Until he grew the seemingly obligatory beard a few years ago, Hugh Dennis never seemed to age. Like his long-time comedy partner Steve Punt, Hugh must have taken the elixir of youth. I recall when working for Radio 4 I would often see the pair in Broadcasting House, largely because the production office for The Now Show, the network’s topical comedy, was located by the lifts outside the old eighth-floor restaurant. Steve’s curly hair was often wild but Hugh’s was neat, his tall, gawky frame always relatively dapper.
I have had the pleasure of attending a recording of The Now Show, and also saw them live at, I think, Brentwood back in 1993. I tend to think of Dennis as the master of the dry quip, one eyebrow quizzically raised but that evening he split our sides with a wonderful physical routine playing ‘the rude ghost of Guildford’ which, while full of visual gags, does sound terribly Radio 4!
But it was even earlier, in ’87 that, introduced as ‘Steve and Hugh’, the pair were launched on television supporting Jasper Carrott on Carrott Confidential. Dennis may still have been working in marketing when he and his fellow Cambridge graduate Punt wrote and performed some amusing set-pieces, their delivery honed by years at Footlights, The Comedy Store and other venues. Jasper retained their services for Canned Carrott, and I have been parroting their “Do you want fries with that?” line ever since.
In the early Nineties, Hugh Dennis was enjoying not one, but two parallel comedy careers. He may not have been in the same class of impressionist as Steve Coogan, Rory Bremner et al but joined the cast of ITV’s Spittin’ Image for three years voicing characters as diverse as Gazza, Frank Bruno, David Owen and Saddam Hussein. At the same time, he and Steve Punt also teamed up with David Baddiel and Rob Newman on Radio 1’s innovative sketch show The Mary Whitehouse Experience. This swiftly transferred to BBC2, ensuring Hugh’s transformation into full-time entertainer.
It became essential viewing for me and many of my contemporaries. Newman and Baddiel were the ‘edgier’ pair, pushing the boundaries a bit further. However, this made some of their routines and regular characters more memorable than the more mainstream Punt and Dennis. I remember travelling all the way across the Thames with my friend Jenny for the acclaimed live theatre tour’s Gravesend leg and not being disappointed. Unconstrained by BBC rules, Baddiel and Newman let rip with plenty of foul language but I don’t recall Punt and Dennis doing the same. It may just be my memory playing tricks but they didn’t need to change their winning formula for a live audience. The contrasts between the two partnerships were also what made TMWE such a great show.
In the mid-Nineties Steve and Hugh were granted their own series, which revived a few of their Mary Whitehouse Experience characters besides introducing new ones. Looking back, I’m surprised how many of them and/or their catchphrases have stayed with me, although sometimes the memory mischievously confuses them with Armstrong and Miller!
Pretty soon, TV viewers were confronted with the notion of Hugh Dennis being an individual, no longer joined at the hip to Steve Punt. Their Radio 4 work went from strength to strength but Hugh appeared regularly, albeit only in animated form, in Jack Dee’s Happy Hour and briefly on the bewildering yet brilliant Brass Eye. In ’98 he guested on Clive Anderson’s satirical panel show If I Ruled the World alongside Graeme Garden and another of my Nineties favourites, Tony Hawks. It was basically a piss-take on politics and politicians in general, somewhere between Have I Got News For You and Mock the Week and, were it not for Richard Osman creating the show for Hat Trick TV, would surely have fitted Radio 4 like a glove.
It surprises me that Mock The Week has continued for fifteen years, including 176 episodes featuring our Mr Dennis. I’m not so naïve as to believe these topical shows are completely unrehearsed and unscripted but I may still chuckle at Hugh’s newsreel voiceovers or his ‘What they’re really saying’ one-liners, as also performed on 2014’s Sport Relief in a futile bid to make even Andy Murray look funny.
Comic timing, of course, need not be restricted to stand-up; it comes in mighty handy for the acting profession. Hugh Dennis has, like so many other fine comedians, made the transition to other writers’ sitcoms. The first I watched was My Hero, in the early Noughties. It was really a vehicle for Ardal O’Hanlon, transferring his trademark wide-eyed dim innocence from Channel 4’s Father Ted to primetime BBC1 but Hugh played his girlfriend’s vain TV doctor and health centre boss, Piers throughout all six series. It was pretty tame stuff but for a while I quite liked it.
Advance a few years and Hugh Dennis assumed star status in another Beeb comedy, Outnumbered. It took me a while to catch on but once seen I was hooked. Written by the prolific Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin, it turned into a twenty-first century powerhouse in an era bereft of classy sitcoms, meriting four big-audience Christmas specials.
Dennis and Claire Skinner, apparently now real-life partners, were brilliant in the part-improvised episodes but the early scenes were utterly stolen by the six year-old Ramona Marquez. Of course the three children aged as the series progressed, yielding different problems faced by their long-suffering parents Pete and Sue and, even if like me you had no children of your own, you empathised with them completely. The adult stars were superb, of course, but the series was nothing without the gifted youngsters. Scrap all those hideous kids’ talent shows we are afflicted with, and repeat Outnumbered instead.
Not content with ably supporting the likes of Carrott, Dee and O’Hanlon, Hugh Dennis has in recent years joined Lee Mack in the latter’s ever-likeable Not Going Out. I tune in only sporadically these days but when channel-hopping, I may sometimes alight on a repeated episode on Dave or Gold to remind me how smart Mack is and reliable Hugh is as a sidekick.
But when it comes to jaw-dropping ‘straight’ comedy acting, surely nothing can surpass Fleabag. It took the tedium of Covid-19 lockdown shielding to entice me into binge-watching on iPlayer to see what all the fuss was about, but I was blown away. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a revelation in her self-penned series, and Andrew Scott stunning as ‘Hot Priest’, but there are all sorts of beautifully-observed secondary characters, too. We first encounter Hugh Dennis in the very first episode as a stereotypical unsympathetic bank manager but, being Fleabag, we later learn more about the character, notably in a poignant scene towards the end of, I think, episode four.
I am quietly confident we will see (and hear) plenty more of Hugh Dennis. Such is his ubiquity in sitcoms, panel shows and advert voiceovers that I could very well despise him. But his winning but self-effacing personality and comic talent that ensure I don’t.
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