In the UK of the late 1970s, TV sketch comedy was a rather cosy place. It was a world represented by the likes of The Two Ronnies, Morecombe & Wise, and Mike Yarwood – people who, when they appeared on screen, prompted your granny to declare, ‘Ooh, I like him.’

It was an in-between period. The 80s wave of alternative comedy hadn’t yet struck, while the Pythons – who’d exploded onto screens in 1969 – had long since left sketch comedy in favour of feature films. When they’d disbanded the Flying Circus in 1974, nobody had really succeeded them as anarchic, absurdist experimentalists. Yes, there were the likes of Kenny Everett fiddling around with the format, but the sketch world once again belonged to the conventionalists.

But in 1979, a band of young upstarts leapt into the fray and mixed things up. They were different. They were provocative, offensive, anything but cosy. They named their sketch show Not the Nine O’Clock News¹, and were both lauded and reviled by critics. They grabbed the comfortable sketch show by the scruff of the neck, broke all the rules and smashed the conventions to pieces. Finally the Pythons’ successors had arrived.

Or had they?

Naughty New Faces

If some commentary on Not the Nine O’Clock News is to be believed, the show screamed revolution and anarchy. In fact, it’s sometimes lumped in with the punk movement, which had already been delighting and distressing the British population throughout the late 1970s. In some ways, it’s a fair comparison.

For one thing, NTNON was made up of young folks new to TV comedy. Even its most established performer, Rowan Atkinson, was then relatively unknown. (1979 was long before Bean and Blackadder.) Like fellow performers Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones, he’d only really performed comedy on stage, in venues like university revue and the Edinburgh Fringe. Pamela Stephenson was arguably the most familiar face to a TV audience, having popped up in various shows of the era (like Space: 1999, The Professionals and Tales of the Unexpected), but her background was in straight acting. Even the show’s two producers were fresh faces – John Lloyd knew comedy but was a TV novice; Sean Hardie worked in TV, but produced, of all things, current affairs.

Nevertheless they charged ahead despite their youth and inexperience – remember, punks didn’t necessarily know how to play when they staggered on stage. By their own admissions, the NTNON team were disorganised and made things up as they went along. And, like punks, they offended people.

Although it may seen tame by modern standards, some of their output was genuinely shocking to a contemporary audience. After all, Ronnie Barker never drove over a hedgehog with an articulated lorry (and if he did, he’d have called it a ‘hodgeheg’ in one of usual pispronunciations). Some of their sketches were merely naughty, like the one where a man asks a Swedish chemist for some deodorant and is asked back in a tortured accent, ‘Ball or ar-re-zole?’ ‘Neither,’ replies the customer, ‘I want it fer meh ar-empits.’ Some sketches broke taboos, like the one where a character enters a sex shop and asks for ‘keep-it-up cream.’ Another featured an ironic take on bad language, staging a mock current affairs debate:

VICAR: This is just the kind of bad language and endless references to parts of the body, which are, by their ceaseless repetition, knob, in the media, just part and parcel and pubes of everyday conversation. We must relief massage the bad language out of television, rump.

INTERVIEWER: What you’re saying is that, without our knowing it, our tickle-my-nuts language has become corrupted?

VICAR: Inner thigh, yes.

[…]

GUEST: I just don’t see what proof the Reverend Bartholemew has for his strange breast-fondling theory.

VICAR: You just have to listen […] For instance, do you realise in that last sentence you said ‘breast-fondling’ large nipple?

GUEST: I did not!

VICAR: Yes, yank on it, you did!

Reaction

You could argue that another punky element of NTNON was the team’s motivation. They were striving to be different, to not be like the current icons of sketch comedy. In the late 1970s, that meant shows like Monty Python’s Flying Circus, whose shadow still loomed large, or The Two Ronnies, which ruled prime time comedy. In other words, they were reacting against something as much as forging their own identity. Even the show’s name defines it in terms of what it isn’t!

The Two Ronnies was the epitome of a cosy sketch show: safe, gentle and filled with middle-class characters delivering word perfect lines in polished accents. Naughtiness was kept safely behind well-constructed euphemisms of the ‘Have you seen my rollocks?’ and ‘No, it’s just the way my trousers hang’ variety. NTNON were intent on being a negative image of them, opposite in every way. In fact, in one infamous sketch, they went as far as parodying Barker and Corbett themselves.

But that wasn’t all NTNON were reacting against. They were just as intent on not being the next Monty Python. Therefore out went absurdism and endless breaking of the fourth wall. Out too was the larger-than-life grotesque characters, all those Gumbys and screeching housewives. Performances were instead much more naturalistic, delivered by rather everyday sorts of characters with the umming and ahhing left in.

So, if the NTNON team weren’t going for the cosy conventionality of The Two Ronnies and refused the moniker of Python’s successors, just what were they exactly?

Let’s find out.

Counterreaction

In a previous article, I explained the conventional elements of a comedy sketch. How do the efforts of NTNON compare?

A comedy sketch usually lasts between 1 and 5 minutes in duration. NTNON sketches stuck firmly within these bounds, rarely outstaying their welcome. In fact, I’d say it was one of the faster-paced sketch shows of its era. I even demonstrated in that earlier article how one particularly good sketch lasted all of 45 seconds.

Sketches on the whole stick to one location. Some of their most memorable sketches (Gerald the Gorilla, Life of Python, Question Time Armageddon, Origami) are studio-based and feature a handful of chair-bound performers. I know we’re dealing with 1970s BBC budgets here – pitiful payouts that discourage the writers from adding too many scene headings to the script – but even they’d wanted to, the writers knew better than to regularly have sketches featuring characters flitting from place to place.

Similarly, their focus is laser sharp. A sketch has a situation involving just one attack. Sure, there are usually several characters and they all mine the idea for as many laughs as possible, but they all do it in service of the core idea. The sketches don’t stray from that idea or have several competing attacks. Take the Gerald the Gorilla sketch, for example. The characters are all dealing with the core idea, namely this astoundingly erudite primate. There’s no subplot like Stephenson’s character struggling with a speech impediment or an inept producer, she’s watching in horror her interview fall apart as Smith’s sober academic squabbles and argues with his talking ape.

Finally, typical NTNON sketches follow standard structure like little three-act plays. They start by introducing their characters and the conflict they face. Things escalate as they attempt to deal with the obstacles. And then a twist gives us a final surprise and a punchline.

In other words, the NTNON team knew exactly what they were doing.

That shouldn’t be surprising when you realise that these people weren’t anarchic punks who wanted to smash all the rules. They came from comfortable backgrounds, were privately educated, and had already honed their comedy skills in university revue at places like Oxford and Cambridge. They certainly had cosier backgrounds than The Two Ronnies (both state school boys who didn’t go to university but rather graduated the more thankless worlds of night clubs and repertory theatre).

When you think about it, NTNON had a lot more in common with the Ronnies than you might think, despite the team’s intent on being the opposite. As well as sticking to sketch conventions, their output covered the whole gamut of sketch types. You name it – absurd situations, sane characters in an insane world, parodies, musical sketches – it was all there, even that old favourite the news desk, which Barker and Corbett had been sitting behind for a decade before Mel Smith and Pamela Stephenson did the same. Apart from the bitingly political sketches, The Two Ronnies covered very similar ground, albeit with a highly different tone.

A negative image may have the opposite colours but the form is the still the same.

The End

The NTNON team did a better job at avoiding copying that other touchstone of sketch comedy, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Yes, there was the odd off-beat or absurd moment – the storytime sketch, where the whole cast take it turns to tell a fable but Atkinson alone mutters incomprehensible nonsense, is a fantastically daft example – but they largely took what they’d learned from revue and Fringe, and stuck to the classic rules of sketch comedy. The result was glorious, an energetic, provocative and edgy laughter fest, sometimes shocking, but also reassuringly conventional.

Ironically, they did unintentionally emulate the Pythons in one way. The show quickly started pulling in huge ratings and made comedy rock ‘n roll stars of the team, just as had happened to the Pythons. Like them, they released books and albums, which flew off the shelves and made the members rich. By 1982, producer John Lloyd had quite forgotten about his avoidance of aping Monty Python and instead proposed to the team that they be as Pythonesque as possible: make more series, make films, conquer America, just like Cleese and the others had.

It wasn’t to be. Rowan Atkinson showed no interest, replying to Lloyd that he wanted to go solo and pursue his own projects. Pamela Stephenson had had rather enough too, particularly since becoming tabloid fodder in light of her affair with Billy Connolly (himself a sort of NTNON honorary member, having appeared in several sketches). Additionally there were tensions among some of the cast and not a lot of love lost between certain members. All were happy to call it a day and go out on a high.

In future articles, I’ll explore some of the things that these comedy icons went on to achieve. For now, let’s say goodbye in typical Not the Nine O’Clock News fashion:

1. A reference to being on BBC2 at 9pm simultaneously with the main evening news on BBC1. ↩︎