Keith Harris, Orville and the lost age of oddball comedy

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/apr/29/keith-harris-and-orville-oddball-comedy

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Will we ever see his like again? Keith Harris is dead, and for once, cliches such as “they don’t make them like that any more” are probably true. For those of us of a 1970s vintage, Harris wasn’t in any way unique, or incongruous – he and his ilk were staples of the telly of our childhoods. Back then, comedy on TV was capacious enough to include ventriloquists, cross-dressing child impersonators, men oddly grafted on to cloth ostriches – you name it. Should we lament the end of that era? Or celebrate that comedy – variety, more properly named – has loosed the bonds of naffness for good?

Related: Keith Harris: a life in pictures

It didn’t seem naff, exactly, when I was a kid; it seemed normal. TV back then was The Paul Daniels Magic Show and Swap Shop, Crackerjack and The Royal Variety Performance. There was no Michael McIntyre’s Roadshow or Live at the Apollo. We were still living in music hall’s shadow, and standup had not yet come to dominate the light-entertainment landscape. If programmers wanted a brand of funny that could make the whole family laugh, they called on Harris, or – just as weird – Rod Hull and Emu. If they weren’t available, you could get a man with a spitting dog (Bob Carolgees), a man who pulled funny faces for a living (Phil Cool), or a troupe of overweight dancing women (the Roly-Polys). Reader, these were giddy times.

So what killed the “spesh act”? Why did the public appetite die for, er, comedians pretending their microphones were broken? Well, alternative comedy is partly the culprit – for exposing how un-cool variety was; for establishing comedy as a vessel for meaning, subversion even, not just a thoughtless giggle. And audiences and technologies got more sophisticated, in a way that left behind what in many cases were essentially one-trick-pony nuggets of children’s entertainment.

Then there was the naffness/creepiness factor. All those rictus-grinning, bow-tied gents, oozing insincerity as they talked to their dolls (and countless TV and movie narratives about the sinister flipside to ventriloquism, for example) put us off. We began to prefer the homeliness and seeming authenticity that standup offers.

Variety survives, to some degree. Acts like The Boy with Tape on His Face prosper, in cabaret and circus contexts as well as the standup circuit. Nina Conti pretty much single-handedly sustains the profile of UK ventriloquism – and shows, to boot, how this art form can be made spry and self-knowing enough for 21st-century tastes. Occasionally, voice-throwing crops up on one of Simon Cowell’s talent shows – on the last occasion, getting the French ventriloquist Marc Metral into hot water with the RSPCA. His doll was a real, live dog – whose jaw he was accused of manipulating in the name of primetime entertainment.

That’s what we’re missing: in the 1970s, Metral would have been a TV mainstay (as he apparently still is in France). Amid a sea of personable, honest, un-messed-up comedians, where are the oddball entertainers to make us speculate wildly about what goes on in their hearts, heads and beds? I mean, Ian and Janette Krankie: how did that work? And “I often pretend, my sadness will end. But it won’t / It will / It won’t!” – what was that all about? Or as Rod Hull once said, “I want to write, but Emu doesn’t leave me the time. I want to be a comedian in my own right, but Emu won’t let me do it.”

If Keith Harris’s death marks the end of such weird co-dependency masquerading as humour – if the space is shrinking to zero, in other words, for oddball clowns with un-guessable psychological hinterlands – aren’t we the poorer for it?

Three to see

Machynlleth comedy festival

A cracking lineup in Wales of new work from Aisling Bea, James Acaster, Tim Key and others, alongside comic-tinged theatre from Sh!t Theatre, Rachel Mars and more.

Machynlleth, 1 to 3 May

Live at Parliament Square

Bridget Christie, Gein’s Family Giftshop and Liam Williams top the bill at the first of three election-week gigs opposite the Houses of Parliament as part of Occupy’s festival of democracy.

Parliament Square, London, 5,7 and 9 May

Alex Horne

Horne’s Edinburgh comedy award nugget of stunt comedy – an hour of jokes, an act of construction and a metaphor for life rolled into one – starts its tour with a London run.

Soho theatre, London, 4 to 16 May.