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BEING FUNNY VERY SLOWLY
"The money for this erection was raised by pubic contribution."
Everyone loves Laurel and Hardy - fact. There's something about the air of inevitability hanging over proceedings when Ollie gets Stan to fetch a hammer from upstairs that should be tediously inevitable - we know pretty much what's going to happen - but somehow becomes rivetting, almost hypnotic, even. It's the expert creation of a world in which everything is on the edge of falling apart that's so entertaining - the comedy of the expected rather than the surprising. Everyone knows, to the precise step and double-take, what's going to happen when two music hall comedians (one small and bossy, the other huge and docile, of course) set up a trestle table and start pasting up wallpaper. The joy is in the pinpoint skill with which they carry off the controlled chaos. It's an ancient tradition, but it managed to last in some form or other way past the days of bowler hats and long underwear with a buttoned-up flap on the arse.
The first example of the genre we're clumsily dubbing The British (Largely) Silent Half-Hour Comedy Short is the well-loved A Home of Your Own from 1964, a neat little black and white ensemble piece about the tribulations of the workers on a housing estate building site, not least Ronnie Barker's cement mixer, Peter Butterworth's flustered carpenter and Bernard Cribbins' dyslexic stonemason. Dormar Productions, the chaps behind it, had a run of silent whimsy in the '60s - the Tati-esque Brits abroad feature San Ferry Ann was another popular success. Rather more offbeat, as you'd expect with Michael Bentine at the controls, was The Sandwich Man, in which the Potty man, as the titular peripatetic pigeon fancier, wanders around a newly-swung London, observing beatniks, coppers, escapologists and fish traders going about their business. In 1968 came a different take on the genre - in colour! - with Dormar's Albert Carter, Q.O.S.O., an Eric Idle-scripted tale of the adventures of Roy Kinnear's dogged but optimistic street sweeper, who eventually, after an encounter with a regal gloved hand in a Rolls Royce window, is made Queen's Own Street Orderly, sweeping up the Mall with a golden handcart.
The prime mover in the B(L)SH-HCS stakes, however, is of course the venerable Eric Sykes. No mean verbal gag master, Sykes showed he could recreate the spirit of Stan and Ollie in his '67 short The Plank, in which Tommy Cooper and Mr. S perpetually tried to move the titular timber from yard to house in a ramshackle car, causing havoc in their wake for the likes of Roy Castle's dustman, Bill Oddie's window cleaner and Jimmy Edwards' bicycle-incompetent copper. It remains the most consistently entertaining of these films because Sykes treated the programme filler as seriously as a feature, and while there's many a slow moment, there's never a dull one. Plus his inherent playfulness adds great touches like the opening public information film-style narration about wood, and the closing credits larking about. Two years later came It's Your Move, essentially a repeat performance, again with Cooper as Eric's partner in clumsiness.
As the '60s wound down, so did the B(L)SH-HCS. Possibly the last of the old guard was Graham Stark's Simon Simon, detailing the tribulations of a bill sticker (Stark) on a lorry-mounted crane, thwarted in his top floor window girl-impressing attempts by Norman Rossington's similarly lofty fireman. This one even had a conventional plot of sorts - the rivalry is forgotten as the cranes team up to foil a robbery - rather like Carry On Cabby, and indeed dozens of other films of the time - and had the most gratuitous guest star appearances of all - Eric Morecambe appears just for the sake of it, and Peter Sellers is badly edited in from some other location entirely. But the sense of innocent adventure was in it, unlike subsequent entires, which took the form of stretched-out comedy sketches which could have come from any TV programme of the period, like '73's The Cobblers of Umbridge, a Ned Sherrin parody of The Archers, with Willie Rushton, Joan Sims and the like putting on the fruity burrs and repeatedly witholding important information. There was a pair of films starring Arthur Lowe as an officious public servant getting into music hall in It All Goes to Show and the self-explanatory A Hole Lot of Trouble. Also on avariety theme was Can I Come Too?, with Charlie Chester, Chic Murray and Rita Webb. And the sainted Spike held forth in the bizarro Fish and Milligan, playing a hapless angler perpetually thwarted by various incarnations of Arthur Mullard.
Closer to the (largely) silent tradition was The Waterloo Bridge Handicap, possibly unique among these films in that its subject matter was resolutely middle-class - various commuters (Leonard Rossiter, Lynda Bellingham) rushing to catch a train, narrated Haydock Park style by Brough Scott. Sadly, the 'auteur' behind this one - one Ross Cramer - was hardly in the Sykes league, being more at home helming wonders like Eddie Kidd biopic Riding High. The Park was a retread of visual gags that had gone before (especially in The Sandwich Man), with a few token gestures to modernity such as Derek Griffiths' park keeper growing marijuana in his shed. 1980's Balham: Gateway to the South was even less original, consisting as it did of an old Muir/Nordern LP sketch originally performed by Peter Sellers, here with David de Keyser reading out the cod-Whickerian monologue while Robbie Coltrane played the benighted borough's inhabitants. Entertaining enough, but as the need for these programme fillers in the cinema waned, so, it seems, did the inspiration behind them.
With the notable exception of Sykes, of course, whose love for arcane slapstick reasserted itself towards the end of the '70s, first with a remake of The Plank for ITV with Arthur Lowe in the Cooper role (no pale retread - we prefer the original but many plump for the latter) and then with Rhubarb Rhubarb, a lightning-struck tale of golfers and God-botherers, played out with the tidy conceit of having all dialogue consist entirely of the background extra cliche of the title. He followed this with a TV version of It's Your Move, then Mr H is Late, in which the McGuffin was, of course, a coffin. As late as 1993, Sykes turned in what must be his last B(L)SH-HCS, the sporadically amusing The Big Freeze, but he was working from a different era. The cinema bills no longer featured such appetisers, and slapstick was now regarded as the exclusive domain of a few children's entertainers. If we were going to get all cod-sociological about it, we might add that the defining characteristic of most of these films, the whimsical optimism of the working class 'little man' in the face of endless adversity, isn't something that would play that well in our cynical age. But that's not really the case. The Plank and Simon Simon - if perhaps not enough of their fellow shorts - are repeated on telly regularly to this day, and still come up as fresh as wet paint on a bench from which the warning sign has just blown off. Watch where you sit, Woman With Shopping Basket!
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