Melvyn Bragg’s notebook: I found hell on Regent Street

John Lloyd, producer of Blackadder, Spitting Image, QI etc, has boldly picked up where he left off at Cambridge more than 40 years ago. He has gone back to his youthful passion for stand-up. I’m making a South Bank Show about him and last week I went to Ealing Town Hall. He was on the 9.30 slot in ‘Chortle’ week. It was unlike any stand-up I’d ever seen. But then Not the Nine O’Clock News, his first big hit, was like no comedy show I’d ever seen and his originality continues on Radio 4 in The Museum of Curiosities. What makes his act so fresh is the mixture of funny broad jokes, bullet points of esoteric scholarship and entertaining recollections from a career seriously dedicated to making people laugh through other people. Now he does it face to face. And it works — again.

Charles Dickens called it ‘streaky bacon’. Mixing the categories so that for instance tragedy can include comedy. It began with Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales when we have kissing ‘her naked ers’ (or arse) alongside the perfectly high-minded gentil knight. Shakespeare is full of it. John Lloyd is stand-up streaky bacon.

I went to Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath the other day. It has emerged magnificently from a year-long cocoon of restoration. Genius wherever you look. But one painting that intrigued me is by Charles Jervais of the two Finch sisters. Elizabeth was to marry a younger man, a lawyer, who was later to become the first Earl of Mansfield and remodel Kenwood with Robert Adam. The portrait shows a rather truculent woman. Her father was a double earl and London society thought she had married beneath her. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu settled the matter. ‘People are divided in their opinions… I am among those who think, tout bien compté, she has happily disposed of her person.’