I don't know if anyone else has been watching The Curse of Comedy season on BBC4. (Can I just out myself here as a bit of a BBC4 junkie. Shameful. Tsk.) A series of dramas about the lives and careers of familiar faces in all of our lives: Hancock, Hughie Green (I was a bit young for him), Frankie Howerd.
It kicked off with a stonking drama about Steptoe and Son, a little gem of a piece: mirroring the stuckness of the actors (the price they paid for playing such successful characters, type-casting them so concretely they could never do anything else) with the stuckness of the Steptoes, representing a whole era where class and unconfidence were major inhibitors.
The acting was incredible from both leads, Jason Isaacs and Phil Davis. I was particularly impressed with portrayal of Bramble - particularly as the actor looks nothing like him. Somehow he transformed himself into Bramble's performance of Steptoe so vividly, you forgot who was who. And he was able to create the stiff, uptight, clip-voiced persona of the actor himself - very moving in relation to the Steptoe character.
After the drama, BBC4 aired the original play that introduced the world to Steptoe and Son. It was filmed in the 50s, was grainy and in black and white. It is rare for comedy writing not to date irrevocably. Yet the play was as riveting today as it must have been at the time. It has a timeless feel - and a touch of Beckett about it.
After getting off to such a good start, I was ready to gobble up the other helpings of The Curse of Comedy. But, sadly, the season seemed to have kicked off with the best and the others seemed to have less to say both about the characters, and as plays in their own right.
In fact, the last two - about Hughie Green and Frankie Howerd respectively - I couldn't help feeling were bordering on exploitative somehow. Chewing up the lives of these performers, then banking on their popularity to make people curious about their private lives. Ok, so Hughie Green loved shopping people to the press, so perhaps we won't worry so much about him. But I felt uncomfortable about the way the BBC were so happy to splash Frankie Howerd's difficulties with his sexuality across the screen. The scene where he is in the bath discussing anal sex ("But it's dirty") just seemed wrong to me.
Perhaps, if this drama had had something more to say about this, then it might have been different. The argument can always be made that exploring a gay man's self-hatred is exposing the hypocrisy and idiocy of the society around him and the times he lived in. The gay season on BBC4 was great at doing this. But, somehow, the Frankie Howerd piece did not do this so successfully; rather it seemed intrusive.
I felt a bit the same about Fantabulosa - a very well-made drama about Kenneth Williams, with a spectacular virtuoso performance from Michael Sheen in the lead role. Somehow it was glittering and impressive, but - at the end of the day - seemed to miss something to me.
When I was a small child I adored Kenneth Williams and Sid James above all others. I also loved Fred Astaire and Walter Mathau - anyone with a wrinkly round face. Sir Alan Sugar would have been my absolute pin-up when I was five.
This is the part that these dramas are missing. Why we loved these performers so much. No matter how acerbic Williams was in reality, how depressed and cruel Hancock could be, how self-absorbed Howerd might have been, all of them as comedians were not just funny: we LOVED them. Perhaps The Curse of Comedy season took this too much for granted: that we would just remember their lovable personas to compare to what we were being shown.
And why did we love them? Not just for round wrinkly faces surely?
Unlike the Pythons and the satirical comedians who followed, I think that post-war generation of comics were particularly lovable because they were all so vulnerable. And they were vulnerable because of what they represented about the society and snobbery of the society around them, in a nutshell - class. (And in the case of some of them - sexuality too.) Kenneth Williams, in particular, specialised in giving himself rhetorical airs and graces and a ridiculous half-camp, half-posh accent that he would cut through with his "common" voice at well-chosen moments, when he wanted the audience to laugh at his pretensions. Hancock, also, had airs above his station, forever fancying himself as more educated than those around, not understanding why people didn't understand he was better than them...Steptoe, perhaps, epitomises the class trap better than any other comedy of the era, which makes it particularly powerful even today.
There are so many issues that could have been explored, but apart from Curse of Steptoe, the season seemed more interested in the personal, than what that represented in terms of the wider society around.
We love those comedians because of this vulnerability. It makes them human. It makes everything that is unpleasant about them understandable and identifiable with. We half want them to succeed but half recognise that given half a chance, they would be putting down all those around them, because of their own insecurities.
I have thought a lot about this aspect of British comedy. That we laugh at those trying to better themselves, who have aspirations above their allotted stations, and what it says about us as a society and whether there is a deeply unpleasant aspect to it. But, at the end of the day, comedy reflects human nature and when you see something that is True, you recognise it and laugh at it. All those comedians took aspects - some of them not very noble aspects - about themselves, and used them to make us laugh.
Even with the greatest actors portraying them, with the exception of the brilliant Curse of Steptoe, the Curse of Comedy season failed to capture this. The unique power that these comedians had by drawing on their own foibles and insecurities. In comparison, dramas telling us that - yes - they had problems, tells us less, and with considerable less subtlety, than the best work of those performers themselves.
I don't need a drama to show me the pathos of Hancock or Howerd, the snidey unhappiness of Williams; I can see all that myself in their actual performances, whilst happily laughing my socks off.
So, I am left with mixed feelings about these dramas (with the exception of Steptoe, I should add.). I think there is a lot of potential in the idea, I thought a lot of the acting was amazing, they were beautifully directed, but I can't help thinking they missed a trick somewhere.
These characters remain fascinating in the way they represent parts of ourselves and in the way they reflect back parts of society onto us, the audience. By concentrating on the personal over the persona, The Curse of Comedy season ended up cutting a lot of the potential away.
The result was a number of well-realised portraits of some flawed individuals: what we weren't shown, or lead to understand, was what made them truly great.
My comic novel "Sadomasochism for Accountants" is to be published by Marion Boyars in February 2009 and is represented by Adrian Weston at Raft PR 
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