Count Arthur Strong

Entertaining enough but does anyone have the same problem as me? I always get distracted trying to work out who is he specifically parodying?

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I suppose I expected/wanted more specific fifties/sixties showbiz references if that's where he's coming from, a bit like Simon Day's Tommy Cockles character. I can certainly see that he's part of a noble tradition of bumblers. But a big part of the pleasure of Shuttleworth for me is the sense of a whole world of hospices, garden centres (with their newfangled "campuccinos"), fun runs etc. I don't get that sense of a precisely realised world with the Count but maybe I'm looking for the wrong thing.

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Yes, I get it and by and large I enjoy the show ... there's just that sense, for me, of something not wholly in focus. I want a clearer sense of his world, which will then give a more precise notion of what's at stake for him when he messes up.

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I do like it ... maybe I need to unshackle myself from expectations. I had trouble with Vic Reeves' Big Night Out an' all, expecting by the decor that this was to be a parody of the old Tom Jones shows made for US consumption.

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Maybe I haven't been clear - it's not the pleasantness of the character for me; it's about wanting the world he inhabits to be consistent and fully thought out - in other words for the writer to have done his/her/their homework so throughly that as a listener I don't have to be distracted by thinking "That doesn't fit in if this is a spoof of a particular era" or "this is a sudden lurch in tone" or "what exactly is he trying to do here?"

I'm not saying the programme does or doesn't do the above; I need more time. I enjoyed the half an episode I heard today and the processes whereby he grasps the right word eventually work well, but my personal jury is still out on whether he's likely to last and resonate in the way that, for me anyway, John Shuttleworth does (we are all, like John, filling time with meaningless activity, avoiding the bleak thought of "the only end of age").

Of course if you don't like Shuttleworth then there's another argument blasted out of the water.

Comedy can perform a variety of functions: it can heal and inform; it can reassure; it can divert. It can do all these things at once, which is when it gets really good. But if it only diverts, great: a friend who was analysing the structure of a sitcom in some detail went on to mention an episode of Simon Nye's Hardware. It was slipshod and careless by comparison, he said, but by God it made him laugh and he was grateful enough for that. As, most of the time, am I.

I suppose I'm basically saying I need more time to decide whether the Count will go into my personal First Division. I will, however, say that even if you have to stretch matters to describe it as a sitcom I have no doubt, no doubt anywhere at all in any corner of my heart, that in time the comic strip Drunken Bakers in the humorous publication Viz will be regarded as the work of genius it undoubtedly is.

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Yes, I think that's why I'm not hundred percent sure about him myself. He looks like Gilbert Harding who I associate with the fifties but the name suggests to me the singer Count John McCormack, who was even earlier. He's familiar with the name of Jimmy Clitheroe to judge from the last episode but Clitheroe was around for a long time. He's also like a Harry Worth with the bumblingness but without the benevolence - which I suppose actually means not very much like Harry Worth at all.

A lot of the people in rubbish seventies sitcoms came from a variety background which further confuses the issue. Still, I'm enjoying it and will go on listening.

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I certainly enjoyed the last Radio 4 episode - there is a pleasure in seeing just what not-quite-right phrase he will reach for and enjoying the warped logic of the associative process ... still not hundred percent sure.

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Enjoying it but am still trying to work out how I feel about it. With another similar character, the persona created by Harry Worth, he's essentially a well-meaning character who inadvertantly creates mayhem. With the venerable Count I don't really get him as a character other than a vehicle for all those malapropisms as he searches for le mot juste. (I can't do italics.) That is amusing and diverting but I'm not as aware of a character beneath as I am with John Shuttleworth or Harry Worth and that bothers me. With JS, he's boring but you feel that his creator loves and understands him and sees himself in him (I don't know any of this, of course, other than reading that JS was based in part on old men he observed in fancy mice contests and on his own father). In other words, what is behind the Count? And to those who say it's simply funny, so what's the problem? Fine, and it does amuse and divert me. But it's comedy of a second division order, I feel. So why isn't Dave Podmore, not the most profound show in the world, also second division? (Again in my opinion.) Answer: because there is a precisely realised world there; even though I know little about cricket I can make out what is being sent up in minute detail. Yes, maybe in direct interaction with an audience it's different. Though with JS my feeling is an audience dilutes him - hmmm... how would the Count fare in a radio show sans audience (like Shuttleworth and Pod)?

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"He's Count Arthur Strong, there is no antecedent, he's not mimicking anyone or deconstructing anyone."

At the very least, the performer/writer is drawing on a tradition of comedians who get their words wrong for humorous intent. Hylda Baker springs to mind, though I admit I can't think of anyone who regularly makes quite the same number of associative leaps before alighting on the correct word, so maybe that counts, NPI, as an innovation, though you could also see it simply as an extension of what's gone on before.

I still hesitate about him for reasons mentioned earlier: a) I'm not certain he's part of a precisely realised world and b) other than being a device for the expression of these verbal leaps, what does the character add up to? And these two related factors slightly lessen my enjoyment and immersion. It's about the need for something else between the jokes: a strain of melancholy, perhaps.

I'll be quiet now. I promise.

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Just when I'd promised to shut up on the subject ... Ok, here goes. I am - usually - amused by the show but something holds me back from really giving in to hilarity in this particular case. And I take this to mean that the writer or performer (same in this case) has omitted something so I'm trying to work out what that might be. So the critical reaction is a way of trying to understand the rumblings in the gut (if that's not too indelicate a metaphor) - but the intestinal tract is where the unease starts.

But I don't know what I can add to what I've said before, which is that I don't think I quite buy the character as a three dimensional creation, and when I feel I'm just being sold gags that isn't enough to take a sitcom to my heart even if it passes a perfectly agreeable half hour. I can understand what some others have said about its being about old age and its attendant annoyances, so maybe it comes down to the irrationalities of individual taste, like the letters I used to read in music papers in the seventies: "How can you say group A are the best ever when it's clear group B are the best?" But all I can say is I "get" the humanity and vulnerability of John Shuttleworth and, whether it's a reasonable reaction or not, I feel more manipulated in the case of the Count and I cannot provide any further arguments to justify this difference.

One coda which was why I returned to this thread in the first place: listening a few minutes ago to The Clitheroe Kid I heard an embarrassed Alfie tell Jimmy's sister something like: "He's just been telling me about your grandfather's windbag - downfall - windup." And Jimmy Clitheroe has been namechecked by the Count, so perhaps there's a direct source of inspiration, though his slightly more extended scrambling after intended words do tickle me.

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"There is not the time to develop character, and it's not the point anyway, characters should only be sketched out enough to provide jokes!"

Blimey, the Count has, as always, stirred up a lot of debate - especially when I thought I'd retired myself from this thread. Luckily I have nothing more constructive to do with my time.

Anyway, I fundamentally disagree with what you say. Sitcom would be more accurately described as "charactercom" (a term I've already used on another thread, quoting John Brennan): without the character element it's difficult to care. And (again on another thread) I've referred to the relationship at the heart of many sitcoms: Frasier and dad; Harold and Albert; Del Boy and Rodney etc.

I remember seeing the series of sitcom tryouts which Channel 4 used to do at the Riverside Studios in London. Three different shows a night onstage. Very interesting to see them but very few made it to TV.

Two common flaws.

A lot of the would-be shows were telling a single story with a conclusion; entertaining enough as a half hour comedy but lacking the essential materials for further episodes.

The other recurrent mistake was to treat the exercise as solely as a means of cramming half an hour with as many gags as possible at the expense of character, pummelling the audience into exhausted submission, presumably in the hope that someone from Channel 4 would be there that night to pick up on the resultant laff-o-rama.

Even when it appeared to work you could tell which shows were really a kind of confidence trick. And I like to think that Channel 4 executives felt the same (or possibly they just didn't like commissioning shows). I certainly remember on another occasion talking to Mike Bolland, a former major player on Channel 4 and BBC Scotland, and agreeing with him that sitcom had essentially the same rules as drama - plus gags. But the gags had to come out of the characters, and therefore the characters had to be thoroughly understood first.

When, in that famous scene, Basil Fawlty berates the mini with a branch it's funny because he has led himself to this disastrous state of affairs - and even at the supreme moment he has to blame something external rather than admit his own stupidity to himself. It's a slapstick, physical comedy moment but it comes out of Basil's personal inadequacy. The same could be said of many Frasier moments. And the regularly hymned "Don't tell him, Pike!" comes out of Mainwaring's understandable anxiety to protect the "stupid boy".

Yes, I do think that Hancock is more fully rounded than CAS - not simply because we've seen him in a greater variety of situations but because G & S understand about using other characters to illuminate that main character. Galton and Simpson (forgive me for repeating more points I've made elsewhere on this board) said later writers for Hancock got it wrong - he needed to be up against intransigent officialdom for his bluster to appear human and understandable, otherwise he could simply come over as the term they often gave him for others: a buffoon. And I would suggest much the same is true for Victor Meldrew. Victor's actions may compound the problem but it started with a thoughtless workman etc.

Going back to your post, maybe it depends precisely what you mean by "characters should only be sketched out enough to provide jokes", but I read that as you regarding the character being a kind of afterthought, whereas I think knowing the character inside out is the first essential step from which appropriate jokes can then come.

A good recentish example of gags at the expense of character: Frank Skinner's sitcom Shane. I found it quite disturbing (but hypnotic) to watch the way that Skinner (and his scarey sitcom mini-me son) were unrelenting gag machines at the expense of believability and consistency of any sort. Ditto a brief-lived series called Blind Men (I think), with Jesse Birdsall, Sophie Thompson and someone else about two rival salesmen. One line which Ms. Thompson had was along the lines of "If earhairs were explosives you wouldn't have enough to blow your brains out" and it immediately became apparent: Funny Line. The writer has written a Funny Line. Forget about what's going on in the story, just don't let this Funny Line escape. Yes, it was an ITV 1 sitcom (remember them?) but even so.

Simon Nye, by contrast, is a master at bedding down gags in character: in Men Behaving Badly it's clear how the Gary character is feeling with each jokey line he utters. And if Caroline Quentin's character had spoken a line like Sophie Thompson's character you can bet Gary would be ironically clutching his stomach, ie registering that Dorothy had been trying to be clever, to score a point off him. In Nye's best work (not Carrie and Barry) as an audience we're having our cake and eating it, which I think is what sitcoms are meant to do: we're being amused and being carried along in the story as we see the character pursuing his or her goal.

And this doesn't exempt the more surreal examples of the genre. The world of Father Ted, say, has its own logic and rules and in each episode we can believe and accept whatever it is Ted is striving to achieve; even if you examine the supremely strange Nightingales by the late Paul Makin you will find it's clear what the characters want beat by beat, even when the show morphs into a Jacobean revenge tragedy.

Even in something as broadbrush and simple as On the Buses (which I have found myself watching recently with a surprising amount of pleasure) the characters have clear objectives and, dated as the barbs may be there is always some kind of comeback by Blakey or Olive to whatever gag-cum-insult may be hurled at them. According to the show's fanclub website Stephen Lewis even invented a backstory for Blakey - y'know, just like for real drama (just don't ask me to explain the array of dolly birds willing to throw themselves at Reg Varney).

To round off, and to get back more directly to the Count, the actress Irene Vanbrugh worked on the gossamer-light stage comedies of AA Milne in the 1920s. She said something to the effect that the characters appeared to be protected from the world by a veil of gauze, but Milne's writing was such that you felt the characters could rip that gauze down if they wanted. Sitcoms don't need to dig deep into character each week but you need to have a sense, I think, of who the characters are and what they want in order to feel totally immersed. As in straight drama, when that isn't clear then an audience, whether it is able to articulate the lack or not, will be uneasy. Which is how I feel re Count Arthur Strong. It doesn't feel to me like there's a sufficiently thought through backstory, that it may be all gauze - all cleverness. I may be wrong and I will keep listening. I certainly hate it when sentimentality is bolted on like that terrible sitcom with Jasper Carrott and Meera Syall/Nina Wadja, but I don't think it would dilute the comedy for us to get the occasional glimpse into whatever bleaknesses there may be in the Count's life.

Beat. Clears throat.

Erm ... Can I go now?

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Spir-An,

I'll likewise respond to a few points in your post. I can see there are several things I didn't make clear.

One is that in conventional drama the focus is usually on a single person - the protagonist - and that even if other characters are complex their function is primarily to illuminate that central character. The writer/tutor Tim Fountain calls the protagonist the "motorway" and the other characters sliproads. So yes, in drama as in sitcom not everyone can be explored equally or there would a problem with focus. (Not the only way to structure plays but at the theatre I often find that as soon as I have to start asking myself where's the protagonist it's an ominous sign.)

When I talk about knowing all the characters inside out, however, I'm thinking more of the process for the writer rather than the audience. Even if someone has a limited role onscreen in most episodes of a sitcom the writer - and then the actor - needs, I would suggest, a wider sense of what makes them tick.

And that's what I understood from the AA Milne actress's remark about the gauze veil: even if what the characters are saying is trivial there needs to be a sense of something underpinning that, that the outline of a fuller person is somehow there behind the witticisms should the need arise.

And I would suggest this process of exploration is only different in degree (the time available) rather than in kind from conventional drama. It was certainly my experience being present throughout the rehearsal process for a sitcom pilot with one of the writers on hand that the actors asked the same sort of questions about their characters as might have been asked in a stage play.

Against that, however, quite a large chunk of the one week rehearsal time (a complete afternoon) was given up to the perfecting of one small bit of comic business which would only last a few seconds onscreen, so priorities are not quite the same, but that certainly ties in with Mike Bolland's drama-plus-gags idea. To put it as simply as possible, the basic stuff about characters' wants and needs (or objectives and superobjectives) has to be attended to in both forms. Without it, even good actors like Gwen Taylor and Sam Kelly (in the TV sitcom Barbara) plummet. But maybe our disagreement is about what constitutes *detailed* exploration in either case. Less of it in sitcom but it still has to be there.

To move on, when you say "what I was thinking of as an alternative to characters as the focus was the very 'sit' of sitcom: the situation, which potentially supplies a large part of the humour", I don't agree. Del Boy and Rodney could be astronauts but they'd still be Del Boy and Rodney. Mainwaring and Wilson could be running an office, etc. The situation is a means to an end - exposing the characters' follies - but the characters, I believe, come first, though some "sits" are more likely to be conducive to bringing out the characters than others: Ricky Gervais makes the point that Brent needs to be in an authoratitive role as that's the context in which his behaviour - mistakenly seeking affection rather than respect - is supremely inappropriate.

Another point. When you distinguish between comedy drama and sitcom where does that leave something like Frasier or Larry Sanders? Many genuinely painful and poignant moments in both yet I've never heard them described as anything other than sitcoms. And the creators of Frasier made the conscious decision to trust the audience to stay with them for that page and a half when no one was cracking wise.

I do agree with what you say re character development and fleshing out also happening over a long period of time, though this doesn't contradict the importance of intial character exploration by the writer(s). In recent Dad's Army tributes Jimmy Perry has said that Arthur Lowe gradually became Mainwaring and vice versa, and Galton and Simpson seem to have taken bits from Hancock and from themselves etc. And yes, some of it may or may not be conscious: in another thread I have quoted Frank Muir in the book The Laughtermakers saying that because of G & S being who they were, inevitably their attitudes came out in whatever they wrote, consciously or not, and had they tried straight drama it may have been less successful, which is an interesting thought.

But I don't think you can separate out "Be Funny" from exploration of character and I continue to maintain that comedy comes from the central character's failings.

Postscript: Re Count Arthur Strong in particualr, have just read newNigelParkinson's post (message 45) which (sob) makes rather a lot of sense. So please ignore all the above and step well back as this message will self-destruct in five... four.. three...

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Hi Spir-An,

Poss not astronauts but Del and Rodney could be in a variety of situations which could give Del's eye for the main chance an equal pportunity. Even spacewise, I could imagine his conning Rodders out of being the first man on the moon ... But I still say character is primary; it's just a question of finding whatever settings might show that off to best advantage. And re Red Dwarf - someone described it as "student flatshare in space", which I think is true.

Re Safety Catch, have only heard clips. But it sounds like a mismatch - seemed naturalistically played so perhaps tone was wrong if it was intended to have satirical overtones. But Rigor Mortis was about the self-delusion of a number of workmates and could have transferred to any work situation, I feel - the specific setting was a bit of top dressing but it was the working out of the characters' interactions that made it a good series, I feel.

Yes, I think some of the shows you mention are really actual, or glorified, monologues. In the Horrible Hancock Hiatus thread, mostly chewing the fat with Eurkablitz I suggested that that most sitcoms have a central relationship of a dreamer and a doer, a Panza to deflate Quixote, and I think we came to the conclusion that you could also have a situation where the rest of the world is, effectively, that other person, giving the self-deluding protagonist a reality check. Now that could mean that Hancock in the Blood Donor is the same as Count Arthur Strong but what I'd suggest is that if CAS is really indifferent to the world around him then that is a glorified monologue whereas Hancock is actually engaging with that outside world (much as he resents and dislikes most of it). Maybe the crucial thing is you can imagine the Count having the same sort of arguments in his house by himself trying to locate his toothbrush whereas Hancock needs others to allow his own pomposity and bluster to show. That great exchange (in context): "Are you a doctor, then?" / "No, I never really bothered" from the Blood Donor is an example.

I don't agree about sitcoms only risking poignancy when well-established: Frasier (whose pilot is rightly regarded as a classic of the genre) hits the ground up and running with a truly painful moment with Martin. But more generally, I suppose, it's true.

Seems that most sitcoms now have a serial element but there could probably be several subcategories - in other words, the "serial" thing can apply to a whole season in a rather loose way - eg Frasier loses his radio job - or there can be more specific developments episode by episode - though madness lies in more specific categorisation, I suspect.

Okay, think I'm done for today...

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"yes, it is a mishmash of many war-time comedians" - maybe that's what gets me. Those comics seem fully formed in a way that CAS does not.

But I suppose the argument could also be that the writer/creator is deliberately avoiding the warmth which emanated from Rob Wilton, Sandy Powell et al, however ineffectual they were being. I suppose Count Arthur Strong could be said to be a comic character for our times, adrift in a society which doesn't care about him, someone whose cultural references are no longer understood by those around him. Possibly.

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This puts me in mind of a well known newsagents/stationers/booksellers etc with a very common surname such as used to be used by unmarried couples in hotels.

Recently - in the last couple of years, I think - they have started doing a bit of hard sell at the till, shoving large chocolate bars etc at you.

Does anyone find it quite as annoying as I do? Anyway, it took me quite some time to work out an appropriate response and took up a great deal of my waking hours.

My responses, in the event, ranged from a cold "No" to the sloganeering "No to hard sell!" which made me feel, respectively, guilty or overreacting.

The eventual formula I alighted on, which has served me well in the last few months is simply this: "Pass." I commend it to you. It either dumbfounds assistants or, as yesterday, the response is: "Fair enough."

Now, before I descend into Count Arthur's solipsism, I am aware that the assistants are probably obliged to ask this question but I also feel entitled to voice my objection.