Ashley Blaker picks his comedy favourties

Ashley Blaker is at the Edinburgh Fringe performing  Normal Schmormal, his stand-up show about the joys of raising children with special needs, at Underbelly Bristo Square at 5.15pm. Here he picks his comedy favourites.

Not The Nine O’Clock News 

Every episode was recently uploaded to YouTube and as soon as my children have grown up, this will be one of the first things I watch in my freed up time. However, in the meantime, I am basing this choice on the eight Best Of episodes which are repeated every now and again. It feels necessary to state as perhaps this is an unfair advantage as any weaker bits aren’t in my memory. 

It’s also really dated. Anyone under the age of 45 won’t appreciate the spot-on parodies of Ask the Family, Barry Took-era Points of View, That’s Life, Game For a Laugh, Bamber-era University Challenge and Robin Day-era Question Time. 

But that’s why I love it. It’s not just brilliantly funny, performed by a cast of comedy greats, and overseen by the peerless producer John Lloyd; for me, it’s like a time machine back to my childhood. And as with most great comedy, once you’ve seen it, it’s impossible to see the world the same way again. Whenever a former MP dies and those from rival parties eulogise them, I always think of the Not The Nine O’Clock News  sketch where Mel Smith calls Rowan Atkinson ‘a great parliamentarian of our time’.

Benny Hill 

A controversial one, perhaps, but I wish Benny Hill received the credit he deserves. I loved him as a child so it was a delight when, in my former life as a producer, I got to make an hour-long documentary called There’ll Never Be Another Benny Hill’for BBC Radio 2. 

I got to interview his long-time producer Dennis Kirkland and others who worked with him from Barry Cryer and Nicholas Parsons to Bella Emberg and Les Dennis, and everyone had only the kindest words to say about Benny, both personally and professionally. 

I always liked Dennis Kirkland’s line about how The Benny Hill Show was the most sexist show of all time, in that it was entirely anti-men. That Benny, Bob Todd, Henry Magee and little Jackie Wright were always the sad pathetic men and the woman always came out on top. The sketch where Benny is counting a huge pile of receipts and gets distracted by his secretary and needs to start again is such a brilliant comment on man’s inherent weakness. 

But even setting that debate aside, I wish people were aware of Benny Hill’s earlier work which featured none of the material for which he’s now criticised. At the BBC, he was arguably the first comedy star made by TV and he truly embraced the format. He was the very first person to parody other shows, and he even invented techniques including the locked-off shot where he could appear as multiple characters on screen, such as in his amazing parody of Juke Box Jury.

So whatever you may think of him, you should remember that every great TV parody from The Day Today to Smashie & Nicey: End of an Era owes a debt of gratitude to Benny Hill.  

 Seinfeld

There are other sitcoms that I think are funnier line for line – Porridge and Only Fools and Horses for a start – but there’s something about Seinfeld that gets under the skin in a way that no other sitcom does. 

Perhaps it’s helped by the sheer number of shows they made but almost every day something happens which reminds me of an episode of Seinfeld. It’s also because most of those 180 episodes somehow crammed in four separate plot lines, and dealing as it did with the minutiae of life, it feels like every scenario one encounters is covered. 

Seinfeld is also just incredibly watchable. Without adverts, the episodes whip by and I could happily sit through hours of them in one sitting, which, as much as I love other comedy shows, wouldn’t usually be the case. To me, it’s just real comfort food of a show.

Carry On Abroad

I love the Carry On films and if I had to pick one it would be Abroad. Almost every member of the core cast is in it and it’s peak Talbot Rothwell writing, packed with more double entendres than maybe any other in the series. 

The sequence where Kenneth Williams mans the switchboard and listens to everyone’s complaints is just glorious. 

In my mind, I always associate this film with the Are You Being Served? movie and it’s funny how often people muddle them up. The Carry On team’s holiday to Elsbels and the Grace Brothers’ staff jaunt to Costa Plonka seem to co-exist as archetypal 1970s package holidays to European destinations with unfinished hotels, dodgy food and incompetent staff.

Woody Allen: The Stand-Up Years

Years before Netflix specials, there were three albums of Woody Allen performing in Chicago, Washington DC and San Francisco, which were collected together as a box set called The Stand-Up Years. I first heard clips from it on Fred Housego’s LBC comedy show in which he mostly played this and bits of Hancock and Tom Lehrer. I immediately bought the album and soon learnt it off by heart.

It’s probably the most Jewish stand-up ever even though he barely even mentions being Jewish. He doesn’t need to because it permeates everything he says. So in his peerless moose routine – for my money, the greatest single stand-up bit ever performed – he goes a party hosted by Mr and Mrs Berkowitz, claims the moose is a fictitious couple called the Solomons, and delivers the amazing punchline that the New York Athletic Club restricts Jewish members. 

Steve ​Coogan In Character with John Thomson

In August 1992, in between my years in the lower and upper sixth, I went to the Edinburgh Festival for the first time. I saw lots of great shows from Lee and Herring, Harry Hill, Frank Skinner and Ben Miller. But one night in a really small room in the old Gilded Balloon, I saw a show that simply blew my mind. 

I booked a ticket because I’d seen Steve Coogan do impressions on TV and I loved the bit he did about overdubbing crap 70s foreign films but he didn’t do any of that. Instead he did four characters who were introduced by John Thomson as Bernard Right-On, which was a phenomenal character in his own right, and it was just so funny.

The show ended up winning the Perrier Award and formed the basis of Coogan’s first live video.

However, by then he had inserted Pauline Calf into the show in place of Alan Partridge so I only have my own memories from 31 years ago of what he did in that set. I seem to remember it being a Q & A with the audience, with Partridge himself providing the questions for them to read, and I recall a funny story about him driving around every Hotel California in LA until he found one that said ‘Welcome to the Hotel California’. 

There was also a now non-canonical reference to his own father being a sports reporter and commentating on the 1966 World Cup Final (‘Me and some idiots are on the pitch. We think it’s all over!’) I wish I could go back in time and sit in that audience and enjoy that show all over again.  

Published: 1 Aug 2023