If you think your life is stressful it’s good to reflect on what poor René Artois went through each week in ’Allo ’Allo!, the 1980s BBC sitcom set during the German occupation of France. RAF pilots hidden in his mother-in-law’s cupboard upstairs, German officers in the café downstairs, Herr Otto Flick of the Gestapo likely to limp in at any moment – and all the time trying to serve drinks and juggle a sex life that would have exhausted even Errol Flynn.
‘I have to be nice to the Germans, they are my customers, they are winning the war, so if I am not nice to them they will shoot me,’ René would say. ‘I have to be nice to the Resistance, otherwise they will shoot me for being nice to the Germans. I have to be nice to my wife because if she finds out I am having an affair with Yvette she will shoot me… and it is only Tuesday.’
When ’Allo ’Allo! first aired 40 years ago this month, it was generally looked down on by snooty critics who thought it in poor taste. How could anyone find humour in the tyranny of the Gestapo and the life and death struggles of the French Resistance under Nazi occupation? Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft, the show’s writers, were said to be trivialising the 20th century’s greatest tragedy.
’Allo ’Allo! has had the last laugh on its detractors. It has aged so much better than many of the ‘alternative’ comedy shows the critics drooled over at the time. It’s still being shown on nostalgia channels and its good-natured, unpretentious exuberance is like a breath of fresh air. Channel 5 has aired a documentary for the sitcom’s 40th anniversary this year, although the BBC has not marked the occasion.
‘It wouldn’t be made today!’ is a bit of a cliché, but ’Allo ’Allo! really wouldn’t. (In fact, a proposed BBC remake a few years ago was reportedly dropped over fears that it might cause offence.)
Consider how ’Allo ’Allo! came into being. One night, in his little cottage next to St James’s Palace, actor-turned-sitcom-writer Jeremy Lloyd had the idea of a farce about the French Resistance. At midnight he rang producer and co-writer David Croft, with whom he had collaborated on Are You Being Served?, and put the suggestion to him. Croft replied: ‘Good idea! Let’s start tomorrow.’ The pilot was written in just two-and-a-half days. That’s how things were done in the BBC when people of genuine talent were in decision-making positions.
Then consider the content. There is no sermonising. Its mission is just to entertain. Lloyd and Croft were comedy writers, not preachers or wannabe politicians. Any modern remake would have lots of po-faced statements woven in about how the Resistance were fighting for ‘freedom and democracy’. There’d be captions telling us ‘The Nazis are really evil!’, just in case we thought differently. There’d be no national stereotyping.
In ’Allo ’Allo! the stereotypes are a delight. The French locals – and the Italian character Captain Bertorelli – are more interested in making love than making war. The British are portrayed as silly arses. The English policeman Crabtree, who speaks atrocious French (or rather atrocious English with a French accent), was inspired by Ted Heath who spoke French with a broad English accent. ‘We weren’t sure whether the public would get the joke, but from his first entrance when he said “Good moaning” the audience fell about,’ Croft recalled.
The occupying Germans meanwhile are a splendidly mixed bunch. They are serious and efficient (Major-General von Klinkerhoffen), corrupt and lazy (Colonel von Strohm), comically sinister (Herr Flick, Herr von Smallhausen), very sexy (Private Helga) and wonderfully camp (Lieutenant Gruber).
Today we’d lose these hilarious characterisations. There would instead be tedious, ‘right-on’ attempts to link Nazism to modern politics and regular, none-too-subtle warnings about the dangers of political extremism. Just look at what happened in the dire 2018 BBC remake of The ABC Murders. Agatha Christie’s most exciting story was turned into a dreary anti-Brexit diatribe, with Belgian refugee Hercule Poirot faced with angry Oswald Mosley supporters at every turn. ‘In the 1930s things were very much like they are now. In 1933 the British Union of Fascists started to gain real traction. The language of it is exactly the language of Brexit and Trump,’ explained the screenwriter Sarah Phelps.
Forty years on, it has aged so much better than the ‘alternative’ comedy shows critics drooled over at the time
The irony is that in being properly funny, Lloyd and Croft’s masterpiece is infinitely more profound, punchier and more subversive than any of the more po-faced and political offerings.’Allo ’Allo! wasn’t really taking the mickey out of the war, but out of those intense wartime dramas where you were not allowed so much as a giggle. It is refreshingly cynical about the motivations of ordinary people caught up in conflict – be they occupier or occupied. René, hailed as ‘the bravest man in France’, is in fact a coward. When Monsieur LeClerc asks why he doesn’t want to marry communist Resistance leader Denise Laroque, who is, after all, ‘an intelligent woman with beautiful boobies’, René replies: ‘Think of the life I would have to lead. Blowing up trains, dodging bullets, sleeping in hedges, living in ditches.’
The British airmen, too, are hardly heroes. One night during an ‘RAF bumming’ raid, Fairfax asks Carstairs if the sight of Wellingtons overhead made him want to be up there with his old chums. ‘No, not really,’ Carstairs replies. And instead of hounding the French peasants, the town Commandant Colonel von Strohm pleads with René to stop aiding the Resistance so they can have an easy life. When General von Klinker-hoffen asks him, ‘Do you want to be in this war or not?’, he replies: ‘Well, I’m not mad about it.’
How interesting that we could more easily joke about the second world war in 1982 – which was just 37 years after the end of the conflict – than we can today. ’Allo ’Allo! reminds us of a time when comedy writers had one single, honourable objective: to make us laugh, and they were all the better – and in the end more serious – for it.
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