Keeping Quiet
Julian Dutton remembers the silent comedies of the 60s, 70s and beyond
Slapstick, in the 1960s and 70s? Surely physical knockabout comedy died with the old silent stars in the roaring 20s? Not so. In the 1960s and 70s, a much-loved and sometimes forgotten genre of screen fun was the revival of comedy without words, made by some of the best-loved British stars of the era: Eric Sykes, Ronnie Barker and Marty Feldman to name but three. Not completely silent, but what became known as “sound effect” or “grunt and grumble” comedies.
Who does not remember Eric Sykes’ immortal The Plank of 1967, when a veritable banquet of British comedy stars from Tommy Cooper to Jimmy Edwards appeared in the thoroughly broad romp of two workmen transporting a wooden plank from warehouse to building site? Never has a film had a simpler premise, yet none of the actors spoke, merely peppering a scene with unintelligible grunting or jabbering. Eric Sykes explained the thinking behind his masterpiece: “A visual gag is worth three pages of dialogue. Two visual gags and you’re well on the way to fame and fortune.”
The Plank was not the first British all visual comedy film and wouldn’t be the last: it followed a rich tradition of comics choosing to return to the basic roots of screen fun, the slapstick gag. But what was the origin of this revival? Well, it was largely the result of an enterprising American producer, Robert Youngson, who compiled a series of internationally popular clip shows – The Golden Age of Comedy (1957) and When Comedy was King (1960).
These films showcased the cream of the old slapstick stars: Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and fired the imagination of British comics such as Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers, who found fame as the Goons then burst on to cinema screens in 1959 with their seminal The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film, with Sellers going on to create one of the great slapstick screen clowns, Inspector Clouseau.
Before making The Plank, many of the most memorable episodes of Sykes’ long-running TV series Sykes and A… involved a physical predicament. In one show, he and his sister Hattie (Hattie Jacques) found themselves handcuffed together, performing a classic mime sequence as they try to eat dinner: the tug and pull of each other’s arms as they both attempt to take mouthfuls is an hilarious routine whose deftness reveals meticulous rehearsal. And when in 1964 he wrote Sykes and a Plank, he unwittingly was sowing the seeds for the flowering, three years later, of the first silent British comedy feature film for three decades.
My love affair with silent comedy began as a small boy when I watched Bob Monkhouse’s series Mad Movies on ITV between 1965 and 1967, and Golden Silents, the BBC’S slightly more upmarket version of Monkhouse’s show filmed at the NFT and presented by Michael Bentine. So, when I discovered that comedians were still making visual comedy, my joy became stratospheric.
Sykes followed up The Plank with Rhubarb Rhubarb (1980), It’s Your Move (1982), and Mr H is Late (1988) for Thames Television, three masterpieces of near silent or “sound effect” comedy. Rhubarb Rhubarb has a somewhat mystical tone, using some surreal sight gags reminiscent of Buster Keaton. Once again, the central premise of the story is simplicity itself – a chief inspector (Sykes) plays a vicar (Bob Todd) at golf. The inspector cheats, using bumbling bobby Jimmy Edwards to clandestinely assist him, and the vicar in turn uses God. A divine wind curves his ball on to the green; his club emerges from the bag of its own accord; the creator even makes a shed move right in front of Sykes just as he’s about to tee off. And the miracles become more impressive: a tree does a nifty sidestep; Todd walks Christlike across a lake; and in an animated graphic particularly novel for its time, the ball makes divine progress from hole to hole adorned with angels’ wings and accompanied by a choir, while the policeman’s ball careers into the rough to the strains of a siren.
Sykes was not the only British comedy star who returned to his first love, silent comedy. Rightly remembered as one of our finest television actors for his role as Norman Stanley Fletcher in Porridge Porridge, Arkwright in Open All Hours, and for his prime-time sketch show The
Two Ronnies, Ronnie Barker’s range as a verbal comedian was already vast when he, too, turned to silent comedy, becoming one of its most creative champions. Futtocks End, The Picnic and By the Sea were Barker’s rich contribution to the canon.
Barker’s skill at visual comedy had first been showcased in A Home of Your Own (1965), which inspired him to write his own. He explained later to interviewer Bob Mccabe in 2005: “There’s a lot one can do without any words and I like complicated things. [Futtocks End] was a very complicated thing to write. Someone said to me that it must have been very easy because there was no dialogue. But it was the hardest thing to write… it was a very thick script even though there wasn’t a word spoken.”
Futtocks End is a joyous homage to the Donald Mcgill saucy postcard. As lusty as Benny Hill, the peregrinations of General Futtock and the inhabitants of his decaying Dorset manor were a throwback to the world of PG Wodehouse, featuring coquettish maids, doddering butlers, idiotic chinless wonders and peppery colonels. This was Blandings with slapstick.
In Futtocks End, Barker recalled, when talking to Mccabe: “I wanted to capture that sort of far-off, childhood summer… Although everything was funny in it, there was still a feeling of an unreal little encapsulated world. Which is the same with the others to a degree [The Picnic and By the Sea]. In The Picnic it’s an Edwardian picture. It’s a situation that’s unreal to most people, and that’s what I liked about it.”
For all its gentle English humour, Futtocks End is not averse to the surreal: a self-portrait of Van Gogh falls off the wall, causing his hat to drop down over his eyes. There is a marvellous sequence when a bread roll drops under the dinner table and becomes the ball in a “football match”, complete with cheering crowd and goalscoring.
There is traceable pathway from the visual work of Eric Sykes and Ronnie Barker to the global phenomenon of Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean – via the wonderful slapstick of Marty Feldman and the memorable visual sketches of Dave Allen. Like Feldman, Atkinson is a clown, using his entire body and facial expressions as part of the plot of a scene. But where did Bean come from? The television series launched in 1990 but Atkinson’s reputation as a visual clown went right back to his stage work at university. From the start, Atkinson and his co-writer Richard Curtis identified Bean as not of this world – quite literally, in the opening sequence, he is beamed to Earth from outer space.
Consisting of a series of two or three sketches, each episode of Mr Bean abounded with sublime sight gags, built around extended routines. The lunch in the park routine, performed as a sandwich eating businessman sits beside him on the bench and observes him in growing puzzlement, is reminiscent of Stan Laurel. Like Laurel, Bean has all sorts of odd items of food stashed away inside his coat but, unlike Laurel, there is no surrealism, such as eating a hat or lighting his thumb. Bean rinses a lettuce and shakes it in his sock; slices bread from a loaf; stuns live minnows from a jam-jar and places them carefully inside the sandwich.
Mr Bean won the Rose d’or and was sold to 245 territories worldwide, so inevitably movies were in the offing. Bean: The Ultimate Disaster Movie (1997) and Mr Bean’s Holiday (2007) were both worldwide smash hits, and it was his appearance as the only comedian at the opening ceremony in the 2012 Olympics in London that cemented
Atkinson as probably the most famous comedian in the world.
After years of working on television impression shows and children’s comedy, I decided in 2015 to pay homage to my comic heroes – Sykes, Barker and Feldman – by creating Pompidou with Matt Lucas, the roly-poly funster from Little Britain. Our aim was to create a fun, teatime all-visual comedy that all the family could enjoy. There hadn’t been a Mr Bean episode for many years, and I felt the time was ripe to reinvent the grunt and grumble comedy half-hour. We wrote a script, and a series was quickly snapped up by the BBC.
Surrealism, we felt, would supply us with a much-needed contrast with Mr Bean and Futtocks End, so in Pompidou a shoe-shine machine in a hotel grinds people’s feet down to white powder, and shadows have lives independent of their owners. Pompidou, sunbathing in a park, has a makeshift dog-collar painted on him by a groundsman applying white lines to the edge of a putting green, and from then on is perceived as a vicar.
Humans behave like objects: a fat man has a charity badge pinned on him and promptly pops like a balloon; Pompidou accidentally flattens his neighbour with a garden roller, then attempts to post the paper-thin fellow through his letterbox. A man in a hospital waiting room has a pencil-thin moustache that resembles the hands of the clock right above his head; and as Pompidou stares, the moustache ends start moving in synchronicity with the timepiece.
Filming began on Pompidou in the summer of 2014. Someone mentioned an old silent film studio had stood only 1½ miles away, and The Plank had been filmed in the streets roundabout. And now here we were, another group of people assembling with the same aim of producing wordless films in an attempt to make people laugh.
We felt part of a grand tradition. As the director yelled “Action!” we toasted Eric Sykes, Ronnie Barker, Marty Feldman and all those other great British comics who chose to keep quiet.
Julian Dutton is the author of Keeping Quiet: Visual Comedy in the Age of Sound, published by Chaplin Books. He co-created The Big Impression for BBC One, Pompidou for BBC
Two and Netflix, and has won a Bafta and British Comedy Award for his television and radio work. He is the author of six books.