A postmodern post-mortem: or, the metafictional paradox of Ernie Wise’s hairpiece

So postmodernism has an exhibition dedicated to it, which probably means that it’s dead. Hari Kunzru (in The Guardian) and Edward Docx (in Prospect) would both agree, although they differ over the precise cause: the former says it was 9/11 and the internet, while the latter thinks we all  just got bored and decided to read Jonathan Franzen novels instead. They are unanimous, however, that: a) postmodernism as a movement was characterised by a desire to break away from pre-ordained notions of taste, morality, even reality, but aside from that it’s quite tricky; and b) the Talking Heads movie Stop Making Sense was very postmodern indeed, thank you. The problem is, though, that as soon as they agree on b), the validity of a) gets a bit of kicking; if postmodernism was tearing up the canon, it’s entirely inappropriate that it can only easily be defined with reference to a canon of its own. (Although in a truly postmodern universe, the concept of “inappropriate” also ceases to have any meaning.)

The same problem applies to such pieces of chinstrokery as Stuart Jeffries’ 10 key moments in postmodernism (also in The Guardian) and a slightly older 61 postmodern reads (from the LA Times). In this instance, if you *are* on the list, surely you can’t come in. Part of the problem is that postmodernism remains all but ineffable, and so rather than formulate a coherent definition of what it is, we find it far easier to point to individual fragments of cultural jetsam and say, yeah, that’s postmodern, so if you see something else like that, it probably is as well.

Which leaves me with two thoughts. First, if authenticity and sincerity  and Franzenicity are the concepts that have replaced postmodernism in our collective affections, then how do we deal with the likes of Jade Goody or William Hung, who have commodified “realness” into a sort of hyperauthenticity, bewitching the media with their finely spun un-spun-ness?

The other notion is that to be truly postmodern is to be self-aware, to go through life flanked by metaphorical quotation masks. And yet if you point too hard and too long, it rather spoils the joke. Which is why the defining artefact of postmodernism should not be a Talking Heads movie nor a Philip Johnson building nor even a pair of Tracey Emin’s pants, but Ernie Wise’s wig, which became a cultural touchstone for an entire generation, despite the minor inconvenience of its non-existence. In fact, it took the notion of the simulacrum into places that even poor, dear Baudrillard couldn’t have conceived: you could see it as an original (Wise’s hair) pretending to be a copy (Wise’s wig) of something that purported not to exist any more (the hair again); or indeed as a reality that wasn’t real, masking – literally and figuratively – something that had never existed (Wise’s baldness).

Now, get out of that.

Before I finally go insane

In the absence of any plausible earworms these days, I make up my own. For some reason I can’t shake from my head the notion of Frankie Howerd singing ‘Black Betty’ although – as far as I’m aware – he never did. No worries, because 90s electro-japesters Fortran 5 had a similar idea. The whole point of their version of ‘Layla’ revolves around the moderately amusing fact that ‘Derek and the Dominos’ sounds a bit like ‘Derek Nimmo’. So this is what they did:

A straightforward concept, perhaps, and the execution was even simpler: just plonk Mr Nimmo in the studio with a pink gin and a lyric sheet and you’re done. A little tougher was their attempt at recording Pink Floyd’s song ‘Bike’, replacing the ethereal voice of Syd Barrett with the rather earthier tones of Sid James; the problem was that James had died in 1976. They resorted to some rather elegant splicing of existing recordings, effectively resurrecting the old rogue as a whimsical hippy:

Which rather throws down the gauntlet, doesn’t it? Should I root around the thricenays and oohmissuses of Howerd’s audio oeuvre to make real the bizarre performance that’s banging around my brain? Or is there a more fitting combination of 70s rock anthem and dead comedian that might more profitably occupy my time? Do let me know.

Moon on a stick (the statutory vaguely Royal-Wedding-themed post)

Stewart Lee was, I suppose, a bit of a spear-carrier when I first became aware of him; in the period when comedy was supposedly the new rock and roll, if Newman and Baddiel were the Sex Pistols, Lee and Herring were somewhere between the Damned and the Lurkers. Their TV show, Fist of Fun, was amusing, but the most memorable bits were mostly supplied by Kevin Eldon in the guise of Simon Quinlank, King of Hobbies. And subsequently Lee became one of the lost souls in the self-devouring cycle of Moderately Cerebral Blokish Radio DJ Double Acts Consisting Of Ex-Comedians, Journalists And/Or Musicians. (Essentially, first there was Lee and Herring, and [Andrew] Collins and [Stuart] Maconie – ex-NME, Select, etc – and [Mark] Radcliffe and [Marc] ‘Lard’ [Riley] – ex-The Fall and various other post-punk entities – and then suddenly there was Radcliffe and Maconie, and Collins and Herring, leaving Lee and Lard on a metaphorical shelf somewhere, which is like a real shelf, but in less immediate need of dusting.)

But then suddenly he was back, fatter and balder and pinker and apparently having read more books. In the past week or so he’s written two pieces for British broadsheets that deserve wider attention. First, in the Financial Times of all places, he lays out his principled opposition to the notion that he ought to be creating comedy that can be tweeted or txted, as part of a wider attack on the whole notion of the creative person as a mere content provider. His work is quotable sure, but in passages and paragraphs, and even then you lose some of the context. For example, from the FT article itself:

But today content is king and form is mutable. Can the comic become a film? Can the film become a game? Can the book become an e-book? Can the song become a ringtone? Imagine if the Japanese super-robots the Transformers were suddenly put in charge of all human culture. Here’s a Jacobean tragedy you can also use to mix trifle! Content is being dictated by its possible application to a variety of forms.

And from his most recent TV show:



And just to prove that Lee’s content extends beyond his own metaphorical navel fluff (which strangely finds its way from his metaphorical midriff to the metaphorical shelf mentioned above, where comedians and musicians and journalists who don’t make the grade are sent to die, possibly metaphorically), here he is in The Guardian on the subject of some wedding or another that’s happening today. There’s been some pretty extraordinary content created about this event, and I thought it had simultaneously reached its zenith of weirdness with the Kate and Wills roast dinner, but Lee goes one better by explaining the nuptials in terms of the Grail myth, with reference to the Fisher King and TS Eliot:

The prince has taken his lowly bride from within this charged landscape, where our ancestors celebrated the union of man and woman in stone and earth, and began the communal processes that forged a nation from their descendents, the broken nation that William the Fisher King must now heal. Our shaman-prince could not have chosen a better receptacle for his magical purposes than Kate Middleton, a peasant-spawned serf-girl, sodden with the primordial mire of the Swindon-shadowed swamplands.

Try txting that, you bastards...

PS: More cogent analysis of this utterly speshull day, from Marco Evers in Der Spiegel and Will Self in the New Statesman. Have fun, everyone, and don’t eat all the bunting!

Will the real Simon Amstell please sit down?

One thing that always perplexed me about Moving Wallpaper/Echo Beach, ITV’s flawed-but-at-least-they-tried essay in comedic postmodernism, was the acting of Hannah Lederer-Alton, who played teenage temptress Abi Marrack. By most objective standards, this was a car-crash of a performance, a masterclass in how not to do it. But within the universe of the entwined shows, we weren’t necessarily watching Hannah Lederer-Alton playing the role of Abi Marrack in Echo Beach; we were watching Hannah Lederer-Alton playing the role of a bad actress called ‘Hannah Lederer-Alton’ who played Abi Marrack in Echo Beach. The crises and weaknesses of the Cornish soap were, in part, the engine that drove Moving Wallpaper, so it’s entirely plausible that the fictional producers would have cast a very bad actress in the role. It’s difficult to judge whether the real Lederer-Alton is in fact a bad actress, or a good actress who once played a bad actress, because after leaving Echo Beach she put her acting career on hold to go to university. She’s studying drama, since you ask.

There is no such get-out clause in Grandma’s House, the new BBC vehicle for Simon Amstell; no framing narrative that tells us that this is a play within a play, and that the actors are playing actors. This is, for the most part, an old-fashioned domestic sitcom with some top-class performers (Rebecca Front, Linda Bassett, Geoffrey Hutchings) being very funny indeed.

Into which set-up ambles Amstell, playing himself, or perhaps a simulacrum of himself. As the show starts, ‘Amstell’ announces to his family that he is giving up his role as presenter on Never Mind The Buzzcocks (which he has in fact done), because he has become tired of its inherent cruelty. Immediately we have a problem; Amstell’s entire career is based on being rude to pop stars – his on-screen mother encapsulates his purpose in life as “you’re a presenter who takes the pisss out of people” – and once he’s given that up for ethical reasons, there’s not a lot left. Certainly not acting ability; Amstell seems to be delivering his lines at the level of a first read-through, while the other actors are already up to speed.

It’s as if Amstell has watched other performers playing comic versions of themselves – Tony Hancock; Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm; Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in A Cock And Bull Story; the various guest stars, especially Les Dennis, in Extras – and tried to have a go himself. (I touched on this a few years ago, when discussing Brydon’s Annually Retentive.) But while those creations are exaggerated versions of the original, for the most part funnier and more flawed, the ‘Amstell’ in Grandma’s House is nicer and less funny than the Satanic choirboy who abused lame rappers for our delectation. When he’s rude to or about people (such as Clive, his mother’s boorish fiancé), he offers up half-hearted sneering, as opposed to the vicious deflation he deployed against the likes of Preston out of the Ordinary Boys.

So why is Amstell in the role? The only thing he seems to provide as a performer is a veneer of knowing metafiction that makes the show seem slightly edgier and more sophisticated than it really is; “I am here in real life!” he whines, when his family insists on playing a recording of his latest show. In fact, the most effective nod to the collision of realities is entirely accidental, coming when ‘Amstell’’s grandfather confides that he might be seriously ill; watching it, we know that the actor Geoffrey Hutchings died between filming and transmission. It’s as if broadcasters don’t believe that 21st-century audiences can cope with comedy that doesn’t knowingly tap its nose or put exaggerated air quotes around itself. You know, those staid, unfunny shows like Porridge and Rising Damp and Steptoe and Son.

Moving Wallpaper needed the parallel universe of Echo Beach to give it validity, to make it about something. When, in the second series, the fake soap was removed from the equation, the overall product was fatally wounded. Grandma’s House is potentially strong enough to survive without its intertextual nodding and winking. The premise is fine, the cast is excellent, many of the lines made me laugh. Is it too late for a reboot, with Amstell’s character replaced by an entirely fictitious creation, who’s resigned from a fictitious job on a fictitious comedy quiz show? Amstell (the real one) co-wrote the show, so he can clearly do funny; on the evidence of this, though, he can’t actually be funny.

Maybe in the second series they can give the part to Hannah Lederer-Alton. By that time, she may have learned to act.

Titter ye not much

Disquiet has been expressed within the comedic fraternity about the Foster’s Comedy God poll, in which the current sponsors of the Edinburgh Fringe prize ask us to pick the greatest talent from among all those who have ever been nominated for the award (best remembered from the years when it was the Perrier). Most vociferous among the critics has been the excellent Stewart Lee, who pointed out that very few people voting in the poll would have encountered all the nominated acts, which was why, when he first remarked on it, more recent performers such as Michael McIntyre and Russell Howard were in the lead, rather than... well, that’s where things got a bit out of control, as he recounts:

...I chose at random Frank Chickens, the Japanese female performance art duo, as an example of possibly worthy winners who would not get a look in under this illogical and unfair voting system, and the Twitter world has adopted them as a cause. This was never my intention, and I was drunk when I sent the e-mail in a fit of annoyance anyway, but they are now leading the field, and it appears we should embrace them.

The thing is, being roughly the same age as Mr Lee, I do remember Frank Chickens, and while they might not have been my first choice, they are clearly far more amusing than the bland, gittish likes of McIntyre and Howard. So I voted for them. But in doing so, was I actually subverting the poll, or just adding one more page-view’s-worth of credibility to the whole sorry process, and by some weird collision of digital technology and marketing voodoo, making one dull, Australian lager brand appear to be marginally less horrid than another? If Lee hadn’t sent his original drunken diatribe, I probably wouldn’t even have been aware of the poll, and would just have sighed and shrugged when it was announced that McIntyre is the best thing to have come out of Edinburgh since Burke and Hare. Then again, my contempt for the Foster’s effort has been edged aside by another poll, the results of which suggest that the greatest comedy double act of always and forever is Horne and Corden. Although maybe that, in its own vile way, is more subversive than voting for Frank Chickens.

In any case the Foster’s poll only works if you believe the Fringe is defined by the Awards, which is as absurd as the idea that Edinburgh is defined by the Fringe. (Some people believe that it disappears between September and July, like Brigadoon.) Despite the hundreds of thousands of people there, it’s a deliciously solipsistic experience, with each individual creating a remembered Fringe unique and perfect to himself or herself. I had to check on Wikipedia to see who’d won the Perrier in the years when I was there, but I had no trouble in placing the custard doughnuts and chips with salt-an’-sauce, flyers, Bill Hicks in a tent, telling an American tourist that the Scott Monument was named after Terry Scott, flyers, the guy doing a one-man show about King Saul who needed thirty prompts, flyers, Archaos stopping the traffic, sleeping on the floor, gatecrashing the Fringe Parade and hassling Arden and Frost because they were drinking the wrong lager, that Scotsman review (“...unbelievably atrocious”), the rain, putting the review in the flyers, Jerry Sadowitz not getting served in the bar at the Pleasance and that night in 1993 that Margi Clarke got so annoyed with one persistent heckler that after the gig she went out and poured a pint of lager over the wrong woman. Which is the Fringe only as it is through my tired eyes, but is surely more Fringey than Michael McIntyre.

That said, if you’ve never been, and you really want to know what it’s like, listen to this.

PS: Kazuko Hohki of Frank Chickens responds to the brouhaha: “It’s like someone talking about who won the Derby. I don’t care. I am not a comedian.”

Do bears Shi’ite in the woods?

Religion, eh? Woooh. Tough one. In response to images of Mohammed in a bear suit being snipped from South Park, artist Molly Norris created this:


but then had a change of heart, which she attempted to explain with this:


Now, the most reductive explanation was that she was scared of decapitation, which was the implied threat that had led the South Park episode to get cut. But it’s all a bit more complex than that. Norris’s whimsically satirical suggestion for a ‘Draw Mohammed Day’ was intended to be a statement of support to the beleaguered South Park creators, and a statement of support for free speech; but inevitably it also attracted a fair share of people who just hate Muslims, which made her feel uncomfortable. So in the end she did this:


I wouldn’t presume to tell Molly Norris what she should and shouldn’t do with her pictures; an artists doesn’t necessarily have any social or moral obligations. But I might point out that it can sometimes be more effective to avoid statements altogether, and just to ask questions. Questions such as: “Why are you scared of cartoons?” for example.

Thanks to Dick Headley for flagging this one up. On vaguely related lines, and to show it isn’t just Muslims who suffer from humour fatigue, here’s Cristina Odone claiming that the BBC has it in for Catholics after she was harangued by a stand-up comedian; and yet the self-same organisation tuts at a different stand-up for comparing Palestine to a cake “being punched to pieces by a very angry Jew”. Now, I’d argue that (leaving aside for the moment the uncomfortable status of the word ‘Jew’, as opposed to ‘Jewish person’) Boyle’s line is worthy of TS Eliot, and a far more successful piece of art than the South Park bear or Norris’s doodles or the shrill hectoring of either Hughes or Odone. And one or two Muslims might agree with me. But does that make it OK?

As I said, tricky one.