The Comic Strip, Part 3 - "Walking on water wasn't built in a day."

"The Beat Generation" - January 17th 1983

What I recall of the Comic Strip is that the episodes tend to degenerate into utter chaos. At the time, I took that chaos to be a sign that the writers couldn't come up with a satisfying ending, so they just blew everything up and that was the end of it. Just as the intro is a cartoon bomb being dropped, the series was a set of bombs being dropped.

I've been kicking this one in my head for a while. Utter chaos is the only place this one can go. This episode is about the end of a scene compounded with the beginning of another one (it starts with a throwaway joke about the Beatles getting squeezed into the bottom of a variety show gig, because the little kids seem to like them and ends with the literal death of jazz.)

I remember enjoying this episode back in the day, because I thought the atmosphere was cool and there were just enough funny bits to keep my interest. I didn't think that this was one of the best that the series had to offer. Either I wasn't paying that much attention, or this is only going to get better.

It is 1960 and Desmond (Adrian Edmonson) is an enthusiastic beat aficionado. His parents have gone on vacation, leaving him the run of their country house, so he invites a crowd of beats to come for a weekend. The guests include established writer Alan (Peter Richardson), publisher Charles (Nigel Planer), American film-maker Anne (Jennifer Saunders), party girl Eleanor (Dawn French), rising (or imploding) star Jeremy (Rik Mayall) and "the most promising illiterate of your generation" Kix (Daniel Peacock).

The theme of this episode is the sense of "coolness." Desmond and Eleanor want it. Jeremy seems to have it but doesn't know that he has it yet. Alan and Charles drip with it and suffer from it in their own little ways. Everyone is swirling around, establishing pecking orders, trying to be as cool as possible.


I think that perhaps when I was watching this the first go around, I was more likely to be taken in by the cool. Now I have a better sense of how the little games were working. Before I was able to see that Desmond was horribly inept, and that Jeremy and Eleanor were subtly so. Now, I can see that Anne, Alan and Charles are also terribly sad figures, struggling to keep up with the illusions that they constructed for themselves.

They fooled me. Which is what, I suppose, they were meant to have been good at.