How to sell out in the ’70s

By Sophie Atkinson

Outside, it's raining: great ropes of water slapping against the pavement. It’s so relentless that it feels less like weather and more like metaphor. The rain says something about the dreariness of Manchester; the way the city feels swaddled, like its own remote universe. Even the talent scout up from London gets it. Evening Eddie, he says to your comedy teacher, on his way in. I’ll never understand why they don’t run boats to Manchester. It’s a fair point. In the early 1970s, a train from Piccadilly to St Pancras could take over five hours to reach the capital. 

In 1974, Richard Eyre commissioned a new play for the Nottingham Playhouse: Comedians. Its author was Trevor Griffiths, a 39-year-old playwright from Ancoats. Griffiths was a socialist and his first two plays had been works of political history, but he later wrote scripts for television. Comedians was ostensibly a departure from his usual fare — it was set in the present day, for starters, and there was no explicitly political material for the audience to tussle with. Yet Comedians covered the same territory as much of Griffiths’ other scripts: the tug of war between opposing viewpoints, and what happens when principles held in theory collide with daily life.

Eyre, who I communicated with via email, remembers the commissioning process: “I said: do you have an idea for a play and he said, I do: a group of working-class men go to an evening class for club comedians, there's an old teacher, a liberal, a humanist, who believes in the idea of a 'good' joke, and there's a young skinhead, a real hard man who won't compromise. So I said I’d love you to write that. And he agreed.” The play became a huge success. Following a run at the National Theatre, it played internationally before BBC1 broadcast it as a Play for Today in 1979. “I never doubted that it was the best and funniest new play that I'd ever read — I thought the best play of the 1970s,” Eyre tells me. 

Comedians has a brisk economy of form, sketching out its stakes within the first ten minutes. The aspiring comedians seem on edge — understandably, when we learn that Bert Challenor, a former comedian and current talent scout from London, is due to watch them perform at a pub that same evening. If they impress him with their stand-up routines, it’s implied they’ll be able to leave their day jobs and become rich and famous professional comedians. 

But their teacher, Eddie Waters, has known Bert a long time and says they don’t see eye to eye on much. Eddie delivers a sort of manifesto as to what a true comedian’s joke should be: medicine, something transformative, not sugared sweeties to rot your teeth. He doesn’t traffic in lazy stereotypes. Comedy should be truthful and good (‘good’ denoting ethics rather than quality, though there’s some overlap — no ethically bad joke can be a good joke). Bert, on the other hand, is looking for escapism and laughs, not philosophy. So the aspiring comics square up to a choice, with varying degrees of panic. They can stick to the routines they’ve been chipping away at for the prior three months alongside Eddie or, in search of a job in the industry, they can rapidly patch together new material more in line with what Bert’s looking for: tooth rot. 

Watching Comedians today (which you can do here), there’s a built-in challenge that Griffiths may not have anticipated — the context of comedy has changed so much that it’s difficult to experience the play as it would have been intended. By ‘sugared sweeties’, Eddie means the style of comedy that was absolutely mainstream in the 1970s, characterised best by Bernard Manning (who like Griffiths, grew up in Ancoats). Manning’s comedy was often racist and sexist but always delivered very genially, smoothly, with a twinkle. 

The parts of the play which hew to this style of comedy are difficult to watch — it’s only fair to warn you that there’s plenty of racist language. This said, presumably jokes like this wouldn’t have been all that shocking when the play came out in 1975. Actor Stephen Rea launched his career playing George McBrain, the Irish comedian who ends up delivering one of the most Manning-esque routines in the play. Speaking to the Guardian about his monologue’s reception at the time: “Comedians’ first three venues, Rea observes, were all “basically liberal theatres, not [working men’s] clubs. But all the people who [you’d expect to] have anti-sexist, anti-racist views were laughing their legs off at McBrain. That was the great irony. The trouble is that if something’s funny, it’s funny.”

The play proposes a radically different model for what comedy can be in the figure of Gethin Price, a 25-year-old Mancunian who drives a van for British Rail. Gethin, who has been strange and restless all night, comes out on stage as a skinhead mime, complete with what looks like a Man United scarf tied to his arm. In what appears to be utter indifference to Bert’s guidance, he brandishes a tiny violin, lights a string on fire and then harasses two mannequins, dressed up for a posh night out. His routine is full of class-fuelled rage. It’s unpredictable, but more than that, it’s scary and original and electric. In Gethin’s routine, Griffiths prempts the ‘alternative comedy’ movement born at the end of the 70s, defined by what the Guardian argues was “its opposition to the predictability and prejudice of working men’s club comedy”.  

Even today, even with the missing context, Comedians is one of the most gripping plays I’ve ever watched. This isn’t an accident: it’s driven by two engines. One, its central contradiction: that comedy is serious business. The other? That the stakes are impossibly high because these are working-class men. The play implies that this could be their only chance to transition from working as a docker or a van driver or a milkman to working in entertainment, the thing they all dream of. Without the dilemma, there is no play. The men in the class all respect Eddie Waters, and if they had perfect freedom and control over their chances in the entertainment business, they would presumably not restructure their standup to add lashings of racism and misogyny and homophobia to impress the audience and catch Bert’s eye.

The play asks, over and over, which of the men will sell out? Under what circumstances would selling out be natural — understandable, even? This question of compromise seemed to obsess Griffiths over the course of his career. His interviews are full of tiny, furious details about ways that he had to fight to preserve the integrity of his writing: locking horns with the BBC over moving his drama to a later slot with little notice, refusing to cut swear words from his work, feeling outraged when someone tries to tamp down the complexity of his writing. The question of selling out feels, perhaps, even more of its time than the Manning-style comedy. It’s hard to imagine many creatives today weathering sleepless nights over whether or not they’re doing so. After all, you can’t say no to an opportunity you’ve not been offered in the first place.

Griffiths told the New York Times in 1976 that he wrote Comedians to explore a conflict within himself: between the side that “instinctively enjoyed an imaginative joke”, and the part that felt uncomfortable since so much of comedy trafficks in stereotypes (thick Irishmen, greedy Jews, unpleasant mothers-in-law and so on). “I wanted to know what it was I was laughing at,” Griffiths said. “I wanted to look at a part of myself that hadn't been reconstructed since childhood. But I was also looking at a representative section of the working class in a northern town — examining, as realistically as I could, the hoops through which people must jump if they're to succeed.”

What were these hoops? Let’s look at Griffiths’ own life. He wasn’t writing about the working classes from some remote distance. His family were wretchedly poor, he tells the journalist. He was born in 1935, his father was a chemical process worker, his mother was (among other jobs) a bus conductor. At the same time, he was one of the first generation of working-class children to benefit from the Education Act 1944, which guaranteed a free secondary school education for all pupils. He went to St Bede’s College, and from there, the University of Manchester to study English.

University was followed by a compulsory two years of national service, then he worked as a schoolteacher for eight years. After this, he started as a further education officer at the BBC, which had opened a regional hub in Leeds in 1968. There, he began writing for television, radio and theatre. A stroke of luck: the television company Granada opened a new theatre in Manchester, the Stables, based out of the former Liverpool Road station. 

As critics Mike Poole and John Wyver observe in Power-plays: Trevor Griffiths in Television, the Stables was a “fringe theatre subsidised by Granada Television as a means of recruiting writers for its expanding drama department”. Alongside the classics, it put on new work by new writers, including Griffiths’ first full-length play. The joy of fringe theatre, perhaps, is that work does not have to be commercially viable. But even by these metrics, Occupations sounds a bold gambit: set in Turin in the 1920s, it followed the Marxist writer Gramsci and the workers who took control of the Fiat factory, struggling to negotiate with the factory owners while also hewing to the Communist Party’s political goals. It was a success. In 1972 it was shown in London at the Place, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s studio theatre for new work, where it generated a certain amount of buzz. 

After this, Griffiths would be invited to contribute a play to the BBC. Perhaps as a corrective to the chintzy toffs-and-underlings period drama Upstairs, Downstairs, which had just been released at the time, he wrote about the trade unionist Tom Mann and his leadership of the 1911 Liverpool dock strike. This would fulfil Griffiths’ main aim: “to restore, however tinily, an important but suppressed area of our collective history, to enlarge our ‘usable past’ and connect it with a lived present, and to celebrate a victory”. Many different commissions would follow. Griffiths would make the measured decision that it befitted his political goals to focus on writing for television over theatre — you reached more people that way.

Recounting Griffiths’ career at top speed, it’s hard not to sink into gloom. The idea of a working-class writer, early in their career, who could so freely decide whether or not to make their living writing for television over theatre seems entirely alien to our time. Last week, a new study by the University of Sheffield’s Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre showed that working-class representation in the entertainment industry had sunk to the lowest level in a decade. Only eight per cent of those in film and TV identified as being from a working-class background, while 60 per cent identified as middle or upper class. Even in music and the performing arts (a sector which is generally more diverse in terms of class than TV and film), only 16 per cent are from working-class backgrounds — a record low for the sector. Jumping through hoops? The ringleader isn’t even looking.

In that New York Times profile, Griffiths argues he probably would have become a “crook” without the good luck of the Education Act being introduced when it was: “I would have felt deeply frustrated in most working‐class contexts, given the sort of drive I have, and I think I'd have found a way out of them into crime”. Luck played a role in some other key ways too: that he could get a job (not an internship) at the BBC with no prior experience in entertainment, and see first-hand how TV and radio worked before he’d even started writing. That Granada chose, for both commercial and artistic reasons, to establish the Stables. And, in a much more profound way than any of these contextual details, he was lucky that his own interests and morals as a writer dovetailed with the spirit of the age he was working in. 

The Stables wasn’t an exception to the rule. There were plenty of fringe theatres at the time putting on interesting new work: the Arts Lab in London, Ed Berman’s Inter-Action and Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, among others. If you’ve watched much of the old BBC stuff from the 70s, you’ll know it wasn’t unusual for challenging drama to air on TV and radio. Plus, with far fewer channels than today, intellectually serious social commentary was more or less guaranteed a substantial audience. This is not to say it was all gold. I am sure few pine for the light entertainment of the decade’s variety shows, or the casual racism of some of its studio sitcoms, but progress made in these areas seems to have been at the expense of politically provocative work. The result is a dominance of a very beige vision of entertainment.

Long before John Prescott’s claim in 1997 that “we’re all middle class now”, there was more of an appetite for work about class struggle. Despite the central tension of Comedians, it feels like saying no to an opportunity in the 70s wasn’t the same as saying no today. For one to have integrity was more economically feasible, and there were more avenues to create and exhibit working class art (as the writer Alan Garner said of his time on benefits in the 80s: “The personal truth is that the dole absolutely formed me as a person. It gave me a haphazard literary education”).

Perhaps what’s so exciting about Comedians is how Griffiths’ own life seems to animate the work. While it seems to offer up a familiar conflict (do you stay true to your class background for no gain, or sacrifice your integrity to escape it?), the emotion that pulses through it is only possible because Griffiths had lived it for himself — the desire to put your work on a stage, tempered by the uneasiness around the ethics of someone asking you to change it.

After all the laughter and jeers and arguments, the end of Comedians goes very quiet. It’s after the show, and the aspiring comics have returned to the school, bickered, made their excuses, and peeled off one by one to brave the rain and go home. Under the strip lights of the classroom, Eddie looks older, more haggard, than when he started the evening. Finally, there’s just him and Gethin. Perhaps sensing what’s about to come, Eddie tries to leave, too: it’s getting late, they can talk it out another time. But Gethin insists on knowing: did Eddie like his new routine? His teacher replies: “No compassion, no truth. You threw it all out, Gethin. Love, care, concern, call it what you like, you junked it over the side.” But Gethin persists: was he good?  Eddie is forced to show his hand: “You were brilliant!” 

It doesn’t matter, though. For Eddie, the act was still ugly. “It was drowning in hate. You can’t change today into tomorrow on that basis. You forget a thing called… the truth.” At this, Gethin bristles. What would someone like Eddie — a retired, once famous club comedian — know about the truth? He’s so successful, he’s lost touch with what truth is. “You’ve forgotten what it’s like. You knew it when you started off, Oldham Empire, People’s Music Hall, Colne Hippodrome, Bolton Grand… Nobody hit harder than Eddie Waters, that’s what they say. Because you were still in touch with what made you… hunger, diphtheria, filth, unemployment, penny clubs, means tests, bed bugs, head lice… Was all that truth beautiful? Truth was a fist you hit with.”

Griffiths always argued that he identified more with Eddie than he did Gethin. Griffiths had been a teacher himself, and like Eddie, those who met him suggest he was enormously warm. But the play — and Griffiths’ body of work as a whole — contradicts this. His writing never lets you sit easy in your seat, allowing a play or a show or a film to wash over you. Instead, it forces you to raise your own fists, to fight with it. Was Eddie right? Was Gethin? Were the men who didn’t sell out so full of integrity, or did they just have nowhere else to be?

Griffiths argued that the guiding principle of Comedians applies more broadly than just to comedy. That the same temptations apply to those who write plays, do chemical experiments, or indeed, do anything at all. He said it was natural for anyone talented to want to exploit that same talent and convert it into riches. “But you’ve got to learn to say no.” Which means what? “You’ve got to say ‘no’ to being bought off, absorbed, sucked in. You've got to say ‘no’ to triumphs and prestige and status and awards and acclaim. You've got to pull back from all that, and say ‘that's not what it's about, it's not what happens to me that's the most important thing; it's what happens to us.’”

With Comedians, Griffiths insists that the ‘us’ he constructs matters. That the experiences of dockers and van drivers and milkmen (and, at the very close, of an Asian abattoir worker) is just as worthy of the stage, of the audience’s attention, as the kings and queens of Shakespeare. Instead of a tidy, take-home moral, the play ends on a case for working-class rage: that anger is only natural, given the way Britain functions. Because wouldn’t you be angry in Gethin’s place? And now, half a century on, wouldn’t you be angrier than ever?