Dave Cohen says the genre's been reinvigorated

Even though I’m about as far removed from the Oscars as it is for a moderately successful British comedy writer to be, I couldn’t help but feel the slightest glow of vicarious pleasure seeing Bret McKenzie pick up the best song prize last year for his brilliant power ballad Am I A Man Or Am I Muppet?

I have no connections with the Flight Of The Conchords star, apart from the fact that we once shared the same practice room at BBC Radio while making programmes there (it was the only room with a piano). Nor with Tim Minchin, whose massively successful musical adaptation of Matilda for the Royal Shakespeare Company has gone to Broadway. But I’m delighted because they have both shown emphatically how funny songs, done well, can add so much to our wacky world of comedy.

The silly song has not always been this popular. Comedy, and alternative comedy in particular, has often had an awkward relationship with the comic ditty. The bastard child of English light opera and music hall took a while to become acceptable to the more hip post-Eighties audience.

Yet it’s a form that is as old as comedy itself. The word ‘satire’ was created more than 2,000 years ago, largely to define the song form that was used by the Greeks to describe a comic tirade against the folly of power.

The Romans enjoyed a good comic song too, apparently Pseudolus used to storm it of a Saturday night down Caesar’s Palace. And even Judaism and Islam, those monotheistic faiths not renowned for enjoying a good laugh at their own expense, have been known to embrace the satire which, when wrapped inside a pleasant enough tune, doesn’t seem quite so nasty as is clearly intended.

The current song style as seen live and on TV, grew from the music hall acts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The great stars like Marie Lloyd and Dan Leno sang ditties that were packed with more innuendo than a Carry On theme night hosted by Graham Norton. Towards the end of the music hall era many of the biggest acts became TV stars, and carried on some of the traditions they’d learned while touring.

By the 1970s, the grand finale number was the way to end your light entertainment TV show. There was always a song and some funny business at the end of The Two Ronnies, Morecambe and Wise and... Crackerjack!!! – a kids’ TV show that always finished with a current hit rewritten and crowbarred into a comedy sketch.

As a small child I watched Peter Glaze and Leslie Crowther manfully attempting, on one memorable occasion, to bring humour to the show while parodying the Rolling Stones song 19th Nervous Breakdown. In the unlikely event that I ever meet Mick Jagger, I will ask him if he gave the song that title simply to see if Crackerjack would use it at the end of their show.

During this period, one of the greatest exponents of the genre, and my hands are hovering nervously over the keyboard, wondering if I can bring myself to type this, was… Benny Hill. At the risk of blowing all credibility and being kicked out of the Right On Comics’ Union, I remain a great admirer of the songs of Benny Hill. His sexism bordering on misogyny is of course well-documented, less so the racism and frequent pillaging of Marx Brothers silent gags, but Hill’s songs were original and brilliantly crafted.

It was perhaps the unfashionable nature of those shows, parodied so cruelly and effectively on Not The Nine O’Clock News, that helped turn live audiences off the comedy song. TV continued to use them (notably Spitting Image and Rory Bremner) but there was in the Eighties on the live circuit a sense that the 1982 movie Spinal Tap had so utterly nailed the comic song, that anyone attempting to perform them would always be living under the shadow of Nigel Tufnel and David St. Hubbins.

Ronnie Golden was (and is still) able to do it. As a former star with hit band The Fabulous Poodle he brought rock’n’roll glamour to the live circuit – and it helps that his songs are funny, of course. Skint Video stormed every gig they played (and going solo Steve Gribbin still does), and it was always great to hear John Hegley’s brilliant songs about specs and dogs and mobile homes.

As one of that tiny number of comedians performing comedy songs in the Eighties, I always felt like an intruder among the stand-up fraternity. They rarely said it to my face, but I knew the other comics always used to moan at the free rounds of applause we generated at five minute intervals during our sets. I understood them, I felt the same way every time I watched jugglers eliciting whoops and cheers for throwing things in the air. I was especially annoyed by the bloke who always accidentally-on-purpose dropped his clubs just before the grand finale, in order to heighten the illusion that what he was doing was more difficult than it really was.

At one point during my stand-up career, sensitive to the criticism that I wasn’t a ‘real’ comic, I stopped singing songs completely, and performed pure stand-up for 20 minutes. The joy of impressing my peers, and not having to schlep my guitar on the underground every weekend, was offset by the fact that I had relinquished the one talent that set me apart from those peers, in order to become indistinguishable from the growing ranks of white male middle-class stand-up comics.

Actually, another reason I gave up doing comedy songs for a while was because they’re bloody difficult to work into a 20 minute set. A working comic can try out new lines every night, give them a few goes, maybe try them in a different place or order, and eventually build a nice two-minute routine around them. But you can’t build a two-minute song in several goes. It has to arrive, fully formed, with a big funny idea at its centre, and several great gags along the way. You can tweak the odd gag contained within, but if the whole isn’t delivering big laughs throughout then the only difference between it and an unfunny two-minute routine is that you can tap your feet to it. Unless it’s jazz. In which case, I’d walk off stage right now.

In the last ten years or so, the comedy song has been taken to extraordinary new places thanks to the remarkable talents of Minchin, The Conchords, Mitch Benn, Bill Bailey and Bo Burnham among others. The great circuit stalwarts like Boothby Graffoe, Richard Morton, Gribbin and Golden (often with added Barry Cryer) have continued to create crowd-pleasing anthems. More recently they’ve been joined by top circuit performers like Ginger and Black, Pippa Evans and Doc Brown (to name only the ones I’ve actually seen), and there’s even a competition currently running on the comedy circuit (The Musical Comedy Awards), whose final takes place at the Bloomsbury Theatre each April.

I’ve made part of my living from lyric writing, thanks to hooking up with the multi-talented music-making machine that is Richie Webb, and the brilliant Horrible Histories team including producer Caroline Norris, historian Greg Jenner, and the magnificent cast and production crew.

I wrote a few songs for the first series, and thought no more about them for several months, until I saw the finished products. Great music, beautifully filmed videos complete with lavish costumes, with vocal and comedic performances that brought the whole to life. I became almost teenage with excitement.

That summer term I started to hear words that I’d written, sung in the playground by the kids at my son’s school. Then parents came up and told me how they were enjoying the programme as much as their kids. I’d never had such feedback from across such a range of people.

And now, I must bid farewell to Horrible Histories, as it glides towards its conclusion. I know it’ s only a telly show, and a kids’ telly show at that, but the last song in the last series goes out next Tuesday at 5pm, and it’s a little bit special so after five series and 60+ episodes I’m giving you a final chance to catch up before it’s gone for ever.

• Horrible Histories’ Episode 12 is on CBBC on Tuesday 16 July at 5pm. Savage Songs, featuring all the series 5 songs is on CBBC on Tuesday 23 July at 5pm.

Published: 12 Jul 2013