Abigoliah: Hello, guys. Welcome back to All British Comedy Explained. Today we have an amazing interview for you all. It is with Griff Rhys Jones, who you will know from Not the Nine O’Clock News, Alas Smith and Jones, also one of the guys who started TalkBack Productions. The guy’s done it all. Was a radio producer before he did Not the Nine O’Clock News.
Tom: Yeah. This was a — this was an amazing interview, and such a thrill for me. As I slightly fanboyishly told Griff during the interview, I remember being, like, 10, 11 years old, listening to the Not the Nine O’Clock News record album in my father’s study with headphones on. I mean, such — such a thrill.
And he’s such a nice guy and so full of stories. Absolutely amazing. One doesn’t like to have favourites, and this could just be recency bias, but I think it’s my favourite interview we’ve done so far.
Abigoliah: I mean, he’s pretty great, and I feel like we barely scratched the surface. Like, I think we could have just let him go for, like, two hours, and he would have had more stories for us. It was great.
Guys, I have a personal podcast update for you all, because I know you’ve been wondering. You might notice that I have a little smudged eye make-up right now. That is because yesterday Tom and I went to the Independent Podcast Awards, where we were nominated, and we didn’t win.
Tom: And it’s an honour to be nominated. I’m so pleased.
Particularly thrilled that the podcast that did win in our category began with the same word.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Which is the — oh no, “All”. All, sorry. I forgot the name of my own podcast. But when they said “All”, Tom started to stand up, and then it’s like, no, no, it’s not us. It’s the other one.
Tom: Yes.
I treasure — I think it’s Robin Williams at the Oscars who described himself as sitting in the audience “smiling through clenched wishes”, which is absolutely perfect.
Anyway, listen. Yeah, congrats to everyone who did win. It was a lovely evening, and we are sincere when we say it’s an honour to be nominated. Maybe next year.
Abigoliah: It really was. And, guys, I don’t think we should keep this from you—
Tom: Well, one thing I want to say. We do kind of jump into the middle, partly because Griff is such a garrulous guest, but also because there are quite a lot of technical problems.
We normally record these things on Riverside. That didn’t work for Griff. We ended up doing it on Zoom. So the picture and audio quality aren’t quite as pristine as it usually is, but it should be absolutely fine to watch and listen to.
But we do kind of jump into the middle, so that’s partly why that’s the case.
Abigoliah: Fair. Good morning. Good morning. Well, let’s jump into the middle then, shall we?
Tom: Let’s do it. Here we go.
Abigoliah: Let’s do it.
Griff: Hello there.
Tom: Hello.
Abigoliah: Hello.
Griff: I’m so sorry about that. It’s been a crazy journey for me. I suddenly discovered that I haven’t been on Chrome for very, very many, many years.
Tom: Oh, right.
Griff: System is completely out of date. And let me just ring Matt. I think this is Matt saying, “Have I got through?”
Hello, Matt. I’ve got through now. We’re all right. Right. Okay. So there we are. So it was just a bit crazy. I’ve spent—
Tom: Not at all.
Griff: Are we all right? How are we doing? Are you all right for time? I’ve spent half an hour trying to get it to take various versions of Chrome and things like that, and put it into Applications and fill in passwords which I no longer have.
Anyway, here we are. Sorry.
Tom: We were just talking about Douglas Adams, who I think you knew at Cambridge. And one of his observations that I treasure is, we use the word “technology” to describe things that don’t work properly. There was a time when chairs were technology, but chairs work all the time now, so we don’t use that word for them.
Griff: Douglas and I were at school together.
Tom: Were you? Okay, well, let’s start there then. Let’s start with your school days. So you — I didn’t know you were. I knew you at university. I didn’t know you were at school together. Tell me about that.
Abigoliah: Sorry. Before we start, I just want to say, Griff, it’s a pleasure to meet you. My name is Abigoliah.
Griff: Abigoliah. Hello, Abigoliah. That’s great. That’s a fantastic name. Where does that come from?
Abigoliah: Thank you. I just have hippie parents, but I just — yeah, I just wanted to—
Griff: So Abigoliah, but not Abigail.
Abigoliah: I’m the only one.
Griff: Are you? Did they make it up?
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. It’s made up. So — but yeah. So off we go into the interview. I just wanted to say hello.
Griff: Say hello. Hello.
My child, George, he’s called his children— The first one, he rang me up and it was sort of six in the morning, and the little boy had just been born. And he said, he said, you know, “We’re going to call it Elwyn.” And that was the name of my father.
So I was overwhelmed. You know, I thought, this is fantastic. And I thought I was crying because I thought, he’ll never get away with that in South London.
But it’s a Welsh name.
And then the next child comes across and they call her Iris. Well, I mean, just absolutely — this is more peculiar than the Dovers, you know, who called their children Eileen Dover, Ben Dover and all that.
But anyway, there we are. So — well, I’m used to the idea now.
I’ve never met another Griff, for what it’s worth. Called Griffiths, but never another—
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Is Griff short for Griffith?
Griff: It is Griffith, yeah. I wish that when one came to joining Equity, you had to choose a name, you see. And so, because there was already a Griffith Jones, so I registered as Griffith Rhys Jones, which is my middle name, you know? And I’ve been stuck with it ever since.
And you sort of go, I wish — a bit late now — I wish I’d chosen to just be called Griffith Rhys or something like that, which would be a little bit more distinguished, because it sort of really limits you to what you can do if you’re called Griff.
Tom: But there was already a Deborah White in Equity, and so she co-opted her middle name to be part of her surname. So now she’s Deborah Frances-White. But that’s also made up.
Griff: Well, that’s just the way it went in those days. But nobody joins Equity these days, so, you know.
Tom: Anyway, Griff, let me take you back to your school days. Were you a comedy fan growing up?
Griff: Yeah. Of course.
Because what — I was at sort of quite a hothouse school, right? There was a system called direct grant schools, and that was — they would sort of siphon off from a big area the people they thought they could get into Cambridge or Oxford.
And so in those days of the 11-plus and everything like that, so we were all sucked into this rather bizarre sort of mixture of people.
There’s some argument — I’ve got a friend who said to me, “What did you go to, Griff?”
I’m going to say that some of the people we used to hang out with came from Harrow and places like that, you know. And after we’d been at university, they’d say, “What school did you go to?”
I went to somewhere called Brentwood. And they said, “What sort of school was that?” And I said, “Oh, well, it was a sort of jumped-up grammar school, really.”
And they said, “Oh, that’s funny, because Simon Bell just the other day told us it was a public school.”
Oh well. Anyway, never mind. It was depending on how you looked at it.
We thought it was an egalitarian time, and we didn’t — we always said when we went to Cambridge that we went to college. And I said that I used to go to a sort of grammar school, but it had a few boarders.
And amongst them was a very tall, sort of slightly superior chappie called Douglas.
And Douglas was in the year above us. And, you know, I don’t know if you find this — have you already talked to John Cleese and people like that?
Tom: Have we talked to John yet? No.
Griff: You’ll come—
Tom: I’ve seen interviews with John.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I’ve tried to get him on, but his people said he wasn’t interested at the time. But by the by, I’m just going to throw it out there, Griff: if you know him personally, we’d love to talk to him.
Griff: I don’t know him personally. I’ve just met him a few times.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Griff: Socially. And Douglas knew him very well.
I mean, Douglas very quickly sort of ingratiated himself with all the Pythons and thought of himself as being a sort of Mr Python sort of monkey.
But John Cleese was one of those people — he’s one of those people, I know a few people, and there are some tall people who draw themselves, in public occasions like parties and things like that, they draw themselves up, don’t they?
Tom: You mean to their full height?
Griff: And they actually even put their head back a little bit so that they can look down their nose at you. John Cleese is one of those people.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Griff: And so was Douglas, from the very earliest—
Tom: Douglas Adams describes going to see, like, a Footlights smoker and seeing John Cleese on stage and saying, “I could do that. I’m as tall as he is.”
Griff: Yeah, exactly. Yes. There was a sense that what John Cleese exploited was his altitude. So he had altitude and attitude.
At school, it went — he was sort of like me. He was somebody who was, for one reason or another — we played sort of minor parts. He played Caesar in a production of Julius Caesar, and I can’t remember what I was. I, you know, the poet or something.
Anyway, but we spent a lot of time, because we played minor parts in the one school production we were ever allowed to do every year, which was a sort of version of Shakespeare, sitting around in a classroom, playing with wigs, things like that, and chatting.
And so we were friends.
And Douglas — when I arrived in my college, I’d already decided the last thing I should be in life is an actor. I mean, already I had decided that that was not so.
But I arrived in college, and in those days we didn’t have social media. We had pigeonholes, which were a set of stairs. And I was sent up to explore this possibility, this thing into which messages were given.
There were already messages in it because I was a new undergraduate. And so these things were in there. But in amongst them was a handwritten message from Douglas Adams saying, “Griff, you know, we need somebody to come and be in a play.”
So I went to play Fag in The Rivals, and Douglas played Lucius O’Trigger, and we renewed our thing. And he sort of then eased me into various bits of Footlights and things like that.
And before I knew it, there I was, as amazing, into the whole business of it.
Abigoliah: Were you — you were also in the Footlights?
Griff: I was. I think I rose to be vice-president. I had a very illustrious career.
Abigoliah: Yes, you have.
Griff: Because what happened was, I was sort of quite a noisy, show-off sort of person on stage. And I was—
Abigoliah: By the way, I just want to say, I love that this is how it went. After you quietly decided you weren’t going to be an actor: into the Footlights, loudest, noisiest guy on stage. Keep going, Griff.
Griff: This is sort of slightly what happens. It’s a bit like, for — you know, it’s a bit like that Harvard Hasty Pudding Club, or whatever it was called.
You know, you were sort of — you had to join in. That was the really important thing. And you had to show yourself to be a sort of sociable — and, I mean, somebody who would fall over on stage and just get up.
Because we had sort of — they had sort of twice a week—but that was nothing. I was really nothing to do with Footlights.
I sort of saw myself by then, almost within days, because I’d been in this play. I had to go and see my tutor. Personal — sort of personal supervision was a very important part of being at college.
And I went to see my tutor and he said, “Have you got any outside interests?”
And I said, “Well, actually, I’m quite interested in the theatre,” because I’d changed my mind by then. I’d already got this part, I think.
And he said, “Oh,” like that.
Tom: It’s not what he had in mind.
Griff: No, no, exactly.
He said, “Well, look here, my recommendation is, you know, if you want to pursue that sort of thing, I would just, you know, settle in and sometime, you know, at the end of the year try and be in a college production.”
And I said, “No, I’m already in a play at the ADC.”
He shuffled his papers and you could see him making a big X against my name.
Abigoliah: You know.
Griff: That was the end of him. And it virtually was.
But anyway, so I got into Footlights. I was in Footlights in the coveted place in the May Week Revue, which I got in my first year, which was—
Abigoliah: So who — who was in Footlights with you? What year were you?
Griff: Well, now. I went to my earliest meeting. I met John Lloyd. Have you ever heard of—
Tom: Yes.
Griff: You’ve heard of John Lloyd? Okay. That’s great. Because his resentment throughout life, I think, John’s, is that nobody’s ever heard of him and only heard of the people he’s produced, the shows that he’s been capable of turning into huge hits.
So as far as we were concerned, you know, there was John sitting, and he was hilarious. He made me laugh so much, John Lloyd, that I, as a complete novice sitting in his room — all I remember is I snorted.
I was drinking coffee at the time, and I laughed so hard that it came out my nose. Have you ever done that?
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Griff: You accidentally — like that. And suddenly I’m sort of — I’m, you know, I’m sort of — I’m spouting coffee all over the sofa, which was sort of not seen as being credible in somebody who’d already been given the part.
I was a little bit more sophisticated.
But as you can imagine, since I arrived in the first year, I spanned an enormous sort of gulf, by general Cambridge standards. And I changed course, so I ended up with an extra year, and then I did an extra year sort of directing stuff around Cambridge and stuff like that.
So I started with John Lloyd, Jon Canter, and then went through Rory McGrath and Jimmy Mulville and all those sort of naughty boys.
And then I came out the other end, and that was — that was a real change, because suddenly Footlights went from being totally luvvy, which was very, you know, all very sort of people worried about their make-up and theatre and things like that, and went through to being a very sort of — what I would call quite earthy state-school boys coming up.
And they were quite vigorous. In fact, they had a fight with the Oxford Revue. Literally a fight involving—
Abigoliah: Sharks and the Jets, but it’s like posh English boys just being like, “We’re the funniest.”
Griff: I know, I know. Can you imagine this happening? Can you imagine this happening?
Abigoliah: It’s amazing.
Griff: What they had to do was — they were invited, the Footlights, to be in a very — a thing that happened very rarely, which was to be in a sort of parade around the Edinburgh Festival.
And so they got in — and they needed something. They were given a coal lorry to go—
So they got the drums and the band up on the back of the coal lorry, and it looked a bit like a coal lorry with a band on it.
So they borrowed a huge amount of sort of silver paper that was lying around, but that turned out to be the Oxford Revue’s set.
And when they came back there was a sort of — a little bit of a—
I wasn’t there. I was just the director by then. I was the director of that revue.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Griff: So you can imagine they had a little bit of a contretemps.
And that was sort of — that was Angus Deayton and other luminaries of comedy like Richard Curtis, and later — even later — Rowan.
So we, you know, we saw Rowan in his first incarnation on stage, on the same stage.
In fact, somebody who’d been in a pantomime that I produced came and said, “Oh, you must come and see this wonderful and amazing sort of performer called Rowan Atkinson.”
And we all, being in the same building, sort of went and stood at the back and watched the rehearsal, and she said, “What do you think?”
And we all went, “Well, I don’t know.”
Abigoliah: Not very interested.
Tom: Never amount to a thing.
Griff: Because he came from Oxford. We didn’t—
Tom: Have—
Griff: Him.
Abigoliah: Because—
Griff: We didn’t have a fight. That was to come later.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Griff: Well, I’m still there. I’m still knocking around.
I went to work in BBC Radio, and I was still knocking around when Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry and—
Abigoliah: All right.
Griff: You know. So I sort of met them all in our green years, as it were.
Abigoliah: That’s got to be so exciting, to, like — I don’t know — meet everyone right when you’re figuring out what kind of comedy you do and what your voice is, and then, like, to literally watch — like, all of you guys have gone on to do such amazing, great things.
And to be there at the beginning, it just sounds fake, man.
Griff: Oh, it does, except you’ve got to imagine this: that there was no sense amongst any of those people that that might happen to anyone.
Abigoliah: That’s crazy.
Griff: You know what I mean?
In fact, those golden days are gone, because the people we all revered, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, the Pythons, you know, they’d done a revue in 1963, exactly ten years before we were up there doing our stuff at the Festival.
And in those days, because of the effect of the — because of the Peter Cook effect, you see what I mean? And Beyond the Fringe, producers would come from London, from the BBC, and they’d sit and watch the Footlights and they’d go, “Oh, we’ll have him. He’s very good. He can have a television show,” and all that.
And as far as we were concerned, those days had gone forever.
We didn’t, you know — we were just lads from various grammar schools, state schools and all that stuff. There was no — there was no sort of golden path that we could see.
So we didn’t assume that that was going to happen.
And I think that probably is one of the reasons why the people who did come through that generation were more ruthlessly ambitious than the previous years.
And also, when I say that, you know, every review would start by saying, “Well, there’s definitely no John Cleese or Peter Cook in this year’s Footlights.” That was — that was a standard review.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Griff: And so you got the idea that you were of — we are of no consequence.
And I did — I did— They just were terrible titles.
The first one I was in was called Every Packet Carries a Government Health Warning. We used to sing — we used to sing songs. They were revues. So they’d start with a song.
And that song was: “Every packet carries a government health warning.” But I can remember it very well.
And then I was in something called Chox. You need Chox. Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo.
And then I was in something called Paradise Mislaid.
Abigoliah: That’s my favourite title so far.
Griff: And then we had another one, which I directed, called Tag!.
And we did that just because— A Kick in the Stalls, that was the one that Douglas directed and I had to redirect.
Abigoliah: Because it was—
Griff: A great writer, and slightly resentful because he wasn’t ever in the — he wasn’t ever in the big revue at the end.
He had himself into another sort of group, a sort of rival group, because he wasn’t ever in.
But he was invited back to direct it, and he directed—
He was only rivalled by John Bird, who was a comedian who used to work with Rory Bremner. But before he worked with Rory Bremner, he worked — you know, he was one of the satire boys, one of the sort of ones plucked from Footlights to be famous at a junior age, be in everything.
Anyway, John Bird — his production of May Week Revue was three hours long. And Douglas’s — well, Douglas was two and a half hours long.
And so I was called in because I was a bit of a — my job, I was — that was what I did. I was a director. So I didn’t want to be an actor. I was just — I used to turn up and do occasional things in revues and fall over a lot.
And Douglas’s two-and-a-half-hour— So they said to me, “Would you like to — would you care to have a go at editing this down for Edinburgh, for the Festival?”
So I did. Sixty minutes.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Griff: Exactly. I thought there was a lot of spare. So I got wielding the old blue pencil.
And the irony is — the irony is that my job — I was offered a job at the BBC because the producer, Simon Brett, had seen Douglas’s two-and-a-half-hour, and he’d seen my version of it, which was cut down and restaged and came in in about an hour and a half.
And he thought, “Oh, wait a minute. We can use this. We can use this.”
Abigoliah: This—
Griff: This is somebody who knows what he’s doing. He’s cut down somebody else’s.
And that’s all, after all, being a BBC producer was all you’re ever required to do.
So that’s — and that’s how I got into the BBC.
Yeah. Sorry. That’s a very— We haven’t got very far, have we?
Tom: It’s all good.
Griff: Come on, come on. Come in with — what else?
Abigoliah: I guess after talking about your college days — so when you got Not the Nine O’Clock News, did you already know everyone who was in the cast with you? Were you guys all friends or colleagues by the time you guys got it?
Griff: Here’s the thing about the Edinburgh Festival, which was the sort of training ground for people in sketch comedy.
And this is the thing. I mean, television comedy in Britain, whether you’re in a sitcom or a sketch show, was in those days about scripted material, dealing with writing, putting in front of the camera scripted material.
And these days, comedy on television is largely people improvising in game shows.
You know, there were only three revues on in Edinburgh when we were there. There were three comedy shows in any year at the Edinburgh Festival.
There was the Cambridge Footlights, the Oxford Revue and the Bristol Revunions, and quite a lot of people were in all those things.
Mel was in the Oxford Revue. Rowan was in the Oxford Revue. Mel Smith was in that.
And so — and these days, just to put it in context, two years ago — I don’t know about last year — two years ago there were 6,000 would-be comedians at the Fringe.
Tom: Yeah. It’s nuts.
Abigoliah: Well, yeah.
I’ve been one of them.
Tom: So have I.
Abigoliah: You know what that means?
Griff: That means that we had it so easy.
Abigoliah: Because—
Griff: There was nobody else.
I mean, the shows we did were “not as good as so-and-so”. That’s what people said about them. Some of them were quite funny. And we had a lot of audiences coming to see us.
But in those days, this was a world where the stand-up comedian and the comedian who entertained an audience by getting in front of a microphone had sort of disappeared.
There were old club comedians, you know, like the American Catskills set, you know, who went out and they were up in northern clubs, and very good, very strong performers as well.
But the sort of people who were in comedy — but, you know, did it—
So I got together with Rory McGrath, Clive Anderson and Jimmy Mulville, and Emma sometimes, and we did a thing called An Evening Without…
And we were doing this in our spare time when I was a radio producer for the BBC, and that was an evening that we’d do at theatres on Sunday nights, you know, and so on. Fit ourselves in. Late-night shows at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge.
But there was no circuit.
It’s very difficult for people to understand now, because everything changed with the Comedy Store and the idea of the comedians coming through and being live on stage in that way as an individual entertainer.
Everything changed.
And at that point there was a sort of interim between variety, the music hall, and the beginning of that explosion that happened in about 1980 or at the very end of the seventies. There was a sort of ten-year, 15-year lapse between.
And then, of course, there were great comedians. I worked with a lot of them. Ken Dodd. I was Frankie Howerd’s producer.
Now, you know, I don’t know if — Tom, I’m gonna have to — you’re gonna have to explain who Frankie Howerd was.
Tom: Yes. We’ve talked about him a couple of times.
Griff: And when I say that, a little frisson goes through the audience, you know, in England, because Frankie Howerd was a major, major figure.
Tom: He has an amazing guest spot on an episode of That Was the Week That Was, which of course went out live, and he starts by complaining that he’s been kept waiting for over an hour.
Griff: Well, Frank was — I loved Frank. We worked together. We were all worked together to write his show — me, Clive Anderson—
Now, do you know who Clive Anderson is?
Abigoliah: Yes. Yes, yes. Yeah, because he was on Whose Line?
Griff: Yes.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. That was — that’s my introduction to Clive.
Griff: Well, Clive is very, very, very, very, very close and an old friend of mine. We were, you know, in the Footlights together.
And I was at the launch of his latest book only two days ago. If you look on Instagram, there I am sort of plugging away Clive’s book.
But Clive and I and Rory McGrath, we were all in this show together.
But Clive came in to write for Frankie Howerd.
Have you ever seen My Favorite Year?
Tom: Oh yes. Yes, yes, yes. Terrific film.
Griff: This is like that, you know.
We were dealing with a comedian who had been huge in the fifties. Absolutely enormous. Britain’s top comedian.
Then he’d sort of fallen off, and then he’d been picked up by Peter Cook. And Peter Cook and Dudley Moore had taken Frank and turned him into another huge thing and made him sort of satirical.
And then it all faded away again. And then suddenly he was up back doing — because he was in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and he was given a BBC show called Up Pompeii!
And so he’d had three career highlights, and we were very conscious that we weren’t giving him a fourth. Let’s put it that way, in this radio show.
We did our best.
But, you know, he would ring me at three o’clock in the morning. I wish I’d never given him a script. But I’d say, “Okay, because we’re doing it tomorrow, Frank. Okay. All right. Yes, I understand, Frank.”
So he always wanted it rewritten at three in the morning, and you’d just go, “Well, Frank, it’s been with you for four days.”
And so this used to annoy the writers a lot, because they would — they would find themselves, you know, looking at the whole thing and it would all be falling to pieces, the show.
But we had great fun. It was amazing. We were on a stage in an underground radio sort of studio recording with Frank, and that was sort of quite a—
And a lot of other shows, satire shows, things like that.
John Lloyd was the sort of king. He’d started The News Quiz and things like that. He’d arrived a little bit before me, three years before me, at the BBC, and he’d already established himself as this hotshot producer.
And Geoffrey Perkins — he went on to be head of BBC Light Entertainment — he was there as well.
And, you know, there were a lot of writers who wrote for the radio, and I was producer and we were doing our show.
And one night John had been to see it and we were coming back in a train from wherever we’d done An Evening Without…, and John said, “Well, if I ever get a television show, Griff, you will be in it.”
So I said, “Oh John, that’s really nice.”
So then he did get a television show called Not the Nine O’Clock News. And so I was in it, and I wasn’t in it — I was in it from the very start, but I was still a radio producer, still producing Frankie Howerd, still producing Week Ending, various other things, Alfred Marks and various other comedians.
But what I think John needed at that point, because he was working with Mel and Rowan and people, but none of them had had the sort of cut-and-thrust experience of dealing with what I would call the whole world of these freelance radio writers, some of whom were very, very funny writers indeed.
And they had not had an opportunity.
It’s very difficult to understand television in those days. But in the seventies there was only BBC One. BBC Two started quite early on, but — but there was only—
And there was only one show. There was The Two Ronnies.
And if you wanted to be a writer, a freelance writer, getting a foothold and working in television was almost impossible. You didn’t belong to the coterie and you didn’t belong to the sort of group of people who wrote the David Frost and all that stuff, and you couldn’t get yourself established.
So the thing that John Lloyd did was work with a huge number of really brilliant writers who wanted an outlet in television.
And the thing that Not the Nine O’Clock News represented more than anything else was all those writers finding that outlet.
And I’ve never been in a show before or since where you would sit down and sort of start reading the script of sketches that you were going to do at the end of the week and just laugh so much, and then go, “This is brilliant.”
And they’d say, “Well, we’ve got to cut, you know, we’ve got to cut four or five of these because we won’t have time to do it.”
You’d say, “You can’t cut any of them. They’re all so brilliant.”
They were.
I’ve never been in that situation before or since.
Everybody wanted to write for the new freelance show, and that included some of the — you know, Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin included, Colin Bostock-Smith, Laurie Rowley. It included people who went — like the guys—
Now I’m going to get senile and not remember people’s names.
David Renwick, who went on to write, you know, One Foot in the Grave and things like that. Some of the greatest comedy.
And of course it included Richard Curtis.
And all these people were writing busily and in a very competitive environment. You had to be good.
And it’s a bit like My Favorite Year, when the comedian comes in and says, “I’ve got the funniest joke I’ve ever written,” and then reads it out. They all stare at him and nobody laughs, and he says, “Don’t worry, I’ve got another one.”
So it was like that.
And it was an amazing thing to be in, because that was the—
And it was different from Python. Monty Python, we’d all grown up with so many shows, sort of imitations of Monty Python at that stage.
So many would-be television sketch shows thought the easiest way of establishing themselves was to slavishly copy Monty Python. And of course that was sort of — it was like, well, we’ve seen this.
What John had established through doing things like The News Huddlines and The News Quiz and things like that was the return of joke comedy with punchlines, with, you know, funny jokes, identifiable—
And that was the difference between Monty Python and Not the Nine O’Clock News, is that—
Abigoliah: You guys had jokes.
Griff: Yeah. Well, you had jokes, you know.
I mean, Python had had a profound influence. I remember watching it with my father. It was a great bonding thing for people of my age because my father was laughing uproariously at it.
And it was a thing that when you were in the sixth form, it was essentially yours. You said, it was like your whole world was represented by this comedy.
Well, ten years later, that’s what Not the Nine O’Clock News became.
Abigoliah: Yeah, but with jokes.
Griff: For an entire generation. Their television, you know, there for them. And of course it was young people who liked it.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Griff: Young people were watching this.
Tom: I was just old enough. I was about ten or 11 when it finished, so I was like — I was just old enough.
But, like, I had — do you remember you put out those almanacs, Not 1982?
Griff: Yes.
Tom: Yeah. So I had — my mum, I think, bought me Not 1982 in a charity shop. And I was just like, this is amazing. There’s, like, 365 pages of comedy brilliance. It was all absolutely amazing.
And we had the record album, which I listened to over and over again and practically wore it out.
So yes, absolutely. That’s exactly what Not the Nine O’Clock News was for me.
And like I said, I was just old enough. But I don’t remember the very early ones. But I remember — I remember the last series very clearly.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Griff: It was astonishing, because this was before DVDs, which became a huge business for comedians.
And that’s as well — I mean, streaming, the world that that represented — people would make huge amounts of money as comedians out of residuals in the eighties from, you know, from their videos or their merch.
You know, which has all sort of, again, disappeared.
A comedian would be looking rather like a rock band to put something out, and that version of their live show was what was going to make them rich and successful.
Tom: So when did you first start to suspect that you were involved in a show that was becoming a bit of a phenomenon, that was becoming this playground staple, or it was going to have a profound impact on comedy history?
Griff: Well, that all happened in the second series. The first series was slightly indulgent.
Tom: But have you ever seen the pilot? You weren’t—
Griff: In it. It’s really not very good.
Abigoliah: You’ve seen it?
Griff: Yeah. No, but it’s amazing. It’s just — it’s just an illustration. John Howard Davies, you know, and the faith they would have to keep going, which you wouldn’t get—
Abigoliah: No, you won’t.
Griff: It was not great. The first show got some very bad reviews, but it was partly because it didn’t — it lacked—
Now, John needed an ally. I think that was my job, really. I arrived — my job was to be an ally with him for keeping sketches short, pithy and with jokes, and encouraging people to understand that these things that they found a bit distasteful, you know, the quickies and all that, was the stuff that we were doing.
Abigoliah: You know.
Griff: So that’s what we did, and that’s kicked it off.
And we realised it was going during the second series.
I remember Mel saying he was standing at a— No, he was walking down the street or something in West Hampstead or something like that.
And a whole bus queue of kids who were about to get on a bus — they were all waiting because school was out — and one of them recognised him on the other side of the road, and they all started pointing at him and yelling and sort of getting overexcited.
And then the bus arrived and they had to get on and go.
But he suddenly thought, oh, I see.
Abigoliah: Oh my goodness. Wow.
Griff: Oh, look at that. This — I’m recognisable far more than I would be by being in a sitcom or something like that. This is something — means something to all those teenagers on the other side of the road, yelling and screaming and fainting because there I was, you know, the real thing.
And we became — and it sort of took off over the next few series.
We got huge figures, which is outrageous. But by today’s standards for television, I mean, you know, I think one repeat or compilation or something got 18 million viewers, you know, which by BBC standards today is about — is about 1,800% more than—
Tom: Yeah.
Griff: Unless it’s a reality show.
Tom: Like even then I think that’s — that’s two Traitors or four MasterChefs at least.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Griff: Exactly.
Abigoliah: No, I was — I was just going to say, like, a lot of The Traitors viewing figures are from people watching it on iPlayer. Like, no one watches appointment TV anymore. Very few people do. Let me say that. Very few people watch it now.
But yeah. Continue, Griff.
Griff: Oh, just to say that was — that was the realisation.
And then we were in the newspapers and, you know, we were the front— Pamela very quickly became the front page of the newspapers, you know.
Tom: I mean—
Griff: Very glamorous and fantastic. And Rowan had visited from another planet, you know.
And so those two — Mel and I were sitting on a sort of substitute bench watching all over — quite over all the — all over the developing series, you know. It was sort of like, wow, that’s — you know.
Tom: There is a lovely balance between the four of you. You’re all bringing very different things to the table. But as a quartet, I think you do work very, very well together.
And one of the things I was struck by as I was reviewing old episodes, because I think John Lloyd said he didn’t realise how good an impressionist Pamela Stephenson was going to be, but you’re a pretty mean impressionist yourself.
Griff: It’s, “Great, you’re Russell — we’re doing a Russell Harty sketch and you’re going to play Russell Harty.”
I go, “Oh God.”
And I had to go off and watch Russell Harty and try and pretend to be Russell, and I couldn’t— I mean, I think this is just crazy. I’m not an impressionist.
But, you know, just by diligent study, you know.
In fact, I started by — the thing that got me into the full series when Chris Langham left was that I, in the first series, I’d done Donald Sinden.
Tom: Donald Sinden. That’s right. Yes.
Griff: And because of my impersonation, I got marked as being an impressionist.
And so from then on I was sort of like—
But Mel, when he was Eamonn Andrews, they had to put up a caption underneath saying “Eamonn Andrews”.
Tom: Okay.
Griff: People weren’t quite sure what that Irish accent was supposed to be.
But anyway. Yeah. And I did McEnroe and all sorts of things like that as well.
Tom: Oh, the McEnroe sketch. I don’t think I showed you that. The McEnroe sketch is amazing. Absolutely amazing. John McEnroe at breakfast.
Abigoliah: Oh, okay. I’ll have to check that out. No, I’m having a tantrum.
Griff: His parents. A memorable sketch. Yes.
Abigoliah: A question I asked Tom when we watched Not the Nine O’Clock News that he was like, I don’t know, ask Griff.
So, like, in the last year, they have brought SNL to the UK. So they have SNL UK. And before it happened, everyone was like, oh, this is so great because, you know, sketch is such a foundation of British comedy. Like, you guys have created such great sketch shows through the history, and it’s what you’re known for.
And, like, I think SNL UK, I think they’re doing a great job on there.
But then I watched Not the Nine O’Clock News, and I’m like, well, why didn’t they do a reboot of a British show? Why didn’t they do Not the Nine O’Clock News and, like, recast it?
Do you think that’s a thing that, one, could have happened? Would you want it? Or would you be like, the kids are doing it wrong?
Griff: Oh, I’d be really happy.
I tell you what, what’s interesting is we did four or five series — four series.
Abigoliah: Not very many.
Griff: Really. And it came to an end partly because of people pursuing — wanting to pursue solo careers. So it was like a band, you know?
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Griff: “I’m off to do my own show,” and things like that.
Again, Mel and I had, by that stage, we’d done a lot of producing. We’d been around. We’d been around the block more than the others, and we knew quite clearly that these things should not be brought to an end just like that. They just shouldn’t.
Because, you know, the length of service — you know, it’s not—
Abigoliah: That easy.
Griff: —to have a success.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Griff: And, you know, you don’t—
And the other interesting thing is that Saturday Night Live happened at about the same time.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Griff: And is still running, and Not the Nine O’Clock News lasted until 1981. And then that was the end of that.
And you go, wow. That’s the difference between the English way, the American way.
You know, I mean, why — we could have gone on doing Not the Nine O’Clock News for the next— Or they could have recast it and brought other people in. They could have developed the writers and they could have banged on for another 20 years, and then they could have revived it or whatever.
The difficulty now, of course, is that all the people who wrote it and all the sort of — I tell you what’s weird about it as well, is that it was so complex for a freelance show, is the number of people who wrote it.
And, I mean, there was this much more core number of people who wrote it than it looks like sometimes when you see the list of names at the end.
But I think that one of the problems about repeating it for the BBC is that if they want to repeat an episode, they also claim it was topical and can’t be repeated.
Well, that’s just not true. Most of it wasn’t topical at all.
But they also go, “Well, now we’d have to send somebody to spend, you know, about a year going round all the writers and their estates and getting them to give us an agreement,” do you mean, to show it again.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Griff: And so what’s funny is that Not the Nine O’Clock News was the benchmark. I mean, I’m not exaggerating here. It was really the top show. It was the top funny show. It set a standard.
It was really enormously influential and funny and shone like a beacon.
But unlike a lot of other shows that are being repeated by the BBC, it hasn’t been repeated. It hasn’t been — you know, it’s not like The Young Ones, which was written by Ben and a couple of other people, or even Blackadder.
It can’t be repeated because of the number of people who were involved in writing it and the complexities of it.
And so it sort of drifted down a bit in its status. Which I think is a great pity.
Abigoliah: Do you feel like it’s a bit of a forgotten gem now? Like, when people meet you, are they still like, “Oh my gosh, Not the Nine O’Clock News”? Or do they talk about, like, your work with Mel and other stuff before they—
Griff: They’re more likely— It’s — I mean, I don’t — I mean, you know, you can’t do anything about that.
But Tom and his generation and people who, you know, who grew up with Not the Nine O’Clock News are still, you know, absolutely enthusiastic.
I was talking to John Lanchester, you know, and he said— One of the greatest— John O’Farrell, I mean, not John Lanchester. I’m getting my writers mixed up.
I was talking to John O’Farrell, and he said, “You know, when we came to write with you, Griff, you know, Mark and I, and we wrote the head-to-heads with you and everything like that, the excitement of being involved with the people — somebody from you and Mel. You mean, you were the core of Not the Nine O’Clock News. This is what we — this is our whole sort of, you know, faith and idea of comedy was based upon.”
And you think, wow, it didn’t feel like that when we were doing it.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Griff: It didn’t feel — because we were, you know, we were separate from all that.
But so people of that generation, the answer is yes.
So I’m being long-winded about this, but I think as time — you know, I mean, we finished Alas Smith and Jones in 1997. And, you know, it’s 2026 now. So that is — that is 20 — nearly 30 years since we finished.
For the same reason as I was talking about Not the Nine O’Clock News, it’s never been successfully sort of repeated. They don’t necessarily want to cut it together and repeat it because, you know, they go, “Oh, this — this — this would be really complicated.”
Tom: You did the Smith and Jones Sketchbook, didn’t you?
Griff: Yeah. Which — that didn’t really work for various reasons.
Abigoliah: No?
Griff: Yeah. But this just happens. Just happens. Just shows how good intentions — good intentions suddenly come awry.
Anyway, it was — by then we actually carried on doing Smith and Jones the opposite, I think, rather slightly too long. We should have — we should have finished earlier.
Tom: Let me just pick up Smith and Jones starting. So you said you kind of felt like Rowan and Pam were going to go off and do their own thing. So it seemed natural for the two of you to keep working together.
And then when you started doing Smith and Jones, did it feel like a continuation of Not the Nine O’Clock News? Did it feel like the start of something new?
Griff: No. I don’t know what happened. It was a very straightforward thing.
They were making a pilot with Pam which they didn’t pick up. They didn’t make it a series. Rowan was already, you know, going his own way.
And I never realised until recently the whole of Not the Nine O’Clock News was based around trying to find a vehicle for Rowan.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: I knew that.
Tom: Because I told you.
Abigoliah: Of course you did.
Griff: I read John Lloyd’s history of it all and all that stuff, and I go, wow, I never — I was never really aware that the whole thing was based around, what can we do with this genius?
Anyway, so — but Mel and I, we were asked if we would write a sketch for a Christmas show, right.
And I sat down and wrote a sketch about a hospital visitor and a Christmas — somebody who was in hospital for Christmas, and it was a very quiet ward.
And he’s just — you know, the nurse comes to tuck him up and he’s going to watch television all evening.
And there’s a sort of — there’s a hospital visitor played by me who is obviously totally lonely and got nowhere to go at Christmas, and comes in and makes — and sits down with him and makes his life an absolute misery.
All he wants to do is watch the telly, and he’s — you know what I mean? And this bloke suddenly turns up in hospital to be his companion through Christmas.
And it was a two-hander.
And John Howard Davies loved it and said, “You must do a series.” So we did — “You must do a pilot.” So we did a pilot, and then we did a series. And then it just went on and on and on like that.
We didn’t quite have, you know — I used to write about 60% of it, I suppose.
And we — but I always felt that I wrote some of the best stuff, but some of the worst stuff as well.
I mean, I would rather — I would have liked to have a team supporting me and all that. Mel didn’t really write much.
So, you know, in a funny sort of way, it was quite a — it was quite a thing to keep going for so long.
Abigoliah: How did you guys morph from being the comedy duo into running the production company TalkBack?
Griff: Well, what happened was, I, being a producer with an office — and I like to have an office to go to.
Those days when I first arrived at the BBC, I was given two offices. I was given an office and an outer office. Can you believe that?
Abigoliah: That is another thing that does not happen today.
Griff: No.
Tom: Did you always have a secretary who said, “Mr Jones will see you now”?
Griff: Yes. Yeah. I mean, it was crazy.
Jane was sitting outside and I was sitting— I didn’t have any work. I’d go in, I’d sneak past her hiding the newspaper because I just was going to read the newspaper all afternoon, because they didn’t find anything for me to do at that stage.
And so we left, and I felt — I began to feel a chill wind blowing around my nether regions, because I’d been in receipt of a standard sort of salary as a BBC producer.
And also I felt — and I knew I had a lot of experience by then of the ins and outs of show business by being a producer, you know, for radio for three years.
And I knew perfectly well that there was no sense that, you know, the world — we didn’t feel the world would come beating a path to our door.
So I — Mel and I had started writing the commercials together in radio.
So I said, well, look, why don’t the two of us — why don’t we set up a little company to make radio productions for all the new independent radios in Britain, which were relatively new, and they had to have, in those days, they had to have a little bit of drama and stuff, like a bit of comedy.
We thought this was perfect.
And also, why don’t we make more radio commercials for other people? Which we did.
And so we became hugely successful making radio— Hugely successful. I think there were 14 International Clios and we won 11 of them.
Tom: Wow.
Abigoliah: That is insane.
Griff: Not just with us, but bringing other people in to do it.
So when we started, we just set up a little advertising thing and we revolutionised, at the time, radio commercials, because radio commercials were noisy. They still are. Very quick, trying to say too much, trying to put lots of sort of, you know, more information into 30 seconds than you could even deal with, you know.
So we just said, why don’t we, when we started selling our radio commercial capabilities, why don’t we write commercials which actually, just like a poster, says one thing? You know what I mean? Instead of trying to say 400 things, why doesn’t it just say one thing about the product?
And so we started doing conversations where Mel would say, “I tell you what.”
“I tell you what.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ve, you know, I’ve just seen this marvellous video cassette.”
And off we go.
We had a very relaxed— And one of the jokes we had was we’d leave pauses in the middle of it as well.
Tom: Dead air.
Griff: And—
Tom: You can’t have dead air.
Abigoliah: Exactly.
Griff: What was so funny was that became really successful.
When we came to do Smith and Jones, we said, well, we must do these two characters.
People think we, you know, we did it from Pete and Dud. But we didn’t really. We stole it off a couple of Americans called Dick and Bert, who did radio commercials.
And the next thing we were doing it, you know, on television, in front of people, you know.
And when we came to do the thing we called the head-to-head, that was literally two guys sitting with a microphone in front of them, just as we had done all those hugely successful radio commercials, one kind or another.
And so, you know, it was just — it was a thing that had developed.
But we had a little company.
And we realised that because doing two people sitting in front of a microphone, unfortunately, in the radio production company world, if you didn’t have a brass band playing and a cast of thousands and loads of people in it, you didn’t have a large enough production budget to actually make any money.
So we needed to sort of expand, which we did, and we expanded and we moved gradually into television.
I say “we”. That was all done by Peter Fincham, who I brought in, and was a mate, being in Footlights, playing the piano.
Playing piano. And people who play the piano — all I can say is, you know, look out for the people who play the piano.
David Hare played the piano in Footlights. You know all this?
Tom: Yeah, yeah.
Griff: So it’s — it’s the position which is actually, you know, you watch what’s going on every night and you think, I can do better than this. Let me just — I’ll organise this.
So Peter did, and he organised us to take off as a television production company.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: The head-to-heads reminds me: I’ve seen this written, and now I’ve got the opportunity to ask you.
When you shot those, I’ve heard it said that, at least at the start, you couldn’t actually look each other in the eye because you were too prone to giggling, so you had to do it off-set like that. Is that true?
Griff: No.
What was — it was a computer device. Two heads would come in from opposite sides of the screen and meet.
But we — the thing that was fun about it was that we never had any problem looking each other in the eye. We never really had any problem with corpsing because — because we were too frightened, because it was all one take. It was all—
Tom: One. Yes.
Griff: —television that has ever been made. It’s just a black thing behind us and two staring at each other in the face.
And we just — and we had to get it right.
So if we got it wrong over, you know — sometimes they went on for quite a long time, ten minutes, you know, six minutes or whatever — and the two of us just talking, and there was no chance, there were no cutaways, there was no chance of going again because the audience had heard it.
So you couldn’t hope that the jokes would work the second time around.
If we did get it wrong — and that happened very, very, very rarely — and there was one in every show, we would do it in the next show, because we were recording. So we’d do a second one in the next show to just repair what had happened.
But they were the most successful part of the series.
And they were written by Clive Anderson, Rory McGrath at stages.
We started — we didn’t have a black background. We didn’t even have the white shirts. And those gradually emerged.
We had a brilliant producer, Jamie Rix, who I don’t think we acknowledged as being brilliant enough at the time. He knocked us into shape after the first series.
All first series are a little bit complicated. You find your feet.
But the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth series were utterly brilliant.
And then we moved to BBC One and we tried to make ourselves a little bit more sort of, you know, front-of-cloth light entertainment, and I think that was probably a bit of an error.
But so the series, you know, weren’t — I mean, I think they were really good on BBC One and they certainly got good—
But it’s a sketch show. You’re only as good as your last sketch.
So, you know, it’s always — it’s always—
I must admit I look back and go, thank God I don’t do that anymore.
Tom: Because it was—
Griff: The most phenomenal responsibility to—
Abigoliah: Hope—
Griff: Everybody does a sketch show for a very short amount of time, because it’s such a responsibility, trying to get another sketch together.
You know, it doesn’t matter if it’s The Fast Show, Not the Nine O’Clock News, Monty Python. You do it a little bit and then you stop, because you get to the point where you find you’re repeating yourself.
This is the truth.
Working with Jon Magnusson, who’s the producer now of — and has been ever since — Graham Norton. And he said — he came to me one day and he said, “You know this sketch?”
And I said, “We’ve done this. We’ve done this.”
And he said, “You say that about every sketch that I give you.”
And I said, “No, no, but we — this is a sketch we actually have done. I mean, I wrote this sketch ten years ago.”
At some point somebody had sat down and written out word for word—
Abigoliah: That’s amazing.
Griff: —sent it back into us.
But you know what I mean. You’re not only scraping the bottom of the barrel, you’re not only going round and thinking, no, we’ve done this before, but freelancers are actually sending your own sketches again.
Which, I suppose now I think about it, we could have done that. We could have just gone back and chosen the best—
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Griff: —from the first series.
Tom: Your own tribute band.
Speaking of responsibility, you also took on the role of Jim Hacker in the stage version of Yes, Prime Minister. What was that like?
Griff: That was very, very entertaining. I really loved it.
And it was great working with Clive Francis, who was utterly brilliant. And he had played it before.
You know, in other words, the production started and they needed somebody to come in and play it because they’d had a little bit of a history of people — of people playing Jim Hacker who sort of fell by the wayside.
I mean, these are all old actors.
Tom: Yes.
Griff: So they’d had a couple of people.
I mean, I can’t remember who it was, but the first person who was playing the part couldn’t remember the lines. You know, he couldn’t go — oh, that awful thing when you’re a certain age.
And then the director lost his faith in him, so he went. And then they brought in somebody. And so it went.
And then the author himself took over, Jonathan Lynn.
And then — and so I came in, and this was a comedy and we made it funny. And it was a really funny show.
Abigoliah: I need some gas. I need some gossip from you, Griff, because Tom told me this story about a composer who had written a song for The Two Ronnies, and Ronnie Barker said that, according to legend, they don’t need to pay the composer because it’s for a comedy song, ergo no one cares about the music.
So said composer then went over to Not the Nine O’Clock News and wrote “The Two Ninnies” for you guys.
And after Tom said that, I said, “Ronnie Barker sounds like an arsehole.”
And now the internet is coming for me. They are. Everyone on the internet hates me because I said Ronnie Barker sounds like an arsehole.
So my question for you, Griff: what’s Ronnie Barker like?
Griff: Barker was so sweet.
Tom: Oh.
Abigoliah: Oh, I really misjudged it.
Griff: I mean, unfortunately, it’s very complicated with your comedy heroes.
You know, I can’t believe we did that, because we turned up—
It wasn’t just — it wasn’t just the composer. I don’t think — I think it was probably written by Peter Brewis, but I have never heard — yeah, I’ve never heard that story before.
But what I know is that — not me, because I’ve never tried to write for The Two Ronnies — but there were people involved, I’m not going to name any names, who had tried to get their material into that really complicated little thing, and they had a sort of slight resentment about The Two Ronnies and the way they think.
So who knows?
I mean, anyway, Mel and I were told to be Ronnie — Ronnie Corbett, Ronnie — for this extraordinary song, and very rude song.
And we — I mean, not only that, we attacked Monty Python as well.
And I know that there were so many people there in the cast who revered Monty Python. But the truth is, when you get a team or group and they start to think, let’s take the piss out of them, they start to laugh amongst themselves at their own audacity.
It’s not — it’s the truth. They like the idea of it.
And, you know, I mean, the point is that Douglas Adams suffered from this because he was such a hero.
In fact, all the group, you know — I suffered a lot from my companions, you know, who would attack me for Not the Nine O’Clock News when it became successful.
You know what I mean? An Evening Without…, Jimmy and Rory and people like that — we nearly had a fight, you know, in an Indian restaurant in the Finchley Road. I remember it quite clearly.
And so, like — and we used to nip at Douglas Adams’s heels because Douglas had been so successful.
So if you can imagine, it’s not a — it’s, it’s, it’s a really weird world that you’re entering into where people have strong opinions in favour of people. The people within the business can’t wait to see them topple down because it’ll open up an opportunity for them.
So this is rather — I don’t think they think that way. It’s just the way it goes.
So, you know, you have to accept.
Personally, I decided — this is a weird confession — personally, I decided about 20 years ago, possibly 15 years ago, I would never read another review about anything I did.
I just—
Abigoliah: Went—
Griff: I just went, that’s it. There’s absolutely no point.
If you read a bad review, it really affects what you do and your own opinion of yourself.
And so by just never, never, never, never seeing them, I really don’t know what people think. But I don’t want to know.
Tom: Why would you?
Griff: They want to tell you. They meet you on the train. They say, “Oh, you’ve got a fantastic review,” and you go, “Well, right. Thank you. I don’t really — I’m not really interested in the thing.”
“Yeah, but so-and-so didn’t like you, did he?”
Members of the family: “Why did that man attack Griff so much? I enjoyed it enormously.”
And you have to go, no, I don’t want to — I really can’t hear any of that, because in a funny way it’s irrelevant to the world you’re living in.
And just let people speak out.
But I was really — I went to a BBC party, and I was about to play in Charley’s Aunt. And I walked into the BBC party and there was Ronnie Barker, and he — and I was sort of, you know, I couldn’t not say hello to him.
And he put his arm around my shoulders and then around my neck, and I just felt that it was a little bit stronger in the embrace than I would have liked.
Abigoliah: You mean slightly hugging you, slightly choking the life out of you?
Griff: Yes. Sort of just coming up like this.
And so I have to say how much I loved him and everything like that. It was all — I was just playing the part and all that stuff.
But anyway, there we are. And that’s the only time I met him.
And I greatly regret that I wasn’t able to say, you know, just, “Did you like the sketch we did?”
Tom: I think the answer is not very much, but nobody would.
Griff: It was appalling.
Tom: Exactly.
Abigoliah: At the same time, like, parody is the greatest compliment. Like, I feel like if I turned on the TV and SNL UK was doing a parody of me, I’d be like, I’ve made it. I’ve made it.
Griff: No. That’s true, that’s true.
We have to say, if you weren’t that famous, you know, if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be— Nobody would know what you’re talking about.
Abigoliah: Exactly.
Griff: Going off to sort of try and knock somebody that people don’t know.
But anyway, along the way we had a good old innings, and plenty of opportunity to do various things.
And now I — you know, what was interesting is that I do—
I said about ten years ago, 11 years ago, I started — I went to talk about Mel just after he died at the Slapstick Festival and started telling stories about Mel.
And then I thought, oh, well, I, you know, I could take this on the road. It was quite — it was quite good fun to do it.
So I did that, and just telling stories about Mel, and then did another show and then another show and another show.
So I’ve done sort of a lot of stand-up since then. Which — stand-up, telling stories and working through like that.
And I’m really glad, because I sometimes find myself sitting on a railway station, you know, at 11 o’clock, with a sign that’s just gone up saying that train is cancelled and there isn’t another one till 1:15.
And just coming back into London from the Home Counties, you know, on a slow train full of strange-looking people and the odd aggressive maniac, you know, and hoping they don’t recognise me.
And that’s sort of like, you think, well, hey, look at that. Look back — all you stand-ups, back off. I’m paying my dues.
Bit late in the day. Bit late in the day, some may say, but I am — I am actually doing that. I’ve done that. I’ve done all that stuff.
Amazing. Chosen, you know, and — and, you know, going out in front of audiences and having to woo them over and all that.
I’ve done it all across Britain, and I’m happy to have done it. It was great.
And I’m doing that as well.
So I went for a period where I got away from comedy, and I’ve really come back to it the hard way now, which is standing in front of an audience with a microphone.
Abigoliah: Oh, I hope we gig together soon. You’re still doing it. That’s what I do. I’m a stand-up, so — yeah.
Griff: So — well, you know the thrill of it.
It’s a very different thing from being in a — in a funny sort of way, from being in a sketch show and working through material and all that.
And I look — I look back now and I think, you know, I’m sort of just about recovered. I don’t get the jitters quite as much thinking about Smith and Jones.
So, you know, I could do another sketch show now.
But it is — there is a sense where you go, God.
It’s like when Hugh Carleton Greene was the — he was the Director-General of the BBC, and he really — he revolutionised the BBC. He brought in That Was the Week That Was and all sorts of things.
But I read his biography — autobiography — and he said when he left the BBC, he started walking down Regent Street towards Oxford Circus. And as he walked down, he suddenly realised he was running. Not just running, but skipping his way to freedom.
And a sort of feeling — you go, wow.
When something you’ve been doing for 13 years comes to an end, and you may think, what am I supposed to do now? But there is a feeling of, God, that yoke is off my back.
Now lead me to — I’ll do other things.
Which is, you know, one of the things that I think is important in life, is to do as many other things as you possibly can. There’s still other things worth doing.
I don’t have a bucket list, but I have a bucket list. I have a list of things that I never want to do again.
Tom: Well—
Abigoliah: Can I have three things on the bucket list and then we’ll wrap it up?
Griff: I don’t go to stadium rock.
Abigoliah: Okay. No stadium rock.
Griff: I don’t go to firework displays. So I don’t want to climb any more volcanoes.
There are things that seemed like a good idea at the time, and somebody else said— No, I’m not saying they’re bad. I’m just saying once you’ve done them, don’t force me.
And there’s a whole list of things I don’t want to—
I tried, but it’s very, very, very, very difficult.
But my major is I don’t want to go to formal dinners anymore.
I mean, when somebody says you’ve got to put on a dinner jacket, we’re going to sit there and you’re going to get up and make a speech at the end of it, and they don’t get there until 11:30 at night, after they’ve got everybody in there at sort of seven—
You go, I don’t want to do that anymore.
Life is genuinely too short to be sitting there trying to make conversation with somebody to your right who, you know, clearly has no idea who you are, but they’re there because they’re in some way an associate of the charity that you’re supposed to be making the speech on behalf of.
I don’t know. It’s just awful.
So I try — I do have things that I say, no, I don’t do that.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Fair.
Tom, you want to take us home?
Tom: Yeah. We have two questions we’d like to finish on.
So one is, I’m taking Abigoliah on this journey through British comedy. We’ve watched a number of classics, including Not the Nine O’Clock News, including Fawlty Towers, including Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
Is there anything which is a particular favourite of yours that you think we might be going to overlook?
Griff: Well, I’d go back further. You see, I’d go back to Hancock, and I’d go back to the things that — when I was a kid and I was at this school which expected me to go to Cambridge.
And so I’d get home and I’d have this huge pile of homework to get on with, and I’d go upstairs, and I could hear my father downstairs hooting with laughter at various sort of comedy shows.
In fact, the comedy show that Galton and Simpson wrote for Frankie Howerd, when he just sat on a — against a darkened screen and talked to the audience about his troubles. Things like that.
He’s a classic. He’s a classic comedy that I — that I grew up with and loved before Monty Python came around to say, oh no, you can be sort of surreal as well. You can have something which is left of centre.
You don’t have to be full-on.
But those are the — those are the shows that I cut my teeth on, you know, or used to laugh at and be sorry if I missed them because I had big mathematics prep to do.
Tom: And lastly, as a thank you for giving up so much of your time and telling us all these amazing stories, is there a charity which you’d like us to give a shout-out to, which listeners to the podcast might want to donate to?
Griff: I’m patron of East Anglia’s Children’s Hospices.
And I organise a show every year in Ipswich, in the Regent, big theatre, nearly 2,000 seats.
And we get — we’ve had everybody from Suzy Izzard to all my old friends, Clive and Rory and people like that, Lee Mack and Bill Bailey, everybody.
And Lenny, one of my oldest sort of sparring partners in comedy, is coming up to do it on the 30th of November.
And so, you know, it is — it’s a great, great show, and we’ve had some fantastic shows.
So if you’re around, if this goes out before, come and see it. If not, there’ll be another one next year.
But we do it every year and we raise quite a lot of money for it.
Abigoliah: And sadly I’m not around this year to perform on it, but I’d love to next year, Griff, with you and Lenny and Bill. I’ll be there just with the crew.
Griff: It’s great.
We have a really great show. It’s a two-hour show, so, you know, we’ll do eight minutes, but Chris McCausland will do — he’ll do ten minutes as well.
But then lower down — lower down, but further down the bill, if you like, like an old-fashioned variety show, we have other comics coming on.
So there’s no sense in which it’s only a place for, you know, like people who’ve done major British comedy shows. It’s for people who are really funny instead.
Abigoliah: Oh.
Tom: Oh, this sounds fun.
Abigoliah: Well, we’ll post the ticket link and make sure that we get the word out there about it for sure.
Griff: So it’ll be a really good show this year, I think.
So, you know, and we’ve — we’ve had an amazing array of — you know, Stephen Fry’s done it. He’s done it.
All the people I’ve ever met dread getting that phone call. Dread it, dread it, dread it now.
I mean, we’ve come up to — coming up to ten, nearly ten years of doing this.
Yeah, eight years. Eight or nine years.
Tom: Griff Rhys Jones, this has been an absolute honour. Thank you so much for joining us.
Griff: Well, what a pleasure. I’m sorry it took me so long to get attached. You can’t ask me to do new tech. It’s just — however basic it is.
Abigoliah: You did great. Thank you so much for coming on.
Griff: Thank you.
Tom: Wow. I mean, it’s a — it’s a roller coaster. We’re just, like, hanging on there, aren’t we?
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Well, what was your favourite story?
Tom: I think some of the early ones, because I didn’t know any of that stuff.
I didn’t realise — I guess I probably could have looked it up — but I didn’t know he’d been at school with Douglas Adams.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And it’s making me even keener to try and do The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with you at some point, which is not currently among any of our plans, but who knows?
Abigoliah: I mean, it’s our podcast. We make it up as we want. We can change things around.
Yeah, all those early stories.
I mean, I just love the idea of the Oxford and the Cambridge sketch groups getting into actual fisticuffs.
Tom: Yes, that was amazing.
Abigoliah: It just cracks me up so much.
Tom: And what can happen with some people — I won’t name any names here — but I’ve seen some people who got those lucky breaks early on and it generated a sense of entitlement.
Like, well, of course I got those breaks. I’m amazing, because people could see my genius, that everything fell into place for me.
He just seems to be completely relaxed and very grateful and slightly bemused at all of his good fortune, and I found that so endearing.
Abigoliah: It is. And it’s so funny because when you think about Griff coming up through the Footlights and Rowan coming up through Oxford and all — and, you know, Emma — Emma Thompson was around then, and you think, like, oh my God, these guys are — these guys are going to go on and change comedy. These guys are absolute stars.
And he’s like, we had no idea.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: We just knew we weren’t Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and everyone was really pissed off at us for that at the time. We were constantly being told we weren’t good enough, so we had no idea this was going to turn out well for us.
I think that’s hysterical.
Tom: Yeah. And just as the reviews when he was up there said, well, there’s clearly no John Cleese or Peter Cook among this cast, you can bet ten years later there are reviews saying, well, there’s clearly no Griff Rhys Jones among this cast.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Hey, the Footlights, they weren’t as funny as they were last year. You know, that’s what they say about them.
Guys, thank you, as always, so much for listening to All British Comedy Explained. We love doing these little special interviews when we get a chance.
A couple ways you can support the show if you’d like to.
One, leave us a five-star review on your podcatcher app.
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You can also leave a comment in your podcatcher app, depending on which one you are in, but I don’t read them. I just want you to know I’ve tried. I’ve tried to go in there. Too much work. I’m reading too much.
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Tom: We do, yes. So there are various ways you can support us monetarily, should that be your thing.
Patreon is the main one, but it’s kind of the same wherever you go. You can also give us money via Apple Podcasts or via YouTube.
But the deal is: £3 a month gets you ad-free episodes, and £5 a month gets you special bonus episodes, which are essentially more full-length versions of All British Comedy Explained, except we flip the script. It’s All-American Comedy Explained.
Abigoliah finds shows that I haven’t seen and she explains them to me.
Abigoliah: Yes. And at the end of November we will be doing The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Tom: Yep. Can’t wait.
Abigoliah: Which is very exciting.
And yeah, also I just want to say, as Christmas is coming up, if you want the Patreon but you’re not in a place where you can afford it, Patreon has a little system where people can gift it to you.
So you can ask — ask for All British Comedy Explained Patreon for Christmas.
Tom: And if you are subscribing to Patreon, please remember to do so via the website, not via the app, because if you do it via the app on an Apple device, then Apple takes 30%.
Abigoliah: And that’s why I have Android.
That’s it, right? That’s all we — that’s all—
Tom: That’s all she wrote.
Abigoliah: Yep. Exactly right.
All right. Well, we’ve got more stuff coming for you through the holiday season. You’re going to love it.
Guys, have a good one.
Tom: Take care. Bye for now.
Abigoliah: Bye.