With his first TV outing, Fringe darling Simon Munnery has the mainstream in his sights, reports Stephanie Merrit.
For more than 12 years Simon Munnery has been garnering a reputation as the comic's comic, admired and respected by contempararies and critics alike, and beloved of audiences on the live comedy circuit, but always at a distance from the mainstream. His first TV series, Attention Scum, will ensure that his surreal brand of comedy will finally reach a large audience.
Attention Scum is the first television incarnation of Munnery's Nietzschaen alter ego, the league against tedium, who travels the land in a modified transit van denouncing the mediocrity of the masses in pithy, gnomic aphorisms. The league began life in 1994 as part of a cabaret act, Cluub Zarathustra, went on to win acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe and various London venues, and in 1999 was nominated for a Perrier Award. The television series is directed by Stewart Lee, who starred with partner Richard Herring in two BBC2 comedy series, Fist Of Fun and This Morning With Richard Not Judy, and also features accomplished comedians Johnny Vegas (Johnny Vegas Television Show) and Kevin Eldon (Jam, I'm Alan Partridge).
The show has retained-largely by necessity- the ad hoc feeling of a fringe show. "You have to remember it was made for a quater of the budget you'd get for a sketch show like The Fast Show" says Lee. "Most of it's shot in fields or car parks, and everyone joined in and worked for cheap rates and did about three jobs, but we had a lot of fun making it". In spite of the low production values Attention Scum is being trumpeted loudly by those who have seen it, yet Munnery, who is described as "One of the most innovative, intellegent and acclaimed comics in Britain" is less than delighted by all the praise.
"If you approach the show calmly, you may take to it, but if it's been hyped and hyped and looked forward to, it's bound to dissapoint, and in fact it's quite good. Poor little frightened show, it just wants to survive and be loved, Please Please, damn it with faint praise". It's the first and only time I will ever be asked by the writer to say that a programme is not very good. "But it is very good" I protest. Sudden alarm registers behind the thick rimmed glasses. "No don't say that. Say it's quite good. Or-no, say "Not as good as you'd expect, but nevertheless quite good." Or better still don't say anything at all." I suggest that this approach may not work as an interview; He sighs and rearranges himself in the armchair. "I'd much rather it became a word of mouth thing, but then I suppose if no one knows it's on they won't watch it anyway."
It's easy to see why a programme as provocative, unashamedly clever and delightfully absurd as Attention Scum might make the BBC nervous. The League stands atop of his Heath Robinson vanship in his valanced New Romantic shirt and towering hat, weilding a sword that conceals a camera which flashes warped and fluid close-ups of Munnerys curiously mobile face on to a large screen behind him. When not deriding his small and bemused al fresco audience, he offers them such deadpan insights as: "Many are willing to suffer for their art. Few are willing to learn to draw" Or "Why do men die before their wives? Could it be because they want to?" I really hate it when critics quote my jokes," says Munnery with a warning frown. "Especially if they get them wrong") Intercut with the live shows on the van are surreal graphic sequences, an operatic duo (Lori Lixenberg and Richard Thomas) whose arias are unexpectedly dark and violent, and "24 hour news", read by a man whose been up for 24 hours (Johnny Vegas); there's a visible, if unacknowledged, python legacy. Did Munnery ever worry that his material was too recherche' for a television audience?
"What's a television audience then?" he asks defiantly, shaking off his laconic demeanour and sitting up for the first time. "That's precisely what's wrong with television, this idea that you create a vision of an audience in your head, and then try and appease it." is that the mistake of the commisioning editors, I ask? "I wouldn't know" he says diplomatically. "I think you should just make what you want to make and hope someone likes it."
Which is a nice theory, but somewhat impractical in the new, streamlined BBC, in whice experimental comedy is being slowly banished to the hitherlands of cable and digital channels. This will probably be the last new comedy series made for the BBC on a budget of more than £60, 000 says Lee. He has learned, before the first episode is even broadcast, that Attention Scum will not be recommissioned because it doesn't fit the new profile of BBC2. "It's sad because Simon's comedy is about great language and ideas, it's a timeless notion of wit. He has that eprigrammatic style you feel could fit in and be appreciated at any time in history". Except apparently, on BBC2 in the year 2001.
"In many ways Simon is a naive idealist", says Lee later. "He wasn't really interested in doing television or being famous. We had to coax him and he only did it in the end because he wanted the van to do live tours. That's why it's a double shame that the BBC have decided to kill the series before it's even started, because it will make it difficult for him to go back to doing it as a live show."
So it is that Attention Scum begins its life as a one off series, never to be recommissioned. Rarely does a viewer get to see the programes that don't get made, but Attention Scum has fallen into this unique air pocket between being commissioned and being cancelled; Munnerys off-beat, provocative comedy has all the potential to gain a huge cult following, and the programmes all too brief flowering will very likely increase its reputation.
Watch it-you'll be witnessing the end of an era in British comedy. It's also very, sorry, quite good.
--Stephanie Merrit, The Observer, Sunday 18th February 2001--