Part Two — You Lucky People!

One of the curious things about comedy is that we inherit much of it from generations who came before us.

I was born in 1952, which meant that much of the comedy I encountered as a child had its origins in music hall, variety theatre and the wireless.

The comedians themselves were often considerably older than their audiences. Their jokes might have been older still.

Take Tommy Trinder.

“You lucky people!”

It was his catchphrase, and it belonged to a particular tradition of British entertainment in which a comedian could walk onto a stage, address the audience directly, tell a few jokes, sing a song and generally behave as though everyone had come along to see an old friend.

There were also comedians such as Arthur Askey, George Formby and later Norman Wisdom, whose popularity was built around recognisable comic personalities.

The little man. The cheeky fellow. The innocent who somehow triumphs over authority.

Comedy was often about class, although it wasn’t always described that way.

The man in the audience might spend his working week being ordered around by employers, supervisors and assorted people who considered themselves his betters.

For an hour or two he could watch someone make fools of precisely those sorts of people.

And then television came along.

Television didn’t immediately destroy the old variety tradition. Quite the opposite. It brought it into millions of homes.

Sunday Night at the London Palladium was one of the great showcases for entertainers who had learned their trade before television became dominant.

But television also changed the relationship between comedian and audience.

A music hall performer might have to win over a different audience every night. Television allowed the same comic character to return week after week, becoming almost a member of the family.

Some survived the transition brilliantly.

Others belonged to a world that was disappearing.

And the audience was changing too.

The generation that had lived through the Depression and the Second World War did not necessarily find the same things funny as the young people growing up in the 1950s and 1960s.

That didn’t mean one generation had a sense of humour and the other didn’t.

It meant that comedy, like almost everything else, was changing.

And somewhere in the background, a rather different kind of comedy was already making itself heard.

Sometimes quite literally.

On the wireless.