1991 Hale & Pace With The Stonkers: The Stonk

It was, I think, long defunct music monthly 'Select' that first branded comedy as 'the new rock and roll' sometime in the early nineties. With Alexie Sayle, Stewart Lee, Steve Coogan, Chris Morris, Armando Iannucci et al running riot though the media and the likes of Newman and Baddiel able to play Wembley stadium, they may have had a point. With what would previously have been considered 'underground' now very much overground, it doesn't need rose tinted spectacle to cast the early nineties as a comedic 'golden age'.

It wasn't lace in every window though, dear me no. Take Hale and Pace, a Cannon and Ball with attitude comedy duo who managed to churn out ten (TEN!!!) series for London Weekend Television between 1988-1998 with no apparent legacy save for a hazily remembered fluky tabloid hoo ha involving a cat in a microwave. It was pretty weak stuff all told and yet for some reason they were the bees knees in 1991, a name big enough to carry that year's Comic Relief single to number one.

Ah yes, Comic Relief; we've been here before of course, and regular readers will know that slack remains uncut regardless of any good intentions involved. After all, we know what the road to hell is paved with, and in presenting itself as promoting a fictitious dance craze a la 'The Twist', 'The Stonk' lays down enough tarmac to take us half way there all by itself.

Is it funny? Well not really - 'The Stonk' derives most of it's humour from the innate hilarity in loosely equating 'stonk' with 'bonk'. Or 'fuck', to be less mumsy about it (pardon my French, but let's call a spade a spade here). "But it's better little baby if you stonk with me". See? Except it's lazy, not funny; true the prime time, family friendly nature of its intended audience meant that the risqué had to be kept to a minimum, but in so doing the premise is diluted into nothing until all that remains is an endless stream of cheap gags ("Let's stonk, if you're skinny or if you're fat. Let's stonk, if you're on the way to wearing a hat") and a video full of gooning celebrities trying desperately to pretend we're all having a great time. Well some of them might well be, but I'm not - comedy the new rock and roll? 'The Stonk' isn't even the old type. No, what it is is a horrendously irritating three minutes of polite humour designed to appeal to a red nose wearing demographic who apparently only laugh one day a year and need a little something to prompt them from their comedy torpor. To Hades with the lot of them.