Tony Slattery was outrageously funny. And he was funny because he was outrageous. The actor and comedian, who died yesterday aged 65, may have belonged to that unhappy category of performers who were ‘troubled’ – tormented by insecurities and afflicted by addiction – but he also joins that distinguished pantheon of entertainers who made their mark for their rude and bawdy humour.
Slattery was described as a ‘lost anxious teddy bear’
Slattery first came to public attention in the late-1980s as a panellist on the Channel 4 improvisation show Whose Line Is Anyway?, a programme that entailed playing out scenes in the style of a movie, programme or genre decided by the audience or the host, Clive Anderson. It was no mean feat that he became a main attraction of the show (his cherubic good looks and soulful, dark eyes did help). After all, he was pitted alongside and against some of the most imposing talents of the time: the versatile Josie Lawrence, the erudite John Sessions and the lugubrious everyman Paul Merton.
Yet Slattery, the son of Irish immigrants who grew up on a council estate in North London, often proved more than a match for his peers. He may have been a manic, jitterypeddler in smut and vulgarity, innuendo and double-entendres, but it was often of a high-class variety and in the vaudeville tradition. His indecency was eloquent, delivered with a debonair touch and learned aura.
His faculty for word-play and capacity to invent scenarios in which reality was distorted or inverted – the two hallmarks of a genuinely cerebral comic – betrayed a keen intelligence. It demonstrated a first-rate mind and a first-rate education, not just at Cambridge, where he studied medieval languages, and where he teamed up with fellow Footlights performers Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, but at the Roman Catholic Gunnersbury Boys’ School he had attended: ‘The central tenets of grammar and correct speaking were drummed into us at Gunnersbury from very early on, using lots of Jesuitical tension, irony and power games.’
Slattery later appeared on the comedy shows Just a Minute and Have I Got News for You, and ventured into movies, appearing in The Crying Game, Peter’s Friends and How to Get Ahead in Advertising, with Richard E Grant. By the end of the 1990s, however, his fortunes had waned acutely, hastened by drink and drugs problems: he was consuming two bottles of vodka a day and ten grams of cocaine a week. A nervous breakdown, penury and years of relative obscurity followed.
For this, he will be sadly remembered. Some will conclude that his later travails were an inevitable consequence of his temperament, that his frenetic, scurrilous and attention-seeking persona unwittingly exposed the dark side of an insecure and delicate soul. But his intensity and relentless work-rate also reflected a working-class background and fear of poverty and unemployment, something that haunts and preoccupies all stand-up comedians and actors, irrespective of social standing. Therefore the charge, once made by the Sun TV critic Garry Bushell, that Slattery was ‘smug, self-satisfied and middle-class’ was not only untrue on all three counts, it would have undoubtedly hurt as well.
Perhaps he deserved it. Comedians who give it should be able to take it as well. He did, after all, announce at an awards ceremony that ‘Jeremy Beadle should be clubbed to death’. But such is the perennial tragedy of those who demand attention and are thrust into the limelight as a consequence: when it happens, they are often ill-equipped at dealing with it.
When he was interviewed by the Guardian in 2019, Slattery was described by Hadley Freeman as a ‘lost anxious teddy bear’. That may well be an accurate summary of the man. Slattery may also be remembered as much for his downfall as for his triumphs. But we should cherish his memory – and learn from it.
Tony Slattery embodied qualities of TV comedy that are rarely apparent or evident today. His risqué humour and penchant for suggestion are aspects of the genre largely absent in our over-sensitive times, where anything that might be construed as ‘inappropriate’ is suppressed. Whose Line Is It Anyway?, and his virtuoso performances on that show, embodied comedy for grown-ups that was intelligent, skilful and spontaneous, and didn’t use swearing or being offensive as a crutch. Sure, Slattery loved naughty words, probably more than most, but invariably as a means and not an end. His swearing worked through its dissonance: it was often delivered in a refined or affectedly plummy manner.
In an age where so much television comedy is banal (Mrs Brown’s Boys), safe and sentimental (see the return of Gavin and Stacey) or cosy and smug (Have I Got News For You), Tony Slattery made us laugh because he dared to make us think – to make us think forbidden, naughty thoughts.
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