Mention The Cambridge Footlights to most people, and they will think either of Beyond The Fringe or of the double act of Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, such is the long shadow cast by those particular eras of success.
It’s a neat shorthand, but one that barely scratches the surface of an institution whose influence stretches far wider and deeper than a handful of celebrated names.
In Robert Sellers’s latest book, these familiar connections are given their due, but he also ranges more widely, dipping into the longer history of Cambridge University’s most famous entertainment society.
Drawing on a mixture of archival material and interviews, he speaks to many of those involved with the Footlights right up to the present day, creating a narrative that feels both grounded in tradition and alive to ongoing change.
It is an eminently readable book, peopled with names not just from comedy but from light entertainment, film, television, theatre, and other fields only tangentially associated with making oneself look faintly ridiculous on stage.
Sellers is particularly good at sketching the breadth of influence the Footlights has exerted, and he makes a persuasive case that much of British comedy from the 1960s to the 1990s (and beyond) would look very different without its graduates, whether as performers, writers, directors, or producers working behind the scenes.
At the same time, the book does not shy away from the more exclusive aspects of the society’s past. The Cambridge Footlights were, for a long time, a privileged male preserve, where those destined for careers in law, medicine, academia, or diplomacy could afford to cock a snook at authority from the comfort of their colleges, clad in dinner jackets.
That sense of establishment irrelevance – of rebellion conducted within safe boundaries – runs through much of the comedy that emerged from this environment.
From this talent pool, you can trace a distinct comedic trajectory: David Frost, half of Monty Python, The Goodies, John Lloyd, Fry and Laurie, Mitchell and Webb. The presence of Emma Thompson, Miriam Margolyes, Eleanor Bron, and, later, Mel and Sue points to the gradual, sometimes hesitant, assimilation of women into what had long been an overwhelmingly male domain, and Sellers treats this evolution with an appropriate mix of context and critique.
As readable and engrossing as other books covering similar ground, particularly those focused on the 1960s peak, The Cambridge Footlights fully earns its subtitle as a portrait of “a British comedy institution.” It works equally well as a chronological history of revues.
It shows an aide-mémoire of the people who passed through its ranks, or as a broader slice of popular culture spanning a century, from female impersonation to sharp political satire to a training ground for modern career comics.
It is, however, the interviews that provide the book with its greatest immediacy. Through them, we gain a sense of what it actually felt like to be inside those hallowed Cambridge rooms. I look forward to a similar delve into the mechanics of the ADC (Amateur Dramatic Club) at the university, which may not be too dissimilar to 21st-century eyes.
In the meantime, this book will take its place on my shelves alongside From Fringe to Flying Circus (1980) and That Was Satire That Was (2009).
The Cambridge Footlights by Robert Sellers is now available from Bloomsbury’s Methuen Drama imprint.