To be hit so regularly, for so many years, with such careless abandon, makes the violence almost meaningless. Is this what berserkers felt as they slashed their way through the enemy ranks with no regard for killing or being killed?
It obviously had a major impact on my life because I’m able to recall it here with such clarity. I think there were only two ways to deal with it: to buckle, and become a gibbering wreck; or to find it funny. Laughing at it somehow negated the ignominy, somehow belittled my tormentors.
But it’s weird that things happened to me on a regular basis which less than twenty years later are made illegal.
What’s not weird, perhaps, is my obvious delight in gratuitous violence in all the comedy programmes I’ve been involved in ever since. The glee in The Führer’s face as he gives me three on the hand is the same as the glee in Vyvyan’s face as he hits Rick between the legs with a cricket bat.
In 2005 the heads of some Christian independent schools (those fun-loving Christians again) appeal against the ban on corporal punishment, claiming it’s a breach of their religious freedom. They drag it through various courts trying to assert that their vision for modern corporal punishment won’t even hurt like it used to; they say boys will be hit with ‘a thin, broad flat paddle to both buttocks simultaneously in a firm controlled manner’. Whilst, ‘girls could be strapped on the hand and then comforted by a member of staff and encouraged to pray’. Seems odd that girls should get the stiffer penalty. But the ‘broad flat paddle’ sounds so amazingly like the slapstick from commedia dell’arte.
Commedia dell’arte is a name given to the raucous touring theatre companies popular in Italy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. I do my thesis on commedia dell’arte in my final year at university. The comedy was broad and often quite violent, and a slapstick was a device – a kind of paddle made of two wooden slats – that made a slapping noise when you hit someone with it. Like a large slim castanet. It meant you could get a satisfying sound without inflicting any major damage. If only my parents had had one.
By the time Rik and I make The Young Ones, the Dangerous Brothers and Bottom, we replace the actual slapstick with ‘spot effects’ – a soundman sits watching us and as we pretend to hit each other he plays in various thwacks and smacks. But it’s still essentially slapstick. We make a pretence of hitting each other, and it sounds like we’ve hit each other, but we don’t inflict any major damage. Well – that’s the theory.
Slapstick has always had a poor reputation, even in the days of commedia dell’arte. People call it ‘puerile’. Puerile comes from the Latin word for boy – puer. Which, rather curiously, is an anagram of the word pure. People only ever use puerile in a derogatory way to suggest slapstick is the kind of humour that would make a young boy laugh, which they think is unworthy. I call it pure. Young boys are a tough crowd. I’ve got two grandsons. I know.
The reviews for Bottom when it’s first broadcast in the early nineties are mostly scathing, and often use the word ‘puerile’ as an insult. Perhaps reviewers fear that enjoying slapstick might make them appear lacking in intellect.
I’m furious when Ken Loach’s film Raining Stones comes out in 1993. I love Ken Loach films. I love Raining Stones. But he uses slapstick in exactly the same way we do: watch the scene as Ricky Tomlinson and his mate go out rustling sheep, slipping about and falling over to a Benny Hill-type soundtrack; or the scene where the toilet backs up violently and he gets covered in shit. Does Ken Loach get censured? No, he doesn’t.
I’m happy to admit there’s a lot of bad slapstick too, which doesn’t help. We’ve grown up watching the awful custard pie nonsense on the knockabout kid’s show Crackerjack – unthought out, unstructured and unfunny. They’re not even custard pies, it’s just shaving foam on a paper plate.
I direct an advert in the early 2000s for some now defunct TV satellite dish. It features Phil Cornwell getting a custard pie in the face. I spend most of pre-production working with the designer Lez Brotherston to get the correct consistency for the custard, and the base, and end up throwing the pie myself because no one can get it to land correctly – breaking on the nose and dropping to reveal the eyes.
And I’m not trying to claim our work is highbrow, but you can’t dismiss the urge to laugh at slapstick as simply puerile or lowbrow. Especially when we put so much bloody adult effort into it.
And our slapstick has a vicious streak to it that is perhaps new. It’s often mean-spirited, never accidental, and it’s meant to look painful. It’s the pain we find funny. The more it hurts, the funnier it is. It isn’t cosy. It’s not Benny Hill slapping the bald bloke’s head. It’s not the classic wallpaper routine at the panto. It comes from a new strain that we’ve noticed in Monty Python’s Fish Slapping Dance; and in John Cleese’s abusive treatment of Manuel in Fawlty Towers.
All the work Rik and I create is chock-a-block with violence, disorder and brutality. The most frequently used stage direction in our scripts is ‘they fight’. Any argument between our characters, any dispute, will always end in some form of ruckus: punching, kicking, slapping; a dart in the eye, a pencil up the nose, a fork in the testicles; stapling hands to tables, sawing off legs, beating a gas man with a frying pan seventeen times; explosions, electrocutions, being fired out of a cannon. It’s relentless. It’s frenzied. It’s out of control. It’s berserk.
Of course, it’s not all related to being beaten at school.
A lot of it comes from American cartoons, particularly Tom & Jerry and Road Runner. These are from the 1940s and ’50s respectively. We’re also indebted to Bob Monkhouse, an aficionado and avid collector of black and white shorts from the twenties and thirties, whose TV show Mad Movies introduces us to Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and especially Laurel & Hardy – the unexplained attachment between these two (why did they stay together when they fought so much?) is a big driver in the relationship between Eddie and Richie in Bottom. When I say ‘big driver’ I mean ‘something that we steal wholesale’. Mind you, the same could be said for Galton and Simpson who created Steptoe & Son and Hancock’s Half Hour, and Clement & La Frenais who created The Likely Lads.
When The Young Ones is conceived the idea is to create four truly horrible characters. It’s a kind of reaction to The Good Life. We don’t want lovable, we don’t want comforting, we don’t want ‘ah’, we want what we see around us – spotty, selfish, violent bastards. We don’t have an intellectual mission, we just like jokes about what we see. Making jokes about violence is perhaps a way of processing it.
Violence is everywhere in the seventies – our formative years. We’re bang in between the Moors Murderers and the Yorkshire Ripper. Football hooliganism is at its peak – rival ‘firms’ are busy hospitalizing people and throwing darts from the back of the terraces. The Troubles in Northern Ireland are headline news most days, and spill over onto the mainland in a series of indiscriminate pub bombings. Control of the unions always breaks down into the police giving the workers a bloody good kicking. And in Vietnam the Americans are fighting an enemy they can’t see with napalm, Agent Orange, and carpet-bombing.