How I Escaped My Certain Fate Read Free

the form itself. With every frill removed, and with the very notion of what a joke was boiled down to the barest of bones, Ted was stand-up in its purest form, belonging neither to the politically charged world of the new stand-ups nor the reactionary hinterlands of working men’s clubs. I was utterly transfixed and my heart was racing as I realised that stand-up could be anything you wanted it to be. You didn’t even have to look as if you were enjoying it. And I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ *
    * ‘Eventually, Ted became a minor cult, though he never played any conventional comedy clubs, preferring to perform where he was not necessarily wanted. In 1986, a collaboration with Birmingham bands The Nightingales and We’ve Got A Fuzzbox And We’re Gonna Use It nudged Rocking With Rita to the bottom of the charts, and the DJ Steve Wright’s fascination with Ted’s oddly moving take on The Beatles’ She Loves You led to brief major label interest and three TV appearances. Years later Vic Reeves arrived by another route at a similar, but more sophisticated, form of bent light entertainment. At the dawn of the nineties, Ted’s audiences were in on the joke, so he split to seek fame and fortune in Los Angeles, eventually ending up driving trucks to Mexico and working as a cook. And then the trail went cold.
    ‘In the late 1980s, at university and the Edinburgh fringe, I met other teenage, would-be comics who knew Ted’s lone album, Man In A Suitcase, off by heart. Ted’s releases documented him struggling with hostile crowds, though his indifference seems now almost sublime. Ted taught us that a bad audience reaction didn’t necessarily mean that what you were doing was worthless, and we co-opted his low-energy insolence and fed off it. At the risk of seeming delusional, I now think you can hear second and third hand echoes of Ted in the routines of comics who probably never even heard him. The relentlessness of Ricky Gervais’ Aesop’s Fables bit is Ted with a tailwind, and in 2005, when I had the superbly baffling young Edinburgh fringe award-winner Josie Long open for me on tour, a disgruntled Leeds punter remarked, “This is the worst thing I’ve seen since Ted Chippington, twenty years ago.” I couldn’t have been happier.
    ‘It’s difficult to say who the first alternative comedian was. Ben Elton? Alexei Sayle? Victoria Wood? John Dowie, if you really know your stuff? But one thing is for certain. Ted Chippington was the first post-alternative comedian, and without him, everything would be different. Not necessarily worse. But different.’ (From a piece written for the Guardian upon the release of the Ted Chippington box set Walking Down the Road (Big Print records), in February 2007.) 
     

    Not long after seeing Ted, in the spring of 1985, I applied to St Edmund Hall at Oxford University to read English Literature. I did so for two reasons. Firstly, I loved English Literature, and the Anglo-Saxon poetry course really appealed to me (although sadly I turned out to be particularly poor at this subject, lacking the requisitegrammar-school Greek and Latin). And secondly, a doctor for whom I did a Saturday morning filing job had told me about going to the Edinburgh Fringe in the seventies with an Oxford University student comedy group that had included some of Not the Nine O’Clock News , and it sounded superb. I passed the exams and got a place. I still can’t believe I was really allowed to study there, with all those clever people, reading books all day in the midst of the Cotswold-stone cathedrals of culture. However, the wind of change was already blowing across the comedy continent.
    Everything I ever read, and every documentary I ever saw, about the fifties satire boom and its inheritors seemed to suggest that going to Oxbridge was a passport into a BBC Light Entertainment career, irrespective of your actual ability. But the Alternative Comedy scene that was swiftly becoming the