Cut to Graham Linehan looking very confused over his morning muffin...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/ ... -pemberton


WELCOME TO PSYCHOVILLE

The Guardian, 13 June 2009

If Royston Vasey scared you silly, wait until you see the citizens of TV comedy Psychoville. Creator Reece Shearsmith explains his taste for the dark stuff. It's all the Fly Lady's fault, apparently.

When Steve Pemberton and myself wrote the first episode of our new series Psychoville in a little office in north London, not far from where Dennis Nilsen dismembered his last few victims, it was the summer of 2006 and someone of weight at the BBC had announced that all new comedy had to be "big and funny". We didn't know what this meant. Something like It's A Knockout presumably, with padded costumes and buckets of blue water. But one thing was clear, "dark comedy", our supposed bread and butter, was out. We carried on writing our new little story regardless, feeling that if it was funny and intriguing and different it would be forgiven for whatever it was and they'd simply have to commission it. Happily they did, and it's finally coming on the telly. Dark comedy may well be back in again now. I don't know, I couldn't tell you, and to be honest I never thought we were that dark in the first place.

In the heyday of The League Of Gentlemen we were heralded as "the new shock jocks of comedy", and comedy's "dark princes", but mostly (and most ingeniously) "gentlemen in a different league". Now, I concede that some of the themes we embarked on in that programme - and indeed now for Psychoville - are not Last Of The Summer Wine material. However, all we've ever done is write what tickled us.

The strong sense of horror that pervades our writing - and certainly the situations in Psychoville - comes from the thrill that it gives you to be genuinely surprised or made to feel "something" while watching a piece of entertainment. When was the last time you were at the theatre and you didn't check your watch to see how long was left? The answer is never (except if you're watching Stomp). Our mission with this new show was to write a comedy that grips you like an episode of 24. And still has the exposition be funny.

This balance is very fragile to achieve. The comedy-horror is a rare formula to get right. And of course it's all subjective anyway. One of the things that always made me question our "darkness" was the wildly different reactions to our show. Tubbs and Edward - the serial-killing owners of the local shop in The League Of Gentlemen - would physically repel some people, while others giggled at them like they were Mr and Mrs Tiggy-Winkle! It made me realise we were tinkering with people's thresholds. I hadn't thought about that before because what "type" of comedy we were creating wasn't relevant, or even a question in our heads. Only after some success - and in some newspapers - were we told we were shock jock dark princes. Whatever they are.

Sir Anthony Hopkins - whenever asked his theory on why people are attracted to Hannibal Lecter - often cites the "everyone loves to be scared/thrill of the roller coaster ride" notion. I think a lot of our comedy is borne out of situations we find disturbing, given a little twist and made into something funny, but still recognisable. It's not conscious; we don't go looking for it particularly. I haven't just given away some kind of secret formula, but it's all there. I have played a lot of angry characters over the years and Mr Jelly, the one-handed children's entertainer in Psychoville, is next in that particular canon. I hate arguments - I am more a silent seether/poison them later person - but I love acting "rage", and find misplaced, disproportionate anger very funny to watch.

But comedy can also hide in much less obvious places. There's a scene in Psychoville with Joy (brilliantly played by Dawn French), our midwife with a rather unhealthy attachment to her demonstration doll "Freddie", creeping into the hospital blood bank, stealing blood while singing When You Wish Upon A Star and topping the bags back up with Vimto. "And no one's any the wiser," she says, leaving with a baby's bottle full of Freddie's special "medicine". It's one of my favourite scenes because it's funny and scary and disturbing all at the same time. In that little 40-second scene you have a snapshot of everything we are trying to do.

But why does this make me chuckle? I think I can trace it back to a particular incident when I was a small boy growing up in Hull. (And no, it isn't that I was a small boy growing up in Hull.) When I was about eight, I was taken to a travelling circus that had pitched up its sawdust-and-elephant smell on a bit of wasteland usually reserved for car boot sales and glue sniffing (sometimes both at the same time). As I sat in the big top and watched the scary people perform their tumbles, I felt a growing sense of panic. My fear mounted as the high-wire act began; a be-sequined lady with arms like mutton chops and huge silver painted eyes like something out of Priscilla climbed up a long pair of ladders and capered above us. With her silver-foil face glinting in the spotlight I thought she was in fact that most terrible of creatures, a woman with a big fly head. I began to cry. I think my mum thought that the peril that was playing out before me had gotten too much, but I was in fact simply terrified of the ghastly woman and her strange face. It disturbed me that I couldn't quite make out the real expression behind the shiny mask.

Then the clowns came out. Now, you're a reasonable person;

I don't at this point need to explain to you that clowns are anything but funny. And we are never more attuned to this fact than when we are little and they creep before us, squirting water from their eyes with crosses on, and purporting to show us the funny side of being hit with a plank.

I recount the memory because I think that somehow seeing that woman with fly eyes in the circus all those years ago changed how I perceived the world. Her and the clowns changed my view of "funny". Fly Lady was thrilling, but in the wrong way. And yet I remember her face 30 years on. What did she do to me? Actually, probably nothing except give me recurring nightmares for about five years, but what trip to the circus doesn't do that?

A lot of Psychoville has a "fairytale" quality to it: reality and emotion stretched to breaking point; situations that

are heightened and extraordinary but housed in the mundane. Stephen King always said it's much scarier to have a ghost haunting a radiator in a modern flat, than in the attic of a spooky old house. And finding comedy in places that are "other" is what I think we like to do, and hopefully do best. It's a far more dodgy path to furrow because sometimes I don't want you to laugh; I want you to glimpse that terrible face of the Fly Lady up there on her trapeze and think, "Ugh! Is she smiling or screaming?" ·

Psychoville, Thursday, 10pm, BBC2

I wish a new word could be found to replace the word "dark", in context of the general tenor of a work of entertainment. Dark, to me, sounds so wanky and adolescent, an attempt at instant sophistication. When you're fourteen and desperate to be taken seriously, you start to think that "dark" things are what all adults respect, therefore "dark" things must be respected. The 2nd part of most trilogies are always touted as being "darker" than the first installment (and then the third instalment is usually a "return to the fun elements of the original").

Would macabre be a better word, I wonder? Macabre suggests that a sense of fun is involved, a thrill of the unsettling, unexpected and gruesome. Which would sum up "The League of Gentlemen" very well, I think.

When did "dark" become a label to hang around comedy? 'Cause the best of British comedy has always had a genuine psychological depth to it. The relationship between Albert and Harold Steptoe, for example, or the Meldrew's subtle grief over their dead child. Were those comedies ever labeled "dark"?

The other option is "black humour", although that could be misinterpreted as referring to the likes of Lenny Henry and Gina Yashere.

"Morbid"? Well, that's a bit specific, I guess.

Yes, it's always been an integral part of comedy - truly great shows (like the ones you mention) understand that darkness is not an 'add-on' but part of the mix. Same with 'seriousness', 'intelligence', 'anger', etc - they're not side orders to the comedy platter, they're the food of comedy itself.

The first time I remember 'dark' being touted as a separate selling point was in an NME interview with Newman and Baddiel to plug the second MWE TV series (March '92). 'Darkness' in that case referred to sketches about Derek Bentley, Shaun Ryder being a rent boy, sub-Woody Allen routines about loneliness etc. I remember being confused about the label, because I'd never consciously realisd that MWE was dark in approach. Of course it was, but said darkness wasn't, until that point, worn on the team's sleeve.

It became a popular label in the late 90/early 00s, though, mainly down to The League of Gentlemen, Blue Jam, Human Remains, etc. Even shows which weren't overtly macabre, like The Office or People Like Us, got lumped in with the movement because of their apparent naturalism and subtlety. The first series of Nighty Night (in production in late 2003) was probably the Abbey Road of the fad; by the time the second series limped along two years later, critical rapture was less forthcoming - 'big and funny' was back in. Although I do remember some critics (and maybe Julia Davis herself) clutching at straws and arguing 'Well it's not really dark as such, it's more cartoony, actually...'

I seem to remember Peter Baynham writing a strawman article in defence of Nighty Night, defending it from all the complaints about its dark subject matter the show never received.

Was that the same one where he was plugging I Am Not An Animal?

Would it be fair to say that Nighty Night seems to be one of those things which hasn't really lived in the memory much since it went out? It had a few critics making a fuss about the first series, but seemingly hasn't made much of a public impression overall. Or is that my lack of interest making me biased? Tried watching it a few times, but found it so dreary and pointless that I couldn't work up the patience to bother with the thing.

My memory of Nighty Night is that the first series got hyped to buggery and declared a masterpiece, then the second series went out with less interest from everyone. I didn't watch the second series (having hated the first), but I wonder if it was considered so awful by the BBC bods that it was put out "quietly". It certainly looks awful judging from that clip of her shoving a hospital dinner covered in the spunk of the guy she fancied down her vagina. That clip, for me, was beyond "dark, gross-out comedy" (or however it's been described) and well into "tasteless, desperate, shock tactics comedy" territory.

The original BBC3 transmission of Nighty Night series two went out on raw video by mistake, which they later had to pretend was deliberate even though it obviously wasn't (the BBC2 screenings were filmised). That's how little they cared about it.

Nighty Night was such a hit that Davis has to rely on Ruth Jones for work these days.

That's interesting - the whole 'NME-reading student' notion of what constitutes 'cool' - creating a division between the old and the new, etc.

The first time I heard the word 'Dark' being uttered as a 'positive' by someone within the comedy industry was in about 1998 - one of the Blue Jam cast used it to describe the scripts they were being given to read. "So dark, apparently," I remember saying to Mike, "No mention of 'funny', you'll notice..."

I doubt I need to remind anyone on this board about our own attempts to isolate 'Dark' as a potential problem, but hey ho: Jam (April 2000) and Dark (December 2000).

No-one listened. 'Dark' followed a depressingly traditional road through the industry as the usual idiots slowly latched onto the idea that there was some new 'too cool for school' thing in town. And, yes, it got mixed in with a shared distancing from 'traditional sit-com' which was going on at the time - part of an increased drive to 'save the UK sitcom industry'. Anything resembling Terry and June became an automatic Aunt Sally, to be knocked off its perch, while anything on fake film, presented without a laughtrack and boasting slow-burning 'reveals' rather than 'boffo woofs' became elevated far above its status and declared 'progress'. It was depressing watching various bits of the media cottoning on to this 'new' fad - I think it would have been around the time of Nighty Night that Jonathan Ross started slipping in coy little references to it on his TV show (and, as has already been mentioned, the broadsheets fanfared that dreadful little series as something new and amazing).

(Got to laugh - just had a wander about the net and noted that the Wikipedia entry for Nighty Night actually had a link to page about 'Dark humour'. I clicked on it and got redirected to an all-encompassing 'Black comedy' page!)

The Peter Baynham article Doomwatcher mentions above ('Dead Funny') was April 2004. I recall the consensus reaction to it on internet messageboards at the time was pretty much "Great article - gonna use those opinions myself in the pub later!" A typical response aimed at anyone who dared go against that particular 'tide of opinion':



Ugh.

So when did the industry swing away from 'Dark' actually occur? The first inklings would be that edition of Radio 4's Heresy (recorded December 2004 - never broadcast, but transcribed on our limbo site here) in which Baddiel and Iannucci denounced it as a specific problem - as part of a wider argument about those po-faced 'more than just comedy' frills which the Lawsonite 'critical consensus' had declared something new and exciting to be reckoned with.

In June 2005, the League of Gentlemen touched on the subject in an Independent interview about their movie and live pantomime ('The local heroes'), paying tribute en route to some dead website or other which had apparently sent up their 'Dark'ness:



That 'enormous backlash' clearly needed a kick up the arse - and Iannucci's Oxford Lectures, in January and February 2006, provided the boot, dealing specifically with the need to reclaim mainstream TV comedy from the edgy, fringey Dark-dwellers. The second lecture, also written up as a Guardian piece ('Grow up - and let's have a laugh') built on his initial Heresy comments and pretty much said everything that needed to be said.



So, 2006 was the big turning point. Note that Reece Sheersmith isolates it at...



...although, there are possibly earlier examples of this industry rethink. Wasn't Harry Thompson's last written work, the 'Dark' sitcom Respectable (set in a brothel), given a bit of 'trad' gloss and presented thusly on C5 in about March 2006? I seem to remember this was alluded to at the time in the accompanying write-ups.

At least Iannucci accepts that 'his lot' should ultimitely take a lot of the blame for the rot that eventually set in - there's a specific ref in that lecture to the old Lee and Herring 'crap sit-com' routines (ie punning titles like 'Nelson's Column'). The money-shot of Lee and Herring's creative contribution towards dissing trad sit-coms occured in TMWRNJ's 'The Lettuce Family' (1999) - which took recognisable stock sitcom set-ups and replaced all the characters with squeaking vegetables. A decade earlier, The Mary Whitehouse Experience had aimed brickbats in the same direction with All Cosy At Home In The Family House, twisting those set-ups into a series of increasingly bizarre or surreal scenarios. And a decade before that, The Young Ones had given trad-com a good kicking with Oh Crikey!, sending up its theatrical farce 'vicars and pants in a cupboard' origins - and culminating in one of the main characters fucking a dog in front of just such a vicar.

You could also throw in examples from Not The Nine O'Clock News and End Of Part One (even Flying Circus at a pinch, with 'The Atilla The Hun Show'). There probably hasn't been a worthwhile comedy team which hasn't rallied against what it regarded as safe, conformist sitcom fare. I suspect the problem with the most recent spate of rallying is that it occured during that turn-of-the-century drive to 'save the British sitcom industry' - at which point those gags about the crapness of Terry and June suddenly became a 'career opportunity' rather than a general critique.

The most recent attack on trad-com was probably Series 2 of Gervais and Merchant's Extras - which set out to ossify the 'consensus opinion' that the genre was now dead (and that Gervais and his naturalistic Office held the smoking gun). Rather pleasingly, this was broadcast around the time that people in the industry started to take those Iannucci lectures seriously...

Which more or less brings us up to date. Reece Sheersmith isn't the only person cautious about the 'no more Dark' drive at the BBC. Other comedy writers have submitted 'dramatic' comedy works and been advised to change it into 'a traditional sitcom' format. It would appear that they still haven't quite 'got it' - 'Big and funny' is just the latest trend to follow.

What was it the Lab Rats Facebook page proclaimed? "Viva Daftness!". Just a few short years ago, that would have been "Viva Darkness". It's all fake.

Edit: Updated the 'Jam' and 'Dark' article links - now pointing to the new platform.

(Sorry, that last posting didn't start off as a mini-article... But I guess we need an update for the main 'Dark' page on the site anyway, so fuck it.)

No need to apologise, Champniss. I found it a fascinating little potted history. Many thanks.

I seem to recall Graham Lineham making a few damning comments about dark comedy when he was promoting the first series of "The IT Crowd". Certainly, in the "Screenwipe" interview he confessed that he didn't do naturalism, which seems to be an important ingredient in dark comedy.

But yeah, I agree with Scott. Dark used to be just one of the colours good comedians would use when they, err, painted their sitcoms/sketch shows. They'd use many other colours, too. Including zinc. Which is why something like Python --which refused to ever be just one thing-- stands the test of time. There's so much richness and variety, new things to discover. Whereas "The League of Gentlemen", which I rather liked, doesn't really reward return visits. The tone is so oppressive that it swamps everything, and you really have to be in the right mood to get much out of it.

I remember watching the episode of "Only Fools And Horses" where Grandad had died, and thinking, blimey, this is rather raw. And then there's a great belly-laugh moment with the hat (I forget the specifics; it was properly plotted comedy writing with a great pay off). The two things -- the rawness of grief, and the belly laugh reveal -- weren't fighting each other for space; they were part of the general feel of the series. Which is why it was so great.

Why not repost that to BLOGCAA, 'niss?

Probably better to just tidy it up and stick it straight on the revamped 'Dark' page as an update. The Linehan/IT Crowd comments Vince mentions should ideally form part of it, as should some of the broadsheet articles which accompanied Paul Jackson's pro-Silly speech at the Fringe last year (which, as I recall, were decidedly shifty - twisting Iannucci's observations about The Royle Family in the Oxford Lectures and effectively blaming it for 'starting the rot').

That would be the scene where they're gathered around Grandad's grave at the funeral, with Rodney staring down intently into it while the others gradually move away. Del apparently finds Grandad's hat and, in a sentimental gesture, deliberately drops it onto the coffin below. A few minutes later, when they've started filling in the grave, someone there realises that their hat's missing.

From the same episode:



I'd forgotten how powerful that scene was. That's yer proper 'Dark' sitcom-writing right there. No blood, fake horror-genre homage or edgy cancer gags - just two characters struggling to get through life and failing.

And it comes straight after one of the funniest jokes in the whole of Only Fools..., where Rodney makes a dramatic, angry exit from the flat... then storms back in and, in the same angry tone, growls "I'm gonna put some clothes on first!"...

I always think comedy works a bit like opera. You know how, in an opera, nobody ever says 'Why are we all singing?'? That's because, within the universe of the opera, the characters aren't singing. The characters presumably hear the words as normal speech - singing is simply the medium through which the dialogue is presented to the audience.

Similarly, in a sitcom nobody ever says 'Look, can we all stop cracking gags every ten seconds?', and - for the most part - sitcom characters never laugh at one another's funny dialogue either. I've always assumed this is because, in the same way that the opera singers aren't really singing to one another, sitcom characters aren't really making jokes. We, the audience, hear them as jokes, but the characters in the show, within their own self-contained bubble, hear it as normal dialogue.

This is why I've always had a problem with 'serious bits' in comedy shows. Everything from Spitting Image's 'Every Bomb You Make' to the Blackadder poppy scene, from Royle Family Christmas specials to Del Boy delivering a toe-curling speech to his new-born baby, they jar slightly. Because it suggests that all the comedy which hitherto occurred in 99% of the show somehow wasn't serious or moving or worth thinking about. The 'Grandad's hat' scene in OFAH is fair enough because the humour co-exists within the same scene, but the latter episodes contained a lot of 'Hey, but seriously...' longuers that simply sat awkwardly within the show.

That's the problem with the labels 'dark' and 'silly' - if suggests that dark can't be simultaneously silly and silly can't be simultaneously dark.

Also, David Jason does something very few actors do - when he's making a joke as Del Boy (ie, one that Del intends to be funny), he often fluffs it slightly or chuckles to himself as he delivers it; he reserves his real razor-sharp timing for when Del's unintentionally hilarious. That's the way to do gags-within-gags, but not eveyone can master it.

Pemberton shows off his ego: http://tinyurl.com/l22v7b

Heh heh:



Er, revealing (in an interview with the highest-hit comedy website in the UK) how to find the URLs... this doesn't count as 'spoonfeeding', apparently.

It's not exactly "innovative" either, as that sort of thing's been before.

I think you're being a bit harsh on comedy. I've never seen it as "here's what comedy is unable to give us", or that one is intrinsically better than the other, but more that comedy and drama are two different ways of telling a story.

The argument’s very rarely used the other way round – I don’t see the same complaints when a drama features a comedic moment. Well, when it’s done badly, of course, but that’s more about the end result and not the underlying thing.

That was one of the 'revolutionary' cures put forward for the ailments of the British Sitcom - the insertion of deliberately bad in-character jokes to heighten the 'realism'. That whole "People in real life just don't talk like that!" blether. Richard Herring was quite big on it at the time (and Gervais later appropriated it as part of his suddenly-acquired 'deeply held opinions' on successful sitcom writing!)

But it's true - latter-day comedy writers don't seem to be able to juggle it properly, partly because for the device to work, the rest of the writing has to be a constant stream of genuinely great lines. In the absence of this, the 'bad gags' inevitably end up being telegraphed in the most unsubtle ways, usually by showing the surrounding characters reacting with contempt or dismay (a conceit taken to ludicrous extremes in the supposedly 'subtle' The Office.)

Which Rentaghost was doing a generation ago...

Amusing to read the newspaper previews of this today: all of them (a) bang on about how the show's an acquired taste, you either love it or you hate it, it's 'comedic Marmite' etc, and (b) fall into line and say exactly the same thing.

They also talk about seeing 'Dawn French as you've never seen her before' - showing an ignorance of Murder Most Horrid, let alone her roles in the Comic Strip.

Presumably all such articles are lifted from press releases (read the book Flat Earth News for a good summary of the concept of "churnalism"). Mind you, that way of working pre-dates the internet age ruining old media's business models. In my days as a student film reviewer for the university paper I used to compare the press releases to the reviews written for the proper newspapers. They would just copy and paste entire chunks when they'd run out of their own views on the film.

The Pythons pretty much did the LoG's act in about 20 seconds, before stopping and doing something else:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RkAZdceknw

That sentence also works if you replace 'The Pythons' with 'Spike Miligan' and 'the LoG' with 'The Pythons.'