Three More Heroes of Comedy Sketched – Alan Coren, John Wells and Roy Hudd

Here’s another three sketches of some of the people I consider to be great comedy talents – the satirist Alan Coren, and the actors John Wells and Roy Hudd.

I’m not quite satisfied with the picture of Alan Coren, as he really wasn’t jowly or fat in the lower face. But I do think he is one of this country’s greatest comic writers of the 20th century. He was for many years the editor of Punch, and just about the only reason in its last years to read the magazine. Coren’s method was to take a ridiculous story from one of the papers, and then write a ridiculous piece about it. Thus, a story about a ‘sexy actress’ missing her pet tortoise turned into a tale of the said reptile making an excruciatingly slow bid for freedom before finally getting caught. The beginning of package holidays to Spain with booze included turned into a tale of a totally blotto bloke trying to write back home. 1984 is rewritten as if it was about 70s Britain, where nothing works. The press runs headlines like ‘Come Off It, Big Brother’, the Youth Spy is annoying brat who shouts to its mother that Winston Smith has a lady friend, and Room 101 isn’t really terrifying because due to supply problems they can’t get a rat. They offer Smith a hamster instead, but he isn’t afraid of them and annoys them by telling them so. They inflict the hamster on him anyway, and he has to pretend to be frightened. Coren has been accused of racism because of a series of pieces, The Collected Speeches of Idi Amin, and More of the Collected Speeches of Idi Amin, in which he depicted the thug using the stereotypical Black pidgin English. I dare say it is racist, but as it’s directed at a brutal torturer and mass murderer, I honestly don’t care. Amin deserved far worse, and I don’t see Coren as personally racist.

At the same time as he was editing it, Coren also appeared as one of the contestants on Radio 4’s News Quiz, facing Richard Ingrams and Ian Hislop on the opposing side representing Private Eye. I read Private Eye now, but back then I far preferred Punch, which seemed more genteel and funny without being vicious. Punch died the journalistic death after Coren left it to edit the Radio Times, but he still continued to appear on the News Quiz until his sad death in the early ’90s. He eventually stopped editing the Radio Times and took up writing a column in the Times giving his humorous view of life in Cricklewood. These pieces are funny, but the really good stuff was earlier in Punch.

His pieces were collected in a number of books, some of which had deliberately bizarre names. In an interview on Pebble Mill he revealed how one of them got its particularly striking name. He rang up W.H. Smith to ask them what their bestselling books were about. They told him, ‘Cats’. He then asked them what their second bestselling books were about. ‘Golf’, they replied. He then asked them what the third most popular books they sold were about. They told him it was the Second World War. So, he called it Golfing for Cats and stuck a swastika on the cover. For his next book, he contacted them again and asked them what the most popular product they sold was. They told him it was tissues for men, so that’s what he called it.

Coren’s humour was distinctive – it was dry, but also slightly silly. Answering a question on the News Quiz about one of the members of Thatcher’s cabinet, he replied, ‘Oh – this is the ministry of Gummer’. A question about Prince Philip on an edition of the show in Edinburgh prompted him to reply, ‘This is the patron of this fair city, Zorba the Scot’. When the Tory election broadcast for the 1987 general election showed Spitfires and other World War II planes zooming about, Coren remarked that it was the Royal Conservative Airforce and pointed out that when the servicemen came back from the War, they all voted Labour. He’s been succeeded as broadcaster by his daughter, Victoria Coren-Mitchell, who is genuinely erudite and intelligent, and his son, Giles, who is a right-wing snob, and who made a sneering comment about people in council houses. Although Coren edited the patrician and eminently establishment Punch, he himself was a former grammar school lad, and there was a bit of class friction in the News Quiz between himself and the genuinely upper-class team from the downmarket Private Eye. I stopped listening to the News Quiz a long time ago because I got sick of the anti-religious sneers when Sandi Tokvig was chairing it and didn’t agree with many of the views of the panellists, who seemed to be stuck in the London bubble with a contempt for the rest of the country. Previous series are available on DVD, however, and they are well worth listening to, not least because of Coren. A great comic wit, sadly missed.

John Wells. He was one of the Private Eye team and was as patrician and establishment as the people that magazine skewered. He was the headmaster and French teacher at Eton. He was also one of the writers of the Dear Bill diaries in the Eye, which were supposed to be the letters of Dennis Thatcher to Bill Deedes, one of the writers in the Times. The book’s hilariously funny, especially when it describes Keith Joseph getting egged everywhere, but no-one can work out why it’s only him that does. Other highlights include him visiting the old folk’s home in which Ted Heath and Harold Macmillan are respectively housed, with Heath hating and ranting about Thatcher while Macmillan still hates and rants about Heath. As with Bentine and the Bumblies, this work of fiction excited the interest of the security people, who asked Wells where he got his information from. Wells replied that he just made it up, and he wasn’t getting any information from anyone. ‘Thank heaven for that,’ the rozzers replied, ‘We thought there’d been a leak.’ Wells had got the tone of Dennis Thatcher’s speech and mindset exactly right, in my opinion. He also appeared as Thatcher’s husband in the farce Anyone for Dennis?, which I can remember being put on TV. There’s a piece of very Cold War humour there, when the Russian ambassador fears that a nuclear war is imminent and talks about the brave Soviet soldiers with their eyes fixed on the last dawn, before collapsing with relief when he finds out that he’s mistaken.

Wells also appeared as a guest on a number of TV shows, including Lovejoy, and the radio shows The News Quiz and Tales of the Mausoleum Club. He had a camp manner, which he knew how to use for great comic effect. For example, when the teams were answering a question about the controversial portrait of the royal family that showed them all nude, he remarked that it was glad one royal was absent because ‘that would have been really gristly’. A question about the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland prompted him to describe her as a woman, who wrote covered in small, white dogs. Tales from the Mausoleum Club was a series of parodies of Victorian classic literature. One of these was a spoof of Treasure Island, ‘Trevor Island’, in which a gang of pirates go after the treasure buried on the island of Tombola. Wells played the pirate’s camp captain, who at one point remarked, ‘Oh damn, I’ve snapped my second-best bra!’

Roy Hudd. He was on TV quite a bit in the early 70s only to subsequently vanish. I can remember him from when I was at junior school presenting an afternoon programme for the elderly. While he vanished from TV, he carried on broadcasting on the radio, where he was the star of the satirical News Huddlines on Radio 2 with June Whitfield. He also appeared from time to time on other programmes, including as an astral seaside entertainer playing the Wurlitzer on the Reeves and Mortimer revamp of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). I’m including him here as he was also an expert on the Music Hall. Back in the 1980s he appeared on a Radio 4 programme about the original Peaky Blinders, who were so notorious that they even wrote Music Hall songs about them. The one he performed was about how they could drink a brewery dry. Away from such elevated matters, he also apparently appeared as the Litterbug in the 1970s public information film against littering.

Guy Debord’s Cat on the Tory Party Conference

Buddyhell over at Guy Debord’s Cat, has some very pertinent observations on the Tory party conference, beginning with their complete absence of democracy, their ranting smears against Jeremy Corbyn and the Left, Cameron’s recruitment of Blairite Andrew Adonis, and particularly journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer’s outrage at people spitting and throwing eggs at the Tories attending the conference. The Cat’s article begins

If anyone was ever in any doubt as to the Tories’ loathing of democracy, then they need look no further than this latest conference or, indeed, previous conferences. Speaker after speaker mounted the platform to address the conference, all of whom either syruped praise on their leadership or smeared their opponents. Policies are never openly debated or voted upon at Tory Party conferences. The unspoken dictum is, as ever, “we speak and you will listen”. The Conservative Party’s members have little or no say in how their party operates or how policies are decided. It is, for all intents and purposes, a dictatorship. Is it any wonder why Tory governments act to crush democracy in this country when there is so little of it within their own party?

This conference also showed us how far into themselves the Tories have retreated since Jeremy Corbyn’s election to the Labour Party leadership, and the hundreds of thousands who have joined the party since his victory. In contrast, the Conservatives are estimated to have less than 100,000 ageing members. So watching the Tory Party conference was, for me at least, a little like witnessing the last days of the Roman Empire. Degenerate and decadent, they can only look inward and indulge themselves in a little mutual masturbation for a bit of comfort. Indeed, it could be said that the security barrier surrounding the conference centre was the physical manifestation of their bunker mentality.

This is exactly right, and it’s been well-known for decades. I can remember being told about it by members of the Socialist Society back at College. They were outraged at the way the Tories under Thatcher were making much of the division in the Labour ranks over the Militant Tendency, and contrasting it with the supposed tranquil orderliness of their own party. In fact, the Tory party has never been a democracy, and given its history, this should come as no surprise whatsoever. The Tories started out as the party of the Anglican aristocracy. The Anglican Church has since clashed with the Tories several times on important social issues. I can remember Norman Tebbit’s frothing outrage when the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, dared criticised St. Maggie of Grantham on her contempt for the poor. However, the aristocratic attitude of patrician leadership over the masses continues. The major decisions are always made in private behind closed doors. The Cat notes that the Tories are now down to a bare 100,000 members – coincidentally – or not – the numbers the Italian Fascist and Nazi party in Germany claimed they would limit the membership of their parties to in order to make them truly elitist. Part of the reason the Tory party has shrunk so massively is that the rank and file members feel that they are being shoved aside and ignored in favour of rich donors and the party leadership.

Then there’s the little matter of Cameron’s tirade against Corbyn. Corbyn has stated that he wants a united Ireland. This, apparently, is the basis for Cameron’s denunciation of him as ‘friend of terrorists’. This looks very much like a piece of grossly malicious slander.

A lot of people in the Labour party want a united Ireland. One of the reasons for this is that a lot of Labour party members are themselves, or are descended from, working class Irish Roman Catholics. Clare Short was one of these. I can remember an interview with her on Radio 4, in which she talked about her Irish working class roots, and how she had made pilgrimages to the sites deep in the Irish countryside where her descendants were forced to worship secretly when the Roman Catholic church was banned by the British. Short was a very controversial figure, notably for her campaign to ban page 3 of the Sun. She was not, however, to my knowledge a supporter of terrorism. Neither is Corbyn.

Cameron here is trying to use one of the major lies Thatcher used against the Labour party in the 1980s. Some sections of the Labour party aroused extreme controversy for supporting Irish Republicans, including talking to Sinn Fein. Thatcher, by contrast, portrayed herself as resolutely defying the terrorists with her usual posturing of Churchillian patriotism.

It was all a lie.

All the time she was declaring her firmness of resolve never to give in Irish Nationalist terrorists, she was in peace negotiations with them. In fact, the Tories had tried to negotiate a peaceful settlement to the Troubles under Ted Heath, but that collapsed due to the obstinate refusals of the Unionists. And when a peaceful settlement was eventually found, the impetus for it was not the shocking violence and loss of life created by terrorist atrocity after terrorist atrocity from the paramilitaries on both sides of religio-political divide. No, it was purely monetary. It was when the IRA bombed Canary Wharf. Suddenly realising that the IRA could wreck the multi-billion pound financial hub of the City of London, Thatcher and Major finally decided to stop pretending military force was the only solution and talk to the Republicans.

Let’s get this straight: for all the Tories maudlin rhetoric about the victims of the IRA, what they really cared about, what really frightened them, was the IRA might force the bankers and financiers out of the capital, thus dealing a severe blow to the financial sector that they favour so strongly. Human lives don’t count. Elite money does.

As for supporting terrorists, this is another piece of massive hypocrisy. The Cat has already published numerous pieces about the connections between the Ulster Unionist parties and the various Loyalist paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland. Moreover, there is considerable evidence that the British secret state heavily supported the Loyalist paramilitaries, using them to gather intelligence and act as death squads against leading Republicans.

As for spitting on and throwing eggs at politicians, the Cat rebutted Hartley-Brewer’s argument by putting up footage of Edward Heath having eggs thrown at him. There was a flurry of it in the 1980s under Thatcher, mostly directed against Keith Joseph. So much so that it became a joke in the spoof Dear Bill diaries published in Private Eye. As for it being only a feature of the Left, well, not quite. Some of us can still remember the incident when John Prescott punched a young Welsh farmer. The lad had thrown an egg at him, and Prescott responded with his fists. A thuggish, but perfectly understandable reaction.

So, as the Cat’s article shows, the Tory Conference shows the elitist contempt for democracy, and the revival of the kind of lies and smears used by Thatcher. It’s the politics of desperation, although you could be forgiven for thinking that the opposite was true. The Beeb was practically falling over itself yesterday about how exciting and optimistic it all was. The female newsreader on Points West, the Corporation’s regional news programme for Bristol and Somerset, even went and declared that it was ‘bubbly’. She seemed positively overjoyed.

It’s all forced. The fact that Cameron is claiming that Corbyn is a supporter of terrorism, simply because he wants a united Ireland, is proof of that. Behind the smiles is the looming spectre of despair.

The Cat’s article is entitled ‘Tory Party 2015 Conference: Some Thoughts’. Go and read it at https://buddyhell.wordpress.com/2015/10/07/tory-party-conference-2015-some-thoughts/ for an effective deconstruction of the Tories’ bile and hypocrisy.