The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
VICTORIA COREN MITCHELL HOW I SEE IT
There’s nothing like isolation to make us appreciate a studio audience
In the past few days, several TV production companies have been in touch to ask whether I’d be happy to appear on comedy panel shows with no studio audience. The obvious answer is: “Delighted! My jokes are always met with silence anyway.”
On Only Connect, they literally are. We don’t have a live audience, so I’m used to my jokes receiving no reaction at all. Sometimes the contestants are kind enough to chuckle, but often – especially during my introductory remarks – they are too nervous or focused to laugh. Sometimes I glimpse the shake of a cameraman’s shoulder, but the crew remains mute out of sheer professionalism. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself.
I actually find this liberating.
I’m free to make some quite strange jokes direct to camera – or viewer – without worrying about the immediate reaction in the room. I enjoy this because I find something absurd in all comments made by quiz show hosts anyway.
It’s customary to offer welcoming remarks and a closing epigram, but this is a pointless nicety, like men wearing a tie (about which there is also something absurd). Viewers are there to hear questions, guess answers and watch the contest.
It is inherently silly to pad out the format with pleasantries.
And yet people take them quite seriously! I even get complaints online, sometimes, from people who didn’t enjoy my closing joke. My response is always: “Why were you still watching? The quiz was finished.”
Thus, although I hope the viewers at home are amused by my various pieces to camera, I also mean them to be something of a pastiche. One time, I began a show with the words, “Quiz beginning: to be written. Let’s meet the teams.”
Another time, I said: “Apologies if you’ve tuned in expecting to see the exciting conclusion of the European Masters Golf live from the Belfry. You can switch over to BBC Four – although it’s not on there either. The BBC aren’t actually showing it. In fact, the European Masters isn’t taking place right now. How could it be? I invented it. If you’ve tuned in to watch the European Masters Golf live from the Belfry, you’re living with a very slender grasp of what happens in the real world. So stay and watch the show – you’re in good company.”
Another time, really beckoning viewers into the vortex, I said: “Hello and welcome to Oakerly Mekt… Oops! Sorry, one for the bloopers reel there! Cut, cut, we need to start again … except we don’t because this isn’t Only Connect, it’s Only Be Connect on the Night, a compendium of errors from Only Connect! But it only includes the errors from episode 18, which featured, on my right…” and then I introduced the teams and we recorded episode 18 of the series.
Does anybody laugh audibly at home? I have no idea.
But certainly some viewers understand the deeper joke I’m going for, and appreciate it in a way that makes us soulmates.
A proper comedy programme would feel odder with no audience. Nevertheless, all panel shows due to record in spring/ summer 2020 are considering that option. I hope they are able to go ahead: in this country I’d classify making jokes as essential work, up there with selling food and mending roads. I’m not sure if the Government will agree, though we surely have a PM with a greater than usual grasp of entertainment?
I think viewers will be comfortable watching comedy shows with no laughter because we are used to it from modern sitcoms. Twenty years ago, it became so fashionable to record comedy shows without a studio audience that people started sneering at the very idea of having one. It became voguish, during the broadcast of traditional-style sitcoms, to tweet smart-arse remarks about “canned laughter”, not understanding this was the true laughter of real people at a real performance: a beautiful sound, bringing the collective pleasure of humanity into our lonely living rooms.
Giving the Ronnie Barker Lecture for the BBC a couple of years ago, Ben Elton proposed that a snobbery had arisen “because the laughter is evidence of effort. The terrible British sin of going for laughs [or of being seen to try hard at anything]. Laughs which will then be routinely dismissed as ‘cheap’ and ‘easy’.” Of course, they are anything but.
From The Office to Fleabag, there have been great sitcoms made on closed sets, but I think the pendulum will swing back now. Isolated in our homes, we yearn for the sound of collective laughter. And this has always been seen as a necessity of the panel game – but surely comedy made in empty studios is better than no comedy at all? It was even tried, last week, on a chat show, Channel 4’s The Last Leg, and it worked absolutely fine. It was the only way for the performers (Adam Hills, Alex Brooker, Josh Widdicombe, Tom Allen and Lorraine Kelly) to gather and make live jokes about our developing crisis – and those jokes were reassuring and comforting to hear.
Meanwhile, Only Connect concludes this Monday night on BBC Two and I hope the final will also prove a comfort in your isolation. Not because you’ll get any answers (by this stage of the series, I can barely understand the questions), but because it was such a jolly recording with such likeable, sweet-tempered teams. The sporting spirit will be cheering, I think.
And if you don’t laugh at my jokes, I’ll be none the wiser.
She had been calling on Miss Bates, and as soon as she entered the room had been struck by the sight of a pianoforte – a very elegant looking instrument – not a grand, but a large-sized square pianoforte.___
He began thundering on the piano, and singing to it with loud and lofty enthusiasm; only interrupting himself, at intervals, to announce to me fiercely the titles
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