Not the Nine O’Clock News at 40: No longer exactly topical but still surprisingly funny
The BBC sketch show not only kick-started ‘alternative comedy’ and some of the most influential careers in British comedy, writes Gerard Gilbert, but also the second great age of TV satire
The late spring of 1979 was not just a watershed moment in British politics, ushering in a decade of Margaret Thatcher’s nation-reconfiguring Conservative government, but also a pivotal moment for British comedy. Or, at least, it would be… eventually.
Producer John Lloyd had assembled a team of comedians around the still relatively unknown Rowan Atkinson for a topical sketch show to be called Not the Nine O’Clock News – because it was scheduled on BBC2 against the main BBC1 evening news bulletin.
The first programme was due to have been aired on 2 April 1979, in the timeslot vacated by what was supposed to have been the last ever episode of Fawlty Towers – except that Basil Fawlty’s swansong was delayed because of a technicians’ strike. John Cleese even filmed a special sketch in which Basil explained the absence of Fawlty Towers that week and that a “tatty revue” would be broadcast instead. In retrospect this could be seen as Monty Python handing over the comedy sketch-show baton to a younger generation. The so-called “alternative” comedians.
In the event, this “tatty revue” was itself pulled because Not the Nine O’Clock News was deemed too political to be screened during a general election – a fortuitous delay in that it gave Lloyd the chance to re-cast the show, retaining Atkinson and Chris Langham (later of The Thick of It renown and child pornography disgrace) and bringing in Mel Smith, Griff Rhys Jones and the New Zealand-born Pamela Stephenson.
Best comedy shows on Netflix
Best comedy shows on Netflix
1/10 Elder Millenial, Iliza Shlesinger
Standout line: “There’s no secret [to meeting your future spouse], just so we’re clear. Don’t buy the books, don’t buy the hype. There’s no secret, OK? I’m gonna be 35 when I get married. If there was a secret, I would have f****** used it. There’s no secret. There’s no special magic to it. I’m never going to be like, ‘GATHER ROUND, LADIES! Off the 405, lies a toad hole. You must go to it.’”
2/10 Nanette, Hannah Gadsby
Standout line: “I have built a career out of self-deprecating humour and I don’t want to do that anymore. Do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from somebody who already exists in the margins? It’s not humility, it's humiliation. I put myself down in order to speak, in order to seek permission to speak, and I simply will not do that anymore. Not to myself or anybody who identifies with me.”
3/10 Hard Knock Wife, Ali Wong
Standout line: “Now, I make a lot more money than my husband by, like, a long shot. My mom is very concerned that he’s going to leave me out of intimidation. I had to explain to her that the only kind of man who would leave a woman who makes more money… is the kind of man that doesn’t like free money.”
4/10 Relatable, Ellen DeGeneres
Standout line: [On losing her sitcom, then struggling to sell a talk-show to TV executives after coming out as a lesbian:] “A lot of people didn’t want to buy it, because no one thought they’d watch. There was this one station manager that said, and this is a quote: ‘No one’s going to watch it. No one’s going to watch a lesbian during the day.’ And I said ‘Well, they weren’t watching me at night. What time of day is good for a lesbian?’”
5/10 Son of Patricia, Trevor Noah
Standout Line: [Having established Americans’ love for tacos]: “We’re living through a time when we are all learning about the presidency at the same time as the president. That’s never happened. How wild is that concept? You wake up every day reading the news, and you’re like ‘Wow, I didn’t know that.’ And somewhere, at that exact same moment, he’s reading the same news, going, ‘Wow, me too.’"
6/10 Glitter Room, Katherine Ryan
Standout line: [About a romantic partner:] “He said, ‘Well, I need to be with someone who makes me a priority. And I suppose, because you have a child, I will never be your first priority. I shall always be second.’ And I was like, ‘Hah! Second? Oh… no.’”
7/10 Weirdo, Donald Glover
Standout line: “I lived in Downtown LA, and Downtown LA is kind of like the Eighties decided to stay there. They’re like, ‘Oh, OK, you guys go ahead and be the Nineties. Go enjoy Ace of Base – we’ll be here practicing the Moonwalk and selling crack.’”
8/10 Not Normal, Wanda Sykes
Standout line: “In the Mueller investigation, how does [Trump] not know that he’s Individual Number one? Come on. Everybody who’s been indicted or going to jail… Papadopoulos, Gates, Flynn, Manafort… It all says in the Mueller report that they co-conspired with Individual Number One. Motherf*****, that’s you! If everybody you come in direct contact with gets herpes, wouldn’t you be like, [confused face] ‘Am I giving everybody herpes?’”
9/10 Growing, Amy Schumer
Standout line: “It’s a new invention called THINX. They’re just this underwear that you just bleed into [during your period]. Which I guess… makes me a f****** inventor. Who knew? Should I go on Shark Tank?”
10/10 Live Shows, Daniel Sloss
Standout line: “As a parent – no, I’m not a parent, but I like speaking for other people, because I’m white, middle-class and male, and that’s what my people do.”
1/10 Elder Millenial, Iliza Shlesinger
Standout line: “There’s no secret [to meeting your future spouse], just so we’re clear. Don’t buy the books, don’t buy the hype. There’s no secret, OK? I’m gonna be 35 when I get married. If there was a secret, I would have f****** used it. There’s no secret. There’s no special magic to it. I’m never going to be like, ‘GATHER ROUND, LADIES! Off the 405, lies a toad hole. You must go to it.’”
2/10 Nanette, Hannah Gadsby
Standout line: “I have built a career out of self-deprecating humour and I don’t want to do that anymore. Do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from somebody who already exists in the margins? It’s not humility, it's humiliation. I put myself down in order to speak, in order to seek permission to speak, and I simply will not do that anymore. Not to myself or anybody who identifies with me.”
3/10 Hard Knock Wife, Ali Wong
Standout line: “Now, I make a lot more money than my husband by, like, a long shot. My mom is very concerned that he’s going to leave me out of intimidation. I had to explain to her that the only kind of man who would leave a woman who makes more money… is the kind of man that doesn’t like free money.”
4/10 Relatable, Ellen DeGeneres
Standout line: [On losing her sitcom, then struggling to sell a talk-show to TV executives after coming out as a lesbian:] “A lot of people didn’t want to buy it, because no one thought they’d watch. There was this one station manager that said, and this is a quote: ‘No one’s going to watch it. No one’s going to watch a lesbian during the day.’ And I said ‘Well, they weren’t watching me at night. What time of day is good for a lesbian?’”
5/10 Son of Patricia, Trevor Noah
Standout Line: [Having established Americans’ love for tacos]: “We’re living through a time when we are all learning about the presidency at the same time as the president. That’s never happened. How wild is that concept? You wake up every day reading the news, and you’re like ‘Wow, I didn’t know that.’ And somewhere, at that exact same moment, he’s reading the same news, going, ‘Wow, me too.’"
6/10 Glitter Room, Katherine Ryan
Standout line: [About a romantic partner:] “He said, ‘Well, I need to be with someone who makes me a priority. And I suppose, because you have a child, I will never be your first priority. I shall always be second.’ And I was like, ‘Hah! Second? Oh… no.’”
7/10 Weirdo, Donald Glover
Standout line: “I lived in Downtown LA, and Downtown LA is kind of like the Eighties decided to stay there. They’re like, ‘Oh, OK, you guys go ahead and be the Nineties. Go enjoy Ace of Base – we’ll be here practicing the Moonwalk and selling crack.’”
8/10 Not Normal, Wanda Sykes
Standout line: “In the Mueller investigation, how does [Trump] not know that he’s Individual Number one? Come on. Everybody who’s been indicted or going to jail… Papadopoulos, Gates, Flynn, Manafort… It all says in the Mueller report that they co-conspired with Individual Number One. Motherf*****, that’s you! If everybody you come in direct contact with gets herpes, wouldn’t you be like, [confused face] ‘Am I giving everybody herpes?’”
9/10 Growing, Amy Schumer
Standout line: “It’s a new invention called THINX. They’re just this underwear that you just bleed into [during your period]. Which I guess… makes me a f****** inventor. Who knew? Should I go on Shark Tank?”
10/10 Live Shows, Daniel Sloss
Standout line: “As a parent – no, I’m not a parent, but I like speaking for other people, because I’m white, middle-class and male, and that’s what my people do.”
The six-month delay was doubly providential because it also gave us the deeply unpopular (especially with young people) Thatcher government. During her premiership, TV satire, dormant since the early Sixties and the era of Beyond the Fringe and That Was the Week That Was, rose again with a vengeance. Not the Nine O’Clock News was the neonatal ward of that rebirth.
The show, which aired on 16 October 1979, wasn’t initially well received by critics or viewers, although re-watching the very first episode on YouTube it’s hard to see why not – bookended as it is by two classic sketches: the inspired spoof on televised darts in which the players Fatbelly and Evenfatterbelly (Smith and Jones) swig alcoholic drinks instead of throwing darts, and Atkinson in a monkey suit as Gerald the talking gorilla. “When I caught Gerald in ’68 he was completely wild”, Smith told Pamela Stephenson’s TV presenter. “Wild?’ retorted the gorilla peevishly. “I was absolutely livid!”
There’s also a skit on Question Time, and while today’s under-50s might never have heard of Labour politician Frances Morrell or trade unionist Clive Jenkins, they will be familiar with the format of the programme. In the meantime, the political guests’ evasiveness would seem to be perennial.
Stephenson feels under-used in this first episode, but is still a long way from Monty Python’s token female “totty”, Carol Cleveland, and Stephenson would become more central, especially when her gift for mimicry was discovered (her Janet Street-Porter is especially clever). Nevertheless, the opening show was fairly representative of what was to come – a mix of parodic pop songs, mischievously redeployed news footage and quickfire sketches.
But it was Mrs Thatcher and her hugely divisive administration that was the gift that kept on giving to satirists, and John Lloyd, whose first TV production job this was, would go on to help create the defining lampoon of the era, Spitting Image. Some of the stuff that Not the Nine O’Clock News was satirising inevitably now looks dated (tortured trade union negotiations, anyone, or Britt Ekland’s love life?) or even redactable (Cyril Smith and Jimmy Savile as innocent figures of fun), but a lot of it still remains relevant, from pornographic pop videos and the dearth of hospital beds to one skit in which Atkinson plays a hardline MP addressing the Tory party conference on immigration and crime – even if, unlike her fictional counterpart, Priti Patel wouldn’t use the “n word”.
Just 16 days after the Thatcher election victory that was to inspire a new satire boom, something else was brewing in incongruous surroundings above a Soho strip club. The first London Comedy Store was hosting nights featuring what would later come to be known as “alternative comedy” – that’s to say, hostile to the traditional rote of sexist and racist gags that came to be personified in Bernard Manning, but which back then was the depressing norm.
Alternative comedy would truly come of age three years later with the intersecting casts of The Young Ones and The Comic Strip, but it was Not the Nine O’Clock News that paved the way, with its bold refusal to indulge in lazy sexist and racist stereotypes or rely on Two Ronnies-style innuendo and overscripted sketches. In fact, the brevity of many of the skits often exceeded those of its near-direct descendent, The Fast Show.
Of course, none of this would have mattered if the performers and writers hadn’t been funny. Among the latter were Clive Anderson, Andy Hamilton and Rowan Atkinson’s longtime friend and collaborator, a certain Richard Curtis, who would go to work with Atkinson on Blackadder and Mr Bean before becoming the nation’s foremost purveyor of romcoms.
Blackadder would showcase Atkinson’s verbal dexterity, but Not the Nine O’Clock News introduced his rubbery facial expressions, matched if not exceeded by Mel Smith’s wonderfully mobile features – a countenance that one obituarist described after Smith’s untimely death in 2013 as “mugging with a deadpan virtuosity rarely seen since Oliver Hardy in his pomp”.
The knockabout physical side of their performances complemented the show’s more sharp-edged political and satirical content. Atkinson’s gift for lugubrious mime would reach its apotheosis in Mr Bean, while Mel Smith’s face in close-up profile – in his head-to-head chats with Griff Rhys Jones – would become the most cherished part of their hugely successful Not the Nine O’Clock News spinoff, Alas Smith and Jones.
Smith and Jones’s greatest legacy, however, turned out to be off-screen. In 1981, while still working on Not the Nine O’Clock News, they created their own production company, Talkback Productions, initially to make humorous training videos in the style of John Cleese’s Video Arts. Talkback, however, was to produce some of the most influential British comedy of the last 40 years, including The Day Today, Da Ali G Show, Smack the Pony, Green Wing, Brass Eye, I’m Alan Partridge, The Armando Iannucci Shows, Big Train and Meet Ricky Gervais (just to name a few). Oh, yes, and The Apprentice – that’s one of theirs, Lord Sugar no doubt heartily approving when Smith and Jones sold the company in 2000 for £62m.
As for Pamela Stephenson, she had tired of comedy by the mid-Eighties, married Billy Connolly and trained as a psychologist with a successful practice in Beverley Hills. Her unhappy experience working as the only woman on a live version of The Comic Strip (“Doing stand-up was like a war with everyone playing this game of ‘I can be funnier than you’”) reflects a still ongoing complaint of female comedians booked on to highly competitive, male-dominated TV panel shows.
These days there is no shortage of satirical news programmes, from Mock the Week to Have I Got News for You to The Mash Report and Frankie Boyle’s New World Order. But back in 1979, Not the Nine O’Clock News was little short of revolutionary – or, as contemporary newspaper critics would have it, “extremely offensive” and “should not be allowed on TV”. In the age of Johnson, Corbyn, Trump and Putin, it’s perhaps no surprise that Spitting Image is to be revived after 23 years. Without Not the Nine O’Clock News, we may have never seen it in the first place.
Comments
Share your thoughts and debate the big issues
Please be respectful when making a comment and adhere to our Community Guidelines.
You can find our Community Guidelines in full here.
Please be respectful when making a comment and adhere to our Community Guidelines.
You can find our Community Guidelines in full here.
Follow comments
Vote
Report Comment
Subscribe to Independent Premium to debate the big issues
Want to discuss real-world problems, be involved in the most engaging discussions and hear from the journalists? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.
Already registered? Log inReport Comment
Delete Comment
About The Independent commenting
Independent Premium Comments can be posted by members of our membership scheme, Independent Premium. It allows our most engaged readers to debate the big issues, share their own experiences, discuss real-world solutions, and more. Our journalists will try to respond by joining the threads when they can to create a true meeting of independent Premium. The most insightful comments on all subjects will be published daily in dedicated articles. You can also choose to be emailed when someone replies to your comment.
The existing Open Comments threads will continue to exist for those who do not subscribe to Independent Premium. Due to the sheer scale of this comment community, we are not able to give each post the same level of attention, but we have preserved this area in the interests of open debate. Please continue to respect all commenters and create constructive debates.