An interview with Johnny Monroe, 'the punk Victoria Wood', creator of Coronation Street spoof Buggernation Street, and the notorious BBC Wokeday Evening
During the first lockdown, shortly before I fled London, living in a shared house that had become a miniature lunatic asylum, and with murder in the air, rather than wallow in the boo hoo hoo I retreated into and saved my sanity with the ha ha ha, gorging on Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Seinfeld, Spongebob, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Fast Show and Harry Enfield clips, anything. One evening I found myself, in my cups, down a comedic YouTube hole, and came across Buggernation Street for the first time. I did, as they say, PMSL.
I’m not quite sure how I found it, possibly via Derek and Clive, but I was quickly addicted. The channel was under the name ‘Victoria Lucas’, a pseudonym of its creator Johnny Monroe, who had taken 1970s episodes of Coronation Street and dubbed his own dialogue, sound effects and music over them. Coronation Street became the story of “the filthiest street in the country”, Buggernation Street, set, like Coronation Street, in the fictional town of Weatherfield, but recounting the deviant, erotomaniacal exploits of a streetful of “depraved and retarded northern folk”.
The pilot episode opens in the home of “serial benefits cheats” Stan and Hilda and Ogden. “Back street abortionist” Hilda is crowing, with Van der Graaf Generator playing in the background, about having been chosen to feature in the Readers’ Wives section of a porn mag, news she can’t wait to convey to Annie Walker, stuck-up landlady of the Rover’s Return, and Chairwoman of the Weatherfield Satanic Abuse Society. In a later episode, Wild is the Wind, her husband, “fat lazy cunt” Stan, with an ear-dazzling firework display of flatulence, will win a farting competition in a rival pub. This very funny and slyly political episode includes a recitation by Ken Barlow of one of Joyce’s filthiest letters to Nora Barnacle, and the series is shot through with knowing cultural references, high, pop, and low.
Monroe’s relentless torrent of scatology and hilariously improbable, baroque sexual scenarios and obscene vituperations show great imagination and linguistic verve. You don’t see any filth, it’s all language, and it can hardly be said to be pornographic – you’d have to be very peculiar indeed to be turned on by it. It has in common with de Sade’s writings that the sexual scenarios are patently preposterous and impossible (though de Sade took himself seriously and his writings, though not lacking in satirical content, are emetic and unpleasant).
In the alternative universe of Buggernation Street, Albert Tatlock, 173 years old, is a serial flasher obsessed with watching Minnie Cauldwell pee, Ena Sharples is interviewed by the NME, Deirdre Barlow is on the game, Bet Lynch a gravel-voiced transwoman, Len Fairclough a swimming pool haunting paedo, and “pompous wanker” Ken Barlow a rapist (“Can I join you ladies, don’t worry, I’m not going to rape you. Having said that, would you mind if I patronised you for a while?”)
Johnny Monroe
This laying over a whole new set of narrative threads over the originals and synchronising consistently funny new dialogue over the old shows an immense original talent, especially considering that it is all improvised. This detournement has been tried before, in Situationist Rene Vienet’s Can Dialectics Break Bricks? and Woody Allen’s What’s Up Tiger Lily? (the former is much funnier than the latter). They’re not nearly as successful, but then Monroe has been at this since his teens, when he created “pastiches and parodies I indulged in with my first tape recorder”. There’s a trickle of filth that runs through Western literature, from Juvenal to de Sade, the poems of Rochester and Swift, to Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre and Viz. The closest to Buggernation Street are the expletive strewn, filthy fantasias of Derek and Clive in audio-sketches such as Joan Crawford’s Cunt.
Much of the humour of Buggernation Street derives not just from the copralalic content and the inventiveness of the invective but also from the incongruity of it coming from the mouths of these ‘beloved’ characters, though in fact most of them retain the essential character traits they have in the original. Albert Tatlock, for instance, was already a miserable old bastard (though not a former gigolo), and Ken Barlow a pompous, superior prig - these traits have merely been exaggerated to absurdity. The dialogue in Buggernation Street is also a kind of uncensoring because its expletives and obscene, sexually mocking banter, though grossly exaggerated, are nevertheless closer to the speech in ‘real life’ of that class, time, and place than the dialogue of the original.
Although Carry On’s saucy repartee is clearly an influence, Buggernation eschews double entendre for straight up filth. No people swear as well or with as much gusto as the British and, like James Kelman, Monroe is alive to the poetry and music of swearing. ‘Fuck’ is an infinitely multivalent word, and for the English there are more types of cunt and modes of cuntishness than there are words for snow for Eskimos. The sauciness of British humour and its wordplay, the sketch show and stand-up genres, have their roots in the British working class and music halls, and the figure of the comedic pervert, often comically inadequate or half-mad, also began there, continuing into modern popular culture with the suggestive songs of George Formby, characters in the Carry-On franchise, various stand-ups, Benny Hill, and Les Dawson’s Cosmo Smallpiece.
Cosmo Smallpiece, quintessentially British pervert
Johnny Monroe is prolific and has self-published several novels, several volumes of poetry and, under the pseudonym Petunia Winegum, writes a regular blog, The Winegum Telegram. This is wide ranging, though Monroe’s fondness for the 70s is evident, covering subjects as Starsky and Hutch, the sophistication of script and characterisation in 70s tv dramas, the trial of Fatty Arbuckle, discontinued chocolate bars, obituaries of cultural figures, the Online Safety Bill, and the death of the High Street. It’s a shame that this remains in an obscure corner of the internet because the blog is really a regular column and makes for more entertaining and insightful reading than fraudulent woke clickbait whores like Zoe Wiliams and Owen Jones.
Monroe’s video output isn’t limited to Buggernation Street. The filth and elaborate verbal abuse continue hilariously with Bruce Forsyth’s Humiliation Game, in which Bruce mocks, berates and humiliates his gormless contestants (again, he’s bringing to the surface a dynamic that was already present under the surface of the detourned original). There are TOTP chart run downs that are both mocking and fondly nostalgic at the same time, the humour lying in the puerile and ridiculous names given to songs and bands (Turd Burglars, Klunge, Dicky Dumpling, Erectile Delinquent, Salty Creampie, The Slags) paired with their ridiculous hair, costumes, and posturing. His cruelly hysterical overdubbing of Rick Beatto’s Spotify Shitlist perfectly skewers the comic banality of every dimwit genre of contemporary music, complete with puerile lyrics, and in one of his Jim’ll Fix It covers that sail right into the wind a child gets to meet the Gay Daleks. Indigo Rumbelow’s interview with Mark Austen is rendered even more comic and her true idiocy brought more fully out into the open just by the addition of a laughter track and the intercutting of a laughing studio audience.
It was Monroe’s spoof programme rundown of a BBC Wokeday Evening that led to his cancellation. This spoof, which began with “highlights from this year’s book-burning championship from Islington’s George Floyd Stadium” and included notices for LGBTXYZ Cars and Emily Maitliss giving “an impartial sermon on News Speak at 11pm” went viral. Shortly afterwards, Monroe received notice of the permanent removal of his channel from YouTube and his banning from the platform, citing “multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s policy on nudity or sexual content”. Although the complaints may have been made about Buggernation Street, it was the Wokeday Evening video that attracted the attention of the “Identity Politics Gestapo”. (A very generous sampler of Johnny Monroe’s video content, including episodes of Buggernation Street, can be found on his Vimeo channel, the remainder, and regular new content, on a subscription-only Patreon.) Authoritarians don’t like to be mocked or lampooned and when they are, if they can, they invariably punish. This episode – like so many cancellations – seems an act of revenge from the woke, whose absurd shibboleths, fraudulent cant, dark psychological motivations, inherent totalitarianism and stupidity the video so accurately and scathingly skewered.
In the 80s, 90s or 2000s an inventive, original talent like Johnny Monroe would have become a household name (though the sexual content of Buggernation Street would always be beyond the mainstream pale). His satire is essentially Juvenalian. The fact is that from around 2014 comedians could have had a field day. Never in history has so much been offered up for satire, so many maniacs, middlewitted mountebanks, hypocritical fellow-travellers, and crackpot ideas to mock; never so has much low hanging comedic fruit been there for the taking. Even on the visual level, of physiognomy and dress, there’s been an embarrassment of riches. Instead, apart from a few honourable exceptions, the comedy world chose cowardice and conformity, to speak fawning lies to power, to promulgate an oppressive ideology, and to thus become themselves fit subjects for satire and derisive mockery.
This cowardice, and the decision not satirise the bien pensant elites and dominant middle class doxa, has contributed significantly to the world eventually becoming almost impossible satirise; its absurdities were left unmocked for so long that it has taken on the sinister aspect of a world that is a parody of itself. Satire is after all a corrective mirror intended to eradicate or at least reduce vice and stupidity, to shame into wisdom and right conduct. If one looks at the staff biographies, physiognomies, imbecilities, mission statements, and destructive work of, for example, sensitivity reader agencies, one sees that, though they’re funny, it is not possible to actually satirise them, they’re’ too OTT and extraordinary already. Similarly, a typical Guardian headline is now impossible to differentiate from a parody Guardian headline, which was not the case in 2014, and many of the spoofs of Tatiana McGrath from a few years ago became reality. Gatekeeping, nepotism, conformity and ideological screening are now so prevalent in comedy and in all the arts (Jesse Darling’s acceptance speech for the Turner Prize was a comedy sketch), that the situation has become very much like that of the arts behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War – only with far fewer dissidents.
I interviewed Johnny Monroe by email:
CM: How did Buggernation Street start, and how popular had it become before YouTube took it down?
JM: I suppose the genesis of Buggernation Street and all my videos can be traced back to the first tape recorder I received at Christmas when I was 10. After using it to record favourite programmes from TV, I quickly set about producing my own 'programmes', even though they were audio-only. I even used to create my own listings magazine to document them all, miniature versions of the Radio Times that I'd draw by hand in exercise books. So, I was creating 'content' on cassette and writing about it as well; today, I create content on video and write a blog and books. It's evident all the seeds were planted a long time ago.
The first Buggernation Street appeared - I think - around 2011; it was just a short, really, running for around 12 minutes. It went down well on YT, but I had no idea whatsoever it would lead on to 70-odd episodes over a decade later. It was something of a best-kept-secret cult for the best part of ten years and then it went into overdrive during lockdown. I had a fair amount of subscribers before then - well into the thousands - but I was pretty overwhelmed by the amount of new subscribers I received in 2020/21. I'd usually gain maybe a couple of new ones a week, but during lockdown that completely snowballed so I'd be gaining a dozen a day. It was mind-blowing, really. It's only because of that sudden and unexpected rush of interest that I returned to Buggernation after a gap of six years (I'd originally ended the series in 2015). People were demanding it and I figured I may as well give people what they wanted, especially when they were so bloody miserable thanks to events. Due to a few screen-grabs I thankfully took from YT, I can see that the first new episode of the series premiered on 4 April 2021 and was on 83,521 views and 1.2K thumbs-up by 17 April; at that time, my channel had 12.4K subscribers.
CM: Could you tell me more about your cancellation by YouTube. What reason did they give for taking your channel down?
JM: YouTube gave me no warning, no 'three-strikes-and-you're-out' beforehand when they cancelled me and the channel; suddenly, everything was gone. I literally ceased to exist on YT. They completely erased me from history - every video I'd ever posted, every comment I'd ever made on someone else's video, all vanished in an instant, as though I'd never even been there. I could no longer subscribe to any other channel, or like a video, or comment, or even see comments. An email from YT informing of the event after it happened contained an opportunity to appeal, which I did; but it was a joke. They replied to my appeal within a matter of hours and it made no difference to their decision. They'd made their mind up. They said - and I quote: 'This account has been terminated due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube's policy on nudity or sexual content', to which they added: 'We have permanently removed your channel from YouTube. Going forward, you won't be able to access, possess or create any other YouTube channels. In other words, we have rendered you a non-person. The reply to my appeal was that 'YouTube is not the place for nudity, pornography or other sexually provocative content.'
This gives an entirely misleading impression of my channel. There was no nudity in any video I ever posted. Yet, the uncut and uncensored Blurred Lines promo video was still accessible on YT at the time; it may still be for all I know. Double standards. All my videos with 'bad language' or references to sexual acts were over-18 only; they already had measures in place for that and I abided by them. But I'd seen YT change and become more 'corporate' over a period of years from when my channel began in 2010; I was writing about it as far back as 2015, and I'd more or less stopped posting videos by 2019, instead posting new material on smaller and less censorious platforms like Vimeo, as well as my Patreon subscription channel, which I set up in 2021. I only came back to YT because of the sudden rush of new subscribers during lockdown. So many of them told me I was making a difference and giving them something to laugh about that it felt wrong not to pay them back for their kindness.
It's too coincidental that when my Wokeday Evening spoof BBC1 trailer went viral due to being picked up on and tweeted by several (in the eyes of the MSM) 'undesirables' that YT cancelled me just a few weeks later. I'd touched a nerve, even though to me it was just straightforward satire, which I've always done. To me, if you ring-fence anyone and make them exempt from having the piss taken out of them, you castrate satire, and anyone who calls themselves a satirist and avoids certain subjects is complicit in this.
CM: Do you think anyone should be unmockable and banned from being subjects of satire? And would you agree that a society in which there are protected privileged groups that you can be punished for mocking is totalitarian?
JM: I don't think anyone should be ring-fenced from satire, though it has to be good satire to begin with; if it's not funny in the first place, there's no point anyway. I don't believe in the 'punching down/up' rhetoric because it's another extension of categorising everybody and pigeonholing people on the basis of race, gender, sexuality et al. 'It's okay to take the piss out of that group, but not this group' and so on. I've spent most of my life avoiding being put into a neat little box and labelled, and I can't understand why anyone would want to begin a sentence with 'As a gay man' or 'As a woman of colour' etc. Just feels like facilitating divide & rule to me.
Funnily enough, going back to schools programmes - one that was referenced in a Buggernation episode was called Cloud Burst, a serial that was part of the long-running Look and Read series in the 70s. In it, the same actor plays identical twin brothers, one of whom is a good guy and one of whom is a bad guy. Both characters were played by the British Indian actor Renu Setna, and when the BBC at the time were concerned casting an Asian actor as a villain might imply all Asians were villains, they received reassurances from organisations dealing with race relations that showing both positive and negative traits would present a more rounded and honest portrait of an Asian man - scarily proving 'them' are actually just like 'us'. That to me seems a healthier approach than what we have now. But as Jim Morrison once said in relation to the Permissive Society, this is always a cyclical thing; it swings to an extreme and then gradually swings back again. Could well be a generational thing as well, that the next generation will reject what the current one is pedalling and thus return us to a better place than where we are now; just seems a shame we have to wait.
CM: Do you think that your cancelling was down to higher ups at the BBC or to disgruntled and offended lower downs?
JM: I doubt that my spoof reached as high as the BBC upper echelons, but enough like-minds lower down the food-chain are active on social media, and they probably played their part.
CM: Because you criticise woke shibboleths and absurdities, I'm sure there are those who would categorise you as on the right, though it seems to me that you're essentially left wing and sympathetic to the working class - Is that accurate?
JM: Like a lot of people in my position and of my generation, I always regarded myself as being on the 'Left' up until the Left handed the keys of the asylum to the lunatics. Now I'm just one of many who regard themselves as politically stateless. I remember one of my most popular videos was my Trumpton spoof, and the comments I received when it was on my YT channel varied from calling me a Communist to labelling me 'Far-Right'. I remember thinking if I'm being accused of both I must be doing something right. The Wokeday Evening video saw some on the Right try to claim me as one of their own, but I'm not being claimed by anybody. The minute you nail your colours to the mast, your ability to take the piss is immediately limited and you're back in a box, just like adhering to Identity Politics. Fuck that.
CM: Which comedians and comedy shows do you like? Are you a fan of Derek and Clive and 70s stand-up comedians and Carry On?
JM: When it comes to my own favourite comedians or comedy shows, I've always liked comedians who are clearly intelligent and have knowledge about a wide range of subjects but who are also not too highbrow to indulge in smut or simple silliness. This is why I will always be a fan of the Pythons or Derek & Clive or South Park. The Carry On films I enjoy because I love that feeling of being able to see the next gag coming a mile off, making its delivery all the more enjoyable. To be fair, the same thing applies with Laurel and Hardy; the joy is waiting for what you know is coming.
CM: Do you see yourself as in any kind of tradition - like Hogarth, Viz etc.? And does satire for you have any purpose other than to be funny?
JM: I suppose I do fall into a British tradition of satire, yes; but it's not really a conscious thing, not as though I thought 'Hey, I can do that!' - it just came naturally, something I was doing at school, drawing caricatures of teachers and doing Mike Yarwood-like impressions of them. To me, what I do now is a natural outgrowth of that. Even the name Buggernation Street I coined when I was at school, drawing a comic strip parodying Coronation Street in an exercise book, one which plumbed the same kind of perverse depths as the series does today.
One could take Peter Cook's oft-quoted sarcastic comment about satire re 'the great German satirists of the 1930s' whose sterling efforts prevented the Nazis from seizing power; but to me it's one of the few weapons people have against the powerful, even if it's ultimately like taking on a tank armed with a pea-shooter. What better reflected the mass discontent of one half of the population with Thatcherism in the 80s than Spitting Image? And the powerful always find it an irritant, as their reaction in the 18th century demonstrated; playwrights having to submit to the scrutiny of the Lord Chamberlain was a direct response to satirical plays taking the piss out of Walpole and his generation of politicians. So, yes, it has to be funny; but it can be the sole tool that those who will never have power can use as annoying little slingshots aimed at those who do.
CM: Do you have any fondness for 70s and 80s Coronation Street, and already find it funny?
JM: I do have genuine fondness for the first 20 years or so of Coronation Street. The characters and dialogue are so rich, and those old episodes totally hold up today; it goes without saying they piss on today's unwatchable excuse for the series from a great height. People have often asked me to do parodies of Eastenders or Emmerdale, but they're missing the point. It's because I love the Coronation Street from the era I cover in Buggernation that I can parody it with such attention to detail; if I didn't care about the source material like I don't care about other 'soaps', Buggernation wouldn't have stretched beyond one episode.
CM: I grew up in working class, semi-rural north Lincs in the 70s and 80s, and the swearing in Buggernation Street is not that exaggerated to me - is that the case with you too?
JM: Swearing was certainly prolific in the playground in the 70s - virtually every 'swear word' I ever learnt infiltrated my ears for the first time there, and we all swore like navvies whenever a teacher wasn't around. In fact, I remember when I was about 10 being summoned to the headmistress's office to receive a bollocking because some other kid had grassed me up for telling him to fuck off. Although parents in my experience didn't as a rule swear in front of their children then, whenever they imagined their kids weren't listening they'd be effing and blinding like The Sex Pistols having tea with Bill Grundy. As far as the language on Buggernation goes, to me it's perfectly normal that adults around each other at that time would have sworn; as if Len, Ray and Jerry wouldn't have sworn in a masculine bastion like a builder's yard! In a weird way, to me Buggernation is closer to real life than any TV soap ever could be because of the language and the fact characters break wind and go to the toilet - just like real people do.
CM: Are you much aware of the real working class 'sexual underground' of the period?
JM: As far as the 'sexual underground' of the working-class goes during this period, it was perfectly normal for one's dad and his mates to go see a stripper at the pub, or purchase a top-shelf mag, or visit an adult cinema to see the latest Mary Millington movie, or to be having it off with a bit on the side (to use the parlance of the time). It was in the culture, so seems silly to pretend it wasn't there.
CM: Several Coronation Street characters were comic characters already, Hilda and Stan Ogden, Ena Sharples, Albert Tatlock and the rest. You've made them even funnier. Do you think you've partly brought out something that we already knew was there.?
JM: For me personally, what I often find the funniest about the way in which I've exagerrated the existing characters is when I give them extensive knowledge of pop cultural subjects they clearly wouldn't know anything about - such as Minnie's love of King Crimson, Ena's of Eno, Albert's of Genesis and so on. To me, that's as sublimely silly as the two 'pepperpot' characters on Python paying a house-call to Sartre to settle an existential argument that a couple of middle-aged suburban housewives simply wouldn't have in real life. There are other examples, whereby the Buggernation characters routinely watch and talk about obscure down-time TV of the era, like the test card, IBA Engineering Announcements or schools programmes. The manner in which, say, Alf and Maggie casually discuss water-sports or spanking over dinner is equally so preposterous that it can't be taken as anything other than a joke. As I said in a piece I wrote after my cancellation by YT, the presence of this kind of subject matter in the dialogue of these videos put such horrific images in the minds of the offended that it's almost as though they convinced themselves that the acts were actually shown in graphic detail on screen - utterly ridiculous.
CM: Have you always been a pisstaker - were you a class clown?
JM: I suppose I was what you might call a 'class clown'. At the school-of-hard-knocks I attended, three things mattered in terms of status and respect: being good at fighting, being good at football, and being good at making people laugh. I was useless at the first two but could manage the third.
CM: Stupid names and nickname-giving seems to be a peculiarly British form of humour, there were always kids at school with those particular cruel talents - were you one of those kids?
JM: Any nicknames at school seemed to already be in place before I came up with any, but I did impersonate the teachers, both physically and in comic strips I'd draw with them in.
CM: Do you think puerility has a positive social function - or is it just funny for its won sake?
JM: Being puerile in humour is something I think most people enjoy, even if they don't admit it. I don't really think it has a valid function beyond provoking a laugh, though.
CM: Could you tell me more about your novels and poems.
JM: I've been writing novels and poetry volumes more or less as long as I've been producing videos; the two have run on parallel lines for a decade or so and have had very different audiences. People have come to me through both and have told me they'd often struggled to equate the author of each as being the same person. When I set up my website, the aim was to bring these different audiences under the same umbrella, as I think people aren't as one dimensional as some would have you believe and can actually enjoy both.
CM: Have you ever tried to break into the mainstream? Into the BBC itself, or mainstream publishing houses?
JM: I sent manuscripts to publishers for years and got nowhere; I eventually gave up when it became possible to publish physical books via Amazon. I knew I was writing good stuff and I felt liberated by the fact I no longer had to go cap-in-hand to detached institutions that I would never be at home in anyway. Being told to 'stay in my lane' is not something I would be comfortable with.
CM: What was your experience of scriptwriting before Buggernation Street?
JM: I don't actually 'write scripts' for any videos I produce, Buggernation included. It's all improvised. In the case of the latter, I assemble the footage from dozens of different archive Coronation Street episodes and create my own narrative, coming up with the dialogue on the spot as I watch the visuals.
Stan, you fat lazy cunt
CM: You said some perceptive things in your blog about the shallowness of contemporary drama compared to the 70s. How would you account for this?
JM: I think the state of TV drama today is a natural consequence both of the BBC's DEI policy being imposed upon writers and the way in which those writers are schooled in the system. In the 60s and 70s, television was largely informed by theatre and many of its writers, actors and producers came from that arena; today, that link has been completely severed. Soap operas serve as the contemporary university for writers in particular, and they bring all of its cliches to post-watershed drama, with the only difference being the use of the word 'fuck', which they seem to imagine the repetition of makes what they're writing 'grownup'.
CM: Were you expecting to be cancelled at some point, or did it come as a surprise?
JM: I'd already retreated from YT as far back as 2019, sensing which way the wind was blowing. I only returned because of the tidal wave of new subscribers I received during lockdown, and I largely stuck to just Buggernation Street when it came to posting new material on there. I was very aware of walking a tightrope, but I think it was the sudden abruptness of YT's cancellation which surprised me, not receiving any warning beforehand.
CM: Your sensibility seems best described a 'punk' - were you a punk?
JM: I was too young to be a Punk in the 70s - just a school-kid. But I suppose I have a Punk 'sensibility'. One of my favourite YT comments re Buggernation was one I used on my
website, which called it “A Punk Victoria Wood. I think that's as good a description of the series as anything.
Johnny's Vimeo channel can be found here:
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