"The Mary Whitehouse Experience" experience

[TJ]

There was an interview with Newman in one of the weekend papers this, erm, weekend - very interesting stuff, but I'm sad to report that he's still being a jerk as regards Punt and Dennis. Pity he doesn't realise that his sneering attitude towards them made him seem like a smug pretentious idiot back then, and still does now.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Which paper was it?

[benthalo]

He does that all the bloody time. He was sniggering into his sleeve about The Now Show last year which is, well... I don't care for The Now Show at all, but come on. Do your Ronnie Corbett, Rob.

How you can dislike Hugh Dennis, a natural comic performer, is beyond me. Putting "capabubble" into his impression of John Cole is a thing of purest joy.

Where on Earth was that interview re the Gulf stuff, though? It's the sort of thing I would have kept at the time but obviously didn't. And everyone seems to remember it.

I haven't looked at series one for a couple of years now and I've been watching them nightly, not forcing them down my throat and with a bit of distance after watching them to death when I was younger. Show 3 just fell a bit flat on this occasion. Yes to The Other One Out Of Soft Cell..., but there's twenty odd minutes before then and it did seem a little mechanical. Something I couldn't quite put my finger on if I'm being honest.

I never really got people's criticisms of the TV version. I thought it was great then and it still makes me laugh now, no matter how close to the radio show I've been down the years. Series one is the last time in which you really get a sense of them as a unit, as opposed to the divided partnerships of the following run. It's also the last time it feels like a radio show, but with a few props thrown at it. Which I like, but does seem a bit of a false start.

How much do people think Marcus Mortimer had an influence on the odd line change here and there, if any? Was it just a case of the team looking again at the radio sketches and tweaking them slightly? You have to keep in mind that those scripts would have been delivered very late in the day for radio, enormously overlength and edited in post-production by Iannucci, or whoever happened to be producer. It rarely feels as if the TV versions have been condensed via in-camera editing, as opposed to the script stage. Perhaps that's what restricts it, more than the seemingly contrived accidents of the end product, eg. keeping  the CSO image of Sherwood Forest for slightly too long in show 4.

[Roger Byrne]

There was quite a lot of Gulf War stuff in the Radio Show wasn't there? The Entertaining the Troops Experience or something like that which went on over several weeks. Was all this between the invasion of Kuwait and the war actually starting, because I don't remember there being any overlap between TV and radio series.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Yeah, 'the Gulf crisis' started with the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. The TV pilot was 3 Oct, the last radio series was 20 Oct - 15 Dec '90, and the first TV series was 3 Jan - 7 Feb '91. War didn't break out until 17 Jan, and that was when all the censorship took effect.

[TJ]

Which paper was it?

Either The Times or The Telegraph, in one of the colour supplements. He's even worse than usual this time, and appears to tacitly suggest that he was responsible for any P&D 'good bits'.

Which is a load of baloney. 'Ken Dodd Is Innocent' is funnier than any of his sodding impressions of Shaw Taylor, and even where solo stuff is concerned, I've had a lot more enjoyment from 'Take Me To The Fridge (Milky Milky)' than I ever have from "Dependence Day".

[benthalo]

Either The Times or The Telegraph, in one of the colour supplements. He's even worse than usual this time, and appears to tacitly suggest that he was responsible for any P&D 'good bits'.

I've got the paperwork to prove him wrong. He certainly wouldn't get paid for any of it if true.

"We've got ties."

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Is it this one? It's from today though.

Do I still look funky?

From comedy god to geopolitical sage: it's a tricky switch. Dominic Maxwell finds how Robert Newman is coping  

Robert Newman is sitting chewing over the world-changing ramifications of dwindling oil supplies when suddenly everything turns to jazz. We're the only people in this backstreet Islington café, but still there is enough Dixieland pumping out of the speakers to drown out Ian Paisley. Raising a weary eyebrow, Newman gets up and asks the waiter to turn it down.

"You often go to these places on your own," he says as he returns to the table, "and they think, oh, we'd better show them we're funky people, crank it up. And I just think, I'm reading the paper, I'm looking at the graphs of oil deposits and shale reading in geographical journeys . . . do I look funky?" Well, he certainly used to. It's ten years since the phrase "comedy is the new rock'n'roll" was cliché of the day. And often it was Newman and his partner David Baddiel that provoked this now-weary neologism. Their TV fame, Newman's good looks, and the easily imitated schoolboy taunts of their best-loved routine, the History Today sketch, made them pin-ups. And when a long-maned Newman skateboarded on to the stage at the duo's Wembley Arena show — the first time a comedy act had played this 12,000-seat hangar — this pair were about as funky as a pair of joke-telling Cambridge smartypants could be.

A decade on and a short-haired Newman sits here drinking black coffee and rolling his own cigarettes. He's still good-looking, still funny. But on Friday he turns 42, and he's several years into a reinvention that has him as the Noam Chomsky of the stand-up circuit. Comedy, it seems, is the new non-hierarchical anarcho-syndicalism.

His previous pair of live shows tackled centuries of terrorism and the history of our imperialist interventions in the Middle East. Both were fact-packed but stimulating, not nearly as po-faced as they might sound, even if his early swagger was replaced by a careful delivery that was almost donnish. "Well, it's difficult to put on a convincing swagger if the next sentence you're about to say contains the word 'hegemony'," says Newman. "It can't be done! But I'm trying!" The new show is No Planet B — A History of the World Backwards. It's a history in reverse in which the suffragettes successfully campaign that a woman's place is in the home; in which the CIA ousts the fascist dictator General Pinochet from Chile; in which the work of Queen reverberates through the history of classical music. This time the comic conceit can carry a lot of the ideological load. And by the looks of the extracts on his website (www.robnewman.com), this looks to be his easiest fit yet between gags and geopolitics.

"I think so," he says. "It's closer to pure entertainment. In the earlier shows I was like, OK, that last joke was quite funny, I think I've bought myself 40 seconds of utter stodgy stuff. And then just as the audience are beginning to remember how much they paid for their tickets, a bucket lands on my head."

Newman recently wrote an article on climate change that finished with the punchline "You can either have capitalism or a habitable planet. One or the other, not both." He's not mucking about here. But nor is he a prig. He knows how useless boggle-eyed proselytising can be, both onstage and off. So sometimes he's eloquent, and sometimes he looks riven by the dual demands of talking turkey without being interminable. "Once we make the transition away from oil," he says, "we'll be having more fun, instead of making lots and lots of meaningless commodities. Well, apart from quality stand-up comedy DVDs, of course."

The desire to be taken seriously has been there throughout his career. He prospered fast on the stand-up circuit, but seems apologetic that he did so because of his impersonations. "Other comics could be quite chippy about this," he says, "'cos you're like a 'spesh act', you always get an encore. I had it easier in that crucial period when your confidence is wobbly."

He met David Baddiel when they were both writing for Radio 4's Week Ending. They started collaborating, which led to The Mary Whitehouse Experience, the Radio 1 comedy series on which they appeared with Punt and Dennis, Jack Dee, Skint Video, Jo Brand and Mark Thomas. "And then we went to television and the producer thought, well, that Jack Dee, he's not going to work on the telly. Mark Thomas, Jo Brand . . . no. So we were down to the sketch writers. Which was a mistake."

When the show moved to television in 1990, the public perception was of two separate acts — Newman and Baddiel v the conspicuously less funky Punt and Dennis. For once, public perception had it about right. "Sometimes I'd rewrite or suggest changes that could be made to some of the other camp's stuff," says Newman, his Hertfordshire tones becoming what can only be described as heavy with contempt. "And sometimes I wouldn't." An unnatural smile. "Let's leave it there."

And then there were two, for the follow-up show Newman and Baddiel in Pieces. They worked separately: more twin-pack than double act. "Yes, like some process of mitotic subdivision. It's like Tony Hancock: it's four people, then it's two, then it becomes just him, then he splits himself up when he kills himself."

After one series, Newman felt he had run out of ideas for sketch or character comedy. "And David and I were going in different directions. The split itself was amicable, we knew the last gig was the last gig and wished each other well and said nice things to each other."

Which is not how it was reported. "Of course there were arguments, but not that many. I'm a non-confrontational person — ie, a coward." Are they in touch? "He came to see the last show. He liked it a lot. We met up about a month later. But we're in different sorts of worlds now."

Newly solo, Newman got serious — working on novels that, until his third effort The Fountain at the Centre of the World (2003), he wouldn't recommend you read. He changed his first name from Rob back to Robert. So 'Rob' Newman was a showbiz alter ego? "Yeah," he sighs. "It's not quite Ziggy Stardust, is it?" He lives on his own in London, in a flat with no television. Alexei Sayle is his only celebrity friend, although he likes the comedian Daniel Kitson when he bumps into him: "We have a competition between us about who's the most dysfunctional, who has the least friends." But he is comfortable with his own company.

"I've always been a loner," he says, "but you get quite worried when you think, I'm 41, what's the future for loners? The women I find attractive now are the ones with big biceps who look like they could lift you off a bath chair without breaking sweat."

Self-deprecating though he is, he admits he's on a bit of a cultural mission. "Partly it's down to alternative comedy, partly it's the culture we live in, but people don't have any sincerity or passion," he says. "There's all this sneeriness around, and people should know that their ideas are not forlorn or crazy just because they don't fit into the Jeremy Clarkson paradigm of what we're allowed to think." He smiles, acknowledging an incoming irony — one that defines so much of what makes him get up in the morning. "Comedy," he says, "should have a certain seriousness."

No Planet B, Tricycle Theatre, NW6 (www.tricycle.co.uk 020-7328 1000), from Monday

[TJ]

Yes, that's the one.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

'his Hertfordshire tones becoming what can only be described as heavy with contempt'

See, that sounds like a Punt and Dennis parody.

[benthalo]

What a cunty thing to say. The dig at Marcus Mortimer was more questionable in another interview. "Let's get rid of Skint Video..." Yes, quite. Good choice, Mr Producer.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Thing is, I always assumed they script-edited each other's stuff anyway, suggesting line changes and generally plumpening the comedy up. That's what made both "camps" better as a result. They had different approaches, but they also shared the same sense of humour underneath it all. 'You have to be nice to old people in case they die soon' may well have been a Baddiel/Newman line, for example, but Punt wouldn't have said it unless it tickled him.

Why is it that people these days have such difficulty understanding that a strange mixture of styles and approaches can result in top-notch comedy? Why is that such an odd concept? It makes perfect sense to me. The contrasts are what makes it, plus the fact that those contrasts all combine to create something greater than the sum of its parts. These days, you have The Now Show, Heresy and Rob Newman's live act...all of them are about as good/bad as each other, quite good in places but generally unsatisfying. I normally  shudder at the thought of reunions, but I do wonder what would happen if they reunited and did a new R4 show now.

Whatever he says, Newman wasn't 'the good one' in MWE. No more than Chris Morris was 'the good one' on TDT.

It's bollocks about Mortimer ditching the stand-ups too - that was something that happened gradually during the radio series. As early as the second radio series, Harry Thompson was clearly trying to contrive two distinct double acts. By the end of S4, there was usually only one guest act (Mark Hurst, The Tracy Brothers) on each week. Brand and Thomas had gone long before the TV show was a concern.

[benthalo]

Thing is, I always assumed they script-edited each other's stuff anyway, suggesting line changes and generally plumpening the comedy up.

In my head yes, but on paper you'd expect that to be reflected in additional credits on each item. And four-way collaborations are pretty scarce. You've seen as many MWE radio scripts as I have, and they always scream 'this was delivered at the last possible hour' and stories from those involved tend to support that. Now, whether they spent the day of recording reworking it I don't know, but it's worth noting that Steve Punt's bits were frequently submitted in impenetrable long hand. Was this after changes by Rob, Dave or the producer? Possibly.

I remember you had a long-held conviction that Baddiel wrote a fair bit of The Sea Monster's early contributions, but there's no official indication that it was the case. Jo Brand gets her own quota of minutes and seconds and that's that. What that tells us about individual/group style is an essay in itself.  I see exactly why you made the conclusion and suspected it myself, but it's curious that there's no supporting evidence at all. PasBs would directly link to royalties and I don't seriously believe that Jon Thoday would let that sort of thing slip.

For that reason, I would play down Newman's claims.

[The Mumbler]

I still think Newman's dislike of Steve and Hugh boils down to "They were on the Jasper Carrott Show".  Lee & Herring seemed to inherit this prejudice, for no good reason, as far as I can tell.  Maybe it was clause 15c) on all the Avalon contracts.

[The Mumbler]

Also, and it's a while since I really listened to loads of the radio show, but Newman never really carries it.  Baddiel and Punt & Dennis stamp their identity on it so fully that when any of them are absent (particularly the week Baddiel's missing) there's a very big hole in the centre of the show.  Newman is basically Impressions Man a lot of the time.  This is absolutely not to say he isn't funny - far from it - but for him to suggest he defined that R1 show is verging on madness.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Maybe the inter-"camp" influence was more organic than script-specific? In other words, they were subconsciously writing with the others' styles in mind. P&D deliberately did darker material than they normally would; B&N toned down their more adolescent excesses.

P&D are a lot sharper on MWE compared with any of their earlier work (eg, Live On Arrival, or that Olympics thing). Which isn't an unusual phenomenon - it's like comparing At Last the 1948 show with Monty Python's Flying Circus. Good suddenly becomes excellent. Something suddenly gels. It's a team thing.

You could also argue that Steve Punt is (and always has been) a bit of a hack. A very funny and talented hack, but a hack nonetheless - someone who will just write according to the brief. I can imagine him thinking 'Late night Radio 1 eh?' and deliberately writing "harder" material. But I suspect that, in so doing, he discovered another side to his scriptwriting ability. I never doubt that their MWE rants were heartfelt. Once the team broke up, they drited back into  middlebrow territory. It's not to do with B&N 'making them better' - it was about the show making everyone better.

The Mumbler's right about the P&D-less and Baddiel-less episodes suffering but the Newman-less show being about the same. I do think it's unfair to dismiss him as an impressions man, though - that's only really true of S1. After that, he was integral to the tone of the show I reckon. The unsettling/strange lines were often his, as was the 70s nostalgia stuff (back when such a thing was original).

Also, I've always found this bit interesting, from 3.3 (20/1/90):

BADDIEL: Punt and Dennis aren't here tonight, so they're missing out on all the delights of doing a comedy show - they're actually in Ipswich supporting Jasper Carrott. [AUDIENCE GROANS/BOOS] Oh dear. Right...
NEWMAN (To Baddiel): Shall I start now?
BADDIEL: Yeah, start now. I'm sorry about that.
NEWMAN: Yeah, keep walking. Till Kilburn.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

I also suspect Dominic Maxwell was scraping the barrel for an anti-P&D comment to support his dull editoial. A journalist doing that eh? Who'd have thought it.

Newman's quote is annoyingly ambiguous, anyway, especially in print.

What has Newman said about P&D in the past?

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Here's The Funfair Experience from 4.8 (8/12/90), which I think is a great example of B&N and P&D working together. You can hear the influence of all four of them in this.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/s3eqwl

[benthalo]

"I want to play on the pile of burnt mattresses."

What's loveable about the TV version of that is when Rob Newman appears as an enthusiastic, nodding father, in a raincoat and with a tiny moustache - behaving as if the child's seen a panda for the first time. With no dialogue, he achieves that perfectly.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

There are so many great gags in that sketch. 'One hundred and eightyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!...pounds you've spent on this stall without even winning an Elvis Presley mirror.'

The sheer contempt with which he says those last three words is just brilliant. It's a whole tone of comedy that's totally diasppeared. It's the opposite of the 'needles to say'/That Voice bollocks we have these days. Hard punchlines.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Here's something rare - Punt and Dennis on Radio 1's The Jonathan Ross Radio Show circa June 1990. It was broadcast live every Friday from Ronnie Scott's.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/w0ng4b

[benthalo]

The sheer contempt with which he says those last three words is just brilliant.

Similar to his opening monologue in The Pantomime Experience: "I'm the narrator of the pantomime, and when I come on I want you all to run around the aisles and not listen." "Up the beanstalk went, higher and higher... until it looked like this step-ladder we've covered in green crepe paper."

Again, choice words. "Crepe" kills me every single time, not to mention the plummeting mundanity of "step-ladder".

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Also: 'Instead of opening up his big bag of tools, he said 'I haven't got the right sort of washer' and left .'

[The Mumbler]

What has Newman said about P&D in the past?

From memory, an N&B guesting on Danny Baker's Morning Edition in late 1992 to plug the History Today video:

On P&D: "We shan't be working with those two again".  Didn't even give them a name.  There's a smidgeon of generosity in my head that thinks he's delivering it a la Spinal Tap, but a lot more of me thinks he's screeching away from light entertainment towards Bill Hicks and co. as fast as his pretentious legs can carry him.

Also, in Melody Maker, June 1992, a Glastonbury tent plug, mere weeks after the telly series finished for good, he described The Mary Whitehouse Experience as "the worst title imaginable".  

The four of them don't do many sketches together in that second TV series, do they?  Still, at least Mel Hudson got some good lines ("Oh!  I appear to have walked into the door!") - which made a change from what most women in the show's supporting cast had to make do with.

[benthalo]

"People will still pay £1.50 however to catch verrucas and roll around in a nine year old's turd."

That's why I always believed in the value of a script book. There's such discipline, personality and focused bile in the writing that it leaps off the page.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

You know, it's odd, but when MWE was on the radio it never occurred to me that there was a trad/alternative distinction between the two duos. More to the point, it never occurred to me that they were especially young. I always imagined Rob Newman looked like Arthur Perkins from Rentaghost.

Both Badiel and Newman were 24 when MWE started, which I find extraordinary.

[TJ]

Here's something rare - Punt and Dennis on Radio 1's The Jonathan Ross Radio Show circa June 1990. It was broadcast live every Friday from Ronnie Scott's.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/w0ng4b

Nice one! Did you ever preserve the VLS-penned theme tune anywhere?

[Catalogue Trousers]

The thing is, I really can't agree with that "Newman and Baddiel were great/Punt and Dennis were crap" stuff. Cliched as it is, they all had their own strengths and weaknesses.

The only one that does sometimes feel as though he's purely there to make up the numbers is Punt - he's great at deadpan narration, but otherwise comes over as pretty bland. The other three have enough memorable characters, catchphrases and what-have-you to help them stand out, but poor old Steve is usually just there, lurking in the background, largely ignored.

However, Punt and Dennis's own material - however "safe" it might seem - is usually funny stuff. I'll stick up for their imaginatively-titled TV show any day, if only for A Man Called Martin and the cookery show stuff ("you poured it ON A FISH?...right. I'm gonna come round to your house, and I'm gonna lick your turbot...I shall be sick as a dog tomorrow...").

My first exposure to the show was with the TV version, and while I could laugh at stuff like The Boy Looked At Mark Experience I still didn't know what the actual inspiration was. The basic joke - guy with stupid rolling-head dance being useless in everyday situations - was enough to be funny, but I still got that immediate feeling of smug hipper-than-thouness from Newman and Baddiel for it.

Certainly Newman and Baddiel relied as much on regular characters/catchphrases as Punt and Dennis ever did - Robert Smith sings happy songs, History Today, etc. But the immediate, shallow response some people have to their stuff being younger, hipper, and more dangerous than Punt and Dennis's more affably avuncular stuff is entirely the wrong tack. They're all consistently pretty funny, and that's good enough for me.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

The only one that does sometimes feel as though he's purely there to make up the numbers is Punt - he's great at deadpan narration, but otherwise comes over as pretty bland. The other three have enough memorable characters, catchphrases and what-have-you to help them stand out, but poor old Steve is usually just there, lurking in the background, largely ignored.

His impession of The Queen is the funniest thing in the world, though.

'My husband and I would like at this time of year to extend our sincerest wishes to all members of the Commonwealth. Except for Bobby Robson...who is crap. I mean, why didn't he play Gary Stephens? Or even Hoddle.'

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Nice one! Did you ever preserve the VLS-penned theme tune anywhere?

No, that was the only snippet I kept - it only survives because I stuck it on one of my homemade MWE compilations.

It was a great series - nobody seems to have them.