This Is Not A
BLOG!
Date: 11/03/05
The End Of Another Story...
There was great excitement in our house in about 1972. We finally
rented a television set (those were the days when you had to
rent because they were expensive and not very reliable) which could
receive BBC2, the Corporation's flagship 'serious' channel.
(This was still black & white for us, though, not colour;
although our slightly scatty neighbour Ada said that they were going to
get a 'BBC2 aerial' "so we can watch The Queen in colour". No
matter that they still only had a black & white set....)
Starting to watch BBC2 was a true opening of the eyes. There were
documentary series, such as Horizon (mostly science and
technology) or The World About Us (natural history and
anthropology); rather 'highbrow' (remember that term?) quiz programmes
like Call My Bluff (only a truly meritocratic network could
host a programme about words where one team captain lisped (Frank Muir)
and the other (Patrick Campbell) had a terrible stammer) or Face
The Music (including that cultural icon, Joseph Cooper's dummy
keyboard).
There were other strange delights, too. As a boy with what would
now be called geekish tendencies (I can't quite recall what it was
called at the time....Ah, yes! 'Weird'...), I was drawn to the
Transmitter Information bulletins broadcast up to three times a day,
and the Trade Test Colour Films, which didn't entirely fulfil their
remit on a 20" monochrome Pye set, but it's the thought that counts.
These films were often made by companies such as Shell or Philips as
sort-of-but-not-quite promotional movies. Philips' Evoluon,
about the technology exhibition the company staged in Eindhoven, was a
particular favourite.
There were entertainment programmes too, mind. But whereas BBC1's
and ITV's tended to be either down-home tat (The Generation Game)
or just sitcoms from hell (Love Thy Neighbour), BBC2's had at
least the veneer of sophistication and/or daring. The former quality
was shown by the variety programmes which always seemed to be hosted by
Kenneth Williams or Lulu, and which expressed their suaveness by
featuring French singers and gave off the overwhelming aura of a boîte
de nuit.
The daring, however, at least to my 10-year-old understanding of
it, was exemplified by this man:
Dave Allen was a revelation. Here, instead of the standard stand-up
schtick about mothers-in-law, frigid wives and (how one rightly recoils
from the word today!) 'Pakis', was a man who told jokes about
priests and nuns, who wasn't averse to letting out the odd 'bloody',
and whose on-screen persona was that not of the comedian, but of the
storyteller; relaxed on his leatherette high-stool, with the glass of
whisky (although he claimed it was ginger ale!) and the ashtray and
packet of cigarettes on the arm-ledge of it.
But then, that was the milieu from which David Tynan
O'Mahony had sprung. The son of a Dublin newspaper editor, brought up
in the miserably spartan and circumscribed Ireland of the De Valera
era, educated (if that word can be used) by a particularly brutal sect
of Catholic priests ("They literally beat the fear of God into me!"),
who succeeded only in making the young O'Mahony a convinced atheist for
the rest of this days. There was no television, scarcely any
electricity even. Entertainment was what you could make for yourself.
In the O'Mahony household, this took the form of Cully O'Mahony
gathering his children around him of an evening, by the light of the
fire and one, solitary candle, and spinning his yarns.
That's where Dave got it from. Because he was a
storyteller, with the great storyteller's talent of drawing you in to
the tale, making you believe it implicitly, and then cutting you loose
to laugh almost in shock at the twist at the end. Anyone who ever heard
Dave Allen tell one of the many shaggy-dog tales of how he came to lose
the tip of one of his fingers would testify to that ability.
His straightforward jokes had the underpinnings of a deep love of
language, a sharp eye for our absurdities and a profound anger at human
credulousness and stupidity. His talent was such that he could make us
see those weaknesses in ourselves and make us laugh at them at the same
time.
Let's not forget the sketches. In the Dave Allen At Large
series which ran through most of the 1970s, the sketches (featuring
what was, in effect, the Dave Allen Repertory Company, such as
Jacqueline Clarke, Peter Hawkins, Ronnie Brody and the splendidly-named
Michael Sharvell-Martin) were eagerly awaited, and always worth waiting
for. They displayed Allen's irreverence (for once, the right word) and
his sense of the surreal. No-one, having seem them, could forget the
sight of two rival funerals racing (whilst trying to make it appear
that they weren't) to be the first funeral at a particular
churchyard that day; nor the sketch where a newly-crowned Pope does a
footballer-style, cartwheeling celebration of his new status; or, best
of all, the sketch in which a boys' choir and their choirmaster try to
find out just who has farted. The sketch was devoid of
dialogue, with the accusation merely mouthed to each suspected culprit
in turn.
Of course, such material led him to get up the noses of the pompous
and the prudish, but that's a recommendation rather than a rebuke in my
book.
To a child (such as I was when I first watched his shows), the
whole idea of being able to joke openly about religion, death and sex and
on television too was a truly thrilling one. I'd like to think that
he helped make me broad-minded about what is funny and what is allowed
to be funny.
Dave Allen died last night, at the age of 68. A lot of honest
laughter passed with him.
Dave: Goodnight, thank you, and may the sound of our grateful
laughter go with you.
R.I.P.
