Source: Wikimedia Commons

What do you put on the homepage of a website about everything ever?

Wikipedia, the oracle of online omniscience, answers this question beautifully with a daily plucking from its vast repertoire of content.

With a snappy summary and an intriguing image, you’re up and away on a digital magic carpet, skimming over the fascinating landscapes of Esoterica.

However, today’s selection was an unexpected source of mirth this morning:

Fanny scratching in 18th-century London’s Cock Lane was so notorious that interested bystanders often blocked the street … Fanny scratching eventually resulted in several prosecutions, and the pillorying of a father

At first I had this pegged for the last revenge of a disgruntled Wikipedia editor. Then I clocked the date. An April Fools Day joke masquerading as a fascinating tale of pre-Victorian squalor.

She is not amused.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Victorians themselves would never have got the joke. We English are often reminded today that those same Victorians deserve most of the credit for our sexually-repressed English sense of humour.

The 2007 edition of Let’s Go Western Europe, an anglophone backpackers’ bible, attempts to prepare non-British readers for a visit to Britain with a bit of background.

Summing up the culture and history of a whole nation in a couple of paragraphs was never going to be a backpack in the park, but Let’s Go gamefully wades in, describing the English sense of humour as “raunchy” and therefore somewhat at odds with the popular impression of “English reserve” held abroad.

If this is actually true, it was not always thus. Indeed Victorian Britain abhorred raunch. English humour during Queen Vic’s reign was much broader than the claustrophobic, organ-fixated morals and manners of our own times. In a rare Daily Mail article (‘rare’ inasmuch as it is actually quite good), AN Wilson describes the kind of content one finds in a Victorian jokebook:

Marry a woman with a wooden leg. When you want a spree, steal the leg, she can’t run after you!

Quite. Beyond the Victorians, Wilson delves deeper into the bargain bin and comes up with Shakespeare and Chaucer: fertile ground, as John Sutherland notes in The Guardian, for richer and far ruder treasures.

With decorous dialogues and sparkling soliloquies, Shakespeare’s poetry and prose often soared high. Bawdy bard that he was however, occasionally it would also swoop very low indeed:

I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale:
Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.
Within this limit is relief enough,
Sweet bottom-grass and high delightful plain,
Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough,
To shelter thee from tempest and from rain…

— Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis

Meanwhile Chaucer’s responsibility for rudeness is aggravated by the paucity of contemporary works for comparison, together with his status and singularity in English literature.

Derk was the nyght as pich, or as the cole,
And at the wyndow out she putte hir hole,
And absolon, hym fil no bet ne wers,
But with his mouth he kiste hir naked ers
Ful savourly, er he were war of this.

— Chaucer, Miller’s Tale

Were he here to answer to the charge of excellence in picturesque smut, Chaucer’s excuse in The Canterbury Tales might be that his characters – his Miller, Reeve and Wife of Bath – are doing the talking. Moreover, they’re only treading the well-worn pilgrim’s path of a literary genre called fabliau in which a certain degree of filth was expected and even encouraged.

Today, both Shakespeare and Chaucer are of course required reading on the syllabus of every schoolkid in Britain. Say no more.

Most people remember John Savident as Coronation Street‘s recently deceased butcher Fred Elliott.

Fred was a self-made man, a local personality, a mainstay at the Rotary Club. A character on the cusp of extinction in today’s Britain: part of the local Con club scene, part of the furniture along with the photos of once successful football teams and dusty plaques commemorating long forgotten charity events. Fade to brown.

Happily, unlike his character, the actor is still with us and though there are similarities between the affable meatman and the grumpy old cobbler, it was the welcome return of Savident as arch-thesp that made this production of Hobson’s Choice a prospect to relish.

Indeed other people – myself included – remember the actor as a scene-stealer extraordinaire in Remains of the Day and a fistful of other period dramas.

So John Savident was right here, treading the boards at the Sheffield Lyceum as Henry Horatio Hobson, widower, cobbler, father of three aspiring daughters.

Those who remember David Lean’s 1954 film adaptation may recall that Charles Laughton didn’t really play Hobson for laughs, but the stage script was rendered duly hilarious as soon as the starting gun cracked.

Savident’s Hobson rightly dominated the play despite appearing in relatively few scenes, with the unlikely pairing of assistant bootmaker Willy Mossop (an excellent Dylan Charles) and eldest Hobson sister Maggie (Carolyn Backhouse) gelling particularly well. The wedding night scene was beautifully and affectionately played.

Indeed, the performances were all superb, as The Stage pointed out, this was “a cast which never gives less than best” [1].

• Director: Wes Anderson
• United States, 2007
• 

Anderson’s films are often about families or groups of individuals who form strong bonds. What’s becoming increasingly clear after seeing Darjeeling is that the director’s troupe of actors is imitating his art: almost all of the cast here seem to have appeared in multiple Anderson movies.

And Darjeeling is hardly the black sheep. It’s probably his most accessible effort yet and the humour and human story here are uncomplicated. Yet the audiences have been consistently small and the publicity was probably overshadowed by Owen Wilson’s personal troubles.

More’s the pity, because as three very different characters, Brody, Wilson and Schwartzmann are incredibly convincing siblings, travelling across India on the eponymous train and trying to make sense of each other.

Brief Encounter, The West Yorkshire Playhouse

Noël Coward’s play Still Life (1936) formed the basis of the wonderfully restrained (or rather dry, depending on your sympathies) 1945 film Brief Encounter.

The film tells the story of Laura Jesson, a terribly middle-class, well-to-do sort of housewife who takes the train at Milford Junction to do a few chores. One day she meets the urbane, well-to-do sort of doctor, Alec Harvey. An impossible affair flourishes and dies in the anonymous privacy of the station café.

Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as housewife and doctor were delightfully repressed in the film, their furtive affair played out more in silences than in spoken words. And if we’re more used to seeing stage remade for screen, as an example of the opposite Brief Encounter seems a tough proposition.

But here the Kneehigh Theatre has done everything opposite.

As if a reaction to the monochrome movie, the play is full of colour, music and – shock horror – comedy. The stiff upper lip has curled into a knowing smirk. At times, the denizens of the cafe come perilously close to vaudevillian caricature, but the blossoming romance at the centre is wisely protected, retaining its naïveté.

The principal criticism must be that this stage Brief Encounter is rather uneven. When the wider focus of the first half – on character sketches in the station cafe – narrows significantly in the second, the play loses much of its rhythm and energy despite occasional recorse to scenes of light relief.

Nevertheless, the transformation from film to stage is successful. Even then the play does not entirely reject the overtures of cinema. Indeed, aspects of film are celebrated with film sequences projected directly onto the action and the action is choreographed in extraordinary detail.

• Director: Pedro Almodóvar
• Spain, 1993
• 

Déjà vu abounds in Kika, a brief return to the sort of hair-brained frivolity that characterised Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown. Parallels might also be drawn with Almodóvar’s ¡átame! (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!) (1990), another film in which the director treats a sexual attack on a woman with surprising humour.

At times, Kika comes across more music hall than movie, though the main plot manages to remain perfectly serious, similar in content to High Heels, as a son and his newly returned father divide up the affections of the eponymous make-up artist and the smell of murder gets increasingly strong as the father’s past unravels.

Verónica Forqué is an unusual but affable Almodóvar muse as Kika while craggy father figure Peter Coyote doesn’t quite fit in. Star turns come from the goofy-gorgeous Rossy de Palma as a yokel housemaid and Victoria Abril as an investigative journalist cum TV presenter, bravely sporting what must be one of cinema’s weirdest wardrobes.

• Director: Edgar Wright
• United Kingdom, 2004
• 

Perhaps it’s because British comedies are more enjoyable on the small screen – when you can have a curry and a few tins of lager and not concentrate too much on their frequent flaws – that I got on with Shaun of the Dead much better than its successor Hot Fuzz.

Working as a home electrical store sales manager, Shaun (Simon Pegg) is the epitome of late 20s / early 30s UK mediocrity, riddled with ennui and incapable of growing up. He needs some life-changing event to boot him up the arse. Like a pandemic of zombification.

There are less holes in Swiss cheese, but the DVD experience hides the implausibility of such elements as Shaun’s relationship (his girlfriend is much too smart and sexy to be going out with him) and the limited number of extras (the vanquished undead are still undead when they fill out later scenes). Like old bananas: a little overripe but still entertaining.

• Director: Ron Howard
• United States, 1994
• 

As a screenwriter David Koepp has been around. He’s written some terrific scripts and some not so terrific. His work on The Paper, alongside brother Stephen, manages to reach both extremes.

Suddenly put in charge while chasing a big story, workaholic newspaper editor Michael Keaton is forced to choose between the job and his wife, whilst his colleague and adversary Glenn Close must choose between printing the truth and her professional envy dressed up as the economics of a late print run. All that drama, and it’s a comedy!

A terrific script and energetic acting bumps us through the first 90 minutes or so with only a few lingering issues, notably the woeful underuse and probable miscasting of the delectable Marisa Tomei. Then it all goes horribly wrong: the overwrought denouement is steeped in typically Howardian sentimentality and mediocrity creeps in to spoil the fun.

• Director: Norman Jewison
• United States, 1964
• 

Like Sidney Lumet, Jewison’s career is still going strong today, four decades after his feature debut and the studio star vehicle Send Me No Flowers isn’t the sort of movie with which you’d associate him.

On paper, it looks hammy: a hypochondriac overhears his doctor discussing a terminal diagnosis and believes it his own, so he sets about finding his wife a replacement husband. On paper it doesn’t stand up. On paper, it’s ridiculous material for a marital comedy.

Somehow Rock Hudson as the hypochondriac with the ever dependable Doris Day (also still working) as his wife manage to keep the movie from catching cold: if you can swallow a pill of disbelief, Send Me No Flowers is charming, warming and most importantly, it’s funny.

• Director: Mark Herman
• United Kingdom, 1992
• 

The inoffensive – often romantic – British comedy is the plat du jour of Mark Herman. His oeuvre is small potatoes compared to the smorgasbord of Working Title produced, Richard Curtis penned transatlantic exports, but Herman’s movies are memorable because they’re typically more earthbound, hearty and wholesome.

I seem to remember this particular dish being tastier. My memory must have failed me, else I was drunk or drugged when last I saw it. Blame it on the Bellboy looked promising, serving up the kooky Bronson Pinchot, the gravel rash cool of Bryan Brown, Richard Griffiths in a rare ugly role and Dudley Moore behaving like, well, Dudley Moore.

But the fabulous location – the floating city of Venice – is bafflingly irrelevant, the acting makes you seasick and the comedy is so light that if floats off on its own, leaving you thoroughly unsatisfied. Watch this and go hungry.

• Director: Martin Brest
• United States, 1984
• 

The Cold War was loosening up, Reaganomics was ramping up and America was booming: 1984 was a big year for big movies and Beverly Hills Cop was one of the biggest.

Hardened maverick cop Axel Foley leaves behind the bleak streets of Detroit to hunt down his old friend’s killer in exotic Beverly Hills. It doesn’t sound promising, but the brash confidence of Eddie Murphy as Foley improvising in his first leading role is the stuff of legends, with a memorable double act from John Ashton and Judge Reinhold as a duo of feckless cops more used to low crime and sunshine. Bronson Pinchot also steals several scenes as gallery assistant Serge.

And it could have been so different: only weeks before shooting began, producers Bruckheimer and Simpson were going to make a straight actioner with Sylvester Stallone gunning his way down Rodeo Drive. Phew, that was a close one!