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(several spelling corrections & un-Americanisation by ST Jan 2001)

 

ANDY HAMILTON  Andy Hamilton, writer of the award-winning Old Harry's Game, and television's Drop the Dead Donkey, has joined forces with the American writer Jay Tarses to create Revolting People. Set in Baltimore, just before the American War of Independence, it focuses on a shopkeeper, Samuel, who is beset by difficulties ranging from a loathsome prospective son-in-law to weevils in his biscuits. Jo Morris met him to talk about revolution, revolting people and radio.

 

 "I’m achieving re-entry, I’m not really with you," Andy Hamilton tells me laughing. He has just flown back from a family holiday in Scotland and his thoughts are still in the Highlands. Oh well, at least he’s here physically. Small and slightly balding, with his shrewd eyes and medieval beard he looks like a rather cuddly monk. But it’s his voice that will be familiar to fans of comedy on Radio Four - an infectious London twang that has a knack of making everything sound funny. "You know, I don’t sound like this in my head," he tells me. Oh no, how does he sound? " Well, not nasal and twangy. I’m really rather elegant," he says suppressing a giggle.

 

 For the past twenty years Hamilton has been tirelessly turning out scripts for radio and TV – and with a new series of Old Harry’s Game, Revolting People and a TV sitcom in the pipeline, he’s as busy as ever. He clearly loves writing for both mediums but enjoys the freedom radio affords, "there’s a whole area of abstract visual humour that you can’t pull off on TV" he says. "For instance in Old Harry you can attack someone with 40,000 vampire crabs by using a sound effect! Or in Revolting People say, Joshua has this prestigious strength, which is quite cartoonish, but on telly that would be hard to stage and well, could look pretty stupid."

 

       Revolting People.

 

Born and bred in Fulham, South West London, he cannot remember a time when he didn’t, "love to show off and make people laugh." His family, he says, were always mucking about and he feasted on a comedy diet of Steptoe and Son, Morecambe and Wise, The Goons and his particular favourite Hancock’s Half Hour. "I’ve always been drawn to that slightly put upon character, I’m not sure why."

 

From grammar school he went on to read English at Cambridge and it was here that he first started writing sketches. Ah, was he in Footlights? "Nah…Footlights seemed a bit glittery, a different world. I was in.. er.. another group called CULES." What was that? "Well, it stood for Cambridge University Light Entertainment Service. We specialised in putting on shows in prisons, old people’s homes and schools, you know places where people couldn’t get away."

 

   The joys of performing.

 

 Not exactly inspired by the CULES comedy archives, Hamilton began to write and perform his own material, "but at the time, I think I imagined I would be a teacher." It wasn’t until a young Jeff Perkins (now head of comedy for the BBC) saw one of his shows and suggested that he wrote for Weekending, that he thought seriously about making comedy his career.

 

 He’s never looked back. Weekending, Who Dares Wins, Not the Nine O’clock News and Shelley were just a few of the shows that benefited from his deft sense of humour. "Ah I was young then" Hamilton muses wistfully as I list them. But his biggest success has to be the triple award winning Drop the Dead Donkey written with co-author Guy Jenkins, and commonly thought to have rescued the sitcom from three–piece-suite hell.

 

   Drop The Dead Donkey.

 

 Set in a television newsroom much of the show’s appeal stemmed from its immediacy. The programme was recorded in front of a live audience the day before it went out, and many of the funniest gags were included at the last minute. "I think the latest we handed it in was an hour before transmission," Hamilton laughs. The title of the show came after channel four rejected their proposed title of Dead Belgiums Don’t Count. Perhaps fortunately since the renamed series proved to be a big hit in Belgium.

 

 Has he always relished tweaking the tail of the establishment and pushing material to the very edge of taste? "Ooh that’s gonna be very hard to answer without sounding pseudy," he says. But so much really exciting comedy hovers near the margins or line, I say, of what is perceived as good taste. "Well yes sometimes the most satirical jokes, or very penetrative observations are very close to the margins because you know they involve a streak of dark honesty that pulls people up a bit." He’s thoughtful for a minute. "But I think the great misconception is that we don’t worry about it. In my experience I think your average comedian worries far more about crossing the line and where it is in terms of taste than say, any serious programme-maker."

 

          Good taste?

 

 I’m sure there’s some truth in what he says. In the very first episode of Donkey the amoral reporter Damien (Stephen Tompkinson) was revealed planting a child’s plimsoll and blood stained teddy bear at the scene of various disasters. What Hamilton and Jenkins didn’t know was that a certain real life tabloid journalist is infamous for doing just that. It wasn’t the only time they got it right. In the second series newsreaders Sally and Henry were seen arguing over who said "hello" and "goodbye". The writers were worried that it might be too silly, but then a story came out about how allegedly Julia Somerville and Trevor Macdonald argue over who sits in the right hand chair!

 

 Just what makes Hamilton’s work so funny is difficult to say. Take Old Harry’s Game for example – a sitcom where everyone is sent to Hell and damned everlastingly, is not, on the face of it, the most promising basis for a comedy, is it? "Well no," he chuckles "but hell and Satan run so deep in our cultural identity. What I wanted was to do a piece where you could tackle big ideas without it seeming, forced." Hamilton himself plays Satan, as a kind of infernal Basil Fawlty ("ahh I love the smell of freshly baked sinners") who stuffs all architects into one tiny box and keeps popes permanently eight months pregnant.

 

 He clearly relishes the part. But I’m curious, having terrified myself from an early age on a ghoulish diet of hammer horror, has he ever got nervous about playing "His Evilness"? "You know the thought that you might be summoning dark forces and that something really bad might happen?" I ask somewhat breathlessly. "Er...no...no" he laughs nervously looking at me rather oddly." Erm ... I don’t think we’re actually scaring anybody." (Although for a moment I think he has his doubts about me.)

 

 "I think the strangest moment I had was outside Oxford Circus tube. Louis Farrakan’s mob was there, you know the Muslim guys who wear the bow ties and sell the newspaper. And I was walking through this gaggle of about eight of them, when a man in a white van stopped at the traffic lights, wound down his window and shouted at me OI SATAN!’ Then he gave me the thumbs up and drove off," he laughs. "And these guys were all staring at me, so I stupidly said to one of them ‘it’s alright, I’m not really Satan I just play him in a radio show.’ "

 

 I think Andy Hamilton has just re-entered.