Let's Talk About the Chuckle Brothers' Cultural Renaissance

The Chuckle Brothers with Tinchy Stryder (Screen shot via)

Stone cold fact time: Paul Chuckle has reinvented the selfie. I say this as a man who cannot stand the word selfie, but – just for a second – let’s consider how excessively tight the younger Chuckle Brother's selfie game is. Without getting hyperbolic, I'd say he's done more for selfie-taking than Kim Kardashian’s butt ever has.

Has Kim Kardashian’s butt ever taken a selfie in funereal garb, captioned, “Off to a cousins funeral today so it will be a sad one”? It has not. Has Kim Kardashian’s butt ever taken so many selfies that Tinchy Stryder invited it to record a charity single with him? Nope. Has Kim Kardashian’s butt ever tweeted a selfie outside Southwark Crown Court after giving evidence in the trial against Dave Lee Travis? While posing next to Barry Chuckle? No, and no.

Paul Chuckle’s selfie game, as well as being technically immaculate (the man has a real flair for light, context and framing), is important because it alters the paradigm of selfies. No longer are they another ticket in a vanity lottery, but instead a sort of visual check-in – an update without the words. When Paul Chuckle is working hard in the garden, he will take a selfie. When Paul Chuckle is on a train to London to hang out with literal Professor Green at an actual hat launch party for SB.TV founder Jamal Edwards, he takes a selfie. And hey, when he’s played his part in finding DLT guilty of sex crimes, he takes a selfie.

Paul Chuckle has taken your concept of the selfie and turned it upside-down. Paul Chuckle is inside your head, messing things around, and he doesn’t give a shit. Paul Chuckle just took your expectations and blew them to atomic smithereens. And then he took a fucking selfie of it.

This is all part of the Chuckle Brothers’ cultural renaissance, of course. Like Matthew McConaughey before them, they have reinvented themselves, using darkness (True Detective, testifying at a sex trial) and intensity (Dallas Buyers Club, nine selfies in one day) to crawl, butterfly-like, out of the shell of their previous works (How to Lose a Guy In Ten Days, Pirates of the River Rother) and be born anew.

Tinchy Stryder and The Chuckle Brothers - "To Me, To You (Bruv)" 

Basically: Paul and Barry took so many selfies that Buzzfeed breathlessly exclaimed: "The Chuckle Brothers Won’t Stop Tweeting Selfies From Inside Cars," before their follower count exploded, they were invited to do a guest bit on Celebrity Juice and then met Tinchy Stryder (and took a selfie). Now, they are minor players in the glossy end of the UK grime scene, and they’ve recorded a charity single.

Which brings us to the new video the Chuckle Brothers did with Tinchy Stryder, "To Me, To You (Bruv)". Where to start. Firstly, watching two generations collide like this makes me feel like I’m fading into nothingness, a spare McFly in Marty's family portrait, as though Tinchy Stryder is currently in a 1950s car park trying to get off with my mum.

Secondly, what I would have given to be on that nondescript cul-de-sac while Paul, wearing a waistcoat even John Virgo would have declared "a bit too rich for me", and Barry, wearing what appears to be a pair of cataract glasses, throw pantomime gurns at each other while Tinchy Stryder raps about ladders and undone laces. It’s obviously brilliant.

The Chuckle Brothers in the studio with Tinchy

There’s so much going on here. Did Tinchy e-mail Barry and tell him to wear his most street outfit, and after long deliberation he decided on a dad-in-a-nightclub flower-patterned shirt and red braces? Why is there a minute-long spoken word breakdown where the Chuckle Brothers just play ping-pong for a bit? Is that Tinchy Stryder’s actual ping-pong table? If so, is it not calibrated a bit high? Does he have a little ping-pong stool just hidden out of sight? Why is Tinchy Stryder wearing a snapback saying "HOOD" when he is stood in the least hood cul-de-sac in human history? Who taught Barry Chuckle to skank?

What I personally enjoy about what I’m just going to go ahead and term "The Rechucklesance" is that it sort of transcends irony. Keen followers of Barry on Twitter will know that he will retweet literally anything that contains the letters “plz RT” – birthdays, dad’s birthdays, the fact that they met them once in an airport, a fictional pilgrimage to Mecca. But nobody really uses it for evil. Even when Paul did a selfie of him looking properly fed up ahead of a funeral, nobody really went in on him. “I do them each day mate,” he told DbXBEANZZZ after the funeral pic. “I was letting MATES know why it's a sad day !!” DbXBEANZZZ, consider yourself told.

But everyone else seems to be following along in genuine appreciation, a warm tidal wave of nostalgia, 50,000 people remembering childhoods spent cross-legged in front of the telly while Paul pied Barry in the face then rode off in the Chuckle-mobile. That’s a nice thing.

The Chuckle Brothers in their heyday

Being a kid was ace, and I miss it. Especially in the autumn, when I used to run around with a stick, with pockets full of conkers, with the smell of burning leaves in my nostrils, with a cold nose and mittens on. Summer was good, when I used to run around so much I turned ruby red, and ran home to grab an ice pop and put my entire head in the freezer. Winter was dog shit because one time I ran around in the rain so much I got full-on pneumonia and nearly died, in hospital, hallucinating an elephant, belching up vast quantities of glucose ahead of a kidney test.

But then: Christmas, when I got a black-and-white TV for my room that you had to tune with these little tuners that could only really be got at with a matchstick, and I would watch CBBC while great waves of static washed over the screen. One time, a ghostly vision of porno appeared on my telly – a nude, dancing woman, revolving in a perfectly black room, rendered Lynchian through the static – which, in hindsight, I reckon was a VHS player leaking through a partition wall, the one shared with that neighbour who still lived with his parents at home, even though he was 40 entire human years old.

I suppose that's why I have a genuine and sincere fond appreciation for the Chuckle Brothers’ Twitter rebirth. The Tinchy video, out of context, hovers around the edges of being cringe-worthy, jarring just towards being the kind of cheesy comedy single released ahead of the World Cup – but then there’s that bit where they have to visibly speed Paul’s mouth up so his lip-syncing matches his pre-recorded bit, and the whole thing is redeemed.

A behind-the-scenes clip from the Tinchy x Chuckle Brothers video shoot

At 27, I don’t find two grown men playing tug-of-war with a ladder especially funny any more, but the sheer mad juxtaposition of them doing it while Tinchy Stryder does finger tutting in the background does make me smile. I don’t want to invoke the "it’s just a bit of fun" defence – I mean, UKIP used that to defend the "UKIP Calypso", so as far as I’m concerned it’s the “it was just banter” of 2014; the kind of thing an uncle in the 1970s might say after pulling his eyelids tight and doing a faux Japanese accent at the dinner table — but, you know, it is.

Plus, if all those people in pub gardens wearing bucket hats and doing Liam Gallagher walks are anything to go by, the 90s have already been back for a while, meaning the TV personalities are presumably just catching up. This gives me hope; hope that other forgotten 90s stars – your Buchanans, your Benson-Phillips’, your Sharps and your Forbes’, your Rustie Lees and your Mr Blobbys, Otis the Aardvark, Dick off of Dick and Dom – can also forge a single song career with UK grime artists. Flowdan feat. Lizo Mzimba, anybody? Stuart Miles joining BBK?

Believe it and it will happen. The Chuckle Brothers are proof of that.

@joelgolby

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