Badgerstoke on Comedy
The television comedy of today is not a patch on what it was
in the past. In the 1960s and 1970s we had such comedy gems as Terry and June,
On The Buses and Crossroads. There is nothing today to match that golden age.
It really does worry me that the youth of today will grow up with no sense of
humour and then where would we be? It is a well-known fact that people with no
sense of humour are more prone to commit petty crime and it isn’t too much of a
stretch to assume that much of today’s crime can be laid at the door of such
new wave comedians as Ricky Jervase and Roland Atkinson.
In my day we had such enlightened liberal comedians as
Bernard Manning and Jim Davison and we’ll never see their like again.
It all started to go wrong with so called alternative
comedians in the 1980’s. I did try to get into the spirit of the thing at the
time but I found that the bad language put me off. I did take Mrs Badgerstoke
to see a new wave comedian at the civic hall just after we were married. This
didn’t turn out to well as my wife put her finger in her ears every time she
heard a swear word and so she tended to miss much of the show.
I was determined to give it another try on my own (nobody
can say I give up easily) and watched a couple of stand-up comedians on a late
night TV show and I now think I understand the secret of Alternative Comedy. What
I noticed was that they were still telling the same old jokes that I’d heard in
the past but their trick was to tell the joke in a very loud and aggressive voice
and sprinkle in the F-word occasionally and for no apparent reason. This tactic
disguised the fact that it was just an old joke that they were telling and
allowed the comedian to reuse much material that had been discarded by other
non-Alternative comedians because it was no longer funny.
Comedians seem to have calmed down a bit since the 1980s but
they still haven’t got back to the quality of their heyday. Many of today’s
shows like Little Britain save on material by just doing exactly the same
sketches every week. I can only assume that they are hoping their audience have
forgotten the previous show.
Mrs Badgerstoke insisted that we had Satellite Television so
that we could continue to watch the delights of yester-year. She is a great fan
of Are You Being Served and is particularly fond of allusions to Mrs.
Slocombe’s pussy as she is an animal lover herself.
Badgerstoke’s Tip: You can always freshen up an old joke by talking
loudly swearing.
