Lord Raffles
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During the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals in 1945, Albert Speer, the architect to Hitler's monstrous dream, let slip the slightly odd revelation that The Führer was an avid listener to the BBC world service. What could his favourite show have been? Gardener's Question Time? 606 with Spoony? The Moral Maze? No, it was ITMA aka It's That Man Again, with Tommy Handley: a kind of vaudeville romp set aboard a fake pirate radio station called Radio Fakenburg (Radio Luxembourg).
Don't mention the war
You might think that some things are no laughing matter, but Hitler has always invaded our comedy. Jacques Peretti examines the innate hilarity of the 'David Brent with clicky heels'
Saturday May 5, 2007
The Guardian
During the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals in 1945, Albert Speer, the architect to Hitler's monstrous dream, let slip the slightly odd revelation that The Führer was an avid listener to the BBC world service. What could his favourite show have been? Gardener's Question Time? 606 with Spoony? The Moral Maze? No, it was ITMA aka It's That Man Again, with Tommy Handley: a kind of vaudeville romp set aboard a fake pirate radio station called Radio Fakenburg (Radio Luxembourg).
"Oh yes," Speer recalled fondly to a stunned jury of international experts, chuckling as he spoke. "The Führer loved your Tommy Handley." He then proceeded to imitate the voice of Mrs Mopp.
Whether his impression secured Speer a more lenient sentence (he avoided execution, spending the rest of his life in Spandau prison, growing daffodils in the shape of swaskitas) we shall never know. But Speer was certainly right when he said that Hitler, like Stalin - another evil, mass-murdering dictator with a moustache - was a big fan of comedy.
When Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator came out during the war, a merciless satirising of Hitler by Chaplin designed as anti-Nazi propaganda, lampooning his every pompous gesture and preening vanity, Hitler ordered a number of copies, watching it over and over again in his private cinema, laughing uproariously throughout, and presumably shooting anyone who didn't find it equally funny.
Hitler didn't just enjoy comedy. When the war ended, Hitler came to live in Britain (spiritually, as it were), providing inspiration for much postwar comedy: from Monty Python and Spike Milligan to Freddie Starr and even that Tommy Handley-influenced comedy colossus of the 1980s, 'Allo 'Allo.
If we'd known Hitler enjoyed comedy, this would never have happened. Because key to Hitler's innate hilarity is the fact that he was utterly, completely and totally devoid of any sense of humour about himself. This lack of self-knowledge combined with his insane megalomania is a winning combination. Hitler was basically David Brent with clicky heels: a pompous egotist with ambitions not just to control paperclips and stationery in Slough, but to take over the whole world (oh, and get rid of Jews and Gypsies along the way). How mad, and therefore how rich in comic potential, is that?
Psychologist Richard Wiseman believes Hitler might well have lost the war because he looked ridiculous. Hitler's plan for world domination was fatally flawed by the fact he was short . "If you look at the average world leader, they are closer to six foot than barely five foot. Leaders of men are supposed to look like JFK, not Hitler".
When the war ended, Hitler became shorthand for a certain kind of petty-bureaucratic mind, coupled with thwarted personal ambition. Nearly every British sitcom needed its "Little Hitler": MacKay in Porridge, with his clipped bristling moustache and clicking heels; hapless Blakey in On The Buses, who'd have loved to be Hitler, but thought he'd put the kettle on first. Peter Sellers in I'm All Right Jack as a leftwing Hitler: a trade union leader, with the Nazi salute mutated into an accusing jab at scabs and capitalist bosses.
In the 1960s, people began to miss the war and thus, in a slightly disturbing way, they began to miss Hitler, not least because in a morally ambiguous world of cloak and dagger cold war espionage and drug-addled hippies bringing about the breakdown of any kind of suited, bowler-hat wearing authority, Hitler came to stand for "values". Other people simply missed the straightforward million megawatt evil of Big H: Steptoe spoke for the older generation when he asked: "where's 'itler when you need 'im?' (presumably to deal with "the coloureds"). Alf Garnett berated 1960s permissiveness generally, which he saw as a disease (like lumbago): "we should have joined up with Hitler when we had the chance". Gas chambers for anyone with long hair.
In the 1970s, we went even darker and weirder with Hitler. Spike Milligan, who suffered from shellshock in Italy during the war, became obsessed with reliving his wartime trauma through bizarre sketches involving Hitler as George Formby; or married to the Queen and running a cornershop as Jews. It's far from clear that Milligan thought Hitler was bad. Milligan's most (in)famous sketch, the "paki Daleks", can no longer be shown on TV (wonder why?).
The apex of Hitler's hold on Britain's postwar psyche was not the Daleks, not even the Sex Pistols wearing swastikas, or David Bowie's Nazi salute, but that John Cleese moment in Fawlty Towers, in which he goose-steps relentlessly for a minute before German guests, shouting Nazi orders and ignoring their 1970s, liberal, Hush Puppies-wearing pleas for him to stop.
The moment has been diffused and devalued by clip show retreads, but it is a beautiful moment of TV: borderline racist, but immensely enjoyable to watch because as Peter Thompson, German professor at Sheffield University, says, Cleese is proper payback for the war, a war we refuse to let go of. "He inverts our traditional view of the war. There they are, the guests: minding their own business, just as we were in our little country villages, and this fascist lunatic comes in, dropping bombs relentlessly on them".
I guess we'll never win a war the way we did down at Fawlty Towers in Torquay in the 1970s: with our wit. Hitler's light is dimming now, the further and further we travel from 1945, the more Germany is just a place where Mercedes Benz and techno comes from, and has as many Starbucks outlets as us. But just wait until the next World Cup qualifier with Germany, when those inflatable spitfires come out again, thrown at German police, and Hitler's name is in every chant. It's not funny, it's not clever ... well, actually, it is funny. I mean, if we let go of Hitler, what else have we got?
Don't mention the war
You might think that some things are no laughing matter, but Hitler has always invaded our comedy. Jacques Peretti examines the innate hilarity of the 'David Brent with clicky heels'
Saturday May 5, 2007
The Guardian
During the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals in 1945, Albert Speer, the architect to Hitler's monstrous dream, let slip the slightly odd revelation that The Führer was an avid listener to the BBC world service. What could his favourite show have been? Gardener's Question Time? 606 with Spoony? The Moral Maze? No, it was ITMA aka It's That Man Again, with Tommy Handley: a kind of vaudeville romp set aboard a fake pirate radio station called Radio Fakenburg (Radio Luxembourg).
"Oh yes," Speer recalled fondly to a stunned jury of international experts, chuckling as he spoke. "The Führer loved your Tommy Handley." He then proceeded to imitate the voice of Mrs Mopp.
Whether his impression secured Speer a more lenient sentence (he avoided execution, spending the rest of his life in Spandau prison, growing daffodils in the shape of swaskitas) we shall never know. But Speer was certainly right when he said that Hitler, like Stalin - another evil, mass-murdering dictator with a moustache - was a big fan of comedy.
When Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator came out during the war, a merciless satirising of Hitler by Chaplin designed as anti-Nazi propaganda, lampooning his every pompous gesture and preening vanity, Hitler ordered a number of copies, watching it over and over again in his private cinema, laughing uproariously throughout, and presumably shooting anyone who didn't find it equally funny.
Hitler didn't just enjoy comedy. When the war ended, Hitler came to live in Britain (spiritually, as it were), providing inspiration for much postwar comedy: from Monty Python and Spike Milligan to Freddie Starr and even that Tommy Handley-influenced comedy colossus of the 1980s, 'Allo 'Allo.
If we'd known Hitler enjoyed comedy, this would never have happened. Because key to Hitler's innate hilarity is the fact that he was utterly, completely and totally devoid of any sense of humour about himself. This lack of self-knowledge combined with his insane megalomania is a winning combination. Hitler was basically David Brent with clicky heels: a pompous egotist with ambitions not just to control paperclips and stationery in Slough, but to take over the whole world (oh, and get rid of Jews and Gypsies along the way). How mad, and therefore how rich in comic potential, is that?
Psychologist Richard Wiseman believes Hitler might well have lost the war because he looked ridiculous. Hitler's plan for world domination was fatally flawed by the fact he was short . "If you look at the average world leader, they are closer to six foot than barely five foot. Leaders of men are supposed to look like JFK, not Hitler".
When the war ended, Hitler became shorthand for a certain kind of petty-bureaucratic mind, coupled with thwarted personal ambition. Nearly every British sitcom needed its "Little Hitler": MacKay in Porridge, with his clipped bristling moustache and clicking heels; hapless Blakey in On The Buses, who'd have loved to be Hitler, but thought he'd put the kettle on first. Peter Sellers in I'm All Right Jack as a leftwing Hitler: a trade union leader, with the Nazi salute mutated into an accusing jab at scabs and capitalist bosses.
In the 1960s, people began to miss the war and thus, in a slightly disturbing way, they began to miss Hitler, not least because in a morally ambiguous world of cloak and dagger cold war espionage and drug-addled hippies bringing about the breakdown of any kind of suited, bowler-hat wearing authority, Hitler came to stand for "values". Other people simply missed the straightforward million megawatt evil of Big H: Steptoe spoke for the older generation when he asked: "where's 'itler when you need 'im?' (presumably to deal with "the coloureds"). Alf Garnett berated 1960s permissiveness generally, which he saw as a disease (like lumbago): "we should have joined up with Hitler when we had the chance". Gas chambers for anyone with long hair.
In the 1970s, we went even darker and weirder with Hitler. Spike Milligan, who suffered from shellshock in Italy during the war, became obsessed with reliving his wartime trauma through bizarre sketches involving Hitler as George Formby; or married to the Queen and running a cornershop as Jews. It's far from clear that Milligan thought Hitler was bad. Milligan's most (in)famous sketch, the "paki Daleks", can no longer be shown on TV (wonder why?).
The apex of Hitler's hold on Britain's postwar psyche was not the Daleks, not even the Sex Pistols wearing swastikas, or David Bowie's Nazi salute, but that John Cleese moment in Fawlty Towers, in which he goose-steps relentlessly for a minute before German guests, shouting Nazi orders and ignoring their 1970s, liberal, Hush Puppies-wearing pleas for him to stop.
The moment has been diffused and devalued by clip show retreads, but it is a beautiful moment of TV: borderline racist, but immensely enjoyable to watch because as Peter Thompson, German professor at Sheffield University, says, Cleese is proper payback for the war, a war we refuse to let go of. "He inverts our traditional view of the war. There they are, the guests: minding their own business, just as we were in our little country villages, and this fascist lunatic comes in, dropping bombs relentlessly on them".
I guess we'll never win a war the way we did down at Fawlty Towers in Torquay in the 1970s: with our wit. Hitler's light is dimming now, the further and further we travel from 1945, the more Germany is just a place where Mercedes Benz and techno comes from, and has as many Starbucks outlets as us. But just wait until the next World Cup qualifier with Germany, when those inflatable spitfires come out again, thrown at German police, and Hitler's name is in every chant. It's not funny, it's not clever ... well, actually, it is funny. I mean, if we let go of Hitler, what else have we got?
