Déjà vu all over again!
IT’S said that history has a habit of repeating itself, which is quite a daunting prospect. Who wants Viking longboats returning to Swansea Marina and warriors in horned helmets pillaging supermarket shelves (“Look, Sven! Chocolate digestives are on special offer – two packets for £1.50!” “Excellent value, Ragnar! Take two hundred! And grab six packets of Hob Nobs. Mrs Sven loves them!”) and running back to the fjords with half-a-dozen check-out girls and Brenda from the deli counter?
You wouldn’t want to see Roman centurions marching past your front door on their way to set up a gladiator school, hot baths and pizza parlour at the local leisure centre. On the plus side, if they did invade again, I reckon their first port of call would be the Highways Department to ask why they’d failed to maintain the straight, potholefree roads they’d laid down in 388 AD.
My thoughts on history repeating itself came about when I read that comedy duo Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders are complaining they can’t interest the BBC in making another series of their sketch show, which ran from 1987 for five series, because TV bosses think they’re too old now they’re in their sixties.
Isn’t irony absolutely fabulous? This is the same French and Saunders who, like many of the performers who left university and crashed on to the comedy scene, had nothing good to say about the established, middle-aged TV comedy performers of the time. As younger comedy fans took to them, they quickly elbowed the Brucies and Tarbys out of prime time and took over TV comedy, eventually becoming “mainstream” themselves.
And now, several decades on, a new generation of comedians have elbowed them off our TV screens – despite the fact there are hundreds more TV channels now than there were in the ‘80s.
I just hope the new generation of comedians at the top remember that one day, someone will be eager to elbow them out of the way too!
Your homework this week, students is a 1,000-word essay on… “The use of elbows in the comedy profession!”