historical nuance. I’d be utterly flabbergasted if anyone came away from reading this feeling that getting rid of the HMI and replacing them with OFSTED has been a good thing. It also leaves you certain that large class sizes, teachers being overworked and thus relying so often on utilitarian, non-differentiated methods have let the majority of people down who rely on the state system.

Book review: Richard Hewett (2017) THE CHANGING SPACES OF TELEVISION ACTING – From studio realism to location realism in BBC television drama

This book, published by Manchester University Press, seven years ago, is a detailed academic study of TV acting. It provides a clear contextualised historical framework, conveying the progression from studio realism to location realism. With Outside Broadcast video as the transitional technology towards single camera DV/film that we largely now have. Hewett tantalisingly notes some exceptions which have marked a return to multi camera studio live – EastEnders and Corrie live episodes and the live event drama Frankenstein’s Wedding (2011). There’s a great account of the throwback The Quatermass Experiment (2005), which reached a 542,000 peak audience on BBC4, and pointed to some notable possibilities that were being neglected. Here, I feel Hewett could have explored the crucial previous attempt at doing live dramas, Live at Pebble Mill (BBC2, 1983) and engaged with arguments about why there was an unfairly negative critical response to fine dramas like Keith Dewhurst’s The Battle of Waterloo.

Hewett traces how, initially, very gestural stage derived acting styles were still prevalent among some in the 1950s Quatermass cast, like Van Boolen, but that Reginald Tate was pioneering the ‘scaling down’ of performance that would go onto dominate TV acting. He evocatively and economically describes and analyses the subtleties of acting gestures, movement and vocal delivery in impressive detail. In the 1970s, studio realism and restrained performances were very much hegemonic, but in the Survivors episode analysed, Talfryn Thomas using far a more expressive and gestural and large style where the acting performance is very much evident. And viewers were still very much admiring and accepting of this, at this point. Most of the actors were developing a location realism on OB video in real spaces, not created ones in the studio. Perhaps Hewett here could have explored key precursors to this like Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966) which began using 16mm film for TV dramas.

This book contains a wealth of reflective analysis of changing training for actors, with a gradual decline in the central of stage training: IMO, which hasn’t really benefited screen acting. There are telling and caustic Broadsides from Tony Garnett and Timothy West that more people should have been listening to. There’s also great and intelligent testimony from actors like Louise Jameson and Denis Lill. While Hewett records how the younger generation of actors feel that some older, more theatrically rooted actors only really act with their voice. This reminds me of Roger Lewis’s significant observation about the stillness of Richard Burton in his excellent recent book.