When the Beyond the Fringe quartet first took to the boards in 1960, spawning decades of imitators, modern satire, 'aimed at things and people that need it', was born. Their work has still not been surpassed 40 years on, while in Ireland, it seems, we're still waiting for a fringe to go beyond, writes Brian Boyd.
Between the ending of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP came satire. With respect to the claims of Aristophanes, satire's annus mirabilis was 1960, the place Edinburgh and the intent "a work of literature or art that by inspiring laughter, contempt or horror seeks to correct the follies and abuses it uncovers".
At 10.45 p.m. on August 22nd in the Lyceum Theatre, four Oxbridge chappies by the names of Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett first went Beyond the Fringe. Reviewing the experience in the Daily Express, Bernard Levin wrote: "The theatre came of age last night. A revue so brilliant, adult, hardboiled, accurate, merciless, witty, unexpected, alive, exhilarating, cleansing, right, true and good, that my first conscious thought as I stumbled weak and sick with laughter up the stairs at the end was one of gratitude. This 'satire' is real and barbed - aimed at things and people that need it".
Beyond the Fringe later transferred to London's West End and then Broadway. It also transformed the cultural climate. This dam-burst of seditious irreverence inspired the publication of Private Eye, the broadcasting of That Was The Week That Was and Not Only But Also, the setting up of The Establishment Club, the birth of Monty Python, the post-Goon re-birth of Spike Milligan, the comedic ideology of the "alternatives" and the modern-day genius of Chris Morris.
Such were the sweeping reforms of the "Satirical Sixties" that, at the height of the boom, the producers of That Was The Week That Was regularly received letters from well-to-do parents asking what training their children needed to become satirists, "as it seems quite the done thing to do these days".
This was punk rock for the National Service generation. Revue, before Beyond the Fringe, was jaded hotel cabaret. Clapped-out music hall acts took other people's jokes out of a jar of formaldehyde and rarely strayed from "saucy" seaside postcard material - that is, when they weren't peddling hatred against people who had the temerity to be black. In case the hilarity proved too much, these turns were alternated with torch singers or dancing troupes, "variety" being the spice of old-school revue. Politicians, royalty and various other "worthies" represented no-go areas. It must have been like living in a country full of Frank Carsons.
If Beyond the Fringe, though, was an act of theatrical lèse-majesté, this fab four were the last to know about it. Alan Bennett recalls the rehearsals for that first Edinburgh show as being a series of sessions of "standing around and deciding what we loathed - then sending it up". While a later generation had the enviable dartboard of Margaret Thatcher, BTF had the patrician Tory leader, Harold Macmillan. They also had a culture of deference which was then protected by a polite and formal media. It was BTF's fracturing of this deference - allusions to the foibles and indiscretions of politicians and the injustices inherent in the "Establishment" - that provoked the later seismic changes.
Just released for the first time on CD, a three-CD box set, The Complete Beyond the Fringe, features both the West End (1961) and Broadway (1964) shows. It's a masterclass, a sui generis piece of work that holds up 40 years on.
What the "Angry Young Men" were doing for theatre, these acerbic young men were doing for satirical comedy. These recordings still cast a shadow over all that has followed.
Just 15 years after the event, the four were parodying the "stiff upper lip" approach of the British military during the war - a sketch that led to numerous walk-outs and threats of violence from members of the audience. The beautifully titled sketch, 'Aftermyth of War', has been "borrowed" by both Monty Python and Blackadder in subsequent rewrites. Similarly, Peter Cook's lampooning of Macmillan provoked gasps of shock when first unveiled. Jonathan Miller, from the wings, remembers a man in the audience, during the sketch, turning to his wife and whispering in an appalled manner: "I say! This is supposed to be the prime minister." Gentle enough by today's standards, it's still a good deal more penetrative than anything Rory Bremner or Alistair MacGowan can contrive against Tony Blair.
The legendary sketches here - Bennett's marvellous 'Take a Pew', 'The Great Train Robbery', and Cook discovering his E. L. Wisty character in 'Sitting on the Bench (I Never had the Latin)' - are remarkable not just for their content but in how many times they have been "adapted" over the years and passed off as new material. You can work out 'Take A Pew's' trendy vicar with his overwrought metaphors ("Life is like a tin of sardines - we are all looking for the key") for yourself; 'The Great Train Robbery' last surfaced in a repeat of Only Fools and Horses (apart from most every other sketch show going); and you don't need to tell Paul Merton about the influence E. L. Wisty had on his stand-up persona. (Artful dodger that he is, Merton always tells interviewers Tony Hancock was his main influence).
Whether in tone, rhythm or style, you can hear echoes of BTF anywhere from the Pythons to The Two Ronnies (particularly in their more "daring" wordplay stuff) to Rory Bremner (most notably the Two Johns).
The only acts, it seems, to escape their creative shadow are those of genuine originality and brillance: The Young Ones and Alan Partridge.
And while much is made of the "new camp" - Julian Clary, Graham Norton - you only have to listen to the Cook-written 'Bollard' sketch to realise that it has all been done 40 years ago. 'Bollard', in fact, also inspired the brilliant Julian and Sandy characters in Round the Horne - and has a historical dimension - up until 1967 all scripts had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain's office for clearance.
It was an unwritten rule that "the representation of homosexuality" was not allowed on stage, so the BTF troupe had their stage directions for 'Bollard' returned to them with their stage direction of "Enter two outrageous old queens" changed to "Enter two aesthetic young men". A wily Peter Cook though he could get the point across by having the "aesthetic young men" calling each other "love" - but this too was stopped.
Remarkably, this show, replete with allusions to Macmillan, the British class system, vicars and Cambridge dons, thrived for years on Broadway, where Jackie Onassis became a big fan. The audacity of its assaults on the establishment saw it through.
Back in Britain, a Nationwide league of satirists rode BTF's wave - most notably the really rather useless David Frost who got the job presenting That Was The Week That Was only because television chiefs were petrified by the thought of letting Peter Cook loose on live television. (TW3 was originally pitched as a television version of Cook's live stand-up venue in Soho - the Establishment Club - the only place in Britain to allow Lenny Bruce to perform).
Towards the end of the decade, the BTF team fractured. Alan Bennett turned to writing plays, his comic touch never deserting him; Jonathan Miller (regarded as a bit of a "passenger") became a doctor, opera producer and polymath; while Cook and Moore kept working together - whether as Dud 'n' Pete or the transgressive Derek and Clive. The Establishment Club closed, TW3 was axed and only Private Eye remained as an outlet for "fracturing the culture of deference". Around the corner lay The Goodies . . . the antithesis of everything BTF.
The satire that was left had come to mean throwing insults at the government - more out of a feeling that that was the way than anything more substantial. But for BTF fans like John Cleese, Eric Idle and Michael Palin, there was a way to be satirical in the broader sense of the term. The Pythons were "Something Completely Different". Their Dada-esque satire ('The Ministry of Silly Walks') had the requisite surreal touch to put them at a remove from BTF and free them up to create their own comedy of the absurd. If the Pythons broadened the picture, Johnny Speight brilliantly narrowed it down to a specific target in Till Death Us Do Part.
If the 1970s take on satire merely amounted to Mike Yarwood, the 1980s, with its blood-rush of "alternatives" (Ben Elton, Alexei Sayle et al), attempted, after a fashion, to resurrect the cadaver by putting a self-limiting party political spin on their material. The new breed came tumbling out of polytechnics with a Red Wedge sticker in one hand and a burning sense of injustice - not towards the government but towards the fact that they hadn't yet got their own Channel 4 series yet. These performers didn't go beyond the fringe, they became the fringe and - although there were some colossal talents (Gerry Sadowitz, Ian MacPherson, John Hegley) - the game was up for anything resembling robust satire when Frank Skinner, a man who wouldn't have a set were it not for the curious anatomical fact that women have breasts and men have a penis, won the Perrier Award in 1991. Some of the new acts were merely panto stars-in-waiting.
In Ireland, it seems, we're still waiting for a fringe to go beyond. Niall Toibin had a crack with If the Cap Fits (1973), which was admirably, as Bernard Levin said, "aimed at people and things that needed it". RTÉ soon put paid to any development of the content of the show, displaying the craven and cowardly attitude to anything remotely funny that still characterises its programming policy.
Hall's Pictorial Weekly got a decent 10-year run, though, and was a true Irish satire in its poking and prodding of parish-pump politics in Ballymagash. Eschewing the harshness of full-on political satire, Frank Hall's programme put a surreal rural spin on its sketches and such was its popularity that it's catchphrases and nicknames entered the language.
It's some tribute to the power of the programme that it's credited with helping - in however minor a way - to bring down the Fine Gael/Labour coalition in 1977. This is in stark contrast to ITV's puppet political satire show, Spitting Image, which blazed brightly for a few years but was killed off because British politicians, far from being wounded by their characterisations on the show, saw being "done" as a sign that they had arrived.
While the sketches on the short-lived Nighthawks were always hit and miss, and had a whiff of the RTÉ canteen about them, Arthur Riordan's re-casting of de Valera as a rapper remains one of the best Irish satirical creations. The rapping Dev recently reappeared in the stage show, Rap Éire, an underrated slice of satire about Irish political life which featured the broad talents of the Irish-American Des Bishop.
Scrap Saturday (Dermot Morgan, Gerard Stembridge, Pauline McLynn) also played its part. Regarded in certain sections of the media as akin to the Second Coming, the show was nevertheless a watershed in prime-time vitriol against those who had it coming to them, even if it indulged in too many politically correct in-jokes.
From the moment the first politician bayed his/her approval of Bull Island, the show was doomed. In his sleevenotes to the BTF CD release, Michael Frayn may as well be writing about Bull Island when he talks about modern British satire: "What the show's imitators failed to observe was that such slaughter and demolition as it did contain were devastating, firstly, because they were done with wit and secondly, because they outraged the hitherto generally accepted convention that such things should not be done as public entertainment. The show made its audience laugh at the unthinking attitudes of respect which up till then they themselves had shared. Once it had annihilated the convention, to go on mocking the so-called Establishment has more and more meant making the audience laugh not at themselves at all, but at a standard target which is rapidly becoming as well-established as mothers-in-law. To do this is not to undermine but to confirm the audience's prejudices, and has less in common with satire than community hymn-singing. It's also much less funny."
The cry of "where are the satirists now that we need them" in a tribunal-infested, corruption-laden political landscape is missing the point of how satire has journeyed over the last 40 years. Satire is now part of the mainstream, practiced as much by any good parliamentary sketch journalist or radio/television broadcaster as any bawdy stand-up. The vernacular has loosened up, the media are no longer polite and formal. And sometimes contempt works better than ridicule.
If the government of the day is the new mother-in-law, at least for entertainers, how then to continue to "correct follies and abuses by inspiring laughter, contempt or horror"? The new breed, disciples of Cook one and all, take the arch approach.
The League Against Tedium (Nietzsche meets Frank Spencer); The Mighty Boosh (Beckett with gags), and Garth Marenghi (shlock comic in literature shock) all acknowledge their debt to that first real Edinburgh show, but all plough their own satirical furrow.
The only one capable, though, of causing a good ruck these days is Peter Cook's only anointed successor, Chris Morris. In his Brass Eye programmes, he has clinically and devastatingly satirised a plethora of media constructs (violence, drug-taking - the whole tabloid gamut). His last show was about how the media treat the subject of paedophilia. It was "so brilliant, adult, hardboiled, accurate, merciless, witty, unexpected, alive, exhilarating, cleansing, right, true and good" that in the next day's papers he was "named and shamed" as "Britain's most evil TV comic".
And that's the tragedy and the farce of the last 40 years of satire.
The Complete Beyond The Fringe is on EMI. Monty Python's The Life of Brian has been re-released on video and DVD. The Après Match video is on general release