No Laughing Matter

The end of the year means the start of the awards season. Or annual self-congratulatory circle jerks, depending on how you see it.

As a youth I used to follow the Oscars religiously. At least until Terms of Endearment beat Philip Kaufman’s magisterial The Right Stuff to the Best Picture Award. I mean, what was all that about? Anyway, tonight we had the British Comedy Awards.

Two years ago, I was getting the train back to Devon for Christmas and discovered that across the table from me was one of the actresses from Channel 4’s innovative Green Wing. The British Comedy Awards for that year had been the night before and we discussed the event.

That year, bizarrely Green Wing hadn’t been nominated in any of the categories, (although it might have been up for the audience vote Award. Instead the usual suspects in the same tired old shows had their names on the ballot. And Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders were given the Outstanding Contribution to Comedy Award, which was like making Heydrich humanitarian of the year.

One of the things we talked about was Johnny Vegas who had presented one of the awards. Vegas is the English Flounder who never paid heed to the advice that “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life.”

He can do drama pretty well, and was particularly fine as Krook in the BBC’s recent adaptation of Bleak House, but on the night of the awards he was back to doing his increasingly tiresome drunken idiot shtick that has become the signature act of his career.

Acting like an attention seeking cock-knob is fine if you’re doing it on your own time, but this was at the beginning of the ceremony and went on for so long that all the further awards and acceptance speeches had to be hurried along. The official consensus appeared to be: Johnny Vegas – Unfunny Twat!

Of course the actual awards aren’t really that important to the viewers. After Julian Clary claimed he had been killing time backstage by fisting the Conservative politician Norman Lamont and then Spike Milligan called Prince Charles a “grovelling little bastard,” people watch the ceremony to see who’s going to be the most outrageous.

Just like British comedy this year, the show was utterly piss poor. Courtney Love wasn’t outrageous. The ceremony ran behind schedule after a massive fucking snake was brought on stage for some apparent reason.

Bizarrely, the ceremony was sponsored by Highland Spring mineral water, which obviously nobody was drinking. On the bright side, Catherine Tate, the UK’s official harridan, wasn’t there to pitch up on stage. And neither was Vegas.

More interesting, the BBC website posted news of the British Comedy Award winners before the ceremony was over and some of the awards had even been presented. The page has since been revised, but either they didn’t give a fig about any press embargo or the live event wasn’t that live after all.