I have never found stage magic that entertaining, but this young orangutan thinks it's hilarious.
This is a remarkable little video. Not only is the animal able to form rational expectations about the permanence of objects, when reality fails to bear them out it finds it funny.
If I had to name my favourite comedian it would be Alexei Sayle. Not only - as this, his second volume of memoirs, goes a long way to prove - did he invent politically engaged alternative comedy, he can do whimsy and the absurd too.
Sayle is also a proper writer - not only memoirs but fiction. Every Oxbridge comedian has one novel in him before he gets the call from American television, but Sayle is a master of the unfashionable form of short stories.
Douglas Adams called Sayle's story 'The Last Woman to Die in the War' a masterpiece. He was right. Thatcher Stole My Trousers is a good-natured romp through Sayle's rise to fame. It also tells us a lot about an important moment in British comedy:
verdict on the other comedians he met at this height of his fame is surely right:
I came to the conclusion that mainstream comedians were nasty men pretending to be nice whereas alternative comedians were nice men pretending to be nasty. (Apart from Keith Allen.)
Allen has a role as antihero of this book, exceeded only by Sayle's mother Molly. The heroine is his wife Linda.
"Like most wars, this one will end inconclusively with a narrow margin on a low turnout and the losers promising to keep fighting once they have regrouped and rearmed." Vince Cable takes a humorous look at referendum campaign.
A proposed new law would make it harder to criticise the ruling regime on Jersey. Voice for Children has the details.
"Reiner ends his memory with an envious observation: 'The word fuck is a perfectly good word now.' 'I never minded Richard Pryor saying it,' says Van Dyke, 'but so many comedians use it constantly instead of good material. That’s when it gets offensive.'" Katherine Brodsky interviews Dick Van Dyke and Carl Reiner, who are both past 90 but still crackling with ideas.
"If you’d have said that to us 50 years ago, that’d we’d be doing this still, we would have not believed it. That was the time Lennon said that he didn’t expect to be still doing it when he was 30!" Midlands What's On interviews Rod Argent from the Zombies.
Can you name the six London Underground stations named after pubs? Londonist can.
Charles Kennedy found that the path to public approval passed through chat-show studios. Now Tim Farron is taking it too.
The other day he appeared on Matt Forde's Political Party.(Me neither. Apparently it's something the young people listen to.)
You can hear how Tim did for yourself above.
He appears at around 19:30 if you find Forde's opening set palls after a while. He turns out to be a better interviewer than he is a comedian and Tim comes over very well.
That is a site where people are asked to listen to and write about a famous album they have somehow never heard.
Tim will be reacting to Straight Outta Compton by N.W.A.
Funnily enough Lord Bonkers recently wrote about the film of the same name - or at least something very like it:
Today I attend the Oakham premiere of a film I helped finance: ‘Straight Outta Nick Compton’. It tells the story of an opening batsman who is unjustly treated and records the controversial single “Fuck tha Selectors” as a result. I see from its evening edition that The High Leicestershire Radical (which I happen to own) has given it five stars.
Although this was made some fifty years ago it could just as easily been set in 2015. The Victory Party has several aims (which appear to have been designed to alienate as many people as possible) – keep Britain white, kick out the financiers (especially the Jews) and also deal harshly with the pacifists.
One reason for that conclusion is this episode and Gideon's obvious dislike or mistrust of an officer who says of the left-wing demonstrators who are confronting the Victory Party:
“I’m sick and tired of these people trying to push everyone around. Why don’t we shove the lot of them into jail?”
That officer is played by Allan Cuthbertson, who you will recognise from dozens of film and television appearances, including gourmet night at Fawlty Towers.
I also wrote in that post that:
Gideon's family feature regularly. Political trivia fans may like to note that his younger son was played by Giles Watling, who was the unsuccessful Conservative candidate against Ukip's Douglas Carswell in the 2014 Clacton by-election.
You can see the young Giles Watling in the clip above.
As well as being a Conservative councillor in Tendring (he won an open primary to be the party's candidate against Douglas Carswell in the Clacton by-election), Watling is still an actor. He appeared regularly in Bread.
I have now watched all 26 episodes of Gideon's Way on Youtube. As I said in my first post on the subject, one of the pleasures of the series is the regular appearance of actors who later became famous in other roles.
So it is that in one episode (Boy with Gun) you will find both Sir Oliver Lacon from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Wally Batty from Last of the Summer Wine.
That first post showed you John Hurt and Michael Cashman. Here are some more familiar faces.
The former chairman of the United Kingdom's Financial Services Authority, Adair Turner, makes the case for helicopter money.
David Boyle is characteristically illuminating: "I have no problem in principle with contracted out services, but note that the contracts tend to be won by companies whose main skill is the delivery of target data to their commissioners."
"Labour’s new members have arrived at the expense of the Greens and the assorted Judean People’s Front parties of the far left. Those new members are still fighting their #1 enemy, the 'Blairites', some of whom have decided, for various reasons, that enough is enough and have left." Jake Wilde dissects zombie Labour.
"Hancock, Fawlty, Partridge, Brent: in my mind, they’re all clinging to the middle rungs of England’s class ladder. That, in large part, is the comedy of their situations." Zadie Smith on her father and British comedy.
Rob Baker nominates his Top 8 Swinging Sixties London Films. Groovy! Laura Reynolds maps London's lost lidos.
These days I find something too premeditated about televsion comedy. The idea of sitting down to watch something for 30 minutes because it will be funny, feels odd. I much prefer wit in the pursuit of another goal.
But the comedies we watch when we were young don't just form our sense of humour: they form who we are.
When I was in the sixth form ... we conversed using lines from Fawlty Towers and Reginald Perrin in the way Victorian schoolboys are supposed to have swapped Latin tags.
Recently Radio Four Extra, my new favourite station, has stated repeating two comedies that take me back further than that.
When I was 11 my favourite radio comedy was The Men from the Ministry. I suppose its anti-Whitehall ethos has its roots in post-war resentment of socialism by the comfortably off - think of the fuss over the Tanganyika ground nut scheme - but it was immensely good natured.
The comedy was in the hands of pros like Derek Guyler and Richard Murdoch,* and it managed to be funny despite, even because of, its formulaic plot.
Their General Assistance Department would have two projects on the go, get them mixed up (perhaps sending the letter referring to one project to the other and vice versa) and there would be a news bulletin describing the resultant chaos.
They would fear the sack, but then discover that their boss was happy with it for some reason and live to cause chaos another week.
So ingrained is the show's comedy in my own sense of humour that I recently heard a joke that I stole for one of the first couple of Lord Bonkers' Diaries. (It is a sobering thought that those first diaries are nearer in time to my 11-year-old self than they are to me today.)
But I can go back further than that.
Radio Four Extra has started to repeat The Clitheroe Kid, which was my favourite radio comedy when I was 8.
You'll get a good idea of Jimmy Clitheroe's schtick if you watch the video above of him with George Formby. He was the ultimate precocious, cheeky schoolboy.
Except that Much Too Shy was made in 1942 and Jimmy Clitheroe was born in in 1921. Which means that he was already 20.
Because Jimmy Clitheroe - and that was his real name - suffered thyroid gland a birth and never grew after the age of 11, remaining 4ft 3in tall.
So by the time I fell in love with his show in 1968, he was 47. He still turned up for recordings in schoolboy cap and short trousers, but he had the face if a middle-aged man. That is why his television and film career had foundered by then.
Jimmy Clitheroe died in 1973, at the age of 51, after taking an overdose on the day of his mother's funeral.
* Richard Murdoch married into the family of Market Harborough's doctor. When he had his appendix out in the cottage hospital here he was plagued by urchins demanding to see "Stinker". He entertained them by putting his bare feet up on the windowsill and wiggling his toes.
Andrew Hickey says the Liberal Democrats should support Basic Income: "The person receiving the benefits will always know better than some Whitehall bureaucrat who earns a hundred grand a year what they most need to spend money on at any given time."
Internet voting is a terrible idea. In a video, Andrew Appel explains why.
"Having first placed Eliot in his historical and literary context, then having pointed to what is unique in him, Obama ends by showing how he speaks to any individual reader who pauses to listen. This is what the finest literary criticism has always done." Edward Mendelson discovers Barack Obama the literary critic.
Railway Maniac uncovers Ilkeston's forgotten history as a spa town.
"The last time I had seen Panesar at Wantage Road the club shop was fully stocked with Monty merchandise – “I Love Monty” and “Sikh of Tweak” t-shirts, the ill-advised “Monty’s Cricket Madness” DVDs (a compilation of cock-ups, whose cover made him look as though he had just been pulled up for driving a minicab uninsured), those masks." Backwatersman sees Monty Panesar return to play for Northamptonshire.
Curious British Telly on a forgotten (by me at least) comedy starring Rik Mayall - Believe Nothing.
Stewart Lee discusses the fantasy that stand-up comedy is spontaneous rather than written, and describes the evolution of stand-up over the last few decades.
His talk, given at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, takes in a wide range of subjects from the first app he ever came across to a discussion of the value of culture in society.
Some on the right have been pleased to see Carr get his comeuppance, seeing the affair as confirmation of their belief that lefties are all hypocrites. But if anything, Carr was recruited to 10 O'Clock Life as a balancing right-wing voice.
Certainly, as I argued in a post last December, there is nothing particularly lefty about Carr's comedy:
Left-wing politics is based in a belief that things could be better. Carr's schtick, by contrast, is to imply that he is wiser than us. Life is shit, and he has seen through it.
George Osborne's budget announced the biggest appropriation of Church land since the Reformation, as John Elledge demonstrates.
"As anyone involved in the fight to save London’s council housing knows, the boroughs at the forefront of the social cleansing of our city over the last fifteen years are Labour boroughs." Architects for Social Housing are not taken in by Labour's rhetoric.
Michael Gerson says the Republicans are staining themselves by sticking with Donald Trump.
Exposure to nature makes people happy and could cut mental health inequalities between the rich and poor, argues Natasha Gilbert.
The decline of Ricky Gervais is itemised by Joe Bish.
Dirty Feed shows that the first episode of Fawlty Towers was originally filmed as a pilot. That version differs significantly from the broadcast version: "In the reshot section, Danny’s grapefruit is far larger and has a cherry on top, compared to the rather meagre offer on display once we cut to the wide shot." Such obsession is to be applauded.
We all know that the comedian Al Murray is a direct descendant of the Victorian novelist William Makepeace Thackeray.
But our Trivial Fact of the Week reveals that he is also the great nephew of the actor Stephen Murray.
A young person writes: Who was Stephen Murray?
Only the star of the radio comedy The Navy Lark, Sir Francis Walsingham to Glenda Jackson's Elizabeth R on television and star of such post-war films as London Belongs to Me and The Magnet.
You'll have to hurry to catch it, because it closes on 12 March, but I can thoroughly recommend the Albany Theatre Company's Round The Horne: 50th Anniversary Tour at the London Comedy Museum.
In the 1960s the radio comedy Round the Horne was extraordinarily popular and this production puts you in the place of the audience at the recording of a couple of episodes of the show.
Much of the script was filth (if only in the listener's mind) but the writers Barry Took and Marty Feldman got away with it because the show was centred on the urbane, establishment presence of Kenneth Horne.
Here are a couple of examples of the humour. Kenneth Williams as Rambing Syd Rumpo singing The Ballad of the Woggler's Moulie above and the opening of the sketch Bona Law below...
HORNE: Can you help me? I've erred.
SANDY: Well, we've all erred, ducky. I mean, it's common knowledge, ennit, Jule?
HORNE: Will you take my case?
JULIAN: Well, it depends on what it is. We've got a criminal practice that takes up most of our time.
Have you noticed a similar change happening in comedy?
SL: I have. If you went to the alternative night with all the weird acts, which 25 years ago was downstairs at the Market Tavern on Islington Green on Essex Road, you'd see Simon Munnery who is the son of a plumber. Or Johnny Vegas, who is not a member of the upper classes.
The same thing now, which is the Alternative Comedy Memorial Society at the New Red Lion, is a very good night, but there's a higher proportion of people whose parents bought them a flat. Inevitably, because you can't do that sort of stuff that doesn't pay, unless you've got some sort of fallback position.
The interviewer, Simon Price, takes Lee Terribly Seriously, but then maybe we should.
Good news. A new series of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle starts on BBC2 at 10pm on Thursday 3 March.
Stewart Lee is interviewed on the Guardian website today (and in tomorrow's paper?) by Will Self:
On stage, Lee is apparently an embittered, envious, self-lacerating man, caught in a ferocious double-bind: if he’s unsuccessful it’s because his audience are stupid shits who don’t get his jokes; and if he’s successful it’s because he’s a stupid shit churning out jokes that confirm his audience in their prejudices. So convincing is this act – if indeed it is an act – that I became intrigued: was the “real” Lee quite as prickly as his performance persona? In order to find out I asked him over for a serious sit-down.
It's good stuff, but I wish someone would tell Self to stop saying "self-reflexive".
Our latest visit to Bonkers Hall ends with an outing to Oakham Zoo.
An alternative chameleon
A sombre day: the moving television brings news of the deaths of both Pierre Boulez and Christy O’Connor Jnr. I am confident that they will go down in the annals of the game as one of the great Ryder Cup pairings.
To cheer myself up, I take a party of particularly Well-Behaved Orphans to Oakham Zoo. The consensus on the charabanc is that we want to see the chameleons.
As is the way with such creatures, they rather blend into the background. I am struck, however, by one that spends its time ranting about how much it hates “Thatcher”. I ask the keeper why it does this. “Oh,” comes the reply, “it’s an alternative chameleon”.
Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.
