Ground-breaking comedy gala is making its American debut – but will the Last Supper be on the menu?
It has been 36 years since some 1,200 people crammed into Her Majesty's Theatre in London's West End for the inaugural Secret Policeman's Ball. An evening of Lumberjacks, Dead Parrots and Funky Gibbons, it was held in aid of Amnesty International, but its influence would extend far beyond one single charity or even that first run: it would change the relationship between charity and the entertainment industry, and influence the humanitarian work of stars such as Bob Geldof, Bono, Sting and Bruce Springsteen, as well as fathering Live Aid, the Prince's Trust concerts and Comic Relief.
This Sunday evening, after a four-year break, the Secret Policeman's Ball returns to toast 50 years of Amnesty International, promising to be the grandest ball to date. For the first time it will take place in the United States – at Radio City Music Hall in New York – and bring together a plethora of comedy stars, among them the Daily Show's Jon Stewart, Russell Brand, Sarah Silverman, Reggie Watts, Kristen Wiig, Stephen Colbert, David Walliams, the Muppets and Burma's leading stand-up comic, Zarganar, as well as musical turns from Coldplay and Mumford & Sons.
Today the concept of the celebrity-endorsed gala is familiar, but in 1976 when the three-night run of shows was launched, under the title A Poke in the Eye (with a Sharp Stick) – it would not become The Secret Policeman's Ball until 1979 – it was an idea that seemed quite magnificently preposterous.
The show was the brainchild of Monty Python comedian John Cleese, Amnesty's assistant director, Peter Luff, and entertainment industry executive Martin Lewis, and the idea was simply to assemble a clutch of Britain's finest comedians, including the stars of Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe, the Goodies, Barry Humphries, John Bird, John Fortune and Eleanor Bron, to perform some of their best-known sketches. Tickets would be sold to the live event, and the whole show taped and released as both a film and an audio recording.
"At the time, I found the prospect of the audience less terrifying than the other comedians," recalls Jonathan Lynn, the comedy writer and director best known for Yes Minister who appeared that first year.
"John Cleese phoned me up and said he was putting on this Amnesty show and would I like to direct it," he says. "He said it would be the Pythons, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett, Bird and Fortune … And it was just too iconic a crowd for me – I didn't have the nerve to direct them, so I said no thanks. But then John called me back and said would I do a sketch with him. And I agreed."
The sketch in question has become known as the Last Supper sketch, a hypothetical conversation between the Pope and Michelangelo that Cleese had written for Monty Python. The comedian had been when it was banned by the BBC, which was afraid it might be deemed blasphemous.
Both Cleese and Lynn found their schedules were too busy to arrange formal rehearsals and so they were forced to run through the sketch over the telephone. "And we rehearsed it on the day," Lynn adds. "I remember Jonathan Miller, who was directing it, suggested I play my part a little camp – because Michelangelo was gay. And I remember I saw John shaking his head solemnly behind him."
The only act to perform a new sketch on the night, Lynn recalls experiencing a degree of trepidation before taking to the stage. "You can get quite galvanised by the idea of 1,200 people out there wanting to be entertained. But as it turned out, the audience loved it."
Indeed, the effect was profound. "The ball has been part a major part of Amnesty's history," says Kate Allen, UK director of Amnesty. "It managed to reach out to people who weren't thinking about human rights and inspired them to stand up and defend the right to freedom of speech."
It also made many young performers aware that their fame gave them a platform for charitable fundraising.
In the following years, U2's Bono would speak of how watching the ball "sowed a seed", calling it "a mysterious and extraordinary event that certainly changed my life."
In 1986, Sting told the BBC how he had joined Amnesty "due to an entertainment event called The Secret Policeman's Ball and before that I did not know about Amnesty, I did not know about its work, I did not know about torture in the world."
The ball has not been an annual event; rather it has returned in spurts over the years, filling venues such as the Royal Albert Hall, the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin and Wembley Arena, and featuring performers ranging from comedians such as Steve Coogan, Vic Reeves, Fry and Laurie and French and Saunders, to musicians including Morrissey and Lou Reed.
"I'll always remember Eddie Izzard performing at Wembley Arena in 2001," says Allen. "That was my first year as director of Amnesty and seeing Eddie Izzard perform and reach out to a wide range of people on the issue of free speech inspired me that we need to continue working with such wonderful artists to help us to carry out our message of defending the basic rights of free speech and other basic rights."
Peter Serafinowicz is one of many British comedians heading across the Atlantic for this year's ball. His involvement is in part due to his brother, James, who is producing Sunday's performance. "And I'm really excited about it," he says. "I remember watching the first one as a kid, and I loved that it was quite dangerous, quite sweary and irreverent and hilarious. These were the performers who used to break my brain."
What Serafinowicz will be performing on Sunday night remains to be seen. "What I'm doing keeps changing," he says, a little nervously. "I think I'm doing a singing thing with Reggie Watts, and also something with Bill Hader from Saturday Night Live and some of the cast of 30 Rock, but we'll have to see. It doesn't feel like a glitzy thing. It feels … I was going to say shambolic, but what I mean is quite organic, and I think that means it's going to be a fun night."
On the line from Los Angeles, Reggie Watts is similarly unsure of what Sunday night might bring. "We're trying to figure it out." He laughs. "I'll do four minutes on my own, and a spot with Peter, but I'm an improviser and they write comedy, so it will be interesting to see how that works out …"
Watts believes the ball's relocation to New York will give Amnesty an opportunity to raise its profile in the US, and form a kind of entente cordiale between the UK and US comedy scenes.
"The ball is not at all famous over here," he says, "but it was explained to me as a benefit, and then it started getting out of control.
"But the gap in UK and US comedy is getting smaller, there's a lot of borrowing of ideas, and a huge influx of UK humour and BBC shows here. The cultural exchange is getting bigger."
Whatever the performances may bring on Sunday night – whether Serafinowicz will find himself duetting with Marcus Mumford, or Noel Fielding will play a camp Michelangelo to Chris O'Dowd's Pope – the spirit and objective is likely to remain much as it did back on that first night in 1976.
"There were some wonderful things," Lynn says. "The Dead Parrot sketch, all the Beyond the Fringe people, Alan Bennett doing his Norwich sketch. But what it really did was this: it got a lot of well-known funny people together to put competitiveness aside for one night and raise money for Amnesty."