What with the death of Heath Ledger followed by the passing of Jeremy Beadle, I’m sure hilarious wags around the country will say something like ‘from one evil Joker to another’.
But I wonder how many will say that Jeremy Beadle introduced them to Virginia Woolf?
Before he appeared on shows like Game For A Laugh and Beadle’s About, before he became ‘Jeremy Beadle’, I was rather a fan of his. Because in the early 80s he presented children’s teatime programmes like Eureka, April Fool and The Deceivers. These were quirky little BBC non-fiction entertainments, with a touch of the educational, showing how the safety pin was invented, or relating the history of imposters and hoaxers through the ages.
Mr Beadle would do the main narration and explanations to camera, then there’d be an acting out of the story in elaborate sketch form, via period costume and appropriately decked-out studio sets. I remember the actors included Madeline Smith, the doll-like Hammer Horror beauty, and Sylvester McCoy, the future Doctor Who. No studio audience, no on location hidden cameras.
So Jeremy Beadle was once the early 80s equivalent of Stephen Fry on QI, or Robert Newman on his recent programme The History Of The World Backwards. Or Ben Schott of Schott’s Miscellany. He represented the quirkier side of learning.
Though the genre of trivia is thought to be self-serving and unedifying in itself (often equated with the pub bore or list-compiling geek) it’s not always pointed out how it can sometimes be a shoe-in for autodidacts, piquing curiosity and encouraging further reading. Which I’m a firm believer in – the ‘rubbing off’ principle of learning. Demonstrating the history of the safety-pin might spark a lifetime’s interest in that particular process of science, or that particular historical period.
The one sketch I most remember was Mr Beadle’s retelling of the story of the HMS Dreadnought hoax in 1910. He mentioned one of the participants was the young Virginia Woolf. I would have been about eleven at the time, and had never heard of the novelist until now. I came away from Mr B’s history of hoaxes wanting to consult my parents’ bookshelves. By the time I was thirteen, I had read Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Orlando. All thanks to Jeremy Beadle.
I also remember the first edition of Game For A Laugh, and how my childhood heart sank to see this hero of quirky children’s TV turn into a tacky presenter of hidden camera pranks on the adult public. I could see how retelling the HMS Dreadnought hoax could lead to similar elaborate set-ups of his own, but fooling the Armed Forces in 1910 is a world away from convincing some hapless present-day wife that there were aliens in her garden, all to get The Look On Her Face on camera. I knew it was a step down, replacing the quiet joy of historical trivia with cruelty and belittlement. People with proper jobs could now be made to look like idiots for the sake of TV entertainment, with Mr Beadle at the helm. And the concept of televised petty schadenfreude wasn’t even original – Candid Camera had been doing it for years in the US.
From Beadle’s About to Dead Ringers to ‘happy slapping’, bringing cameras into the equation turns the playful side of pranks into the realms of cheap sniggering, bullying and depressing voyeurism. The 1910 newspaper photos of the Dreadnought incident, with Ms Woolf in blackface and drag, may have been the direct precedent of Beadle’s About, but the lack of TV gave it a certain style.
Horace de Vere Cole was indeed the Beadle of his day, but without the element of playing to a mass audience in their sitting rooms, history has filed him as a lovable eccentric. Once TV was invented, the prank had fallen from grace, and Jeremy Beadle became famous for being hated.
It’s true Cole was hated too, but the stakes for elaborate pranks were somewhat higher. After the Dreadnought affair was revealed, the Navy had Mr Cole ceremonially caned. Those were the days.
