It wasn't until after typing them up that I realised that most of these articles actually have little or nothing to do with the theme of canned laughter or laughtracks, but as they are interesting regardless they're being posted.
From The Guardian, Saturday 9th April 1977:
Oh no, it's realFrom the Daily Mail, Saturday 9th April 1977. By Jenny Rees:Sir, - In Peter Fiddick's column (March 29), he made statements that "canned laughter" was used in a recent edition of Oh No It's Selwyn Froggitt.
The phrase, "canned laughter," seems to be bandied about indiscriminately in this context. Let me make it clear now that we do not possess some magic "can" of uproarious laughter, or applause, or whatever, which can be injected at will into programmes.
The only audience reaction, whatever it is, heard on Oh No It's Selwyn Froggitt is that of the audience present in the studio.
Duncan Wood,
Head of Light Entertainment,
Yorkshire Television Limited,
London.
ONCE upon a time a joke was only a joke when it got a good round of spontaneous laughter. A bad joke got none.Apropos of nothing, on the same page is the following:Now, with television, there isn't such a thing as a bad joke. With the help of canned laughter, one of America's less savoury exports, and nicely warmed-up studio audiences, every gag is a winner - whatever it's worth.
We don't use a lot of the canned variety in British television. The BBC never has done, and the Annan Report reprimanded the independent companies for not following suit.
Coachloads of willing volunteers from sports clubs and women's institutes are wheeled into the studios and really do laugh out loud.
Sometimes, of course, they don't - though you'll never get a television company to admit it.
Guffaws
Thames TV's Head of Light Entertainment, Phillip Jones, says that if they don't laugh it's usually for some technical reason - a camera has moved or a boom is in the way. Then the few laughs get 'sweetened' or strengthened up by the sound engineer.
But none of it is strictly what you'd call spontaneous - every audience is jollied up before the show starts by a warm-up man - and, to some people sitting at home, the sound of the assembled coach parties guffawing away is intensely irritating.
Stands have been taken against manipulated laughter. Comedy writer Barry Took, in his year as Head of Light Entertainment at London Weekend Television in 1970, responded to viewers who had complained that the laughs distracted from the content of the programme.
He set out to produce two comedy shows without audiences. Both were dismal failures.
He chose two comedies that seemed to be more like drama than laugh shows - If It Moves File It, starring John Bird, and The Trouble with You Lillian, with Dandy Nichols and Pat Hayes.
Took remembers: 'I decided there were to be no yakking laughs, but my actors got decidedly disturbed without an audience. People tell jokes, even in pubs, to get a laugh, not silence. So I brought the audiences back, and everything was fine again.
'Almost exactly the same people who had written in to complain, wrote again to say how much they preferred the shows with an audience.'
He learned from that experiment. 'You don't have to have an audience screaming with laughter, but you do need some kind of feeling of exuberance, so that the viewers at home can share it.
'The studio laughter is the electric spark that bridges the gap between the actors and the viewers at home.'
Back in the days of Till Death Us Do Part. Alf Garnett's creator, writer Johnny Speight, took a stand against studio audiences, and remains a solid opponent. 'It's always been my contention that you can do without those people.
'I once had eight minutes taken out of a show, because the audience failed to laugh at the right moment, and I was furious. My words were the important part of the show. The laughs just got in the way.'
Bitter
He didn't win his battle against the BBC, but is left with bitter impressions about manipulated laughter in general.
'What I particularly hate is that American canned variety - I have the terrible feeling that half those people laughing died long ago. It's a chorus of dead voices.'
Impersonator Mike Yarwood is someone who's come a long way from the gag-laugh-gag-laugh routine. He's now got a very sophisticated, technically complicated act, some of which he has to do, unwillingly, without a studio audience.
'When I'm being six people at the same time, it takes about six hours of work to make six minutes of television. I miss the audience then. It's like working to an empty house.
'It's difficult to get your timing right without an audience. Timing is vital to a comedian. We show the recording of that six minutes to a studio audience, then record their reaction.
Booze
'Now that could be called phoney, but for me it gives atmosphere to the show. It would look very strange if you left a gap of silence for the laughs at home.
'Audience reaction is also marvellous for your morale. If you don't get a laugh, then you know the joke deserves to be dropped.'
Paul Fox, managing director of Yorkshire TV, says: 'Artists need that reaction for their timing, and to see that what they are doing is working. The producer needs it, too. It's the only audience he's got that he can use as a gauge.'
He feels the warm-up for a studio audience had become less of a fiasco than it used to be.
'In the old days, they used to get booze. That doesn't happen any more.
'You need someone, a warm-up man, even the producer, to welcome them, to get the used to the fact that they've come to be entertained.'
Flavour
BBC Head of Light Entertainment, Bill Cotton, says it's a tradition there not to dub laughter. His point about studio audiences is that kind of flavour to comedy shows.
'It's a change of gear for viewers. The applause and the audience reaction add to the enjoyment of the programme.'
No, they don't hold large white cards up in front of studio audiences saying 'Laugh' any more. They never did. They do tell audiences to shut up if they're laughing too much - and certainly sound engineers add a bit of volume when the laughs are not loud enough.
Shows with a young appeal are purposely not packed with coachloads of OAPs and the companies like audiences with an even male-female ratio.
It's been said that there's one lady who pops up regularly in comedy audiences with an instantly recognisable laugh. None of the companies is claiming her.
In the happy world of comedy, the quality of laughter is never strained.
ONE MAN'S RADIO WEEKFrom the Sunday Mirror, Sunday 22nd January 1978. By Alan Shadrake and Angus Mayer:
Bob Monkhouse
TALKING TO DAVID GILLARD
'I AM an absolutely devoted radio buff. I grew up with "Bandwaggon," "Hi Gang!" and "Happidrome".
It was the radio that first started me writing gags and, from the age of 11, I was regularly sending off material to comedians. By the time I was 16 Tommy Handley was occasionally using my jokes and, when he needed more, I'd get a postcard saying: "Wheezes, please. T.H.".
When I was 18 - and on a 36-hour pass from the RAF - I did a BBC radio audition which led to a spot on "Beginners Please". The next day I was a star (the radio made stars of people in the 40s in the same way TV made stars in the 50s) and I was soon resident comedian of "Showtime".
I feel the same sense of excitement doing a radio broadcast today as I did 30 years ago. Stimulating the imagination is radio's job. TV just delivers the goods and you either admire what you get or you don't.
Every room in my house if fitted with loudspeakers and there's an alarm on my wristwatch so that I know exactly when a programme is about to start. I have a quadrophonic system in the car and four tape-recording units at home (one fore each radio channel) so that I can tape all the programmes I'm not in to hear.
Library
Being an acquisitive being I now have an enormous library of radio drama and have taped every Shakespeare production in the past five years.
Today I'll probably get up at about 12 and catch "Two's Best" and then the first 15 minutes of "Jim The Great" (Radio Two) before going over to "Any Questions" on Radio Four. At 5.30 I'll hear most of "Week Ending" before switching to "Critics' Forum" on Radio Three.
My recording techniques come into effect later, because I want to watch "The Magic Flute" on TV so I'm forced to record the "Saturday Night Theatre" (Radio Four) and the beginning of "A Word In Edgeways", though I'll be able to hear the end of this after the "Flute".
On Sunday I'll start the afternoon with "Windsor Davies Presents" (Radio Two) and then go to my favourite programme, "The Leading Ladies". Then I can't miss Hubert Gregg and Charlie Chester afterwards which means I've got to tape "Disraeli's Reminiscences" (Radio Three).
In the evening I'll be tearing madly between Radio Two, Three and Four, just a normal radio weekend in the life of an addict - chaos!'
? Bob Monkhouse appears on 'Celebrity Squares' (ITV today) and reads the 'Morning Story' on Friday on Radio Four.
SECRETS OF THE TV TRICKSTERSFrom the Western Daily Press, Thursday 17th August 1978:MANY of Britain's TV comedy stars would rather not discuss it, but...
The truth is that the instant laughter that greets even the weakest gags on some British TV shows comes not from a studio audience - as you viewers at home are expected to believe - but out of a can.
It is pre-recorded on tape, then filed away until needed to be dubbed on to a TV comedy for transmission.
TV producers have many good reasons for adding canned laughter - and we'll come to those in a minute.
But underlying all is the hope that viewers at home, hearing an apparently "live" audience laughing their heads off, will be infected by their guffaws and laugh, too - perhaps even against their better judgement.
Benny Hill, Morecambe and Wise, Tommy Cooper, Frankie Howerd, and the Muppets have all had canned laughs added to their shows for technical reasons.
And nearly all TV shows pre-recorded in studios are pepped up with canned laughter.
As many stars are not keen on the subjects, we discovered the facts from TV's senior sound engineers, who were more forthcoming.
Free drinks
At Anglia TV, we were told they once invited viewers to their studios, poured them a couple of stiff drinks each - then recorded the subsequent hilarity.
The idea was to obtain a huge store of audience laughter to feed into shows.
A special bar was put up in the studio and by the time the guests were led into the recording room they were all suitably relaxed.
"They were given enough to put them in a fun mood and at the same time keep them responsible. We didn't want anyone to get out of hand," said an Anglia technician.
"The guests were shown a couple of comedies and we recorded the laughter to synchronise with the programmes.
"We can make the laughter sound better if we want to. For instance, the sound of fifty people can be made to sound like a hundred people by recording.
"Laughter is infectious. That's why a big audience is better than a small one. If one person laughs the others laugh, too.
"It's much easier to get a good reaction from 100 people than from six or seven.
"If you have one hundred people with a couple of drinks inside them, someone is going to laugh straight away."
Who decides how much laughter is to be dubbed in for a particular gag?
"The directors have overall responsibilty, but it is usually based on the judgement of the sound department," says Anglia. "They have a little room where they balance sound to get a natural blend."
One of Anglia's situation comedy programmes is the successful Backs To The Land, which has just ended its present series.
"A lot of the scenes were shot on location and it was impossible to have a studio audience," says an Anglia executive.
"The production crew have a standard laughter tape and the director decides where he wants it dubbed in.
"He pushes levers to create laughs where he thinks fit.
"You can get an inferior type of canned laughter - a continuous recording. You fade it up and down to emphasise parts of the film you think are funny.
"That's the stuff that really irritates - because it sounds phoney."
Canned laughter and applause, however, were used very successfully in Tommy Steele's last show, a costly Thames Television production.
All the effects to make it sound like a live show with an audience were dubbed in.
One scene alone had taken six days to shoot, so it would have been impossible to have had an audience present,
Arthur [obscured], head of sound at Thames, says: "We sometimes add a bit more laughter to a comedy show where the studio audience didn't particularly get a joke.
"It may be that the audience didn't hear it properly because they were looking at something else going on in the studio.
"Most situation comedy and light entertainment special productions, which take time to record, are given canned laughter for various technical reasons. The Benny Hill and Tommy Cooper shows have it.
"The BBC try to avoid dubbing but sometimes they have to cue it in, during a live studio production.
"We use canned laughter in comedy shows for technical reasons, not to try and make them funny afterwards.
"You can be fooled. I've watched shows I thought had canned laughter - but hadn't. Sometimes live laughter sounds like canned laughter, and vice versa."
Freddie Slade, one of Britain's top dubbing mixers, works for Thames TV. "Canned laughter can become so mechanical," he says. "It is abused more often than not.
"Sometimes it is not the big-name comedian but the warm-up man who comes on before him who earns the laughter you hear.!
Freddie explains. "The warm-up man tells a few jokes to the studio audience. Than, when the show is edited, the laughter he got is often dubbed into the screened version."
Some TV stars hate the idea of canned laughter. June Whitfield, who appeared in the BBC's Happy Ever After, says: "I find it irritating.
"It is not used in programmes I appear in.
"It is so phoney. The Americans are the worst offenders. I am sure it irritates viewers. Good programmes are often ruined by it.
"It takes a very special skill to know precisely when to dub in the right amount of laughter.
"Nothing turns me off a humourous programme more than hoots of unnecessary laughter in the wrong places."
Comedian Terry Scott, co-star with June in Happy Ever After, is even more forthright: "Canned laughter is sordid. Real laughter is infectious, but canned laughter tends to take away the viewers' willpower.
"They find themselves laughing at something they would not normally find amusing.
"I hate hysterical laughter. I prefer it mild, so it doesn't interfere with what I feel about a joke or comic situation.
"Canned laughter should be used only in very exceptional circumstances, where it is necessary to have atmosphere.
"I have heard canned laughter added at the feed-line to a joke. It spoils the whole thing."
Molly Sugden, of BBC TV's Are You Being Served and Come Back Mrs. Noah, says: "I think viewers sometimes get the impression that our programmes use canned laughter. We don't.
"We have an audience of about 500 people when we record the show. Sometimes one of us can be doing something amusing when the camera isn't on us,
"It raises a laugh with the audiences, but viewers at home can be left wondering.
"I think the use of canned laughter on some other shows is a pity.
"You either make an audience laugh, or you don't. If something is not funny enough to be laughed at it's not funny enough to be shown."
Nerys Hughes, of The Liver Birds, says: "We always have a TV studio audience when we are filming the show. The bits filmed outside, in Liverpool, are shown to the audience on monitor screens, between the live shots of us in our flat.
"The audience reaction to the outside shots, which viewers at home hear is therefore genuine, not canned.
"We never use canned laughter. I think shows that do have it are awful."
SOME TV stare use technical camera tricks to achieve new dimensions in entertainment.
Two who benefit from them are Dave Allen and David Nixon.
David Nixon, one of the elite Magic Circle, is a brilliant magician, but on TV some of his tricks are impossible.
Puzzled viewers have seen him appear to spoon water uphill, for instance.
John Eveleigh, a Thames TV senior engineer, explains. "The uphill water effect is achieved with a camera mounted on a trolley which swings at an angle and deceives the viewer."
Bernard Wilkie, head of the BBC's special effects department, has more than a hundred designers and technicians doing nothing else but develop new TV techniques. He says:
"In one Dave Allen show a car had to fall apart when a traffic warden slapped tickets on it. That was a difficult one. The car was rigged with hydraulic jacks and levers.
"The levers pushed the wheels off and a special spring device released the windscreen. There were about twenty-five separate mechanisms to do the tricks."
In another show, Dave Allen was sending up the Bionic Man. He met the Bionic Woman, they collided - and seemingly fell to pieces.
This effect was achieved through a clever technique known as Croma Key.
Dave and the Bionic Woman were draped in blue sheets with their arms and legs poking through.
Using a technical trick the blue sheets became invisible to the camera which registered just the disconnected limbs, apparently falling about.
Setting up tricks can sometimes lead to unexpected results for the effects experts. Martin Gutridge, of Special Effects Associates, recalls working on a Benny Hill show.
"Benny was playing an opera singer, and a huge vase was going to shatter when he hit a high note.
"My job was to make sure the vase shattered at the right moment. I fired small charges at it, but they bounced off.
"I fired all sorts of missiles from a catapult. Still nothing happened.
"After all else failed I shattered it with a sharp piece of granite."
Whatever technical tricks are achieved, some stunts still call for sheer guts.
Michael Crawford, who doesn't rely on camera tricks, performed a whole series of dangerous stunts which made BBC TV's Some Mothers Do Have 'Em so successful.
They were made possible only by Crawford's nerve, and the skills of Bernard Wilkie and his special effects team. "The stunts had to be clever and dangerous to hold the viewers' interest," says Bernard.
In one episode Michael hung to the bumper of a car rocking to and fro on a cliff edge with an 800ft drop below. It was filmed on location near Dover.
During the stunt Michael had to hurl himself over the car roof and grab the bumper on the way down.
As he swung in mid-air the boot fell open and a sack of manure poured over him.
"The old Morris we used a lot of special refinements," says Bernard. "I was underneath Michael, roped into the cliff, pulling levers.
"If Michael hadn't caught the bumper be would have gone crashing to his death."
THE picture on your TV screen is brutal. A rampaging army is burning, looting and raping.
You hear the roar of the flames, the smashing down of doors, the screaming of women.
The effect is horrific. The truth is less startling. It's an even bet that the director of the scene that set your teeth on edge has got his horror-sounds "off the peg" from a sound library and dubbed them into the film.
Let Charles Earle explain. He is a sound expert with Anglia TV.
Friends call him the Ear because, they say, "he has such finely attuned hearing that he can pick up the sound of a raindrop at three miles."
A historical series called Dark Ages needed the sounds of battle. "We had only four sounds, but we wanted them to sound like an army in battle," says Charles.
"Two men in the studio held a sword in each hand and clashed them against each other's swords for a couple of minutes. Then I multi-recorded the sound until it was like hundreds of men fighting.
"I got burning sounds from the sound library and borrowed a couple of office secretaries to do the screaming!" That was for the rapings.
On location in Africa, for a Survival documentary, the camera crew filmed an elephant bathing, but the sound was poor.
"I never like to be beaten," says Charles. "I threw a ground sheet across a five-barred gate and slung buckets of water at it.
"It produced just the sound we wanted."
One day Anglia's news editor received film of four brewery chimneys being blown up - but there was no soundtrack.
A quick search of the sound library unearthed a track of a brewery chimney falling.
"I re-recorded that sound four times, mixed it and sychronised it with the soundless film," says Charles.
Tens of thousand of sound effects are stored away in TV libraries, ready to give life to dull films.
Once in a while things go wrong. Thames Television dubbing mixer Freddie Slade tells how the sound of a tractor's engine was needed for a farming programme. "A chap went out and recorded one, and the sound was dubbed in.
"A few days after the film was screened we got a letter from an angry schoolboy complaining that the engine noise didn't fit that make of tractor.
"We double checked. He was right. We had blundered."
Mistakes are easy to make. One veteran dubber says: "Once we had a sky-lark singing merrily in what was supposed to be a January countryside."
Why laughs come in cansFrom the Guardian, Saturday 19th September 1981:
by Charles FraserWHAT makes you laugh on TV? Your favourite comedian? Some absurd situation that tickles your sense of humour?
More likely it's an electronic box of tricks looking like a cross between a typewriter and a harmonium, known in TV circles as the laugh-box.
"Hardly any pre-recorded comedy TV show, either in Europe or America, now has spontaneous laughter in it," says Rose K Goldsen, Professor of Sociology at Cornell University, and author of a new book on the inside secrets of TV.
Quota
'The laugh track is now as essential to television comedies as the gags and the music. A burst of happy and appreciative laughter every 30 seconds is now the normal quota for comedy series.
"Producers sat they just can't depend on an audience laughing at the right time. Imagine piping into 20 million homes a comedy show with just a sprinkling of week titters on the tape!"
So next time you hear a studio audience laughing helplessly at the antics of someone you find only mildly funny, don't automatically assume that your sense of humour is lacking.
The laughs are more likely the work of a technician sitting at the laugh-box, working its foot pedals and 36 typewriter-like keys.
Inside the box are loops of audio-tape with ten different types of laugh on each loop - about 400 categories, which can be combined in an almost infinite number of combinations.
Charles Douglas, head of Northridge Electronics, the American firm which leads the laugh-box field says: "Every conceivable kind of laugh has been preserved on these loops.
"From the producer's point of view, canned laughter is preferable to the real thing.
"One reason that studio audiences can't be counted on to laugh properly and at the right time, is that they can hardly see the performers.
"Much of the time, cameras obscure their view, and they have to follow the action on monitor screens.
"And often a show may be recorded in sections, perhaps starting at the end and working towards the beginning!"
Some shows, using the laugh box to liven things up, are taped before two live audiences at the dress rehearsal and the final performance.
Then the finished product is put together from the better bursts of laughter, regardless of which gags caused them.
"It's known in the trade as sweetening a show," says Irving Waring, who operates the laugh box at ABC television headquarters in Hollywood.
"I enjoy doing it. I work on the script with the comedian before the show and during rehearsals.
"The whole idea of television is to be entertaining, and the people sitting at home want to feel they're laughing with somebody."
Why are TV bosses so reluctant to televise a joke with no laughter?
"The ear of the viewer is attuned to expect instant reaction," explains a spokesman for Britain's Thames Television network.
"So if they don't hear studio laughter they get the feeling that things aren't going so well."
What do the stars think of canned laughter?
"It doesn't appeal to me at all," says British comedy star Max Bygraves.
"I'm still old-fashioned enough to prefer applause that's actually made by hand!"
The BBC has decided to put out its latest comedy series without any recorded laughter to go with it. Peter Fiddick reports.Page 25 of the Daily Mail, Friday 7th February 1986. By Herbert Kretzmer:
Stop it, you're killing meTHERE is a clearly detectable air of apprehension around the BBC's comedy department, about its newest creation. They are worried about the lack of laughter - but not ours. Theirs.
It is not the producer: the highly experienced Dennis Main Wilson thinks it's funny, all right. Besides, toilers in the BBC television comedy department are well used to nursing their babies against the initial disdain of an audience, appearing not even to notice the ruderies of mere critics and quite and quite often being right.
It cannot be the cast. So many of our best actors have a crack at television comedy that it scarcely comes as a surprise to find such worthies as Norman Rodway, James Gossins, Hugh Lloyd, in supporting roles. But to have in the lead a chap who has been voted Best Actor Of The Year for his Hamlet, and won a Tony in Stoppard's Comedians, must beat par for the course. Roger Doesn't Live Here Any More had Jonathan Pryce in the title role. He's off to Hollywood now to make a movie.
Nor is the writer of the piece exactly an unknown quantity. John Fortune has currently been treading the boards himself again, in The Secret Policeman's Other Ball, and is about to start in a new play with West End aspirations, but in partnership with Eleanor Bron his writing has provided several series of wry, sly humour that have found some favour and certainly never courted disaster.
But the fact is, they are worried. And what worries them is not so much that we won't laugh, though that is part of it. It is that the programme itself is not laughing for us: Roger Doesn't Live Here Any More arrives - on BBC-2 next Thursday - without benefit of audience cackle. And that, in the theology and practice of television comedy, is heresy.
With very few exceptions, comedy series are made with an audience in the studio, and the accumulated wisdom of the laughter factories is, first, that the performers need it to get their timing right, and second, that we at home need to hear other people laughing, to nudge (nudge!) us into laughing ourselves.
If they do have to film a sequence - in a field, say, where the cows might lack the right sense of humour - then they show it to the studio audience later, and record the laughs. (Please don't talk about "canned laughter", though - it makes them terribly hurt.) We do, of course, enjoy comedy without laughter. Douglas Livingstone's marvellous Born and Bred did without it - but that came from a drama department. M.A.S.H. fans don't get it - but that is made all on film, and controllers of BBC-2 have always chosen not to use the laughter-track the Americans inflict on their own audiences. West End Tales, from ATV earlier this year, was a very rare example of a series coming out of a comedy stable, BBC or ITV, unattended by its audience.
But this one, everybody agrees, is different. Writer, producer, the head of comedy - John Howard Davies - all recognise it would not be the same, played before an audience. And it is not just the playing, but the writing that is affected.
"The truth is, that if you have got to have an audience, you have got to have laughs, and at frequent intervals", John Fortune says with some force. "You take a script into a comedy executive and the first thing he's liable to do is sit there, whipping through it, ticking the 'laughs'. If there aren't two or three a page, you have to provide them.
"I recognise that as a fact of life, but there are times when I wish I could stop the lift between the two floors at the BBC. You'd go into comedy department and they'd sit straight-faced, ticking your latest script, then up to see how the drama people liked the play and find them falling about, telling you how funny it was!"
Given the assurance that Roger Doesn't Live Here Any More could be done without an audience, Fortune, whose first solo outing as a writer this is, had the pleasure of nipping out the lines that had been consciously dropped in to provoke the necessary titter.
"But then you can write it quite differently, and the studio is liberated too. The audience takes more of the space than the sets, so they have to be limited in size and lined up so that they can all be seen at once. They have to be lit from the front, giving everyone that flat look, and the actors have to play to the audience and the cameras at once. Whatever the merits of my scripts may or may not be, it just looks and sounds altogether more subtle."
Even so, he is nervous. So is John Howard Davies, who took the final decision. "I am sure it is right," he said this week. "And I am sure it is funny. What frightens me is that, having tried, if it isn't an immediate hit, everyone will blame the lack of audience laughter, and we'll be right back at square one. Or further."
So perhaps this is the big opportunity for all of you who have groaned and raged about television's latest idiot cackles, all these years, to give a boost to the new, pure comedy.
On the other hand, perhaps I shouldn't have told you. You might never have noticed.
Uncanned, the secret of that corny laughterPage 27 of the Daily Mail, Wednesday 12th March 1986. By Herbert Kretzmer:'CANNED' laughter comes very high among the pet hates of television viewers. Few subjects I have raised have excited such a wide and furious response.
The majority of correspondents name The Two Ronnies and Yes, Prime Minister as persistent culprits. I recently invited the producers of both shows to assure this column's readers that the laughter on their shows was genuine and not manipulated.
The response has been a vast silence. Clearly there is something to hide.
But I have received a detailed and courteous letter from one of TV's best-known comic actors explaining the process which results in those outbursts of cackling mirth which so madden the public. His letter was marked 'Personal' so I will not name him.
He writes: 'Laughter on audience shows is always, in a sense, manipulated because it is recorded selectively by the sound engineer. There are various microphones above the audience. The engineer listens to each one separately before the show starts (a 'warm up' man gets the audience to laugh for this very reason.) The engineer picks out the best ones, the jolliest laughers, and so on, then locks all these individual mikes into one master control....'
My correspondent explains that the mikes are switched on at the end of a joke line, and switched off before the actor speaks the next line. 'If a shot has to be performed again, for any reason, the audience cannot be expected to laugh a second time, so the laughs from the previous "take" are used, though they may have to be chopped off or lengthened...'
I thank the comedian for his candour. His letter confirms that soundtrack laughter on British TV shows is artificial and cynically manipulated for best results. It is no a criminal offence but readers hate it.
Reginald G. Young of Midhurst, calls it 'this idiotic practice.' Michael Yarrow of Lilley near Luton, Bedfordshire calls it 'synthetic and distracting.' Mrs B. Slinger of Fleetwood, Lancashire writes: "The last edition of The Two Ronnies was unbearable.' Mr J. Haffey of Harrogate says: 'I had to stop watching Yes, Minister because of the lunatic laughter.' Mrs E. M. Lee of Nottingham calls it an 'abomination'. 'Maddeningly annoying,' says Mrs E. M. Deckin or Welwyn, Hertfordshire.
I could easily fill this page with such complaints. Will anyone take heed?
THE great debate about 'canned' laughter continues. Never a day passes without another fistful of protesting letters from readers maddened by the bursts of automatic cackling that now routinely accompany British TV comedies.Page 29 of the Guardian, Thursday 6th February 1992:Soundtrack laughter is clearly one of the great hates of the British TV public. Only the BBC does not know it. On three occasions I have invited BBC producers and departmental heads to reply in writing to the wave of criticism.
The response, alas, has been a long and apparently sulky silence. However, my invitations remain open. And that goes for the ITV guys as well. All I want are the facts.
Other correspondents have not been so shy. Ronnie Barker wrote to say that a certain, but hardly criminal, amount of sound engineering does go on at TV comedy shows, especially when a scene has to be reshot. Composer Laurie Johnson saw no reason for studio audiences at all, since dozens of shows like the Laurel and Hardy comedies are regularly shown on TV without studio laughter, and do not suffer as a result.
A similar point is made, from an actor's perspective in an interesting letter from Nigel Hawthorne (Sir Humphrey in Yes, Prime Minister), who writes: 'In common with a number of my concerns I feel strongly that studio audiences are unnecessary. If an entertainment is designed for TV it is clearly a contradiction to invite an audience to attend. It turns it into a theatre performance. Encouragement from an audience tends to make the performer play up to them.
'And I find it wrong that 300 people, egged on to respond with maximum enthusiasm by the warm-up man, should decide for the audience at home what is funny or not.'
Although Mr Hawthorne finds studio audiences 'always unnerving and disruptive', he does not think there's much dirty work afoot when it comes to recording their laughter, although 'it may well be possible that the level of laughter is "fixed" in the control room.'
Comedy writer Richard Waring (Marriage Lines, My Wife Next Door, etc.), an experienced warm-up man himself, insists that studio laughter is not manipulated and is, furthermore a Good Thing. 'Studio audiences,' he writes, ' can be hell, but after 30 years of them I truly believe that they bring out the best in the best comedy writers and performers.'
Putting a lid on canned laughterAndrew Clifford
warns that the oh-so-set-up comic sketch may be past its sell-by dateCANNED laughter is at best a mixed blessing. At times each short drone of hilarity seems not so much a response to the comedy as in cahoots with it; as though it were the guffaws of the comedians at their real-life audience. This feeling happens not so much in sitcoms, where the humour is less childish, but a lot in sketch shows, like the current run of A Bit Of Fry And Laurie on BBC2.
The uncanned viewer hasn't known whether to laugh or moan at this weak series of preppy, hectic sketches. In 10-second or three-minute bursts we've watched petrol pump attendants who used to be estate agents, silly linguists and, yes, a thriller spoof, to say nothing of vox pops where idiotic vicars, businessmen, and middle-aged women say dumb things to camera, "they way people do". Each programme ends with pianist Laurie playing mouth trumpet as Fry makes wacky cocktails.
Fry and Laurie are funny, talented men and everyone has off days (particularly when given complete editorial control). But judging from the empty feeling one also has had at the end of shows by Paul Merton, Alexi Sayle (an astonishing Monty Python rerun, right down to ad hoc sketch links and Angus Dayton's John Cleese lookalike), to say nothing (thankfully) of Josie Lawrence, it's clear that the problem lies more at the level of the sketch "form" itself.
Did we ever find sketches funny? A man walks into a shop. He makes an outrageously out-of-context demand. The shopkeeper expresses amazement. As the demand is persisted with, the shopkeeper gets angry. Things reach a dismal anti-climax with a non-punchline or symbolic violence. Next sketch. A man being interviewed. He makes an outrageous claim. The interviewer expresses amazement, etc, etc.
Despite music hall and the Goons, the sketch as we know it began with Beyond The Fringe, and as an agent of satire and absurdism it couldn't be bettered. The form peaked with Monty Python, who did whatever could be done, including self-destructing it. Subsequent shows have had muted success but nowadays, even when sketches raise a smile, it's a strained one.
We know all the angles of the sketch. We know its highs, lows, shifts and twists and turns. We know the non-joke, the anti-joke, the joke-joke, the joke double-axle with reverse spin and pike. We've learned to expect the unexpected, to expect the expected, even to expect to expect the unexpected. We know, above all else that, as soon as it starts, something "funny" this way comes. Even when it is funny, it becomes draining because almost viscerally we feel the effort that has gone into it. And for a form which aims at satire, this transparency is a disaster.
For some time professionals have been fighting a rearguard action to preserve the sketch. Smith and Jones and Spitting Image advise their writers to avoid "format" sketches which mock genres, like ads or game shows, thus booting out what is an important staple of the sketch: television itself. And despite the fact that the sketch tends to work best as a verbal (studio?) form, Smith and Jones encourage their team to create ones that are highly visual, usually on film.
Even the "improv" shows, like Whose Line Is It Anyway or the rather feeble S & M, rely on a kind of sketch "short-hand". While Whose Line uses stand-up comedy, the "improvs" are funny often because after two words we know the area satire involved. To that extent Whose Line, though entertaining, can still seem rather vacuous. It attempts to confound the audience's knowingness while only partially addressing the knowingness in the sketch form itself.
It would be ludicrous to suggest that one one will ever write a funny sketch show again. But the gleeful hyperactivity of its items, its glib and almost viciously stupid characterisations, its oh-so-set-up set-ups turn most sketch shows like Fry and Laurie into half an hour of full-of-itself mockery.
The character-led sketches of the wonderful French and Saunders and the peculiarly overlooked Harry Enfield prove that there are ways forward, but perhaps these talents should be more ambitious, because no amount of canned laughter can save the sketch. Nowadays you can't make a silk purse out of a dead parrot.
