Let’s start this week with a joke: ‘You know Mrs Kelly? Do you know Mrs Kelly? Her husband’s that little stout man, always on the corner of the street in a greasy waistcoat. You must know Mrs Kelly. Well, of course if you don’t, you don’t, but I thought you did, because I thought everybody knew Mrs Kelly.’
No, I can’t claim my sides are entirely split either. Yet, according to the first episode of What a Performance! Pioneers of Popular Entertainment (BBC4, Thursday), this sort of material by the Victorian music-hall star Dan Leno marked the birth of stand-up comedy as we know and are perhaps overburdened by it today.
The series’ stated aim is to explore mass entertainment from the days before television. But there appears to be another, unstated one as well: to show that BBC4 documentaries don’t all have to be by genial middle-aged academics keen to impart their knowledge in the form of neatly constructed arguments. Instead, they can be fun!
To this end, the chosen presenters are the unlikely double act of Frank Skinner and Suzy Klein, who bubble with a degree of chuckling enthusiasm that the average 18-30 holiday rep might envy. For a while on Thursday they were on best BBC4 behaviour, as they traced the origins of the Victorian music hall in the various strands of urban entertainment that grew up after the industrial revolution. Before long, though, the problems that would mar the rest of the programme began to surface.
For one thing, there was the surprisingly sloppy editing, with facts we’d already been told later put forward as startling revelations. For another, there was the decision to get Frank and Suzy to re-enact old music-hall turns. Seeing these turns as they might once have been was certainly necessary and even illuminating.
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