Bad Show, Goons

From Reveille, Friday 8th June 1979:

When comedy isn't funny
Making you chuckle is no laughing matter for television's funny men
by ALAN SHADRAKE

DID YOU hear the one about the two top TV comedy stars? who hated each other so much that they couldn't bear to be in the same room together?

They got on well enough until half-way through filming a long-running comedy series. Then tempers flared. The producers faced a problem. For the show just had to go on.

So they got round it by writing the scenes so that the two stars were never seen face-to-face again.

The writer explained: "I had to rewrite the scenes so that they were always talking to each other over the phone, through letter boxes or windows."

It's a true story that reflects some of the tension involved in producing top comedy shows for the box.

Turning out a regular show of successful situation comedy series is one of the tougher challenges facing TV executives, writers and actors.

I learned of the rows, the petty jealousies and bitterness that so often develop when highly talented people get together to make us laugh.

Gauntlet

Arguments over laughs always occur in comedy series which have a big cast - and over how much time an actor or actress has on the box.

The same writer added: "When you turn up with scripts it's a bit like running the gauntlet.

"Annoyed performers pull you aside and want to know why you haven't given them more of the action."

The Rag Trade, with its cast of six actresses and two actors, is a real headache for its writing team.

Ronnie Wolfe, who writes the series with partner Ronnie Chesney, explained: "The show lasts only 24 minutes, so even if no-one else is involved they could only have three minutes each.

"And you have to have lead players, so of course some people aren't going to be very happy.

"Of course, they get twitchy because they go several pages of script without having a word, then they rush to us for reassurance that they are not being written out of the series.

"The solution is to balance it nicely."

Bitchy

Actresses Wendy Richards, who has appeared in a number of sit. coms. including Nearest and Dearest, Not On Your Nelly, Please Sir, and Are You Being Served? with John Inman, told us: "There is a lot of bitchiness in this business."

At a cocktail party to introduce the cast of a new comedy series to each other, she met the star for the first time.

"She looked me up and down and said: 'She's no good - she's too short and her boobs aren't big enough'."

Wendy, who says working on Are You Being Served? is wonderful because everyone gets on with each other, added: "On another series the star of the show used to get furious every time anyone else got a special close-up shot for slotting in later.

"She used to clench her fists until her knuckles went white in a kind of controlled rage. It was pure jealousy."

Shows like Are You Being Served? share the glamour equally between the stars, highlighting individual characters week by week.

But Nicholas Smith, who plays store manager Mr Rumbold, said: "I recall John Inman on one occasion saying pathetically 'Do you know, I got only eight lines this week', and it was only because that week's story didn't really concern him."

Impossible

Bouncy actor Bill Maynard scored a hit with his portrayal of Selwyn Froggitt in the setting of a working men's club. But for some of the cast of Oh No It's Selwyn Froggitt, working on the series became impossible.

Actress Rosemary Martin says she walked off the first series after arguments over the scripts.

Following bitter arguments involving other members of the cast Yorkshire TV executives decided to change the format of the series.

So Bill returned as Selwyn causing chaos in a holiday camp with a fresh supporting cast each week.

From his home is Sapcote, Leicestershire, Bill commented.

"Whether I get on with people or not doesn't bother me.

"When I am doing a series that's my series. And if it comes to survival, I am going to put my foot down."

On the box Happy Ever After, starring Terry Scott and June Whitfield, looked a very happy affair all round.

But there were difficulties when everyone got together to record the fifth series.

There were wrangles over the scripts.

And in the end script writer Eric Merriman parted company with the show.

Merriman and John Chapman - co-writer of the earlier series - claimed that the characters were their copyright.

That was why they withheld permission for use of subsidiary characters such as Aunt Lucy when the BBC decided to go ahead with a different Terry Scott/June Whitfield series.

Victim

This meant that actress Beryl Cooke had to say goodbye to Aunt Lucy.

"I am sorry for Beryl because she is a really lovely person," said Eric Merriman.

"But I feel she was a victim of the circumstances.

"And I'd be absolutely delighted to write for her again at any time."

But B B C's The Good Life, starring Richard Briars and Felicity Kendal, was one comedy series where the atmosphere wasn't just manufactured for the viewers.

Said Briars: "I think the show succeeded so well because we were lucky to have four people who worked in the same style and no one was pushy. The competitive spirit that is usually prevalent about who is getting the laughs wasn't there."

Do any readers wish to make any wild, libellous guesses as to the names of the anonymous comedy stars in this article?

Page 16 of the Independent, Wednesday 20th January 1993:

Absolutely fabulous. Not!

Baikie, Banks, Docherty, Hunter, Kennedy & Sparkes. Who? The comics from Absolutely tell Jim White why they're basking in obscurity

If things went horribly wrong, and the six writers and performers of the television sketch show Absolutely needed to find another job, they should steer clear of sales, marketing or public relations. Talk about self-effacing - this is a typical anecdote they tell about themselves:

Apparently on a business trip, a top executive at Channel 4 happened to catch their programme on a hotel television. When the executive returned to the office, she immediately issued a directive: "We must sign these people up, they're brilliant."

A colleague tactfully pointed out that since Absolutely went out on Channel 4, they already had signed these people up. "Oh yeah," the executive replied. "So why didn't anybody tell me about them?"

This, the team insists, is true. Peter Baikie, Morwenna Banks, Jack Docherty, Moray Hunter, Gordon Kennedy and John Sparkes prefer to keep a low profile. Or rather no profile at all.

"If David Baddiel and Rob Newman are known as the Morrissey and Michael Stipe of comedy," said Morwenna Banks, the only one with an English accent, "then you could call us the Spinners."

Absolutely - which should not be confused with Absolutely Fabulous ("No, no, we don't mind if it is," said Jack Docherty. "Maybe we'll pick up some of its viewers") - begins its fourth series this week. After three years of drifting around the schedules like Mark Thatcher on a car rally, the programme has been allocated Channel 4's most prestigious comedy slot: 10.30 on Friday night.

It will return with many of the comedy characters developed over the previous shows: the philosophising Little Girl; Calum Gilhooley, the anorak-wearing know-all; Stoneybridge Council, in which every citizen of a remote Scottish town has executive powers; and the Nice Family, a bunch of cardigan-clad greysters whose living room is dominated by a portrait of John Major. Theirs is the best collection of comic characters this side of Harry Enfield's, known and loved in, well, several households up and down the country.

"We can be fairly precise about who watches the show," said Peter Baikie. "We have their name and address."

"I don't think even our parents watch, so they?" said Morwenna Banks.

"We get around 500 in the studio audience," said John Sparkes. "So we know they watch. And that's about it, really."

"Actually, to be sadly serious about it, we are Channel 4's most watched show among 16 to 35 year olds," concluded Banks. At which John Sparks rummaged behind the two plaster-cast busts of Jack Docherty where were, for some reason, sitting on the team's office desk, and emerged with a pin board. On it was stapled BARB's official confirmation of Absolutely's ratings success.

"Mind you, don't read too much into figures," added Peter Baikie. "The man who pilots the ferry between Kyle of Localsh and Skye told me he was a big fan and he's about 75."

All this self-effacement was, in the beginning, quite deliberate. The team won their commission about the time that Emma Thomson's show had been extravagantly hyped and then, when it turned out to be about as funny as Fiona Armstrong, even more extravagantly pilloried.

"We wanted people to find us," said Gordon Kennedy. "We didn't want to push things too hard. That way Channel 4 could stick with us, we couldn't become the great new thing that failed. And it was a chance to learn."

"Fortunately, no one watched Series 1," chipped in John Sparkes. "Otherwise we wouldn't have got Series 2."

Several of the six were well-known on the live comedy circuit before they grouped up for the series. Docherty and Hunter's schtick was Don and George, an effete pair of Edinburgh gentlemen. Sparkes had Siadwell, the educationally sub-normal Welsh schoolboy with a talking brick, and Frank Hovis, a hopeless night-club master of ceremonies. Banks, meanwhile, had recently come down from Cambridge where she was in the Footlights. She is one of the few recent Footlights stalwarts to miss the cut for Peter's Friends.

"Well, that crowd were a bit older than me. I didn't really, well, we hardly, you know, overlapped," she said, by way of explanation.

"She has been guaranteed a role in the sequel, however," revealed John Sparkes. "Peter's Nodding Acquaintances."

They all first got together, Docherty claimed, "at Reading Borstal. I was Stephen Fry's fag". Their intention was to secure a commission for a show which was performer-led. Unlike, say, Not the Nine O'Clock News, in which a staff performer recruited likely players and handed them a script, the Absolutelies were determined to do everything themselves from the start. One thing they did not want to do was topical gags.

"I'd written topical stuff endlessly for Spitting Image and I was sick of it," said Docherty. "It's difficult doing a topical show. What I find about topical humour is that everyone does the same joke, the gag of the week. That's the theory, anyway. The good thing about Absolutely is, it's pretty likely no one else is doing the same gag."

From the base of their sketch show, the team hoped to branch out into other things. It has taken them several years to manage it. Their first commission is for a Don and George sitcom which goes into production later this month. To help them develop their production company, they have just recruited a managing director.

"You need some sort of profile to get your programme on these days," said Banks. "And if we're known at all, it's solely for Absolutely. But we've got ideas, plans for all sorts of things, so we're hoping a bit of marketing will help us."

"Channels have to be perceived as having stars," added Baikie. "Ratings are less important than your status. We're being encouraged to do all sorts of things like adverts to put ourselves about a bit."

They are also, in order to raise their profile, publicising themselves in a systematic way for the first time. Halfway through this interview John Sparkes popped out of their office to make more coffee in reception and returned with the news that the Daily Express were on the phone to interview Morwenna.

"Tell them you've shagged us all, Wen," he advised. "We need the headlines. After that I've got to call the Shropshire Star. We're very big in Shropshire. We could do the Ludlow Festival anytime. I mean I'd do it this year. If they wanted me."

Gordon Kennedy added that they were hoping to crack the telly chat-show circuit. But the only one they had been on so far is Pebble Mill at One.

"Don't knock it though. Loads of people have said to me 'Ooh, I saw you on Pebble Mill at One." said Morwenna Banks as she stepped out to engage with the Express. "Nobody I know has ever said to me they saw me on Absolutely."

'Absolutely' Friday, Channel 4, 10.30

Page 6 of Times Vision, Saturday 8th January 1994:

IT COULD be an absolutely irritating year for the great of men wildlife television. Davids Attenborough and Bellamy, not to mention Jacques Cousteau, might think it more than a bit fishy. For the team which makes Absolutely, the comedy sketch series, is busy riffling the commercial libraries of out-take material from the many prize-winning animal and nature series. All perfectly legal, it seems. And at least two of the Channel 4 bosses approve. Director of programmes John Willis and entertainment head Seamus Cassidy have apparently taken to signaling each other with duck squawking whistles, which inspired the idea.

From the Daily Mail, Wednesday 14th June 1984:

BBC admits 'word flash'

SPLIT-SECOND comic messages, which would be illegal if shown on ITV, have been featured in every episode of BBC 2's comedy series The Young Ones, the BBC admitted yesterday.

The disclosure follows the row over ITV's satire puppet show Spitting Image last weekend, which showed a subliminal messages. These are banned under the Broadcasting Act covering all ITV programmes, but not on BBC programme which are governed by its Royal Charter.

Page 44 of Variety, Wednesday 20th June 1984:

Fastest Joke In London
London, June 19.

Subliminal messages have been slipped into segments of two tv satire shows here recently, much to the embarrassment of broadcasting authorities, who have banned such advertising.

First incident to come to light was in BBC's "The Young Ones," which has been running a subliminal gag over the past few weekly shows. The them of the joke remains unclear, because those who have seen it via a freeze-frame video player say it so far consists of seemingly unconnected film clips.

Point of the most recent flash-frame gag, however, is perfectly clear. During a segment of TV's "Spitting Image," a message reading: "'Spitting Image' scriptwriters are incredibly good in bed. Go out and sleep with one now" was flashed on the screen for a micro-second.

Only question is, did it work?

Page 17 of Time Out, 15th to 21st October 1982:

YOUNG, TWISTED AND DAFT

A Monty Python for the 1980s? The Likely Lads meet Bunuel? Frank Barrett reports on a new BBC sit-comm.

What The Goons did to the 1950s and Monty Python achieved in the 1970s, 'The Young Ones' - a new BBC comedy series starting this month - looks set to do for the 1980s. It might seem premature to label it as a cult but those at the BBC involved in its production and others who have seen it are confident that the programme will rapidly become compulsive viewing.

The six-part sit-com is the joint effort of a group of young comedians who have made their name in the alternative comedy cabaret 'The Comic Strip'. The series is co-written by Rik Mayall, half of the Twentieth Century Coyote act and already seen on TV as his alter ego Kevin Turvey, Ben Elton and Lise Mayer. The main performers are Mayall, Nigel Planer, half of the Outer Limits act, Ade Edmondson, the other half of Twentieth Century Coyote, Chris Ryan, currently starring in 'Can't Pay? Won't Pay!', and Alexei Sayle, probably the best known of the group through his appearances in the ill-fated 'OTT'.

Happily, the basic story line of 'The Young Ones' is less complicated than its writing and performing credits. The plot ostensibly concerns four students - where and what they study isn't revealed - in a squalid North London flat. The content of 'The Young Ones' is a compelling mixture of anarchic humour and surrealism - a sort of cross between Bunuel and the Likely Lads.

Alexei Sayle, for example, appears as several (mostly aggressive) characters in the East European family of the students' landlord but he often breaks out of character to deliver one of his famous (aggressive) routines. There are also asides in the programmes - one of which, for example, studies the life of a dustbug in the groove of a Cliff Richard record - while music is also a regular feature of the programme with appearances by bands such as Madness, Nine Below Zero and Dexy's Midnight Runners.

'The Young Ones' (the title is an ironic reference to Cliff and another swipe at the Swingin' '60s) was originally devised by Rik Mayall and Lise Mayer. Mayall is 24 and a graduate of Manchester University where he studied drama; Mayer, 21, met Mayall through her father Professor Mayer, who was Mayall's drama tutor at Manchester. The two took 'The Young Ones' idea to Ben Elton, a fellow Comic Strip performer and another Manchester graduate. The three of them produced a pilot script which was designed to draw on the talents of fellow artistes in the Comic Strip (some of whom had also been to Manchester University).

The script was performed to BBC producer Paul Jackson, 34, who had worked with Comic Strip people on a short-lived series with the compact title of 'Boom Boom, Out go the Lights'. Jackson made a pilot show and persuaded his less than enthusiastic superiors to approve a series of six programmes. Anyone familiar with the content of Comic Strip comedy might understand why the more conservative elements of the BBC hierarchy demonstrated a certain lack of enthusiasm: jokes about tampons, masturbation and breaking wind caused anxiety among executives who have now also had to sanction expressions which may be common in colloquial student speech but are less often heard on television.

One of the other problems troubling the BBC is how they're going to bill 'The Young Ones' in the Radio Times and elsewhere. 'Wacky' and 'zany' are labels which make the cast cringe. 'You can't explain it,' says Mayall. 'It's a modern video comedy which attempts to cross sit-com and variety with a surreal story.'

Knowing that the success of 'The Young Ones' could lead eventually to Pythonesque superstardom, when asked if the series will become will become a cult the cast exchange nervous grins. Mayall remains straightfaced but wistful. 'I hope so,' he says, 'I hope so...'

Pages 18 and 19 of City Limits, 4th to 10th May 1984:

REALLY HEAVY!

This week a nose picking punk who doesn't like doors, a middle class 'politico' Cliff Richard fan, a bewildered spiv, an enraged landlord with a lot of cousins who look just like him, and a morose hippy whose lentil soup inevitably gets thrown at the wall will all scream at each other for half an hour on TV. JOHN CONNOR talks to the creators of 'The Young Ones'.

Vivien: 'I think I'll put my head through this wall. There. I did.'

A YEAR and a half ago, I and about two million other people, sat down to watch a comedy programme about four students, their shared house and their foreign landlord.

By the end of the six week run, the house had been demolished in a variety of interesting and creative ways, the four students had become household characters, and five million people were regularly watching it. The repeats did even better.

'The Young Ones' became a popular cult hit in just one series. With a TV viewing figure even 'Monty Python' and the more recent 'Not the Nine O'Clock News' failed to achieve so quickly.

In its wake 'The Comic Strip' launched to mixed reviews in Channel 4, paradoxically with many of the same performers. Predictably, several other shows of indifferent appeal have crept into the schedules of the TV companies.

In many ways this comedy movement echoes the events of the sixties, when the Oxbridge inspired satire boom launched upon an unsuspecting world in November 1962 with 'That Was The Week That Was'. Exactly two decades later, 'The Young Ones' burst - or more appropriately smashed - their way across our television screens.

RUBBISH BAG

It all started in the now forgotten ripples of the new wave of comedy that itself developed in the wake of the punk movement.

The idea that anybody could get up and play music transferred just as well to anyone getting up and cracking jokes. In 1979, when the American idea of a Comedy Store was tried out in a Soho strip club, it hit exactly the right note for the time.

Posterity will no doubt refer to this as the start of the 'alternative' comedy boom.

Interestingly enough its epicentre was just around the corner from the site of Peter Cook's original '60s satire club, the Establishment. If there is such a thing as a comedy cycle - its wheel had turned full circle.

It was BBC producer Paul Jackson who first put together a 'Comedians' style montage of cabaret stalwarts in a TV show: 'Boom Boom Out Go The Lights'. During the recording Rik Mayall first broached the idea about a weird sitcom he and Lise Mayer had thought up one drunken evening.

At the time The Comic Strip's stage show was at the height of its success and there had been a good reaction to the two 'Boom Boom's'. Jackson went off to cajole the BBC. Rik and Lise, after inviting Ben Elton - an old friend from Rik's Manchester University Drama Department days - went off and wrote the pilot.

So besides a quantity of alcohol what else prompted the idea for 'The Young Ones'?

Rick: 'You're all so incredibly unbelievably stupid!'

Rik and Lise, over a cup of tea in their classically ornamented Islington flat, think on.

'Well we were sitting around talking about the Rick stage character,' Lise recalls, 'and just reminiscing about university. Saying, "I bet he's the sort of person who made everyone in the house put their milk bottle tops in a different rubbish bag, and then never actually sent it to the people who collect milk bottle tops."

'Then we started thinking about other characters.'

The other characters they came up with were all based on performers they knew down at The Comic Strip.

For 'The Young Ones' Alexei Sayle ended up being very Sayle; Nigel Planer transferred his hippy stage character Neil; Vivien was specially designed for Rik's double act partner Ade Edmondson, and the last character, Mike, was originally written with Peter Richardson in mind. When that didn't work out it went to audition and was secured by an actor, Christopher Ryan.

So out of five leads only one wasn't a stand up comic. But they were all men. Why no women characters?

'Well,' Rik admits, 'that has been a criticism levelled at the programme. But we weren't just writing parts - we were writing specifically for people we had in mind.'

'And at the time,' says Lise, 'Dawn and Jennifer (French & Saunders) weren't around and we didn't know any female comedians. It's also in the reality of people like that - that none of them would share a flat with a girl. I mean it's very much one of those all-male households that you get at university.

'And we made it students, not just because we'd been students, but because it would have been a lot more dodgy if they were young unemployed - since they're always being really horrible about people. So we put them into what's a privileged position to begin with.

'What we're basically attacking is the "me" generation. If you listen, they never really have conversations. They just talk about themselves all the time.

'Then there's all the hippy ideas. The only thing that's seemed to survive from all that is that if you're over 30, forget it. Then you see what being a selfish bastard with spots all over his face.'

And how does the Cliff Richard connection come into it?

'The Rick character has always had an obsession - it used to be Vanessa Redgrave - and now it's Cliff,' says Mayall. 'Liking Cliff was originally to show that Rick was a wanker. It's taken on more emphasis now because of the idea of attacking youth. In the show there's

Neil: 'I think I'll just go and kill myself. Right. I'm going to.'

someone from the fifties, the sixties, the seventies and the eighties. And you've got Cliff who's been there all the time and is still the eternal youth, the Peter Pan if you like.

'And,' he adds mischievously, 'we're going to bring out a Young Ones book you know - entitled "Bachelor Boys".'

In the end though, whatever the theme of the show, its success lies in its anarchic style.

What 'The Young Ones' has done is revolutionise TV sitcoms in the same way 'Monty Python' revolutionised the TV sketch show. Yet the original idea was a simple one: to put something on television that Mayall and Lise Mayer wanted to see themselves and that had that same air of exciting 'uncertainly' as 'Monty Python'.

'With "The Young Ones", by showing that almost anything in the house can be alive, you can go anywhere - through the window, the roof, the walls,' says Mayall. 'And you've got all these characters who are trying to get through a story. Or stories' happening that they're all ignoring. You've got almost that same feeling as the Pythons that anything can happen. And that excitement is, I think, one of the most satisfying things fro an audience.'

FIRE-BOMB

Having watched the first episode of the second series being recorded - replete with much audience amusement when Ade Edmondson nearly set fire to the bed he was lying in during a petrol bomb sequence - it's fair to say that the style 'The Young Ones' has developed hasn't just got progressively weirder, it's also become very slick. Rik accurately sums it up:

'It now looks like people who are good at making subversive television, rather than people who are new to television looking subversive.'

Now that they've succeeded in producing a popular show, without compromising the ideas they had in The Comedy Store, what happens next?

'Perhaps this series is the last because we're not young ones anymore,' Rik muses, 'and for the first time we're beginning to think of something else... better.'

'People,' Lise adds, ' are going off in different versions. There's talk of a stage show. That's the next one we've got to hit - the West End. The next bastion.'

Currently what The Young Ones seem most glad about is that, now the BBC scene shifters dispute is over, the last two episodes of the new series will be made after all.

'The last is a devastatingly important programme,' Rik says deadpan. 'It's called "Summer Holiday".'

'The Young Ones' put their foot though the screen on BBC2 at 9.00 this Tuesday.

Alexei: 'My cousin likes men in uniforms you berks.'

Page 12 of the Times, Friday 11th May 1984:

moreover...
Miles Kington

AUNTIE AND THE YOUNG ONES GO A REVELLING

A new trend is abroad which has not yet been noticed. It's called not-knocking-the-BBC. Yes, the early part of 1984 was deafened by the outcry against the Beeb and because our ears are still ringing with the sound, we haven't noticed that it has stopped. The Thorn Birds is forgotten; the ratings battle is not drawing the crowds it used to; The Jewel In The Crown can no longer be waved in the BBC's face; and it's months since Max Hastings last lambasted the upper reaches of the Corporation.

Much of what Max said was true, as the middle reaches were quick to agree, but there seemed to be a feeling that once Aubrey Singer had been sacrificed to the gods, things could go quiet again - why, I don't believe I've heard Sixty Minutes criticized for more than a week. And as the smoke of battle cleared, the damage on the battleground was much less than supposed.

The BBC may still find it hard to get programmes in the Top Ten, but when you look at most of the ITV programmes that pull in the crowds, you wonder if anyone seriously wants to be in the Top Ten. Furthermore, if a week in which the BBC got 47 per cent of the audience can be described as a very bad week for them, you wonder what they have to do to be called good. If the Tories got 47 per cent in a popularity poll, who would call it bad?

The fashion for slamming the BBC was in large part just that - a fashion. We love slamming something, but we need to move target. Channel 4 was getting it in the neck last year, and is now agreed to be putting on very good stuff, even if it hasn't got its sums right. Then TV-am fell flat on its face and got the rotten tomatoes, though it seems to be matching the BBC pretty well now.

So it was time that the Beeb came in for its fair share of mud-slinging and it has, on the whole, got away quite lightly. You wait and hear the howls of derision that will greet early cable TV. Just you wait and hear.

Meanwhile, the BBC has had the luck to chalk up a few recent successes. David Attenborough's The Living Planet was every bit as good as Life on Earth - and producing a good sequel is the hardest trick of all. (If he wants a title for another series looking at our deteriorating environment, I can offer him something I saw written on a car engine the other day: Negative Earth.) For a fortnight they have given us wall-to-wall snooker, the nearest thing to perfect television ever devised. And now they have started a new series of The Young Ones.

Right from the start of the first series I was quite convinced that this is the best, brightest, most inspired TV comedy since Monty Python. Also the funniest. They have latched on to the simple yet hard truth about comedy: that if you have a solid story line and a cast of clearly drawn characters, you can be as crazy as you like. The Goon Show knew that. Soap knew that. Not many others do. So, although The Young Ones is ostensibly about four ill-matched students in one house, they can without strain introduce a hamster talking broad Scots, the contents of the fridge bursting into song and - a magnificent conceit, this - The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse going mad with boredom and getting nothing from God in answer to their prayers but endless sets of Travel Scrabble. In an effort to emphasize how original the series is and how much better than anything else around, people keep telling us that it is wonderfully anarchic and without precedent. Anarchic is precisely what it isn't: the scripts by Elton, Mayall and Mayer are beautifully controlled and constructed. Without precedent? Nearly, yes, but there is one parallel from nearly 25 years ago which keeps nudging my memory: the radio versions of Hancock's Half-Hour.

That programme, like The Young Ones, put four or five egocentric monsters in the same house and let them get on with their fantasies, with the lamest of excuses for being there. None of the pseudo-sociological background that cripples most sitcom ("John is a single parent with a child who has recently moved in with his divorced father, next door to his mother.."), simply a huge delight in making outsize egos bump into each other, watching the sparks fly and entering a realm of invention which few comedies even suggest. Twenty-five years hence parents will be saying, "Ah, but you should have seen The Young Ones ... on the BBC," they might add. So was Hancock , come to think of it.

From the Financial Times, Saturday 18th May 1985:

The lure of surreal squalor

NEARLY FIVE million people are staying in on Monday evenings to watch Rick, Vivian, Neil and Mike talk about "botty-belches" and call each other "complete bastards." The Young Ones is being repeated on BBC2 (not Channel Four, as you might expect) and, barring freak snooker finals, is getting the highest rating of any programme on an outlet more usually renowned for documentaries, wild life films and efforts of a more sober nature.

A comedy show about an unpleasant group of students living in surreal squalor obviously is likely to appeal to students, but its attraction has been much greater than a college "cult show." This must partly be because 'the Kids," as Rick would refer to them, cannot quite believe that anyone actually has been permitted to break wind on BBC2, and anxiously switch on to see what else gets through. Yet, more and more older young ones seems to be enjoying the series this time round, and a staggering 800,000 people forked out for a copy of the spin-off book.

With this sort of success, the show is almost heading into the mainstream. Not quite, though. There are still plenty of people who are delighted that no more episodes of The Young Ones are to be made.

They never found reference to Felicity Kendal's knickers acceptable: nor did they find remotely funny the idea, say, of an animated sock escaping from a foetid laundry bag and having to be executed.

I always did, and I think that the decision of the BBC to put on the series was an enlightened move rather than the end of civilisation as we know it. Critics of the programme, like most critics of humor, and much use of adjectives like "juvenile" and "puerile" and "childish." It is all of these things, of course, but how exactly does "adult" humour work? If so much humour is to be dismissed as fourth form, or fifth form, or sixth form, or undergraduate, then we are to be left with only with some sort of mature humour. I have visions of old men in leather chairs smiling wryly at Victorian editions of Punch.

It is not, however, only the outrage - the feeling of watching a comedy video nasty - that is so entertaining about The Young Ones. That does not really do justice to the fact that, although it is a bizarre situation comedy, it works through the strength of the characters. The plots include unexploded nuclear devices appearing in the kitchen, devils dropping in from Hell for the day, or the students appearing on University Challenge; odd interludes feature vegetables talking, washing machines refusing to wash laundry, or giant cream buns descending. But the main interest and the compelling comedy lie in how the students react both to these things and to each other.

With the possible exception of the "smoothie" character, Mike, The Young Ones characterisation is superb. The average sitcom might have come up with a punk and a hippy but no one would have come up with Rick, the Cliff Richard fan-cum-anarchist-poet-cum-poseur. On closer acquaintance, both thep unk and the hippy are so extreme as to be, in fact, completely individual. Sitcom punks usually have green hair and say "Hello, Mum" at the breakfast table whereas Vivian (the punk in The Young Ones) sets fire to mattresses, cuts off his fingers, gets decapitated in a train and then kicks his own head along the tracks.

Neil is not only a peaceful hippy but he is a terminally depressed one. Added to this, he is incompetent and feeble. These two react to the self-obsessed Rick with an absurd yet convincing logic. Neil is a hippy and should therefore do all the work in the house from answering the phone to cooking the supper; he fails to do this and is abused by the others, particularly Rick. Meanwhile, Rick gets carried away with his own voice, talking about Thatcher or fascism of the Kids, and can be distracted only by extreme violence from Vivian.

These characters are, however, anally-fixated and foul - difficult to defend against people who do not appreciate foul-mouthed, anally fixated comedy. I can plead only that The Young Ones is different from other sitcoms. It's funny.

Ian Hislop

Given the passion that he describes as having for the series one can't help but wonder if, at some point during the eighteen years (so far) of Have I Got News For You, Ian Hislop ever turned to Paul Merton and said, "Look, it's all very well you making whimsical comments about politicians wearing jetpacks and stuff, but have you got any interesting reminiscences about the Time location shoot...".

Page 11 of Private Eye, Friday 31st July 1992:

CHANNEL 4 personnel are sporting new badges with the legend "I had nothing to do with Stab in the Dark" - a reference to the bold, innovative, late-Friday-night satire programme.

The programme was commissioned by Mike Atwell and, despite inviting mockery from fellow professionals, Stab in the Dark has managed to retain the customary ratings for the slot, with the ghastly possibility that a second series might be in the offing.

If any ex-Channel 4 employees own one of these badges that they don't want to keep anymore then could they send it to me, please? I promise to wear it on appropriate occasions.

Page 18 of the Star, Monday 15th February 1988:

Two Rons are out of order, say the Krays

TELEVISION comics Hale and Pace have upset Kray Twins Ronnie and Reggie.

The caged East End killers reckon the comedians' routine on the Two Rons is a right liberty.

Ronnie, who is in Broadmoor, stormed: "They are well out of order.

"It's obvious they're taking the mickey out of Reg and me."

The former gang boss refuses to watch the duo's new TV show, The Management.

Denied

"They're trying to make me and Reg look like idiots," he raged.

"I'd like to know if they'd have the bottle to do their act if me and Reg were out. I doubt they would."

Reggie Kray had a go at the comedians in a letter smuggled out of Gartree prison.

He wrote: "Ron and I feel it is wrong that they should earn money at the expense of our adversity."

Norman Pace and his partner Gareth Hale have denied basing their act on the notorious twins, jailed for life for murder.

Gareth once emphasised: "We're not trying to take the mickey out of the Krays.

"The two Rons started when we picked up a couple of oversized dinner jackets and did a parody of the song Da Doo Ron Ron."

Ronnie Kray snarled: "We used to wear tuxedos - but we didn't go around acting like gangsters from a B-movie."

Page 13 of the Daily Star, Friday 19th November 1993:

Fury over TV poem on Cilla murder
NICOLA PITTAM

A TV station was blasted yesterday for broadcasting a poem gloating over the murder of Cilla Black.

The sicko work fantasised that the Blind Date hostess was bludgeoned with a hammer.

Now comedian Peter Baynham - who read it on Granada's late-night show The Full Monty - has triggered a storm.

After starting with the words Cilla Black is dead, Hooray! the poem concludes:

The hammer down upon her head
Cilla Black now Cilla Red
And as she lay there in the mud
She lost a lorra, lorra blood.

Former Lord Mayor of Liverpool Rosie Cooper, who has complained to TV watchdogs, fumed: "This so-called poem is sick and appalling. Cilla must be fuming."

A spokesman for Granada said: "It was intended as light-humour."

Cilla herself would not comment.

Worth noting that long-time Baynham collaborator Armando Iannucci featured a staged autopsy of Cilla Black in his series Time Trumpet last year and received no reaction, negative or otherwise.

Page 9:4 of the Sunday Times, Sunday 17th October 1993:

Snakes and ladders

TIM WILLIS infiltrates the Snake Pit, a clique of funny men and powerhouse of media comedy.

Griff, for whom Clive used to write, is producing Angus at the moment . Clive and Angus are both doing things with Jimmy and Dan. John, who used to produce Griff, is now directing Rowan, as well as putting together a project with Douglas, Angus and Hugh. Peter, who represents Rowan and Harry, is producing Clive...

And the girls? Well, the girls are girlfriends and wives. The loose collaboration of the 200-300 writers, performers and producers who rule British broadcast comedy is by and large a boys' club. Still, as Griff likes to joke: "If you can't be in the right place at the right time, make sure your sister is. I got my first telly break because John was sleeping with mine."

And the Snake Pit - the nickname for these intertwined talents - was made to stick by a girl, Lise Mayer. (You know, she dated Rik, Rowan, Harry, Hugh, John and now Angus.) Naturally, she writes comedy scripts.

To introduce the characters in this one: John Lloyd is a director, the creator of Not The Nine O'Clock News, Blackadder and Spitting Image, and co-author of The Meaning Of Liff, with Douglas Adams. Adams is the author of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy (brought to TV by Lloyd). Griff Rhys-Jones and Rowan Atkinson are well known for their commercials. Peter Bennett-Jones is a producer and agent. The performers Clive Anderson, Hugh Laurie, Rik Mayall, Harry Enfield and Angus Deayton are near-neighbours of the above, as are the producers Dan Patterson and Jimmy Mulville.

Though many live in north London now, most of their stories begin at Oxbridge - most likely at Cambridge - in the 1960s, when Peter Cook and Co, followed by the Monty Python team, reinvented the universities' revue societies as the home of British satire. Treading in their Footlights through the mid-1970s, in the 1980s our heroes graduated to the Edinburgh Fringe and Radio 4, before passing through BBC Television to emerge in the 1990s as high flyers in the Birtist network of independent production companies, such as Hat Trick, responsible for Clive Anderson Talks Back (Mulville, Patterson), and Tiger, responsible for Clive Anderson In China (Bennett-Jones).

Along with the composer Phil Pope and the producer Geoffrey Perkins, they socialise together, or work together, or both - and have done ever since another of their number, Andre Ptashinski, producer of Forbidden Planet, ran the Oxford and Cambridge Theatre Company with Bennett-Jones, touring Rik Mayall across America and thus providing Mel Smith with the material for a screenplay-in-progress.

Mr Bean? Coltrane In A Cadillac? Vic Reeves's Funny Business? They're Tiger's. Dawn French's Murder Most Horrid? That's Talkback's, the company run by Rhys-Jones (who, incidentally, went to school with Adams). One begins to sniff another of those very British cliques that exist in every profession. But many of comedy's cream say the Snake Pit is a fiction, or else a tiny group they don't belong to.

Lloyd differs: "You just have to go to Lenny Henry's summer party to see that the Snake Pit exists. Just look at Peter's Friends [the film starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson]. That was produced by Martin Bergman, who used to do revue with Dan Patterson and Jimmy Mulville. Dan and Jimmy produced radio's On The Hour, by Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci, who are represented by Peter Bennett-Jones. It just goes on and on."

Lloyd is eager to stress that this network in meritocratic: "Rowan Atkinson went to Newcastle, for God's sake. He only did a year's electronics course at Oxford, and would have been funny wherever he came from." Enfield, Reeves, Mayall - the exceptions are witnesses for the defence. But inevitably there are murmurings in the industry.

"Them?" says one red-brick outsider. "You can't beat so you have to join them. But the ones before them, like John Cleese, and the ones after them, like Armando Iannucci, they're all a bunch of Oxbridge w***ers. I'm not saying they're not funny, but they can just stroll into Alan Yentob's BBC, because they all knew each other at college. They make you very aware they are intellectual, and they make it twice as hard for the women."

"All they do is gossip about each other," says another. "They used to compete for the Perrier award, now it's for a Bafta, and they're all so paranoid. Adams and Lloyd used to go into despair when one was doing better than the other."

Lloyd agrees that the Snake Pit is "claustrophobic, a lot of talent fighting for a very small space", but claims that should not give the impression British comedy is a bitchy little world providing jobs for college boys. "Look what people are interested in," he says. "It's One Foot In The Grave and Victor Meldrew. Cambridge Footlights doesn't dictate British comedy." And so says Rhys-Jones: "Being at university together didn't make us help each other up the ladder. It simply spurred us on. If one of your friends did well, you wanted to spite them - to do better."

Adams is less sure: "If people have worked together, there's a natural inclination to do so again, because you know each other." But Rhys-Jones is adamant: "It's not a case of how far we have all come together. It's a case of how far we haven't come together. We're still working with the same people as 10 years ago, doing the same things." But crucial to that, he claims, has been not working with his Footlights friends. "When you get out of university, the first thing you want to do is work with professionals."

"Having directed Griff since 1975, I can confirm that," says Lloyd - who is entitled to snipe. Even Rhys-Jones acknowledges that Lloyd was central to his generation's fortunes: "When we left university, the corridors of the BBC Light Entertainment were deserted. All those ex-cavalry officers and military policeman who had run the department were coming up for retirement, so David Hatch [who used to be in the Cambridge Circus revue with John Cleese] filled one of the empty desks with John Lloyd.

"Well, the 40-year-olds were burned out. But John was an eager beaver. He'd been a big fish in the small pond of Footlights, he didn't think it was difficult, and went on to create Hudd Lines, The News Quiz, Quote Unquote. On the strength of his success, the BBC had a huge recruitment drive at Oxbridge. In turn, these people devoured material, creating a need for more and more writers."

Not that it helped Adams: "In fact, John Lloyd was so keen not to be seen as nepotistical when I followed him out of Cambridge, that he was almost leaning over backwards not to employ me on the BBC."

It is no easier getting a definite line about the nature of comedy's inner circle from any of its members. But if there is a common thread in the Snake Pit's CVs, it is writing for radio, rather than hacking round the pubs and clubs. Take Weekending, which spawned The Mary Whitehouse Experience, which went to television and spawned Newman and Baddiel, who - surprise, surprise - both went to Cambridge...

Still, nobody should be too surprised that England's great universities provide such a disproportionate amount of talent. As Adams says: "You don't find yourself in Footlights and think: 'Oh, I'll go into comedy.' You go to Cambridge to get into Footlights and try to get into comedy." All (rarely) agree: what is most important is "the lack of hierarchy in the theatrical societies." According to Rhys-Jones: "There's no don in charge, everything is decided by the undergraduates. So you have to become expert in shenanigans and diplomacy - all the things that happen in the real world - to get in a show. And if you can't join someone else's, then you put on your own and try to bankrupt the opposition." Oxbridge, he says, "teaches you to pick up the phone, not just to wait for it to ring". But, he stresses - wheel on Jennifer Saunders, Paul Merton, Vic Reeves and the alternative wave of the past decade - an education there is not a prerequisite.

Jonathan James-Moore, head of BBC Radio Light Entertainment, has the proof: "When John and Griff were here, there were no female producers, and the trainees were all Oxbridge. This year, of the six trainee producers, none was Oxbridge and half were women." And what did he do at university? President of the Footlights, naturally. Still, while he acknowledges an Oxbridge caucus, he says its influence in waning. "They have been overtaken by events. The Edinburgh Fringe used to be dominated by them. Now they have been swamped by the professional cabaret circuit."

"Really, please give this an airing," says Rhys-Jones. "I want to make a programme on it myself." Starring Angus, no doubt, with music by Phil, and material from Geoffrey, if he has finished working with Dan on John's project for Rowan...

It wasn't all Hardwicke House in 1987 - here are some other press clippings from that year.

Page 3 of the Daily Mirror, Monday 16th March 1987:

No-de-No
BBC chiefs last night denied reports they were scrapping the holiday camp sitcom Hi-de-Hi after the next series.

Page 10 of Time Out, Wednesday 6th to Wednesday 13th May 1987:

Strip Show

One of the odder spots on C4's autumn schedule promises to be a six-episode series - each a full hour long - by a new, improved Comic Strip. Included in the line-up is 'Didn't You Kill My Brother?' by Alexei Sayle and David Stafford (eyes right!) in which Sayle plays both twins of a murderous East End family (with Beryl Cook as Mum: 'You wouldn't behave like this if your father was still alive.' 'He is still alive.''What? You haven't killed him yet?') Then there's 'Mr Jolly', with Peter Cook as psycho hit-man, and 'The Fun Seekers', with Nigel Planer as a punter on an 18-30 Club holiday who's discovered half-way through to be 34, and 'The Strike', a stirring saga of the miners' strike shot by the director of 'Rambo' ('Strike - The Bloodshed Begins'). But our favourite is 'The Yob', a blatant rip-off of 'The Fly' by the estimable due of Keith Allen and Danny Peacock, in which a pretentious, yuppie pop promo director (Allen) slips into a university lab during a UB40 concert for a quick toot off the back of his Filofax, and suddenly finds himself transmuted into a half-Yob when the machine in the lab switches his genes with a skinhead across the room (Peacock)... his knuckles erupt into tattooes (SKINS...HATE), his Gucci loafers balloon into Doc Martins during a meal in L'Escargot, his arm develops an uncontrollable urge to scrawl ARSENAL over every wall, etc... But the best joke is his name - Patrick Church - which coincidentally is not a million miles from that other Gucci-shod pop-promo director Julian something or other. Another coincidence: the charming Chris Brown was producer of 'Absolute Beginners', which was directed, of course, by Julian whatisname. With the disastrous box-office performance of 'Absolute Beginners', Brown's employment with 'Absolute Beginners' production company Palace Pictures was abruptly terminated. From there he went to head... the Comic Strip!

Page 19 of the Evening News, Wednesday 12th August 1987:

TV BOSSES IN COMIC CAT FLAP
Mickey taking was no joke

THE BEEB are hopping mad over a comedy show loved by viewers but hated by the TV bosses.

The hugely-successful Filthy Rich and Cat Flap, which attracted a massive weekly audience, took the mickey out of the BBC's top brass.

The big chiefs didn't like that and have now decided not to let the series get another run, says one of the show's stars.

Nigel Planer, who played the grubby television agent, Filthy, in the series, said: "I'd love to do another series but Rick (Mayall) and Adrian (Edmondson) won't, because it seems to have upset too many people."

Planer, who starred alongside Mayall and Edmondson in the Young Ones series, said he was disappointed that Filthy Rich and Cat Flap would not appear again.

But a BBC spokesman denied that the series had been taken off because of problems with bosses. "That's not the case from our point of view," a spokesman said.

"The series had three people in it who are stars in their own right and they're all heavily committed to other projects," he added.

"The scripts for the series were written by Rick Mayall and Ben Elton, and they are both too busy doing other series to write any more."

Ben Elton, apart from starring on Saturday Night Live, is also writing scripts for Black Adder and sit coms.

"If they'd have written another series of Filthy Rich and Cat Flap I'm sure we would have done it. I don't know what Nigel Planer's interpretation of the situation is," said the spokesman.

From Time Out, Wednesday 18th February 1987:

SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL

Many of those drawn to teaching aspirations; after all they're guaranteed a captive audience all year round. But it's often the kids who dominate the performance, as two teachers turned TV scriptwriters explain to Don Perretta.

It's not uncommon for those who have been processed through the British educational system to have in their dinner party repertoire at least one absolute from their days at school. Imagine a TV series packed with the ghastliest of those stories and set in a run-down comprehensive and you'll arrive at 'Hardwicke House', Central TV's latest comedy.

Written by Simon Wright and Richard Hall (Wright, an ex-teacher, is now a producer/company director of the Comic Strip production company while Hall is still teaching history full-time), 'Hardwicke House' is one of the wildest comedies to come out of an independent television sector not known for taking risks - or making many decent sitcoms for that matter. It is painfully funny, almost entirely because the incidents portrayed are not all that far from reality and the moments of recognition are frequent and vivid.

The writers confirm that there is more than the proverbial grain of truth in the show. Hall: 'It got to the point where we had to do something along these lines. The number of times over a drink the remark's been made "Jesus, someone's got to write this story". So we just sat down and decided to have a bash at it.' Wright: 'It's such a rich subject, so ripe for this kind of treatment. Nothing that's happened to me at anytime in my life is anything like the three tears I spent teaching. I'm amazed that no one's done this sort of thing for such a long time.'

'Hardwicke House' is the first work either have written for television (although Hall confesses to having once sold an article to Titbits). They met while teaching in the same North London school seven years ago, but it wasn't until Wright's association with the Comic Strip made him familiar with the workings of the film/television industries that they had the confidence to submit an idea to a TV company.

Hall and Wright consequently are very vulnerable and precious about their first-born creation, but as far as Central are concerned it's a major success. After tinkering a little with the original idea (they were especially nervous about a black African teacher character who was eventually dropped from the script to avoid the minefield of racial stereotypes), the company ploughed in sufficient funds to make it a big production number and then put it up against 'Dallas'. The second series goes into production in a month's time.

Although the cast is universally well-chosen, with Roy Kinnear and Roger Sloman perfect as a fat fool of a headmaster and his sycophantic, perverted deputy head respectively, it's Gavin Richards as the street-wise Mr Flashman who stands out. Hall: 'He's excellent. Flashman is also the character who is closest to either of us, in as much as we have him doing some of the things that I do all the time. I've found that if you're teaching about the First World War or something similar, the only way to get the kids to shut up is to concentrate on the violence, death and destruction and if possible to show them videos of the same.'

But even if there is a strong streak of uncomfortable reality in 'Hardwicke House', there are certain things hat the authors could never have used on television. Hall: 'We must all know stories of teachers coming in and finding turds on their desks, but something happened the other wee that you will not believe. A kid wanked himself off in science class and then rubbed it on another kid's face who ran out screaming and on the verge of being sick. That is the tops. In all my time teaching, I thought there was nothing left to shock me. What would Kenneth Baker say? When he says "the comprehensive system isn't working", has he even in his wildest nightmares any idea that something like that could happen?'

'Hardwick House' starts on Tuesday night with a one-hour special, followed on Wednesday by the first of six half-hour episodes. See TV Selections.

Page 2 of the Independent, Saturday 21st February 1987:

Teacher tells tales out of school in TV series
By Peter Dunn

TEACHERS and children at one of London's big East End comprehensive schools, Homerton House in Hackney, will turn on their televisions next Tuesday to find out what their history teacher, Richard Hall, thinks about the system.

They may be in for a bit of a shock. Mr Hall, along with Simon Wright who taught English at Homerton House for three years, has written a seven-part comedy series for Central TV, Hardwicke House, about the "bullies, thugs, sadists and weirdoes" who teach in a comprehensive school. The first, hour-long, episode. Part two is on Wednesday evening.

Hardwicke's "undisciplined rabble," according to Central's Press Office, is based on amalgams of teachers known to the authors of the series. The school head, played by Roy Kinnear, is a fumbling drunk. His deputy (Roger Sloman) is a paedophile who takes off little boys' clothes in the school washroom. The French mistress (Pam Ferris) is a loony-lefty, more interested in demos than irregular verbs.

This "appalling bunch of teaching misfits" is counter-pointed by a race of hooligans, the school's children, looting and thieving in pursuit of Hardwicke's three Rs - "rioting, rebellion and arson."

Hardwicke House was filmed on location at a disused school in Nottingham. Central TV and the series' authors refused to name the real source of inspiration in the East End. "I don't think they will want it revealed for obvious reasons," a Central spokesman said.

Homerton House is a boys' school with 1,288 pupils, above-average school by ILEA standards, coming 33rd out of 152 in the authority's league table of exam performances.

Mr Wright taught there (his only school) for three years until he left the profession five years ago. He is now a producer for the Comic Strip. Mr Hall is still there, thankful that the school has broken up for half-term. He has taught in three schools in London and in another near his native Belfast.

He admitted yesterday that he had not told his headmaster about the series." For me to have discussed it with him would have implied there was something to be worried about," he said. "My other colleagues have already told me they think it sounds like a good laugh. When they've seen it they'll have to draw their own conclusions. I wouldn't go further than to say the characters are just amalgams of teachers we've known.

"The left-wing woman, quite honestly, represents five people put together into one little dynamo.

"When you're dealing with kids there's not the same onus on you to hide your traits. A bank manager can't sit there picking his nose in the office but a teacher of many years' standing might sit picking his nose because he doesn't give it a second thought. In that respect traits are exaggerated in schools which wouldn't be tolerated outside."

And whose traits at Homerton House were represented by the paedophile teacher of Hardwicke House? "I think you get these people everywhere," Mr Hall said vaguely. "You have them in offices. I've heard of High Court judges doing that. And quite a few journalists."

Page 19 of the News Of The World, Sunday 22nd February 1987:

Cindy is caught in school for scandal!
By IVAN WATERMAN

* SEXY Cindy Day is at the centre of a storm over a new ITV comedy series that depicts teachers as perverts and drunks. Blonde Cindy, 22, who plays head girl, admits: "It's all very naughty.

* "One of the masters likes me to dress up in stockings and suspender belt." Despite the rumpus it is the biggest break for Cindy, a hostess from The Price Is Right, who will also be seen soon in EastEnders.

And last night co-writer and ex-teacher Simon Wright defended the school for scandal.

He challenged Mary Whitehouse to take her protests to the watchdog Independent Broadcasting Authority.

* Wright stormed: "She's a stupid old woman who never knows what she's talking about.

"I expect she'll go bananas, but she always does. There's a pervert teacher in every comprehensive, and probably a drunk.

"Real-life schools are much worse."

The series - called Hardwicke House - begins on Tuesday.

 Page 13 of the Sun, Wednesday 25th February 1987:

SEXY TV SCHOOL SPARKS OUTCRY
By MARTIN SMITH

A NEW television comedy showing sex-mad schoolgirls trying to get their teachers into bed sparked protests from hundreds of viewers last night.

ITV switchboards were jammed with callers accusing the programme - Hardwicke House, set in a Midlands comprehensive school - of setting a bad example to children.

It showed kids hurling ABUSE at school staff and RUNNING riot in class and BENT teachers doing anything to make a quick buck.

The comedy, starring Roy Kinnear, was shown throughout the ITV network at peak-viewing time and would have been watched by millions of youngsters.

The one-hour special launched a seven-part series of Hardwicke House which begins tonight.

Early

One mother said: "How dare they put it out so early when children are still watching telly."

And an angry teachers aid: "It makes us a laughing stock."

Central Television, who made the series, see it as a 1980s version of Please Sir.

A spokesman said: "People should remember it's meant to be a black comedy and should not be offended."

Page 3 of Broadcast, Friday 27th February 1987:

Anger as Central sit-com axed

The last-minute axeing of Central Television's sit-com Hardwicke House has provoked angry protests from production staff.

Morale is low at the Nottingham Studios, and staff, who believe they worked hard to make a good series, feel let down.

The programme was referred to the director of programmes, Andy Allan, at all stages and, because of the alternative nature of the series, close contact was kept with the IBA.

A second series has now been pulled although Allan initially gave the go-ahead and artistes had been contracted to start shooting in May.

The producer, Paula Burdon, and controller of light entertainment, Jon Scoffield, pressed for a slot after 21.00 because they saw the programme as having a similar audience to The Young Ones and Spitting Image. The production team argues that complaints from viewers have largely been about the time-slot.

The furore has aroused speculation over the future of Scoffield who has supported the programme throughout.

Allan announced last Friday that the present series of Hardwicke House would be pulled after the first two episodes. Central is now looking to run the rest of the series in a late-night slot.

Page 5 of the Daily Telegraph, Staurday 28th February 1987:

ITV drops 'offensive' comedy
By Harvey Lee,
Television Correspondent

A PEAK-TIME ITV situation comedy has been dropped less than a week after its first appearance following telephone calls from angry viewers.

"Offensive", "sick", "disgraceful", "disgusting" and "simply not funny" were some of the reports across the country that greeted the first visit to "Hardwicke House", and anarchic comprehensive school population by corrupt teachers and diabolical pupils.

Central Television, which launched the series with a 60-minute edition on Tuesday night followed by a half-hour episode on Wednesday, admitted receiving an "abnormal" number of complaints.

Thames Television took more than 60 calls in the London area on the first night, only one of them in favour of the series.

Several teachers complained, including one who told the company's duty officer: "No wonder kids are so badly behaved if this is what you show on television."

The series was pulled from the schedules yesterday by Mr Andy Allen, Central's head of programmes. He said: "On the evidence of the first two programmes, it is clear that this brave attempt to break new ground has not found favour with the majority of viewers."

A central spokesman said the decision was not taken under pressure from the other ITV companies and that the remaining five episodes would be shown "as soon as a suitably late night slot can be found."

Page 3 of the Daily Express Saturday 28th February 1987:

Viewers force ITV to 'scrap' school shocker
By IAN LYNESS

ITV's controversial new school comedy series Hardwicke House, starring Roy Kinnear, has been dropped in its first week, following a barrage of complaints.

The seven-part series, set in an anarchic comprehensive lasted for just two episodes.

Viewers jammed ITV switchboards attacking the show's bad language and its portrayal of teachers and pupils running riot. They also found the episodes unfunny.

Star Roy Kinnear, said last night: "I respect the decision to take the series off but I stand by the show.

Audience slams bad language

"I was not displeased with it. In fact I enjoyed it. Humour is a very personal thing and I think the reaction to the show was rather quick on both sides.

"I don't think the language was that aggressive. You hear far worse on other programmes.

"I think people lost sight of the fact that it was a comedy and thought it was more factual than it was ever intended to be. It was meant to be an exaggeration.

"Nobody complained when girls ran around in stockings in the St Trinians films, and that was a private sector school."

He added: "That people should take Hardwicke House to be a comment on the comprehensive system in beyond me."

Hardwicke House began its run on Tuesday evening this week with an hour-long episode.

There was a second, half-hour episode the following evening and the series was scheduled to run at 8.30 p.m. for the next five Wednesdays.

The remaining episodes will be screened in a late-night slot at a date which has still to be decided.

Mr Andy Allan, director of programmes at Central Television, which make Hardwicke House, said last night: "We received higher than the normal number of complaints about her series."

"Viewers didn't like the language or the way the school was portrayed.

Appeal

"On the evidence of the first two programmes, it is clear this brave attempt to break new ground has not found favour with ITV viewers watching at peak time.

"It has a certain appeal to young adults but was not acceptable to a majority of our viewers."

A Central spokesman would not say how much the series cost to make.

It was co-written by teacher Richard Hall and ex-teacher Simon Wright, who is now a producer for the Comic Strip.

At the launch of the series, Mr Wright said: "I taught English in the East End for three years, which is where I met Richard.

'Lifelike'

"Believe me, there are schools like Hardwicke House all over the country."

Mr Hall added: "The series is a reflection of inner-city comprehensives today. The kids in the show are very lifelike and the staff are actually amalgams of teachers that we know.

"But we're not trying to knock teachers. Most of them do a great job under extremely difficult circumstances. I hope teachers won't take offence."

The series showed one teacher having a strong physical development and another with a sadistic bent.

Other members of staff included a teacher who allowed a pupil to mark exercise books.

EXPRESS TV CRITIC MAUREEN PATON WRITES:

● It was a gruesome experience to sit through these two episodes. They were full of sound and fury and signified nothing more than a total lack of wit.

The writers have mounted an assault on the comprehensive system with a crudely-conceived update of St Trinian's complete with paedophilic master gloating over a half-naked little boy and lots of scenes on the lavatory.

The contents of a typical gag could supply a garden with a lifetime's manure.

From the Star, Saturday 28th February 1987:

ROY'S OUT ON HIS EAR
ITV's school for scandal gets chop
By MICHAEL BURKE

ITV's new comedy show Hardwicke House has been axed after just two episodes.

Angry viewers voted it a load of old rubbish.

And Central TV have been forced to pull the plug on the every day story of life in a chaotic comprehensive school, which stars Roy Kinnear as the headmaster.

Complaints

A spokesman said five other episodes will be screened "sometime in the future."

But they will go out later than the 8.30 Wednesday night slot that has caused so much uproar.

Hardwicke House is in a class of its own. It shows teachers as perverts in a school full of budding crooks and jailbirds.

Central admit they have been "inundated" with complaints.

But insiders are amazed by the quick decision to scrap the show, which is written by a former teacher.

Central's programme chief Andy Allen said: "This brave attempt to break new ground has not found favour with the majority of the viewers."

Central, is now negotiating with the other ITV companies to give the series another try later at night.

Last night, Roy Kinnear sprang to the defence of the show.

He said: "It was an enjoyable series. I think the decision to take it off was taken rather quickly.

Forgot

"I respect the decision, but I stand by the show."

The scrapping of Hardwicke House means the viewers will miss the sexiest schoolgirl - actress Cindy Day who plays the head prefect.

She is a former kiss-o-gram girl who once landed a smacker on Prince Andrew.

Now her fans will have to wait to see her in EastEnders, where she will be the new love interest for Dirty Den at the Queen Vic.

Said Cindy: "Some people thought Hardwicke House was more factual than it was supposed to be and forgot that it was a comedy series. It was supposed to be exaggerated.

"Those old St. Trinians girls in stocking tops were saucy, but no one complained about them."

Page 3 of the Daily Mirror, Saturday 28th February 1987:

ROY'S SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL IS AXED
TV comic stunned
By BRYAN RIMMER and JAMES SEDDON

DRUNKEN headmaster R G Wickham's scandalous career has crumbled in disgrace before the end of his first term.

His crazy TV antics have been denounced by viewers and derided by real-life teachers. Now bosses at Central TV have axed the series, Hardwicke House, after only two shows.

Roly-poly Roy Kinnear, who plays the unlikely headmaster was almost lost for words yesterday when the news was broken to him.

"Oh dear! I'm... I'm... well I'm very surprised," he said. "I've just got off a train from Manchester where I've been defending the show on a TV programme. Maybe I didn't do a very good job." Wickham rules over a comprehensive school full of thugs, bullies and weirdos. And that's only in the staffroom.

Hardwicke House's brutal humour and strong language provoked a flood of complaints - many from teachers.

Scripts

Central TV programmes boss Andy Allen said: "On the evidence of the first two programmes it is clear that this brave attempt to break new ground has not found favour.

"Our research indicates that Hardwicke House has a certain appeal to young adults but it's clear that its current time of 8.30 p.m. is not acceptable to the majority of viewers."

Central bosses now hope to pursuade network chiefs to reschedule the show for late night viewing later this year.

Roy Kinnear added: "It seems that Central are admitting the critics are right, but I thought the scripts were very good and I was really looking forward to next week's episodes.

"There may be an argument for showing it later than it is, but at least in this series the teachers are as bad as the pupils.

"Some teachers I have spoken to like the series. And youngsters love it."

Page 3 of the Sun, Saturday 28th February 1987:

TV's SCHOOL SEX ROMP IS GIVEN THE CHOP
Bad example to kids, say furious viewers
By HENRIETTA KNIGHT

ITV's outrageous comedy Hardwicke House has been taken off the screen after complaints from thousands of viewers.

The networked series - set in a Midlands comprehensive and starring Roy Kinnear - showed sex-mad schoolgirls trying to bed their teachers, and pupils running riot.

After just two episodes, protesters jammed ITV switchboards. Most said the children watching at the peak 8.30pm slot.

Now Andy Allen, director of programming for Central TV, the company that made the series, has shelved the remaining five Wednesday episodes.

Sexy Cindy Day, 23, who plays Hardwicke's head girl Donna, had already admitted: "It is all rather naughty."

Stockings

Cindy, who was a hostess in The Price Is Right, dressed in stockings and suspenders to please Hardwicke's headmaster.

Mr Allen said: "We will show the remaining episodes on a late-night slot some time in the future.

"It was a brave attempt to break new ground, but has not found favour with the majority of viewers."

● Cindy will soon be on screen again. She is catching Dirty Den's eye in a coming episode of top soap EastEnders.

From the Daily Telegraph, Tuesday 3rd March 1987. By Godfrey Barker:

NO DOUBT ITV executives are lost in wonder at last week's reverse, "Hardwicke House" (parental fury has forced it from its 8 p.m. midweek screening to late at night "some time in the future").

The post-mortem can be imagined. "St Trinians shocked 'em rigid once. The Remove at Greyfriars was thick with smokers and gamblers. Both quite harmless now. Give us 10 years and we'll have 'Harwicke House' on 'Blue Peter'."

One hopes sincerely that the creators of this deformation are not so deluding themselves. It may not be their fault, though I am not sure, that this Nightmare Academy has been filmed at a moment in the Eighties when public education is far beyond a joke. The main alarm about "Hardwicke House" was that it had no jokes at all. It was rich only in third-rate clichés and in vulgarity, sadly believed to be synonymous with wit. Not recognising it at first as a satire, I was shocked by it in a way that Channel 4 rapes and violence could not come near to achieving. The reason, I suppose, is that what might happen to one's child is as close to the bone as a film-maker can get.

Page 26 of the London Evening Standard, Saturday 7th March 1987:

No laughing matter
GEOFFREY PHILLIPS charts the depths to which TV comedy has sunk - particularly on ITV where the sitcom has been ousted by the twitcom.

THE swift expulsion from the schedules of ITV's unruly-school comedy Hardwicke House will have surprised no one unlucky enough to have seen the opening episodes.

The real puzzle is (a) how it came to be made in the first place, and (b) how it came to be scheduled in a peak viewing slot?

Though this show's demise has given an unexpected airing for the under-rated Chance In A Million made by Thames for Channel 4, the Hardwicke House fiasco underscores the parlous level of comedy on TV in general and on ITV in particular.

What is there today that could sit easily alongside Porridge, The Likely Lads, Dad's Army and Rising Damp?

The BBC has Yes Minister, Ever Decreasing Circles and Only Fools and Horses on the active list if not actually in service at the moment.

A rung or two down the ladder there's Last of the Summer Wine, still plodding along, and 'Allo 'Allo which please many while baffling some.

Praise

No one will need reminding that the BBC is also still churning out twitcoms such as Terry and June, No Place Like Home and Brush Strokes but much-maligned Auntie Beeb deserves praise for its recognition that social conditions and therefore tastes in humour have changed.

Thus, with shows such as Butterflies, the BBC has allowed its comedies to change expression, from a toothy grin to a wry smile.

Not so ITV: the formula that worked well enough through the 'Seventies with shows such as Man About the House, Robin's Nest, and George and Mildred may have been worked to death but ITV remains as devoted to the old sitcom style as Norman Bates was to his mother in Psycho.

And not even Master Bates kept wheeling out his mummified mum for public inspection. For ITV's light entertainment departments, though, a grin is a grin, even if it's the result of rigormortis.

Recently Greg Dyke of TVS railed against the preponderance of northern comedies on the ITV network, going as far as to cite what might be termed the Mollie Sugden Syndrome.

Well, tonight on ITV, the latest Mollie Sudgen vehicle gives way to a new LWT comedy set in London.

Anyone hoping for a cranking up of the intellectual pitch will have to struggle a little to contain their disappointment. Running Wild is straight twitcom, with Ray Brooks as the latest in a long line of menopausal males wondering what happened to their lives that once went round at 78 rpm.

This character is a clot. Lovable but a clot. His wife and daughter are long-suffering but understanding. Isn't this where we came in? No matter. In the undead world of Old Sitcom, Pratman lives.

With shows like A Fine Romance, Hot Metal and Agony, LWT has in the past proved it can produce an out-of-the-rut comedy - but Me and My Girl is its current high-water mark. (A discreet veil, if not a mortician's blanket, should be cast over the Cannon and Ball excursion into sitcom.)

Satire

LWT's confederates do not offer much that is better: Thames once the Monday night sitcom specialists, trundle on with Man About the House, retreads like Full House or Never the Twain.

Executive Stress proved to be a cut above the average, thanks mainly to Geoffrey Palmer and Penelope Keith, but there is little else in the LWT/Thames comedy output to reflect the fact that they serve an area with a high concentration of AB viewers.

Yorkshire drained the last drop of Duty Free; Granada who did break new ground with Brass have recently retreated to the familiar with The Brothers McGregor; Central can brandish Girls On Top, though this was nearer The Young Ones than sitcom, but are also guilty of making Trouble and Strife.

The BBC is by no means perfect (after all it did make the retrogressively chauvinist Brush Strokes) but the gap that is now opening up its more progressive and contemporary comedies and ITV's output is illustrated by a compatison of two Richard Briers vehicles.

Writers

Thames's All in Good Faith, which has Briers as a clergyman-about-the-house character, is a pulpitcom like a revised version of Bless Me Father, with knit one, purl one humour that is similarly dated.

Ever Decreasing Circles, on the other hand, is much more of today, with grace notes of social observation, showing what can be produced from the comedy keyboard when writers and cast are allowed to play with the black notes as well as the white.

The ITV companies might excuse themselves on the grounds that they cannot find enough good comedy writers; the writers they have will complain that it is far more difficult to write for the 23 minutes of an ITV sitcom with its commercial breaks, than the 29 minutes of a BBC show.

It will not have escaped anyone's notice though that there are more laughs in five minutes of shows like Rumpole, Minder and Auf Wiedersehen Pet than an entire series of Troubles and Strife.

Rumpole and the others are classified as drama (to help fulfill the IBA's drama norms). It might be a step forward if the ITV companies were to take comedy away from their light entertainment departments and hand over to the drama producers. Or anyone else who knows that it is 1987 not 1977.

Comedy is too serious a business to be left to people who make game shows.

Page 10 of Today, Wednesday 22nd April 1987:

Pervert teachers scrapped by ITV
by PAULINE WALLIN

ITV has scrapped plans for a second series of the controversial school Hardwicke House, and the decision has cost £500,000.

Executives at Central TV, who made the show, were so confident it would be a success that they booked the cast for more episodes before the first series was screened.

But the programme lasted only two episodes after viewers objected to seeing teachers portrayed as drunks and perverts.

Now Central are left with the bill for actor's fees and location bookings.

The series, shown at peak viewing time, was shelved with a promise from Central that it would come back late at night.

But after two months a slot still has not been found.

Yesterday Hardwicke House co-writer Simon Wright said: "I think Central over-reacted by taking the show off.

"The first two episodes had more than nine million viewers, which is extremely good for a new show.

"Yes, people complained about the way teachers were portrayed, but everyone wanted to watch it."

From the Birmingham Daily News, Wednesday 20th May 1987:

School comedy is finally axed
Central faces TV classroom jury
by LYNNE POWELL

THE angry author of the controversial TV comedy Hardwicke House has caned Central for dumping the series for good.

Central said yesterday the show, starring Roy Kinnear, will not get a second chance even though a later slot was promised when the series was axed from family viewing time last February.

Co-author Richard Hall, who was writing his first TV series, has slammed the TV station for chickening out.

"You are talking about a whole TV station that didn't foresee any problems during the making of the series. Now it's suddenly all changed," said Mr Hall, a London history teacher.

"The moral seems to be that anytime you object to any little thing in a programme, you get a few of your friends to ring up and the TV company will take it off."

Roy Kinnear starred as a boozy headmaster in the black comedy set in a chaotic comprehensive school staffed by bullying teachers.

After the first two episodes were screened at 8 p.m. and 8.30 p.m. in February more than 200 people called Central's switchboard to complain. More than 8.7 million tuned in for the second episode.

Central immediately took the remaining five shows out of the schedule and yesterday decided to forget them for ever - even though they had booked and must pay for a second series.

From the Daily Record, Saturday 13th June 1987:

TV school spoof takes a caning

TV bosses have given themselves six of the best over a classroom comedy that backfired.

For it has been decided that the controversial series Hardwicke House just isn't funny enough ever to be screened.

And it means that the finances of Central TV have taken a caning, because it's reckoned that scrapping the black comedy could only have cost about £2 million.

Originally the series, which starred Roy Kinnear as the drunken head of an unruly school, was shelved after only two episodes.

Then it was said that the other five episodes would be shown at a late night slot later in the year.

But yesterday Central TV's programmes boss Andy Allan said that Hardwicke House has been expelled from the screen for ever.

Page 13 of the Sun, Saturday 20th June 1987:

School's £1m wipeout
By TIM EWBANK

ITV watchdogs have blocked an attempt to get controversial axed comedy Hardwicke House back on the screen.

And in an almost unprecedented move, the Independent Broadcasting Authority have ordered makers Central TV to WIPE their tapes of the show so it can never be seen. The series, set in a Midlands comprehensive school, with Roy Kinnear as head, ended in February after just two episodes.

Angry viewers complained after watching sex-mad schoolgirls trying to seduce teachers, and pupils running riot. Central, who helped to screen the rest of the series late at night this summer, are doubly furious at the ban.

For they have already commissioned a second series - and will have to pay the cast even though the shows won't be made.

An insider said: "That's about £1 million down the drain."

Page 15 of Television Today, Thursday 9th July 1987:

Shock order to 'wipe out' show leaves Central counting the cost
HARWICK HOUSE TAPES DESTROYED
EXCLUSIVE
By ANGELA THOMAS

THE ROW over the controversial ITV comedy series Hardwicke House raged on this week when a senior Central executive revealed that the company had been forced to destroy all traces of the series.

Angry Central officials' hopes of salvaging something from the disastrous situation either by selling the series to foreign buyers or showing it here in a late night slot were dashed when they received the precedented order to wipe the tapes of the show.

The order, which we are told came from 'high up in the IBA', is the latest turn in a surprisingly well orchestrated campaign for the series to be scrapped which seemed to begin within minutes of the showing of the first episode in February this year.

Sources within Central maintain that it was unhappy from the start about the early evening slot it was given for the show which had been conceived as an answer to the BBC's highly successful Young Ones.

"For some reason the network seemed determined to market it as another Please Sir or Fenn Street Gang and that just wasn't the case. This was an adult comedy series not meant for screening before 9am," said Central's Jon Scoffield, one of the men responsible for the series.

Talking for the first time about the rapid scrapping of the series Scoffield said: "I still maintain that had the series been given a chance to run at the right time it could have gathered the same kind of cult following as the Young Ones - now we will never know."

The original reason for pulling the series off after just two episodes was given as the strength of public outrage against the against the show which was set in a Midlands comprehensive school.

But even then it was privately thought within the industry that pressure from within the IBA and possibly from the Government was the real reason behind the unprecedented speed and severity of the reaction.

"Obviously there were complaints - there always are with this type of show, but we've also had a lot of support and I'm still getting letters from teachers claiming it was fairly authentic and offering stories which were even more outrageous than the ones we actually used in the programme," said Schoffield.

The seven part series starred an impressively experienced cast headed by Roy Kinnear, Roger Sloman, Tony Haygarth and Nick Wilton and one of the future episodes was to have featured Young Ones' stars Rik Mayall and Ade Edmonson as anarchic old boys. And Central were apparently so pleased with it that it not only gave the show a big pre-publicity build up but was also believed to be preparing to commission a second series.

Central is keeping the cost of the series under wraps but it is believed to be thousands of pounds out of pocket.

"I've never known anything like this before. When the series was shown it seemed like all hell had broken loose, and the order came from high up in the IBA to get it off. Obviously it must have offended someone very powerful, the pressure was incredible - they were down on us like a ton of bricks," said a Central source.

"To follow that up with the order to wipe the tapes shows that maybe the series hit a raw nerve somewhere," he said.

As an update to the above, it's worth noting that in 1993 the Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford (now the National Media Museum) tried to obtain one of the unaired episodes of Hardwicke House for their TV Heaven exhibit. They were told not that such tapes didn't exist, but instead that Central were unsure about donating for viewing something that was unbroadcast - which rather suggests that Central lied to the IBA in 1987, and in fact hadn't wiped the tapes at all. Indeed, the TV Heaven programme notes for Hardwicke House state that Central continue to offer the complete set of seven episodes for sale to foreign television stations.