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.
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