TED CHIPPINGTON
Guardian Guide - February 2007

As a comedian and F-list celebrity I am occassionally asked to appear as a talking head on TV shows called the ‘Greatest Stand-Up Comedians of All Time’. But most the people I want to discuss – Simon Munnery, Kevin MacAleer, and Ted Chippington for example, - are deemed inadmissable by the producers, who want to use footage of pre-approved performers. History is written by the victors. The official story of moden stand-up that has coalesced from Broadsheet articles and TV factual-entertainment programmes is one that remains unrecognisable to many comedians themselves.

I first saw ‘top comedian’ Ted Chippington on October 28th 1984 at a little rock club in Birmingham called The Powerhouse. Don’t look for it. It’s not there anymore. But Ted’s performance that night remains the coolest thing I ever saw. In the early 80’s, as a young stand-up fan outside London, one was largely untouched by the supposed mainstays of the Alternative Comedy Boom. Now that the tonal inference of the movement is everywhere – from McDonalds adverts to day-time Radio 1 dj’s – it’s worth remembering that, back then, there were few provincial equivalents of The Comedy Store or The Comic Strip. Beyond the metropolis you would see the new comedians supporting bands or at forgotten hippy festivals like The Elephant Fayre. In the immediate post-punk era, music audiences accepted variety-style line-ups, and I saw Peter Richardson with Dexy’s Midnight Runners, a young Phil Jupitas doing performance poetry before Billy Bragg, and Ted Chippington, the Ted-shaped hole in the history of comedy, supporting The Fall.

Ted took the stage to a crowd that weren’t expecting him, rooted to the spot in Teddy Boy regalia, scowling and supping a beer. He spent half an hour delivering variations on the same joke, each of which began with the phrase “I was walking down this road the other day,” in a flat midlands monotone, interspersed with listless interpretations of pop hits. People were paralysed with laughter, or furious with irritation. Just as Britain was processing the new stand-up styles of Ben Elton and Alexi Sayle, Ted was already dismantling the form itself. With every frill removed, and with the very notion of what a joke was boiled down to the barest of bones, Ted was stand-up in its purest form, belonging neither to the politicaly-charged world of Alternative Comedy, nor the reactionary hinterlands of Working Men’s Clubs. I was utterlly transfixed and my heart was racing as I realised that stand-up could be anything you wanted it to be. You didn’t even have to look as if you were enjoying it.

Eventually, Ted became a minor cult, though he never played any conventional comedy clubs, prefering to perform where he was not necessarilly wanted. In 1986, a collaboration with Birmingham bands The Nightingales and We’ve Got A Fuzzbox And We’re Gonna Use It nudged Rocking With Rita to the bottom of the charts, and the DJ Steve Wright’s fascination with Ted’s oddly moving take on The Beatles’ She Loves You led to brief major label interest and three TV appearances. Years later Vic Reeves arrived by another route at a similar, but more sophisticated, form of bent light entertainment. At the dawn of the 90’s, Ted’s audiences were in on the joke, so he split to seek fame and fortune in Los Angeles, eventually ending up driving trucks to Mexico and working as a cook. And then the trail went cold.

In the late 80’s, at Univeristy and the Edinburgh fringe, I met other teenage, would-be comics who knew Ted’s lone album, Man In A Suitcase, off-by heart. Monday’s Tedstock benefit at the Bloomsbury Theatre sees us convene to raise money for a 4cd reissue of all his recordings. Ted’s releases documented him struggling with hostile crowds, though his indifference seems now almost sublime. Ted taught us that a bad audience reaction didn’t necessarily mean that what you were doing was worthless, and we co-opted his low-energy insolence and fed off it. At the risk of seeming delusional, I now think you can hear second and third hand echoes of Ted in the routines of comics who probably never even heard him. The relentlessness of Ricky Gervais’ Aesop’s Fables bit is Ted with a tailwind, and in in 2005, when I had the superbly baffling young Edinburgh fringe award-winner Josie Long open for me on tour, a disgruntled Leeds punter remarked. “This is the worst thing I’ve seen since Ted Chippington, twenty years ago.” I couldn’t have been happier.

It’s difficult to say who the first alternative comedian was. Ben Elton? Alexi Sayle? Victoria Wood? John Dowie, if you really know your stuff? Or maybe the folksingers – Billy Conolly or Jasper Carrot? But one things is for certain. Ted Chippington was the first post-alternative comedian, and without him, everything would be different. Not necessarily worse. But different.