A Fun Thing To Try With A Rat

 At a birthday party in a studio in Hackney in early January, talk got round to our current creative endeavours and I announced that nowadays I was "thinking about the nature of Fun". I said this not just because I was just trying to pass off new my job at the Crystal Maze as an area of serious study, nor because it was a fun party but I was mainly sitting down, but because I had realised that I had actually been thinking about the nature of Fun ever since a conversation in the Finnetour van last Autumn: "Of course comedy is all about fear," David Tyler had said, quoting studies made on the laughter of chimpanzees, the booze bag perched betwen us. But in the context of the show we were touring, this seemed to me worth questioning. There really wasn't much to fear in John Finnemore's Flying Visit, I thought, and yet it was still definitely a comedy. Maybe then, although this sounded glib, comedy was actually all about Fun, not Fear - It's just that there were far more scientific tests being done into the nature of the latter than the former. Fun still definitely existed though, and it didn't seem a stretch to suggest that like Fear it might exist as an evolutionary advantage - that somehow Fun fitted, and helped us to survive. But what did Fun help us to do? Cooperate? Communicate? Learn? Teach? When did it become part of our programming and why? Fast forward to last Friday then, and I'm catching up with my friend Sally, who's saying how her eighteen-month-old has started to walk, and learn to play games, before suddenly exclaiming "Oh!" as if to preface something incredibly exciting that she's noticed, which was this: "Hide and Seek isn't learnt!"