Slapstick: Laurel & Hardy’s Silent Goodies

The Slapstick Festival has always been a pleasingly Bristolian mix of geeky celebration and laid-back luvvie love-in, with ever-more famous names tempted to rock up each year to present their own selections of silent films and, it seems, watch almost everybody else’s presentations too. This Laurel & Hardy event at Bristol Old Vic attracted the likes of Barry Cryer and Nick Park to the audience, as well as festival favourites The Goodies onstage to present the films in an enjoyably ill-prepared and ramshackle manner.

Bill Oddie cheerfully admits that he hasn’t even seen the film he’s presenting, while egging on the excellent accompanists, the eight-piece Bristol Ensemble and three-piece European Silent Screen Virtuosi, with a cheerful “Take it away, gentlemen,” before realising that the crew isn’t entirely male. “Oh, there’s two of you!” he chuckles delightedly at the female pianist and bass clarinettist. The musicians themselves are much more professional but no less fun, with conductor Günter Buchwald knocking the music off his stand once or twice for an unintended slapstick twist.

The films themselves are still, of course, an absolute joy. While audiences raised on the quickfire humour of Family Guy or The Fast Show may have to slow their metabolism somewhat for the first reel of each, the payoff in the last few minutes is always riotously fast and funny – and sometimes surprisingly surreal.

In one, a pattern in which Ollie pokes Stan in the eye, then hops around in pain as Stan kicks him in the shin, is repeated seemingly ad infinitum until some other men get involved in an eventual twenty-way orgy of eye-poking, shin-kicking and even, most oddly, trouser ripping in the middle of a New York street. In another, the bushy beard of a hotel concierge is revealed to contain a chirruping chick, as the otherwise mostly realistic world that Stan and Ollie inhabit seems to break down into complete disorder.

It’s no surprise that, while accepting the Aardman Visual Comedy Award the next day, Vic Reeves names the Laurel & Hardy films as one of only three influences he’d care to acknowledge. It’s all here, from knockabout violence to surreal whimsy: all acts like Vic & Bob or The Goodies had to do was modernise it and speed it up. Far from simply bolstering their own egos, the comics seem to be here for the same reason we are: to revel in the creations of these older comic talents. That’s what makes this annual outing such a reliable and continuing source of joy.

Slapstick 2015 took place from Thursday, January 22 to Sunday, January 25 at Watershed, Bristol Old Vic and Colston Hall.

For updates on future Slapstick events, visit www.slapstick.org.uk/events