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For every comic disappointed that a year’s work ends in a nothingy 3 star review. Imagine nearly dying and all the trauma that comes with that and…
3 stars….
As always in the middle of about four books as I prepare for Book Clubs and try to find suitable tomes for future ones. This week has featured a couple of works that have taken me back to the TV of my childhood and made me fully appreciate how beholden to the golden age of Children's TV I am.
Tim Worthington has written a fantastic account of that name, which I've only just started on and it's full of great memories and half-memories, And I've also been reading Johnny Ball's fabulous account of his childhood, national service and early show biz career
"My Previous Life in Comedy". My generation knows him as maths whizz presenter of Think of a Number and I didn't know he'd even been a stand up, let alone a drummer who was a contemporary of the Beatles. He also had a ball removed (though then put back in again), so I will have much to talk to him about when I meet him to record a Book Club next week. I never imagined that one day I'd be talking to Johnny Ball about our balls (or indeed Tommy Cannon about our balls).
My whole career, it seems has been a homage to the kids' TV that I grew up with. One of the first sketches I wrote at University was about a Crackerjack warm up man - a motif that has continued throughout my career, by getting the audience to shout out TMWRNJ or AIOTM or RHLSTP. Fist of Fun was billed as an adult version of Why Don't You? with a bit of Vision On and Emu's Broadcasting Company chucked in and This Morning With Richard Not Judy owed a lot to the Banana Splits, which was probably my first TV obsession. We got Brian Cant to narrate the Organ Gang (which I think we might have also pitched to the company that made Ivor the Engine).
I was a huge fan of Tiswas (as I've said before I cried when we moved to Cheddar and discovered that it wasn't yet available to view in this area and I had to put up with some Westward TV shit, though they did at least give me Gus Honeybun, even if I couldn't afford to own him in the recent auction) which introduced me to the anarchy and mayhem that comedy can create and Twitch of Fun is basically full of mutated versions of dozens of puppets and cartoon characters from the 70s. I see it as a 21st Century Michael Bentine's Potty Time with a bit more of a potty mouth.
I am absolutely at the heart of the one generation for whom TV was everything - before computer games and the internet knocked the medium off its perch and the rest of my life has been an attempt to pay homage to my heroes, whilst cannibalising and morphing everything about them. And when you're morphing Morph then you know you've stepped through the looking glass. It's both glorious and pathetic, noble and perverse. Which I suppose sums up me in general.
It's a thrill to meet people like Peter Lord, one of the geniuses behind Aardman or Johnny Ball or Brian Cant (I once lived on the same street as Toni Arthur and she knew who I was, what larks!) They're so much more important to me than pop stars and are up there with my comedy heroes, though because some of them were there before I could even talk or comprehend, the connection runs deeper. You think you've forgotten someone like Carol Chell or Chloe Ashcroft and then you see her photo and it's like reunited with a member of your family.
And we haven't even really got into the puppets that haunted my dream and sent me spiralling into the dubious world of ventriloquism.
So anyway, nice to do a piece about 1970s kids' entertainers where they are the heroes, rather than the villains, though as much as I have to thank them, I do have to blame them for making me turn out this way.
