Ben
Elton’s masterwork. This existed. Face reality.
1.
If anything illustrates the current increase in nannying at the BBC, it is Happy Families (17/10/85 - 21/11/85). Looking at the series now, it is incredible what Ben Elton got away with; more incredible still is the fact that the episodes were broadcast at 8:25pm on BBC1. The dark nature of the script and performances coupled with the general oddness of the show (which pisses over anything The League Of Gentlemen could mug at) would these days be enough to worry the BBC into banishing the series to a post-watershed BBC2 slot. And that’s before one considers the following specific instances, all of which got past the BBC1 censors in 1985, but would NEVER HAPPEN NOW.
Swear-words like ‘piss’, ‘bastard’, ‘shit’ and ‘dickhead’ were used quite openly. In one episode, Dr De Quincy (Stephen Fry) addresses Grandma Fuddle (Jennifer Saunders) as ‘Mrs Fuckle’.
The innuendo was astonishingly crude, particularly from the Cook character (Dawn French) whose repertoire concerning the maid Flossie (Helen Lederer) ranged from ‘polishing’ her ‘jugs’ to inserting her ‘chocolate finger’ into her ‘juice’.
Double entendres of an incestuous nature (‘Mr delivery man, would you mind not honking all over the road while I’m trying to fantasise about playing with my little sisters?’) were common, as were references to ‘peeping dirty’ Dalcroix’s crypto-paedophilic photo collection and the perversions of Grandfather Fuddle (‘He loved you alright - especially at bath time. You must have been the cleanest girls in Britain.’). Dr De Quincey also excels in pederasty-based slips ('Women are lucky - they have babies…I can think of nothing better than having a little boy inside me.'), or the less-subtle 'There's a lot of rubbish talked about perversion these days. Now where can be the harm in tying a naked teenaged boy to a barrel-organ and playing Knees Up Mother Brown for a joke?' and is incredulous that Grandfather Fuddle was only interested in girl-children: ‘You know there’s a great deal of reactionary prejudice being aired in this discussion…’.
‘Dean’s life has been so goddamn pampered by his mother that he doesn’t recognise a gold-digging harlot when one sits on his face’
The drug jokes were very explicit. In the last episode, Cook complains that she has ‘cakes to make, bread to bake and joints to roll’, whilst - in the ‘Cassie’ episode - there is a joke about a vending machine which provides cocaine (a Hollywood producer begins to snort a line, only for the grill on the machine to suddenly snap shut).
In another episode, Dr De Quincey spends the duration of a scene preparing a syringe, apparently for Grandma Fuddle; the punchline sees him inject the syringe into his own wrist and do a zonked-out-on-heroin type face.
2.
Happy Families was repeated in the summer of 1988, but the original 35-minute shows were each edited down to 30 minutes (See also EDIT NEWS/THE YOUNG ONES). Since the cast and crew were generally disappointed with the look of the series, it is likely that producer Paul Jackson welcomed the chance to re-edit it.
It’s interesting that the 1988 repeat was scheduled at 9pm on BBC2, and the cuts were included for reasons of time rather than offensiveness. It is also worth noting that Happy Families has been rather swept under the carpet by the BBC, despite its alumni (French, Saunders, Edmondson, Mayall, Planer, Fry, Laurie, etc etc) being of enormous interest to comedy fans. It is almost certainly the case that the BBC1 censors did not understand half the references, and thus feel they can never repeat it in the same slot again. Or it could be because of...
3.
PRS problems, which may explain the non-appearance of Happy Families on video. The series featured most of Ben Elton’s record collection, and - if I’m Alan Partridge is anything to go by - the first problem will be Joni Mitchell’s ‘Big Yellow Taxi’. (Interestingly, as with Partridge, this offending song is faded out just before Cassie speaks, which may be an example of forward-thinking on someone’s part.)
