At a Hollywood roast for the Star Wars mogul George Lucas, Carrie Fisher gave a speech in which she remembered how, in the years of her incarnation as the intergalactic Princess Leia, space was haunted by “a small merry band of stalkers”. I met her only a couple of times, but heard enough to know that she could talk like that for ever.
Compounding the gloom of her demise was that her mother, Debbie Reynolds, went, too. So, along with all the footage of Carrie fighting the Imperial stormtroopers and frowning with glacial heat at Han Solo, the screen was suddenly playing host to a zillion clips of Debbie dancing with Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor. One of the reasons I could never go fully ape for the daughter, despite her brilliance, was that I had long ago gone fully ape for her mother.
Back in the day of its first glorious release, I had seen Singin’ In The Rain three times on the trot, thrilled by every number in it, but by no number more than Good Mornin’, Good Mornin’, in which the barely post-teen Debbie keeps up with every step of those two dazzling male dancers. At the time, there was no vast mass of online commentary to tell me that Debbie had been taught to dance just for the movie.
Debbie was too sunny of aspect ever to add much darkness to her onscreen persona, but Carrie, a generation later, could give her inborn merriment a tragic aspect. Even in Shampoo, Warren Beatty’s most convincing stint as a psychologically troubled man of outstanding handsomeness, he is mainly a bouffant hairstyle in tight pants, but Carrie as the ravenous teenage sexpot is something more complex. She had tragedy in her nature: the element that always sharpened her comedy, and made her a touchstone for other writers. Tina Fey wrote a whole episode of 30 Rock around Carrie just to celebrate what her witty example had meant to the generation that came next.
But no comedian gets far who just relies on being influenced. Somewhere inside must be the capacity to see what might be funny if you tilt your head this way instead of that. In the Beeb’s magnificent panto Peter Pan Goes Wrong, the cast had no big names to lean on except David Suchet. He was on magisterial form, but there were youngsters who showed every sign of capturing the comic future, stretching ahead like a long corridor with flying wires that get tangled without quite killing you and trick panels that fold under your feet. There were times, when the cast were crashing into each other in mid-air, when I got so sick with laughter, I clean forgot that I was sick anyway.
