It's not going away, is it? Every transgression by a BBC broadcaster is now cross-referenced to the Brand-Ross scandal while that story itself continues to provide tabloid fodder, some of it truly bizarre. I read that Jonathan Ross could sue the Beeb for actually allowing his broadcast. Really? And perhaps he could launch a further suit against them for their neglect in leaving a phone within his reach; he could also take action against Andrew Sachs for entrapment by having voicemail in the first place.
One paper gleefully announced that branches of Borders were selling the latest books by Ross and Russell Brand at 50% off, conveniently ignoring the fact that this was part of an ongoing discount offer also involving a number of biographies by other (non-controversial) stars!
My previous column centred on the issue of cruel humour but this time I would like to add a few more thoughts about the biggest story concerning radio comedy in years.
I am tired of hearing about it being a comic's 'duty' to push boundaries, as if any show which doesn't attempt to do this has limited merit. It is perfectly possible to consistently entertain audiences without trying to push boundaries all the time - thousands of performers manage to do so every day - and is radio really the place to be pushing them anyway? The Goon Show was ground-breaking in the fifties but there was very little TV then. In later years, great iconoclasts, such as Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Billy Connolly and Bill Hicks got their breaks through live shows, albums and late-night TV. In the nineties, Armando Iannucci did create a new comedic genre by mixing vox pops with scripted material in Radio 4's On The Hour but that was rather more sophisticated than prank answerphone rants!
I think Paul Gambaccini got it right when he mentioned the dangers of airlifting TV presenters into radio. A performer whose natural arena is a late night chat show or an adults-only live comedy gig is always going to be difficult to rein in.
Much has been made of the fact that the 40,000 complaints were only received after the press coverage but I think that for many listeners it wasn't a matter of protesting about an item they hadn't even heard but a long-overdue opportunity to petition against Jonathan Ross: his over-exposure, his inadequately censored outpourings and, of course, his reported salary. Incidentally, I see that he won't be hosting this year's Comedy Awards on ITV. It's always amazed me that the BBC let him moonlight for other channels when they are shelling out so much for his services. It's a bit like Man Utd saying to Rooney 'Ok, Wayne, this is your salary but if you want to go off and play the odd game for City then that's fine by us'. If a station has to put someone on the air so much in order to get their money's worth then you would think the last thing they would want would be to have their rivals contributing to the diminishing returns in audience appreciation. What would he have charged them for exclusivity...?
And if only two complaints were received from among 400,000 listeners before the Mail on Sunday ran the story then doesn't that indicate that boundaries weren't exactly being pushed that much anyway?
Over the fourteen years that I have been writing daily topical prep for commercial presenters, I have always been given a clear idea of limits. ILR stations may have had their share of phone-in scandals (just like the BBC) but any instances I read about where presenters overstep the mark (usually on breakfast shows!) these seem to be dealt with far more swiftly and effectively.
The coverage of the US elections once again demonstrated how BBC radio can be so much better than its television. It really shouldn't need to imitate it.
(Republished from the Radio Magazine Issue 866, 12 November 2008)
Friday, 21 November 2008
Thursday, 13 November 2008
A beef about bullies
(This was the first of my two most recent articles for the Radio Mgazine about this major news story from the world of radio comedy).)
No prizes for guessing the big radio story this week. In fairness to the BBC, what started out as a headline in the Mail on Sunday did become the lead item on Radio 4's PM the next day despite it being about them, complete with extracts from the offending calls to Andrew Sachs' answerphone by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross, material that was pre-recorded and, remarkably, cleared by a producer for broadcast. As we go to press, there are demands for heads to roll but, as we have seen from so many public figures in recent years, sackings are simply the new suspensions.
This story has merely added to what was going to be the subject matter of this article anyway: drawing the line between using topical humour involving celebrities and bullying them, humour vs humiliation.
Nicola Roberts is a member of Girls Aloud, the pale redhead who didn't crop up performing sketches on the Friday Night Project with her bandmates and who perhaps says least in interviews. Despite having a large following, she is perceived as less glamorous than the rest of the group, rather like Mel C in the early days of the Spice Girls. She is also a regular target for Chris Moyles on Radio 1 and elsewhere (in his first book, he launched into an attack on her in the opening pages) and, earlier this month, she spoke out about his constant attacks.
All humour has a victim and although self-effacing wit is least likely to offend, a presenter or comic who only talks about him/herself could be accused of self-obsession (not that this stops some!) There are arguments that those who choose to put themselves in the public eye are fair game and that all publicity is good anyway. Having met a certain number of celebrities, all I can say is that they have varied in personality type from those who seemed incapable of even ringing for a taxi without a manager doing it for them to the totally down-to-earth.
At a talk to a mature audience recently, I drew applause when I said that I try to adhere to a rule of only joking about behaviour that can be avoided. I'm not sure if this was entirely deserved - there are times when I know I break this rule.
Of course, there are some famous figures whose self-destructive tendencies are bound to be fodder for comedy: Doherty, Amy, Kerry: celebrities whose names end with a 'Why?' as well as a y. But sometimes it becomes clear that we gag writers need to lay off. The stage show We Will Rock You removed a reference to Britney Spears as her personal life imploded and there seem to less jokes about Jade Goody since her cancer diagnosis.
Mock The Week is a show I love (Andy Parsons was the first person who spoke to me when I started going to Broadcasting House as a new, nervous comedy writer) and Frankie Boyle's material often makes me laugh out loud. My partner Val loves a lot of his stuff too but when she recently asked me why Professor Stephen Hawking is the butt of so many jokes, it was hard to find any answer other than the obvious. Modern comedy is supposed to be non-sexist, non-racist, non-homophobic but somehow the disabled and elderly have often been targets for otherwise PC comics. Difficult to take the moral high ground if all you do is demonstrate a different set of prejudices. Of course, it is possible to be humorous about Hawking, for example, his Brief History of Time which so many ostentatiously bought and carried around everywhere but so few read because they couldn't actually understand it. Years ago, I was proud to get a sketch aired on Radio 2 which satirised one of Anne Widdecombe's policies as a minister rather than making fun of her looks.
Ofcom are now involved in the Brand - Ross case. All told, not a good week for radio comedy.
(Reprinted from the Radio Magazine, issue 864, 29 October 2008)
No prizes for guessing the big radio story this week. In fairness to the BBC, what started out as a headline in the Mail on Sunday did become the lead item on Radio 4's PM the next day despite it being about them, complete with extracts from the offending calls to Andrew Sachs' answerphone by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross, material that was pre-recorded and, remarkably, cleared by a producer for broadcast. As we go to press, there are demands for heads to roll but, as we have seen from so many public figures in recent years, sackings are simply the new suspensions.
This story has merely added to what was going to be the subject matter of this article anyway: drawing the line between using topical humour involving celebrities and bullying them, humour vs humiliation.
Nicola Roberts is a member of Girls Aloud, the pale redhead who didn't crop up performing sketches on the Friday Night Project with her bandmates and who perhaps says least in interviews. Despite having a large following, she is perceived as less glamorous than the rest of the group, rather like Mel C in the early days of the Spice Girls. She is also a regular target for Chris Moyles on Radio 1 and elsewhere (in his first book, he launched into an attack on her in the opening pages) and, earlier this month, she spoke out about his constant attacks.
All humour has a victim and although self-effacing wit is least likely to offend, a presenter or comic who only talks about him/herself could be accused of self-obsession (not that this stops some!) There are arguments that those who choose to put themselves in the public eye are fair game and that all publicity is good anyway. Having met a certain number of celebrities, all I can say is that they have varied in personality type from those who seemed incapable of even ringing for a taxi without a manager doing it for them to the totally down-to-earth.
At a talk to a mature audience recently, I drew applause when I said that I try to adhere to a rule of only joking about behaviour that can be avoided. I'm not sure if this was entirely deserved - there are times when I know I break this rule.
Of course, there are some famous figures whose self-destructive tendencies are bound to be fodder for comedy: Doherty, Amy, Kerry: celebrities whose names end with a 'Why?' as well as a y. But sometimes it becomes clear that we gag writers need to lay off. The stage show We Will Rock You removed a reference to Britney Spears as her personal life imploded and there seem to less jokes about Jade Goody since her cancer diagnosis.
Mock The Week is a show I love (Andy Parsons was the first person who spoke to me when I started going to Broadcasting House as a new, nervous comedy writer) and Frankie Boyle's material often makes me laugh out loud. My partner Val loves a lot of his stuff too but when she recently asked me why Professor Stephen Hawking is the butt of so many jokes, it was hard to find any answer other than the obvious. Modern comedy is supposed to be non-sexist, non-racist, non-homophobic but somehow the disabled and elderly have often been targets for otherwise PC comics. Difficult to take the moral high ground if all you do is demonstrate a different set of prejudices. Of course, it is possible to be humorous about Hawking, for example, his Brief History of Time which so many ostentatiously bought and carried around everywhere but so few read because they couldn't actually understand it. Years ago, I was proud to get a sketch aired on Radio 2 which satirised one of Anne Widdecombe's policies as a minister rather than making fun of her looks.
Ofcom are now involved in the Brand - Ross case. All told, not a good week for radio comedy.
(Reprinted from the Radio Magazine, issue 864, 29 October 2008)
Saturday, 1 November 2008
Peter Hickey: An Appreciation
When Peter Hickey died last year, the media coverage was centred on the fact that he died in a fire and only briefly mentioned his long and impressive comedy writing career. I tried to redress the balance a little with this article in the Radio Magazine.
I stay in touch with some of my old BBC colleagues and, from time to time, an email will arrive, headed ‘Some Sad News’. This happened a few weeks ago when I learned that the comedy writer Peter Hickey had died aged 67 in a fire at his Brighton home.
As a script editor, Pete was the first person to select anything I’d written for BBC radio (Week Ending) and in later years I would sit with him on Wednesday afternoons writing last-minute News Huddlines sketches while he compiled that show’s opening monologue.
He would plough methodically through hundreds of gags sent in on spec (many handwritten/hopeless) and somehow produce a flowing routine which got roars from 300 people at the recording but he was never too busy to contribute ideas if other writers were struggling. On one occasion, Gerry Goddin and I were discussing a news story I’d read about Siamese twins arrested for fighting…each other (only In America!) With Pete’s input, we quickly wrote a sketch which went down very well despite being in dubious taste but then he loved outrageous humour; if someone sent in a really offensive gag, he would groan ‘Oh de-ar!’, laugh, remove his glasses and go off to regale the producer with this foul offering before returning to the mountain of submissions.
Pete grew up in Bermondsey and even as a child wrote short stories. His father sent him to Pitman’s College but his early jobs included taxi driving (often conveying some shady characters!) and working for a Russian tea merchant who also specialised in certain ‘duty-free’ goods! After an involvement with pirate radio, he put his shorthand and typing training to good use as a sub-editor for the Sun and also worked in the teleprinter room at LBC/IRN where his colleagues included our own Paul Easton.
By this time he had started writing for BBC radio. Derek Jameson claimed in his autobiography that Pete wrote the notorious sketch which led to his expensive libel action against Week Ending but years later he still employed him to write for his show on BSB.
In fact, he wrote for an amazing array of stars on radio or TV in the UK, USA and Australia: David Frost, Joan Rivers, Bob Monkhouse, Ronnie Corbett, Les Dennis and Dustin Gee, Little and Large, Roy Walker. Alfred Marks, John Inman, Keith Harris, the Copy Cats…But he was more likely to boast about who he HADN’T worked for; he proudly told me that he’d never written for Spitting Image! (I guess he didn’t need to).
Radio quizzes were a speciality for Pete, for example, Press Gang, where he attempted to write material accommodating the speech difficulties associated with host Glyn Worsnip’s cerebellar ataxia. And then there was the hugely popular (and frequently risqué) Trivia Test Match, its 8-year innings ended only by Johnners’ death in 1994. The show still gets BBC7 repeats.
And with his lifelong love of movies, he must have been delighted when studios employed him as a script consultant.
I remember Pete as a dapper character (radio comedy writers didn’t usually wear ties, braces and cufflinks!). He appeared forbidding if you didn’t know him but once you did, he was friendly, encouraging and an amazing source of scurrilous showbusiness stories!
On a professional level, he never used any of my initial material until I had reached the required standard. Any revisions he made demonstrated his perfect English or his years of experience of what made a gag work. And seeing how my material fitted into the monologues he compiled taught me about structure - which carries through to my work today. I’m glad I knew him.
(With thanks to John Vyse and Paul Easton for their help regarding Peter Hickey’s extensive CV).
(Republished from the Radio Magazine Issue 809, 10 October 2007).
I stay in touch with some of my old BBC colleagues and, from time to time, an email will arrive, headed ‘Some Sad News’. This happened a few weeks ago when I learned that the comedy writer Peter Hickey had died aged 67 in a fire at his Brighton home.
As a script editor, Pete was the first person to select anything I’d written for BBC radio (Week Ending) and in later years I would sit with him on Wednesday afternoons writing last-minute News Huddlines sketches while he compiled that show’s opening monologue.
He would plough methodically through hundreds of gags sent in on spec (many handwritten/hopeless) and somehow produce a flowing routine which got roars from 300 people at the recording but he was never too busy to contribute ideas if other writers were struggling. On one occasion, Gerry Goddin and I were discussing a news story I’d read about Siamese twins arrested for fighting…each other (only In America!) With Pete’s input, we quickly wrote a sketch which went down very well despite being in dubious taste but then he loved outrageous humour; if someone sent in a really offensive gag, he would groan ‘Oh de-ar!’, laugh, remove his glasses and go off to regale the producer with this foul offering before returning to the mountain of submissions.
Pete grew up in Bermondsey and even as a child wrote short stories. His father sent him to Pitman’s College but his early jobs included taxi driving (often conveying some shady characters!) and working for a Russian tea merchant who also specialised in certain ‘duty-free’ goods! After an involvement with pirate radio, he put his shorthand and typing training to good use as a sub-editor for the Sun and also worked in the teleprinter room at LBC/IRN where his colleagues included our own Paul Easton.
By this time he had started writing for BBC radio. Derek Jameson claimed in his autobiography that Pete wrote the notorious sketch which led to his expensive libel action against Week Ending but years later he still employed him to write for his show on BSB.
In fact, he wrote for an amazing array of stars on radio or TV in the UK, USA and Australia: David Frost, Joan Rivers, Bob Monkhouse, Ronnie Corbett, Les Dennis and Dustin Gee, Little and Large, Roy Walker. Alfred Marks, John Inman, Keith Harris, the Copy Cats…But he was more likely to boast about who he HADN’T worked for; he proudly told me that he’d never written for Spitting Image! (I guess he didn’t need to).
Radio quizzes were a speciality for Pete, for example, Press Gang, where he attempted to write material accommodating the speech difficulties associated with host Glyn Worsnip’s cerebellar ataxia. And then there was the hugely popular (and frequently risqué) Trivia Test Match, its 8-year innings ended only by Johnners’ death in 1994. The show still gets BBC7 repeats.
And with his lifelong love of movies, he must have been delighted when studios employed him as a script consultant.
I remember Pete as a dapper character (radio comedy writers didn’t usually wear ties, braces and cufflinks!). He appeared forbidding if you didn’t know him but once you did, he was friendly, encouraging and an amazing source of scurrilous showbusiness stories!
On a professional level, he never used any of my initial material until I had reached the required standard. Any revisions he made demonstrated his perfect English or his years of experience of what made a gag work. And seeing how my material fitted into the monologues he compiled taught me about structure - which carries through to my work today. I’m glad I knew him.
(With thanks to John Vyse and Paul Easton for their help regarding Peter Hickey’s extensive CV).
(Republished from the Radio Magazine Issue 809, 10 October 2007).
Book review: The Invisible Girl by Peter Barham and Alan Hurndall (Harper Element)
In 1991, a new name appeared in the credits of Week Ending and the News Huddlines. I assumed the formal-sounding monicker belonged to some retired university professor.
A year later, ‘D. A. Barham’, a tall, attractive but very shy teenage girl, appeared in the Writers’ Room.
She had been a brilliantly clever but lonely, bullied child who spent years listening to radio comedies and building up a collection of 350 cassettes of them. She developed an ambition to write, believing that she could do better than much of what she heard!
Her first contributions were submitted under initials because she didn’t believe producers would take a female’s work seriously. If only she had known that the BBC were desperately trying to attract women into comedy writing!
Having ‘outed’ herself by turning up at Broadcasting House (a nerve-wracking experience, as she later admitted) she now hid behind another alias, that of an eighteen year-old. She was actually fifteen but because of her height, intelligence and remarkable knowledge of comedy and current affairs, she could probably have passed herself off as a mature twenty-something.
Her work demonstrated a stunning capacity for wordplay; she could spot potential puns instantly. She also had a filthy mind, often employing vulgar expressions which I hadn’t heard since my own schooldays! Furthermore, she was seldom asked for rewrites and could adapt her ideas to any market.
And then there was the sheer quantity of material she produced. Every week, hundreds of gags and dozens of sketches poured from her laptop (a novelty among writers then but she was always fascinated by computers).
Her progress at BBC Radio was rapid and she made the decision to forego a sixth form scholarship and university in favour of moving to London to write full-time. Her reputation grew and she began to attract national press attention.
It was no surprise when she won the Contract Writer’s Award, a bursary with a guaranteed income and the opportunity to develop new BBC radio projects. It was also seen as a passport to television. Her shyness disappeared and ‘D. A.’ was finally replaced in credits by ‘Debbie’.
We had been close but we parted in 1994. She went on to develop radio sitcoms and quizzes, then to TV where she wrote for Spitting Image, Rory Bremner, Clive Anderson and many other big names. She also wrote books and became a prolific journalist.
But even when she was a star columnist for the Sun, she never lost her love of radio. She continued contributing to the Huddlines and was part of the Sony Award-winning team behind the Sunday Format.
And while she preferred to write rather than perform, she made radio appearances, mainly reviewing the press.
Her name was everywhere and I assumed that her life was an exciting round of media events. So I was stunned to learn in April 2003 that Debbie Barham had died, aged 26. It transpired that she had suffered from anorexia since 1995, her weight at times being as low as four and a half stone, and she had lived as a virtual recluse. But her illness never affected the quality of her work.
At her memorial service at St Paul’s, Covent Garden, eulogies were delivered by personalities ranging from Ned Sherrin to John McVicar. Her final radio sitcom, About a Dog, was broadcast in 2004 with a script sympathetically completed by Graeme Garden.
She was highly secretive so when her father Peter decided to write her biography, he asked me for my memories, describing me as ‘perhaps the only person who was ever allowed to see the inner Debbie’. The resulting book is often harrowing and, to some reviewers, controversial in terms of whether Peter should have written it or not but it is packed with fascinating tales and hilarious examples of his daughter's radio genius.
(Reprinted from the Radio Magazine Issue 750, 24 August 2006)
A year later, ‘D. A. Barham’, a tall, attractive but very shy teenage girl, appeared in the Writers’ Room.
She had been a brilliantly clever but lonely, bullied child who spent years listening to radio comedies and building up a collection of 350 cassettes of them. She developed an ambition to write, believing that she could do better than much of what she heard!
Her first contributions were submitted under initials because she didn’t believe producers would take a female’s work seriously. If only she had known that the BBC were desperately trying to attract women into comedy writing!
Having ‘outed’ herself by turning up at Broadcasting House (a nerve-wracking experience, as she later admitted) she now hid behind another alias, that of an eighteen year-old. She was actually fifteen but because of her height, intelligence and remarkable knowledge of comedy and current affairs, she could probably have passed herself off as a mature twenty-something.
Her work demonstrated a stunning capacity for wordplay; she could spot potential puns instantly. She also had a filthy mind, often employing vulgar expressions which I hadn’t heard since my own schooldays! Furthermore, she was seldom asked for rewrites and could adapt her ideas to any market.
And then there was the sheer quantity of material she produced. Every week, hundreds of gags and dozens of sketches poured from her laptop (a novelty among writers then but she was always fascinated by computers).
Her progress at BBC Radio was rapid and she made the decision to forego a sixth form scholarship and university in favour of moving to London to write full-time. Her reputation grew and she began to attract national press attention.
It was no surprise when she won the Contract Writer’s Award, a bursary with a guaranteed income and the opportunity to develop new BBC radio projects. It was also seen as a passport to television. Her shyness disappeared and ‘D. A.’ was finally replaced in credits by ‘Debbie’.
We had been close but we parted in 1994. She went on to develop radio sitcoms and quizzes, then to TV where she wrote for Spitting Image, Rory Bremner, Clive Anderson and many other big names. She also wrote books and became a prolific journalist.
But even when she was a star columnist for the Sun, she never lost her love of radio. She continued contributing to the Huddlines and was part of the Sony Award-winning team behind the Sunday Format.
And while she preferred to write rather than perform, she made radio appearances, mainly reviewing the press.
Her name was everywhere and I assumed that her life was an exciting round of media events. So I was stunned to learn in April 2003 that Debbie Barham had died, aged 26. It transpired that she had suffered from anorexia since 1995, her weight at times being as low as four and a half stone, and she had lived as a virtual recluse. But her illness never affected the quality of her work.
At her memorial service at St Paul’s, Covent Garden, eulogies were delivered by personalities ranging from Ned Sherrin to John McVicar. Her final radio sitcom, About a Dog, was broadcast in 2004 with a script sympathetically completed by Graeme Garden.
She was highly secretive so when her father Peter decided to write her biography, he asked me for my memories, describing me as ‘perhaps the only person who was ever allowed to see the inner Debbie’. The resulting book is often harrowing and, to some reviewers, controversial in terms of whether Peter should have written it or not but it is packed with fascinating tales and hilarious examples of his daughter's radio genius.
(Reprinted from the Radio Magazine Issue 750, 24 August 2006)
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