Funny Cow
Adrian Shergold (2017)
Successful female stand-up comedians were thin on the ground in the 1970s and early 1980s, when Funny Cow is set. One of the few who broke through at the time was Marti Caine. Born Lynne Shepherd in 1945 and raised in a working-class Sheffield family, she got her first engagement at the Working Men’s Club in Chapeltown in the mid-1960s. She worked the Yorkshire clubs circuit for the next decade, as a stand-up and cabaret singer, before winning the television talent show New Faces in 1975. Caine continued to be a familiar face on British TV for the next twenty years (the remainder of her short life: she died of cancer at the age of fifty). Maxine Peake, who stars in Adrian Shergold’s film, has been quoted as saying that Caine was a main inspiration for her character (who doesn’t have a name, other than the stage name of the title). An article by Tony Earnshaw in the Yorkshire Post[1] implies that Funny Cow was conceived as a vehicle for Peake. That, at any rate, is what Tony Pitts, who wrote the screenplay and plays a key role in the film, suggests, in making clear that Marti Caine wasn’t an inspiration for him:
‘Maxine had originally been interested in doing something on Marti Caine … I didn’t want to do that at all. The idea of that time and my memories of that culture… that interested me. I said I wouldn’t do a biopic but I’d write something about a female comedian. And that’s what I did.’
Pitts goes on to describe his writing as ‘essentially vomiting. I walk round and round until it’s ready to come out. It’s terrifying for my agents because it’s against the orthodoxy of how things are done. I do it, it comes out and there it is. Once it’s there, it’s there’. And once you’ve seen Funny Cow, Pitts’s description of his creative process is easy to believe. So is Maxine Peake’s reaction to first reading his script: ‘I just remember being in floods of tears and saying, “It’s beautiful” but then getting this feeling [of], “Good God, how will this get made?”’ I kept asking myself a rather similar question as I watched the end product: how did the screenplay get a green light?
Funny Cow begins with the heroine on stage. Looking glamorous in a sparkly red dress and with her own pianist (nothing here or in the rest of the film indicates that she needs one for her act), Funny Cow looks to have made it to the big time. She tells a few jokes that elicit gales of canned-sounding laughter from an unseen audience with whom her face and voice barely interact. The look in her eyes as she delivers scathing recollections of her hateful father not only makes clear that Funny Cow’s talking about her own past but gives the impression she’s talking virtually to herself. We prepare ourselves for an extended flashback that describes her journey to stardom but that’s not quite what we get. Pitts says that he ‘wrote down the days that would shape her: what it was to be a woman in the ‘70s, and a funny woman’. In that order of priority, I think.
It’s a disappointment, given the film’s USP, that it shows so little of Funny Cow’s professional struggle. In spite of his proud unorthodoxy, Tony Pitts is happy to rely on the most primitive conventions of show business rags-to-riches stories to keep things simple. Lenny (Alun Armstrong), a superannuated club stand-up, is too depressed to go on. Funny Cow, though entirely inexperienced, seizes her chance. She counters the reservations of the cynical club manager Danny (Kevin Eldon) by offering to perform free of charge. She wipes the floor with a sexist heckler (Steve Money) like a seasoned pro and goes down a storm. As she comes offstage, Danny tells her he’ll give her a contract and take her all the way to the top. He’s a caricature of slimeball showbiz small fry but, from what we can see, as good as his word. In terms of a description of career progress, nothing intervenes between Funny Cow’s public debut and the celebrity perspective from which she introduces the film.
The protagonist, through trying to assert some kind of independence from those who rule her life, is on the receiving end of violence throughout her early years. Funny Calf [sic] (Macy Shackleton) tells her father (Stephen Graham) to make his own cup of tea so he takes his belt to her. The next scene, which shows him in his coffin, has a weird wages-of-sin impact. When his daughter grows up (Hebe Beardsall plays her as a late teenager), she marries Bob (Tony Pitts), who’s just as bad. The tradition of male tyranny extends beyond physical violence. Adrian Shergold summarises the inherited domestic subservience of women in an image of two laundrette machines with washing spinning round in them. The younger version of Funny Cow’s mother (Christine Bottomley) contemplates the machines and her face is reflected in the door of the left-hand one. Then Funny Cow’s face appears on the right-hand one. Vicious cycles: this is what it was like ‘to be a woman in the ‘70s’, though a striking feature of Funny Cow is the lack of any reference to another woman of that decade – and the next one. The rich-and-famous Funny Cow returns to the narrow terraced streets of her native Rotherham. As she walks along, I thought I spotted a poster for the 1983 General Election. If that’s right, it suggests, even allowing for Funny Cow’s meteoric rise to fame, that most of her story takes place before 1979. This makes a crucial difference. Thatcher-era stories in British cinema have normally treated the male working class of northern industrial areas sympathetically, not to say sentimentally. In Funny Cow, their chief representatives are misogynist thugs. Pitts and Adrian Shergold are tough on domestic abuse but not on the causes of domestic abuse: it’s a bit too early to blame Margaret Thatcher for those.
Not being a real man in this context might seem a good thing but not in the case of bookseller Angus (Paddy Considine). He’s derided for being educated and middle-class – as well as (therefore) sexually unconfident and a bit of a physical coward. Angus is brave, though, to run a bookshop: in the culture the film describes, his line of work seems more crazily optimistic than Funny Cow’s ambitions to be a stand-up sensation. On the heroine’s several visits to his (vast) shop, it’s deserted. Only one other customer is ever sighted there – and Funny Cow isn’t really a customer anyway: Pitts and Shergold just need to engineer a meeting between her and Angus to get their improbable relationship going. It’s love at first sight for him when he sees her flicking through Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s Le petit prince, a book that gives him ample opportunity to demonstrate from the outset what a pretentious twit he’s going to be. At the cinema, he waxes similarly lyrical about Le ballon rouge. His relationship with Funny Cow ends the night he takes her to the theatre and Macbeth. In their last conversation, she starts by saying she didn’t enjoy the play because ‘I’m thick’ but swiftly moves on to deploring how Shakespeare has been kidnapped by cultural elites. In the meantime, Angus’s home has provided a refuge for her, away from Bob’s fists. Not that Angus gets any credit for this either. The first night he and Funny Cow sleep together, each of them wears a pair of his pyjamas – I mean, how timidly bourgeois can you get? She wakes up in the morning and wanders round his palatial home, exclaiming ‘Fucking hell’ on entering each of its many rooms.
‘We don’t’, Tony Pitts tells the Yorkshire Post, ‘have a strict narrative’. There’s no disagreeing with that. After a while, he replaces the original framing device of Funny Cow’s stage act with another. The colour of her dress changes from red (her signature colour) to midnight blue and she appears to be narrating her story via some kind of TV special. The relatively very experienced director may be less comfortable than the writer with the ‘there it is’ structure of Pitts’s first feature-length screenplay. Adrian Shergold punctuates the action with a succession of arch chapter titles – ‘the first bit’, ‘a few years later’, ‘the next bit’, ‘nearly the last bit’, ‘a few more years later’ – as if desperate to suggest some kind of structure. The following will cut no ice with Pitts, committed as he is to spontaneous screenwriting, but here are a few examples of how nonsensical and amnesiac Funny Cow often is.
- The heroine reads about a local talent contest in a newspaper, cuts out the details and immediately gets into a row with Bob, who demands to know what she’s holding in her hand. She won’t reveal the newspaper clipping. Rather than forcing her to show him it, her husband merely glowers. Nothing more is said until the evening of the talent contest when he confronts Funny Cow with the clipping, just as she’s about to leave the house. He warns her what he’ll do to her if she takes part in the contest but he makes no attempt to stop her going out.
- Angus takes her out to dinner and drives her home. After she’s got out of the car, Bob appears from nowhere, gets into the back seat and warns Angus to back off. In spite of this – and although Bob is violent enough to punch his wife in the face when she returns from the talent contest – there’s nothing to suggest he sees the need even to discuss with her the outing with Angus, let alone punish her for it.
- At the talent contest, over which Danny presides, Funny Cow is so consumed by nerves she can’t even speak and exits crying. She next encounters Danny when Lenny is unable to perform and she, happening to be in the right place at the right time, offers to take his place. Danny pooh-poohs the idea because she’s a woman – the audience, he says, will eat her alive. He doesn’t mention she’s also a woman who, the only previous time they met, was consumed by stage fright when facing an audience of one.
These aren’t just plotting technicalities: they concern – and contradict – the film’s central themes of male violence towards women and Funny Cow’s aptitude for performance. The approach to racism is similarly careless. In the first of his routines that we see, Lenny gets silence or catcalls from an audience that’s heard his jokes often before. In desperation, he resorts to racist gags and gets a much better reaction. The act immediately before Funny Cow goes on stage in Lenny’s place is a singing duo. The man is Rodney Chittingdon (Richard Hawley, who also wrote the original music for the film), the only contestant at the talent contest who wasn’t a dead loss. Danny, as he said he would, has paired the grey-looking, pleasant-voiced Rodney with a girl singer (Corinne Bailey Rae) and called them Coffee and Cream. Danny evidently had no worries about choosing a non-white girl for the act. The audience’s enthusiastic reaction seems colour-blind too. Then, when Funny Cow takes the stage, she tells a joke about ‘a Paki, a poof and an Englishman’, complete with comedy accents for the first two. The film steers clear of addressing whether she shares the racial and homophobic prejudices of her time and place – or whether she’s just affecting these attitudes because she knows what’s good for her act.
All the way back to Dinnerladies (1998-2000), I’ve found Maxine Peake a too insistent performer. Her superb portrait of Alice Aisgill in the mini-series of Room at the Top (2012) made me think again but normal service has been resumed in the parts I’ve seen her in since. She was Stephen Hawking’s carer-with-an-ulterior-motive in The Theory of Everything (2014); more recently, a grating Titania in the Russell T Davies television adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (a largely gruesome example of making Shakespeare ‘accessible’). As a screen actress (I’ve not seen her on stage), Peake is always a vivid presence but she tends to be overeager to stress the political significance of the character she’s playing, and that’s how she approaches her role here. It’s an irony because Tony Pitts has barely written her a character at all – as distinct from supplying her with plenty of nifty putdowns (and a few decent gags) to deliver. We don’t get to know much about who Funny Cow is or even what she does until she gets her chance to perform. She doesn’t appear to have a job – or to be unemployed. When she revisits Rotherham as a star and pays a call on her brother Mike (Stephen Graham again) and his family, the hostility of Mike’s wife and kids is emphatic but unexplained. As Funny Cow takes her leave and approaches her flashy red car, the family watches through their living-room window and she moons them. The way this film works, you can’t help wondering if they had to be hostile simply in order for her to show them her bum. We seem meant to think the mistreatment the heroine suffered at the hands of her father and husband hardened her into lifelong cynicism (she exults in the death of both abusers) and deprived her of the capacity to feel anything for anyone – though she eventually rescues her mother (now Lindsay Coulson) from her life of alcoholic despair and solitude.
Adrian Shergold has worked predominantly in television – this is his first cinema feature since Pierrepoint in 2005. He’s good with actors. In the high-powered supporting cast, the standouts are Alun Armstrong, Lindsay Coulson and Stephen Graham, in his brace of roles as Funny Cow’s vicious father and sheepish brother. (There are cameos too from actual comedy celebs like John Bishop and Vic Reeves, as no-hopers in the local talent contest.) In other respects, Shergold’s direction isn’t too hot, even allowing that Tony Pitts’s screenplay would present a challenge to a major auteur. On her return to Rotherham, Funny Cow repeatedly meets her girlhood self and hands her a red balloon (did she change her mind about the movie?) Near the end, in the alley between the back-to-backs, she goes to sit on the swing she used as a kid: Maxine Peake approaches the swing with the alacrity of an actor spotting her marks. The hapless Len’s suicide, inexpertly hanging himself on a toilet chain in the club toilets, is even more garish than I was prepared for. The staging of the talent show is as lame as are the contestants in it. So far, most reviews of Funny Cow have been positive. This reflects the subjects that the film purports to explore, not what it actually is.
24 April 2018
[1] http://tinyurl.com/yabk4qdf