The acclaimed British comedian recalls five personally influential moments from the scene’s 1980s heyday

5 DEFINING MOMENTS OF ALTERNATIVE COMEDY, A PERSONAL VIEW

5th May 1981

BBC 2 aired the second and final edition of Boom Boom Out Go The Lights, the first, and extremely short-lived, TV showcase of Alternative Comedy. I didn’t see the first one, and I’m not sure how the thirteen year old me came to watch the second one. All I know is after seeing Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson’s double act The Dangerous Brothers struggle in a Beckettian vortex with the basic mechanics of telling a joke about a gooseberry in a lift, whilst dressed like disheveled members of the R&B mod band Nine Below Zero, I was never the same again. The joke didn’t matter. It was all about the process. It was the opposite of comedy as we knew it.

3rd October 1982

I see Dexy’s Midnight Runners at the Birmingham Hippodrome, supported by The Comic Strip’s Peter Richardson, performing, for the first and last time, in character as a threatening and mysterious Mexican Bandit. I lived in Birmingham and I was 14. Back then there wasn’t a touring comedy circuit for Alternative Comedians, and if there had been I wouldn’t have been able to get into the clubs anyway. Seeing this unannounced appearance was amazing and unexpected. But Richardson never performed this act live again, having been largely ignored by a bewildered crowd of Come On Eileen-craving pop-pickers.

28th October 1984

Ted Chippington is supporting The Fall at The Powerhaus, Birmingham. (Don’t look for it, it’s not there anymore.) He comes on as if he doesn’t want to be there, performs variations on the same joke over and over again for half an hour interspersed with poor renditions of club standards, scowls over a bottle of beer while dressed in Teddy boy garb, and divides the audience into the hysterical and the furious. It is the most punk rock thing the sixteen year old me had ever seen. I knew at this point I wanted to be a stand-up, having previously thought you had to be either Ben Elton or Bernard Manning.

Sometime in 1985

Oscar McLennan at Warwick Arts Centre. At this point McLennan was still nominally a stand-up, but was clearly on his way to becoming the hardcore performance artist type he is today. An hour plus monologue about a dysfunctional family ended with him rolling around on the floor, lit by a single low level light, to the strains of Helicopter Man by the forgotten punkabilly band Turkey Bones And The Wild Dogs. There were few laughs from the small audience but I have subliminally subsumed the show my own pretentious art comedy outpourings ever since. On the way home, my then girlfriend slagged me off for singing along to a tape of the new Scottish indie band del Amitri covering Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl, in a fake American accent.

August 1987

Arnold Brown, Norman Lovett, Arthur Smith and Jerry Sadowitz, at The Gilded Ballon, Edinburgh. I went to The Fringe for the first time with a student show and, only nineteen years old, saw this unimaginably brilliant and era–defining stand-up bill. I’m lucky I saw all the weirdo acts of Alternative Comedy when I was young, not the emerging generation of football lad squares, or I wouldn’t have thought it was for me. Brown and Lovett’s deadpan surrealism solidified the studied indifference I’d seen in Ted, Smith showed you could be literary and louche and love language, and Sadowitz opened up all sorts of arguments about taste and targets. I can’t imagine a bill this brilliant ever happening today.