How Harry Hill's TV Burp (and a good friend) helped my lockdown loneliness
How Harry Hill's TV Burp (and a good friend) helped my lockdown loneliness
This is a homage to the days when watching lots of silly TV was actually a choice
Today’s newsletter is the flipside of last week’s opening Episodes of My Life which looked at ‘Marge Be Not Proud’ and my childhood. You can read it here, but to sum up I looked at my troubled past, issues with my mother and how counselling helps. Seeing a therapist is something I strongly advocate especially if you’re keen on paying a lot of money to feel a bit icky. That said, I’m finally going to answer the question posed 34 years ago by Mick in the movie Crocodile Dundee when he found out that a New York socialite had to use a shrink: “Hasn’t she not got any mates?”
I’m lucky to have ‘mates’, Mick. Even though it was necessary for me to see a ‘shrink’ it’s also has been vital to have really good friends (not just mates, Mick) and a life full of laughter. And this week’s instalment is about two people who made me laugh a lot: one of my best friends Neil, whom I shared a house in a small Hertfordshire market town nearly 20 years ago, and the comedian Harry Hill. During this period, Neil and I watched a lot of television particularly Harry Hill’s TV Burp – which oddly was a comedy digest of the week’s TV.
For international readers, I’ll try to explain who Harry Hill is although he’s quite hard to define. Despite being firmly middle class (he was a GP before he became a standup) his roots are more working-class musical hall – slapstick, songs, catchphrases, silly expressions – mixed in with a bit of surrealism (more The Goodies and Tommy Cooper than Python). But he’s a firmly modern act as primetime clipshow TV Burp (2001-2012) shows: it was very TikTok as it featured lip syncing, cutaway gags and poking fun at reality TV (at the time this was Big Brother, The Apprentice and The Dragons’ Den AKA Shark Tank in the US). I once interviewed Harry Hill about the thrice Bafta-winning show and he told me that the real work was done by the team of researchers that would watch hours and hours of terrible TV. I so wanted that job.
This Episodes of My Life is about this one short TV Burp clip which features chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall preparing a cuttlefish in his bath and justifiably being mocked by Harry Hill. When I’m feeling low I stick it on and cry with laughter. I guess this is a love letter to how one joke can give so much joy. And it’s also an ode to a friendship that has kept me going through dark times.
Everyone has stories of terrible house shares. Ten years ago I lived with a guy who was affable but so skint that I cooked for him for over a year. Guess what? This guy now owns an entire house in central London as he was stinking rich all along. Last time I saw him on the Tube he blanked me. At university I lived with a guy who was so enraged by the lounge not being tidy that he threw a banana at my bedroom window. Last time I saw this chump he was a barrister practising criminal law which says everything about that profession.
But when house shares work well it’s a joyous thing. And, believe me, I’ve thought a lot about this during lockdown. Not that I don’t love being with my wonderful family but, well, the global pandemic could have happened when I was really into gaming, had cable TV and zero responsibilities. Although it could’ve been a lot worse: imagine being trapped with your parents. Worse still imagine being trapped with my parents.
But looking back to a house share nearly 20 years ago is soothing in a time when everything is closed and childcare is difficult. House shares on TV tend to focus on two men who are dysfunctional but self-reliant (see Peep Show, Bottom, Joey and Chandler in Friends) and there was an element of truth to this with Neil and I. We were young enough to want to go out most nights (I was 25; Neil 30) but found ourselves in Royston, a market town that had no market (unless you count a guy selling fruit in a car park), zero nightlife and an army of pensioners who spent their day queueing outside banks.
Worse still, it was Neil’s house and he worked full-time while I was studying to be a journalist. That meant the place was full of his crap which included a huge gong, wooden African-style CD racks and voodoo-style figurines. We were told at one point to limit the gong playing to office hours by our neighbour, Rob, who also complained regularly about our ‘loud appeals’ when we played cricket games on the original Playstation. The shouting stopped when we ruined the game by discovering that you could prevent the other player from scoring by bowling the ball a metre away from the batsman.
The lounge also included the most ridiculous early noughties tech: a 300-CD player that worked well until we lost the handwritten tracklist. It then became a large plastic box containing 300 CDs. You could manually type in the album and song titles but it had a Nokia-style keyboard, so you’d have to take a week off work to complete this task. We lost the remote control and when you picked a random track it would always play some Russian surfing music from the 60s.
But that’s not to say I didn’t have my idiosyncrasies. Despite being a socialist I went through a phase of liking socialite James Hewitt after I saw him win Back to Reality (the setup was radical: reality TV stars live in a house) which led to me smoking a pipe like he did, especially in the bath. I also was skint and would ‘borrow’ Neil’s food. He would tolerate this because when we first met he was jobless (although I don’t remember really helping him out financially other than he smoked my fags in the days when ciggies were cheap).
Neil’s occupation is robotics – he now has his own company and is a keen philanthropist – but luckily his mind was far from binary and we had a similar sense of humour. Before we lived together we visited Prague in the late 90s and spent a lot of the holiday watching Jerry Springer for the first time. Throughout that trip we would quote the show with Neil doing an impersonation of an enraged black guy shouting “what you gonna do?”. Neil’s a man of a thousand voices - all of which sound like John Barnes rapping. Although I can only do Jimmy Stewart which is becoming more and more useless each day. To be honest it never was very useful.
We loved silly voices and TV Burp and this clip particularly. What Harry Hill deftly does is skewer the pomposity of celebrity chefs by showing how ridiculous it would be to attempt to clean a cuttlefish yourself in a shared house. It’s also pointless as all fishmongers would do it for you. The image of Harry Hill wearing pyjamas has me in stitches every time and the cross-cuts between the bathroom and corridor are actually seamless – watch how the colour palettes seem to match.
In lockdown, though, I did have to prepare a cuttlefish like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall does here because I signed up to this ridiculously expensive fresh fish box scheme. It was quite hard to do it without laughing and thinking of this skit. The worst thing is the black ink in the bath looks like the blood in Psycho which then caused me to imagine Harry Hill as Norman Bates (“Janet? How long are you going to be in there?”)
I’m still really good friends with Neil and through lockdown we’ve had chats that have never been strained despite the pressures of having young families. I do miss the days that we spent in the market-less market town but then we both have kids who need a bit more from their parents than a few silly comments when they watch TV. Although I can’t stop myself when my daughter has the interminable Paw Patrol on, but then it’s hard to keep quiet when you’re watching a cartoon based on the premise that a bunch of puppies are a town’s emergency service.
I’ve tried to wean her off this kids’ programme and even showed her the Harry Hill cuttlefish clip. I may have described it here in more than 1,500 words but she summed it up in one: “Yucky!” But what’s yucky to a four-year-old is absolutely satisfying to someone much older and missing his old friend.
Neil, and I, are friends not because of a shared love of comedy or even experience but maybe because we listen to each other. Which links to next week when I’ll be looking at an episode of Cracker and, instead of focusing on the obvious racist violence, I will talk about the importance of listening to those grieving.
The week after I will be looking stateside at an episode from legal series The Good Fight that features a Nazi punch. Conclusive proof that this Substack is not just about British stuff from the 90s/00s.