Not just a load of catchphrases: why the genius of The Fast Show will never be repeated
Paul Whitehouse is recalling the time Hugh Laurie “had a pop” at The Fast Show’s tendency for pathos. “He said, ‘I’ve sussed you out’,” chuckles Whitehouse. “ ‘You do the same sketch every week for a few weeks, and then you completely turn it around, don’t you?’ ”
Laurie, of course, should know what he’s talking about, having starred in British comedy’s most famous example of rug-pulling pathos – the climax to the last episode of Blackadder Goes Forth, when Baldrick, George and Captain Blackadder finally run out of “cunning plans” and go “over the top” to their certain death.
The Fast Show, despite its undoubted skill in creating daft characters and memorable catchphrases (“Brilliant!”, “You ain’t seen me, right?”, “Suits you, Sir”, “Scorchio!”, “Does my bum look big in this?”), revelled in unexpected pathos, jolting moments of depth given to the silliest of characters.
So, it is no surprise, when I talk to key members of the cast – who have reunited for a glorious trip down memory lane, The Fast Show: Just a Load of Blooming Catchphrases – that Whitehouse opts for the show’s most memorable moment of sadness, rather than comedy, for his favourite sketch of all: a scene in which Rowley Birkin, the rambling, sozzled QC, who is incoherent for all but a few words, becomes terribly sad about a woman “with a very long neck” who he “held in my arms”.
Birkin’s normally funny catchphrase – “I was very, very drunk” – becomes a depressing full stop. “There was something cheeky about doing a character who was unintelligible most of the time,” says Whitehouse, who was working with his old university friend Charlie Higson as a writer for Harry Enfield when they pitched The Fast Show to then controller of BBC Two, Michael Jackson. “But it was in the right spirit of the show. Mumble, mumble, and then these little phrases just breach out of you – “Cairo!” – and paint the picture of a life very well lived.”
Long before Birkin became morose about the woman with the very long neck, however, The Fast Show – which ran from 1994 to 2000 – had twigged that audiences were able to handle comedy sketches that were, well, not funny.
“I think it was quite rare to go from a mad and funny sketch to something quite arresting and poignant and sad,” says Whitehouse. “Although, when we first played Ted and Ralph [the awkward romance between an aristocrat and an Irish estate worker] to an audience, they were bewildered. It took a little while to understand that you could do something that wasn’t, on the surface, funny, in a comedy show.”
Watching The Fast Show now, two things strike you. One is how well it stands up – what felt like frippery at the time, is revealed, after 25 years, to be a far cleverer endeavour, with finely tuned sketches that set up their punchlines with perfect precision and tease their catchphrases for maximum impact.
And, two, that so many of the sketches are two-handers in which one performer goes crackers in the face of the other. Actor Mark Williams picks out one good example: the “rambling hiker” sketch, in which Whitehouse’s hiker is scared off by Williams’s wild loner.
Williams, who starred as Arthur Weasley in the Harry Potter films and continues to bring culprits to justice in BBC One’s long-running detective series Father Brown, provided wonderful depth to this oddball.
“He’s a strange man in an environment over which he has some kind of psychological and temporal control,” says Williams. “I suppose that sketch is about people’s desperate need for control, about people finding it difficult when others are on their patch. But also it just made me and Paul laugh, because it was very, very, very silly.”
The documentary’s title hints at some of the criticism that The Fast Show received – chiefly that it relied on the repetition of catchphrases. Today, John Thomson has to live with the consequences more than most, forever hearing people shout “Grrrreat” at him, in a reference to the hip jazz presenter Louis Balfour he played.
Does he get bored? “No, I say “Niiice” back to them and it makes their day, they love it,” he says. “It’s really funny because lots of people come up to me and say “Jaaazzz”, which Louis never said. I just go “Grrreat” back to them and I walk off laughing.”
It’s obvious Thomson, despite his huge success in the ITV drama Cold Feet, misses The Fast Show. “For an actor to do sketch work is joyous, the absolute best thing you could possibly do because you can try new directions, you can really show your skill set,” he says. “But there are no sketch [shows] in the schedules anymore, and, after this pandemic, we need comedy, we need entertainment.”
In fact, Thomson has been passing the time in lockdown creating new characters and posting them on social media. “The filters are so good, you don’t need make-up, wigs, costumes. I pick a filter on Snapchat… and there’s a voice changer on there as well. So I can just instantly create a character. If The Fast Show doesn’t come back in some guise, I’d like to do a character show of my own.”
Thomson’s Louis Balfour, along with other characters, like Simon Day’s Dave Angel, exhibited a bit of Britpop Britain’s in-yer-face laddish swagger. But that laddishness was always tempered by the presence of Arabella Weir. Appositely, the new documentary begins with the “girl men can’t hear”, the woman who is perpetually ignored by the men in the room, who usually pass off her ideas as their own.
Did this character come from Weir’s experience of working in comedy? “It came directly from my experience of working on The Fast Show, never mind comedy,” says Weir. “It was five guys and me, and it wasn’t like a provincial rugby team or anything, but I had to fight to get my voice heard.”
Does she remember pitching the idea? “I absolutely do. Paul and Charlie said, “We’re not sure why that’s funny”. Simon said: “I think the sketch is us.” And they went, “Oh, we’d better do it then”. I hope you see the irony that the sketch had to be validated by Simon.”
Weir’s most enduring character – “does my bum look big in this?” – was initially pooh-poohed by a male BBC executive who said the audience was too blokey for it, while she recalls working on sets where the crew would make lascivious comments about female cast members’ breasts.
Has much changed? “Well, crews don’t say things like that anymore.”
Weir, of course, was not the only woman working on The Fast Show, and the documentary remembers Caroline Aherne, who played a whole host of characters, including the chatterbox wife Renee, the nosy Checkout Girl, and the “Scorchio!” weather presenter, and died of lung cancer in 2016. “She was such a maverick, such a talent,” says Higson.
In one powerful and poignant new scene, Thomson pays a wordless tribute to Aherne that Higson and Williams admit made them burst into tears. It’s a beautiful, heartfelt celebration of both the actress and the show itself. Trust The Fast Show to find one more moment of pathos among the laughs. In’t that brilliant.
The Fast Show: Just a Load of Blooming Catchphrases is on Gold on Aug 29, 9pm
The Fast Show’s best characters, by the cast
? Paul Whitehouse – Rowley Birkin QC
“I don’t think he had a happy life, he just found a way to laugh about it. I based him on a bloke I met fishing in Iceland.”
? Charlie Higson – Johnny Nice Painter
“Like a lot of our stranger sketches, these ones were co-written by Brendan O’Casey, who had a great use of language. He was obsessed with a painter called Alwyn Crawshaw, who looked exactly like Johnny.”
? Arabella Weir– No Offence
“I based her on a woman in Selfridge’s, a rude cab driver and my friend’s mother-in-law,” says Weir. “I loved doing the accent and being unbelievably vile.”
? John Thomson – The Spaceman
Thomson’s time-travelling American spaceman tumbles into ordinary situations and demands to know who the president is. “Americans in films always want to know who the president is, as if it’s more important than the year.”
? Mark Williams – The Directions Man
“There was an old bloke in Bromsgrove, who lived in a shed. You’d ask how he was and he’d shout ‘How long have you been a doctor?’ There’s a bit of that in there, that country suspicion.”
? Simon Day – Gideon Soames
“He’s based on those Radio 4 intellectuals who have obscure theories about Byzantine churches or whatever. People like Simon Schama. Paul Morley, he’s another one. Once I got the voice, I was away.”