Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office by Ben Thompson

TV comedy isn't just a serious business, it's a moral crusade. Nicholas Barber surveys the new golden age of fun with a ferociously intense critic

One of the best things about Ben Thompson's new book is the idea contained in its subtitle. For him, the glory days of British comedy - British TV comedy, to be exact - weren't in the dim and distant past, when you could watch new episodes of Fawlty Towers or Hancock. They were in the last decade, when you could watch new episodes of The League of Gentlemen and Spaced. It's a bracing notion, and it's typical of Thompson's pop and comedy criticism. To most pop pundits, nothing could seem more worthwhile than writing a minute-by-minute account of the recording of The Beatles' Abbey Road, whereas Thompson would rather be tracing obscure links between Teenage Fanclub and the Chemical Brothers. There is, he believes, no time like the present.

He might be onto something. Place The Fast Show, Shooting Stars, The Royle Family, The Office, Black Books, The Day Today and I'm Alan Partridge up against any TV comedy ever made, and even a determined nostalgist would have to admit that the new kids on the block have nothing to be ashamed of. They'll be repeated for decades to come, so we might as well celebrate their extraordinary innovation, their subtle acting, their painstaking production values, and their headspinning loopiness right now. We may have to sit through a lot of duff new comedies for every modern classic on the list, but even so - we've never had it so good.

Thompson suggests that the golden age dawned late one Friday evening in 1990, when the first episode of Vic Reeves Big Night Out confused as many viewers as it amused. Reeves and Mortimer's absurdist sense of fun fused with a "laser-guided pop-cultural precision and a yen for old-school showbiz" to sound a comedy note that has been echoing around the TV schedules ever since. Whereas the 1980s' alternative comedians (Thompson's bête noire) frowned at the previous generation's mainstream light entertainment agenda, Reeves and co made a point of rejoicing in celebrity glamour in all its cheesiness, but they did so with such finely modulated surrealism and irony that it was very nearly impossible to tell where homage ended and mockery began.

The irreverent, post-Vic&Bob attitude hasn't just been adopted by the double act's obvious comedy successors - Harry Hill and Bo Selecta spring to mind - but by the people behind TV's ubiquitous "celebrity" and "reality" shows. To prove it, says Thompson, just describe any scene from I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, eg "Phil Tufnell tenderly washing the cockroaches off Daniella Westbrook in a jungle pool". You'd think it had bubbled up from Vic Reeves's perverse imagination. In the author's words, the duo's vision has "lead us to a deeper understanding of the strange and complex beauty of everyday life". Or, in Bob Mortimer's words, "The one thing it has definitely done is make people a bit daft again."

So why was Reeves's influence so irresistible? What would British comedy have done without him? And just how crucial was the proliferation of satellite TV channels, backroom comedy clubs and independent production comp- anies? These are just a few of the questions that Thompson doesn't answer. His book might present itself as a monograph with an introduction and a conclusion, but it's soon clear that it's actually an anthology of journalism in disguise. As comedy developed through the 1990s, the author was on the spot, writing interviews, reviews and essays, and these articles make up the bulk of Sunshine On Putty.

The writing is formidable and inimitable. Seeing no reason to be any less whimsical and freewheeling than his subjects, Thompson compares Bill Hicks with Richard the Lionheart and Vic Reeves with Michelangelo, dropping in gleeful references to Henry VIII's court jester and the Arician priesthood while he's at it. He is not a man to state that The League of Gentlemen mix Abigail's Party and The Wicker Man when he could say that they operate in "a place where Mike Leigh rubs shoulders with Christopher Lee and the resulting spark ignites the fuel vapour of a passing charabanc, bringing the earthly existences of a party of holidaying pensioners to an unexpectedly spectacular conclusion". But what separates Thompson from other critics isn't just his baroque, not to say bonkers, turn of phrase; it's his conviction that he's on a moral crusade. He argues his points with such ferocious intensity that you wouldn't dare disagree with him, if only because you'd be afraid he might hunt you down and kill you. And he sees comedy as a higher calling. It would have been craven and selfish, he says, for Harry Hill to continue saving lives for a living when he could have been putting on a voluminously collared shirt and telling jokes about badgers.

Ebullient as it is, Sunshine On Putty might have been more satisfying if it really had been the "definitive account" it pretends to be, or else if it had just owned up to being an eccentric selection of newspaper and magazine articles. Instead, Thompson falls between two stools, Sellotaping disparate interviews and reviews together as if they're all part of an overarching thesis, and leaving us to guess how relevant all the details are. When these pieces first saw print, it must have been interesting to read about what Steve Coogan ordered for lunch when Thompson interviewed him, and what Caroline Aherne's plans were for a new sitcom called The Royle Family, and why Eddie Izzard yearned to be a dramatic actor "at the Robbie Coltrane or Keith Allen level". But years after the events, some of this colour should have been edited out.

Also, considering the book's subtitle, you might wonder why it devotes so much space to King of the Hill, which is not strictly British, and Big Brother, which is not strictly a comedy, when Marion & Geoff and Chris Morris's Jam, among others, don't even merit a mention. But if you're after an ordered, chronological study of broadcasting trends, you're probably not going to pick up a book called Sunshine On Putty, a title derived for no very obvious reason from the diary of a pair of Victorian "English lesbian literary icons". And once you accept that what you're reading is really just a bumper scrapbook of everything Thompson has written about comedy in the last 13 years - a book to dip into rather than to wade through - you'll find a surfeit of good, small ideas, even if they don't quite join up into one big one.