Beckett, Black Comedy and Blogging

I caught an episode of One Foot in the Grave the other night, and was struck by how the series was so unlike the usual sitcom. I’m not a fan – I didn’t watch it at all the first time round, and just catch odd episodes that have been rerun. But it is one of the most intelligent and understated comedies ever; it does not treat its audience like morons who will switch over if they don’t hear a joke every 30 seconds. And it dares to be black comedy, dealing with death, senilty, illness and other subjects that TV comedy shies away from. Most of all, it shows to the audience a mirror – a mirror of themselves as they will be in three, four, five decades’ time. OK, we won’t all be like Victor Meldrew (a large number of us will be like Mrs Meldrew). But we’ll all face the reality of growing old and sick and eventually dying. And that’s the reality that this series tackled; and did it with wit and warmth and humanity.
As I watched this particular episode, I was struck by how close to to Samuel Beckett’s plays the series was, especially “Waiting For Godot”. In this play, two tramp characters are waiting for the titular Godot (who never appears). A couple of other characters come in and out, but basically, nothing much happens; the two tramps talk, and wait, and sit, and talk…. We don’t learn much about them, we never find out who this Godot is, or why they’re waiting for him. But, somehow, we become caught up in their meandering conversation, or rather, non-conversation:

“Nothing to be done!”
“I’m beginning to come round to that opnion”.
…………
“When I think of it . . . all these years . . . but for me . . . where would you be . . . You’d be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute, no doubt about it”
“And what of it?”
“It’s too much for one man. On the other hand what’s the good of losing heart now, that’s what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the nineties .”
…………
“Did you ever read the Bible?”
“The Bible . . . I must have taken a look at it.”
“Do you remember the Gospels?”
“I remember the maps of the Holy Land . Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That’s where we’ll go, I used to say, that’s where we’ll go for our honeymoon. We’ll swim. We’ll be happy.”
“You should have been a poet.”

And so on.
What made me specifically think of Beckett when I was watching that episode was that I spotted a reference to one of his other plays – “Endgame”, I think. In this episode, Meldrew finds himself buried up to the neck in the garden; “Endgame” has a character who spends the entire play buried up to her neck in a pile of rubbish. Checking the series out on various websites, I notice further Beckett references in the episode titles: “Waiting For God” and “End Game” (which may well have been the episode I watched). And, overall, the meandering dialogue style is very Beckettian:

“I’ve been replaced by a box…It’s standard procedure apparently for a man my age. The next stage is to stick you inside one.”
“All the miseries in the world seem a hundred times worse at Christmas.”
“All the things you thought you were going to do that never came to anything. You can’t turn the clock back- it’s one way traffic just gradually grinding to a halt.”

And, as in Beckett, tragedy is presented as an inevitable part of life – people die, have terrible accidents, devolope terminal illnesses. And though there are moments of comic ridiculusness, there are no really cheerful endings. Just like life, where people are always waiting for something.

Well, that’s the Beckett and the Black Comedy bits out of the way. Now for the Blogging bit? What was I going to write….? Oh yes, I’ve been thinking lately about why I have a blog. Should be a simple question to answer, no? But it’s something that I’ve never really asked myself before, in all the years I’ve been keeping online journals and blogs.
Yeah, it’s a complex question….
And I haven’t got a snappy answer ready….