Many a comedy double act or group cut its teeth as members of the Cambridge Footlights, the amateur theatrical club run by students of Cambridge University (and which has been going since 1883) – Beyond the Fringe, Monty Python, the Goodies, and a surprising number of media personalities active on our television screens today. One pair of former Footlighters pursue their careers individually these days but for a long time throughout the 1980s and 90s their obvious comedic chemistry was exploited to great effect as a double act. I’m talking about Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, who collaborated in such programmes as the Black Adder series, Jeeves and Wooster, and four series of A Bit of Fry and Laurie.
A Bit of Fry and Laurie was a sketch show cast for a post-Alternative comedy audience, in which elaborate wordplay and innuendo were staples of its material. Both performers brought great characterisation to the sketches, and were equally funny, though Fry’s well-known intellectual heft was clearly present throughout the series.
My favourites of the series’ characters were John (Fry) and Peter (Laurie), who are high-powered, hard-drinking business execs, engaged in backs-to-the-wall, boardroom hard talk, the joke being that their location, unlike London or New York, is completely nondescript (Uttoxeter) and their business distinctly underwhelming (a health club). The characters are of course a parody of hard-driving businessmen of the time, drawing inspiration from such boardroom soap operas as Man at the Top and Howards’ Way, in which characters’ bombast is delivered with such complete seriousness, and as if the fate of the free world depended on it, about matters that the viewers know are of no real consequence.
John and Peter’s loud catchphrase was “Damn!” and several increasingly ridiculous variations on this theme (“Three pints of Damn and a chaser of Hell-blast!”), as they uncover some new business-critical twist or plot engineered by arch-rival Marjorie, John’s ex-wife. This marvellous premise is summed up thus:
“Dammit John, I’m talking about the big idea. The dream that you and I shared. The dream of a health club that would put Uttoxeter on the goddamned map once and for all”
Incidentally, Uttoxeter is in Staffordshire…