There is a certain comic archetype that is particularly British. The likes of Pooter, Mainwaring, Hancock, Fawlty and Brent are in a tradition – going back to Falstaff, perhaps further – of hopelessly optimistic yet socially oblivious dreamers. One such character is John Shuttleworth, created and played by Graham Fellows.
For the uninitiated, John Shuttleworth is a retired security guard and aspiring singer-songwriter from Sheffield who lives with his dinner lady wife and two children, Darren and Karen. He performs mainly at hospices and drop-in centres, often for no more than his travel money. His career is inexpertly managed by his next-door neighbour with whom John enjoys a generally warm, though occasionally fractious, relationship.
The BBC radio sitcom The Shuttleworths, which features these characters, is a fine example of the gentle, unforced observational comedy of northern England. It is a comedy without victims or an agenda. Fellows yields his laughs through recognition of shared foibles and illusions, with the comic song a key element. Within his performances are echoes of Victoria Wood, Peter Kay and Alan Bennett.
The John Shuttleworth live shows are a one-man (and his Yamaha organ) performance. His songs are interspersed with general musings on life, giving, as John Updike said, ‘the mundane its beautiful due’: ‘It’s a very exciting time for food, isn’t it? I had some taramasalata the other day’; ‘I don’t like punk. It’s anti-social’; ‘One cup of tea is never enough but two is too many’; ‘Is it detritus or Demetrius?’
Shuttleworth is on his 40th anniversary tour, ‘Raise the Oof’, which will play venues around the UK until November. In those four decades, there have been 12 BBC radio series, three films, and several TV specials. His latest releases are the CD The Pumice Stone & Other Rock Songs and a new book, John Shuttleworth Takes the Biscuit.
‘You don’t mind if I finish my brownie?’ Fellows asks me over Zoom. His Jack Russell, Kenny, scampers around as Fellows runs his fingers through his unruly fringe (‘I’m having a bad hair day’) and nibbles away. He looks comfortably casual, the opposite of his sleek and well-groomed creation whose greased-back hair, maroon car coat and beige slacks have become his signature look.
We talk of Shuttleworth’s origins. Fellows once had ambitions of being a serious songwriter. ‘I wanted to be the next Burt Bacharach.’ He was given a song publishing contract by Chappell Music in 1985, but his plans were derailed by Shuttleworth, a character partly inspired by the eccentrics he encountered at working men’s clubs and at conventions of mice breeders (one of Fellows’s early hobbies). ‘The A&R men [at Chappell Music] kept asking for more Shuttleworth,’ he explains.
There was a serious intent, though. ‘A catalyst for me doing it,’ Fellows explains, was his frustration with the artificiality of some radio drama and the banality of many pop lyrics. He recalls listening to Radio 4 plays in a sort of despair: ‘I could see the people with their scripts at the microphone trying to sound naturalistic but inevitably you can’t.’
Fellows employs a simple but time-consuming multi-track drop-in recording system (each character has one track) on The Shuttleworths and improvises around a loose plot outline. He does all the voices himself. ‘There is a lot of building up and tearing down, like a painting or a sculpture,’ he explains. One meticulously crafted 15-minute episode of The Shuttleworths can take three weeks to create. But the result is superb – you certainly don’t see actors with scripts and microphones.
We talk about the music, and I wonder if Fellows ever feels undervalued as a songwriter. Do the brilliantly inventive lyrics and the superb puns (‘My Last Will and Tasty Mint’) overshadow the undoubted musical skill? I suggest that he is like Howard Goodall with his work for Not the Nine O’Clock News or Victoria Wood in this regard. He is too modest to agree but does reveal that some of the Shuttleworth songs are serious attempts at high-quality composition smuggled out via his famous alter ego, an example being the haunting ‘One Foot in the Gravy’.
Shuttleworth fans feel like they are part of a club. ‘One secret of its success is that it never got too big’
John Shuttleworth is Marmite (or perhaps taramasalata) comedy, though. Some reviewers are ecstatic – the Telegraph had it at number 14 in the funniest radio comedies of all time – others just don’t get it (an angry Time Out review that didn’t even seem to realise The Shuttleworths was meant to be a joke). Fellows agrees but doesn’t see this as an issue: ‘The answer to that is simple: it’s just people, you either click or you don’t. But that doesn’t mean I automatically dislike people who don’t like The Shuttleworths, and some people who say they’re massive fans I take an instant dislike to.’
He believes another element in the enduring popularity is exclusivity – Shuttleworth fans feel like they are part of a club. ‘One secret of its success is that it never got too big.’ Shuttleworth is a bit like Viz magazine, which acquired much of its initial popularity on a word-of-mouth basis with early readers often thinking they discovered it themselves. I suggest this parallel, and Fellows reveals he is not the magazine’s biggest fan: ‘While I accept it’s clever, at times it’s a bit cruel for my taste.’
Which is revealing, as cruel is the very last word you would ever use to describe The Shuttleworths. I tell Graham that I often listen in airports on my gruelling indirect flights home from Tokyo, escaping from a cold and alien environment into a cosy and friendly one. ‘I’m delighted. I’ve heard that a few times from people who live or work away, or have gone through a bad time. I’ve even met a few people who met and got married through The Shuttleworths.’
‘It is comforting for me too,’ he confesses. ‘I don’t particularly like the modern world and its brashness.’ He says this in a voice halfway between his own and John’s, and probably valid for both.
But is that brashness just how life is too often represented in these days of 24-hour mostly doom-laden news? As John/Graham says on the charming ‘How to Be Happy in a Sad Sad World’, ‘it’s a nice world really, for most people’, and we have much to be thankful for. It’s good to be reminded of that now and again.
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