Part Three: From Bruce Morton to Beavis and Butthead
By TJ Worthington
First published January 2003
1991 began with the transmission of A Shoe Fetishist’s Guide to Bruce Morton, a showcase for a performer who was already a star in his native Scotland. Morton’s humour certainly went down well with audiences, and although he personally preferred stage work and televisual projects with his comedy collective The Funny Farm – who were again hugely popular in Scotland – he followed this show with the themed series Sin with Bruce Morton in 1993, and has since continued to produce short inserts for Channel 4′s many theme nights and weekends.
Built around the inappropriate redubbing of archive footage, The Staggering Stories of Ferdinand DeBargos had been running on BBC2 to great success for two years by the time the production team were invited to produce a new series for Channel 4 in 1991. The result was Pallas, narrated by Richard E Grant, which used footage of the Royal family to weave a mock soap-opera in the same wilfully silly tradition as Ferdinand DeBargos. Perhaps echoing how times had changed since the early days of televisual satire, this tactic failed to provoke the controversy that would normally have been expected to greet it, and was treated more as harmless if irreverent whimsy than any kind of “anarchy”. Pallas was popular enough to enjoy two outings on Channel 4, over Christmas week in both 1991 and 1992, and the same team would also later produce The Almost Complete History of the Twentieth Century, which took a somewhat different approach to the earlier shows – while the stories that it featured were covered in the same irreverent style, they were all essentially extrapolated from fact and actuality.
By 1991, the initial stars of Whose Line is it Anyway? were attracting considerable attention beyond the confines of the programme, and Channel 4 astutely seized the opportunity to provide them with their own starring vehicles during the year. Josie took full advantage of Josie Lawrence’s acting abilities in a series of separate comic playlets, S and M teamed Mike McShane and Tony Slattery for a combination of improvisation and sketch material, and the underrated sitcom The Big One starred McShane and Toksvig as a pair of vertically mismatched lovers. All of these were good, but it was Paul Merton – The Series that really shone.
Opening with angular orchestral music and the name of the series hung on a washing line, Paul Merton – The Series deliberately avoided the usual tried and tested audience-pleasing tactics in favour of a more low-key approach that allowed Merton’s freeform surrealism to expand and contract as the humour demanded. Extended set pieces – famous examples including an epic tale of wartime bravery that ends with Churchill awarding a medal “cunningly disguised as a punch in the mouth”, the adventures of a man who floats out of the window when a dentist accidentally gives him helium instead of anaesthetic gas, and a remarkable sketch involving two security men who can see non-existent intruders on their monitors – bled into each other, linked by Merton dispersing strange observations on society’s peculiarities in the guise of a kiosk-based newsagent. Initial reviews were unfavourable, perhaps because of its atypical approach, but Paul Merton – The Series found considerable favour with viewers.
A second series followed to a more positive reception in 1993, but Merton’s success as a regular team captain on BBC2′s Have I Got News For You (often transmitted in the same night’s schedules as Paul Merton – The Series, prompting Merton to wear a T-shirt urging BBC2 viewers to “Turn Over At Eleven”) soon came to dominate his time, and it would be a further three years before Merton attempted a sketch show, this time for the BBC.
At the same time, though, a sudden upsurge of interest in American performers almost seemed to pass Channel 4 by, and – surprisingly, given their effectiveness in capturing the UK alternative comedy scene a decade earlier – the key performers were rarely glimpsed on the channel outside of occasional guest slots on chat shows. Despite being easily the most accessible performer to British viewers, Denis Leary did not receive much exposure barring a presentation of his live show No Cure for Cancer and a semi-regular slot on Saturday Zoo, while Sam Kinison, Steven Wright and Janeane Garofalo were not really seen on Channel 4 at all. However, in their defence, they were one of the few broadcasters in the world to realize the true potential of the scene’s leading light – the late Bill Hicks.
Characterized by an almost tangible sense of rage at the stupidity and cruelty of global politics and the global media, Hicks had built a strong and well-deserved reputation as a live performer, and Channel 4 were quick to capitalize on this, televising several of his live performances (including the seminal Relentless and Revelations). It seems that the admiration between Channel 4 and Hicks was mutual, as the comedian was in discussions to create a series specifically for the channel – a sitcom provisionally entitled Counts of the Netherworld - when it became obvious that he was too ill to see the project through to completion. Channel 4 may well have curiously and frustratingly underrepresented one of the most exciting phenomena to have taken place in live comedy since The Comic Strip opened its doors, but they did succeed in giving the most valuable and extensive, and most importantly the least heavily censored, exposure to a comic talent whose astounding act was tragically little documented elsewhere.
The channel did continue to buy in worthwhile imports from America, though, and some notable shows made their debut between 1991 and 1992. One of the earliest creations by the cable channel HBO, who would later turn out popular high quality programming like Sex and the City and The Sopranos, Dream On was certainly presented in an original way, constantly cutting to appropriate clips from black and white TV shows that central character Martin Tupper recalled watching as a child to denote his thoughts and emotions. The series also caused something of a stir with its frank and unflinching depictions of casual sex among America’s single thirtysomethings, but Dream On had enough substance for its actual content to rise above visual gimmicks and controversial tactics, and it is a shame that only around a third of the 118 episodes were shown by Channel 4 before the rights were snatched away by Sky.
Andrew Dice Clay’s deliberately cosy and uncontroversial sitcom Bless this House, which wrongfooted practically the entire American viewing audience (something that Clay presumably regarded as the biggest and best joke of all), appeared in a daytime slot. The Marshall Chronicles, a series that bore similarities to The Wonder Years but was also based in equal measure on Woody Allen’s early films and featured a much older central character, failed to catch on either side of the Atlantic; it was cancelled after a few weeks in America, and went virtually unnoticed when shown by Channel 4 in 1991.
As in the 1980s, strong imports from further afield continued to appear on Channel 4 as well. A refreshing glimpse of comedy Carribean-style was showcased in the one-off specials Blouse and Skirt and Tall Dark and Handsome, and the Australian spoof medical drama sitcom Let the Blood Run Free proved to be an unexpected hit with the audience. Australian shows such as Big Girls’ Blouse and Full Frontal were also bought in, albeit several years after they were broadcast in their country of origin. However, the influx of foreign language shows was already winding down, and after the broadcast of the fantastic Swedish sketch show Lorry in 1991, no further shows of this nature – barring obligatory one-off airings for a handful of Montreux television festival winners – have appeared on Channel 4. This, sadly, is one of the great losses in Channel 4 history, stripping the channel of some of its flavour and distinctiveness, and jettisoning some great television along the way.
Meanwhile, as viewers were denied the chance to see another Xerxes, they were literally bombarded with painfully unfunny American sitcoms like the dismal My Two Dads. Although this was not the first slice of hideous sentimental and largely joke-free Stateside sitcom shlock to be seen on Channel 4 – that “honour”, for want of a better word, goes to the 1980s show Family Ties – it was the thin end of a subsequent enormous wedge that saw audiences subjected to and endless list of twee, undistinguished, and nauseatingly bland fare that included Blossom, Hang Time, Sister Sister, Hangin’ With Mr Cooper, California Dreams, Boy Meets World, Running the Halls, Saved by the Bell, Saved by the Bell: The College Years, and most uninspired of all, Saved by the Bell: The New Class.
Thankfully, Channel 4 did continue to support new homegrown talent and a notable vehicle for new talent appeared in 1991 in the form of Packet of Three. Like many of the channel’s earliest alternative comedy shows, this was an attempt to fuse standup performances with some semblance of a sitcom-style narrative, featuring Frank Skinner, Jenny Eclair and Henry Normal as the staff of a fictitious run-down theatre that played host to three acts per week. A second series, transmitted in 1992, changed the title to Packing Them In and replaced Normal with Kevin Eldon and the wonderful Roger Mann. Both series were highly enjoyable containing early television performances from the likes of Harry Hill and Dave Gorman in addition to the always-amusing backstage banter, and Skinner’s closing renditions of Born With a Smile on my Face in an endless variety of musical styles.
Meanwhile, rising star Forbes Mason appeared in the sitcom My Dead Dad as a man unable to rid himself of the unwanted help offered by his father’s ghost, Craig Ferguson turned in a memorable special, The Craig Ferguson Story, that presented a fictionalized account of his life with Peter Cook and June Whitfield as his parents, underrated musical duo Kit and The Widow appeared in two well-received specials, and the uneasy A Stab in the Dark made a brave and occasionally successful attempt to fuse topical debate and media analysis with standup material from David Baddiel.
During the early 1990s, a number of comedians who would later go on to become household names made their mark with work on Channel 4. The youngest ever winner of the Perrier Award for best newcomer, Sean Hughes was still only 25 when he made his first show for Channel 4, the humorous Dublin-based travelogue Aah Sean (transmitted in January 1992). This was soon followed by the first series of Sean’s Show, a deconstructed sitcom that followed a roughly similar pattern to the cult American series It’s Garry Shandling’s Show (which had aired on BBC2 in the late 1980s) by allowing Hughes – in the persona of a single twentysomething who shared his flat with a spider called Elvis and whose answering machine was troubled by confusing messages from ex-girlfriends and God – to pause the action and address the audience directly. Hughes also played fast and loose with the boundaries between the storyline and out-of-context whimsy, with results that could be both embarrassing (a rendition by Hughes of Julian Cope’s Jellypop Perky Jean shoehorned in for no obvious reason and to no obvious artistic benefit) and entertaining (an episodes plagued by typographical errors in the script, causing a character to enter with bags of cornflakes rather than confidence). Hugely popular with its target audience, Sean’s Show was something of a variable affair, but the high points – notably a superb episode in which he accidentally finds himself in a relationship with his local garage’s female mechanic after spontaneously launching into a choreographed performance of Summer Nights – were well worth watching. A second run of the series appeared in 1993, and Hughes recorded the live show Sean Hughes is Thirtysomehow for Channel 4 in 1995. Hughes certainly looked to be one of the most promising new comedians of the decade, but after this, he seemed to do little bar appear on the BBC2 game show Never Mind The Buzzcocks (which he has recently left, prompting rumours that he might be returning to actual comedy performance at last).
Another sitcom that revelled in breaking down the barrier between performer and audience was Julian Clary’s 1992 series Terry and Julian. However, on this occasion it was not the barrier between performer and television viewer, but between performer and studio audience, with Clary frequently halting the on-stage action to allow him to wander around accosting audience members. The premise of the show, co-written by Paul Merton, was simple enough – Clary ends up sharing a flat with an everyday heterosexual man who finds his life somewhat turned around by Clary’s liking for camp surroundings – but the real quality of the venture lay in Clary’s performance. His standup style, with some slight modifications, fitted perfectly into the sitcom format, and in one episode he even gave a memorable performance as his laddish double. The same year Clary also presented Desperately Seeking Roger, a travelogue in which he went in search of whistling easy-listening crooner Roger Whittaker. Alas an appearance on ITV’s Comedy Awards early in 1993 proved to be a major setback to his career; an ill-timed joke about the Chancellor of the Exchequer and deviant sexual practices led to a sudden downturn in offers of television work. His next regular television slot did not come along until 1996, and before then only Channel 4 were brave enough to give him exposure – and even then only in the form of pre-recorded one-off specials (such as a record of his Australian tour, Brace Yourself Sydney, in December 1993).
Having appeared on Friday Night Live when she was still performing as “The Sea Monster”, Jo Brand went on to enjoy a long and successful association with Channel 4, in a series of impressive one-off specials (one of which, JO Brand: Like It or Lump It, seamlessly edited excerpts from her stage act into fictitious mocked-up “backstage” footage) and the long-running sketch show JO Brand Through the Cakehole. Another veteran of Friday Night Live, the notoriously deadpan Jack Dee, attracted greater attention than most with his debut solo series. The Jack Dee Show, which enjoyed an impact and level of popularity that had eluded most similar Channel 4 shows, was set in a fictitious club venue modelled on those that might have been seen in a 1960s detective series. Dee later recorded a one-off live special for the station, along with the visually stunning Jack and Jeremy’s Real Lives in which he teamed up with Jeremy Hardy for a series of well-aimed “mockumentary” parodies of factual television, and has since gone on to find considerable favour with the mass viewing audience. Lee Evans also enjoyed a brief but productive association with Channel 4 at this time, taking in the live special An Evening With Lee Evans in 1993, and the series of individual playlets The World of Lee Evans in 1995, before going on to become an unlikely Hollywood star.
There was also an attempt to encourage new writing talent with the sitcom pilot series Bunch of Five, broadcast over the summer of 1995, which contained a number of noteworthy offerings. Dead at Thirty, written by Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson and starring a pre-Eldorado Jesse Birdsall, prefigured the trend for “edgy” flatsharing sitcoms like Game On that would emerge later in the decade. Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer contributed The Weekenders, a wonderfully whimsical pilot influenced by Monty Python, Spike Milligan and even in places The Beatles’ underrated cinematic ventures, in which they battled to outwit an alien race who wished to steal a quality meat product. The forgotten masterpiece in Reeves and Mortimer’s work, The Weekenders was a fantastic offering and more deserving of a series than many shows that would appear on Channel 4 during the following decade, but sadly it failed to be developed any further after the duo jumped ship to the BBC.
By far the most successful entry in Bunch of Five was Blue Heaven, a sitcom written by and starring Frank Skinner as a member of a struggling musical duo playing dismal Birmingham venues, whose repertoire tellingly included a song entitled Please Stop Booing Us, We’re Going Soon. Although the series has yet to be repeated, somewhat surprising given Skinner’s subsequent star status, Blue Heaven ran for two very strong year between 1992 and 1994, and proved beyond all doubt that the art of the sitcom was still very much a valid one, especially if given a sophisticated and atypical slant as it was here.
When it was reported in 1993 that The Golden Girls was finishing for good, many viewers breathed a long-overdue sigh of relief. Said relief was short-lived, though, as production of the final series was immediately followed by the announcement of a forthcoming sequel, The Golden Palace. This saw the main characters – minus Bea Arthur as Dorothy, who had been the only good thing about the original series – buying and running a hotel. Alexei Sayle had originally been cast as the hotel’s chef (played in the transmitted episodes by Cheech Marin), but had left the production after clashes with the main stars, and he seems to have had the right idea. Suffice to say that anyone who hated The Golden Girls would have hated The Golden Palace even more, and that the show never made it past the end of its first series. Amazingly, someone still thought there was further mileage in the idea, and a decision was made to adapt the series for ITV as the desperately unfunny Brighton Belles. For once, the public treated a stupid idea with the contempt it deserved and Brighton Belles was so unpopular that some ITV regions did not see the series through to the end of its run.
Cheers also came to an end in 1993, but this time there was plenty of good news in store for viewers with a spin-off that rivalled the original series for consistency and brilliance. Hardly the most obvious character to be transferred into their own series, Frasier followed psychiatrist Frasier Craine as he returned to Seattle to look after his disabled former policeman father Marty, with the help and hindrance of his ridiculously pompous brother Niles, their father’s coarse British physiotherapist Daphne and the seemingly infinitely cunning dog Eddie. Frasier takes a job as a phone-in therapist on a talk radio station, failing to get on with the majority of his co-workers but finding an equally neurotic ally in his producer Roz. Like Cheers, the strength of the series derived from the interplay between the mismatched characters (notably between the unashamedly blue collar Marty and his intellectually snobbish sons), and the minimal changes of setting – indeed, most episodes take place almost entirely in Frasier’s flat, with the occasional foray into the radio studio and the wonderfully named Cafe Nervosa. Characters from Cheers would occasionally drop in on the series – Sam, Diane, Woody and Frasier’s ex-wife Lilith all made guest appearances at various times, and one memorable episode saw the entire Craine clan and Daphne descend on Boston for Cliff’s retirement party, with Marty and Norm finding an enormous amount of common ground. Highlights of Frasier are too numerous to detail – although an episode set in a ski lodge filled with characters with unrequited crushes on each other, and another that detailed a single day in two alternate dimensions (Frasier, Niles and Daphne endured remarkably different days in each; Marty just sat in his chair with Eddie on differing sides) deserve special mention – but the series shows no signs of flagging as it enters its 10th year of production. Yet another imported success from Channel 4, Frasier has long since outstripped and shaken off its obvious roots to become recognized as a superb comedy in its own right.
In addition to their commendable and rewarding support for new performers in the early 1990s, Channel 4 also afforded an established performer the opportunity to try something different to the style of humour with which he had made his name. Rory Bremner had been enjoying considerable success as a relatively straightforward impressionist on BBC2 since the mid-1980s, but latterly he had felt constricted by the format foisted on him by the channel and yearned to do something more directly satirical. A move to Channel 4 in 1992 allowed him to facilitate this, and he made his debut with Rory Bremner – The Morning After the Night Before on New Year’s Day 1993. Setting the style for much of his subsequent output, this special featured then-Prime Minister John Major spooling through a videotape of sketches relating to topical events of the previous 12 months, leading into the first full series of Rory Bremner – Who Else? in October. Support in this, and subsequent shows, came from veteran satirists John Bird and John Fortune; both had previously appeared with Bremner on his later BBC shows, but it was here that they really came into their own, furnishing each edition with tightly delivered and scathing assaults on governmental policy. The series also occasionally enjoyed input from guest performers, one notable example occurring late in 1995; to coincide with the release of the “new” Beatles single Free As A Bird, Neil Innes returned to television after an absence of far too many years to perform his own parody of the song in the guise of Ron Nasty, the character he played in the superb Beatles parody The Rutles.
In addition to his main series, Bremner has contributed endless Christmas and Election specials to Channel 4, and full, unedited versions of Bird and Fortune’s contributions were later broadcast independently under the title The Long Johns. In fact, their appeal to viewers was considered so great that from 1998 onwards, the main series was renamed Bremner, Bird and Fortune. There is no avoiding the fact that, compared to the likes of Chris Morris and Mark Thomas, Bremner’s style of satire is not only outdated but also remarkably “safe”. It seems popular enough with viewers, though, and his series remains one of Channel 4′s flagship comedy shows.
Festival coverage and occasional one-off specials aside, live comedy had been somewhat underrepresented on the channel since the end of Friday Night Live. However, by 1993 the popularity of the live comedy circuit was once more in the ascendant, and Channel 4 reflected this by launching a selection of shows with dedicated live comedy content. Jonathan Ross presided over Saturday Zoo, an alternative variety show in intent but featuring a high proportion of comedy, including notable appearances by Steve Coogan, Mark Thomas and some long overdue UK television exposure for Denis Leary. Meanwhile, !Viva Cabaret!, which enjoyed a second outing in 1994, attempted to recapture the atmosphere of rowdy cabaret clubs on television and featured a healthy representation of popular acts from the live comedy circuit at the time, including Mark Lamarr, Mark Thomas, Harry Hill, Lee Evans, Julian Clary, John Thomson and Sandra Bernhard. A mix of standup and sketch comedy was also explored in Get Up, Stand Up, written and performed by a black comedy collective, which ran for four series between 1994 and 1998 and on the whole was superior to its contemporaneous BBC equivalent The Real McCoy.
Six months after the final series of Absolutely, Jack Docherty and Moray Hunter’s characters Don and George McDiarmid appeared in their own spin-off series, Mr Don and Mr George. As with their appearances in Absolutely, the humour was built around their own skewed view of the ordinary everyday world (which took in building a business empire out of cereal boxes, a pathological sense of suspicion towards the Swiss, the existential guilt provoked by the childhood theft of a solitary apple, and the eternal pursuance of their motto: “No Wasps”), blending the sort of material that might have appeared in a sketch in the main series with a narrative structure of sorts. Although more accessible to a mainstream than the original Don and George sketches, the angular and abstract surrealism that was central to their comic identity was maintained, and perhaps this put some viewers off; despite being a genuinely good series, Mr Don and Mr George received poor reviews and was not recomissioned for a second run. The last time that the duo were glimpsed on Channel 4 was with a repeat run in the somewhat less than prestigious 3am slot, and barring an unsuccessful BBC pilot built around McGlashan, this effectively marked the end of Absolutely.
The emergent fad for “sophisticated” cartoons that came in the wake of the international success of The Simpsons appeared to escape Channel 4′s attention at first, with the channel missing out both on that series and on Ren and Stimpy. However, they were quick to buy in another, decidedly more adult example of the genre in 1993, and in so doing exposed late-night viewers to a remarkably undervalued show. While watching MTV one day, animator Mike Judge came up with the idea for a couple of inarticulate, illiterate teenagers who would comment on the videos as they watched them. The result, premiered on MTV in 1992, was Beavis and Butthead. Largely set on a roach-infested couch, each edition saw the titular dim-witted metalheads offer their opinions on extracts from pop videos, using their stupidity as a means of cutting through any sense of hype or artistic pretention; Blur’s Parklife saw them ask, bewildered, “what language is this in?”, Radiohead’s Creep was deemed to alternate between “the bit that rocks” and “the bit that sucks” because “if they had the bit that rocks all the way through, then it wouldn’t rock as much”, and opining during James’ Say Something that the singer’s parents had said “son, we love you and stuff, but don’t use our name cause you suck”. However, their brainless bile wasn’t solely restricted to pop music. The videos were interspersed with narrative material that followed the pair in their day to day life, again using their sheer stupidity as a means of hitting out at the corresponding stupidity of society (for example, an episode that saw them become obsessed with firearms – sensing that they were too young to buy guns legitimately, a crooked gunstore owner repeatedly asked them “now, how old are you guys?”, only to meet the answer “um … 14″ every time – and dozens based around the failings of the educational system).
A massive hit on MTV, Beavis and Butthead arrived on Channel 4 in a blaze of bad publicity late in 1993, following claims in America that an episode in which they were seen starting fires had provoked child viewers into acts of arson. While Channel 4 refrained from showing that particular episode, they initially ran the series in a regular late-night slot, picking up a small but devoted audience along the way. However, in time their commitment predictably foundered – episodes were shown in short, seemingly random bursts, the superb 1995 Christmas special (which blended elements of It’s a Beautiful Life and A Christmas Carol in a devastating attack on the career prospects of America’s youth) was not shown at all, and eventually the just gave up on showing the series altogether. This was the first time that a cult animation with a loyal audience was treated this way by Channel 4, and unfortunately it has been far from the last time.
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