Abigoliah: Hello there. This is All British Comedy Explained, the podcast where I, Abigoliah, finally learn about all the British comedies I have been missing out on. And to guide us through this comedy labyrinth is my good friend and writer, Tom Salinsky.
Tom: Hello there. I’m really looking forward to this one. This is a special one in some ways. But it’s kind of a landmark, but for us, it has a particular resonance.
Abigoliah: Yes. For me and you.
Tom: Yeah, exactly.
Abigoliah: Yeah. This is the one that made — that birthed the podcast, if you will.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Do you want to tell everyone what it is?
Tom: We are going to watch Not the Nine O’Clock News.
Abigoliah: I’m looking forward to this.
Tom: And it occupies this kind of weird space between Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which just sort of seemed like it was the last word in, particularly, sketch comedy, and The Young Ones and the explosion of alternative comedy in the early eighties.
Abigoliah: Okay. See, it’s set in a newsroom, right?
Tom: No.
Abigoliah: Oh.
Tom: You might be thinking of Drop the Dead Donkey.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Which we are coming to.
Abigoliah: It is Not the Nine O’Clock News.
Tom: We’ll come to that. It’s a sketch show, and that’s all it is.
Abigoliah: All right. I’m walking in. I thought it was going to be something completely different.
Tom: So it began in 1979.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: That’s the year that the first prototype music CD was demonstrated by Philips.
Abigoliah: In ’79?
Tom: ’79.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: Yeah. It’s quite an old technology. DVDs came along quite a lot later, but CDs were being talked of and demonstrated. In ’79, Monty Python’s Life of Brian is in cinemas.
Abigoliah: Hey, and you know who helped make that happen? George Harrison from the Beatles.
Tom: Exactly. So British Prime Minister James Callaghan lost a motion of confidence by one vote, and that led to a general election which was won by Margaret Thatcher. And that will be important later.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Now, this is all about John Lloyd.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: His name has come up a couple of times.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Do you know who he is?
Abigoliah: He’s a producer? Writer?
Tom: Yes. Yes. Exactly right. He’d been one of the architects of Spitting Image. But actually, this is kind of his origin story, at least where television comedy is concerned. Actually, he’d been a radio producer since the mid-seventies.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And he’d worked with Douglas Adams. Douglas Adams had said, in his — as he put it — he’d run out of words getting towards the end of the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series, and John Lloyd came in and helped him out with those last two episodes.
Abigoliah: That’s a beautiful — that also, fun fact, happened to George R. R. Martin.
Tom: Yes. He seems to have terminally run out of words.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Poor guy.
Tom: Yeah. But so the satire boom, which we looked at last time, has died away. And when you look around again, this is the same thing that was exercising the—
Abigoliah: Minds. Just to back up real quick. ’79.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Okay. Something you need to know about this recording. You might — I don’t know if you’re going to cut this out, but Tom, my partner has been gone for a week.
Tom: Oh.
Abigoliah: And I have been in my house on my own, doing computer stuff for, like, four days straight without talking to anyone. So I might be kind of weird.
Tom: Okay. All right.
Abigoliah: That’s when I sat down and I started telling you a story. I was like, we got to record the pod. I just — you just haven’t talked to anyone in days.
Tom: Okay.
Abigoliah: Okay. That’s where I’m at mentally. ’79.
Tom: Yes. So that sixties satire boom, which we looked at last time, has died down.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And there’s a kind of safe, staid quality to a lot of what’s going out on the BBC. It’s the same thing that Ben Elton and Rik Mayall and so on were reacting against when we did The Young Ones.
Abigoliah: So, like, more fuzzy-feeling sitcoms.
Tom: It’s The Good Life.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: It’s The Two Ronnies. It’s shiny floor. It all feels a bit predictable. But alternative comedy is coming. And actually, it’s John Lloyd who’ll get something like alternative comedy on television before either Paul Jackson, who did The Young Ones, or Peter Richardson, who did The Comic Strip Presents…
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Now, in particular, what was lacking on the BBC was anything like Monty Python’s Flying Circus. In other words, a writer-led ensemble sketch show with something to say.
Abigoliah: Okay. And they were looking to fill that gap again.
Tom: Exactly. Yes. So sketch shows still existed, but they tended to be star vehicles. So it’s a sketch show, but it’s built around one, or in some cases a double act.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And they’re kind of looking a bit dated. And John Lloyd wanted to get back to the spirit both of Monty Python, with its messing with the form, but also the kind of anger of That Was the Week That Was.
Abigoliah: Okay. Yeah. So combining the two and making something, like, political and also, but stylistically, [unclear] and anarchic. Anarchic.
Tom: Yes, exactly. Yeah. And John Howard Davies at the BBC was thinking along very similar lines. So there is a meeting of minds between this producer and the BBC top brass. But there is one small problem.
Abigoliah: They don’t have an idea.
Tom: It’s not so much that. It’s that John Lloyd has never made a television show before.
Abigoliah: Oh, so this is — this is the show that launched a thousand shows.
Tom: It really is, yeah. So John Lloyd has only done radio. He sort of thinks radio and television are pretty much the same, and you can just turn up and turn the microphones on and do it. But television is so much more complicated.
Abigoliah: But when it comes to writing it, is it that different?
Tom: Not that different, no. But producing it, which is what his job would be, is going to be way different.
So the BBC think, well, we can’t entrust this new show to this guy who’s never made television before. We better find him somebody more experienced to partner him up with. And there’s a guy called Sean Hardie who has been making a nuisance of himself at BBC News and Current Affairs.
Abigoliah: Any relation to Tom Hardy?
Tom: Not as far as I know. And spelled differently, with an E at the end, not a Y. Because he keeps trying to put jokes into Panorama.
Abigoliah: Oh, I like him already.
Tom: Yeah. So it’s decided he’s the perfect person to team up with John Lloyd. So we have one person who’s never made a television show before and one person who’s never made a comedy show before, and they’re going to try and work together to make a television comedy show.
Abigoliah: But the guy who has never made comedy thinks he’s a comedian.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: That’s kind of dangerous.
Tom: And of course, there’s no need to worry about them not being prepared for this because they’ve both been to Cambridge.
So now you can relax.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: However, it’s actually from Oxford that the first inspiration for this show came.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Rowan Atkinson—
Abigoliah: I’ve heard of him.
Tom: —had made a huge impression at the 1977 Edinburgh Fringe.
Abigoliah: I thought — I guess because he was around at the same time that the Footlights — the Stephen Fry Footlights.
Tom: That’s a little bit later. The Footlights have been going since the thirties. But yes, that incredible crop of talent from the early eighties. Emma Thompson — just a few years after Rowan Atkinson.
Abigoliah: Okay. I always thought he was a Cambridge guy.
Tom: Rowan Atkinson’s Oxford. So the Oxford Revue, which was the Footlights’ great rival.
Abigoliah: Okay. But he also performed with Not Only… But Also and they’re Cambridge people, right?
Tom: Not Only… But Also — so, Beyond the Fringe.
Abigoliah: Beyond the Fringe.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: “Will this wind…?”
Tom: Yes. Yeah, yeah. See, that was at a much later Amnesty charity concert.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Yes. “Will this wind…?” Okay. That’s an old Peter Cook sketch.
Abigoliah: They are Cambridge.
Tom: Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller were at Cambridge.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: I believe.
Abigoliah: If you don’t know where they go to school, how do you know?
Tom: How do you know? How do you know?
Abigoliah: How do you know if you like their comedy?
Tom: Rowan Atkinson had actually been in an ITV television comedy show in 1979.
Abigoliah: Really?
Tom: Yeah. Called Canned Laughter, which meant he had one up on John Lloyd and Sean Hardie. He’d actually made a television comedy show.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So he’s their first hire, and their initial thought was maybe he could be their David Frost as they essentially updated That Was the Week That Was for the eighties. So they needed a company of actors to support him.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And the first guy they recruited was somebody called Chris Langham. Ever heard of Chris Langham?
Abigoliah: The name’s familiar. We’ve talked about him.
Tom: He was already a very experienced writer and actor by this point. He was the only British writer on The Muppet Show.
Abigoliah: That’s how I know his name.
Tom: And he had also worked with Spike Milligan and Ken Campbell, Peter Sellers, all the way through the seventies.
Abigoliah: Can I already guess the problem with the format and Rowan Atkinson?
Tom: Sure.
Abigoliah: Rowan Atkinson’s too much of a presence.
Tom: You’re not far off. You’re not far off.
Abigoliah: He’s too goofy.
Tom: Yeah. But no—
Abigoliah: Offence, David Frost.
Tom: We’ve veered away from Chris Langham. And actually, that’s not something I’m too concerned about. I don’t want to dwell on him for too long. He does have the most extraordinary capacity to be fired from projects early on.
Abigoliah: Really?
Tom: And he was also jailed in 2007 on 15 counts of downloading child pornography.
Abigoliah: Oh, okay. All right. I didn’t know that. So thank you for telling me that.
Tom: So Chris Langham is in the cast. Rowan Atkinson is in the cast. About four or five other actors are in the cast. All men. Although John Lloyd did approach Victoria Wood.
Abigoliah: And she was like, I’m gonna make my own show, bitches.
Tom: Exactly.
Abigoliah: Oh, good for her. She is our queen.
Tom: And they shot a rather chaotic pilot in 1979.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Now, they had a commission for six episodes because this was an idea which had been birthed within the BBC. But John Lloyd said they just put every single idea they had into episode one without a moment’s thought about what the other five episodes were going to contain.
Abigoliah: That’s — for a show, he doesn’t know any better.
Tom: And the plan was to start the series in the slot recently vacated by Fawlty Towers. Nine p.m. on a Monday night. And as BBC One would be showing the Nine O’Clock News, that gave the show its title. You could watch—
Abigoliah: Nine o’clock—
Tom: —the Nine O’Clock News on BBC One, or you could watch Not the Nine O’Clock News on BBC Two. It’s also a reference to spoof editions of The New York Times, published during a strike—
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: —which were called Not The New York Times.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And they even got John Cleese to record a pre-title sequence in character as Basil Fawlty—
Abigoliah: Oh, fun.
Tom: —explaining his show’s absence and offering a cheap, tatty revue in its place.
Abigoliah: Oh, that’s fun.
Tom: But the pilot was never shown.
Abigoliah: Why?
Tom: Well, I mean, it’s kind of a mess.
Abigoliah: Have you seen it?
Tom: I have, yes.
Abigoliah: Of course you have.
Tom: There are some horrendous pre-Spitting Image papier-mâché puppets, which look awful.
Rowan Atkinson, who, like I said, was the star, isn’t seen until the show’s half over.
Abigoliah: No.
Tom: Yeah. He’s brilliant when he finally appears. He’s really the only good thing in it. And there are no standout sketches. And although the idea of remaking That Was the Week That Was has been abandoned, for exactly the reason that you guessed, the show ends with four cast members sitting behind a kind of That Was the Week That Was-style desk, reading out fairly feeble topical one-liners.
And as I was watching it, I was thinking, well, if you’re going to do that at all — I’m not sure that you should in 1979 — put that at the beginning.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Don’t — that’s not your big closer.
Abigoliah: No.
Tom: So it’s kind of a disaster.
Abigoliah: And it warms everyone up. Also, I don’t understand — I’m sorry, but, I mean, you said they’ve never made television before, but you don’t put your star at the end. You open — you open with your star.
Tom: And John Howard Davies watched this and came very close to cancelling the whole project.
Abigoliah: I understand why.
Tom: But listen, no one was fooling themselves. John Lloyd and Sean Hardie also knew it wasn’t working. They needed more time. But these slots are in the schedule.
Abigoliah: You’ve got to put something in it.
Tom: Yeah. So what could possibly stop the machine from continuing to roll forward?
Abigoliah: A general election.
Tom: Exactly right.
Abigoliah: Ha!
Tom: John Lloyd and Sean Hardie prayed that something would happen that would stop them. And it was indeed James Callaghan. So Not the Nine O’Clock News was postponed, and the team had another six months to figure out what the hell they were doing.
Abigoliah: Oh, those lucky ducks.
Tom: Yes. So almost everything was scrapped and they started from scratch. The only people they kept were Chris Langham and Rowan Atkinson. And John Lloyd thought of another Oxford Revue alumnus, an actor called Mel Smith.
Abigoliah: I don’t think we’ve talked about—
Tom: I don’t think we have. You did actually glimpse him briefly on The Young Ones.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: He’s the security guard who accuses Vyvyan of trying to bring a pig into the BBC.
Abigoliah: Oh, yes.
Tom: And so by this time he’s an established theatre actor and director, but he’s also broke.
Abigoliah: So he’ll do anything.
Tom: The idea being, he watched the pilot and thought, well, this is awful. On the other hand, I’ve just been offered six weeks of work. So yes, John, I’m in.
Abigoliah: I just want to throw it out there to the BBC that I am also broke. So if they want me to be in a sitcom or a sketch show, I’m around.
Tom: And then John Lloyd met an actor from New Zealand called Pamela Stephenson at a party.
Abigoliah: I don’t know who she is.
Tom: Well, he realised he’d found another potential superstar, as well as that rarest of things in 1970s UK television comedy: a funny woman.
Abigoliah: I love that they approached Victoria Wood and she was like, “I’m making my own show.” And then they were like, “Well, there’s no other women.”
Because also Victoria Wood had, like, Celia Imrie and Julie Walters.
Tom: Susie Blake. Exactly. There’s no shortage.
Abigoliah: She took all the women.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: There are no others. Okay. Tell me about Pamela.
Tom: So she’d been acting on stage and in films in Australia since the early seventies, and moved to Britain and was kind of the pretty girl in UK cop shows. So she’s quite experienced, actually older than the rest of the cast—
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: —but hasn’t really had a chance to show what she can do in terms of comedy.
Abigoliah: I’m picturing, like, as far as career projection, Joanna Lumley sort of situation.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah.
Tom: Not far off. So John Lloyd and Sean Hardie are now trying to think more about what this show is going to be. They’ve got now this small core of performers. And they get rid of the puppets, they get rid of the one-liners. And this show has a much kind of looser, fresher feeling.
And that came largely from Mel Smith.
Abigoliah: So he was— Of course it did.
Tom: He was a theatre actor who worked at the Royal Court, and he was keen to do away with that very presentational style of acting that you associate with Footlights, with Monty Python’s Flying Circus, with kind of all of radio comedy.
He wanted the characters and the sketches to sound like people stumbling, mumbling and talking over each other, not politely waiting for cues.
Abigoliah: That is revolutionary.
Tom: For sketch. It really is.
Abigoliah: No, I’m not — I’m not being silly when I say that. Because even now, when you see modern-day live sketch shows or modern-day television sketch shows — say SNL—
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: —which, again, I’m going to say, love the UK version, but it is like, “Gee, Tom, look at us in this restaurant. What could possibly happen that’s wacky and—”
Tom: “Oh, I seem to have stabbed myself in the kidneys with a fork.”
Abigoliah: Exactly. Yeah.
Tom: So as well as this so-called “roughening” from Mel Smith, John Lloyd put all the scripts through a process he called “plumpening”.
Abigoliah: What? plumpening?
Tom: So they had a good team of writers. Everyone wrote for this show: Clive Anderson, Andy Hamilton, Ruby Wax, Richard Curtis, Victoria Pile, Rowan Atkinson himself. But any promising script, whether it was sent in by a freelancer or generated by this in-house team, was gagged up by all concerned.
I think the sketch I showed you after poker was “Constable Savage”—
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: —in which a policeman is given a dressing-down by a superior officer for all of the ludicrous charges he’s brought.
Abigoliah: So they roughen it and they plumpen it.
Tom: Yes, exactly.
Abigoliah: That sounds like something you’d do when making, like, a rustic bread. It sounds like what you do to the dough. Like, first you roughen it and then you plumpen it.
Tom: And then it rises.
Abigoliah: And then you rise it. And then you stretch and fold it.
Tom: Yeah.
Tom: So things are looking up. They’ve got the right cast. They’ve got a solid set of scripts. They know what they’re doing. The first show went out in October 1979 and got what Sean Hardie describes as the worst reviews of his entire career.
Abigoliah: No.
Tom: It also got less than a million viewers in ’79.
Abigoliah: No one had anything to do.
Tom: Exactly.
Tom: Yeah. So people would literally rather look at the wallpaper than watch Not the Nine O’Clock News, it seems.
Abigoliah: What’s so crazy is, like, if you get 500,000 viewers on a 9pm aired-to-broadcast sketch show now, you’d be like—
Tom: We’re fucking king of the world.
Now, did this worry the controller of BBC Two, a man called Brian Wenham?
Abigoliah: No, he didn’t care.
Tom: It’s not that he didn’t care. What he said was, “I knew you were going to get it wrong the first year, so I’m not even going to watch your first series.”
Abigoliah: People from Cambridge get all the fucking breaks.
Tom: But he says, “If you get it wrong in an interesting way, then you can come back and have another go.”
Abigoliah: Listen, I totally respect and love the fact that he’s giving a show time to breathe.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Commissioners don’t do that enough anymore, you know? They’ll — Netflix will be like, they’ll put out a show, you’ll be like, “This is so interesting,” and then they’ll, like, can it.
So I love that. I’m also going to suggest that Victoria Wood did not have that leeway, and that’s why she wrote it to death.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: With Geoff Posner on her fucking floor.
Tom: Anyway, this first series is much more assured than that terrible pilot. They still have the topical gags, but they’re now handled by Mel Smith and Pamela Stephenson as a pair of newsreaders.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Mel Smith just does generic BBC newsreader, but Pamela Stephenson turned out to be a hugely accomplished impressionist, which actually they didn’t know when they hired her. They just thought she was pretty and funny.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: But she does devastating impersonations of BBC newsreaders of the day, which probably won’t mean anything to you. But she’s doing people like Sue Lawley or Jan Leeming or Angela Rippon—
Abigoliah: Oh, well, there you go.
Tom: I know. She also does Moira Stuart in a few episodes, which is a bit less satisfactory.
Abigoliah: I don’t know. Do I know who—
Tom: No, probably not. But she was a British-born newsreader to Jamaican parents.
Abigoliah: Oh dear.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Someone asked about this in the—
Tom: Yes. Exactly.
Tom: Yeah. So listen, worse things have been done on television in the name of satire. I’m not going to show you an episode of Pamela Stephenson as Moira Stuart, but let’s just acknowledge that it happened and—
Abigoliah: Move on.
Tom: Okay.
But the image of two presenters reading out fake news items couldn’t help but recall The Two Ronnies, which we’ve talked about a few times, but I don’t think you’ve seen.
Abigoliah: No.
Tom: So it’s a very shiny-floor, middle-of-the-road BBC One sketch show.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And it’s kind of what Not the Nine O’Clock News is the opposite of. It is funny that they’re evoking it in this style of presentation, even though the tone of their comedy is utterly different.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But remember The Two Ronnies for later.
Abigoliah: Do they get mad?
Tom: I’m coming to that.
Abigoliah: They get mad because one of the Ronnies is a bit of a curmudgeon to new and up-and-coming comics.
Tom: Yes, exactly.
And they also use lots of newsreel footage, sometimes spliced together with other film to create a joke or a weird juxtaposition, sometimes redubbed. And that did feel new. It kind of feels punk.
And the only other remnant of That Was the Week That Was was a strange running segment involving the four regulars, essentially as themselves, discussing issues of the day in a kind of giant-mouth set. It looks very odd. It was quite quickly abandoned.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: You won’t be seeing it.
Abigoliah: All right.
Tom: So by the end of the first series, the show was really starting to take off. And there’s, I think, one key sketch here. Do you remember talking about the fuss over Life of Brian and John Cleese and Michael Palin appearing on a TV show?
Abigoliah: I remember that they didn’t have much money for it.
Tom: So, because it was seen as attacking religion—
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: —they were on a TV show with Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark.
Abigoliah: Oh, that’s right. Yeah. They had to, like, defend — and the bishop and the other guy, like, really talked down to—
Tom: Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Not the Nine O’Clock News did a sketch in which they copied the set dressing from that interview. They cast Rowan Atkinson as the ecclesiastical director of the new film Life of Christ—
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: —who faced criticism from Mel Smith as film critic Alexander Walker, complaining, how can you make a film like this? This is a Python-worshipping country, and pointing out that the hero of the film, this Jesus Christ bloke, is an obvious lampoon of our comic messiah, John Cleese. Even the initials are the same.
Abigoliah: That’s hysterical.
Tom: This is a sketch written by Colin Bostock-Smith, who was a veteran sketch writer from this time, and it’s a brilliant piece of writing. It’s just fantastic.
Abigoliah: How was it received by the religious sect?
Tom: Oh, they didn’t care.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Because they’re not the target. The person who wasn’t happy had actually been in Life of Brian: Chris Langham.
Abigoliah: Is it because he played Brian?
Tom: He didn’t play Brian. All of the main parts are played by the Monty Python team, but there’s an ensemble cast surrounding them, and Chris Langham is one of the centurions.
Abigoliah: Who plays Brian?
Tom: Graham Chapman.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Sorry.
Chris Langham had been in the film, and he felt that this isn’t the kind of material they should be doing. He was beginning to feel like a bit of an outsider. He didn’t get on well with John Lloyd, and there was a general feeling from kind of everybody, from John Howard Davies down, that Chris Langham was a bit too weird and he was throwing off the balance of the ensemble.
Abigoliah: And now we know why.
Tom: But also, I remind you, he’s the one who’s seen as too weird. And this whole ensemble has been built around Rowan Atkinson.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I mean, to defend Chris Langham’s thoughts on this specific sketch only, I think it’s really weird to be in something that parodies something you’ve done.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: You know what I mean?
Tom: He isn’t in the sketch.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Which I think makes it easier. But he was like, “This isn’t the kind of thing we should be doing. This isn’t the show I signed up for.” And so he isn’t invited back for the second series.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So they’re a man down.
Abigoliah: So who do they get instead?
Tom: Well, that was a versatile performer named Griff Rhys Jones.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: Who’d already been playing support in over half the series one shows. So they quietly bump him up to regular, and that’s the Gang of Four that everybody associates with Not the Nine O’Clock News. People forget Chris Langham was ever in it, partly because sketches featuring Chris Langham were never included in any of the record albums or the best-of repeats or anything else. He’s been quietly erased from history.
Abigoliah: And this is before everyone knew that he was a baddie.
Tom: Exactly. He’s just weird.
Abigoliah: This is funny.
Tom: But it’s that Life of Christ sketch which pointed the way forward.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: There’s a kind of take-no-prisoners approach that the show would adopt from here on.
Now, I nearly showed you this episode, but I’ll tell you about this sketch instead. Have you heard of Oswald Mosley?
Abigoliah: No, I don’t think so.
Tom: Okay.
Abigoliah: Doesn’t sound like a real person.
Tom: It’s absolutely a real person. When he died, they turned the fawning, sycophantic newspaper obituaries about him into a kind of punk song.
Abigoliah: Oh, fun.
Tom: Quoting the actual lines from the obituaries, which praised his performance in the House of Commons while neglecting to mention that he was most famous as the leader of the British fascists before, during and after the Second World War. Or, as the song puts it, “Any friend of Hitler’s can’t have been all bad.”
Abigoliah: That kind of reminds me of, like, when Charlie Kirk was shot.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: And so many people were like, hey, listen, he goes around, he speaks at uni. He’s like — like, we shouldn’t be celebrating. And it’s like, listen, I didn’t celebrate his death, but he wasn’t a good dude.
Tom: That song, by the way, aired less than a week after Mosley’s death. So they’re really turning this around fast.
Abigoliah: You know what I’m finding really fascinating about this satire, what we’ve seen so far, and those of you who are signed up to the Patreon will have already listened to — this comes out in October?
Tom: October, yeah.
Abigoliah: —will have already listened to the episode about the Smothers Brothers, is how on board the BBC is with them pushing the envelope. And from That Was the Week That Was to this, to not holding dear the, you know, the Royal Family, the politicians, the pillars of society, right, that have been revered, the BBC is perfectly comfortable being a part of making fun of these ideas and tearing down the power, which I find so refreshing.
Tom: And wait till we get to W1A, oh boy. Which is that same idea, but directed elsewhere.
Abigoliah: Okay. Which, by the way, is a show that was voted on by our Patreon.
Tom: Yes. Yeah. Last time I looked, the poll was neck and neck between W1A and Brass Eye. But I think it will be W1A because, A, I’m going to give myself the casting vote, and B, I’ve already done the research on W1A because it was winning for such a long time.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tom: Anyway, I think it’s time we watched some of Not the Nine O’Clock News. After a very long process of weighing up different options, we’re going to watch show three from series three and then the very last show from the end of the fourth series.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: I could have shown you almost any episode from the second series onwards and there would have been several all-time classic sketches.
Abigoliah: Oh, fun.
Tom: But I think these are the ones that are going to work best for you. It’s a sketch show, so there’s — it’s not going to be completely consistent. But I think these are two really strong entries.
Abigoliah: Is this going to be like That Was the Week That Was, where you have to give me, like, a glossary and a cheat sheet?
Tom: I don’t think so.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: One of the people that is lampooned twice in the first show we’re going to watch, you have definitely heard of.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And a lot of the rest of it is kind of social satire rather than political satire.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And some of the more topical jokes are just kind of one-liners and you’ll get them or you won’t.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: It sort of doesn’t matter.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: What else are you expecting?
Abigoliah: I mean, I’m expecting just to be wowed by the comedy of Pamela. I’m quite excited to see her. And a sparkly young Rowan Atkinson.
So with the newscasters, I’m expecting to look at this and go, “And that’s where Weekend Update came from.”
Tom: Kind of, yes. And actually, Saturday Night Live would have started three or four years before this.
Abigoliah: Okay. Oh. So maybe it’s the other way around.
Tom: But The Two Ronnies have been doing two newsreaders behind a desk reading out topical news items since, like, 1970, I think.
Abigoliah: I think this one, more than That Was the Week That Was, I’m going to look at and see how it’s inspired comedy of the present day, more so than That Was the Week That Was. I’ll recognise it more.
Tom: I think that’s true. Yes. Yeah, I think you will.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And live studio audience?
Tom: Yes. Yeah. A lot of location stuff, but much more live-audience studio recording than, for example, in The Fast Show.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: A wonderful detail. This isn’t in my notes, but it is a good story. Just very, very quickly. There’s a couple of sketches which you won’t see where Rowan Atkinson walks through the studio audience complaining that this is all rubbish.
Abigoliah: Oh, you told me about this. And a security guard—
Tom: Tried to remove him.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: Exactly. Yes. Because he wasn’t famous. And they kept part of that in.
Abigoliah: You and me both, Rowan.
I had the same problem. Fun fact, wasn’t my show though. Yeah, it was Rosie Jones’s vehicle, but, you know. Anyway, shall we?
Tom: Let’s do it.
Abigoliah: Let’s do it.
Abigoliah: We got nominated for an award.
Tom: Well done to us.
Abigoliah: We did it. We did it, and you did it too, listeners, because this podcast doesn’t happen without you. We said we’d do it for a year and see how it went.
Tom: It’s going really well.
Abigoliah: It’s going really well. It’s going so well. We got nominated for Best Podcast in Film or Television.
Tom: At the Independent Podcast Awards.
Abigoliah: At the Independent Podcast Awards. We’re the only nomination in our category that covers TV. Did you notice?
Tom: I didn’t notice that, no. That’s good. Yeah, yeah. We’re up against some strong competition. But I think, you know, it’s only the five nominees, so I like our chances.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And the awards ceremony is going to happen November 4th, so keep an eye out on our socials. We’ll let you know how it goes. If we don’t win, it’s always an honour to be nominated.
Tom: And if we do win, screw those other guys.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And if we don’t win, screw those other guys. It was fixed.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: But no, really, guys, we just wanted to share that with you because we’re super excited about it. And it’s my first ever award nomination personally.
Tom: Amazing. Yeah. I’m thrilled.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I have won the trophy on Pointless Celebrities, so just throwing that out there. And we have another announcement.
Tom: We do. Yes. So if you want to support the show, there is now an extra way in which you can do that. This show has always been both video and audio. We’ve always put the video up on YouTube, and there are now ads on YouTube. So sorry about that.
But if you want to get rid of them and show your support, you can become a member for £3 a month. And just like on Patreon, if you can go up to £5 a month, you also get special bonus episodes. Those will now be monthly full-length episodes where, for this season, Abigoliah is showing me American comedy shows that she loves.
And what we’re going to do progressively is start putting some of those audio-only episodes up there as an archive. So you’ll get access to those as well as time goes on.
Abigoliah: Yeah. So the video episodes will start at The Smothers Brothers.
Tom: That’s right.
Abigoliah: And then we’ll slowly— We just didn’t record the video for the Jackass or I Love Lucy—
Tom: Or the little bonus minisodes we did for series two.
Abigoliah: Yeah. So it’s all coming to you. And guys, we do appreciate your support. And let’s do a show.
Tom: Let’s do a show.
Abigoliah: All right.
Tom: All right. Welcome back. That’s good stuff, isn’t it?
Abigoliah: Yeah. I mean, I feel like all the sketches just kind of—
Tom: They got into quite a lot of trouble over that.
Abigoliah: Did they?
Tom: Yeah. The BBC wasn’t going to let them do it. And John Lloyd successfully argued, any child who happens to be listening who already knows what that word means, we haven’t corrupted.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And anyone who doesn’t know what it means is just going to think they are saying “kinda lingers”.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s one of those—
Tom: That go over their head.
Abigoliah: I feel like that was a lot of humour of the eighties. Like, you go back and watch— Well, I go back and watch, like, old movies and stuff that I thought were so funny as a kid, and then you watch them as an adult and you’re like, they let me watch this?
Tom: Yes, but you just—
Abigoliah: You didn’t know. Yeah. I’m glad they let them do it. It’s such a fun send-off to the whole show because that was the last—
Tom: That was the last ever one.
Abigoliah: Yes. Yeah.
Tom: I do think that went out on a high. Like, I watched them all through and thinking, oh, that’s quite a good one to show. That’s quite a good one. And I was really impressed at just how consistent that last episode is, and pretty much every sketch—
Abigoliah: Is a winner.
Abigoliah: It’s so good. And Geoff — Geoff did—
Tom: Geoff Posner directed—
Abigoliah: It, yes. That’s so—
Tom: Directed the—
Abigoliah: Full series.
Tom: Yeah. Bill Wilson, I think, was the director of the first three, and Geoff Posner came in for the fourth one.
Abigoliah: Oh, it was so good.
Tom: He was working on that when he heard Paul Jackson working on The Young Ones in the next studio.
Abigoliah: That he talked about that in our interview. So for those of us who might be joining us now, just so you know, if you go back to our first series, we did an interview with Geoff about Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV. So check that out.
But I— I mean, talk about roughening, plumpening, man. It’s just so good. I liked how the sketches didn’t end by resolving the story. They just ended with a really good laugh.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Like, I never was like, but then what happens to the guy who stepped on the glasses? It’s like, no, his feet hurt and that’s all you need to know.
Tom: Or— and it’s a little bit in between the kind of revue-style final line to curtain—
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: —and the Monty Python things just bleed on and nothing ever resolves. Yeah. They keep them really tight, really short, and then a big laugh, on to the next thing.
Abigoliah: And super snappy. Yeah. Like, not as snappy as The Fast Show, which is, like, insane, but just so watchable. At the end of both episodes we watched, when the credits started to go, I was just like, are we—?
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: It’s already— we’ve already—
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: I thought it was delightful. And it’s so cool to see a young Rowan Atkinson.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: You know, I know him from Mr Bean and some of his solo projects, but I’ve never seen this. He is — he is just brilliant. Like, and I’m constantly told that, but it’s cool to be like, okay, yeah. Yeah. Just one of a kind.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Just one. And the rest of the cast was so strong. You know, when you talked about how they got the star Rowan, I thought it was going to be The Rowan Atkinson Show.
Tom: But it really is an ensemble, isn’t it?
Abigoliah: It really is. And there’s no dead weight. Rowan isn’t propping people up. You know, everyone has their skill set and does it so well. And Pamela — just wow, those earrings.
Tom: Yes, they were.
Tom: I think that’s Jan Leeming she’s doing, though she did have big earrings, but obviously they made them extraordinarily big.
Abigoliah: Not only that, but they were moving to a point where I was like, do they have an electronic thing doing that?
Tom: I don’t think so. I think she’s just—
Tom: It’s just they’re so heavy. She moves even a tiny bit and the momentum carries into the earrings.
Abigoliah: So amazing.
Tom: And The Two Ronnies sketch is pretty savage. And legend has it — I wasn’t able to verify this — but the story I heard is that there was a guy called Peter Brewis who wrote a comedy song for The Two Ronnies, and Ronnie Barker basically said, we’re not going to pay you for it, or we’re going to pay you less than you’re asking, because you only wrote the music and it’s a comedy song. And who cares about the music?
Abigoliah: Oh, fuck you.
Tom: So he went across the road and wrote “The Two Ninnies” for Not the Nine O’Clock News as revenge. And again, as legend has it, Ronnie Corbett thought, you know, fair enough. This is what the new guard should be doing. They should be turning around and taking the piss out of the old guard. And Ronnie Barker hated it and couldn’t stand it.
Abigoliah: Ronnie Barker just sounds like an arsehole.
Tom: I mean, he was a very talented comedian, but we’ll do The Two Ronnies at some point, and/or we’ll do Porridge or Open All Hours or these classic shows. He was a brilliant comedy actor.
Abigoliah: You can be talented and also an arsehole.
Tom: It’s true.
Abigoliah: You know what I mean? But from the few stories I’ve heard, he’s very precious about his status.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Like, he knows he’s talented. He knows that he is one of the greats, or was one of the greats, and he expects to be revered at all times because of it.
I did really also, in the first episode, like the line in the ending song that, “I believe Lucille Ball is under 30.”
Tom: Yes. That’s another example of — I don’t know about this specifically — but you can see how plumpening would have worked on that song.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Everyone’s pitching lines, everyone’s pitching ideas. “I’m prepared to believe Colonel Sanders can fry. I believe that pigs and even DC-10s can fly.”
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So doing that today, that would be Boeing.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Of course, of course.
Abigoliah: Also, I just know Lucille Ball really was particular about her looks.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: To a point where she wore so much make-up that sometimes when she went out into the public, people were like — one time a kid was like, “What’s wrong with your face?”
Tom: Right. Yeah. Yeah, because she was still alive in ’82, wasn’t she?
Abigoliah: Yeah. And that might have been when her last sitcom went out, where she played a grandmother. And it only lasted, like, one series. It was a flop. But it would have been her in her late seventies trying to do Lucille — you know, Lucille—
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: —the character of Lucy, which would have been kind of cringe at that point. So, like, that — like, just really, I was like, I know where that’s coming from.
I just loved— it was so just light, you know? And as far as satire goes, sometimes satire can really be quite dark. And this felt so roughed and plumped.
Tom: Well, I love the energy of it. That feeling that you get on comedy shows — The Young Ones has a bit of this as well — like, they’re letting us do this.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: We’re getting away with it.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Isn’t this fantastic?
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And I think it does look a bit impoverished. You know, clearly you can tell they haven’t got a very big budget. They’re throwing sets together in the corner of the studio with whatever bits of furniture come to hand. But it doesn’t matter because it’s the writing and the performances.
Abigoliah: Well, the song where — the song where they’re dressed as Beefeaters—
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: In my head I was like, maybe they, like, got the Beefeater—
Tom: It’s the kind of thing The Two Ronnies would do. They would have got it out of stock.
Abigoliah: Exactly. Yeah. Okay.
Tom: The Two Ronnies would end with a song for the two of them, and it would be, you know, they’d pick different things to do. There’d be two old washerwomen—
Clip: Victoria, Victoria, you’re all the world to me. I really must see more of you.
Clip: There’s plenty there to see.
Clip: You’re the finest range of mountains from the Trossachs to Dundee. Oh, she loves her little John when we dally with Disraeli.
Clip: We are really not amused, but my John’s whimsicalities just cannot be refused. Do you want to dance the hornpipe?
Clip: Do I want to be excused? How she loves her little John.
Tom: Singing opera—
Abigoliah: There’d be two—
Tom: Beefeaters at the Tower of London, birdwatching or whatever. It’s the kind of thing they would be apt to do. But it was an arbitrary choice, and it could very well have been determined by whatever costumes they found in stock that would fit Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones.
Abigoliah: Because in my head I was like, well, they must have had them for another sketch — X that sketch — and was like, well, we have to use them because we have them.
Tom: One of the things you get from watching Doctor Who, for example, is if there’s a Doctor Who story set in the past, it looks fantastic because the BBC has all of these sets and costumes in stock and they can just pull them. They can pull something from The Forsyte Saga or whatever.
But if it’s set on an alien planet, it always looks shit because that has to be made from scratch, and they’ve got 50p and a bag of chips to do it.
Abigoliah: Of course. But even though, like you say, it was low-budget, I didn’t — I mean, we just watched That Was the Week That Was, which is, like—
Tom: Well, that makes a virtue of the low budget because it’s making it feel alive and so on.
Abigoliah: Yeah, but I don’t care. Like, I didn’t look at it and think, like, oh, this looks like it’s held together by Sellotape and cardboard.
Tom: And actually there’s a real ad for the record album at the end because, actually, that version that we watched of the last episode of the fourth series, those continuity announcements at the beginning and end were real. They weren’t made by the Not the Nine O’Clock News team. That was actual continuity announcements because that’s an off-air recording that somebody made in 1982.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And the record album — Griff Rhys Jones talks about this in an interview, because the record albums were huge sellers. And he talks about the fact that he changed agents three-quarters of the way through doing the series.
And the new agent was, like, going through all the stuff the old agent had said to him, was like, “Apparently they want you to do another one of these record albums. Did you make any money from the first one?”
And Griff Rhys Jones was like, “Yeah, I think about £30,000.”
“I’ve never seen somebody actually fall off a chair before.”
Abigoliah: Really?
Tom: Yes. Because £30,000 in, like, 1981, 1982—
Abigoliah: That’s a lot of money.
Tom: It went platinum.
Abigoliah: You could buy a house.
Tom: It literally went platinum.
Abigoliah: Wow. Griff Rhys Jones is so watchable.
Tom: I mean, I think they all are.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: As you say, they all have their different talents. Griff Rhys Jones is incredibly precise. Mel has got that lovely loose quality that he’s trying to get into other performers. Rowan Atkinson — Rowan Atkinson. And Pamela Stephenson is just dynamite.
Abigoliah: I mean, she really disappears into each character.
Tom: I hadn’t planned Annie Nightingale twice, and that wasn’t a regular thing she did. I mean, she had a repertoire of characters, but it’s just coincidence. I think those are the two Old Grey Whistle Test sketches in the run.
Abigoliah: Because from one character to the other, you just do her hair slightly different, put a sweater on her, and then she’s dowdy.
Tom: I nearly showed you the episode—
Abigoliah: And she’s not. She’s the most stunning woman ever to exist.
Tom: But the episode — there’s a very famous sketch where they take the piss out of That’s Life! And I thought, oh, I’m actually gonna have to show you, like, clips of That’s Life! in order for you to get it, which is partly why I didn’t end up showing it to you.
But her as Esther Rantzen is extraordinary.
Abigoliah: Oh, really?
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Oh, she’s— I mean, they’re all so amazing.
So when it ended, did it — did it just— It’s one of those that had to end on top, right? Was it— I can’t imagine the—
Tom: Really, John Lloyd imagined they would all stay together as a team. They would be, like — they would copy the Monty Python playbook. They would go to America. They would make movies. They would start doing live shows. They’d form a production company.
That might have sounded good to some of the cast, but not all of them.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Can you guess who opted out of that?
Abigoliah: Rowan.
Tom: Exactly right. He was the first one to say enough’s enough. And so the fourth series was the last.
Abigoliah: Well, the thing is, though, about Monty Python is, like, they all came up — you know what I mean? They went to school together, minus what’s-his-name.
Tom: Three went to Cambridge, two went to Oxford and Terry Gilliam was educated in the States.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But they’d all been knocking around at the same time.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And Python was specifically a writer-performer show, whereas Not the Nine O’Clock News — yes, a lot of them contributed to scripts, but there’s a huge army of writers, and it kind of funnels up to John Lloyd, who isn’t a performer. So the mix isn’t quite the same.
Abigoliah: It reminds me of the difference between, like, a band that forms because they are a band who want to play together and a band that’s put together.
Tom: It’s the difference between the Beatles and the Spice Girls.
Abigoliah: I was literally thinking the exact same thing.
Tom: Yeah.
Tom: And they are more the Spice Girls.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So let me tell you a little bit about what happened next.
Abigoliah: There isn’t a Posh Spice.
Tom: Yes.
So once the show ended: Pamela Stephenson. You might be wondering why you’ve never heard of her. So she supplied voices for Spitting Image.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: She was one of the only, like, two or three non-Americans ever cast on Saturday Night Live.
Abigoliah: Really?
Tom: But she only lasted 17 episodes.
Abigoliah: Was she in the bad season?
Tom: One of the bad seasons, yes. She would have been in the, like, ’83 or ’84 season.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: She memorably appears only very briefly in Superman III. She is very funny in it. And then after several more years of always impressive but never really sustained work, she gave it up.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: She’s now a psychotherapist. She writes a regular column for The Guardian to this day.
Abigoliah: That’s like John Cleese’s wife, Connie Booth.
Tom: Connie Booth, yeah.
Abigoliah: Also became a shrink.
Tom: Yes, I think she did. Yes.
Abigoliah: That’s amazing.
Tom: She’s married to legendary Scottish comedian Billy Connolly.
Abigoliah: Oh.
Tom: He makes a guest appearance on Not the Nine O’Clock News. So she now writes as Pamela Stephenson Connolly.
Abigoliah: Oh, that’s amazing. Are they still married?
Tom: Yes, they are. Yes. He’s quite old now, but he refuses to die.
Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones—
Abigoliah: Wait a minute. Why did she give it up, though?
Tom: She’s just not getting the opportunities.
Abigoliah: Why do all of these funny fucking women give it up and become shrinks?
Tom: She was — I mean, she was unparalleled. She could have done anything she wanted, and it just kind of didn’t happen for her. And she was like, okay.
Abigoliah: You know, if she had come up in a later decade—
Tom: Then we wouldn’t have had Not the Nine O’Clock News.
Abigoliah: So, yeah. Wow. I can’t—
Tom: I’m sorry. I’ve given her to you, and I have snatched her away again. There isn’t an enormous body of Pamela Stephenson work you can go and watch.
Abigoliah: You know what, though? I’m kind of glad that that’s how it’s ended with her, that she chose to walk away. Because when we paused and ended the show, you know how it shows everyone’s headshots? So Rowan’s headshot is older Rowan, and I clocked hers was really young, and I was like, oh no, she died.
Tom: No, she didn’t die.
Abigoliah: Good.
Tom: Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones. Because Pamela’s off doing her thing, Rowan’s off doing his thing. They decided to stay working together.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: They did a sketch show called Alas Smith and Jones—
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: —which is a riff on Alias Smith and Jones, which is a Western series. That started on BBC Two, graduated to BBC One, and ran for ten series over 15 years.
Abigoliah: Whoa.
Tom: They were kind of the sketch comedians of the eighties and nineties.
Abigoliah: I didn’t know you could have a sketch show that ran that long in this country. I didn’t know any show ran that long in this country, bar I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue.
Tom: And there’s a lot of Not the Nine O’Clock News DNA in there, but it’s kind of smoother, slicker. It’s not as confrontational.
And they also made two films together: Morons from Outer Space, which was an original screenplay, and Wilt, which was an adaptation of a Tom Sharpe novel.
Abigoliah: Oh, cool. Remind me who brought in the idea of roughing everything up.
Tom: And that’s Mel. Mel Smith is — yeah. He’s the theatre guy, and he was the guy who’s like, we don’t want to make this sound like people announcing funny lines. You want to make it sound like people talking to each other.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Now, this show, Alas Smith and Jones, was during the boom of the indies. We talked about this, I think, at least when we talked about The Vicar of Dibley. Independent production companies are now having a lot of power.
And while Not the Nine O’Clock News was still on the air, Smith and Jones formed their own production company, Talkback Productions, intended to make corporate videos after Not the Nine O’Clock News ended.
Abigoliah: Stealing from the Python crew.
Tom: Exactly. They hired Peter Fincham, and from then on Talkback produced an amazing list of hits. They produced The Day Today, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Big Train, QI, Green Wing — the list goes on and on and on.
Abigoliah: You know, as I was watching it, I was like, this might be my favourite sketch show we watched. And then I went, oh, but The Day Today. So it’s interesting.
Tom: Is The Day Today a sketch show?
Abigoliah: Yeah, I guess it’s more—
Tom: Well, it’s broken comedy, to use the term, but it’s a parody in a way that Not the Nine O’Clock News isn’t, despite the title.
Abigoliah: It’s interesting that those two are connected, though. Oh, I want to say too, I love the idea of putting the newscasters in random places. I’m like, yeah, we don’t need a news desk.
Tom: What do you think happened to Talkback?
Abigoliah: It’s either gone on to be super successful or there’s some sort of tax fraud and it shut down.
Tom: Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones sold it to Fremantle for £62 million.
Abigoliah: Jesus Christ.
Tom: I’ve stayed in Griff Rhys Jones’s house. It’s big. It’s enormous. So that was what having a hit sketch comedy show in the eighties did for you.
Abigoliah: Are we going to have Griff Rhys Jones on the podcast?
Tom: I mean, I can ask. I don’t think so.
Abigoliah: But you’ve stayed in his house.
Tom: Deborah was doing a charity show that he was organising, and—
Abigoliah: So you got to stay in his house.
Tom: We did, yes. Yeah.
We won’t get Mel Smith on the podcast because he died in 2013 at the age of 60.
Abigoliah: Oh. Lung cancer?
Tom: I think heart. But only a few years before, he’d been doing a show about Winston Churchill in Edinburgh, of all things. Not because he needed the money, because he’d sold Talkback for 62 million, but he just felt like it. So he was up at the Fringe doing a show for, like, 100 people.
Abigoliah: That’s amazing. Just for the love of it.
Tom: Yeah.
And Rowan Atkinson, of course, used Not the Nine O’Clock News as a springboard. Here’s what I found really interesting about Atkinson. Not the Nine O’Clock News is the first thing everybody associates with Pamela Stephenson and Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith. But with Rowan Atkinson, it’s overshadowed by Blackadder.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Which is in turn overshadowed by Mr Bean, which is one of the most successful British comedy exports ever. It’s been sold in over 200 different territories, despite the fact they only made 14 half-hour episodes.
Abigoliah: Of Mr Bean?
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: I didn’t know that.
Tom: Because they did them as specials. They never did them as series.
Abigoliah: Wow. Is he the most successful British—? I mean, of acting? Maybe not. He’s up there.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Have you stayed in his house? How big is his?
Tom: Have I stayed in Rowan Atkinson’s house? No. No, I don’t think he’s quite as convivial as Griff Rhys Jones.
Abigoliah: How many — how many toilets is in his?
Tom: I didn’t count them, but more than one.
Tom: I mean, it’s basically an estate.
Abigoliah: Oh gosh.
Tom: We stayed in, like, the coach house.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Of course.
Tom: But yeah, no, it’s — yeah. Being involved in a big sketch comedy show in the eighties really did allow you to print money. And then if you parlayed that into a production company, you were set for life.
Abigoliah: Don’t get to do that anymore. Not really. I know people who are attached to popular, popular things and their flat is not bigger than my flat. You know what I mean? Like, wow. Good for them.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Good for all of them.
Tom: They were, like, scrapping around. Griff Rhys Jones is only in it because Chris Langham’s too weird.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Mel Smith hated the pilot but was broke. Pamela Stephenson is somebody John Lloyd met at a party.
Abigoliah: Oh, and by the way, I got to go to more parties.
Tom: When she was introduced, all the rest of the boys were like, “Fucking hell. John Lloyd’s just brought his girlfriend.” But John Lloyd is very clear that, as radiantly beautiful as Pamela Stephenson was, there was never any hint that he was trying to get into her pants.
Abigoliah: Good. Good. Well, I mean, she’s such a talent. And I mean, come on, she’s fucking Billy Connolly.
Tom: Exactly. Yes. And she brings along Billy Connolly as her boyfriend, you’re like, okay, I’m gonna take a step back.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I mean, you can’t — you can’t — you can’t touch that magic.
I mean, even though Rowan wanted to step away at the end, I’d like to think that they all got on really well.
Tom: I think there was a bit of friction between Rowan Atkinson and Pamela Stephenson. John Lloyd tells a story about — because it was such a success, the BBC wanted to show repeats. But because a lot of it was topical, that didn’t work. So they tended to only repeat compilation best-ofs.
And Rowan Atkinson volunteered to cut together a best of himself, which he did, and delivered it to John Lloyd. And John Lloyd looked at it and went, “Rowan, Pamela’s not in this. Like, literally there are no sketches featuring her at all.”
And Rowan was like, “Yeah, but she’s not very funny, is she?”
So I don’t think they got on.
Abigoliah: Oh no.
Tom: But I can’t think of any occasion in which Rowan Atkinson— Rowan Atkinson never guested on Smith and Jones, for example. And I don’t think Smith and Jones ever crop up in Blackadder. So, no, I don’t think they do. But I don’t think there was too much bad blood there.
Abigoliah: But maybe it’s just like, you know, we were hired to work together on this thing, and then you don’t work together anymore, so—
Tom: But there’s an obvious chemistry between Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones.
Abigoliah: Oh, absolutely.
Tom: Continued. And one of the things that they did on their show was these kind of talking-heads things where the image is just profile of Mel on one side and profile of Griff on the other side, and a completely black void, and they’re just talking nonsense.
It’s a little bit Pete and Dud—
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: —but shot very differently. And Clive Anderson wrote a lot of those because you’ve got to be smart to write stupid people.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Clip: That is just, like, thing working, satellite thing.
Well, yeah. How does it work?
Well, I mean, I’m no expert, obviously.
No, I know.
As I understand it, the TV waves are beamed — they’re beamed down, you see, from the satellites and the stalactites and all that which are knocking about up there in space, you see?
Oh, yeah.
So it’s a bit like Radio Caroline, you mean?
Yes. Yeah.
Right. Now, how do they know, right, which light up there? They look down all the millions of houses, right? How do they know, with their beaming machine, right, which one, like, to beam down to?
How do they know?
Yeah.
Well, don’t be so naïve. They see the ruddy great dish on my roof.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, of course they can see.
Abigoliah: Have you ever met Rowan Atkinson?
Tom: No.
Abigoliah: Neither have I. He strikes me as someone who’s incredibly serious in real life.
Tom: Yeah. I think John Lloyd said something about, like, it’s as if God, as a prank, took an enormous mound of leftover comedy talent and gave it to a geography teacher.
Abigoliah: Okay. Yeah, I see that. I see that.
Tom: As he is a sort of serious-minded, rather quiet man who then can just explode in this astonishing array of physicality and silly voices and rubbery faces and so on.
Abigoliah: I wonder if — if this isn’t too much of a tangent — if Will Ferrell’s a bit like that.
Tom: Yeah, I think there’s a— And Christopher Lloyd definitely, though he’s a comedy actor rather than a kind of writer-performer.
Abigoliah: Well, I— So years, a bazillion years ago, Will Ferrell was on Broadway doing a one-man show where he played George W. Bush.
Tom: Oh, right. Yes. Which he played endlessly on SNL.
Abigoliah: Exactly. So they just basically took it and made it a Broadway show. And, of course, it sold out. And I went to see it.
And afterwards me and my friend did the thing where you stand at the stage door and got his autograph and our picture with him. And he was incredibly nice, as you would think, but he almost whispered. I don’t know if I’ve told this story on this, but just, “Hi. Thank you.”
And I always wondered to this day if he was like that to not over-excite people.
Tom: Or is that just him?
Abigoliah: Or if that’s just him. Because it was just like, yes, yes, yes, you know, and— But didn’t really try to engage people in conversation, or, you know, wasn’t— Because I used to do that a lot, stand at stage doors and stuff, and some people really would talk to you and some people just wanted to get in their car.
And he wasn’t— he wasn’t in a hurry. He gave everyone time. But just very, like I said, he just, like, “Thank you for coming.” Yeah. Just very pleasant-faced, but not, like, the crazy guy you’d think he is. I don’t know.
Tom: And now, this is a hard one to get hold of. As I said, there are DVDs, but they tend only to be compilations.
Abigoliah: I would really like to get this off of you. Like, I always ask for the shows we watch, but I kind of really want to watch this one. Like, a lot.
Tom: And you can just dip in and out. Like I said, by all means watch the first series, but most of the good stuff is in series two, three and four. If you picked a random episode from two, three and four, you probably wouldn’t go wrong.
Yeah, maybe the last couple of episodes of series one, but don’t feel you have to be a completist about it.
I’d love to be able to put the two episodes that we watched on a secret link somewhere for our patrons, but unfortunately copyright law means that’s absolutely impossible.
Abigoliah: No, you can’t do that. No. Absolutely not. John— John Lloyd will come after you. He will, because he’s definitely listening. So we can’t do it. Don’t go to the Patreon, where there won’t be a link.
Tom: But yeah, it’s not available, for example, on iPlayer.
Abigoliah: I’m surprised it’s not on iPlayer.
Tom: Bits and pieces are on YouTube if you want to have a look there.
Now, what about the Shelf of Fame, the now very crowded Shelf of Fame where everything’s an absolute legend of the comedy world, rocking out?
Abigoliah: Like, I— I just— I love everything on the Shelf of Fame.
Tom: But maybe I’m gonna have to have a shelf annex at some point, or at least a list of shows that were on the Shelf of Fame and fell off it.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So I do think this is a show which is much more influential than its reputation suggests. I think people have kind of forgotten about it. I think it gets sandwiched between Monty Python and alternative comedy and The Young Ones, and it gets obscured.
And people vaguely remember Mel and Griff. They obviously remember Blackadder and Mr Bean, and they forget where it all started.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Controversial question.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Can I remove something from the Shelf of Fame and replace it with Not the Nine O’Clock News?
Tom: It’s your show.
Abigoliah: Not move anything—
Tom: Exactly. Whatever you like. Okay, so you’re knocking off Victoria Wood, I assume.
Abigoliah: Get the fuck out of your own house. Get the fuck out.
It just might ruffle some feathers.
Tom: Yep.
Abigoliah: I’m gonna take Fawlty Towers off.
Tom: Really?
Abigoliah: Yeah. Yeah.
Tom: Explain yourself.
Abigoliah: I haven’t watched any more of it.
Tom: Oh, really?
Abigoliah: And I could.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: And I haven’t.
Tom: And that tells you something.
Abigoliah: And that tells me something. And it’s the only one that I look at on this shelf that doesn’t hurt my heart to get off. Because the other ones I’m just like, oh, but I can’t. I can’t take that off.
So we’re gonna take Fawlty Towers off at number seven and we’re going to put on Not the Nine O’Clock News, which I think is—
Tom: Controversial, but—
Abigoliah: —is where it belongs.
Tom: Yeah. And how funny that there was that supposed handover.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: It didn’t happen in the end, although they did use that bit of footage, I think, in episode two or three of series one. They had it.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Well, if you have it, you might as well use it.
Tom: And the pilot also had a coda from Andrew Sachs as Manuel, which they didn’t use. But you can see it on the pilot.
Abigoliah: Now, in order to see this, I’m guessing you bought the complete DVD with the extra not-seen—
Tom: You can’t get it on DVD.
Abigoliah: Is this one of those things that you have because you know a guy?
Tom: I know a guy.
Abigoliah: Yeah, dude.
Tom: That’s why the quality’s so bad.
Abigoliah: Just so you guys know, Tom knows a guy who can get stuff, and he has helped us.
Tom: He’s called Red.
Abigoliah: He’s called Red.
Tom: No, he’s not. That’s a Shawshank joke.
Abigoliah: Oh, of course. Oh, over my head. All Comedy Explained.
But what I love is, you know this guy, and he’s helped get ahold of some stuff for me for the Patreon, but I’ve been like, “Can you just give me his email so I can just get in touch with him?” And you’re like, “I got this.”
Tom: He’s closed his website down because people— too many people are asking him for stuff.
Abigoliah: Oh, and he’s getting in trouble.
Tom: He’s getting in trouble. But I just— I don’t want to— Yeah, I’ll talk to him.
Abigoliah: I just— I love it.
Tom: It’s— he’s—
Abigoliah: He’s your comedy dealer, man. Like, listen, I can’t— I can’t give you this number.
Tom: But I need to get some Kenny Everett, you can sort me out.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Okay, so it’s number seven on the Shelf of Fame we’re removing.
Tom: Fawlty Towers. Did not see that going that way. But like I said, it is interesting that one of them kind of handed the baton on to the other. So it is sort of fair enough.
Abigoliah: It’s so good. I really do want to watch it. If only I knew a guy.
Tom: Yeah.
All right. So coming much more up to date with our next episode, because we’re going to watch The Thick of It.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: Now, have you seen any of The Thick of It?
Abigoliah: I haven’t seen The Thick of It. This is another one that Joe keeps asking me. He’s like, “Have you guys watched The Thick of It yet? Have you watched The Thick of It? What do you think of The Thick of It?” And he’s afraid that I won’t get it on two episodes.
Tom: Okay. I think you will. But that is partly down to my expert curation.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: We’re going to watch series one, episode one.
Abigoliah: He also wants to have a word with you because he thinks some of the episodes you pull are the wrong episodes.
Tom: Listen, these are really difficult decisions.
Abigoliah: It is the hardest thing about doing the Patreon. I’m like, how do you— how do you pick one?
Tom: Exactly. Yeah. That’s why from the beginning I said we have to watch two episodes.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Especially with a sketch show.
Tom: Oh, yeah. But all I can say is every choice is a compromise.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And there’s always, if we watch this, we can’t watch that. So I’m very happy to hear you would have picked something else, but I always have reasons for the choices that I make, and they’re never done carelessly.
Abigoliah: Oh, hey, I trust you implicitly. And it is— it’s hard to pick because you’re like, I need to show the show and also have— It makes— it’s the whole thing.
Tom: So with The Thick of It, it’ll be — if you want to get ahead of us, listeners and viewers — we’ll do series one, episode one, and then we’ll do series three, episode two.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And there aren’t very many of these.
Abigoliah: All right.
Tom: So if this one does appeal, you can watch it all in between watching Not the Nine O’Clock News.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Yeah. Which— so The Thick of It‘s easier to find.
Tom: Yes. It will be. I think — I think it’s on iPlayer.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Good, good, good.
Well, guys, thank you so much for joining us here on All British Comedy Explained. If you enjoyed it, please, there’s a couple ways you could support the podcast.
One, go into your app, leave us a five-star review. Helps other people find the podcast.
If you are watching it on YouTube, you can give us a little like, little comment. I’ll always write back to you.
And we’re on social media, and check out the Patreon.
Do you want to tell them about the Patreon? Because I always fuck up the—
Tom: Yes. For three roubles a month— No. For £3 a month, you can support us. You get an ad-free feed, so your listening is not interrupted by people trying to sell you stuff.
If you can spare £5 a month, then you not only get the ad-free feed, but you get special bonus monthly episodes in which Abigoliah educates me about great American comedy shows that I am not familiar with.
Abigoliah: And for the month of October, we will be watching the sitcom The Jeffersons.
Tom: So yes. Which I have heard of and have never seen a second of.
Abigoliah: There’s so much, you know, that I— There’s so much I can’t show you because you know more about it than I do.
Tom: Well, because I’ve watched it anyway.
Abigoliah: But the stuff that you don’t know sometimes surprises me.
Tom: Well, see, this is the— this is the art. This is what men like me figure out early on in our lives, right? If you know a lot about one or two things and you know a little bit about an awful lot of things, you can pretty easily create the impression that you know everything about everything.
Abigoliah: And once we get to season four of All British Comedy Explained, people are going to be like, “Abigoliah knows everything.” And I’ll be like, “I’ve seen two episodes of 30 shows.”
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: And now I know about all British comedies.
Tom: Exactly. There you go. All right. We will see you next time.
Abigoliah: Goodbye.
Tom: Cheerio.
You have been listening to All British Comedy Explained with Abigoliah Schamaun and Tom Salinsky. It was a Spontaneity Shop production for the internet. Find us online at allbritishcomedy.com. Join our Facebook group, sign up to our mailing list or follow us on Instagram or TikTok.
Join us next time for episode four: The Thick of It.