Back in the Fifties, it was possible for a single TV sitcom to capture 92 per cent of the small-screen audience; 92 per cent? It sounds astonishing to us now. The idea of so many people watching the very same comic gags at the very same time. Those fabled water-cooler, coffee-machine chats about what was ‘on’ last night no longer happen. Offices have lost their communal buzz, and are often as dead quiet now as a funeral parlour. No more telephone calls, as everyone is texting. No need to talk to anyone, you just email. Nothing to talk about, because we’re all listening, watching, playing something different. No wonder we have a coalition government. There’s just no chance for any single party to be heard, or seen, by sufficient numbers to have any impact.
Huge audiences, though, were captured back in the 1950s and 1960s by Lucille Ball, the red-headed American comedian, star of shows like I Love Lucy and The Lucy Show, who influenced Tony Hancock, Roseanne Barr, French and Saunders, Miranda Hart. The shows have long ended, but there’s still an annual Lucille Ball festival in her hometown of Jamestown, New York, as we discovered on Barbara Windsor’s Funny Girls, an engagingly nostalgic series (produced by Susan Marling) on great American female comics (Radio 2, Tuesdays).
Nine hundred lookalikes paraded down Main Street, Jamestown, in Lucy’s trademark red hair, red lips, polka-dot shirts on what would have been Ball’s 100th birthday (she died in 1989). Why was she so successful? Barbara Windsor reckoned it was because she was funny and sexy at the same time. But I loved her shows as a kid because she was such a great female role model, in spite of appearing to be nothing more than a browbeaten wife and useless at everything. She was just so quick-witted, so expressive, so in charge of the scene. Not that I knew it then but, as Barbara Windsor revealed, Lucille Ball was actually a very smart operator. She might have played the ditzy housewife to comic perfection, but she also got hold of the distribution rights to all her shows, making herself a mint.
Ball was turned out of theatre school aged 19 for having ‘no talent’, but she stuck it out, made it to Hollywood, appeared in countless B-movies, until she found her ideal sparring partner, Desi Arnaz. Their marriage was the basis for the I Love Lucy scripts, written (and here’s another amazing fact about those early sitcoms) by a group of 20-year-olds, who yet came up with husband-and-wife gags that were so slick, so surreal, and yet so true to family life as to appeal to Mom and Pop in Wisconsin just as much as to teenage girls in suburban London. How they did it, heaven knows, since on the page the gags just don’t cut it. Try this for laughs. Lucy has been roller-skating and comes home still wearing her skates because, typically cack-handed, she can’t get them off. ‘You haven’t lived until you’ve shifted gear in roller-skates,’ she declares, exacting raucous giggles from the studio audience.
It was the way she delivered them. Ball had perfect timing, and was never afraid to look a fool because she knew she was way sharper than anyone else around.
On Radio 3’s late-night essay this week, soothingly produced by Justine Willett, writers have been talking about not going to sleep, describing that 3 a.m. torment of starting wide awake, knowing that sleep will not come again until the first bird starts singing, half an hour before the alarm is due to go off. ‘Perhaps because I was born in the middle of the night,’ began A.L. Kennedy, arrestingly, on Wednesday night, ‘I’ve never really associated the hours of darkness with wasting my time in sleep.’ Once she learnt to read and discovered books, she thought, ‘How could I read them all if I didn’t keep putting in the hours?’ So she snuggled up under the covers with a torch and read till her eyes began to blur. The nights became ‘too bright to resist’.
When committed to a novel, she writes through the night, because, she says, it’s ‘the proper time for dreaming’. It’s made her ill, the constant lack of sleep, but still she does it, in her desire ‘to make something mildly dramatic out of endless typing’ — an apt description of why writers persist with the often tiresome business of writing.
Everyone, though, not just writers, will at some time or other have experienced that 3 a.m. ‘tribunal’ when the mind keeps going over and over the catalogue of ‘mistakes made and damages received’, ‘of threats that are more or less credible, but all insist on being heard’. We all at some time will have felt ‘what a terrible place the edge of sleep can be’. That’s perhaps why, says A.L. Kennedy, when we care about someone we so often ask, ‘How did you sleep?’
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