A joke is dying. It’s not funny. I mean the fact that it’s dying isn’t, not the joke itself. Whether or not that’s funny is a matter of personal taste. I’ll let you make up your own minds: it’s that there’s an international airport in, or just outside, the village of Llandegley in Powys. There isn’t really and so the joke is that there is and also that it has at least two terminals, two of which are called Terminal 1 and Terminal 3.
If you don’t think that’s funny, it may be my fault because I haven’t told it in the right way. The joke should be told, and for 20 years has been told, by a sign – a pretend sign. Or is it a real sign? It’s really there, unlike the airport. But it’s not directing people to anything real. Does that mean it’s not really a sign? Are signs that lie not signs? What are they then? Drawings? Is it art? Or fraud? This is the sort of philosophical question that comedy raises all the time.
The sign is supposed to look like a genuine sign directing people to an airport – though, to be brutally honest, it doesn’t quite. It’s typeset in a similar way to proper signs but there’s something not right about it, like when you get an email saying it’s from your bank and the logo is perfect but the apostrophes are all wrong and it uses the word “gotta”.
The other thing letting this sign down is that it’s on a little hoarding, not a bona fide Welsh government signpost. In the photo, it appears to have a narrow wooden frame and a little advert underneath the bottom telling you how you can commission signs like this yourself; it seems that you do this by calling “Wrexham Signs” though, for me, it would further enrich the joke if Wrexham Signs, like Llandegley International Airport, turned out to be fictional.
This humorous situation has prevailed for two decades but is now going to end because Nicholas Whitehead, the man who’s been paying to rent the space where it appears (and is one of those who came up with the idea, way back before the Iraq war), is calling it a day. It’s cost him £25,000 to keep the sign there over the years and I suppose he doesn’t want to get to the point where it would have been cheaper just to open a real airport, which would then presumably attract council-funded signage. Though then it wouldn’t be a joke – just an appropriately signed airport. Maybe this is how some airports start?
Whitehead holds out the hope that his non-airport may be saved, that the Welsh government heritage body Cadw might adopt the sign. “It wouldn’t cost them anything like as much as it’s cost me,” he points out. Unless someone steps in, though, the joke is over.
It’s weird to see a precise price tag put on a gag: 20 years of humorously pretending there’s an airport costs £25,000. It unavoidably raises the question: was it worth it? But this is unhelpful. In bald financial terms the answer is simultaneously both “Definitely!” and “Of course not!” The pound sterling, even at times when its value is steady, is not a good unit for measuring either comedy or levity. Thinking about the money involved destroys metaphorical levity just as a pin in a helium balloon dispatches the literal kind.
Unless, that is, the money becomes part of the joke. The fact that it cost such large amounts to keep this weird conceit going, in a sense, makes it funnier, more anarchic, more of a rejection of the value system of a world where signposts are supposed to point to sensible things that are actually there and people are supposed to use money in wise pursuit of comfort, security, fulfilling recreation or global betterment.
I can’t blame Whitehead for his decision. Apart from anything else, it was only his recent fiscal prudence that made me aware of his previous sustained investment in making the world a sillier place. Few of us can rival his financial commitment to something daft (except all those who buy personalised number plates – assuming, of course, that their aim in doing so is to appear ridiculous, which may not always be the case). But it makes me sad. We live in serious times and we have to ask the serious question of whether it actually helps to be so relentlessly serious about them.
Last week, Would I Lie to You?, a panel show I appear on, won a TV Times award, which was of course very nice and, as is the way these days, I was called upon to issue a quote saying that it was of course very nice. Quotes stating the obvious seem to drive the economy at the moment. If the latest corporate news is that, in company A, senior executive B has just hired C, then B must say: “We at A are so pleased to be working with C” and C must say: “I’m so pleased to be working with B and the wonderful team at A.” Such quotes never contain anything of interest and indeed mustn’t. The only thing B could add would be their niggling feeling that D gave a cracking interview. Equally, C’s irritation at the prospect of increased commuting times would be considered “off message”.
In the case of the TV Times quote, my desperate instinct was to try to be amusing – to take the piss, to allude to the issue of where, on the vast spectrum of awards from 25-metre swimming badges to Nobel prizes for literature, the TV Times award for “favourite gameshow” might be placed. But people get so cross about everything these days. I don’t mean cancel culture – I’m talking about the world being in a bad mood, refusing to see the funny side. I’d be told I was disrespectful and ungrateful. But when it comes to comedy, respect and gratitude are real buzzkills. Nevertheless I kept it bland.
Nicholas Whitehead would have done better. He’s proved willing to take a personal hit to maintain global levity. We are all going to die one day, so what on earth is the point of anything else?
