2003-2013
'THE MORE THINGS CHANGE'
Pictured - Oxford's High Street, 2000s. The sign for the Wheatsheaf pub, a venue which once hosted the Revue (along with the improv troupe 'The Oxford Imps'), is visible to the top-right of the bus-stop.
In previous exhibits in the Archive, events of significance are arranged and discussed in a somewhat chronological manner, or at least chronological enough for each time period's overarching thesis to be portrayed. However, this approach is unsuited for Oxford student comedy in the 21st century - directional development of the troupe is more difficult to gauge. While it is likely that the recency of the 2000s affects retrospection, it does seem that major permanent changes in the Oxford Revue's fundamental paradigm were decisively rare hereon in.
Why is this the case? For a start, the Revue had been recently cut adrift by the apparent disappearence of its parent institution, the Oxford Theatre Group, or O.T.G. - as implied by the removal of the charitable status in February 1997 [source]. With little in the way of solid historical continuity or records, the Revue has regularly lost and gained aspects of its heritage on a whim - as detailed here by Kieran Hodgson, a Balliol College student who became Revue president within six months of joining Oxford University [source][source].
"Stalinist sex education, goldfish mind bowls and a wet Welsh cave. Wring out your socks and join the satirical feast." - Oxford Revue Fringe programme text, 2007 [source].
The sequence of Revue Workshop, to 'Write-offs', to 'Audreys', to the modern-day 'Etcetera' evenings (named after the former E.T.C. troupe [source]), shows the troupe's apparent evolutionary stasis - this one concept (that of a distinct brand of small-scale but regular comedy evening) has been repeatedly re-discovered and renamed by successive generations of Oxford student comedians. There was little in the way of further elaboration of the concept - one attempt to transfer the 'Audrey' concept from the Wheatsheaf to the more prestigious Old Fire Station venue, for example, proved only a temporary venture [source][source].
Nonetheless, the nurturing of talent these evenings provided (regardless of name) cannot be reasonably denied. Barney Fishwick, who co-organised the aforementioned Old Fire Station transfer, begun his now-professional musical comedy career at the Oxford Revue Audreys, alongside future collaborator Will Hislop (the son of former Etceteras director Ian) [source].
"The Oxford Revue is an Oxford institution that is well worth going to see. Audrey is their fortnightly variety show, hosted at the Wheatsheaf Pub on High Street, which features some of the best comedy in the University. Audreys are shorter and cheaper than the feature-length Revue Shows, and at just £2 for entry, you’d be really silly to miss out." - Louisa Adams, The Oxford Student, 2013 [source].
Laura Corcoran and Matthew Jones, two English undergraduates who initially met during a 2003 production of Guys and Dolls, exemplified the Revue's strengths in musical comedy at this time. After establishing their potent stage camaraderie upon the Oxford stage, the duo would debut an acclaimed pop-song parody act in the London cabaret circuit five years later - 'Frisky & Mannish' (corsetted and eyeshadowed personas lifted from the ragged pages of Byron's Don Juan) [source].
"Juan knew several languages—as well
He might—and brought them up with skill, in time
To save his fame with each accomplish'd belle,
Who still regretted that he did not rhyme.
There wanted but this requisite to swell
His qualities (with them) into sublime:
Lady Fitz-Frisky, and Miss M{ae}via Mannish,
Both long'd extremely to be sung in Spanish." - Lord Byron, Don Juan Canto 11, 1823.
"Musical-comedy cabaret covers what we do, and we say our subject matter is pop music, and that it's for the MTV generation, although it's amazing how many different age groups turn out to be fans." - Matthew Jones, The Independent, 2011 [source].
"Everyone says how well we work together, how great our rapport is and how we play off each other, but we didn’t know that at the beginning." - Laura Corcoran, Oxford Mail, 2011 [source].
Pictured - the Oxford Revue logo circa 2008.
British comedy over the past seventy years has been consistently informed by UK class structure - be that (within the remit of Oxford at least) the influence of the 1944 'Butler Act', the subsequent 'satire boom' or the rise of alternative comedy. The 2000s, however, saw an abrupt shift in how the topic was addressed in the mainstream media, informed in part by the then-recent electoral success of the Tony Blair government.
"New Labour presented itself as the party of the aspiring middle classes... the widening of inequalities that began during the Thatcher years scarcely decreased under the Blair government. On the other hand, attitudes toward the poor changed. Between 1994 and 2003, the percentage of those who thought that poverty was a question of social justice declined from 30 per cent to 19 per cent; in 2007, 28 per cent of British people thought that the poor were shirkers - the figure had stood at only 15 percent in 1994 (Armstrong, 2003)..." - Florence Faucher-King and Patrick Le Galés, The New Labour Experiment: Change and Reform Under Blair and Brown, 2010 [source].
Thus began an episode of British culture with a transparent fixation on deriding lifestyles and activities associated with the working class, with little relief from the previously union-aligned Labour Party. Left-wing commentators have identified this trend of the 2000s in its best-selling literature [source], its cookery programmes [source] and (inevitably) its comedy.
"...Little Britain's characterisation of Vicky Pollard largely contributes to contemporary widespread demonisation of the working class... There is ample evidence to suggest that Vicky Pollard's character reinforces the class-based contempt of chavs evident elsewhere in popular culture. Numerous Vicky Pollard sketches may be interpreted as ridiculing the perceived stupidity and lack of knowledge of chavs." - Sharon Lockyer, Dynamics of social class contempt in contemporary British television comedy, 2010 [source].
This classist cultural attitude inevitably trickled into the echoing halls of the nation's universities - resulting in an uncomfortable era of student comedy, in Oxford and beyond (augmented further by coarse youth-favoured imports like South Park and Family Guy).
"Students at Leeds University have gone to the lengths of making a comedy feature film, titled Chav!: the story line involves the university being invaded by tracksuit clad chav zombies, who threaten to “infect” the middle-class student protagonists...This film can be read as an allegory of wider social anxiety about the feared social mobility of the lower classes and also as an attempt, authorised through comedy, to keep those imagined “class others” out of the social institutions once thoroughly demarcated as sites of class privilege." - Imogen Tyler, "Chav Mum Chav Scum": Class disgust in contemporary Britain, 2008 [source].
This phase of British culture has by no means concluded definitively, but by the dawn of the 2010s, a backlash movement had begun to refocus criticism towards the upper classes - an arguable parallel to the targets of Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett five decades prior. Predictably, those who had once deemed themselves untouchable treated this cultural shift with somewhat performative chagrin [source].
"In my first week of university, I was lambasted for saying 'Barth'. 'Oh, you're posh,' said a peer. 'For saying Barth?' I queried. I was taken aback... I hoped for a world in which people listened to what is being said and not in which accent. Unfortunately, it was not to be." - Eleanor Doughty, The Telegraph, 2013 [source].
One of the most well-known examples of so-called 'posh-bashing' emerged from the Oxford comedy scene, in the form of the viral 'Gap Yah' video, released onto YouTube in 2010 [source]. The sketch's author, former Revue member Matthew Lacey [source], also played its main character - the entitled boozehound 'Orlando', who details his globe-trotting life of excess in a familiar Oxfordian cadence. 'Gap Yah' had been first performed by Lacey in the Revue stage show Fear in 2007, and, three years later, earned him almost half a million YouTube views in the space of a fortnight [source] - along with a book deal and, ironically, an in-character appearance at the Oxford Union [source].
"The private-school equivalent of Little Britain's Vicky Pollard, Orlando is a parody of the pashmina-wearing, point-missing upper-middle-class idiot known as the Rah. Indigenous residents of older universities and public schools, Rahs are known for their ostentatiously unkempt hair, expensive clothes and tediously drawn-out vowels." - Tom Meltzer, The Guardian, 2010 [source].
"Orlando is actually based on a friend-of-a-friend. And when I first met him I thought his name was Miranda because he said it in such a posh voice...YouTube was the perfect vehicle at the perfect time, because with the royal wedding and the TV show Made in Chelsea, Sloanes [posh people] are back." - Matthew Lacey, The Oxford Mail, 2010 [source].
Lacey had graduated by the time of Orlando's absorption into the British Zeitgeist, forming a sketch collective 'The Unexpected Items' with his former Oxford colleagues. Nonetheless, the Oxford Revue itself elaborated upon the same themes as 'Gap Yah' at around the same time. The comic concept of an upper-class person performing a rap number (two Revue examples of which are given below) has been popularised in recent years by British performers like MC Hammersmith [source] and Munya Chawawa [source]. The very existence of this subversion highlights the pre-existing class commentary permeating many genres of rap and hiphop, to which these parody songs act as an outsider's response (for better or worse).
Pictured - DJ Gymkana (as played by Ollie Mann).
"...there are two streams of English stereotypical identity which artists either engage with or reject: the posh and the working class. Both are cultural stereotypes projected internationally, and one reason they become fodder for rappers’ critique... English rap is an important forum in which national identity is discussed, and is one which has real consequences..." - Justin A. Williams, Brithop: The Politics of UK Rap in the New Century, 2020 [source].
The success of 'Gap Yah' and other videos would not have been possible without the emergence of the modern Internet during the 2000s - a platform which progressed from struggling to stream video [source], to hosting video websites with over 2 billion daily views [source] within the space of a decade. In its early days, the Internet was perceived as a 'great equaliser' in the realm of entertainment - anyone could produce and distribute any material they desired, with little in the way of restriction or moderation.
"We can embrace [the Internet] as an opportunity to seek out new, engaging and exciting creations from unknown and underappreciated artists...Despite the various shortcomings, the possibilities abound for creative production, aesthetic appreciation and comedy scholarship. If we do not seize them, the joke is on us." - Peter C Kunze, Laughter in the digital age, 2015 [source].
The Oxford Revue made multiple efforts to establish a comedic presence on online spaces, though an unfortunate side-effect of the troupe's generational turnover was the consistent loss of passwords - as a result, at least four separate YouTube accounts presently host Revue material. Many sketches from 2010/2011 are typically framed like individual-driven webcam vlogs - reminiscent of early content from users like 'charlieissocoollike', or even the inaugural YouTube video 'Me at the zoo' [source]. A key exception to this format was 2010's ambitious three-part online sketch show 'Excelsior' (as produced and directed by James Moore [source]), which established a template for the troupe's later endeavours to co-opt - ensemble pieces with complex filming and editing. Inadvertently, the Revue's multiple YouTube channels, as a collective, depict the evolution of online comedy video and its associated production values.
Pictured - typical Oxford Revue online sketches from 2010 and 2012 respectively.
A probable reason why Internet fame did not reach the Revue's YouTube output is that it always felt like a supplementary addendum to their stage shows, as opposed to its own dedicated undertaking. This is scarcely surprising - as previously discussed, Oxford student theatre's most valuable attribute since the 1980s has been its capacity to nourish creative relationships between people via the medium of live performance. In contrast, while many young people aspire for online success [source], producing online content is inevitably isolating and thankless, and success is depressingly fickle. The Internet had been pegged as a 'great equaliser', but in reality, 90% of YouTube views go to 3% of YouTube channels [source] - furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that consumers tend to primarily binge older media online, making it more difficult for less familiar creations to gain traction [source].
"[We] thought it would be worth filming and posting ['Gap Yah'] online. To start with it was a slow burner and then one Friday we had 40,000 hits and it just went mad." - Matthew Lacey, The Oxford Mail, 2010 [source].
The Oxford Revue's 'nurturing' priority was not necessarily shared by other university troupes of the day. The Cambridge Footlights had a globally recognised (and financially lucrative) brand-name to upkeep, while the revue team at Durham University strategically limited their membership to a core handful, thereby finessing their internal comedic dynamic (an approach which has earned them prestigious alumni like Ed Gamble, Nish Kumar and Stevie Martin [source]).
"The Oxford and Cambridge performances are Revue in the true sense of the word... The Durham Revue is something very different. Where the other two groups present a large cast and a variety of styles, the Durham Revue present a sharply choreographed and entirely coherent comedy show... they also evoked consistent, genuine laughter from the audience... if you get the chance to see any of the groups again, it will be well worth it, particularly in the case of Durham, who really do stand head and shoulders above the competition." - Dan Hemmens, The Daily Information, 2005 [source].
Even Oxford itself began producing competition, with the 2004 origination of the improv troupe 'The Oxford Imps' [source], whose focus on short-form improvisation games contrasted with the Revue's sprawling sketches. Comedians like Ivo Graham, Rachel Parris and Sophie Duker began their careers as Imps [source], while the West End hit Austentatious, a long-form improv comedy informed by the works of Jane Austen, was based on an Oxford Imps project (and initially concerned Mary Shelley and Lord Byron's famed Geneva trip in 1816) [source].
"IMP 1 - Zounds! You were hit by a bike on your way home?
IMP 2 (Sophie Duker) - A very very big bike.
IMP 1 - But you're OK?
IMP 2 - C'mon...I'm hit by bikes on a daily basis - how can I not be OK?
IMP 1 - Down you're knocked and up you just leap again!
IMP 2 - Every single time!" - Oxford Imps playing the 'Alphabet' improv game (in which the first word of every line of dialogue begins with a successive letter of the alphabet), 2009 [source].
Needless to say, Revue members became especially aware of their place in the pecking order.
The complete recordings for the Footlights vs. Revue comedy debates at the Cambridge Union can be found on the Internet Archive [source][source][source][source].
In the face of such competitive adversity, the Revue did attempt one final ambitious push towards reaching the global prestige of the Cambridge Footlights - in the form of the Revue's one and only tour of the United States.
Pictured - the logo for the Oxford Revue US Tour in 2008.
The 'Unexpected Items' may have been born out of monetary necessity - to pay off the exorbitant burden of trailing Footlight-forged paths - but without this new sketch collective, Matthew Lacey would have never published the 'Gap Yah' sketch on YouTube. The Oxford Revue's role as a 'nurturer' of collaboration and talent was basically an emergent property at this point, even in the wake of one of the troupe's largest financial misfires.
And indeed the troupe would remain as such for years and years - not stagnant or unevolving, but consistent and comforting to the young people who valued it. This, in all likelihood, was the glory to which the Revue had always aspired, all along.