Although I found Count Arthur Strong's Radio Show on Radio 4 entertaining I had reservations about whether it really worked as a sitcom, as opposed to an extended sketch or "turn". I could see that he belonged to a noble tradition of bumblers but a big part of the pleasure of, say, The Shuttleworths (the original Radio 4 series featuring John Shuttleworth), is the sense it conveys of the constricted world which Graham Fellows' creation inhabits: hospices, garden centres (with their newfangled "campuccinos"), fun runs etc.
I didn't get a similar sense of a precisely realised setting during the Count's radio outings: such details of his showbiz career as occasionally escaped his lips in those shows seemed vague and fragmentary. Had his showbiz career all been in his mind? If not, just how far had he ascended on the showbiz ladder and what had gone wrong?
I needed to know what was at stake for him when he messed up; instead I found myself distracted when some detail or other didn't seem to fit into what I presumed had been his showbiz era or when some sudden lurch in tone or ambiguity about the character's intentions would be enough to jolt me out of the fragile fantasy.Writing some years ago on the now-vanished forum for BBC 7 (the station now trading as Radio 4 Extra) I wondered whether Steve Delaney's creation would resonate in the way that, for me anyway, Graham Fellows' John Shuttleworth did: aren't we all, like John, filling time with meaningless activity, avoiding the bleak thought of "the only end of age"?
Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy those comital radio escapades. Comedy can can heal and inform; it can reassure; it can divert. When it manages to do all these at the same time it becomes particularly worthwhile. But diversion is still welcome. During his terminal illness I was corresponding with a friend who was analysing the structure of a sitcom in some detail then went on to mention an episode of Simon Nye's lesser-known show Hardware which he'd seen the night before. Structurally, he said, it was slipshod and careless by comparison, but by God it made him laugh and he was grateful enough for that.
As, most of the time, am I: there was a pleasure in anticipating whichever not-quite-right phrase the radiophonic Arthur might grope towards next, but enjoying the warped logic of his associative process wasn't quite enough.
Some have compared Delaney's character to Harry Worth, whose TV persona was essentially that of a mild, well-meaning, unfailingly cheery individual inadvertently creating mayhem around him with a few ill-chosen words. Worth's holy innocent felt substantial, real; in the case of the venerable Count, however, it seemed a little too obvious that he had been conceived primarily as a vehicle for malapropisms - I couldn't be sure what, if anything, was underneath. Others in the forum said the show was just funny and couldn't see the problem; I agreed that it did amuse and divert but because of the insubstantiality of the world in which he moved, the supporting characters often little more than stooges, it seemed to me to be comedy of a second division order.
This is not about ascribing a higher value to sitcoms which seem closer to comedy-drama; I just feel that however light-hearted the piece we still need to understand a character's motivation and that he, in some way, must provide us with a mirror of our own follies and aspirations.I specified "The Shuttleworths" earlier because I have reservations about the other settings in which Graham Fellows subsequently placed John and regard the series of that name, with its domestic setting and absence of star guests, as the best setting for the character. Fellows told William Cook that one episode in the first series, Pillock of the Community, contained the best writing of any episode he'd written to date, even though very little happened: spotting a discarded Curly Wurly wrapper in the grounds of a hospice was peak excitement.
But it worked: Shuttleworth may be boring but you feel that his creator loves and understands him and sees aspects of himself in him (I don't know any of this, of course, other than reading in interviews with Fellows that the character was based in part on old men he observed during fancy mice contests in draughty church halls as a teenager and partly on his own father). In the "Pillock" episode John wasn't being mocked from a distance; indeed, you could easily envy his ability to take pleasure from immersion in such trivial matters as a discarded chocolate bar wrapper rather than bemoan the fact that everyone had taken active steps to avoid his company.
The song which closes that particular episode is a litany of trivial matters and pursuits, akin to that Thomas Hardy poem Not Only I in which a woman, contemplating her death, imagines all the things which will vanish with her:
And the joyous springs and summers,
And the jaunts with blithe newcomers,
... And the grays and blues
Of the far-off views,
That nobody else discerned outspread;
And little achievements for blame or praise;
Things left undone; things left unsaid;
In brief, my days!
... Strange happenings quite unrecorded,
Lost to the world and disregarded ...
For John it's:
... pubs and clubs
The bus to Crookes
And Scouts and Cubs
And Dobermann pups
And woodland paths
And parks and caffs
A Shandy Bass
In a lady's glass
Here is that song from the episode. John doesn't introduce it, nor is there any attempt by Fellows to incorporate it into the narrative; we just hear it swelling up behind John as his monologue meanders to a close though it seems to encapsulate all the days of which this has been merely one example:
A Shuttleworthian detail unremarked by John on this occasion is that the particular keyboard setting he has chosen for this song, Scenes from South Yorkshire, samples a Frank Sinatra/Tommy Dorsey recording: the looped trombone which underpins John's musings is, appropriately enough, an example of the art of the musician and bandleader known as the Sentimental Gentleman.
But I, too, am meandering from my titular subject. One BBC 7 messageboard contributor said, in response to some of my criticisms, "He's Count Arthur Strong, there is no antecedent, he's not mimicking anyone or deconstructing anyone" - but at the very least Steve Delaney was drawing on a tradition of word-mangling comedians like Hylda Baker. I suppose it's that I needed something between the jokes: a strain of melancholy, perhaps. If I feel I'm just being sold gags then that isn't enough to take a sitcom to my heart even if it passes a perfectly agreeable half hour. I "got" the humanity and vulnerability of John Shuttleworth and Harry Worth but felt more manipulated in the Count's case.
Another BBC 7 messageboarder protested: "There is not the time to develop character [in the programme], and it's not the point anyway, characters should only be sketched out enough to provide jokes!" But I think sitcom could be more accurately described as "charactercom" (a phrase possibly coined by sitcom writer John Brennan): without the character element it's difficult to care. There is a relationship at the heart of many sitcoms: Frasier and Martin; Harold and Albert; Del Boy and Rodney and many others, usually with a sense that one partner is grounded in a more earthy reality than the other, Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote.
I went with my late friend to see the series of sitcom tryouts which Channel 4 used to present at the Riverside Studios in London in the 1990s. Three different shows were staged each night, often very entertaining although it wasn't altogether surprising that so few eventually made it to TV.
There were two common flaws. A lot of the would-be shows were telling a single story with a conclusion: entertaining enough as a half hour comedy but lacking obvious potential for further episodes. The other recurrent mistake was writers treating the exercise solely as a means of cramming half an hour with as many gags as possible at the expense of character, pummelling the audience into exhausted submission, presumably in the hope that someone from Channel 4 would be swayed by the resultant laff-o-rama and fail to register its essentially hollow tone.
Even when things appeared to work well during the thirty minutes' traffic you could instinctively tell which shows were really a kind of confidence trick. And I like to think that Channel 4 executives felt the same (or possibly they just didn't like commissioning shows). I certainly remember on another occasion talking to Mike Bolland, once a major player on Channel 4 and BBC Scotland, and agreeing with him that sitcom had essentially the same rules as drama - plus gags. But the gags had to come out of the characters, and therefore the characters had to be thoroughly understood first.
When, in that famous scene, Basil Fawlty berates the mini with a branch it's funny because he has led himself to this disastrous state of affairs but he has to take out his anger on something external rather than admit his own stupidity to himself. It's a slapstick, physical comedy moment but it comes out of Basil's personal inadequacy.
The same could be said of many Frasier moments. And the regularly hymned "Don't tell him, Pike!" comes out of Mainwaring's understandable anxiety to protect the "stupid boy".
The Hancock character is more fully rounded than Count Arthur - not simply because we've seen him in a greater variety of situations but because Galton and Simpson understood about using other characters to illuminate that main character. They have said that later writers for Hancock got it wrong - he needed to be up against intransigent officialdom for his bluster to appear human and understandable, otherwise he could simply come over as the term they often gave him to decry others: a buffoon. And I would suggest much the same is true for Victor Meldrew: Victor's actions may compound a problem but it invariably starts with a thoughtless workman or whatever. Knowing the character inside out is the first essential step from which appropriate jokes can be fashioned.
In Frank Skinner's now largely forgotten sitcom Shane I found it quite disturbing (but hypnotic) to witness the way that Skinner (and his scary sitcom mini-me son) were unrelenting gag machines at the expense of believability and consistency of any sort. Ditto a brief-lived series called Blind Men (I think), with Jesse Birdsall, Sophie Thompson and someone else about two rival salesmen. One line which Ms. Thompson had was along the lines of "If ear hairs were explosives you wouldn't have enough to blow your brains out" and it immediately became apparent: Funny Line. The writer had written a Funny Line. Forget about what's going on in the story, just don't let this Funny Line escape. Yes, it was an ITV 1 sitcom (remember them?) but even so.
Simon Nye, by contrast, is a master at bedding down gags in character: in Men Behaving Badly it's clear how the Gary character is feeling with each jokey line he utters. And if Caroline Quentin's character had spoken a line like Sophie Thompson's character you can bet Gary would be ironically clutching his stomach, ie registering that Dorothy had been trying to be clever, to score a point off him.
In Nye's best work we can have our cake and eat it, which I think is what sitcoms are meant to do: we're being amused and being carried along in the story as we see the character pursuing his or her goal.
And this doesn't exempt the more surreal examples of the genre. The world of Father Ted, say, has its own logic and rules and in each episode we can believe and accept whatever it is Ted is striving to achieve; even if you examine the supremely strange Nightingales by the late Paul Makin you will find it's clear what the characters want beat by beat, even when the show morphs into a Jacobean revenge tragedy.
Even in something as broadbrush and simple as On the Buses the characters have clear objectives and, dated as the barbs may be, there is always some kind of comeback by Blakey or Olive to whatever gag-cum-insult may be hurled at them. According to the show's fanclub website Stephen Lewis even invented a backstory for Blakey - y'know, just like for real drama (just don't ask me to explain the array of dollybirds willing to throw themselves at Reg Varney). In the biography of Doris Hare, written by her daughter, and in the one biography of Reg Varney (more of a booklet than a book) the series isn't remembered fondly but something which Reg Varney once said in an interview made a lot of sense to me: I can't recall the precise wording, just that when he picked up the first script or scripts he immediately understood that this was about a family really struggling to get by financially.
The actress Irene Vanbrugh, who worked on the gossamer-light stage comedies of AA Milne in the 1920s, said something to the effect that his characters appeared to be protected from the world by a veil of gauze, but that Milne's writing was such that you felt the characters could rip that gauze down if they wanted. Sitcoms don't need to dig deep into character each week but you need to have a sense, I think, of who the characters are and what they want in order to feel that necessary, or at least desirable, immersion. As in straight drama, when that isn't clear then an audience, whether it is able to articulate that lack or not, will be uneasy.
Which is how I felt about the radio incarnation of Count Arthur Strong. It didn't feel to me like there was a sufficiently thought-through backstory, that it was all gauze - all cleverness, with nothing underneath.
But then came the TV series.
It was cocreated by Graham Linehan (also responsible for one of the few tryout sitcoms at the Riverside Studios to make it intact to Channel 4, Black Books) and had intentional echoes, if I remember correctly, of Steptoe and Son. TV Arthur doesn't carry the show on his own but is drawn into a relationship with the embittered son of his late comedy partner, a writer. The younger character is nicely set up: his complicated relationship with his late father means he has a compelling need for Arthur, exasperating as he is, to fill in the gaps for the biography he has been commissioned to write.
Three small moments in that first TV series are enough to illustrate the difference between TV and radio Counts. In the first show the son has set Arthur up to deliver the eulogy at his father's funeral, expecting him to rubbish his memory; in fact he comes out with something positive and helpful about his former partner. It's a great introductory episode: the son, you feel, is going to have things to learn from Arthur - albeit in haphazard and unlikely ways - as the series goes on.
And in addition to the new friend Arthur has been given a believable world to inhabit in the TV show. He is an habitué of a greasy spoon peopled by other oddball regulars and has some status there - with the other diners, at least, rather than the frequently exasperated proprietor.
A later episode has him being offered a very small part in a radio play and (of course) messing it up with predictably hilarious results. I'm not quite sure whether this was actually based on one of the radio shows - it's easy to imagine the basic situation occurring in one of the radio episodes - but really it's the framing of that plot which makes the whole thing so successful on TV.
Among other indiscretions Arthur inadvertently gets the main actor drunk, meaning the director has no choice but to ask him to play the leading role as well. Some time later in the cafe, when listening with all his friends to the play as it is broadcast, he discovers that he has been replaced in the lead, and his pride is hurt. But then he hears that his pre-recorded bit part (two lines) has been retained for this final version, a tiny triumph makes for a delightful, unexpected but very satisfying end: in his world, for himself and his little crowd of fellow misfits, that counts as a major result.
Another detail in that episode reminded me of a very good monograph about Laurel and Hardy by Ealing films expert Charles Barr. One of Barr's points is that Stan Laurel's character is consistently and believably childlike in his behaviour, and there is a moment in the show when Arthur, while temporarily promoted to playing lead in the radio studio, drags out his death throes before he is, as it were, definitively deceased.
The two female characters who are meant to be grief-stricken by his demise then moan a bit ... and suddenly the dead Arthur breaks character and joins in. Crucially, however, this isn't done out of malice or mischief, but because Arthur, living in the moment like a child, became aware that they were doing it and decided it would be rude not to show willing and follow their lead. He has a way in the programme of looking around him, blinking at the strangeness of it all, which confirms his childlike perception of the world. Laurel would surely have done the same.
The TV adaptation of Count Arthur Strong gets better with each succeeding episode in that first series. The real achievement is in the marriage of comedy and sentiment - no, that's not fair, because that implies unearnt emotion. You're taken into the lives of these strange and isolated characters - the cafe regulars - and really believe they have been united by the childlike Count Arthur.
In the last episode in particular you see the effect when, for a while, he isn't there. Being childlike, he can't necessarily articulate his pain but he feels it, and he is a generous man, too, as when he praises his former comedy partner in that first episode. He is frequently at odds with a world in which things disappear or go wrong and words keep slipping irritatingly out of reach, but he seems entirely without malice, and he does have some self-knowledge, however fleeting, as when he says that Katia (a cafe regular who dies) was not just his biggest fan but his only fan.
But the great achievement of Graham Linehan and Steve Delaney in fashioning Arthur Mark II is that we buy that he is a loveable man as well as an extremely annoying one, and that he deserves the - well, I don't want to spoil it: the gift which comes his way at the end of the first series.
It could be possible to make the complaint that, transferred to TV, Arthur is no longer centre-stage in his own show, and judging from social media there are some fans of the radio series who continue to feel that way. But I think it's a different and more interesting Arthur we see onscreen. When, at one point in the show, he makes a characteristic entrance to the cafe, you want to cheer because you know by now what that batty ebullience represents, and that Arthur is not a man impervious to pain and loss. Even the proprietor forgets to be irritated at Arthur's characteristically confusing order in his relief at having this force of nature fully restored - and maybe there's also the consideration he's good for business, too, in ensuring the continuing custom of the other misfits.
I don't know how the collaboration between Steve Delaney and Graham Linehan worked out exactly, but I do know that this is a sitcom which makes you believe in the power of the form again: there are good jokes, but it's character driven; that little crowd of the dispossessed says something about London today; and above all the series is life-affirming - healing, even. But it does this with a commendable lightness of touch and an absence of solemnity. You get your sitcom moments - as I've said, this is no comedy drama flying under false colours - but we believe in the world which has been created and care about these characters. I have seen many, many sitcoms over the years. A lot of them have been forgettable, though I usually stayed to the end anyway. Ben Elton's The Wright Way is a case in point. (Yes, really. No, I can't satisfactorily account for it either.) But I think Count Arthur Strong, as seen on TV, anyway, will be one of the ones which lodge in the memory.
*
Most of the above, though considerably revised and expanded for this iteration, was written in 2013, when that first TV series was broadcast. It ran for two more series but the BBC did not renew it after that. I continued to enjoy later episodes though did wonder, towards the end, whether it might be running out of steam. Once the relationship between Arthur and his partner's son was more or less on an even keel the actor playing the son, Rory Kinnear (son of that great comic actor Roy Kinnear), seemed to have less to do. A tentative romance with the cafe proprietor's daughter seemed to be - in my memory, at least - on one note, though this didn't seem to be the fault of the actor. And, for me, episodes like the one involving a "soup-in" tipped the scales in favour of plain weirdness - much as I like soup and indeed consume it on a daily basis.
Another episode which I think was also in that final series had Graham Fellows guest-starring as John Shuttleworth. It was interesting to see but I couldn't quite buy that the two characters had worked together before. John Shuttleworth has had a few excursions on TV but there hasn't been an attempt, as far as I know, to transfer The Shuttleworths to TV. Perhaps, in his case, it's just as well: the intimacy of radio seems his natural home - especially as Graham Fellows also provides all the voices of John's circle.
Postcript:
Postscript: I have just come across a 2019 Guardian interview with Steve Delaney by Brian Logan. It's worth reading in full but some details are particularly relevant to the matters discussed above. It might not have been obvious to this listener but it seems Delaney did have a strong sense of Arthur's background:
"They say write about what you know. Well, when I was a kid in the 60s, a lot of stuff on TV was transitioning from the collapse of variety theatre. Light entertainment was fantastic: The Arthur Haynes Show, The Army Game, Bootsie and Snudge. And I place Arthur right on that transition period." It’s a moment laced with melancholy; Count Arthur has a dark side. "When music hall was breathing its last gasp is when Arthur started getting into it. Beautifully mistimed. So he’s always been chasing it."
That said, the piece also shows that Arthur's character was still left deliberately ambiguous by his creator:
Of course, whether Arthur really was a vaudevillian, or only ever performed in the music hall of his own mind, is moot. "[TV producer] Geoff Posner once told me I should map out everything Arthur’s ever done. His backstory, in effect. So I went home and got out my pen and notepad. And I don’t think I wrote a line." That’s not how the character works. "It would place too many restrictions on his flights of fancy. I deliberately don’t answer those questions. Arthur goes on about how he was in The Bridge on the River Kwai: I don’t know if he was or not."
Delaney won’t be drawn on whether the forgetful Count is a portrait in senility rather than mere dottiness. "I steer clear of it. For me, there’s nothing funny in coming up with a character with dementia. The best way I can describe Arthur is, he’s a nutty old bloke. In the way people were allowed to be nutty when I was a kid. 'Don’t go near him, he’s mad.' People don’t grow old in the same way any more. Mind you," he says, "even when he was young, Arthur was like that."
To return, for the final time, to my late friend: at one point he was in a ward with three other people, one of whom felt compelled to tell his story in detail, over and over again, regardless of who had or hadn't expressed a willingness to listen to it. Compelled to be in that room, my friend found it wearing; reflecting on it later, however, he found something moving and touching about this other man's unquenchable need to declare that he was there, that his life had meaning: attention must be paid.
And whatever my reservations in either case that, I suppose, is the root of the appeal of both Count Arthur Strong and John Shuttleworth.
Oh, and for those readers who have stayed the distance, perhaps I might be forgiven for adding a plug at this juncture for the autobiography of another friend of Arthur's?
This also reminds me that Arthur's friend once advanced the theory in an interview that whatever age a comedian is when he first delivers a piece of material onstage becomes the age to which he magically reverts when delivering that same material again however many years on. For a long time Graham Fellows was playing a character older than himself; now he is playing a younger man. Go figure, as they say.
Links
Read the full Brian Logan interview on Count Arthur Strong's website here.
Another interview with Steve Delaney is quoted in this post along with more thoughts about sitcom in general.
If you haven't got garden centres to visit or reservoirs whose levels urgently need checking you can read more of my thoughts about John Shuttleworth and that "Pillock in the Community" episode here.
Some posts about other sitcoms. The first goes into more detail about the character played by Harry Worth on TV and radio.
Here's Harry
The Night Shift
Nightingales 1
Nightingales 2
PhoneShop
Tripper's Day
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