God save me from former Cambridge Footlights members stretching their brand

I was in Sainsbury's the other week when Ben Miller came on the PA. You will remember him from the sketch show Armstong and Miller. (Or was it Mitchell and Miller? Or Miller and Webb?)

What was he doing in the supermarket? Plugging his latest children's book.

Not long after that, Humanists UK announced a collection of essays, What I Believe. (It was actually published today.)

And among the contributors - indeed listed first on the page announcing it - are two former Footlights members, Sandi Toksvig and Stephen Fry.

Also announced recently was the presenter of the BBC's eagerly awaited new series Chess Masters. Any guesses? 

It was Sue Perkins.

The British left has accorded comedians too high a status for decades now, perhaps because their politicians have been so uninspiring. Future historians will have to account for the cultural eminence Fry enjoyed for so long.

There used at least to be a second route into BBC comedy - the Socialist Workers Party. But now the SWP is too toxic for any ambitious comedian to associate themselves with it, the Footlights has an open field.

Of course, a person can be good at more than one thing, and, of course, Cambridge takes some of the brightest and best.

But I am reminded of the days when I helped produce Liberal Democrat News at conference. One of the things that made it so enjoyable was that I got to talk about the Archers with Jock Gallagher, who produced the programme for many years, and to talk about the Footlights with Adrian Slade, the man who auditioned Peter Cook for the society.

I remember Adrian saying that Cook was the funniest person he had ever met. He would have you laughing for a whole evening, yet the next day you wouldn't remember a thing he had said. This, I think, was because Cook’s greatest contribution to British comedy - and he was enormously influential - was his absurdist attitude to serious things and important people.

But Adrian also said that there is all the difference in the world between being a stage actor and being a revue actor, where you put on a hat and a funny accent for 90 seconds and then move on.

You see that, I think, in Cook's films. If acting is reacting, then he gave his fellow cast members nothing to work with, because he seems wholly detached from what is going on around him. This sort of works with the characters he plays in The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer and Bedazzled, but beyond that it certainly doesn't.

You can see something of the limitations of revue acting in the later careers of David Mitchell and Stephen Fry. In his latest success, Ludwig, Mitchell is essentially playing himself. Fry is a better actor, but even in his finest hour, the film Wilde from 1997, you came away with the idea that Oscar Wilde must have been very like Stephen Fry.

Add to this the way the British tend to confuse an upper-class accent with intelligence - something that has fuelled more than one recent political career - and the increasing funding gap between private schools and the rest, and you realise that the future for former Footlights people will be like the present - only more so.