RIP Alan Simpson

Alan Simpson who died yesterday aged 87 was, along with Ray Galton, one half of the scriptwriting team which wrote two of the most celebrated British TV sitcoms of the 50's, 60's and 70's, Hancock's Half Hour and Steptoe and Son.

A number of themes run through both programmes, contributing to the pathos as well as to the comedy in them.

1. Class: all the best British TV comedies are about class, whether inverted as in Dad's Army, with the lower middle-class bank manager Captain Mainwaring in supposed charge of his aristocratic clerk Sergeant Wilson, both of whom rely on the black marketeer Private Walker for essential supplies, or aspiritional in Only Fools and Horses where Peckham tower block dwellers and wheeler dealers Del Boy and Rodney strive unsuccessfully to become yuppies in the Thatcherite 80's.

In Galton and Simpson's sitcoms, there's a lack of connection between how characters see their class position and the reality of it: Albert Steptoe is a working-class Tory who sees himself as a small businessman, and therefore a cut above the neighbours, while his left-wing son Harold, a partner in the firm, nevertheless sees himself as an oppressed worker; Hancock similarly has social aspirations beyond his working or lower middle-class background, in contrast to the spivvy Sid James and their charwoman Patricia Hayes.

2. The frustrated artist/intellectual: Hancock and Harold Steptoe both see themselves as frustrated men of letters, philosphers, artists and actors, unlike those around them who invariably mock their artistic pretensions.

3. Claustrophobia: Hancock's Half Hour takes place first in a small house in Railway Cuttings, East Cheam, and later a bedsit in Earl's Court. Steptoe and Son live in a gloomy house amid a ramshackle, rickety-gated scrapyard in Oil Drum Lane, Shepherd's Bush, which in the episode where Harold takes up amateur dramatics, only to be upstaged, inevitably, by his father, the director of the play mistakes for a theatrical set. The episode of Steptoe and Son where escaped convicts led by Leonard Rossiter turn up there late at night could easily be a short piece by Harold Pinter or Samuel Beckett.

4. Post-war imperial decline/the nuclear age: there's a feeling in both series that Britain and the characters' best days are behind them: Hancock and Harold Steptoe probably dreamt of, and might even once have achieved, a place of some sort in a now rapidly disintegrating British Empire. The latter did his National Service in Malaya during the so-called Emergency, an end of empire conflict which eventually led to the colony's independence, while the former's finest hours, as recounted in no doubt exaggerated tales of battlefield exploits, lie further back, in World War II. And hanging over both is the sense that their frustrated, claustrophobic lives might end all too soon in thermonuclear destruction.

Irish Blood, English Heart

The untimely passing of the comedian, actress and scriptwriter Caroline Aherne, who died last week at the age of just 52, led me to reflect once again on a particular aspect of her prodigious talent.

Like many other comedians, musicians and performers who came out of the Manchester area in the 1980's and 1990's, Steve Coogan, Morrissey, Marr and the other members of The Smiths, Noel and Liam Gallagher of Oasis, Terry Christian, Shaun Ryder of The Happy Mondays and Mani of The Stone Roses, Aherne was the child of Irish immigrants. As a Catholic born in Manchester of Irish descent, albeit farther back, I've often wondered what it is about that combination that seems to produce such talents.

I think there are two things. One is that being an outsider allows you to see things more clearly than others and, even if only unconsciously, feel little affinity for or need to respect an Establishment (Protestant, pro-monarchy and Empire) that you're not a part of. The other is that as the child of immigrants you belong to the "other" not just in the country you live in, but also the one your parents left, a "double outsider" if you like.

One of Caroline Aherne's earliest, and funniest, comic creations, the Irish nun Sister Mary Immaculate, must surely have been based on her teachers at the Hollies FCJ Convent Grammar School in Manchester.

That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore

The actor Warren Mitchell who died yesterday aged 89 was best known for playing the working-class racist Alf Garnett in the 1970's TV comedy Till Death Us Do Part.

Unlike out-and-out racist comedies of the 1970's like Love Thy Neighbour and Mind Your Language, it was Warren Mitchell and scriptwriter Johnny Speight's intention that viewers should laugh at, rather than with, the character they had created, but it didn't work out like that and Garnett became a hero to the bigots who took up his lines as their own. In an interview, Mitchell recounted how he, unlike West Ham-supporting Alf, a Spurs fan from an East London Jewish background, had once been embarrassed at a football match to become the subject of supportive chanting by racists on the terraces.

Garnett's views are challenged in the show, by his long-suffering wife and his left-wing "Scouse git" son-in-law (played by Labour-supporting actor Tony Booth), but they both tend to come off second best to him. A much better attempt to challenge racism by way of comedy in the 1970's was Rising Damp in which the reactionary views of boarding house landlord Rigsby are made to look ridiculous by a black and a white lodger, played by Don Warrington and Richard Beckinsale respectively, and the audience does end up laughing at his backward attitudes rather than having their prejudices reinforced.

The Job Lot

I watched The Job Lot, ITV's new comedy set in a jobcentre, last night.

I worked in social security offices rather than jobcentres in my ten years in the civil service but I've signed on in them more times than I care to remember. I wasn't expecting too much from The Job Lot but I actually found it pretty funny and quite accurate too, more so in fact than many dramas set in the civil service.  I'd defy anyone who's worked in or signed on at a jobcentre to say they didn't recognise at least one of the characters.

The talented civil servant

I've just received the magazine of my trade union, PCS.  Along with other public sector unions, PCS will be striking at the end of the month over Government plans to attack our pensions and most of the issue is understandably given over to that issue.

There's a bit at the back though about Sarah Millican, one of my favourite comedians, who it turns out is also a former civil servant. 

It got me thinking about other famous former civil servants.  As well as Millican, there are comedians Phil Jupitus and Paul Merton and Mancunian musicians Morrissey and Ian Curtis.  I'm sure there are lots of others I can't think of just now.

So what is it about former civil servants? Are we overrepresented in entertainment and if so why? Does the civil service attract talented people or is it the experience of working in the civil service that provides comedic and artistic material? 

I know when I worked in the civil service we used to laugh at the lyrics of this song knowing that Morrissey had been a civil servant himself.

That joke isn't funny any more

The first episode of Ricky Gervais' latest comedy, Life's Too Short, had one funny scene I thought, the one where lead actor Warwick Davis went to see his accountant.  It seems he's on a downdward curve from the cringingly funny The Office through the sporadically amusing Extras.

I know it must be difficult to repeat a hit or sustain success.  Another of my favourite comedies, Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm, also seems to have fallen a bit flat in the middle of the current series, when the characters relocated from LA to New York.

David started out as a writer for Woody Allen who has also slipped from his stellar seventies films Annie Hall and Manhattan and the bittersweet Hannah and Her Sisters to OK ones like New York Stories and now stuff that doesn't even seem to be written as comedy. 

As someone once said of Allen, real art consists of being able to mine the same seam without it ever becoming repetitive.  The other side of that coin is that if you're in a hole, stop digging.