The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Vıctoria Coren Mitchell How I See It
When Channel 4 tried to teach stand-up comedy, a funny thing happened…
Do you ever have that feeling where you’re so interested in something you can hardly hear it? It’s so gripping, your ears freeze up with a sort of overattentiveness? It’s like the opposite of glazing over with boredom (a skill with which I’ve never been blessed); more like a deafness brought on by a desperate anxiety to hear.
I get it when a hotly debated answer is about to be read out in a pub quiz. I get it when a friend says, “You won’t believe who Sarah’s seeing now…”. I would have got it at the beginning of the “roadmap broadcast” on Monday night, if its contents hadn’t been so comprehensively leaked beforehand. Honestly, they’re really going to have to work on the theatre of these announcements.
And so it was with Stand Up and Deliver, a two-episode special on Channel 4 for their Stand Up To Cancer appeal. It featured five professional comedians training five other public figures to perform five-minute stand-up comedy routines in a competition – all appearing for free, in a laudable charity fundraiser. This arrow hit the bullseye of my personal interest so violently, the board shattered.
My husband and I – quite separately – were asked to take part in this show. I was asked to be one of the “celebrities” trained to do comedy. He was asked to be one of the trainers. Problem is, only one of us has ever done stand-up comedy before, and it isn’t him.
I said no to competing as a novice because I have earned money as a live stand-up (for two years in the 1990s); he said no to being a teacher because he’s never done stand-up at all; and yet he’s both funnier than I am and the only one of us who would be described professionally as a comedian, which does, I must say, point to a slight flaw in the programme’s concept.
I thought about that flaw when I heard that the Rev Richard Coles would be one of the pupils and David Baddiel would be his teacher. A false distinction was being made.
It’s great on paper: laddish, controversial comic teaches gentle, innocent vicar the ropes. But in reality, Richard Coles is a very funny and very worldly man. He often appears to great success on comedy panel shows with large live audiences. Meanwhile, David Baddiel is a clever, fearless and articulate thinker who addresses
questions of life and death, illness, grief and family in his act. What gulf, really, is being crossed here?
Which one of them has just published a book about religious bigotry and the human condition? As it happens, David. Which one hosts Saturday Live on Radio 4? As it happens, Richard. But they could easily swap. For the purposes of a stand-up act, the only difference is that David is funnier.
I hope Richard won’t mind me saying that. I am an adoring fan of that glorious priest. Both these men are good friends of mine, and I’ve been grateful to work alongside them many times on TV and radio. They’re both terrific. I would happily pay to watch either on stage talking for a couple of hours. But David Baddiel has the comedy X-factor; he can push it to a different place; he can leave you helpless and tearful. He’s funnier than Richard and he’s funnier than me, and the thing he’s got cannot be taught.
What can I tell you? Richard Coles is still funnier than two of the stand-up mentors in the programme. Also, he has a greater depth of understanding than David Baddiel. (Although David would disagree with me. That’s because he’s an atheist and I’m not. And neither, I hope, is Richard Coles.)
At the opposite end of the spectrum was the pairing of Baroness Warsi and her mentor, Nick Helm. These are not two
people who could swap jobs. Helm repeatedly lamented the short straw of drawing a Tory, which I thought was boring of him (or at least of the programme’s editors): comedians should push through to the deeper truth, which is the complexity and nuance of human nature.
All the trainers talked – quite correctly – about the best comedy coming from truth. And yet they were all a little blinkered when it came to Sayeeda Warsi. “Tories” were talked of as a type, as though Theresa May were the same as Jacob Rees-Mogg, and George Osborne the same as Norman Tebbit. This failed to recognise the contempt Warsi clearly feels for the posh boys who underestimate her – a contempt that Prime Ministers John Major and
Margaret Thatcher will also have felt – and which, if I had been her mentor, I would have suggested as the starting point for a potentially brilliant stand-up routine.
Instead, Lady Warsi was encouraged to swear a lot on stage, which Nick Helm believed was pulling a mask away but I thought was putting one on. Boris Johnson, David Cameron, Alan Clark: all natural swearers. Sayeeda Warsi, Theresa May, Norman Fowler: no. And yet, although I just put her in a sentence with two of the least funny people who’ve ever existed, the Baroness is a very amusing woman.
She’s full of contradictions that she both understands and can express with a ballsy, witty frankness. These comics have nothing to teach her. In fact, her best line came when she was offstage, competition over, and no longer trying to follow instructions. They asked if she would be in trouble for all the swearing.
“Oh no,” she said. “Tories don’t watch Channel 4.”
‘Tories’ were talked of as a type, as if Theresa May were the same as Jacob Rees-Mogg