Bad Show, Goons

Glam Metal Detectives

Wed, 09 May 2007 20:46:08 +0200

Page 3 of the Observer, Sunday 5th February 1995:

Pace of viewing speeds up for the short-attention generation
Channel surfing package zaps the sitcom

IT IS being billed as the first television comedy for the short-attention generation - a rapid-fire, 'channel-switching' skit on television at its most awful, writes Peter Beaumont.

Imagine Scooby Doo crossed with The Monkees, then intercut with fake advertisements and clips from bogus films - including one which recasts Michael Caine's Harry Palmer character from The Ipcress File as Sir Lancelot.

Glam Metal Detectives, the brainchild of Peter Richardson from the Comic Strip, begins on BBC2 on 23 February and is full on contradictions. It is at once tailored to the younger audience brought up on MTV and Def II, while at the same time operating as a critique of the way audiences consume television.

Mr Richardson sees the model as much in the comic book format as in television, 'Because the viewer understand how television works, you can tell a joke in three lines instead of spending a minute-and-a-half.'

Mr Richardson recognises that many viewers have 'the attention span of a flea' and admits that the 'zapper culture' of multi-channel TV has informed the show's format.

However, he also believes that 'channel surfing' is bad for television. 'What people miss out on flicking, say, from a film to a football match is the boring bits of the match. But it is those dull bits that build up the excitement and sense of expectation.'

Three years in the making, six months in the editing suite and with a cast new to television, Glam Metal Detectives (the name is taken from one of its spoof shows) abandons the traditional format of the sitcom or sketch to present three seven to eight-minutes 'programmes' between staccato bursts of bogus advertisements and game shows apparently randomly sampled by remote control.

The detectives of the title set the tone: they are a Seventies glam rock band who travel the world by bus, saving it from childishly simplistic crises, their passage around the world designated in best cartoon style by the audience's changing hats.

This is also the ultimate expression of post-modernism in television - a show entirely informed by ones that have gone before.

The Glams' world is one of televisual and filmic clichés: London is a world of singing chimney sweeps, à la Mary Poppins; the Australian audience wears hats with corks.

It is the process noted by Neil Postman, of New York University, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: that as visual images supersede the printed text as the main vehicle for ideas, so culture is defined by a shared recognition of certain types of TV and film images.

This change in viewing patterns and approach has in part been pioneered by MTV, which claims an audience among the most 'visually literate'. According to Brent Hansen, president/creative director for MTV Europe: 'Young people understand the way these ideas work. They want ideas, but not in a didactic fashion, and are much more aware of the choice available to them.'

Not all are happy, however, with the increasing pace of television and the temptation to chop and change. According to Professor Mallorry Wober, of Bournemouth University, a psychologist who teaches on a media course, the way that the pace of viewing has changed with the eradication of the pauses between programmes has created an audience that is no longer allowed to dwell on the ideas of what they have just watched. 'You go straight from one programme into an advert, a trailer or another programme and its impact disappears. There is a strong argument, I think, for a five-second gap to allow people to reflect on what they have seen.'

From Time Out, 22nd February to 1st March 1995:

Rock with laughter

For the last 15 years Peter Richardson's main claim to fame has been his association with the Comic Strip films which he has written, directed and featured in, despite their identification in the public's eye with more famous colleagues like Mayall, Sayle and Saunders. Now Richardson stands at the crossroads of mega-culthood with 'The Glam Metal Detectives', a series that he has again devised, directed, co-written and acted in, These films, however, are this time devoid of the ultimately restrictive starry names.

'GMD' has all the ingredients to be a hit, particularly with the late-teen and student audience to which it most obviously speaks. Richardson says it's a 'TV comic', and bemoans the fact that it has taken over three years to develop and find its slot on BBC2's schedules.It's a pot-pourri of running sketches, waccy-baccy graphics, media piss-takes and a preposterous linking storyline which has a bunch of glam-rockers zooming around the world trying to save the planet's ecology through hit records. The group is constantly being attacked by evil media-genius Rolston Brocade (Mac McDonald) who in part two there is a bid to addict another to a canned drink called 'Splat!', which turns people into sex-crazed egomaniac at a burp.

But while 'GMD' forms the core of the series the remaining time is filled by group-writing projects of varying success: there's an amusing feature called 'Colin Corleone' about an undersized, unemployed south London nobody who lives his life as the Godfather; 'Betty's Mad Dash', which splendidly parodies 1920s escapade-flapper movies; 'Call Mickey', in which a parody black stud will, for example, roger your wife and take out the rubbish if you're too tired to do it yourself; and 'Bloodsports', in which pursuits like house repossession, bare-knuckle fighting and ram-raiding are treated as if they were events on 'Match Of The Day'. I've seen the first three episodes and the series is definitely a grower. The woman in particular excel, notably Doon MacKichan, who is already well known from her work with Steve Coogan and shines in a chat-show send-up called 'The Big Me'; and the stunning Sara Stockbridge (see Hotshots, page 5) whose genuine gift for comedy is more than matched by legs longer than the Eiffel Tower's. Unfortunately the males don't have the same high profile, although the drummer is played by the excellent Phil Cornwell who does the best Jimmy Hill impersonation on planet earth, and the guitarist-vocalist is Gary Beadle who doubles up as sex-machine Mickey. The funniest gags aren't always the most original - Mick Jagger as Hamlet had me throwing up on the carpet but may leave you cold. One to track. Definitely. Steve Grant

'The Glam Metal Detectives', 9pm, BBC2

Comments

Censorship, Controversy and General Complaints

Wed, 02 May 2007 10:42:43 +0200

From the Sun, Saturday 18th April 1975:

Black Mark for Golden Goodies
By MARGARET FORWOOD

THE GOODIES, those Golden Boys of television comedy, have been ordered to make last-minute changes in their next show.

The programme, due to go out on Monday, pokes fun at racialism in South Africa. BBC top brass have ordered the Goodies to remake two scenes.

Have The Goodies been censored?

"No," said a BBC spokesman, "nothing has been taken out of the programme."

But the two scenes had to be re-written and re-filmed at the last-minute.

Why the sudden panic?

"Well, programmes are sometimes made that way," said the spokesman carefully, "we have nothing to say about that."

It all seems a bit mysterious. Especially since The Goodies say they were given a simple explanation.

Goody Tim Brooke-Taylor told me: "We were told that the scenes weren't funny enough. So we did them again and put in a few more jokes."

The story is about a South African Tourist Board official - played by Philip Madoc, one of television's favourite villains -who persuades The Goodies to make a film for the board.

Leave

The idea is to encourage more white people to go to South Africa. Instead the film makes all the coloured people leave.

This means the whites have no one to work for them. So The Goodies invent Apartheight to take the place of Apartheid, which segregates tall people from short.

In their new world, tall people are the bosses. Short ones are the servants.

And, of course, Goody Bill Oddie is short.

Brooke-Taylor, 34, explained: "The problem is that when you are dealing with a serious subject like this, you first have to set up the situation of racialism and segregation.

"And the scene-setting wasn't funny enough."

The Goodies have a reputation for producing lightweight family fun.

Brooke-Taylor said: "We are not a crusading programme, but we deal with real subjects."

In 1973 they had problems with a show where Bill played a pop star and became corrupted by the glitter of the pop world.

That was taken out of the series - and given a late slot.

Months later, it was shown at an earlier time.

With a few cuts.

Somebody up there seems to be keeping a watchful eye on those Goodies.

Page 11 of the Sun, Tuesday 19th March 1984:

TV STARS RAGE AT DIRTY JOAN
By PETER BOND

TOP comics blasted Channel Four yesterday for not censoring Saturday night's shock TV-special starring Joan Rivers. They claimed the American funny girl was too "blue and outrageous" for family viewing.

Bob Monkhouse, Bernie Winters and Jon Pertwee all said they were astonished the one-hour show, recorded before a showbiz audience, went out at 9.30 virtually uncut.

And Tommy Cooper said: "It should at all. It was very naughty."

Channel Four said: "We've no regrets. We had very few complaints."

Page 6 of the Sunday Express, Monday 17th June 1991:

Anger at BBC comic's cancer send-up
by Michael Towers

OUTRAGED TV viewers flooded the BBC switchboard last night after a stand-up comedian mocked victims of throat cancer.

Millions of viewers saw American comedian Denis Leary open the bill on BBC1's Paramount City - pretending he was using a voice box.

He joked it would be "great" if everybody in a family had to use voice boxes so they all sounded the same.

One viewer who complained to the BBC was Brian Slater, 44, of Matlock, Derbyshire. He recently lost a sister through the disease.

He told the Sunday Express: "It was diabolical. He was trying to poke fun at people who are very ill.

"He pulled a microphone beneath his chin and started making noises.

"He sounded like the actor Jack Hawkins who had to use a voice box after he had an operation. The BBC should be sent packing."

Viewer Helen Davis of Muswell Hill, North London said: "It was very upsetting. He said he would love to have a tracheotomy so he could smoke two cigarettes at once."

A BBC spokesman admitted there had been complaints and said: "Naturally we regret if any of our viewers were offended by this comedian;s style of humour."

Page 23 of the Daily Mail, Friday 30th August 1991:

Barry's rude awakening for TV bosses

A BARRY HUMPHRIES television special which cost £200,000 may be banned because it contains too many jokes of a graphic sexual nature.

The show features Humphries's bile-spewing alter ego Sir Les Patterson, the so-called Australian cultural attache, and was to have been transmitted on ITV later in the autumn season. It was recorded at the London Weekend Television studios in front of an audience, and some who saw it have told me that it is the most offensive material they have ever had to sit through.

Executives at LWT's light entertainment department are now trying to salvage footage from the programme, A Late Lunch With Sir Les Patterson, that might be deemed suitable to broadcast.

But, I am told, they may be left with very little that they can screen at a reasonable hour.

One gag 'Sir Les' recounts in the show, concerning the disposal of bodily secretions, can never be shown because it is disgusting and way over the top.

'I think Barry just got too carried away and realised too late that he was exceeding the bounds of what is acceptable on television, no matter what hour it is to be shown. Now I think LWT may have to scrap it or, if they've got enough suitable footage, show it after 11 at night,' an associate of the comedian told me.

However, I gather that the 'Sir Les Patterson' incident has not affected Humphries's £2million contract with LWT. Humphries and his producers are planning a game show to be hosted by his housewife-superstar chum Dame Edna Everage.

A special celebrity version of the game show has already been recorded in America for NBC Television featuring stars including Cher and Larry Hagman.

Page 20 of the Daily Mirror, Thursday 20th February 1992:

FURY OVER TV HANGING 'FUN'
EXCLUSIVE
By TONY PURNELL

THE sister of hanged Derek Bentley called last night for a ban on a TV comedy show which makes him a figure of fun.

Distressed Iris Bentley, 59, who has campaigned ceaselessly to get a posthumous pardon for her tragic brother, said: "It's too sick for words."

Controversial comics David Baddiel and Rob Newman will feature Bentley and his accomplice Christopher Craig in a running gag during a news series of The Mary Whitehouse Experience starting on BBC2 next month.

Craig and Bentley were convicted of the gun murder of a policeman in Croydon 40 years ago.

Craig had his finger on the trigger but escaped the gallows because he was only 16.

Bentley, who was 19, hanged because, it was claimed, he shouted: "Let him have it, Chris."

Baddiel, 26, said: "They struck me as the funniest two people this century.

"We joke that Bentley deserved to hang for using an ambiguous phrase in a critical situation.

"We get laughs over uncool linguistic errors."

But Bentley's niece Maria, 29, said: "We'll do everything we can to get this stopped."

Page 5 of the Wimbledon Guardian, Thursday 27th February 1992:

'Ban sick sketch about dead man'
By NICOLA DOWNEY

Iris Bentley has called for a ban on a television comedy show which includes a joke sketch about her dead brother, Derek.

Shocked Iris, from Colliers Wood, who is campaigning to clear her brother's name, said the sketch is "sick".

It is expected to be shown in a new series of BBC2's The Mary Whitehouse Experience starting next month, but Iris wants it scrapped.

Her brother was hanged in 1953 for his part in the murder of a policeman on the roof top of a Croydon warehouse, even though 16-year-old accomplice Christopher Craig pulled the trigger.

Bentley is supposed to have said: "Let him have it" and the comedy gag jokes that he deserved his punishment for using such an uncool and ambiguous phrase.

But Iris and her campaigners are calling for it to be stopped and are planning to talk with the show's bosses.

"They think its very funny situation. From what hear of it, it's in very bad taste," said campaigner, Neil Churchill.

"We have been in touch with the BBC and the head of light entertainment and we want it pulled.

"We believe it's still in the writing stage. For a start it's not based on evidence and just makes fun of the situation. It could damage the chances of getting a posthumous pardon," he said.

The campaigners are still hoping to meet with Home Secretary Kenneth Baker to discuss Derek's case in the near future.

A spokesman for the BBC said: "It is a surreal sketch which illustrates the ambiguity of language."

"However, at present it is still not possible to say if it will be included in the scripts," she said.

Page 15 of the Daily Star, Saturday 11th July 1992:

WHITEHOUSE TEAM TOLD: CLEAN IT UP!
Foul-mouthed duo censored

EXCLUSIVE by NIKKI MURFITT

THE cheeky duo behind the Mary Whitehouse Experience have been ordered: Clean up your act.

Telly bosses are so alarmed at Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis's brand of humour that they have forced them to cut swear words.

And they told them to curb their near-the-knuckle in their new show, Me, You and Him, to be screened later this month.

To ram home the message, worried bosses at Thames TV sent the lads a SEVEN-PAGE letter, telling them to:

? CUT out frequent use of the F-word and slang words insulting to women.

? CUT down on less offensive everyday swear words, such as bloody hell.

Thames TV bosses have defended the decision to gag the duo's effing and blinding.

A spokesman says: "We have an A and B list of swear words, which we use as a guideline for programmes, and writers must comply with it.

Strict

"The B list contains words like bloody, while the A list contains stronger language.

"Changes had to be made to the script because there were words which fell into category A and these are not acceptable in a show going out at 8.30 p.m."

Steve Punt says: "They've been pretty strict. We've been left with only a couple of bloodys and a b* in each episode.

"One sketch had to be completely re-shot."

A spokesman for the other Mary Whitehouse's TV clean-up campaign said the Thames TV censorship was "excellent."

Page 13 of the Daily Express, Saturday 26th December 1992:

BBC show will mock the dead

THE BBC is braced for a flood of complaints about a New Year's Eve TV show mocking dead celebrities.

The Australian-based Doug Anthony Allstars perform an impersonation of blind, deaf and dumb genius Helen Keller, whose life story inspired an Oscar-winning film.

They also imitate singer Karen Carpenter, who died from the slimmers' disease anorexia nervosa and dance to songs including Do The Dead Elvis. Last year their live album was banned by British censors. "I was very surprised when BBC2 said they wanted to put them on," said producer Geoff Posner.

"They do the sort of act that will offend just about everyone. The impersonation of Karen Carpenter is just a long, thin microphone stand."

BBC2 controller Alan Yentob is said to have won a show for the comics after seeing them at the Edinburgh Festival.

"It wasn't an easy decision," said Mr Posner. "Everyone at the BBC is holding their breath."

Page 19 of the Daily Mirror, Sunday 23rd April 1995:

DEE-VOLTING!
TV bosses pull plug on Jack's sick electric chair sketch

EXCLUSIVE by YORK MEMBERY

AT THE flick of a switch, comic Jack Dee sends thousands of volts surging through a Death Row prisoner's body.

The sketch, from Jack and Jeremy's Police 4 to be aired next Friday, is typical of hard man Dee's grim humour.

But we will never see it. TV chiefs have deemed the routine too controversial to screen after British-born killer Nick Ingram's execution in the electric chair.

"The powers-that-be at Channel Four got cold feet," says an insider.

"They feel it would be in poor taste to air the clip so soon after the event."

The humorous series sends up shows such as Crimewatch and features Dee and fellow stand-up comedian Jeremy Hardy as special constables.

In the offending sketch, Dee invites viewers to call in if they want to see a prisoner on Death Row "chaired or spared".

Tiring of the debate, he hits the switch and says: "Let the bastard fry".

Ingram, 31, was the first Briton to be executed in America this century. He lost his life at Jackson State Jail in Georgia for the murder of military veteran JC Sawyer.

Ingram tortured and shot Sawyer after a bungled burglary 12 years ago.

Ingram's mother Ann, from Cambridge, suffered the ordeal of seeing her son's last-minute reprieve overturned.

He was executed by a 2,000-volt blast of electricity.

Jack Dee is on tour in Australia and was unavailable for comment.

Co-star Hardy said: "Both Jack and I disagree with capital punishment and the sketch was our way to highlight the issue.

"Ingram certainly seemed guilty, but his execution was horrifying.

"The scene was shot before the execution took place - but I agree that to show it in the light of his death would now be insensitive."

Page 7 of the Daily Telegraph, Friday 23rd May 1997:

BBC pays libel damages over TV comedy
By Alison Boshoff
Media Correspondent

THE BBC has paid undisclosed libel damages to the Outward Bound Trust after it portrayed a course instructor as a "deranged sexual pervert" in the Rowan Atkinson sitcom The Thin Blue Line.

The trust brought legal action against the BBC over the comedy and over a Radio 4 documentary that claimed the trust employed paedophiles in its adventure centres.

A BBC spokesman said both allegations had been the result of "grave error".

The trust, an educational charity, told the High Court yesterday that the allegations were without foundation and had caused massive damage to its reputation.

Godwin Butsuttil, for the trust, said its main object was to "help people live more fulfilled, worthwhile and productive lives by providing opportunities for personal development through challenging experiences in demanding environments".

Referring to an edition last year of the Radio 4 documentary File on 4 that dealt with paedophiles, Mr Busuttil said: "A statement which alleged that the trust had employed systematic paedophiles and child abusers was entirely without foundation and so caused great damage to its standing and credit."

The Thin Blue Line broadcast "falsely portrayed an Outward Bound course leader as a deranged sexual pervert. The BBC now accepts its grave error and recognises the considerable damage it has caused to the trust."

Comments

When Comedy Isn't Funny

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 10:24:33 +0200

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?

Comments

Absolutely

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 10:20:53 +0200

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.

Comments

Subliminal Messages

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 10:47:51 +0200

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?

Comments

The Young Ones

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 10:43:35 +0200

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...".

Comments

A Stab In The Dark

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:47:25 +0200

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.

Comments

Two Rons Are Out Of Order, Say The Krays

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:45:14 +0200

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."

Comments

Fury Over TV Poem On Cilla Murder

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:43:58 +0200

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.

Comments

Snakes And Ladders

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:41:20 +0200

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...

Comments

1987 - Hi-de-Hi / The Comic Strip Presents... / Filthy Rich And Catflap

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 17:15:35 +0200

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.

Comments

Hardwicke House

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 11:35:32 +0200

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.

Comments

Saturday Live

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 20:34:52 +0200

Page 13 of the Guardian, Saturday 25th January 1986:

Adam Sweeting on a nerve-wracking new comedy show

Jokes alive

HE CUT his teeth on the Two Ronnies, Blankety Blank and The Generation Game, but Geoff Posner says he's really "one of the Ready Steady Go! generation," and his memories of the kinetic Sixties pop show have left him with a strong and lingering desire to create live television. At 8.30 pm tonight, Channel 4 is broadcasting the first of eleven 90-minute shows called Saturday Live. The series London Weekend, is produced by Posner and Paul Jackson and features almost everyone you can think of in contemporary British comedy.

The obvious precursor of Saturday Live would appear to be NBC Television's Saturday Night Live, the American show inaugurated in 1975 which launched the careers of Chevy Chase, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, among others. Not so, says Posner.

"The idea for this came about when Paul Jackson and I worked on Carrott's Lib. That's when we developed a taste for doing long live shows. We decided it would be great if we could do a variety show for Saturday night - that wasn't the traditional kind of Saturday night variety show - using people who are on the cabaret circuit and other people we'd come into contact with through other programmes: Paul via The Young Ones and myself via Carrott's Lib, the Lenny Henry Show and Not The Nine O'Clock News."

Saturday Live uses a few regulars among a constantly shifting crew of performers, special guests and presenters, rather than a stable repertory company of players with a different host each week favoured by the American programme. According to Posner, "the problem with repertory groups is that they start becoming the reason for the show. We decided that we would start with the script first of all and then get people in as we wanted them."

The first show features guest hostess Tracey Ullman, Rik Mayall and Ade Edmonson as the Dangerous Brothers, the Oblivion Boys, John Wells, Ben Elton, erstwhile revivalist preacher Sam Kinison, Robbie Coltrane, and pop acts Squeeze, Fergal Sharkey and INXS. All the pop groups will play live in the studio.

The potential pitfalls are obvious. Put the cream of the nation's most volatile comedy performers in front of a live TV audience at peak time on a Saturday night, and who knows what the eavesdropping microphone might pick up? Ben Elton, whose recent writing credits include Happy Families and Rowan Atkinson's Blackadder 2, has been a stand-up comic for five years, but stills dreads his regular six-minute slot in the new programme. "Live television is without doubt the most nerve-wracking thing," Elton insists.

Host for show nine will be Peter Cook, a choice which reflects a desire among the Saturday Live team to present a broad spectrum of comedy and to avoid being typecast as yet another permutation of the Comic Strip/Young Ones faction. "Anyone who can raise a smile is welcome," says Ben Elton. "I'm absolutely certain that if Ronnie Barker wanted to do it we'd be completely thrilled. He's a genius performer."

Posner and Jackson have cast their net fairly wide. Posner made a trip to New York to check out the current series of Saturday Night Live and to investigate new young comics in the clubs, while Jackson headed for Los Angeles. They've located half a dozen American performers who they hope will find the Saturday Live climate congenial, though Posner was dismayed to discover that American television has the right wing watchdogs tugging at the seat of the trousers. He suspects there may be a similar climate brewing in Britain.

But isn't it the function of comedy to hit back against that sort of pressure?

"Yes. Oh, yes. But I think the moment government starts dictating what can and can't go on television, starting to comment on television, then I think we're getting into very dangerous waters. Spitting Image is probably under the political microscope more than we're going to be. But it seems to me we're being watched much more than maybe a couple of years ago."

Nobody is making any predictions about viewing figures. Eight-thirty on Saturday night has long been reserved for bland and unchallenging "entertainment", but Geoff Posner feels there are potential viewers who have been catered for hitherto. "We're saying that there is a younger audience, 15 to 35 say, who are around on Saturday night. Maybe they don't have anyone to go out with or maybe they don't want to go out. Well, they may like our programme."

Comments

Comedy Responds To Criticism

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 22:10:48 +0200

Page 7 of Today, Thursday 15th July 1993:

OLD KINGS OF COMEDY ON THE BBC'S SITCOM CRISIS

Why did the laughter have to die?
by DOMINIC MIDGLEY

IT WAS etched in stone: BBC comedies are the best in the world. Even though we've lost the Empire and the National Health Service has taken to its bed, the sun will never set on Auntie's sense of humour.

Well, that the theory. The truth is that chuckles are hard to come by in today's streamlined BBC.

The director general may have a mission to explain, but he doesn't appear to have a mission to raise a laugh. You have to go right down to number 37 in TV's top 50 before you come across a BBC comedy - and then it's a repeat.

In fact, all three of the BBC's light entertainment entries in the audience chart are reruns: Birds of a Feather, The Good Life and Open All Hours.

The golden age of British television comedy is well and truly over.

Critics round up the usual suspects - too many news people at the top, too little cash - but the root of the decline is an invasion by the men in grey suits of territory once firmly in the hands of the writers and producers with a direct line to the national funny-bone.

Ray Galton of the legendary Galton and Simpson partnership, who wrote for Tony Hancock and produced the classic series Steptoe and Son, recalls the late Tom Sloan, then head of light entertainment, offering 10 half-hour slots, saying: "You can do what you like." Rash? Perhaps. Unusual? Certainly. But it was this trust that produced some of the best TV comedy in the world. And there is no place for it in John Birt's bureaucratic BBC.

One of Sloan's successors was John Howard Davies, who left the BBC for Thames and is now an independent producer.

HE SAYS of the Sloan incident: "It shouldn't really happen like that, but then it was an experimental period.

"The BBC had much more money. Income from the licence fee was going up every year because of the introduction of colour and they could plough more resources and money into programmes.

"It was a golden era and thank God I worked in it.

"The main problem with the BBC at the moment is it seems to have lost its bottle in programme-making terms. Too many people have to agree before a programme is commissioned. Nothing is done on instinct, everything is done on logic."

Johnny Speight, who created Till Death Do Us Part, is working on a new series of In Sickness And Health. He reckons he is one of the lucky ones. And he sees this as part of the problem. "Maybe it's because the writers who wrote those shows aren't employed any more," he says. "Perhaps it's all down to ageism, the culling of the seniors.

"Part of all this political correctness: you can only work up to 45 and then you are put out to grass. I don't know whether younger people are cheaper or what.

"But it seems to me that a lot of young people are employed beyond their capabilities. Look at our Prime Minister.

"I remember talking to (playwright) Harold Pinter about how standards were failing, and he said the worst part of it was these were the standards the people coming into the business would be aiming at.

"Instead of raising standards, they seem to be more interested in lowering the fences so people can get over them more easily. It applies to drama and current affairs as well.

"There's a big rumour going around that it's the university mafia. They're all buddies and give each other work.

"I go round universities quite a lot and I find that all they want to do is be in the media. They don't seem to want to go into industry, the lifeblood of the country, any more.

"In the old days of showbiz, like in any industry, you'd have worked your way up from the bottom. But it doesn't happen that way now."

So what of the future? The BBC1 controller Alan Yentob has already made one contribution to the cause of quality programming by ditching Eldorado.

But many feel that the intellectual who arrived from BBC2 would be happier watching a Ukrainian art movie than sitting through Bobby Davro's Rock With Laughter.

"I can't really see Yentob being at home with the likes of Bruce Forsyth and Jimmy Tarbuck," says Galton.

"Not that most people would be, but it's just not his world. Birt looks like he should work for Abbey National anyway.

"In the so-called golden age of comedy, most people in positions of power were army captains.

"That was one of the things Hancock didn't like about the BBC - everyone had a military background. But it didn't stop them being responsible for good and popular shows.

"I AM pessimistic at the moment. The Beeb is not the Beeb I grew up with.

"Programmes used to have to fight to get ratings but they got them by exciting people. People rushed home to catch programmes and then talked about them all the next day.

"I overheard somebody from one of the ITV companies saying you don't need good programmes because you can market bad ones. I don't think people are such fools."

Page 7 of Today, Wednesday 21st July 1993:

Absolutely hilarious

Sitcoms dying? We're still laughing, says the BBC

LAST Thursday, in an article entitled "Why did the laughter have to die?", TODAY lambasted the BBC for the quality of its TV comedy programmes. We pointed out that its highest light entertainment entry in the TV top 50 was at number 37 - and that all three of its entries were repeats. We spoke to comic scriptwriting greats such as Johnny Speight (Till Death Us Do Part) and Ray Galton (Steptoe And Son) who argued that things are not what they were.

But here MARTIN FISHER, head of BBC Television Comedy, goes on the counter-attack in a vigorous defence of his regime...

SO THE Golden Age of Comedy is over. Well, all I can say is that it takes a long time for comedy to go bronze, let alone gold. Some of the comedies today hailed as classics would never have reached that status if they had been judged by just one series.

Dad's Army was originally shown to three separate audiences, all of which gave it the thumbs-down. BBC bosses disagreed and the rest is history.

Only Fools And Horses was at first believed to be "too downmarket" for BBC audiences - but a second series was commissioned nonetheless and the programme has gone on to become a British institution.

Its creator, John Sullivan, believes that ITV wouldn't have had the confidence to back a second series.

"The BBC has the courage of its convictions," he says. "It transmits second series of comedies to give them a chance to catch on with the public.

"If Only Fools And Horses, One Foot In The Grave, Blackadder and Dad's Army had all been ITV programmes, they would been killed off on the showing of their first series."

No, comedy is still king at the BBC. One Foot In The Grave recently attracted more than 18 million viewers to BBC1, the Jennifer Saunders/Joanna Lumley comedy Absolutely Fabulous walked away with the BAFTA Best Comedy Award this year, and BBC comedy has dominated the BAFTA Awards for the past decade.

DAVID Renwick, the writer who gave us Victor Meldrew the "capped crusader" and folk hero of the Nineties in One Foot In The Grave, endorses Sullivan's point of view.

"The BBC is unrivalled in its ability to nurture programmes in which it has faith," he says. "It has the kind of creative scheduling that ensures programmes are given the best chance to build up audiences."

Johnny Speight and Ray Galton are right when they say that the BBC isn't the same as it used to be. Nothing is the same as it used to be. The BBC's comedy output must move with the times, while retaining its production standards, if it is to appeal to today's audiences.

David Renwick believes that there is a danger in having one foot in the past.

"I have the greatest respect for the work of Speight, Galton and Simpson, but comedy reflects the society we live in - and there has been a sea-change," he says.

"In my experience of working with the BBC, the climate is more receptive than ever to innovative scripts."

This autumn and winter will see the return of many comedies that have won viewers' affections, including Keeping Up Appearances, Waiting For God, Chef, Two Point Four Children, Birds Of A Feather, As Time Goes By and Last Of The Summer Wine.

There will also be six new comedies on BBC1 and a new series of BBC2 pilots harnessing fresh talent and scripted, in the main, by writers new to television.

The BBC has always had an outstanding record for attracting top performers of the calibre of French and Saunders, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmonson, Alexei Sayle, Victoria Wood, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.

Our situation comedies have produced wonderful characters such as Richard Wilson's Victor Meldrew, David Jason's Del Boy, Patricia Routledge's Hyacinth Bouquet and birds of a feather Pauline Quirke and Linda Robson.

JOHN Sullivan believes that it would be foolish to write off a wealth of comedy for the occasional failure. "I've spent 17 years with the BBC. although I've been offered more money from ITV companies," he says.

"I stay loyal because of the quality, commitment and love that the BBC puts into its productions. If there has been a poor crop occasionally, so what?

"You don't dismiss Manchester United for one lost match and you don't condemn Bordeaux for one bad bottle of wine."

● WHAT do YOU think? Write to TODAY, 1 Virginia St, London E1 9DB.

Pages 4 and 5 of Part Two of the Guardian, Friday 20th September 1996:

Britannia rules the waves...

No way, says American critic Elaine Showalter, who has spent a long miserable summer watching British television and its professional viewers

TUBBY PASSMORE, the hero of David Lodge's bestseller, Therapy, is a writer of a successful TV sitcom called The People Next Door. He is also chronically depressed. Tubby's cognitive psychotherapist thinks he suffers from a lack of self-esteem, and Tubby himself believes there's an epidemic of lack of self-esteem. "It was a time of hope ... when we were beating the world in the things that really mattered to ordinary people, sport and pop music and fashion and television."

I've thought about Tubby and his sitcom a lot. Pop music and fashion are holding their own. So what about television? Thirty years on, is England still beating the world? In a recent poll in London, 60 per cent said yes, probably thinking of Pride and Prejudice and other dramatic glories that carry on the golden ages. But American sitcoms are taking over the audience, and there is increasing evidence that British ones are worrying about the people next door.

I had planned to take a reality check, to do a British TV marathon, the way British TV critics hit New York and hole up in the Paramount Hotel with the zapper and a minibar of cold Buds. But there didn't seem to be any British TV to watch, or not as such. Coronation Street, to be sure, but otherwise five minutes of this, 15 of that, lots of American movies, sports, documentaries on the plight of the Israeli gazelle or sex among the very old.

I was fascinated, though, by the number of column inches devoted to previews, reviews, and opinions. The quantity of British TV criticism is in inverse proportion to the quantity of new British television. Many talented writers are writing about television, but few seem to be writing for it. The contrasts between tube and text suggest that there is a crisis at the moment is British popular TV. In a speech to this year's Banff International Television Festival, Melvyn Bragg argued that television was too infatuated with the present and that its "future growth must lie in a steady cultivation of the past". But most critics think that an obsession with the past is already the burden of British TV. As the Guardian's Stuart Jeffries has observed: "Many Britons are afraid of the present and want to wallow in the dimly remembered, perhaps kinder past."

Writers in the newspapers and magazines have been brooding or bragging about the differences between British and American sitcoms, TV, sports. Journalists disapproved of the Olympics - the patriotism, the commercialism, the unseemly hustle.

Of the success of American sitcoms, Nigel Planer said American audiences liked enterprise and equality between the classes, while "we want irreconcilable differences. Maybe because that's the way we feel - powerless. Also, you can't use smart heroes in British comedy. To be the hero of an American sitcom, you have to be smarter than anyone else." Simon Nye, the writer of Men Behaving Badly, says: "Modern American sitcoms are like stretch limousines: they're slick, expensive, and they go on for ever. A British sitcom is more like an old Triumph motorbike: magnificent when running properly, but hard work."

Television critics, though, noticed the hard work, sharp writing and strong casting that had gone into the success of Seinfeld, Friends and Frasier. Perhaps this success has something to do with the self-confidence expressed in American sitcoms - which, moreover, do not object to attractive actors. Nicholas Barber of The Independent admitted that Friends was very funny, despite its cast of "impossibly well-dressed, breathtakingly gorgeous, painfully witty" New Yorkers, and conceded that "a bit of physical beauty seemed a small price to pay" for non-stop laughs. In The Times, Brenda Maddox wrote: "The Simpsons tells you all you need to know about America today. Why can't someone do the same for Britain?"

Victor Lewis-Smith, of the London Evening Standard, is the most hard-hitting, principled, passionate TV critic in Britain today. He cares about television. It doesn't seem that he is writing about it until something better comes along. Unquestionably London TV reviewers are every bit as witty, gorgeous, and well-turned-out as their New York equivalents.

But overall I found British TV criticism a disappointment. How can the country with the finest cultural journalism in the world, with pop music critics who compare Charlie Watts to Samuel Beckett, continue to treat TV reviewing as badinage? At worst (need I mention A A Gill in the Sunday Times?), the chief qualification for writing about TV seems to be a sneering, dandyish contempt for the medium and its proletarian audience, and an overweening self-regard.

In my view, Clive James did British television a great disservice by establishing banter as the appropriate form for its critics. James set out a dismaying view of TV aesthetics in a collection of pieces for the Observer: "Television is not a medium - at least not in the sense that McLuhan and lesser pundits tried to call it a medium, with special properties shared by no other medium. Television is a medium only in the sense that a window is a medium. His view, which treats all television as shared event or unmediated experience, has prevailed.

His reviews show a preference for easy targets, such as the Eurovision Song Contest. Yet he was fussy about the way actors read Shakespearian verse, and got a lot of mileage out of Johnny Foreigner's funny accent, such as a Japanese TV correspondent reporting the royal wedding ("Royaroo Famiree is so exciting reahree"). Re-reading these reviews is a startling reminder of the casual xenophobia of the past, but otherwise doesn't teach much about the development of British television in the 1970s and 1980s.

So how will the latest British imports - both starting this week - work on American TV? The hilarious and sadistic One Foot In The Grave is much softer as a vehicle for Bill Cosby, but the show's premise is so clever it will probably work anyway. But I found Men Behaving Badly unfunny, charmless, and clumsily written, very different from Nye's witty novel. The production values seemed crude, and I couldn't understand the casting either - why would these men choose these women? NBC has made a lot of changes, particularly in putting together a Friends-style cast. But it still looks dire, clonking, and unsophisticated in the context of NBC's powerhouse comedy line-up. Let's not forget that American television has done versions of this good ol' boy, New Lad shows many times, largely without success. In 1995, cable network UPN tried out Pig Sty, about five men in a two-room Manhattan apartment. In 1996, Fox brought us Local Heroes, about four beer-drinking, marriage-dodging buddies in Pittsburgh. I suspect that another guy straining coffee grounds through his jockey shorts won't catch on either.

What I miss most about British television comedy these days in irony. You know it must be in trouble when the Times Literary Supplement runs pieces about the aesthetic of the native sitcom. I know that British journalism can't get through the week without invoking the myth of the unironic American. Simon Nye clings to this in the face of powerful contrary evidence. "Why," he wonders, "in a country, not known for its sense of irony, are two of the most watched shows Friends and Seinfeld, which ooze cool, knowing detachment?" Maybe, bro, because this treasured British belief that Americans lack irony is blinding you to the truth that we love it. Have you ever watched M.A.S.H, The Simpsons, Beavis and Butthead or David Letterman? Bill Bryson says that Americans are so devoid of irony that we haven't even got an equivalent term for "taking the piss". Hello? Has Bryson been in Yorkshire so long he's forgotten how to say "put-on", let alone "camp", "goof" or "riff"?

While British comedy writers are congratulating themselves on their superior sense of irony, American critics such as Andrew Delbanco describe irony as "the dominant style of contemporary American culture".

British television has produced some of the most innovative and influential contributions to contemporary TV programming, from Monty Python and The Singing Detective to Absolutely Fabulous. But TV irony needs an intellectually-committed cadre of TV critics to sustain it. We don't have anything approaching a poetics of TV criticism. The daily and weekly review columns could be doing more to educate viewers and to pressure stations to produce and retain quality programming. irony is the wave of the television future; why doesn't Britannia seize the chance to rule it?

Elaine Showalter is a TV critic for People magazine and Professor of English at Princeton University.

Page 9 of Part Two of the Guardian, Friday 27th September 1996:

Courage under fire

Simon Nye, the creator of Men Behaving Badly, responds to Elaine Showalter's assault on British television, which appeared in the Friday Review last next

I'M GOING to attempt to rebuff Elaine Showalter's hilariously jingoistic view of her native America as the new home of irony (Guardian, September 20). In so doing, I shall be defending Men Behaving Badly, which I write, against her criticisms and against the embittered rantings of the local TV pundit (Guardian, June 28 - must contact new cuttings service). Oh, what the hell, I'll also say something outrageously trenchant about the oppressive culture of criticism of Britain today (Guardian, every day), and comment on the transfer of the show to America (Guardian, September 23).

I am assured that the subject of Men Behaving Badly will then be closed, hopefully for ever. It is, after all, only a situation comedy about two rather dense men.

It is difficult to take Elaine Showalter's critique of British television seriously when she caricatures it as: "Five minutes of this, 15 minutes of that, lots of American movies, sports, documentaries on the plight of the Israeli gazelle or sex among the very old." This suggests either that she was tuned into Belgian TV by mistake or that she was watching the right channels but kept fainting for long periods.

Whatever your view of British television - and having watched Kilroy I'm not blind to its faults - this is a golden age of factual programming, when every week throws up a dozen quality documentaries. Given her preferences, Showalter would no doubt advice the BBC to divert all the money it spent on The People's Century and Fine Cut into one wise-cracking team-written sitcom because that's how much it costs to produce a few episodes of Friends or even - more to the point - Home Improvement.

And, I'm sorry, Elaine, but goddammit, we care about the Israeli gazelle, whatever it is.

She also foolishly attaches herself to the irony bandwagon at a time when everyone knows that we've had it up to here with irony. We've started sending irony back to the kitchen to be heated through. It could be ironic indeed if, just as American gets the bang of the Big I, everyone else is embarking on exciting new adventures like warmth, sincerity and plain-speaking.

But, sadly, the irony theory doesn't really stand up. How much irony was there in NBC's reinvention of the Olympic Games as the Games Featuring Lots Of Plucky Americans Competing Against A Few Annoying Foreigners? Not so much irony as plasticity. Or in the networks' continuing refusal to broadcast any programmes made outside its 51 states? Precious little irony in the great swathe of US programming from Beverley Hills 90210 to Melrose Place, in its daytime schedule or in the splurge of shows featuring helicopters racing across town in search of car crashes, killer fires or murder victims huddled in bundles oozing blood across the tarmac.

I exaggerate, as you do. Seinfeld, Friends, Letterman, Larry Sanders - these are television programmes that make life worth living, rustling as they do with a dry, peculiarly American intelligence. But the US version of Men Behaving Badly, and to a lesser extent the English one, is partly a reaction to that urban sophistication, and surely a worth while one. We're saying: Ok, we've agreed that we love lychees, and these are the best lychees in the world, but now let's go out and grab ourselves some bananas.

It's an overloaded market over there: Caroline In The City shares jokes with Ellen who is sleeping with Frasier and Murphy Brown, a close personal friend of Grace Under Fire, itself related to Roseanne, and so on. Much as I love comedy, maybe it's time to commission some documentaries.

But I hestiate to criticise. There is far too much of that going on already. It's heard not to agree with Elaine Showalter's perception that most British TV critics see themselves as personalities rather than reviewers. Stuart Jeffries (one of the few critics she commends) writes in the Guardian of Men Behaving Badly: "It has tapped into the zeitgeist and has won a ridiculous number of awards. It has become a national institution. No wonder I dislike it so much." Fair enough - I don't always like the show myself - but it is hard to imagine a book reviewer or a dance critic damning the subject of their review simply because people enjoy it in large numbers.

The critic-as-comedy-turn approach is fine if done well, and it is no secret among viewers and readers which of them does it badly. Special mention in this regard must go to Roy Hattersley, who has topped his regrettable performance in keeping the Labour Party in the wilderness throughout the 1980s by producing a TV column which is almost certainly ghosted by a 12-year-old schoolboy. Contrast Victor Lewis-Smith or Nancy Banks-Smith, who don't just know a joke when they see one, they can also write a joke.

I speak as someone who has been treated well by the critics and even learnt from them. Nevertheless it is hard not to feel that the real action is in making and enjoying the programmes. The drudgery, as in life, is in judging and disliking. If making a TV programme is like having sex (it's actually not quite that good), then being a TV critic is like having to come in afterwards and change the sheets. I may regret this analogy when I spend my twilight years reviewing satellite TV for the Brighton & Hove Gazette.

Comments

Canned Laughter

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 23:59:28 +0100

It wasn't until after typing them up that I realised that most of these articles actually have little or nothing to do with the theme of canned laughter or laughtracks, but as they are interesting regardless they're being posted.

From The Guardian, Saturday 9th April 1977:

Oh no, it's real

Sir, - In Peter Fiddick's column (March 29), he made statements that "canned laughter" was used in a recent edition of Oh No It's Selwyn Froggitt.

The phrase, "canned laughter," seems to be bandied about indiscriminately in this context. Let me make it clear now that we do not possess some magic "can" of uproarious laughter, or applause, or whatever, which can be injected at will into programmes.

The only audience reaction, whatever it is, heard on Oh No It's Selwyn Froggitt is that of the audience present in the studio.

Duncan Wood,
Head of Light Entertainment,
Yorkshire Television Limited,
London.

From the Daily Mail, Saturday 9th April 1977. By Jenny Rees:

ONCE upon a time a joke was only a joke when it got a good round of spontaneous laughter. A bad joke got none.

Now, with television, there isn't such a thing as a bad joke. With the help of canned laughter, one of America's less savoury exports, and nicely warmed-up studio audiences, every gag is a winner - whatever it's worth.

We don't use a lot of the canned variety in British television. The BBC never has done, and the Annan Report reprimanded the independent companies for not following suit.

Coachloads of willing volunteers from sports clubs and women's institutes are wheeled into the studios and really do laugh out loud.

Sometimes, of course, they don't - though you'll never get a television company to admit it.

Guffaws

Thames TV's Head of Light Entertainment, Phillip Jones, says that if they don't laugh it's usually for some technical reason - a camera has moved or a boom is in the way. Then the few laughs get 'sweetened' or strengthened up by the sound engineer.

But none of it is strictly what you'd call spontaneous - every audience is jollied up before the show starts by a warm-up man - and, to some people sitting at home, the sound of the assembled coach parties guffawing away is intensely irritating.

Stands have been taken against manipulated laughter. Comedy writer Barry Took, in his year as Head of Light Entertainment at London Weekend Television in 1970, responded to viewers who had complained that the laughs distracted from the content of the programme.

He set out to produce two comedy shows without audiences. Both were dismal failures.

He chose two comedies that seemed to be more like drama than laugh shows - If It Moves File It, starring John Bird, and The Trouble with You Lillian, with Dandy Nichols and Pat Hayes.

Took remembers: 'I decided there were to be no yakking laughs, but my actors got decidedly disturbed without an audience. People tell jokes, even in pubs, to get a laugh, not silence. So I brought the audiences back, and everything was fine again.

'Almost exactly the same people who had written in to complain, wrote again to say how much they preferred the shows with an audience.'

He learned from that experiment. 'You don't have to have an audience screaming with laughter, but you do need some kind of feeling of exuberance, so that the viewers at home can share it.

'The studio laughter is the electric spark that bridges the gap between the actors and the viewers at home.'

Back in the days of Till Death Us Do Part. Alf Garnett's creator, writer Johnny Speight, took a stand against studio audiences, and remains a solid opponent. 'It's always been my contention that you can do without those people.

'I once had eight minutes taken out of a show, because the audience failed to laugh at the right moment, and I was furious. My words were the important part of the show. The laughs just got in the way.'

Bitter

He didn't win his battle against the BBC, but is left with bitter impressions about manipulated laughter in general.

'What I particularly hate is that American canned variety - I have the terrible feeling that half those people laughing died long ago. It's a chorus of dead voices.'

Impersonator Mike Yarwood is someone who's come a long way from the gag-laugh-gag-laugh routine. He's now got a very sophisticated, technically complicated act, some of which he has to do, unwillingly, without a studio audience.

'When I'm being six people at the same time, it takes about six hours of work to make six minutes of television. I miss the audience then. It's like working to an empty house.

'It's difficult to get your timing right without an audience. Timing is vital to a comedian. We show the recording of that six minutes to a studio audience, then record their reaction.

Booze

'Now that could be called phoney, but for me it gives atmosphere to the show. It would look very strange if you left a gap of silence for the laughs at home.

'Audience reaction is also marvellous for your morale. If you don't get a laugh, then you know the joke deserves to be dropped.'

Paul Fox, managing director of Yorkshire TV, says: 'Artists need that reaction for their timing, and to see that what they are doing is working. The producer needs it, too. It's the only audience he's got that he can use as a gauge.'

He feels the warm-up for a studio audience had become less of a fiasco than it used to be.

'In the old days, they used to get booze. That doesn't happen any more.

'You need someone, a warm-up man, even the producer, to welcome them, to get the used to the fact that they've come to be entertained.'

Flavour

BBC Head of Light Entertainment, Bill Cotton, says it's a tradition there not to dub laughter. His point about studio audiences is that kind of flavour to comedy shows.

'It's a change of gear for viewers. The applause and the audience reaction add to the enjoyment of the programme.'

No, they don't hold large white cards up in front of studio audiences saying 'Laugh' any more. They never did. They do tell audiences to shut up if they're laughing too much - and certainly sound engineers add a bit of volume when the laughs are not loud enough.

Shows with a young appeal are purposely not packed with coachloads of OAPs and the companies like audiences with an even male-female ratio.

It's been said that there's one lady who pops up regularly in comedy audiences with an instantly recognisable laugh. None of the companies is claiming her.

In the happy world of comedy, the quality of laughter is never strained.

Apropos of nothing, on the same page is the following:

ONE MAN'S RADIO WEEK
Bob Monkhouse
TALKING TO DAVID GILLARD

'I AM an absolutely devoted radio buff. I grew up with "Bandwaggon," "Hi Gang!" and "Happidrome".

It was the radio that first started me writing gags and, from the age of 11, I was regularly sending off material to comedians. By the time I was 16 Tommy Handley was occasionally using my jokes and, when he needed more, I'd get a postcard saying: "Wheezes, please. T.H.".

When I was 18 - and on a 36-hour pass from the RAF - I did a BBC radio audition which led to a spot on "Beginners Please". The next day I was a star (the radio made stars of people in the 40s in the same way TV made stars in the 50s) and I was soon resident comedian of "Showtime".

I feel the same sense of excitement doing a radio broadcast today as I did 30 years ago. Stimulating the imagination is radio's job. TV just delivers the goods and you either admire what you get or you don't.

Every room in my house if fitted with loudspeakers and there's an alarm on my wristwatch so that I know exactly when a programme is about to start. I have a quadrophonic system in the car and four tape-recording units at home (one fore each radio channel) so that I can tape all the programmes I'm not in to hear.

Library

Being an acquisitive being I now have an enormous library of radio drama and have taped every Shakespeare production in the past five years.

Today I'll probably get up at about 12 and catch "Two's Best" and then the first 15 minutes of "Jim The Great" (Radio Two) before going over to "Any Questions" on Radio Four. At 5.30 I'll hear most of "Week Ending" before switching to "Critics' Forum" on Radio Three.

My recording techniques come into effect later, because I want to watch "The Magic Flute" on TV so I'm forced to record the "Saturday Night Theatre" (Radio Four) and the beginning of "A Word In Edgeways", though I'll be able to hear the end of this after the "Flute".

On Sunday I'll start the afternoon with "Windsor Davies Presents" (Radio Two) and then go to my favourite programme, "The Leading Ladies". Then I can't miss Hubert Gregg and Charlie Chester afterwards which means I've got to tape "Disraeli's Reminiscences" (Radio Three).

In the evening I'll be tearing madly between Radio Two, Three and Four, just a normal radio weekend in the life of an addict - chaos!'

? Bob Monkhouse appears on 'Celebrity Squares' (ITV today) and reads the 'Morning Story' on Friday on Radio Four.

From the Sunday Mirror, Sunday 22nd January 1978. By Alan Shadrake and Angus Mayer:

SECRETS OF THE TV TRICKSTERS

MANY of Britain's TV comedy stars would rather not discuss it, but...

The truth is that the instant laughter that greets even the weakest gags on some British TV shows comes not from a studio audience - as you viewers at home are expected to believe - but out of a can.

It is pre-recorded on tape, then filed away until needed to be dubbed on to a TV comedy for transmission.

TV producers have many good reasons for adding canned laughter - and we'll come to those in a minute.

But underlying all is the hope that viewers at home, hearing an apparently "live" audience laughing their heads off, will be infected by their guffaws and laugh, too - perhaps even against their better judgement.

Benny Hill, Morecambe and Wise, Tommy Cooper, Frankie Howerd, and the Muppets have all had canned laughs added to their shows for technical reasons.

And nearly all TV shows pre-recorded in studios are pepped up with canned laughter.

As many stars are not keen on the subjects, we discovered the facts from TV's senior sound engineers, who were more forthcoming.

Free drinks

At Anglia TV, we were told they once invited viewers to their studios, poured them a couple of stiff drinks each - then recorded the subsequent hilarity.

The idea was to obtain a huge store of audience laughter to feed into shows.

A special bar was put up in the studio and by the time the guests were led into the recording room they were all suitably relaxed.

"They were given enough to put them in a fun mood and at the same time keep them responsible. We didn't want anyone to get out of hand," said an Anglia technician.

"The guests were shown a couple of comedies and we recorded the laughter to synchronise with the programmes.

"We can make the laughter sound better if we want to. For instance, the sound of fifty people can be made to sound like a hundred people by recording.

"Laughter is infectious. That's why a big audience is better than a small one. If one person laughs the others laugh, too.

"It's much easier to get a good reaction from 100 people than from six or seven.

"If you have one hundred people with a couple of drinks inside them, someone is going to laugh straight away."

Who decides how much laughter is to be dubbed in for a particular gag?

"The directors have overall responsibilty, but it is usually based on the judgement of the sound department," says Anglia. "They have a little room where they balance sound to get a natural blend."

One of Anglia's situation comedy programmes is the successful Backs To The Land, which has just ended its present series.

"A lot of the scenes were shot on location and it was impossible to have a studio audience," says an Anglia executive.

"The production crew have a standard laughter tape and the director decides where he wants it dubbed in.

"He pushes levers to create laughs where he thinks fit.

"You can get an inferior type of canned laughter - a continuous recording. You fade it up and down to emphasise parts of the film you think are funny.

"That's the stuff that really irritates - because it sounds phoney."

Canned laughter and applause, however, were used very successfully in Tommy Steele's last show, a costly Thames Television production.

All the effects to make it sound like a live show with an audience were dubbed in.

One scene alone had taken six days to shoot, so it would have been impossible to have had an audience present,

Arthur [obscured], head of sound at Thames, says: "We sometimes add a bit more laughter to a comedy show where the studio audience didn't particularly get a joke.

"It may be that the audience didn't hear it properly because they were looking at something else going on in the studio.

"Most situation comedy and light entertainment special productions, which take time to record, are given canned laughter for various technical reasons. The Benny Hill and Tommy Cooper shows have it.

"The BBC try to avoid dubbing but sometimes they have to cue it in, during a live studio production.

"We use canned laughter in comedy shows for technical reasons, not to try and make them funny afterwards.

"You can be fooled. I've watched shows I thought had canned laughter - but hadn't. Sometimes live laughter sounds like canned laughter, and vice versa."

Freddie Slade, one of Britain's top dubbing mixers, works for Thames TV. "Canned laughter can become so mechanical," he says. "It is abused more often than not.

"Sometimes it is not the big-name comedian but the warm-up man who comes on before him who earns the laughter you hear.!

Freddie explains. "The warm-up man tells a few jokes to the studio audience. Than, when the show is edited, the laughter he got is often dubbed into the screened version."

Some TV stars hate the idea of canned laughter. June Whitfield, who appeared in the BBC's Happy Ever After, says: "I find it irritating.

"It is not used in programmes I appear in.

"It is so phoney. The Americans are the worst offenders. I am sure it irritates viewers. Good programmes are often ruined by it.

"It takes a very special skill to know precisely when to dub in the right amount of laughter.

"Nothing turns me off a humourous programme more than hoots of unnecessary laughter in the wrong places."

Comedian Terry Scott, co-star with June in Happy Ever After, is even more forthright: "Canned laughter is sordid. Real laughter is infectious, but canned laughter tends to take away the viewers' willpower.

"They find themselves laughing at something they would not normally find amusing.

"I hate hysterical laughter. I prefer it mild, so it doesn't interfere with what I feel about a joke or comic situation.

"Canned laughter should be used only in very exceptional circumstances, where it is necessary to have atmosphere.

"I have heard canned laughter added at the feed-line to a joke. It spoils the whole thing."

Molly Sugden, of BBC TV's Are You Being Served and Come Back Mrs. Noah, says: "I think viewers sometimes get the impression that our programmes use canned laughter. We don't.

"We have an audience of about 500 people when we record the show. Sometimes one of us can be doing something amusing when the camera isn't on us,

"It raises a laugh with the audiences, but viewers at home can be left wondering.

"I think the use of canned laughter on some other shows is a pity.

"You either make an audience laugh, or you don't. If something is not funny enough to be laughed at it's not funny enough to be shown."

Nerys Hughes, of The Liver Birds, says: "We always have a TV studio audience when we are filming the show. The bits filmed outside, in Liverpool, are shown to the audience on monitor screens, between the live shots of us in our flat.

"The audience reaction to the outside shots, which viewers at home hear is therefore genuine, not canned.

"We never use canned laughter. I think shows that do have it are awful."

SOME TV stare use technical camera tricks to achieve new dimensions in entertainment.

Two who benefit from them are Dave Allen and David Nixon.

David Nixon, one of the elite Magic Circle, is a brilliant magician, but on TV some of his tricks are impossible.

Puzzled viewers have seen him appear to spoon water uphill, for instance.

John Eveleigh, a Thames TV senior engineer, explains. "The uphill water effect is achieved with a camera mounted on a trolley which swings at an angle and deceives the viewer."

Bernard Wilkie, head of the BBC's special effects department, has more than a hundred designers and technicians doing nothing else but develop new TV techniques. He says:

"In one Dave Allen show a car had to fall apart when a traffic warden slapped tickets on it. That was a difficult one. The car was rigged with hydraulic jacks and levers.

"The levers pushed the wheels off and a special spring device released the windscreen. There were about twenty-five separate mechanisms to do the tricks."

In another show, Dave Allen was sending up the Bionic Man. He met the Bionic Woman, they collided - and seemingly fell to pieces.

This effect was achieved through a clever technique known as Croma Key.

Dave and the Bionic Woman were draped in blue sheets with their arms and legs poking through.

Using a technical trick the blue sheets became invisible to the camera which registered just the disconnected limbs, apparently falling about.

Setting up tricks can sometimes lead to unexpected results for the effects experts. Martin Gutridge, of Special Effects Associates, recalls working on a Benny Hill show.

"Benny was playing an opera singer, and a huge vase was going to shatter when he hit a high note.

"My job was to make sure the vase shattered at the right moment. I fired small charges at it, but they bounced off.

"I fired all sorts of missiles from a catapult. Still nothing happened.

"After all else failed I shattered it with a sharp piece of granite."

Whatever technical tricks are achieved, some stunts still call for sheer guts.

Michael Crawford, who doesn't rely on camera tricks, performed a whole series of dangerous stunts which made BBC TV's Some Mothers Do Have 'Em so successful.

They were made possible only by Crawford's nerve, and the skills of Bernard Wilkie and his special effects team. "The stunts had to be clever and dangerous to hold the viewers' interest," says Bernard.

In one episode Michael hung to the bumper of a car rocking to and fro on a cliff edge with an 800ft drop below. It was filmed on location near Dover.

During the stunt Michael had to hurl himself over the car roof and grab the bumper on the way down.

As he swung in mid-air the boot fell open and a sack of manure poured over him.

"The old Morris we used a lot of special refinements," says Bernard. "I was underneath Michael, roped into the cliff, pulling levers.

"If Michael hadn't caught the bumper be would have gone crashing to his death."

THE picture on your TV screen is brutal. A rampaging army is burning, looting and raping.

You hear the roar of the flames, the smashing down of doors, the screaming of women.

The effect is horrific. The truth is less startling. It's an even bet that the director of the scene that set your teeth on edge has got his horror-sounds "off the peg" from a sound library and dubbed them into the film.

Let Charles Earle explain. He is a sound expert with Anglia TV.

Friends call him the Ear because, they say, "he has such finely attuned hearing that he can pick up the sound of a raindrop at three miles."

A historical series called Dark Ages needed the sounds of battle. "We had only four sounds, but we wanted them to sound like an army in battle," says Charles.

"Two men in the studio held a sword in each hand and clashed them against each other's swords for a couple of minutes. Then I multi-recorded the sound until it was like hundreds of men fighting.

"I got burning sounds from the sound library and borrowed a couple of office secretaries to do the screaming!" That was for the rapings.

On location in Africa, for a Survival documentary, the camera crew filmed an elephant bathing, but the sound was poor.

"I never like to be beaten," says Charles. "I threw a ground sheet across a five-barred gate and slung buckets of water at it.

"It produced just the sound we wanted."

One day Anglia's news editor received film of four brewery chimneys being blown up - but there was no soundtrack.

A quick search of the sound library unearthed a track of a brewery chimney falling.

"I re-recorded that sound four times, mixed it and sychronised it with the soundless film," says Charles.

Tens of thousand of sound effects are stored away in TV libraries, ready to give life to dull films.

Once in a while things go wrong. Thames Television dubbing mixer Freddie Slade tells how the sound of a tractor's engine was needed for a farming programme. "A chap went out and recorded one, and the sound was dubbed in.

"A few days after the film was screened we got a letter from an angry schoolboy complaining that the engine noise didn't fit that make of tractor.

"We double checked. He was right. We had blundered."

Mistakes are easy to make. One veteran dubber says: "Once we had a sky-lark singing merrily in what was supposed to be a January countryside."

From the Western Daily Press, Thursday 17th August 1978:

Why laughs come in cans
by Charles Fraser

WHAT makes you laugh on TV? Your favourite comedian? Some absurd situation that tickles your sense of humour?

More likely it's an electronic box of tricks looking like a cross between a typewriter and a harmonium, known in TV circles as the laugh-box.

"Hardly any pre-recorded comedy TV show, either in Europe or America, now has spontaneous laughter in it," says Rose K Goldsen, Professor of Sociology at Cornell University, and author of a new book on the inside secrets of TV.

Quota

'The laugh track is now as essential to television comedies as the gags and the music. A burst of happy and appreciative laughter every 30 seconds is now the normal quota for comedy series.

"Producers sat they just can't depend on an audience laughing at the right time. Imagine piping into 20 million homes a comedy show with just a sprinkling of week titters on the tape!"

So next time you hear a studio audience laughing helplessly at the antics of someone you find only mildly funny, don't automatically assume that your sense of humour is lacking.

The laughs are more likely the work of a technician sitting at the laugh-box, working its foot pedals and 36 typewriter-like keys.

Inside the box are loops of audio-tape with ten different types of laugh on each loop - about 400 categories, which can be combined in an almost infinite number of combinations.

Charles Douglas, head of Northridge Electronics, the American firm which leads the laugh-box field says: "Every conceivable kind of laugh has been preserved on these loops.

"From the producer's point of view, canned laughter is preferable to the real thing.

"One reason that studio audiences can't be counted on to laugh properly and at the right time, is that they can hardly see the performers.

"Much of the time, cameras obscure their view, and they have to follow the action on monitor screens.

"And often a show may be recorded in sections, perhaps starting at the end and working towards the beginning!"

Some shows, using the laugh box to liven things up, are taped before two live audiences at the dress rehearsal and the final performance.

Then the finished product is put together from the better bursts of laughter, regardless of which gags caused them.

"It's known in the trade as sweetening a show," says Irving Waring, who operates the laugh box at ABC television headquarters in Hollywood.

"I enjoy doing it. I work on the script with the comedian before the show and during rehearsals.

"The whole idea of television is to be entertaining, and the people sitting at home want to feel they're laughing with somebody."

Why are TV bosses so reluctant to televise a joke with no laughter?

"The ear of the viewer is attuned to expect instant reaction," explains a spokesman for Britain's Thames Television network.

"So if they don't hear studio laughter they get the feeling that things aren't going so well."

What do the stars think of canned laughter?

"It doesn't appeal to me at all," says British comedy star Max Bygraves.

"I'm still old-fashioned enough to prefer applause that's actually made by hand!"

From the Guardian, Saturday 19th September 1981:

The BBC has decided to put out its latest comedy series without any recorded laughter to go with it. Peter Fiddick reports.

Stop it, you're killing me

THERE is a clearly detectable air of apprehension around the BBC's comedy department, about its newest creation. They are worried about the lack of laughter - but not ours. Theirs.

It is not the producer: the highly experienced Dennis Main Wilson thinks it's funny, all right. Besides, toilers in the BBC television comedy department are well used to nursing their babies against the initial disdain of an audience, appearing not even to notice the ruderies of mere critics and quite and quite often being right.

It cannot be the cast. So many of our best actors have a crack at television comedy that it scarcely comes as a surprise to find such worthies as Norman Rodway, James Gossins, Hugh Lloyd, in supporting roles. But to have in the lead a chap who has been voted Best Actor Of The Year for his Hamlet, and won a Tony in Stoppard's Comedians, must beat par for the course. Roger Doesn't Live Here Any More had Jonathan Pryce in the title role. He's off to Hollywood now to make a movie.

Nor is the writer of the piece exactly an unknown quantity. John Fortune has currently been treading the boards himself again, in The Secret Policeman's Other Ball, and is about to start in a new play with West End aspirations, but in partnership with Eleanor Bron his writing has provided several series of wry, sly humour that have found some favour and certainly never courted disaster.

But the fact is, they are worried. And what worries them is not so much that we won't laugh, though that is part of it. It is that the programme itself is not laughing for us: Roger Doesn't Live Here Any More arrives - on BBC-2 next Thursday - without benefit of audience cackle. And that, in the theology and practice of television comedy, is heresy.

With very few exceptions, comedy series are made with an audience in the studio, and the accumulated wisdom of the laughter factories is, first, that the performers need it to get their timing right, and second, that we at home need to hear other people laughing, to nudge (nudge!) us into laughing ourselves.

If they do have to film a sequence - in a field, say, where the cows might lack the right sense of humour - then they show it to the studio audience later, and record the laughs. (Please don't talk about "canned laughter", though - it makes them terribly hurt.) We do, of course, enjoy comedy without laughter. Douglas Livingstone's marvellous Born and Bred did without it - but that came from a drama department. M.A.S.H. fans don't get it - but that is made all on film, and controllers of BBC-2 have always chosen not to use the laughter-track the Americans inflict on their own audiences. West End Tales, from ATV earlier this year, was a very rare example of a series coming out of a comedy stable, BBC or ITV, unattended by its audience.

But this one, everybody agrees, is different. Writer, producer, the head of comedy - John Howard Davies - all recognise it would not be the same, played before an audience. And it is not just the playing, but the writing that is affected.

"The truth is, that if you have got to have an audience, you have got to have laughs, and at frequent intervals", John Fortune says with some force. "You take a script into a comedy executive and the first thing he's liable to do is sit there, whipping through it, ticking the 'laughs'. If there aren't two or three a page, you have to provide them.

"I recognise that as a fact of life, but there are times when I wish I could stop the lift between the two floors at the BBC. You'd go into comedy department and they'd sit straight-faced, ticking your latest script, then up to see how the drama people liked the play and find them falling about, telling you how funny it was!"

Given the assurance that Roger Doesn't Live Here Any More could be done without an audience, Fortune, whose first solo outing as a writer this is, had the pleasure of nipping out the lines that had been consciously dropped in to provoke the necessary titter.

"But then you can write it quite differently, and the studio is liberated too. The audience takes more of the space than the sets, so they have to be limited in size and lined up so that they can all be seen at once. They have to be lit from the front, giving everyone that flat look, and the actors have to play to the audience and the cameras at once. Whatever the merits of my scripts may or may not be, it just looks and sounds altogether more subtle."

Even so, he is nervous. So is John Howard Davies, who took the final decision. "I am sure it is right," he said this week. "And I am sure it is funny. What frightens me is that, having tried, if it isn't an immediate hit, everyone will blame the lack of audience laughter, and we'll be right back at square one. Or further."

So perhaps this is the big opportunity for all of you who have groaned and raged about television's latest idiot cackles, all these years, to give a boost to the new, pure comedy.

On the other hand, perhaps I shouldn't have told you. You might never have noticed.

Page 25 of the Daily Mail, Friday 7th February 1986. By Herbert Kretzmer:

Uncanned, the secret of that corny laughter

'CANNED' laughter comes very high among the pet hates of television viewers. Few subjects I have raised have excited such a wide and furious response.

The majority of correspondents name The Two Ronnies and Yes, Prime Minister as persistent culprits. I recently invited the producers of both shows to assure this column's readers that the laughter on their shows was genuine and not manipulated.

The response has been a vast silence. Clearly there is something to hide.

But I have received a detailed and courteous letter from one of TV's best-known comic actors explaining the process which results in those outbursts of cackling mirth which so madden the public. His letter was marked 'Personal' so I will not name him.

He writes: 'Laughter on audience shows is always, in a sense, manipulated because it is recorded selectively by the sound engineer. There are various microphones above the audience. The engineer listens to each one separately before the show starts (a 'warm up' man gets the audience to laugh for this very reason.) The engineer picks out the best ones, the jolliest laughers, and so on, then locks all these individual mikes into one master control....'

My correspondent explains that the mikes are switched on at the end of a joke line, and switched off before the actor speaks the next line. 'If a shot has to be performed again, for any reason, the audience cannot be expected to laugh a second time, so the laughs from the previous "take" are used, though they may have to be chopped off or lengthened...'

I thank the comedian for his candour. His letter confirms that soundtrack laughter on British TV shows is artificial and cynically manipulated for best results. It is no a criminal offence but readers hate it.

Reginald G. Young of Midhurst, calls it 'this idiotic practice.' Michael Yarrow of Lilley near Luton, Bedfordshire calls it 'synthetic and distracting.' Mrs B. Slinger of Fleetwood, Lancashire writes: "The last edition of The Two Ronnies was unbearable.' Mr J. Haffey of Harrogate says: 'I had to stop watching Yes, Minister because of the lunatic laughter.' Mrs E. M. Lee of Nottingham calls it an 'abomination'. 'Maddeningly annoying,' says Mrs E. M. Deckin or Welwyn, Hertfordshire.

I could easily fill this page with such complaints. Will anyone take heed?

Page 27 of the Daily Mail, Wednesday 12th March 1986. By Herbert Kretzmer:

THE great debate about 'canned' laughter continues. Never a day passes without another fistful of protesting letters from readers maddened by the bursts of automatic cackling that now routinely accompany British TV comedies.

Soundtrack laughter is clearly one of the great hates of the British TV public. Only the BBC does not know it. On three occasions I have invited BBC producers and departmental heads to reply in writing to the wave of criticism.

The response, alas, has been a long and apparently sulky silence. However, my invitations remain open. And that goes for the ITV guys as well. All I want are the facts.

Other correspondents have not been so shy. Ronnie Barker wrote to say that a certain, but hardly criminal, amount of sound engineering does go on at TV comedy shows, especially when a scene has to be reshot. Composer Laurie Johnson saw no reason for studio audiences at all, since dozens of shows like the Laurel and Hardy comedies are regularly shown on TV without studio laughter, and do not suffer as a result.

A similar point is made, from an actor's perspective in an interesting letter from Nigel Hawthorne (Sir Humphrey in Yes, Prime Minister), who writes: 'In common with a number of my concerns I feel strongly that studio audiences are unnecessary. If an entertainment is designed for TV it is clearly a contradiction to invite an audience to attend. It turns it into a theatre performance. Encouragement from an audience tends to make the performer play up to them.

'And I find it wrong that 300 people, egged on to respond with maximum enthusiasm by the warm-up man, should decide for the audience at home what is funny or not.'

Although Mr Hawthorne finds studio audiences 'always unnerving and disruptive', he does not think there's much dirty work afoot when it comes to recording their laughter, although 'it may well be possible that the level of laughter is "fixed" in the control room.'

Comedy writer Richard Waring (Marriage Lines, My Wife Next Door, etc.), an experienced warm-up man himself, insists that studio laughter is not manipulated and is, furthermore a Good Thing. 'Studio audiences,' he writes, ' can be hell, but after 30 years of them I truly believe that they bring out the best in the best comedy writers and performers.'

Page 29 of the Guardian, Thursday 6th February 1992:

Putting a lid on canned laughter

Andrew Clifford warns that the oh-so-set-up comic sketch may be past its sell-by date

CANNED laughter is at best a mixed blessing. At times each short drone of hilarity seems not so much a response to the comedy as in cahoots with it; as though it were the guffaws of the comedians at their real-life audience. This feeling happens not so much in sitcoms, where the humour is less childish, but a lot in sketch shows, like the current run of A Bit Of Fry And Laurie on BBC2.

The uncanned viewer hasn't known whether to laugh or moan at this weak series of preppy, hectic sketches. In 10-second or three-minute bursts we've watched petrol pump attendants who used to be estate agents, silly linguists and, yes, a thriller spoof, to say nothing of vox pops where idiotic vicars, businessmen, and middle-aged women say dumb things to camera, "they way people do". Each programme ends with pianist Laurie playing mouth trumpet as Fry makes wacky cocktails.

Fry and Laurie are funny, talented men and everyone has off days (particularly when given complete editorial control). But judging from the empty feeling one also has had at the end of shows by Paul Merton, Alexi Sayle (an astonishing Monty Python rerun, right down to ad hoc sketch links and Angus Dayton's John Cleese lookalike), to say nothing (thankfully) of Josie Lawrence, it's clear that the problem lies more at the level of the sketch "form" itself.

Did we ever find sketches funny? A man walks into a shop. He makes an outrageously out-of-context demand. The shopkeeper expresses amazement. As the demand is persisted with, the shopkeeper gets angry. Things reach a dismal anti-climax with a non-punchline or symbolic violence. Next sketch. A man being interviewed. He makes an outrageous claim. The interviewer expresses amazement, etc, etc.

Despite music hall and the Goons, the sketch as we know it began with Beyond The Fringe, and as an agent of satire and absurdism it couldn't be bettered. The form peaked with Monty Python, who did whatever could be done, including self-destructing it. Subsequent shows have had muted success but nowadays, even when sketches raise a smile, it's a strained one.

We know all the angles of the sketch. We know its highs, lows, shifts and twists and turns. We know the non-joke, the anti-joke, the joke-joke, the joke double-axle with reverse spin and pike. We've learned to expect the unexpected, to expect the expected, even to expect to expect the unexpected. We know, above all else that, as soon as it starts, something "funny" this way comes. Even when it is funny, it becomes draining because almost viscerally we feel the effort that has gone into it. And for a form which aims at satire, this transparency is a disaster.

For some time professionals have been fighting a rearguard action to preserve the sketch. Smith and Jones and Spitting Image advise their writers to avoid "format" sketches which mock genres, like ads or game shows, thus booting out what is an important staple of the sketch: television itself. And despite the fact that the sketch tends to work best as a verbal (studio?) form, Smith and Jones encourage their team to create ones that are highly visual, usually on film.

Even the "improv" shows, like Whose Line Is It Anyway or the rather feeble S & M, rely on a kind of sketch "short-hand". While Whose Line uses stand-up comedy, the "improvs" are funny often because after two words we know the area satire involved. To that extent Whose Line, though entertaining, can still seem rather vacuous. It attempts to confound the audience's knowingness while only partially addressing the knowingness in the sketch form itself.

It would be ludicrous to suggest that one one will ever write a funny sketch show again. But the gleeful hyperactivity of its items, its glib and almost viciously stupid characterisations, its oh-so-set-up set-ups turn most sketch shows like Fry and Laurie into half an hour of full-of-itself mockery.

The character-led sketches of the wonderful French and Saunders and the peculiarly overlooked Harry Enfield prove that there are ways forward, but perhaps these talents should be more ambitious, because no amount of canned laughter can save the sketch. Nowadays you can't make a silk purse out of a dead parrot.

Comments

Fawlty Towers

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 00:36:36 +0100

From the Daily Mail, Monday 29th March 1976:

Return of Fawlty Towers

A NEW series of 'Fawlty Towers,' television's comedy hit of the year, will be shown on BBC in 18 months' time.

John Cleese, who plays a maniacal hotelier in the series, said yesterday: 'We intend to do another. But I can't see us all being able to record it before the summer of next year.'

The first series - shown on BBC 2 - may be repeated on BBC 1

Mr Cleese said: 'It took my wife Connie and I eight months to write the first series.

'I want to do another seven, but I'm off to America to appear in Monty Python on stage, then I'm writing a Python film and a history book.'

Mr Cleese made £6,000 from the first series and his wife £4,000. They have turned down an offer from American TV to write 39 shows a year for five years.

Next month Mr Cleese will appear with other comedy stars in aid of Amnesty International - the organisation dedicated to Human Rights and the release of non-violent political prisoners throughout the world.

From Television Today, Thursday 14th October 1976:

Strange chorus of praise for poor comedy

MANY programmes are liked or disliked as a matter of personal or even regional taste: such is the nature of a medium that tries to appeal to everyone. In no area does taste play a more major role than it does in comedy, for comedy has to endear itself to an audience. The comedy that some find too brash and almost vulgar is enjoyed by others because it seems vital and real: the comedy that some find incomprehensible and unfunny is held by others to be subtle and skilful in using the written word. In any discussion on comedy, therefore, taste must be accepted as a major factor and every professional broadcaster allows for it to be so. One of the most perplexing instances of a poor comedy series. receiving acclaim that is incomprehensible to professional broadcasters is BBC-1's Fawlty Towers. Here is a programme about which nobody writing in the national press seems to have a bad word but yet is devoid of everything that makes good modern comedy. The programme is reminiscent of the post-war university drama society production. Part at least of the audience for such amateur productions has goodwill to the cast, which is just as well, for the cast and writer can get carried away when it comes to farce because of a lack of professional experience and direction.

The idea behind Fawlty Towers had the makings of one good sketch for John Cleese, who has in the past been shown to such good effect in original sketch material. The series, however, has over-acting and exaggeration on his part which is embarrassing to watch, writing that has no vestige of wit or skill about it and set pieces that are protracted and neither funny nor slapstick; the whole is pervaded by ill-humour. There is no warmth, no vulnerability of characters, no pathos, no visual cleverness, no funny lines. It is an amalgam of everything that does not reach out to an audience and is the epitome of self indulgence by those concerned. One funny walk and a shouting, bullying tone do not make a comedy series; it is twenty-five years too late for that.

It would be a pity if a performer who thinks and cares about his work were to be misled by the praise of critics who are perhaps harking back to their adolescence and to the spectacle of intelligent people trying to be amusing. Perhaps these critics are also being too sympathetic to the actor to judge the series on the levels they reserve for others whose start in the business was more traditional. Mr Cleese has to learn (if he has not already done so) not to be deluded by applauding critics just as he must observe those who do not applaud. Fawlty Towers is a try and there have to be many in comedy. But when the try has been made it is time to move on, to change and adapt, bearing the lessons in mind: the most important being a growing awareness of what one is good at doing and what is out of reach of one's ability and personal attributes.

From the Evening Standard, Friday 4th March 1977:

Cleese bans cuts - loses thousands

ACTOR John Cleese, creator and star of the hit BBC comedy series Fawlty Towers, has sacrificed thousands of pounds over a matter of principle.

He has refused to allow the programme to be cut, thus wrecking chances of a profitable sale to a U.S. television network.

Instead, the series, which was made by the BBC, has been sold to public broadcasting stations which pay a fraction of what one of the big three American networks would pay.

Because the U.S. networks have to make room for advertising to get a sale, Cleese would have had to agree to about five minutes being cut out. He refused.

The BBC has scored a hit with its Friday night comedy hour which links two of its most successful series, Porridge and Are You Being Served?

Porridge came top of the ten most popular TV shows in the London area last week.

3, This Is Your Life (ITV) and the Benny Hill Show (ITV); 5, Robin's Nest (ITV); 6, Coronation Street on Wednesday (ITV) and Thunderball (ITV); 8, Six Million Dollar Man (ITV); 9, Coronation Street on Monday (ITV), Oh No, It's Selwyn Froggitt (ITV) and This Year, Next Year (ITV).

From the Daily Express, Saturday 13th May 1978:

The Big Turn On

THE MONTREUX T.V. FESTIVAL in Switzerland is the place where British T.V. bosses often reveal their plans in the hope of picking up foreign sales.

Here are some of the juiciest morsels we can expect on our T.V. screens soon.

GOOD NEWS for fans of Fawlty Towers, the brilliantly funny misadventures of the lanky John Cleese as the owner of a small hotel.

After two years Mr Cleese has delivered the first two scripts of a follow-up series.

It will star Basil Fawlty, his waspish wife, Sybil (Prunella Scales) and the accident-prone Spanish waiter, Manuel (Andrew Sachs).

Producer John Howard Davies told me: "I took the scripts home and quite literally fell out of bed reading them. I made so much noise that I woke our baby."

Thames Light Entertainment boss, Phillip Jones, has an expensive package of shows coming up in the summer and autumn, boosted by a large lump of the £20 million which Thames are spending on programmes in the next year.

New shows include a Kenny Everett pop and comedy Monday night series.

Special

For older audiences Ken Dodd, Tommy Cooper, Max Bygraves, Benny Hill and Bernie Winters will also have series. The first Morecambe and Wise Special will also be ready for the autumn. They will make another for Christmas.

And for Stanley Baxter fans there is news from London Weekend that he will be back in the studios next month to prepare a Christmas Special.

Comments

Hollow Laughter

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 21:32:58 +0100

Pages 20 and 21 of the Guardian's Weekend magazine, Saturday 5th February 1994:

PERSPECTIVES
So comedy is the rock 'n' roll of the Nineties? That explains why it pretends to be rebellious but instead is a showcase for twerps. PHILIP NORMAN is not amused.

Hollow Laughter

I WAS once trapped into watching a television awards show where Paul Merton was yet again being voted Most Brilliant Comedian in the Universe. On receiving his Platinum Funnybone (or whatever it was), Merton naturally was called upon to provide a sample of his comic genius. The routine he offered went something like this:

"Do you remember Lassie? 'E was always meant to be such a clever dog, wasn't he? If anybody was being held prisoner or trapped in a burning building, Lassie would always come and find 'em. Then 'e'd run to 'is owner and tug 'is sleeve and everyone'd say, 'Look, it's Lassie! 'E wants us to follow 'im!' That's all they ever said in those films, wasn't it? 'E wants us to follow 'im! So then everyone gets really excited and follows Lassie, 'cos 'e's a wonder dog ... and 'e leads 'em straight to a crap 'e done two hours earlier."

Humour, I know, is an entirely personal and subjective matter; what makes one person laugh may well make another enraged. But cannot there be some objective criteria for deciding whether the basic ingredients of a good joke are present? Humour, we can safely say, derives chiefly from shared experience. For how many people in today's world recognise Lassie films as representing shared experience? Allowing it may be an appreciable number, is the sharpest observation to be made about these films really that Lassie was always asking people to follow him? And how does "the crap 'e done two hours earlier" shape up as an example of the modern joke-writer's craft?

Of course, many great comedians have worked with ostensibly poor material. So was the style of Merton's delivery, perhaps, so exquisitely droll that the anecdote no longer seemed witlessly dull and crude? No, it came over exactly as it reads, delivered with the bleary doggedness of a plumber who will talk rather than getting down to your S-bend. More disappointing than the joke, to me, was the idle unprofessionalism it revealed. Merton must have known he was up for the award, and might be called on to perform before the cream of his profession, yet he still didn't trouble to prepare anything better.

Comedy is an intensely serious topic in Britain at the moment. Scarcely a week passes without the virtuosity of Paul Merton being hailed afresh in a long newspaper profile, enlivened by witicism of the part either of writer or subject. The recent public debate about whether or not Newman and Baddiel could be called funny was as earnest (and barren of jokes) as a Channel 4 News report on the General Synod.

What they're chiefly saying about comedy, in this desperately po-faced way, is that it no longer belongs to everyone. In the past, the proof of true humour was always its universality. On the morning after an Itma, a Goon Show, a Hancock's Half Hour, a Monty Python or a Not The Nine O'Clock News, all the generations might be found guffawing over the best bits together. Now, we're told, comedy has become the exclusive province of the young in the way pop music was during the Sixties and Seventies. Today's young comedians have the glamour and charisma of rock 'n' roll stars, performing in the same huge arenas on the same huge arenas on the same Messianic nationwide tours. They speak to the young alone, in the secret argot of youth. It's no good trying to appreciate Vic Reeves or Newman and Baddiel if you're over the age of 25.

For those of us in this benighted outer darkness, penetrating the New Comedy is certainly difficult. Its chief, and unifying, feature seems to be the almost total absence of what used to be known as "the punch-line". To an ageing mentality such as mine, accustomed to the outmoded glibness of a Bob Hope or even Tommy Cooper, nothing ever seems to be resolved. You can watch a new-style comedy show for half an hour, right into the closing credits, and still be waiting for it to begin. Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer are arch-practitioners of this; acting out non-events in strings of non sequiturs which their (many) fans recognise and adore, but which the uninitiated need a cipher book to follow. Is it just disgruntlement on my part that even the very laughter has a hollow and humourless ring; often seeming provoked by nothing funnier than words like "bugger" and "bum" and (if Paul Merton is involved) "dog crap"?

I'm surprised no one has pointed out the great flaw in this "Comedy: the rock 'n' roll of the Nineties" argument. Rock 'n' roll, although seeming a dangerous, iconoclastic medium, actually created a state of mass conformity, where con-artists and twerps could depend on being applauded with exactly the same fervour as genuine talents.

In any case, since when has original humour been the God-given prerogative of youth? Just as the elderly can be wicked and subversive, the young can be conventional, predictable and banal. To the humourless, of whatever age, funniness does not seep through unless semaphored with leaden insistence. Look at any newspaper column by Alan Coren, any stand-up routine by Jim Davidson, any edition of Noel's House Party. And now look at Newman and Baddiel's recent Wembley Arena concert poster, with its stars in Marx Brothers' masks and its tag-line "Live and in Pieces". By contrast, Mr Blobby seems avant-guarde, Alan Coren as light as a soufflé.

The history of modern British comedy has been a series of radical leaps: the Goons, Galton-Simpsons sitcoms, Sixties' satire, Monty Python. "Alternative" comedy in the Eighties was another such leap, but ultimately in the wrong direction. Just like pop music in the Seventies, comedy in the Eighties began turning back on itself, abandoning adventure and experiment for pastiche and regurgitation. Over the past 15 years, show me a new TV comedy show which, sooner or later, has not revealed its ambition to be Python mark II. John Cleese must stand as the towering figure of modern comedy, simply for the number of modern comedy, simply for the number of his imitators. Think of those who have got laughs by portraying Cleese-accented authority figures - Stephen Fry, Tony Slattery, Angus Deayton. Each time Deayton delivers his feeble cue-carded Basil Fawltyisms on Have I Got News For You, I keep willing and willing Cleese to sue.

Television is largely to blame for the rot, with its ruthless suppression of originality, its fear of true danger and subversion, its bullying of studio audiences into orgiastic mirth by producers and warm-up artists. Just as stultifying is the continuing obsession with television itself as a source of material: joke commercials, joke arts' discussions, joke breakfast TV interviews, joke headlines from News At Ten. Steve Coogan's The Day Today - however funny - is no more than a retread of what Monty Python was doing 20 years ago. Newman and Baddiel's dialogue between the two professors, modestly described by them as "the Parrot Sketch of the Nineties" (what a giveaway!) was merely the umpteenth variant on this.

So what's new in New Age comedy? Vic Reeves, with his self-absorbed mugging and bridling, seems to hark back to legends of the Fifties' Variety circuit such as Frank Randall and Al Read. Lee Evans, with his tight suit and orangutan facial contortions, is Norman Wisdom reincarnated. One can't help wondering whether Reeves and Evans are performing acts of conscious homage. Or are they like the modern pop musician who announced he'd written a song called Heartbreak Hotel, blissfully unaware that there'd ever been one before?

A far more urgent question about British comedy is why so many people who used to be brilliantly funny now seem, in various ways, to have gone off the rails. Viewed from the Paul Merton Dark Age, a golden epoch of hilarious men and women seems recently past. It is not long since Ben Elton was doing the most dangerously brilliant stand-up routine since Lenny Bruce; that Blackadder, starring Rowan Atkinson, offered possibly the best ensemble playing ever seen on television; that Smith and Jones seemed viable modern counterparts of Dud and Pete; that Victoria Wood became the natural heir to John Betjeman as a chronicler of provincial minutiae; that cult late night shows, notably Whose Line Is It Anyway?, were constantly producing new talents like Mike McShane and Sandi Toksvig; that you had only to see the Channel 4 logo and a blue-lit set to break into hysterics.

WHERE are they now, the Eltons, the Woods, the Atkinsons, the Smith and Joneses, the Frys and Lauries, the French and Saunderses? Rich and successful, sitcom superstars, best-selling authors, highly-paid columnists, West End thespians, ubiquitous TV voice-overs and - with the exception of Saunders, and Wood when you can find her - nowhere near as funny as before. It seems an immutable rule with British comedians (unlike American) that inspiration and effervescence diminish in direct proportion to financial success. I remember noticing it in the Sixties with Peter Cook, who rapidly metamorphosed from gauche undergraduate regular on the chat show circuit. I saw it again with dismay a couple of weeks ago, as Ben Elton discussed his latest book, solemn-faced, with Des O'Connor. Could he really not sense the nation's silent scream of, "Bring back the silver suit"?

Over Christmas, I watched a marathon television tribute to the great funny men of history. It was by no means as dire as it sounds, with interesting film clips of forgotten pearls like Sid Field and Nat Jackley, and articulate commentary by comedians of all eras. Most agreed that the consummate practitioner was Ken Dodd - not for the quality of his material so much as the quantity. As Ernie Wise (I think) put it: "That man gets off so many jokes per minute that sooner or later everybody's going to hear one that makes them laugh."

For me, comedy at its best has this same reckless, spendthrift quality, coming at you so hard and fast so many directions, it makes your head spin. Ben Elton used to do it with his almost levitating free associations about the Thatcher government and black plastic sacks; Rory Bremner does it in his minority spot on Channel 4, spilling out impressions that change in mid-sentence or even mid-word; jokes that often have barely formed their opening syllables before mutating into something else.

It's no disgrace, but rather a mark of utter professionalism, that great comedians like Bob Hope and Sid Caesar used to employ huge teams of writers, using and casting them aside faster than Catherine the Great did young hussar officers. No other kind of performance is so vitally dependant on making every second count. To me, newcomers like Jack Dee and Jo Brand, while stylistically original, seem to perform in an aching void of what American radio people call "dead air".

Incidentally, the same comedy awards which named Paul Merton Supreme Comic Genius of All Time and Space recorded an almost insultingly small vote for Rory Bremner. The appeal of dog crap is evidently universal.

Comments

Always Look On The Dark Side - Bob Spiers

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 22:02:47 +0100

Page 21 of the Independent, Saturday 7th January 1993:

Always look on the dark side
From Seaside Special to Absolutely Fabulous by way of the Comic Strip, the director Bob Speirs has changed the face of British television comedy. John Lyttle tried to find out the secret of his success

Bob Speirs has spent the morning rehearsing with French and Saunders. "Let's see, the next series ... We've already done the pre-filming, now we're working on the musical items and the stuff that'll be done in front of the audience. The stuff in Jennifer's flat,a two-hander about ladies who organise society parties. Hmm, and a pop video ... the band's called Dickens' Daughters. More? Huh, film parodies: Thelma and Louise, Misery and In Bed with French and Saunders. We're busy, very busy."

Bob Speirs is perennially busy, very busy. Not that you'll find his name in the standard television reference works or singled out in reviews; but since the mid-Eighties he's become the director of choice for personalities as diverse as the Comic Strip, Ruby Wax, Alexei Sayle and French and Saunders, together and separately: witness Dawn French's Murder Most Horrid, not to mention the recent success of Jennifer Saunders Absolutely Fabulous, BBC2's highest-rating show of 1992. Tonight, BBC2 transmits Spiers latest, "a carnal comedy" entitled Joking Apart. It's a consciously slick effort about divorce, jealousy and the methods of modern love; the "hero" (Robert Bathurst) is the sort of stand-up comic you itch to knock down, professionally committed to transforming his private life into public spectacle. "It's adult, sexy," Spiers says. "I think it's timely and dramatic as well as funny. Hopefully it moves the sitcom thing on."

He's entitled to a deciding vote. Indeed, with the possible exceptions of the one-time director-producer Paul Jackson (currently playing executive at the new London franchise-holder Carlton), "friendly rival" Geoff Posner, Victoria Wood's long-term behind-the-camera collaborator, and certain influential performers, few people have done more to shape the public face of contemporary British television comedy.

Peruse the Speirs CV, close to being a Greatest Hits catalogue. You may not want to hum all the tunes - the man was partially responsible for Seaside Special - but you can't deny his range: Dad's Army, The Goodies, It Ain't Half Hot Mum, Are You Being Served?, Fawlty Towers, Five Go Mad In Dorset, Didn't You Kill My Brother?, Lazarus and Dingwall, the clinically disturbed Little Armadillos, Ben Elton's stage hit Gasping ... The list rolls on, relentless, implacable, impressive.

So - what's the secret? Explain the career longevity, the genre-hopping, the ability to move from old-fashioned, sequin-strewn Light Entertainment ("I did a lot of Cilla Black show") to today's New Comic Establishment? Tell us Bob, how come you can skip from low slapstick to lower sexual innuendo, reversing into high weirdness, then up, up, up to the dizzy heights of true wit?

"Hmm?" The silence stretches out like a snake; a veritable boa constrictor. Fine. Next question. When you read a script, how do you know that it's funny? "Argh. I haven't a clue. No ... you just know." Okay. Try this. What makes you different? Silence. Then, with utter certainly: "I do it on instinct. I don't copy anyone or anything. I don't watch other people's comedies. I'm too busy ... and too, oh, ah, sort of self-conscious."

Howard Schuman chuckles at the recounted quote. Spiers directed the writer's four-part, award-winning Upline, a rare directorial venture into not-so-straight drama, inexplicably unrepeated by Channel 4. "Bob articulate? No. In an age of self-promotion he's the least able at selling himself. But a natural, a visionary? Yes. Definitely. He just doesn't carry a neon sign exclaiming 'Artist'.

"Yet when you look at the Comic Strip films you can instantly identify his work. He's incredibly visual. His camera moves. The editing, design, the pacing is impeccable. And he's the first to go to the dark side, to the sinister, without hesitation. It's very rare - a comedy sense with bite."

One reason Spiers is ill-at-ease with words is because, to borrow a Hollywoodism, he "thinks with his eyes", a trait associated with American, not British, directors (perhaps because even British visual media is so damn literary). Most televisual comedy is a mournful matter of idiot-simple composition - a master shot, a medium shot, a reaction shot, oops, here's another joke. Not for Spiers. For him the camera bobs, dips, weaves and tangos, refusing, as Spiers notes after many hesitations, "to be a passive observer. It should move, push, participate."

What the unfettered lens increasingly observes is parody, pastiche and grotesque exaggeration, the preferred modes of modern comics, now too all-knowing and media-literate to be wholly original. Yet the spoofs have their own validity, from the heartless precision of Ruby Wax's fake home video of a quarrelsome Irish family, to the demented liposuction sequence that adorned Episode 2 of Absolutely Fabulous; there lay Jennifer Saunders, speeded-up and reduced to nothing but a pair of collagen-enhanced child-bearing lips and two mad, staring eyes. Funny like a nightmare.

"Of course, Bob would be drawn to that material," says Howard Schuman. "He has very strong political and moral ideas. He's exactly the right person to dissect the mindless fashion set, whom he knows inside out. That's his other great visual gift - extraordinary detail."

Which is not to suggest that Spiers is, heaven forbid, auteur. "Think of the people I work with! It's there in the scripts. I'm in safe hands. I simply have to bring it out." But it's also true that his technique and temperament suit perfectly his writers and stars. (And suit the times, too. Today even a mainstream success like Waiting for God will stop for a prickly plot about, say, imminent death. Sitcom is yielding to serio-com.) "Well, I began by working in the fields they grew up watching and now enjoy satirising; the old sitcoms, the pop programmes. I mean, I've worked with Pan's People. It all comes round again and I call upon it a lot. Remember when Dawn and Jennifer did the Abba take-off? My type of background was useful then ... and the girls have their finger on the pulse."

They certainly do. The bulk of Spiers' best work has been with women, where the real action is. Ade Edmondson and Rik Mayall may be content to recycle their Dangerous Brother personas for Bottom but, as Spiers reports, "the girls take risks. Murder Most Horrid, for instance. Dawn did six characters in one run, finishing with one character on a Wednesday, playing another on Thursday. The emphasis is different. Ruby, Jennifer, Dawn and Victoria Wood - they look at something from every angle."

"Bob likes women," says Joanna Lumley, star of Absolutely Fabulous. "He likes women for what they are. Some directors don't. There's this amazing hangover of what women should be on screen. I was once told 'You mustn't frown if you're playing anger - it makes you look ugly.' None of that with Bob. He has a way of looking dreamy and blue-eyed, but somehow egging you on. He also has this flawless - how can I put this? - unmarked sense of humour. He knows how and when to let things run free."

Still, attempt to draw Spiers on comedy artists or try to get him to analyse their gifts, and a stuttering silence reigns. He makes his involvement sound like directing traffic, not talent. "Oh, Bob knows what's he doing" says Lumley. "He may not say anything but he understands certain performers' unreconstructed, not to say shambolic, ways of thinking. If he says something isn't right, believe me, they listen."

One final effort. What is the secret of good comedy? Spiers gives the enquiry some thought. And some more. "Well, if you think a gag isn't going to work, shoot it separately, so you can have a go at making it work in the editing. If it still doesn't work, at least it's removable." Beginners take note.

Comments

Alfresco

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 21:59:14 +0100

Page 72 of Time Out, 29th April to 5th May 1983:

FRESH FROM THE COMEDY STORE ... BUT IS IT ART?

With 'Alfresco', another wave of new comedy breaks onto the TV screen. John Collis tests the water.

Ben Elton cynically calls it 'middle class comedy', coming from somewhere between Oxbridge and the streets. And with Granada's new seven-part series ' Alfresco', to be networked in the 10pm Sunday slot after a year of pilots and experiments, the 'new wave' of comedians has come of age. Impressively enough, indeed, for there to be 'active moves' towards a second series, before the first has even been exposed to a critical nation.

'Alfresco' is at the other extreme from the energetic 'bullseyes-thru-buckshot' technique of Elton's previous TV credit 'The Young Ones'. On that series (to be repeated from Thursday, making it a good week for him), Elton worked as co-writer with the original creators Rik Mayall and Lise Meyer: he has now graduated to become chief writer, as well as being one of the six performers.

The acting team is a strong one, arising from the twin disciplines of 'straight theatre' and revue. Trinder-chinned Stephen Fry and his blank-faced colleague Hugh Laurie have toured the revue circuit, collecting the odd Edinburgh award on the way; Emma Thompson reached 'Alfresco' by a similar route, clocking up a number of TV and radio credits; Robbie Coltrane came from the straight side, including the London production of 'Slab Boys', before moving on to 'The Young Ones' and 'Comic Strip Presents'; Siobhan Redmond went from drama school into fringe and repertory theatre.

There's a collaborative feel to the comedy, but each item is the work of one writer, almost always Elton. And there's no back-up squad of freelancers shooting in their one-liners, which helps the show's 'integrity'.

'Alfresco', from its moody 'mean streets' credits on, is pitched in a lower key to the previous youthful attempts to break away from the 'Terry and June' graveyard (through Richard Waring's new 'Tears Before Bedtime' prove that the graveyard is still disinterring the occasional corpse).

'We made a conscious decision to slow down,' says Elton. 'From "Monty Python" on, a fast-paced hi-tech style has developed, and I'm not knocking it at all - "The Young Ones" is part of it - but we decided to try something different, to rely more on the performances and the writing.'

In the first episode, there are none of those bubbling accents and eager faces intended to signal 'My God, we're being funny' 'OTT'-style, to an increasingly resistant audience. The settings are conventional: there's a customer and a salesgirl at a perfume counter, frequent dialogue across desks and we're soon plunged among the familiar group of British soldiers trying to escape from a German prison camp. We are back in the territory of 'the sketch', working its way towards some sort of punchline, dissolving in a wacky freeze frame.

What justifies this seemingly unwacky approach is the building-block skill of the writing: Elton and his 'additional materialisers' (in the first show fellow comic Andy de la Tour and Scottish songwriter David McNiven, with one sketch each) set up a situation, and then subject it to a series of surrealistic little tweaks that subtly pervert its progress.

'Alfresco' deliberately breaks no brave new ground and it's barely subversive, even if it does get incest in as soon as is decently possible. But neither is it a slave to the predictability of the 'sketch-to-punchline' format. For me, it passed the 'alone in a darkened room' chuckle test with commendable efficiency.

'Alfresco' is on LWT at 10pm on Sunday. See TV listings.

Comments

Are we seeing too many spooks?

Sun, 04 Mar 2007 20:09:51 +0100

Page 37 of the Evening Standard, Tuesday 28th July 1992:

Are we seeing too many spooks?

As yet another ghost glides across TV screens, GEOFFREY PHILLIPS feels his own spirits begin to sink

TOMORROW night Channel 4 unleashes a new series upon its eager audience. It is enticingly entitled My Dead Dad. It is a comedy.

Made by Scottish TV, My Dead Dad is based on a stage play by John McKay called Dead Dad Dog and concerns a young would-be TV producer whose father, who has been dead for 14 years, reappears outside a toilet cubicle.

Dad is still wearing his Seventies flares and kipper tie and, what is more, father and son appear to be linked by an unbreakable umbilical cord. So far, so hilarious.

But, with all due respect to the energetic performances of Roy Hanlon, as Willie, and Forbes Masson as Eck, the appearance of yet another ghost, even one in flares, causes one's own spirits to sink. Eck might have been dead for 14 years, the idea of comic spooks has surely been dead for much longer.

One cannot fail to observe an apparently incurable obsession with the supernatural as a storyline springboard. We have had recently a BBC sitcom, So Haunt Me, with Miriam Karlin as a Jewish ghost. On a considerably higher plane we have had the films Ghost and Truly Madly Deeply leaving cinemas around the world ankle-deep in soggy tissues.

The recent BBC1 drama series, Friday On My Mind, was another grieving process exercise in which Maggie O'Neill's pilot widow met her dead husband on the beach for a last farewell. We were not told whether the deceased airman knew that his wife had, as part of the grieving process, been to bed with one of his comrades, but we will let that pass.

Whether the apparitions in Ghost, Truly Madly Deeply and Friday On My Mind count as real ghosts is a fair debating subject to lob into a wilting dinner party conversation, but showing hallucinatory ghosts on cinema and TV screens tends to raise just as many, if no more, questions than the portrayal of traditional ghosts.

Personally, one found the fact that Alan Rickman's dead cellist in Truly Madly Deeply had managed to catch a cold in the hereafter rather disturbing. The thought that there might be no escape from the sniffles beyond the grave proved so distracting that frankly one did not really care whether Juliet Stevenson was coming to terms with her loss.

What one wanted to know was: are there man-size tissues and Night Nurse beyond the grave? Perhaps hell will turn out to be an eternity of runny noses and no hankies.

In the much-acclaimed 1946 Michael Powell fantasy, A Matter Of Life And Death, David Niven glides heavenwards on an escalator rather more advanced than anything on the Underground. Was one alone in wondering how the escalator was powered? Did it operate around the clock? One noted that all the people being borne upwards were respectably clad.

Was there a divine law which ruled that people who had died in the nude must use the back stairs?

It may be that the current spate of supernatural stories is a consequence of disenchantment with Eighties materialism.

If Mammon has proved a disappointment worship-wise, perhaps the spiritual has investment potential.

Whatever the reason, the message ought to be as clear as if delivered by floating trumpet: give up the ghosts.

Comments

The Pope Must Die

Sun, 04 Mar 2007 19:22:29 +0100

Page A7 of the Sunday Times, Sunday 28th August 1988:

Row over papal satire

● Channel 4 is planning a three-part series which satirises the papacy, according to a report in the Observer.

The proposed series, which has already caused concern to senior executives about allegations of blasphemy, comes just as Cardinal Basil Hume has told Catholics not to see the controversial new film "The Last Temptation of Christ."

The series stars Alexei Sayle and will possibly be sceened next year. But Michael Grade, the station's chief executive, is said to be worried in case it provokes a similar outcry as the film.

Page 3 of the Catholic Herald, Friday 2nd September 1988:

Papal satire under consideration by Channel 4

CHANNEL Four is considering the first draft of a three part series satirising the Papacy for broadcast next year. Provisionally entitled either "Who Killed the Pope?" or "The Pope Must Die", the series has been scripted by the Comic Strip, a production company responsible for many recent send-ups of current events, including the 1984 miners' strike.

The first draft of the script about Pope Dave the First is now being considered by Channel Four executives. The Commissioning Editor for Entertainment, Seamus Cassidy, will be taking soundings from senior colleagues including Chief Executive Michael Grade, and Director of Programmes, Liz Forgan. Ms Forgan has this week rejected concerns about the subject mater. "You will just have to wait and see. Some people say the Comic Strip people bring problems and controversy, others that they are a delight".

The three one-hour programmes will star Alexei Sayle as Pope Dave, and will feature comedians Robbie Coltrane, Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French. The planned series will take the form of a parody of the American mini-series genre.

A spokesman for Channel Four this week told the Catholic Herald that the series was still in the planning stage. No final commitment had been made.

● IN a speech at the International Edinburgh Television Festival, Greg Dykes, director of programmes at London Weekend Television, dropped heavy hints that the challenge of satellite broadcasting in the 1990s would mean that specialist areas like religion would be pushed to the margins of maintime scheduling. His comments were in line with his recent reported enthusiasm for axing the "God-slot", the Sunday evening "gentleman's agreement" between BBC and ITV to run parallel religious programming.

Page 3 of The Universe, Sunday 4th September 1988:

Papal comedy is just satire, Channel 4 says

CHANNEL 4 has denied suggestions that a forthcoming comedy series satirising the Papacy may be blasphemous.

A spokesman said the series, to be produced by the award winning 'Comic Strip' team, and starring Alexei Sayle as 'Pope Dave the First' had no connection at all with the controversial Maryin Scorsese film The Last Temptation of Christ.

He stressed that it was 'not in any way an attack on the Pope' and was not going to be about religious belief. He said it was too early to give any more detail since the script was not yet confirmed, but admitted that Comic Strip were 'fairly anarchic' in the humour.

Nicholas Coote, Bishops' Conference Assistant Secretary, said there should be a sharp distinction between programmes that satirised religious leaders and church organisations and things that were actually blasphemous.

"One would be very reluctant to look so pompous that we couldn't take light-hearted amusement at our expense. If Spitting Image can make fun of politicians and the Royal Family, we oughtn't to get too excited," Mr Cooke said.

Page 4 of the Observer, Sunday 18th September 1988:

Channel 4 kills off Pope Dave satire
RICHARD BROOKS
■ Media Editor

CHANNEL 4 has scrapped plans for three programmes which would have satirised the Papacy. Lawyers have advised that the series from The Comic Strip group of comedians presents too many potential legal problems.

A spokesman would confirm only that the series, provisionally called 'The Pope Must Die', has been 'indefinitely postponed'. But the series is known to have worried senior executives, who were concerned about the dangers of prosecution for blasphemy and libel.

The series was due to star Alexei Sayle, above, as 'Pope Dave the First', and would also have featured comedians Robbie Coltrane, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders.

The programmes would have been in the form of a parody of an American mini-series, which portrayed a modern-day Pope and his rule across two continents. 'It's a big disappointment for me,' Sayle said yesterday. 'It would have been my first chance of a major leading role.'

The channel has decided instead to commission another programme from The Comic Strip. 'Five Go to Hell' is to be set in a corrupt South American country, and is a parody of Enid Blyton's 'Famous Five' books and characters. The 'Five' meet up again after an absence of 20 years in South America.

This will be the third in the 'Five' series for The Comic Strip, who also made last year's award-winning 'The Strike', a parody of a Hollywood film about the 1984 miners' strike.

Page 17 of the Sun, Monday 19th September 1988:

Telly chiefs ban 'boozy Pope' show
By PIERS MORGAN

A SHOCK comedy show "starring" a boozy, woman-chasing POPE has been axed by nervous TV chiefs.

Channel 4 bosses feared the three-part series, by the Comic Strip team, could be blasphemous AND libelous.

Comedian Alexei Sayle was to have played a modern-day Pope Dave the First in the show, The Pope Must Die.

Alexei would only say last night: "I'm upset. It would have been my first leading role."

Other Comic Strip stars, including Robbie Coltrane, were said to be furious.

Gutless

One insider said: "Channel 4 has become gutless."

But a top source in the TV company revealed: "The script was almost Marxist in its content.

"It showed the Pope amassing vast wealth at the expense of the poor and blowing it on worldly pursuits like booze, fags and women."

A Channel 4 spokesman said: "The series has been shelved for legal reasons."

Page 3 of the Catholic Herald, Friday 23rd September 1988:

Papal send up axed by Channel 4

A SATIRICAL series on the Pope scheduled for broadcast on Channel 4, has been "postponed indefinitely" because of potential legal problems.

The series of three films by the Comic Strip group, which would have starred comedian Alexei Sayle as "Pope Dave the First", was axed after senior Channel 4 executives got cold feet over potential prosecution regarding blasphemy and libel (Catholic Negative, September 2).

Planned as a send up of a US mini-series, the programme, tentatively entitled "The Pope Must Die", has now been replaced in Channel 4's schedules by a parody of on Enid Blyton's "Famous Five" characters by the Comic Strip group. "Five Go to Hell" is to be set in a corrupt South American country. It will be the company's third offering on the theme of the "Five" for Channel 4.

Page 16 of the Sunday Sport, Sunday 16th October 1988:

Church takes Pope at Alexei

SICKO comic Alexei Sayle was last night slammed for agreeing to star in a mini-series insulting Catholics.

For the roly-poly star, who launched Alexei Sayle's Stuff on TV last week, wanted to take the lead role in The Pope Must Die.

Alexei was to play Pope Dave the First romping round Rome insulting and condemning his followers.

The Comic Strip production's pompous Pope eventually becomes an assassination victim when Catholics can no longer stand his crazy campaigning.

And last night a spokesman for Cardinal Basil Hume, head of the Catholic Church in Britain, blasted: "It seems unbelievable that such a programme with such content could even be considered.

"It would be an insult to every Catholic watching it and could have awful repercussions.

"There is nothing humorous in this sort of so-called entertainment, and more stringent restrictions must be introduced."

The Comic Strip production would have cost £1.5 million to make. But it was shelved after Channel Four bosses got coldfeet.

Changed

They were concerned about charges of libel and blasphemy and the mini-series was "Indefinitely postponed."

Now they have back-tracked again and are considering filming the mini-series if the script is changed.

But Alexei, who is currently starring in the West End production of The Tempest, may have lost his chance of landing his first major role.

Page 13 of the Daily Star, Monday 4th June 1990:

Rik and Co pray for their swipe at Pope

* THE Comic Strip team are STILL battling to produce their most controversial film so far.

They quit Channel 4 in a huff because boss Michael Grade refused to back their efforts to make a film called Kill The Pope.

They turned instead to the Beeb where BBC2 boss Alan Yentob proved to have a more open mind about their wild ideas.

But 12 months later, the Pope film - which would have starred Alexi Sayle - is still not in production.

Vintage episodes of the COMIC STRIP (Channel 4, 10 p.m.) are still being screened wile the team, starring Adrian Edmonson, Rik Mayall, Peter Richardson, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French and Nigel Planer, work on a series for the Beeb.

A Comic Strip spokesman says: "The Pope film is no nearer production than it's ever been."

As a footnote, somebody who worked on the Comic Strip Presents... series once told me that the above mini-series was to be in three parts and based on the hanging of Roberto Calvi, and that the legal matters that intervened were due to the characters being based on real people. The project was scrapped but all three parts were rewritten and restarted several times until they finally emerged as three separate productions: Oxford, Spaghetti Hoops, and The Pope Must Die.

Richardson still holds dreams of someday producing Five Go To Hell, and was known to have carried the script around with him during post-production of the last (to date) Comic Strip production, 2005's Sex Actually. However if it were to be made today it is unknown who would play Uncle Quentin, Ronald Allen having died in 1991 (I don't think it is much of a spoiler to reveal that in this production Uncle Quentin is The Devil).

Comments

Heil Honey, I'm Home

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 23:57:35 +0100

Front page of the Jewish Chronicle, Friday 10th August 1990:

A sick sit-com
By RUTH ROTHERNBERG

British Satellite Broadcasting subscribers could be receiving a new sitcom next year entitled "Heil Honey, I'm Home."

Television comedy writer Geoff Atkinson, who has written for the satirical TV programme, "Spitting Image," said: "The intention is to lampoon Hitler in the guise of an American mid-1960s 'I Love Lucy'-style situation comedy.

"Adolf and Eva are shown as a couple in one flat. Their next-door neighbours are a Jewish family. The setting is nominally 1938 Berlin, but the whole thing is done as classic sharp New York Jewish humour.

"It is black comedy but the intention is not to offend, except possibly neo-Nazis. Three-quarters of the cast are Jewish and their reaction has been very positive."

A pilot episode has been made by an independent company, Noel Gay Television. The cast includes Gareth Marks, son of actor Alfred Marks, and Caroline Gruber, who took part in the 1987 Edinburgh Festival play-reading of "Perdition," the controversial Jim Allen play.

Mr Atkinson, who is in his thirties and is not Jewish, said: "I got the germ of the idea 15 years ago when I saw the film 'Young Winston' (depicting Winston Churchill's early years). I played with the idea of 'Young Adolf' as a pathetic figure of fun and it finally blossomed."

BSB's entertainment channel, Galaxy, is to decide on whether to go ahead later this month.

From the Observer's 'Pendennis' column, Sunday 12th August 1980:

THE Jewish Chronicle reports that BSB is considering mounting a situation comedy about Adolf Hitler's early days, provisionally entitled Heil Honey, I'm Home.

I particularly enjoyed the hopeful comment of the writer, Geoff Atkinson, about his scenario in which Adolf and Eva live next door to a Jewish couple: 'Our intention is not to offend.'

Page 41 of Broadcast, Friday 24th August 1990

Jewish group slams BSB over Hitler sit-com
by Kizzi Nkwocha

BRITISH Satellite Broadcasting has been criticised by Jewish groups for commissioning a half-hour sit-com pilot which features Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun in an American mid-Sixties I Love Lucy-style situation comedy.

The show, Heil Honey, I'm Home, is produced by Noel Gay Television. It features the couple living in a flat opposite a Jewish family called the Goldsteins.

Hayim Pinner, secretary general of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said: "Anything that trivialises Hitler is to be deplored. Someone who caused so much human misery and grief is not really a fit subject for humour and trivialisation."

Comedy writer Geoff Atkinson, who produced the script for the show, said: "The joke is that Adolf Hitler is a fool - the guy who always gets sent up. It's not because he's offensive, it's more because he is the ultimate loser.

"He might be a winner at war but at home he loses out to Eva and he loss out to the Goldsteins."

He added: "Obviously there will be a group of people who were so close to the event that it causes some upset, but hopefully many people will get the joke and see that it just proves what a fool Adolf was."

"I hope it was never done to be tasteless on the grounds that the show's situation may be a little hard for some people to swallow."

BSB confirmed that they had commissioned the pilot of Heil Honey, I'm Home, but said "the series is definitely not in our autumn schedule".

Page 5 of the Daily Express, Saturday 1st September 1990:

Protest at Hitler TV sit-com
By ANNIE LEASK

A STORM of protest has greeted a new satellite TV show depicting mass murderer Adolf Hitler as a cuddly comedy character.

Producers of the Terry And June-style sitcom, called Heil Honey, I'm Home, have been accused of "incredibly bad taste".

Set in the 1930s, it revolves around the cosy domestic life of Hitler and his lover, Eva Braun.

A TV insider said: "If people thought 'Allo 'Allo was in bad taste, just wait until they see this."

Last night angry Jewish groups attacked the show, to be screened on BSB.

"We can not believe that someone wants to make a comedy show based on Hitler," said the Chief Rabbi's spokesman.

BSB yesterday defended its decision to show a pilot programme for the series at the end of the month.

The Noel Gay production company has the go-ahead for 12 episodes.

Page 3 of the Observer, Sunday 30th September 1990:

Jewish anger over Hitler TV comedy
Richard Brooks
Media Editor

IS HITLER funny? The Board of Deputies of British Jews obviously does not think so. It is very concerned about a comedy programme due to be broadcast on British Satellite Broadcasting tonight called Heil Honey, I'm Home.

The programme is set in Berlin in the 1930s and concerns two neighbours, a Jewish family called the Goldensteins, and the couple next door, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun.

While BSB says the show, initially a one-off to see if there is scope for a series, is meant to be amusing, it is well aware it might cause offence. It has not let the Board of Deputies see an advance copy, nor, most unusually, has it allowed journalists to see the programme.

The board is very worried about anything which 'makes fun of the war and, in particular, the way that the Jews were treated in pre-war Germany'. Several leading members of the Jewish community will watch the programme tomorrow, as they have been unable to find anybody with a BSB dish to allow them to view it tonight.

Some theatrical agents decided against sending actors on their books to audition for the programme, because they were worried about the subject matter. The actors chosen to play the Goldensteins and the Hitlers are not well known. However, Patrick Cargill plays Neville Chamberlain in tonight's programme.

BSB says the show is really like some of the American situation comedies of the 1950s and 60s, similar to I Love Lucy, where, instead of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez inviting their friends the Mertzes around, the Goldensteins pop in to see the Hitlers. Both families are given odd Germanic New York accents.

The first episode depicts the Goldensteins as a nosy couple, in particular Mrs Goldstein. They are curious and suspicious about Adolf Hitler's intentions now that he has become Chancellor of Germany. The Goldensteins have heard worrying rumours. Is Hitler going to declare war?

In the programme, the Hitlers invite Neville Chamberlain to tea to try to sort out any problems. The Goldensteins, anxious to discover more, drop in. Chamberlain is portrayed as a 'wet' character who sings the ditty 'I'm a little teapot'.

BSB hopes the programme will be regarded as funny, not offensive. It says future scripts show the Goldensteins gradually getting the upper hand over the Hitlers. Certainly, Hitler is painted as an unpleasant character, with a nasty habit of never changing his socks. Eva Braun is rather a loud-mouthed gossip. Mussolini, who is intended to show up in a later episode, has been written in as an idiotic leader who invades Abyssinia because it is the first country in the world atlas.

BSB, as if to assure that it does not want to offend the Jewish community, deferred the planned transmission of Heil Honey I'm Home from yesterday, which was Yom Kippur, to today. 'It was actually going to be transmitted an hour after Yom Kippur ended at dusk,' said a BSB spokesman. 'But we thought we'd better be ultra-careful.'

Comments

Do Not Adjust Your Set

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 23:19:23 +0100

To date all articles on this weblog (bar the first one about The Comic Strip Presents... Back To Normal With Eddie Monsoon) have been taken from the ITC clippings catalogue. Four of the articles below come from the microjacket of articles collated by the BFI Library, so credit must also go to them.

Page 4 of the Leicester Mercury, Tuesday 16th January 1968:

I FEEL I must write and ask if other viewers are as I am by the new ITV programme for children "Do Not Adjust Your Set."

This programme is shown on Thursday at tea-time, when the youngest children are looking forward to happy entertainment and the best offered is a programme full of what can only be described as undesirable rubbish!

Last Friday my five and seven-year old daughters were able to see twice the phrase "Auntie Denise is a silly old bag", blazed across the screen. I can't see any sense in allowing this programme to be continued. Although I know I can switch off the set, and will next week, lots of children will be allowed to watch, and ITV should clean this programme up.

DISGUSTED MUM.

From the Sunday Times, Tuesday 23rd January 1968:

No kidding

A FUNNY THING HAPPENS on your T V screen on Thursday afternoon. At 5.25 p.m. - the tea-time slot - they're putting out another in the comedy series Do Not Adjust Your Set. It has no sexy sketches. No one comes on wearing drag. There are no jokes about politicians. It's adult in a way that those late-night satirical shows never manage to be adult. But, in fact, it's a revue designed specifically for children.

It's written by Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. They all take part in the show, along with David Jason and Denise Coffey, and they're all in their mid-twenties. Humphrey Barclay, who produces the programme, was brought over from radio where he put on I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again. He's twenty-six, went to Harrow and Cambridge, and was meant to be a diplomat. He's much happier with comedy. "When Rediffusion invited me in they told me they wanted a far-out show. No compromise. None of the old second-hand stuff which is so often foisted on to kids."

What's emerged is all first-hand stuff, very Goonish, with its own self-contained serial - a cold-eyed cod of all super heroes called Captain Fantastic. Children love it. The only complaints come from adults who write in to say "I thought your programme was disgraceful and my two sons sons aged two and two and a half agree."

Idle, Jones, and Palin started in revue while they were at university. Denise Coffey has been a straight actress for years. David Jason had his own electrical firm until three years ago when he gave it to his partner, and took the plunge into show business. The veteran member of the team is the director Daphne Shadwell, daughter of Charlie Shadwell, the B B C conductor whose high-pitched laugh made lots of old steam-radio shows sound funnier than they were.

Do Not Adjust Your Set has seven more weeks to run. After that, everyone's on their own. Michael Palin's not worried. "Every time we write a sketch which we can't use on the programme because it offends one of those taboos we just file it away. Very thrifty. We should be able to flog the lot to one of those adult comedy shows."

From the Daily Mail, Friday 23rd February 1968. By Virginia Ironside:

In the same way as it seems curious that David Nixon should be dished up as adult entertainment it is odd that Do Not Adjust Your Set (Rediffusion) isn't.

For this very entertaining show is featured at 5.25, a time when only children, mothers, the out-of-work and the idle rich have an opportunity to see it. And though it includes jokes about Desmond Morris, bank managers, David Frost, it still comes under the heading of Children's Television. It's not the last word in originality. The Archie Andrews take-off was recently done in Cilla Black's show and I'd recognise that Peter Cook voice anywhere.

But although it smacks just faintly of BBC 3 it is at least a programme that is concerned solely with being funny. No one's trying to ram any points down your throat; any debunking is of the mildest nature. And there are proper laughs, the sketches are brief with good punch lines and, best of all, there's a happy lack of any ageing young compare to make you feel as if you're back at school.

From Television Today, Thursday 14th March 1968:

Problems of women in comedy
by Ena Kendell

ONE of the delights of television comedy at the moment is Rediffusion's Do Not Adjust Your Set, which can best be described in generic terms as son of At Last the 1948 Show.

This fast-moving half-hour tea-time revue with its young cast, hilarious sketches, the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band and Denise Coffey as one of its zanier characters, Mrs. Black, has as its director one of the few women in this country directing a comedy show. When you know the woman is Daphne Shadwell, you know why Do Not Adjust Your Set has been such a hit.

Fresh from a long day's rehearsal of a special edition of the show for adult viewers, which will be going out in June as part of Rediffusion's swan song, this small, lively woman with the ready smile clowned good-humouredly with Denise Coffey during a photographic session and confirmed what was obvious - that she enjoyed her work very much.

"I laugh so much. I enjoy what I'm doing, and as long as that is the case, I'm happy with it."

Daphne Shadwell, daughter of Charles Shadwell, the BBC conductor who became a national name through his association with ITMA and other shows, has her roots in show business. She left the BBC in 1955 to join Rediffusion and has been directing for the company since 1956.

Experience varied

Her experience could scarcely be more varied. She began with woman's programmes under Mary Hill, covering cookery, fashion and films. There were advertising magazines, an invaluable basic training ground, then came children's television and the whole gamut of comedy, drama serials, light entertainment.

She directed plays which were the fore-runners of No Hiding Place, Cool for Cats, and shows with Rosemary Squires and Michael Holliday. Then Ready, Steady, Go came on the scene, and more light entertainment.

"I love light entertainment. I always have done. I've never made a big feature documentary or political programme because it is something I wouldn't choose." But she recalled one venture into this field in the 1964 general election, when she was in charge of a programme from Trafalgar Square. "I'm inclined to be claustrophobic and was frightened to death of the crowds."

Daphne Shadwell - married to director John P. Hamilton, who also works for Rediffusion - has seen humour and light entertainment change enormously in style and presentation since she joined the company. "It has to, otherwise we would still be in old-style variety, but I don't like humour so broad and so strong as to be offensive. I know there is always the knob on the set and all that, but I don't think this sort of humour should be thrust on people when they don't expect it."

One of the stars of Do Not Adjust Your Set is Denise Coffey ("The greatest delight of my life has been in having Denise in the series because it is the first time I have worked with somebody smaller than myself," says Daphne).

Filmgoers will recognise Denise as the pert and witty farm-maid in Far From the Maddening Crowd.

Both Daphne and Denise are on the same wave-length, an obvious advantage in working together on the same show for three months, and their views on women and comedy, drawn from practical experience in this, also dove-tailed.

Tessie O'Shea

"I don't think people accept a woman comedian as readily as they do a man," said Daphne. "It 's very hard for a woman to be a stand-up comedian in her own right. A man can joke about his mother-in-law, the races, the pub last night. He has a broader field to draw upon. Can you imagine a woman standing up and telling jokes about her father-in-law?

"Some get away with it - Tessie O'Shea, for instance, as Two-ton Tessie - but she is pretty and charming, and has a voice. She is an entertainer. There is Mae West, too - a great comedienne, but she was always more than that."

Denise has concluded that people do not like to hear woman telling jokes.

"One is more embarrassed if a woman dies the death than if a man does. People like to see woman being funny. Perhaps men are better at commenting on their own shortcomings than women. A man feels free to comment on himself because it is not so important to him. Women are more vulnerable in that they want to be thought marvellous, or stars, and want to be cherished. A woman telling jokes against herself sounds as if she is sniping at herself or it can come out sounding tasteless."

Do Not Adjust Your Set is a humour show aimed at young people, but not surprisingly drawing in the whole age spectrum. It can be enjoyed at different levels. "The only thing we will take out is anything we feel might be above children's heads or unsuitable. It is a show that anybody and everybody can understand and, we hope, will," said Daphne Shadwell.

"The pattern goes back to Take It From Here, the BBC radio show. There you had a broad gag and a subtle gag alternating. What one lot missed the other would get - it's like all revue, where you have an up-and-down bit. We try to create something that in itself can be seen from different aspects.

Gauging taste

"It's very hard to do a funny show every week for 13 weeks, particularly in gauging what people will find funny. There are sketches which we think not so funny yet they are often the ones people write in to say they have enjoyed."

The Do Not Adjust Your Set atmosphere is a happy one. "I have to look after Denise," joked Daphne, "because the boys forget to write her into the sketches. Although we pretend at rehearsals that we have been left out - women think and feel and all that, she added in mock seriousness - we are seeing ourselves all right quietly, what with my personal assistant, unit manager, stage manager, make-up girls, vision mixer, Denise and myself."

The show ends its current run on March 26, to re-appear for one show in June.

"We are hoping there will be another series, but with the change-over in contracts, it is very hard to say. It is a very sad time for everybody and there are a lot of heart-aches. At the moment my own plans are not fixed."

Whatever the future holds for this show, it has offered an oasis of genuine, unfraught, crazy fun.

From the Sun, Thursday 13th March 1969:

SUNTV
By Nancy Banks-Smith

NAUGHT, OR ALMOST NAUGHT, FOR MY COMFORT

As it was my birthday I observed two minutes' silence. Then looked round for what comfort I could find. Mercifully there was a tonic on TV, 'Do Not Adjust Your Set' (Thames) and a pick-me-up on radio, 'I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again' (Radio 2).

I don't promise that You Too Will Fall About The Floor. If a solicitor called Marchin (from the firm of Boots, Boots, Marchin Up and Down-again) or Queen Victoria (A Lady Ventriloquist with a dummy called Little Prince Albert) doesn't appeal to you, try something similar but simpler - 'Do Not Adjust Your Set'.

For kiddies

Technically it's one for the kiddies. But don't let that bother you, as I used to say while pouring the baby's welfare orange juice into the gin.

Mostly it mickey-takes television, like yesterday's skit on Percy Thrower: "When you are feeding your Maneaters, just give them a handful of peat. Or Fred."

Or Outrage, "in which we face the Minister of Education with one of his most virulent critics. The BBC won't take responsibility for anything said on this programme, as it's on ITV."

From the Guardian, Monday 24th March 1969:

TELEVISION
Stanley Reynolds

KIDDING WHOM?

How different are Granada's "Discotheque" and Thames Television's "Do Not Adjust Your Set"; Both are teatime programmes networked each Wednesday, and one assumes they are aimed at the same audience. "Discotheque" is a pop music programme introduced by a "resident disc dolly", and it is a very tired little mime-along-with-morons show. The programme has no visual style that would appeal to a child accustomed to the sophistication of television commercials, but conveys the miserable feeling of being done on the cheap for an automatic pop audience. One element of fun, not exploited at all by the producer Muriel Young, is supplied by the sharp-eyed Northern kids sitting around the studio looking at the pop singers with the flintily appraising glances of comparison shoppers in a supermarket.

"Do Not Adjust Your Set," on the other hand, is a programme that appreciates the visual and verbal sophistication of today's children. Satirical sketches make fun of things that children know about like television, newspapers, advertising, personality fads and fashions, pop music - things that any humorist uses. Children are responsive to the verbal humour of "Don Not Adjust Your Set" - the puns, the word play, and the sending up of clichés - because they are still sensitive to words. Their vocabularies are expanding daily and their ears are more finely tuned than most adults' to the cadence of a phrase. The compressed imagery and sophisticated photographic technique employed in television commercials, the dramatic presentation of even the most mundane household products, all contribute to a child's sharper eye for style. "Do Not Adjust You Set" appreciates this sophistication and plays to it with admirable effect and not the least hint of either patronage or condescension.

From the Observer, Sunday 30th March 1969. By George Melly:

Another growing cult is the children's show Do Not Adjust Your Set (Thames). This is indeed worth catching if you're home by 5.30 on Wednesday evenings. It's not in itself particularly original in format. There are echoes of every comedy show, some of them with almost no effort to conceal the original source. Yet, like many children's programmes it has the relaxation that comes from knowing that its audience is comparatively uncritical and this allows it to take outrageous risks, at least half of which come off triumphantly.

Among other goodies there is an endless serial about a runty bowler-hatted little moron called Captain Fantastic who is constantly pursued by a dangerous adversary called the evil Mrs Black. The most inspired lunacy last week was a sketch in which a trades union meeting of gnomes, elves and fairies got side-tracked into an argument as to whether humans existed. Most of the little people thought they didn't, but a leprechaun and a fairy were strongly convinced of our reality. 'If there aren't people,' asked the fairy, 'who makes Frank Sinatra records?' 'They are sent from above from whence or for what purpose we know not,' parried a sententious gnome. Undefeated she came back with another piece of evidence, 'Who trod on Basil, the mad stoat?' she asked triumphantly. The children thought I'd do myself an injury.

From the Guardian, Thursday 3rd April 1969. By Stanley Reynolds:

COMEDY SHOWS

It is a shame that Thames Television "Do Not Adjust Your Set," goes out before six o'clock. This early hour means that only a relative handful of working adults may see this really inventive comedy serious. Of course, the programme is a children's show, but it is totally unlike anything else put out for children. One must compare it to Marty Feldman's "Marty" on BBC-1, Granada's "Psst" or Spike Milligan's "Q 5" or the American "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, both on BBC-2. It is, I think, a better programme than the last three, and just as good as the superb "Marty." It is written by Eric Idler (what a name for a comedy writer) Terry Jones, and Michael Palin, who also appear in the programme along with Denise Coffey and the Bonzo Dog Band, which does marvellous take-offs of the sort of pretentious pop groups that readers of our own Geoffrey Cannon will know about. Yesterday, the show included a new feature, some really clever animated cartoons done by Terry Gilliam. These cartoons were as good as you would get at any hour on television, the equal of cinema cartoons.

Comments

The Mark Thomas Comedy Product

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 15:31:05 +0100

Page 15 of the Daily Star, Tuesday 24th January 1995:

TV calf sketch apology

CHANNEL 4 has apologised for a sketch in which a comedian dressed up as a "militant calf" threatened to eat Mr William Waldegrave's children, writes David Millward.

The three-minute monologue by Mark Thomas, broadcast at the height of the controversy over the export of live calves, prompted six separate complaints to the Independent Television Commission.

Mr Waldegrave, the Agriculture Minister, who has four children aged six to 14, did not complain directly about the programme, You Don't Know Me But.

Mr Michael Grade, Channel 4's chief Executive, admitted broadcasting the programme was a mistake and said he understood why some viewers took offence.

But Mr Thomas, 31, said: "If Channel 4 wants to broadcast an apology, it is up to them. Personally, I would not have done so. I don't think I went over the top.

"He is a Cabinet minister and if I upset him, I think it is entirely fair."

Page 15 of the Daily Star, Friday 29th March 1996:

MARK LOSES TV'S £10,000 ON A NAG
EXCLUSIVE by JERRY LAWTON

TELLY bosses were trying to see the funny side after wacky comic Mark Thomas blew his show's entire £10,000 budget on a HORSE RACE!

He was given the cash by Channel 4 to produce the last show in the series The Mark Thomas Comedy Product. But in the end madcap Mark was forced to film tonight's episode in his living room.

Mark spent £1,500 sponsoring a race at Doncaster, South Yorks. Then he bet the remaining £8,500 on the 14-1 shot Rebel Country, but lost the lot when it trailed in eleventh. A C4 spokesman said: "This series is supposed to be radical, and you can't get much radical than blowing all the money on a horse race."

Comments

When did you ever hear Eric and Ernie swear?

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 15:26:18 +0100

Page 9 of the Daily Mail, Tuesday 5th December 1995:

ONE OF OUR TOP COMEDY WRITERS LAMENTS THE BAD LANGUAGE OF TODAY'S TV COMICS
When did you ever hear Eric and Ernie swear?
by EDDIE BRABEN

THE Morecambe and Wise show was the most popular light-entertainment programme of its day and I wrote for them for 14 years. A recent repeat still drew huge audience figures.

But in all that time, and in all those sketches, I only used the word 'bloody' once. The situation was this. Eric had taken Ernie to meet his Mum and Dad. After a while, Eric said: 'I'm gong now.' His dad said, 'Hoo-bloody-rah.' He was pretending to be a very hard man.

But then the father said: 'I'm off to work now, anyway,' went into the other room, and came out dressed as a vicar. So there was a very good reason for using that word, and I never did it again.

I turn on the television now and I wonder what on earth is happening. Comedy shows are littered with swearing. Sometimes you can barely make out the joke for the bad language.

Even the Comedy Awards at the weekend, humour's great night of the year, was ruined because so many of the stars resorted to dirty talk - like Martin Clunes, who lived up to his hit show's title Men Behaving Badly by blurting out the f-word.

A four-letter word can never make an unfunny line funny, and every night these comedians prove my point. I look back and think: Did you ever hear Tommy Cooper swear? Or Ken Dodd? Or Morecambe and Wise? And the answer is: Of course not.

Sometimes the older comedians were smutty - British humour has always had that element - but they were never offensive. These days some comedy shows are downright repellent. You watch them for a while and you're left with a nasty taste in the mouth.

I've thought a lot about how things have changed, and the one thing I keep coming back to is warmth. Good comedy leaves you glowing. It has an element of fantasy and a large dollop of humanity, and they are what lift you out of the gloom.

AS A CHILD I used to listen to Arthur Askey on the wireless, and even before I could understand the jokes I knew that he was this happy, jolly man who made people laugh. At the end of the show I'd feel a glow.

Throughout my career I've always striven to reproduce that feeling - but many new writers have no idea that that's what it's about. They write cold, hard humour for cold, hard comedians. But without a bit of compassion, that kind of dry, cynical wit will never really make people laugh. Go backstage with Eric and Ernie and it was clear that it wasn't just respect they had for one another - there was real love. When they got in front of the cameras the audience could see that, and they liked it. It was a sort of love affair.

The problem is that modern writers of comedy have never really served their apprenticeship. They have leapt straight into television and barely know what works before a live audience.

I was lucky. I caught the last of the music halls and sold my first gag to Charlie Chester for 2s 6d (12½p). It went like this: 'When Hopalong Cassidy was a baby his mother always knew he would be a great cowboy because he had a ten-gallon nappy.' I'd written 100 jokes for him, but that was the only one he took. After that I wrote for Ken Dodd, and then I moved to the Morecambe and Wise show.

I was the sole writer for Eric and Ernie; the sole responsibility rested on my shoulders and I wanted my stamp all over it. I think that's very important. But I also took the blame. I watched the Russ Abbot show recently, and at the end about 16 writers were mentioned. No wonder the jokes weren't very good.

WHEN a writer hits a run he'll think: 'Never mind, there are 15 others who'll get it right instead.' But the other 15 thinking the same thing. So at the end of the day you have weak jokes and a sort of mongrel product with no real identity. It's not entirely the writers' fault. There are too many get-out clauses and you need pressure to write really well.

Take canned laughter. I'm not saying there wasn't any in the Sixties, but the Morecambe and Wise show never used it. Nowadays, the writers probably never know when the material is no good but think: 'Thank heavens for the laughter machine.' Sometimes you'll hear laughter when there hasn't even been a joke.

If you really want to understand where things have gone wrong, you have to go back to shows like Dad's Army and Steptoe And Son. There you had all the classic ingredients: great situations, clear conflicts, and brilliantly drawn characters.

They were very different. Dad's Army had a very gentle humour with no hate and no violence. There was a fantasy element - these men were in their own little world - but it's as funny today as it was then. And I'm sure we'll still be laughing in another 20 years' time. Steptoe And Son had animosity right the way through, with the father and son bickering at one another all day. But underneath you knew they loved each other. If you'd thought they really hated each other, you'd never have wanted to watched.

When Last Of The Summer Wine first appeared I had high hopes. Again there was the element of fantasy, and the characters were wonderfully drawn. But somehow it lost the plot. The situations became unconvincing, and the whole show became contrived.

The same had happened with Keeping Up Appearances. It stretches the imagination too far. No man could stand that Hyacinth Bucket woman, and I can't believe that everyone would go in fear of her. Someone would put her in her place.

When you watch these shows you, think, 'Who decides? Who decrees that this is funny?'

PERHAPS somewhere, in some darkened room, there's a genius that television chiefs consult, a man who really knows what's what. But I don't think so.

In my day there was Bill Cotton at the BBC. He could make decisions because he'd been brought up in music hall. His father played all the variety theatres with his band and he'd been out there on the battlefield.

I'm not sure that some people who commission comedy now have even produced a TV show. No wonder they keep on showing The Brittas Empire, which makes me scream - but not with laughter.

I wouldn't slam all comedy shows. Only Fools And Horses was superb and, unlike the critics, I am enjoying The Thin Blue Line, which goes out Monday nights. There is a warmth and a quirkiness about it that could make it a real winner.

We should go back to light entertainment and only have stand-up comedy and sitcoms if they really are funny. The new Morecambe and Wises or Tommy Coopers are out there and will battle through.

What we must not do is allow filth and bad language to take over. If you give audiences something that is bad for long enough, they'll accept it. Have we reached that stage yet? I hope not.

Comments

It'll Be Alright On The Night

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 23:11:30 +0100

From News of the World, Sunday 20th March 1977:

Oops! It's the big Blooper Show

THEY'RE the funniest film clips you've never seen - the clangers that end up on the cutting room floor during the making of TV shows, commercials and movies.

And some of the best are to be screened soon in an ITV programme called It'll Be All Right On the Night.

The hour-long collection of "bloopers," as they're known in the trade, promises to be far funnier than many so-called comedies.

It includes a snippet from the film The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox, in which Goldie Hawn has to fire a rifle. Ten times it fails to go off - and ten times she snaps out a four-letter word.

A clip from a London Weekend programme shows a girl singer carrying on bravely through her number while her scanty costume keeps slipping revealingly.

In a piece from ATV's Space 1999, one of the stars walks backwards across the set and trips over a "dead" actor.

And there's part of a Harlech TV talk show in which the scenery falls down.

But clangers dropped in news and current affairs programmes will not be shown. It was decided that they might affect the programmes' credibility.

From the Sun, Saturday 27th August 1977:

What A Clanger
Excuse me, your slip will soon be showing
By TIM EWBANK

STAND by for the great screen blunder show! Starring dozens of your top telly and film favourites - at their very worst.

For top stars like Peter Sellers, Roger Moore, Goldie Hawn, George Segal, Bruce Forsyth, John Thaw and Denis Waterman have all agreed to allow their film mistakes to be shown on television.

The awful slip-ups that had the directors cursing will be screened next month in a show comprised entirely of clangers that ended up on the cutting room floor.

The celluloid disasters have been put together for the ITV show, It'll Be Alright On The Night.

Among the prize blunders are...

■ JOHN THAW, the Sweeney star, during filming of a chase sequence, runs towards the camera and trips over a kerb.

■ HENRY COOPER in a TV commercial. Britain's ex-heavyweight boxing champ runs through some woods with former Olympic hurdling champion David Hemery.

Name

He turns to talk to Hemery - and can't remember his name!

■ ROGER MOORE in the film That Lucky Touch. Moore tried to unlock a door in a tense scene.

As he strains against the door, he says: "I should have learned my lines before I got here."

■ PETER SELLERS in The Pink Panther Strikes Again. Several times he tries to film a sequence where he grabs another actor by the tie across a desk. Each time Sellers dissolves into fits of giggles.

■ BRUCE FORSYTH in Thames TV's Bruce And A Hundred Girls. Forsyth is filming a sketch in a mock kitchen.

Match

It collapses around him.

■ And an un-named actor in a war film tries to light his co-star's cigarette. By mistake, he holds the match to the man's nose.

Other programmes to get here-are-the-blunders treatment are Space 1999, Yes Honestly, Gunsmoke, and Star Trek.

There are several from The Waltons, including Richard Thomas as John-Boy getting his lines mixed up and shouting a very rude word.

London Weekend Television, who made the programme, had to obtain permission from every actor involved.

Producer Paul Smith, 30, says: "They have all been really good sports.

"It is very noble of them to agree to let us show their faults.

"We also had to get permission from the film and TV companies. Some said No, but mostly they were very helpful, especially in America."

Many of the film clips came from private collectors.

Others are from reels of film compiled by editors and cameramen for a film crew's amusement at the end of the making of a movie or TV series.

From the Birmingham Evening Mail, 8th May 1978:

It's all right to screen clangers, says ATV
from STAFFORD HILDRED in Montreux

ATV has lifted its ban on TV mistakes being screened on Denis Norden's entertaining collection from the cutting room floor, "It'll Be All Right On The Night."

Delegates at the Golden Rose of Montreux television light entertainment contest last night laughed throughout the programme, which is in the non-competitive Hors Concours class.

And afterwards ATV's director of production, Francis Essex, said: "We will certainly contribute to the next show."

ATV refused to allow Norden to include any of its clangers in the original programme. Francis Essex said: "We did not know the shape the show was going to take, but eventually the format turned out to be very acceptable."

The show went out on British TV last year and went straight to the top of the ratings. Producer Paul Smith, whose original idea it was to collect the double-takes, is preparing a sequel to be put together later this year.

He said: "We've got some very funny ATV Today clips and I'm delighted that we'll be able to include some of them. The second show will probably go out in the winter, but we are determined not to do it too often. That would devalue the whole idea."

The use of the ATV material will help the programme makers who had enormous trouble getting the necessary permissions for their first show.

● London Weekend TV has bought the Bette Midler Show, which also features film star Dustin Hoffman, and British TV viewers will see it this summer.

Page 13 of the Sun, Saturday 20th April 1985:

It'll be all RUDE on the night

A BLUE version of It'll Be Alright On The Night is on its way to our screens.

The new, anything-goes show, which includes sex, nudity and four-letter words, was recorded this week for transmission soon by ITV.

Host Denis Norden said the London Weekend show, called It'll Be Alright Late At Night, was "rude and risque".

Among the stars caught with their trousers down or their language out of control are comedian Jim Davidson, quiz show host Max Bygraves and dancer Lionel Blair.

Viewers will be shocked to see shots of the Queen and Prince Philip caught off guard sandwiched in between candid scenes of nudity and swearing.

One highlight shows a couple making love so passionately that the bed collapses beneath them at the crucial moment.

In another scene, a girl is fired from a circus cannon - but loses her outfit.

President and Mrs Reagan are shown looking embarrassedly at a group of stallions - one of which is in a state of sexual excitement.

Another highlight shows a red-faced Dickie Davies, host of ITV's World of Sport, getting his tongue in a twist over the words "Cup soccer".

Norden said: "I call this an unbuttoned version of the earlier shows. Since the earlier shows were a great favourite with children, we had to be ultra careful. With a late night version, we can afford to relax a bit."

Comments

Rutland Weekend Television / All You Need Is Cash

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 18:13:30 +0100

From the Sun, Saturday 8th February 1975:

Secret Plot by the Potty Pirates
Fun TV will replace BBC!
By CHRIS KENWORTHY

A NEW comedy series which threatens to be as funny and outrageous as Monty Python's Flying Circus has been made by the BBC.

It's called Rutland Weekend Television and its mastering is 31-year-old Eric Idle, of the original Python team.

He wrote it. He stars in it. And a lot of the inspired lunacy that was a feature of the Python programmes has gone into it.

The idea of the show is that when the BBC shits down, the Rutland Weekend TV "pirates" station opens up.

Nerves

This week, the last of the six half-hour shows was finished. The series is likely to be seen later this year on BBC 2.

But nobody at the BBC is keen to talk openly about the series. It seems there has been a bout of executive nerves about it. Just the way there was over the Monty Python show.

Well - what have they got to be nervous about?

A technician connected with the series told me:

"Rutland Weekend TV will, we hope, be just about the funniest network in the world.

"And the worst - everything it does is awful, because it's so cheap and incompetent.'

Hmm ...

Drastic

"We aimed at taking to a logical conclusion what could happen to the BBC, if it was compelled to make drastic economies.

Ah - politics!

"Whether it will actually give offence," the technician went on, "depends on the kind of person you are.

"For instance, we show vicars and bishops in funny situations."

Oh dear ...

"In another," the technician said, "we show politicians being given lessons in television deportment.

"Which might upset some politicians and their supporters."

It might, indeed.

And since the BBC have had plenty of clashes with thin-skinned political people, that could be the main reason why everybody is making such a secret of the new venture.

Why Rutland Weekend Television?

Rutland used to be Britain's smallest county. Then it disappeared off the map altogether.

Which could make it a safer target for anything that Idle plans to do with its "television service."

Each show will include a song spot by Neil Innes, 29-year-old former member of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band.

Other members of the cast will include Wanda Ventham, who starred in The Lotus Eaters and David Battley - the undertaker's gormless assistant in the comedy series That's Your Funeral.

Wanda Ventham, 35, told me: "I don't see any reason for worries about the programme."

The BBC say: "Yes, we are laughing at it behind our hands.

"It really is very funny."

Just as long as we're all allowed to share the joke.

From the Daily Mail, Wednesday 14th May 1975:

Rutland is definitely not amused

THEY don't like the BBC's new Monty Python-type programme up in Rutland.

Rutland Weekend Television, written by Python man Eric Idle, had its debut on BBC 2 on Monday night.

Scenes included people disappearing under priests' clothing and a male pop singer wth the figure of a naked pregnant woman.

'An insult to the fair name of Rutland,' was a typical response yesterday.

Foremost among the protesters were three former chairmen of the urban council of Oakham, the market town in the centre of Rutland.

Rubbish

Mr Herrick Watchorn said: 'It was absolute tripe.'

Mrs Winifred Clark described the show as 'a load of rubbish with disgusting language and pictures.' She hoped that people in other parts of the country would not associate Rutland with the kind of thinking behind the programme.

Mr Bill Steele said: 'It was pathetic, in bad taste and should never have been linked with the name of Rutland,' he said.

A BBC spokesman said: 'It is an extremely silly programme and we hope no one will take it too seriously.'

● Rutland used to be Britain's smallest county. Now it's just a part of Leicestershire.

From the Daily Express, Friday 17th March 1978. By David Wigg:

ROLLING Stone Mick Jagger is to appear in a new TV show - sending up The Beatles.

The show is called "All you Need is Cash" and stars a group called The Rutles.

Like the Beatles, they have mop-style haircuts and wear the same round-collared jackets of the sixties.

The 90-minute musical comedy, which also stars Mick's wife Bianca, George Harrison, Paul Simon and fellow Stone Ronnie Wood, will be screened on B.B.C.2 on Easter Monday.

The show has been masterminded by Monty Python star Eric Idle. He plays one of the Rutles with another Python name, Neil Innes.

There are songs performed by The Rutles that have a Beatle ring about their titles - like "Hold My Hand," "With A Girl Like You" and "Ouch!"

With tongue-in-cheek humour the story states the meteoric rise to "excess" of the Rutles.

One of the funniest sequences is when former Beatle George Harrison is seen in the streets disguised as a greying interviewer.

Mick Jagger is asked why as thought The Rutles broke up? He replies: "Women. Just women getting in the way, Cherchez la femme you know."

The show is a bundle of laughs. All you need is to be old enough to remember...

From Time Out, 24th to 30th March 1978:

Beatles Burlesque

An expensive, comic resurrection of The Beatles appears on BBC-TV on Easter Monday. John Collis previews

To paraphrase Woody Allen, Eric Idle had an idea and managed to find the financial backing to turn it into a concept. The idea was to parody The Beatles, in an episode of 'Rutland Weekend Television', Idle's BBC series. In collaboration with that expert of musical pastiche, Neil Innes, the sketch was developed on the American comedy show 'Saturday Night Live', and now arrives as a fully-fledged package: an elaborately-garnished record album and a TV documentary, featuring the rise and fall of The Rutles.

There is really only one gag in the film 'All You Need is Cash', but while the comic philosophers sort out whether there are three or 12 basic jokes, it's a good enough gag to be going on with. It simply involves recognising which public icon of The Beatles' career is being re-created; the laughs come from the extraordinary accuracy of the pastiche, combined with a sudden nostalgic charge prompted by memories of the real thing. In spite of the Pythonesque distortations, that is the Fab Four (now transformed into the Prefab Four) appearing on BBC-TV, arriving in America for the first time, recording 'All You Need Is Love', reacting to Epstein's suicide.

The whole thing is bound together by Idle's familiar but always welcome TV interviewer persona who stands on drab streets outside theatres and in the cellars which are all that remain of The Rutles' myth. He does not seem to have spoken to everyone, though they are now sadly aged, who had any part in the career of The Rutles. At times the in-jokes become delightfully convoluted.

George Harrison lays a TV interviewer who talks to Michael Palin, playing press-officer Derek Taylor under the pseudonym Eric Manchester, about the idealistic naivete of Apple. Meanwhile the Apple building is ransacked behind them. Harrison is the only Beatle to take part in the farce, though Mick Jagger reminisces splendidly about the long-gone rivalry between The Stones and The Rutles.

As a sound-track to the film, Neil Innes' words and music are an integral part of the joke. His music parodies sometimes refer to specific songs, sometimes to a stage in the development of one of The Beatles. They are invariably spot-on, but as a record album they need the support of the third element in the package, the album art-work. Without this, the purely-aural joke would soon wear thin.

Sometimes the metaphor is a little obvious; for example, The Beatles' much-publicised drug-taking is transformed into a penchant for tea. But 'Leggy' Mountbatten, bizarrely representing Epstein, is a masterpiece. At the point where 'Leggy' recognises that his hold over 'his boys' is weakening, and while they sit at the feet of Surrey mystic Arthur Sultan, he is overcome by a fit of depression. Lonely, and unable to reach anyone on the phone, he emigrates to Australia. The shot of the ridiculous 'Leggy', standing at the window with the curtains billowing around him, is at once hilarious, cruel, and touching. 'All You Need Is Cash' is the most extravagant, the funniest, and with any luck the last, indulgence in nostalgia for the '60s.

'All You Need Is Cash' is aired on BBC 2, 8.45, March 27.

Comments

Potentially Wonderful/Terrible Television Comedy Shows That, For One Reason Or Another, Went Unproduced

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 15:50:43 +0100

From the Daily Mail, Thursday 28th March 1974:

Clouseau on TV - by Sellers

PETER SELLERS is planning to make his first TV series - based on his screen role as the world's worst policeman, Inspector Clouseau.

Sellers, who made the accident-prone detective as famous as his Parisian Surete rival Maigret through two films - 'The Pink Panther' and 'A Shot In The Dark,' has discussed the series with Sir Lew Grade, chairman of ATV.

A pilot show is to directed by Blake Edwards, who made the Clouseau films, has already been written.

The series would probably consist of 28 episodes of 60 minutes each, and could cost £500,000.

It would undoubtedly have enormous appeal in America, which is why Sir Lew, noted for his flair at selling TV shows to the States, was initially attracted to the project.

A spokesman for Sellers said: 'Peter is very excited about the possibility of playing Closeau again. It's one of his favourite characters. So far negotiations are progressing very satisfactorily.'

'The Pink Panther,' which also starred David Niven and Claudia Cardinale was released in 1964. Sellers stepped into the role at the last moment after Peter Ustinov walked out following a script row.

Sellers said 'Closeau is one of those lovable characters that actors love to do. He's comic and gives so much room for individual interpretation. I love him.'

From the Sunday Mirror, Sunday 2nd July 1978:

It's no go for the Goebbels show

THE new scriptwriting partnership of Johnny Speight and Ray Galton has suffered a set-back.

B B C-TV has turned down their comedy series, Goebbels' Diaries.

This would have been the first T V product from Johnny (of Till Death Us Do Part fame) and Ray (who recently split with co-writer Alan Simpson after a long partnership which produced shows like Hancock's Half Hour).

Says Johnny: "When Jimmy Gilbert, the B B C-TV's head of light entertainment, read the script we gave him on Goebbels' Diaries, he said: 'It's fearfully funny, but no way can we do it on T V.

"'If I saw it in the theatre I'd probably fall off the seat laughing, but it goes too far to allow it on the air.'

"I suppose Jimmy has a point," says Speight. "Although I can't understand the reasoning.

"I know people are worried about Nazi revivalism, but comedy can make a serious comment.

"You can do real damage to an evil cause by making fun of it.

"In Goebbels' Diaries, we have put in all those marvellous songs of the period which offer an oblique comment.

"We have Eva Braun, Hitler's mistress, pacing up and down in his bunker after heavy bombings. On the radio the young Frank Sinatra is singing I Didn't Sleep A Wink Last Night.

"In comes Hitler screaming: 'He should complain. Nobody in the whole of Germany slept a wink last wink.'

"Sure, Goebbels' Diaries might shock some people but so did Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part.

"We'll probably put Goebbels' Diaries into the theatre," said Johnny.

"And we've been commissioned by ATV to write a pilot for a new series about a suburban police force. This is a big mickey-take of series like Kojak. The Sweeney and Starsky And Hutch.

"Don't worry about us - it's all happening, although we're not going to write pap for anybody or anything."

From the Sun, page 14, 12th May 1982:

ITV PLAN A SATIRE FUN SHOW

ITV is planning a new LIVE satire show on the lines of the BBC's hit series Not The Nine O'Clock News.

The programme is called QWERT - after the first five letters on a typewriter - and will feature four presenters, including a girl.

Writers Colin Bostock-Smith and Laurie Rowley have already been recruited from the NTNON team.

The show is part of a new package of light entertainment planned by ITV next year.

I have it on reliable authority that this show became Channel Four's Who Dares Wins.

The Daily Star, Friday 11th January 1985:

MORE PORRIDGE ON THE WAY...
By PAT CODD

THE BBC are planning a new series of Ronnie Barker's top-rated TV comedy, Porridge.

A repeat of the 1975 show was such a success at Christmas it beat Raiders of the Lost Ark in the ratings.

It attracted 19.36 million viewers compared to the American film's 19.33 million.

In Porridge, Barker plays an incorrigible old lag doing time in prison.

BBC 1 boss Michael Grade said yesterday:

"After the Christmas success we have discussed doing more Porridge with Ronnie.

"Ronnie and writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais would love to do more episodes."

Mr. Grade refuted ITV claims that they had won the Christmas ratings battle.

Page 5 of the Sun, Thursday 2nd May 1988:

BLACKADDER BEN IN QUEEN RUMPUS
By GARY BUSHELL

LEFTIE comic Ben Elton has outraged BBC bosses with plans for a Blackadder series based on a bastard son...of the Queen.

TV insiders yesterday revealed that Beeb chiefs are "seriously concerned" about the bad-taste plot which would star Rowan Atkinson as the "Royal bastard".

Co-writer Ben, 30, scrapped plans to call next year's series Bat Adder based on Batman in favour of the new storyline.

A friend said: "Ben would be the first to admit he doesn't like royalty, but he doesn't think this is particularly over the top."

Page 25 of Today, Monday 26th June 1989:

ITV sinks Carling black comedy slot
by KEVIN O'SULLIVAN

A NEW comedy series has been axed because its stars shot to fame in a TV commercial.

Programme chiefs at first wanted to cash in on the success of Mark Arden and Steve Frost, who play two likely lads in the adverts for Carling Black Label lager.

But they dropped the show after one pilot episode rather than risk it becoming a half-hour plug for the beer giant.

A Thames Television executive says: "Carling would no doubt clamour to get their commercials screened during the programme.

"But other beer companies might shy away and the situation would become too difficult.

"Mark and Steve are a brilliant partnership, but you have to be wary of trying to draw on the success of an advertising campaign."

Arden, famous for his catchphrase "I bet he drinks Carling Black Label", is philosophical about the rejection.

HUMOUR

He says: "It was disappointing but Steve and I don't want to become another Hale and Pace, or be compromised in any way."

But Arden, who does a stand-up routine with Frost on the alternative comedy circuit, does feel that some TV chiefs are out of touch with modern humour.

"Some have latched on to the new breed of comedy, but others are deeply seated in their previous experiences," he says.

"Someone who produced Terry and June 15 years ago is bound to get paranoid when handing out commissions for new stuff today."

Carling's campaign meanwhile has boosted consumption of lager. It has also made instantly recognisable faces out of Arden and Frost - which means the former can even joke about his series' cancellation.

He says: "Maybe Thames shelved it because there wasn't enough money. Or it might simply be because it was rubbish."

Page 3 of Today, Thursday 30th May 1991:

You're just a load of goons
Spike's spitting mad at Blackadder and co
EXCLUSIVE by ANTON RUSH

THE grand old man of British humour, Spike Milligan, yesterday launched a bitter attack on modern comedy stars.

Hit shows like Spitting Image and Black Adder leave the former Goon cold.

He rubbished the crude Spitting Image scripts and added: "I prefer humour that's more abstract - nothing to do with the waist downwards."

Even award-winner Rowan Atkinson did not escape his contempt.

"I was horrified by the coarse sense of humour in Blackadder - sticking celery up people's backsides and all that. I left that kind of humour behind when I was in school."

But Spike gave the latest wave of comedians a grudging "OK".

"Some of them are funny - but the swearing is unbelievable, every second word is a curse."

Spike, 73, who wrote the Seventies cult TV show Q and several best-selling books, has had his confidence shattered by the rejection of his latest project. He said: "It's called Over The Hill and was written for Eric Sykes and myself as two over-the-hill comics trying to get back in.

"The BBC didn't think it was funny, then Thames TV read it and didn't think it was funny. Young people come along, you see, and feel they fire somebody."

Spike, a vegetarian, does 50 laps before breakfast round the pool of his huge house at Rye near the Sussex coast.

But, along with the rejection of his work, a nervous breakdown after the death of his mother last year has had a disastrous effect on his character.

"I used to have the urge to get up and go for a long walk in the morning and now I have to force myself to do that, I force myself to swim every morning in the pool. I'm a forced person.

"I've suffered a personality change and now I haven't got what it takes, it's all come to an end," he added.

Even the memory of his success with the Goons fails to cheer Spike.

"When I see a tethered horse blindfolded and going round and round in circles to turn a wheel I realise I was doing the same thing by writing The Goons.

"But I didn't know any other way to make a living."

To mark the 40th anniversary of the series BBC radio is re-running seven shows this week.

But Spike said: "I expect someone was just sitting around in a meeting and said, 'When is the anniversary of The Goons? Wouldn't it be a jolly good idea to bring some out?'."

Page 3 of the Daily Mirror, Wednesday 6th May 1992:

BENNY SIGNED BIG TV COMEBACK DEAL
By LOUISE FORD

BENNY Hill was signed up for a great TV comeback just eight days before his death, it was revealed last night.

He was thrilled with the deal, and happier than he had been for a long time, said friends.

The comic was shattered when Thames ditched him three years ago - a move that put him into TV exile.

The new contract - with Central - was kept secret because the firm wanted to announce their coup at last week's Montreux TV Festival.

Benny was to have started work almost immediately on two hour-long Christmas specials directed by his pal Dennis Kirkland.

The comedian, who was in and out of hospital from February for heart treatment, signed the deal in his agent's office on April 10.

On April 18 he died in his Teddington flat.

Page 3 of the Daily Star, Wednesday 5th January 1994:

Manuel Switches Channel - ITV Return For Basil Sidekick
EXCLUSIVE by NIGEL PAULEY

FAWLTY Towers waiter Manuel is planning an El of a TV comeback after 15 years.

But the hapless Spanish sidekick from Britain's most awful hotel has ditched Basil...and the Beeb.

The new sitcom Ole! Manuel! - starring 63-year-old Andrew Sachs - will be screened by ITV at a costa £1.5 million.

The wacky waiter from Barcelona soared to fame in the hit series which was a massive money-spinner. But Fawlty Towers creator John Cleese - who played manic hotel boss Basil Fawlty - won't appear in the Yorkshire-Tyne Tees series.

Neither will Prunella Scales, who starred as his shrewish wife Sybil.

There's been no real-life bust-up between the old telly team-mates, though.

In fact Cleese, who killed off the original series after only 13 episodes, has given the new show his backing.

Andrew's son John, whose production company is behind Ole! Manuel!, said: "Manuel will be older - but no wiser.

"He's escaped from the clutches of Basil and Sybil but he's still working in a lowly position in catering and being bullied and generally terrorised."

German-born Andrew has often claimed Manuel blighted his telly career.

But he's still earned a nice paella money from commercials and wildlife programmes.

Page 9 of Broadcast, Tuesday 15th March 1994:

C4 raises its sitcom quota
BY SARAH LITTLEJOHN

Channel 4 is seeking to expand its sitcom output and has ordered treatments for two comedies from specialist Hat Trick Productions.

Seamus Cassidy, Channel 4 commissioning editor of entertainment, has narrowed down new ideas for 1995 to six ideas. 'I'll be rebalancing things a bit and changing the emphasis to accommodate more sitcoms,' he said.

Hat Trick sitcoms in development with C4 are Father Ted Crilly, written by Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews about three Irish priests, and Otherwise You'd Cry, by David Firth about a son looking after his bed-ridden mother.

Other sitcoms under development for Channel 4 include : The Cows, a story of a cow revolution in the 1930s, written by surreal stand-up comic Eddie Izzard, which will be piloted nine months behind schedule in the summer; Captain Butler of the High Seas by Rob Sprackling and John Smith and produced by Humphrey Barclay Productions; and The Horn Beams by Terry Frisbee being developed by Humphrey Barclay, about a family reunion.

Dressing for Breakfast by Stephanie Calman is in development with Warner Sisters. It is a story about women in their late twenties who are under pressure to get married. Just Good Neighbours, by Geoff Rowley, is a sitcom about two next-door neighbours having an affair.

Channel 4 is pressing ahead with programmes for stand-up comedians Lee Evans, Mark Thomas and Mark Lamarr.

Also being negotiated is a second series - of between 20 and 26 episodes - of Don't Forget Your Toothbrush.

Page 3 of Mail On Sunday, Sunday 15th June 1997:

No, Minister - it just won't do for Brussels
Yes, Commissioner is turned down by BBC as 'not funny enough'
By Michael Burke

THE antics of Brussels bureaucrats seemed ripe material for a TV comedy...but the BBC failed to see the joke.

So Corporation bosses have turned down a proposed sequel to the highly successful Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister called Yes, Commissioner, it emerged yesterday.

They were decidedly sniffy about hit writer Sir Antony Jay's idea of transplanting the wily and urbane Sir Humphrey Appleby to the heart of Euro indecision-making.

As a spokesman said last night: 'We decided after very careful consideration that Brussels simply did not offer the comic opportunities of Westminster, so we passed on it.'

Beastly

But the rebuff has astonished Sir Antony who declared that whatever the BBC thought, he would still be going ahead with the project.
'Yes, Commissioner will be funny all right,' he said. 'You wait and see.'

Indeed, the BBC might well live to rue its decision. ITV and Sky say they can't wait to see the scripts.

Nigel Hawthorne, who played Sir Humphrey to the late Paul Eddington's Jim Hacker, was also said to be highly enthusiastic.

Apparently, the plan is to lock the Machiavellian mandarin in a new battle of wills - this time with a British Commissioner.

But it could also involve him being beastly to the Germans and offensive to the French.

Sir Antony, knighted by Margaret Thatcher in 1988 for his part in writing the two series with his former partner Jonathan Lynn, is working on the idea with his 38-year-old son Michael.

But last night he was keeping the details close to his chest. 'We don't want to give too much away at this stage because we don't have a broadcaster yet,' he said, 'and we don't want people stealing our ideas.

'I suppose we are now looking for a little bit of encouragement.'

One broadcaster who has been briefed on Sir Antony's plans said: 'Frankly, a lot of people are amazed at the BBC's attitude.

'Perhaps it is that these days the Corporation is a bureaucracy only marginally less labyrinthine than the EU itself - and it has simply lost the ability to spot a good idea handed on a plate.'

He said that if Paul Eddington had lived Sir Antony could have had him losing a General Election and becoming a European Commissioner. In real life that happened to former Labour leader Neil Kinnock who joined Sir Leon Brittan in Brussels.

'The character who does survive and is transferred is Sir Humphrey,' said the broadcaster.

'I understand that initial approaches have been made to Nigel Hawthorne in connection with this and he has responded with enthusiasm. But nothing is signed and sealed yet.

Jokes

'In Yes, Commissioner the central battle of wills is between Sir Humphrey and the British Commissioner whom, naturally, he thwarts at every turn.

'However, on occasions, Sir Humphrey and the British Commissioner will form an alliance to do the dirty on Commissioners from other countries.

'I belive the French will be the butt of a lot of the humour, There will also be a great many jokes made at the expense of the Germans.'

Some observers wonder whether this lack of political correctness could have had a bearing on the BBC's decision.

But a spokesman would only say: 'Certainly, Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister were brilliantly funny.

'The Jays came to us very early on - but we didn't think Yes, Commissioner had the same potential.'

Sir Antony retorted: 'We think the BBC's wrong. There is plenty of comic potential in Brussels.'

Comments

The Comic Strip Presents... Back To Normal With Eddie Monsoon / Summer School

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 17:05:41 +0100

Page 21 of the Sunday People, Sunday 16th January 1983:

TV SEX SHOCKER BANNED
By TONY BASSETT

THE final episode of TV's controversial The Comic Strip series has been scrapped because, it was claimed, it was too shocking even for Channel 4.

Actor Alan Pellay, who was to have appeared in the episode, said: "The Channel 4 bosses have banned it because they thought it had too much violence and sex."

The episode, called Back to Normal with Eddie Monsoon, was about a freewheeling, alcoholic TV interviewer.

Mr. Pellay, an ex-drag artist, said: "It had homosexuals in it and the language was terrible."

Main star of the Monday night comedy series is Rik Mayall, of the recent BBC series The Young Ones, but he was not in the scrapped episode.

The show's executive producer, Michael White, said the final show was dropped after a joint decision along with Channel 4 executives.

"One reason was that there was a disagreement over the script and secondly it was very over-the-top," he said.

A spokeswoman for Channel 4 denied that the scrapping was a clean-up ruling.

Page 17 of the Daily Mirror, Monday 31st January 1983:

COMIC CUT
Channel 4 chat show gets chop
by TONY PRATT

* THE shock-horror tactics of Britain's liveliest new television team, The Comic Strip, have begun to worry even their broad-minded bosses at Channel 4.

The team decided to drop an episode from their current series which ends tonight with SUMMER SCHOOL (Channel 4, 9.0).

The group had planned a show called The Eddie Monsoon Chat Show. But Channel 4 executives frowned when they saw the script.

A member of the team, Dawn French, said: "It wasn't dirty but it was very abrasive. We didn't want to change it, so rather than argue at this stage we decided to hold it over and try again for our next series."

Dawn was the memorable fat girl, George, in the first Comic Strip show fro Channel 4, Five Go Mad In Dorset.

She stars in and has also written tonight's show which she calls an expose of a university course in Iron Age living.

From the Birmingham Mail, Tuesday 1st February 1983:

Viewers rap 'Comic Strip'

Angry viewers rang Channel Four last night complaining about a "disgusting" comedy starring Droitwich celebrity Rik Mayall.

The viewers were outraged by the last programme in the Comic Strip series, a satire on students attempting an Iron Age expedition.

They were upset by scenes of woad-covered students mistakenly burning one of their colleagues alive.

Others could not take the prominence of a large statue, described by programme-makers as a "silly fertility symbol."

Rik Mayall played Tarquin. He created the character of an imbecilic TV Brummie, Kevin Turvey.

A Comic Strip spokesman said the programme was "a send-up of middle-class intellectual trendies."

She added: "It was a joke. I cannot imagine why people should object. There was nothing in the programme that we have not seen on screen before."

Channel Four said: "Most people thought the programme was very funny."

Comments

Billy Liar

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 17:03:01 +0100

From The Daily Mirror, Wednesday 17th October 1973:

'Billy Liar' TV show is censored
By KEN IRWIN

A NEW TV comedy show has been censored by ITV chiefs - because, they claim, there is too much swearing.

The first programme in the series, "Billy Liar" - based on the hit novel and film - has been altered for its screening next week.

And the rest of the series will be shown at 8.30pm, an hour later than planned. Mr. Cyril Bennett, London Weekend TV's programme chief, said yesterday: "The IBA decided that the word 'bloody' was used too much for early evening viewing."

One of the show's writers, Keith Waterhouse, said of the ruling: "As far as I am concerned, it's bloody stupid."

From The Guardian, Wednesday 17th October 1973:

But unbowed

THE BILLY LIAR series which began on Friday on London Weekend Television is to be put back an hour to 8 30 p.m., because of objections by the Independent Broadcasting Authority to the number of bloodies uttered by Billy's dad, played by George Cooper. But the first episode will go out at the original time: it contains only 15 bloodies, fewer than the other 12 episodes.

From The Sun, Wednesday 17th October 1973:

Oops! Rude Billy Liar Upsets The TV Bosses
By Brian Wesley

BILLY LIAR has run into a TV storm. Not because of his fantasy fibs, but over a six-letter swear word.

The offending word, used in a big London Weekend comedy production about the North Country character is BLOODY.

Officials of the Independent Broadcasting Authority - the ITV watchdog body - objected.

They said the word was used far to often in the new series.

So the 13 half-hour episodes have had to be "drastically rejigged."

Actor George A. Cooper, who plays Billy's father, said yesterday: "There is constant swearing, it is true. But this decision is very silly.

Attack

Series co-writer Keith Waterhouse was stronger in his attack: "I am indignant," he said.

"There is nothing in the Billy Liar series that my 10-year-old son would not know."

Now, when the series begins on October 26 at 7.30pm, it will be with an episode originally planned for a month later.

After that "innocuous" episode, Billy Liar will go out an hour later - at 8.30pm.

From Cinema TV Today, Saturday 20th October 1973:

The IBA has allowed the first of the new London Weekend's comedy series "Billy Liar" to go out as planned at 7.30p.m. but, having seen four completed episodes and several advance scripts the IBA has decided that future editions must be networked at what Cyril Bennett describes as "the more sanitary time of 8.30."

From Evening News, Thursday 14th November 1974:

One Word I Could Do Without

WHEN the first series of Billy Liar appeared I was highly critical of the use of the word "bloody."

It was used 30 to 40 times each show.

As the shows were all pre-recorded before the first one went on the air, there was not much the producers could do short of taking the show off.

The campaign had its effect and in the second series the word was eliminated.

Stupid

However, Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, two of the top script writers in the country, obviously cannot visualise the character of Billy's father as being able to complete a sentence without a massive use of expletives.

They therefore created their own swear word. The word is "swine-ing." Everything is swine-ing this and swine-ing that.

Apart from its idiocy, this one word has made an unfunny show into an irritating one.

Comments