It’s high time Cambridge Footlights moved on
Staying ‘pale, male and stale’ is killing the Cambridge comedy society, says alumnus Kit Hesketh-harvey
From Peter Cook to Dudley Moore; John Cleese and the rest of the Pythons; the Not the Nine O’clock News lot; Fry and Laurie, and later Mel and Sue – the Cambridge Footlights has been the lifeblood of British comedy for decades. The dominance of alumni from the university’s prestigious comedy society, both in front of the camera and behind, has never really abated.
I was there from 1976-79, with great talents like Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, as well as Griff Rhys Jones, Nick Hytner, Jimmy Mulville and Rory Mcgrath.
In my entirely biased opinion, Footlights was truly at its storming best in the late Seventies. Of course, when you are living through a golden age, you rarely have any idea of it. But golden it certainly was. Now, though, I can see clearly that the Footlights of old has cast a very long shadow. It’s why the magnificent old institution has found itself in its current predicament.
A row broke out this week when Ruby Keane, the president, resigned from her post in protest at the system for nominating new members and claiming a lack of opportunities for aspiring comedians from non-white backgrounds.
She wrote in an open letter that the committee system (which sees current members choose new ones) seemed to be “left over from a time when there were only around 10 white men who did comedy in Cambridge”. The society, meanwhile, claims Ms Keane was “asked to resign”.
Whatever the circumstances around her departure, her point is absolutely sound. Institutions can be great but they can also become trapped by their own nostalgia and smugness and unless they adapt, they die.
While I was at Cambridge, it was conclusively proven for the first time that women could indeed be very, very funny. Watching Emma Thompson’s performances remain among some of my best memories of that time. She was revelatory and revolutionary, with her fantastic deadpan humour, and showed women could be screamingly funny without playing the men’s game.
She (along with Sandi Toksvig and Jan Ravens) was a mould-breaker; before that, the Footlights had always been a place where white men were amusing about institutions of power – the Church, Parliament – which were also dominated by white men.
The targets of their satire were predominantly masculine – and if a female part was required, someone would simply put on a dress.
In fact, Footlights has always had a very long history of camp humour. We seemed to spend most of our time in frocks, having the most fantastic time. I have a very dear memory of dancing in drag with Stephen Fry, at one point or other. The truth is that there was a time and a place for that brand of comedy, and the world is very different now.
That vein of humour endured for decades after the Pythons had left the university’s hallowed halls. Its trouble, I think, has always been that every generation since Peter Cook has tried, through its comedy, to hark back to a time that has passed. Rather than move with the times, callow undergraduates have worshipped their heroes; tending to imitate rather than revolutionise.
Cambridge is so cloistered and introspective, it takes a while for the outside world to filter in. It sends its alumni out to change the world, but it takes Cambridge a while to cotton on to what the world is actually doing. In the late Seventies, due to the history of endowments and links to public schools, it was still a pretty masculine set-up. The dons were predominantly men and certainly all white.
Thankfully, these bastions eventually began to crumble, but it has taken an awfully long time for them to be shaken off completely. Indeed, if this week’s row is anything to go by, they are still yet to be shaken entirely.
You see that not just within the Cambridge cloisters, but in comedy in general. You have only to turn on the television to see that it is still as male, pale and stale as ever.
Why? Partly because the graduates of places like the Footlights go on to become the commissioning editors. But if TV networks are still getting it
‘If a female part was required for a sketch, a man would simply put on a dress’
wrong when it comes to diversity, shouldn’t it be down to the next generation of students coming through to bring about real change?
It is sometimes difficult to acknowledge while you’re there, having the three best years of your life, that the world outside bears little relation to the one you are briefly inhabiting. Perhaps Cambridge is just too beautiful and beguiling when you’re in it; I imagine it’s easy to kid yourself that as a member of the Footlights you are supposed to be continuing this long tradition of Great British Humour. But you can only ever do great comedy when you are also being truthful, relevant and different.
In the old days, you had Dudley Moore who was a brilliant pianist, Peter Cook who was camp and languid, Alan Bennett who was, well, Alan Bennett – whimsical and northern. It was the variation in their personalities and backgrounds that made them funny, and they were still all white men.
If, in 2018, an institution like the Footlights allows itself to pose barriers to women and ethnic minorities, it is missing a huge comic trick. There is absolutely no question that anyone can be funny.
So it must evolve or risk vanishing into its own gravy, with the fat congealing on the top.