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 writer Tom Salinsky.
Tom: Hello. Good to be here.
Abigoliah: I think I just said Salinsky and Szalinski.
Tom: Yes. Yeah. There’s a character in — it’s the Rick Moranis character in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. He’s called Wayne Szalinski, but it’s spelt differently.
Abigoliah: Oh. Is it?
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: I don’t remember his last name. That was such a classic.
Tom: Yeah. But it is an unusual name. It was probably misspelled at some point by some immigration official because it’s a Polish name, but the spelling makes it look Russian.
Abigoliah: I was going to ask, what’s it—? Because I figured it was Eastern European. But there are obvious reasons—
Tom: There are no other Salinskys in the UK. Just my family.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: There’s a few in America, including — there is another Tom Salinsky in America who purports to live somewhere called Treasure Island, Florida.
Abigoliah: That’s probably a real place.
Tom: I mean, I can only assume.
Abigoliah: When Facebook first became a thing, one of the first things I did was look up all the Schamauns and friend them. And I remember finding a Martin Schamaun in Switzerland, which is where the Schamauns are from.
Tom: Oh, is that right?
Abigoliah: I bet he’s somehow my cousin.
Tom: Did he reply?
Abigoliah: No.
Tom: Shame. All right.
Abigoliah: What are we doing today? We’re not talking about the — the — the history of our names. Tell me, tell me, what are we watching?
Tom: So this one is a little bit more obscure than some of the ones we’ve watched so far. It’s called The New Statesman. It was quite a big deal when it first came out. I think it’s become slightly forgotten, but it’s interesting in a number of different ways and it’s representative of something which was slowly happening in especially British sitcoms around this time, but also British comedy more generally.
Abigoliah: Okay. So what — what are these interesting—
Tom: Rik Mayall.
Abigoliah: Rik Mayall.
Tom: So one of the things that’s happening is that alternative comedy is being sort of subsumed into the mainstream. As often happens, the new guard takes over and then the new guard becomes the old guard. It’s kind of a little bit Animal Farm. The pigs become the men.
Abigoliah: Oh, I know. Yeah, I’ve been there. One time I was at a comedy club in Birmingham, and it was me and just a really great line-up of all guys my age. And we’re like, what a line-up. This is such a line-up. Isn’t it crazy? None of the old guard’s here.
And we just all had a look and we went, we are the old guard.
Tom: Exactly. Yeah, yeah.
Then the other thing that’s happening is, as the eighties start to become the nineties, there’s an increasing emphasis on visual sophistication.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So kind of from the sixties to the early eighties, in terms of how the shows are shot, you don’t see a lot of difference. Like, you’ve got it figured out in the sixties: cameras on castors rolling around, three-walled set, audience, 16mm film for exteriors.
Abigoliah: And if the set was a little wobbly, no one cared. We’re doing plays. Plays on television.
Tom: So The Young Ones is incredibly ambitious in terms of what they are doing in front of those cameras. And they have that pre-filming and they can do all those puppets and so on. Have you seen the episode where literally the bed crashes through the ceiling? I mean, astonishing to do that in front of a live audience, right?
But it’s shot pretty much like any other show of the time would be.
One of the things you might notice in this show is they’re starting to push the envelope a little bit more in terms of the presentation. And so also around this time, you have shows like Red Dwarf, which are really kind of pushing what you can do in the confines of an electronic studio with a studio audience there.
Abigoliah: So did The New Statesman — is it a BBC show?
Tom: It’s another ITV show.
Abigoliah: ITV. Yes. So is this — are we getting into, like, the ideas of prestige drama? Like—
Tom: Obviously I wouldn’t go that far. Because also — this is a little bit of a tangent — but in the late seventies and eighties, there was also a separate strand of prestige dramas shot usually on 16mm film.
So you have things like Brideshead Revisited, The Singing Detective, these big dramas that were shot on film.
And the kind of fulcrum is — so you look at something like I, Claudius or Pennies from Heaven in the seventies, they’re shot in the same way: combination of electronic cameras in the studio and 16mm film for locations, because that was the way everything was done.
And at a certain point they went, why are we putting up with this cheap, plastic-looking, tacky videotape when we could be shooting everything on film?
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And so the prestige dramas go film, but there’s no way of including the studio audience unless you’re Lucille Ball.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Who invented—
Tom: It. Exactly.
So The New Statesman is an interesting time. It began in 1987.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: That’s the year the Walt Disney Company bought 5,000 acres of French scrubland to build its first European theme park, Euro Disney.
Abigoliah: Which they then changed to Disneyland Paris, because to call it Euro Disney is to just be like Dollar Disney.
Tom: Yeah, exactly.
And then, while they are building, Ronald Reagan is telling Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down that wall.
Abigoliah: Oh boy.
Tom: And importantly for us, Margaret Thatcher wins a third term as UK Prime Minister.
Abigoliah: She was an unstoppable force that needed to be stopped.
Tom: Yeah. And somebody had to go— I can’t remember if this has come up so far, but Peter Cook described the Establishment Club as opposing the forces of conservatism — I can’t remember how he put it — but in much the same way that Weimar cabaret did so much to prevent the rise of Hitler.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So the other thing that’s interesting about The New Statesman is a lot of the shows we’ve watched so far have been big breaks, firsts, innovations. And then you say, it’s worth watching for none of those reasons.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: It’s worth watching because everyone involved is a fairly seasoned professional and they’re at the top of their game.
Abigoliah: Yeah. They’ve now — they’ve made all that. They’ve all broken through.
Tom: Exactly. So the writers are Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: They’ve been in the business by this stage at least half a dozen years. They’d created three different sitcoms.
Abigoliah: I don’t think we’ve ever covered—
Tom: No. We haven’t.
Abigoliah: No, no. What are their other sitcoms?
Tom: Well, one of them had been a show called Roll Over Beethoven.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And that’s interesting because it starred Nigel Planer.
Abigoliah: Really?
Tom: Yes.
So this is post-Young Ones. They are beginning to flex their muscles, these writers. They’re thinking in terms of how they can use their power to advance younger writers and build American-style writers’ rooms.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And they are not scared of alternative comedy. They like Nigel Planer. They cast him in their new sitcom. It runs for 13 episodes. It gets good ratings. And then Nigel Planer decides to go on tour rather than coming back for a second series.
Abigoliah: What an idiot. Did he make the right choice?
Tom: Well, it’s hard to say. Again, Roll Over Beethoven‘s been largely forgotten. But Marks and Gran were like, we gave these alternative comedians a chance. They had their chance. Never again. We’re going back to working with actors.
Abigoliah: Okay. But then — well, they met Rik Mayall.
Tom: Exactly.
So they weren’t interested in alternative comedy, but they were interested in satire.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So you’ll remember from a couple of episodes ago, Spitting Image is riding high at this point. But surely, they think, there could be room for a satirical sitcom?
And they found a kindred spirit in the shape of Vernon Lawrence at Yorkshire Television.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So you remember the ITV franchises?
Abigoliah: I was going to say, now we’re talking—
Tom: So Central in Spitting Image. LWT did those An Audience With… shows, including An Audience with Victoria Wood, which I assume you’ve watched by now?
Abigoliah: Yes, I have.
Tom: You have? Oh, great. Lovely. I thought I was teasing you, but I was just— Okay, great.
And then Yorkshire. So Yorkshire had had Emmerdale Farm as their big soap. That was their big moneymaker.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And they were trying to do more comedy, and they actually were at a comedy symposium, a big comedy television conference.
Abigoliah: That just sounds so great. I’ve been to stuff like that, and it’s just—
Tom: And Vernon Lawrence met Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, not for the first time, but bumped into them at this symposium, and they started talking about wanting to do a satirical sitcom.
And Vernon Lawrence said, “Oh, you know who else is here?”
“Who?”
“I definitely think you should meet Rik Mayall.”
Abigoliah: Da da da da.
Tom: And Marks and Gran said, “No, really.” Had no interest.
Abigoliah: No alternative comedians.
Tom: I think they were a bit put off by the vibe. I think they felt that, of the kind of main cast of The Young Ones, Nigel Planer was the one who looked most like an actor, although actually it’s Christopher Ryan who had the most extensive acting CV.
And this was also around the time The Young Ones has finished, but around this time they are doing their charity single “Living Doll” for Comic Relief.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Where they got actual Cliff Richard to shoot a video with them and appear on stage in a live sketch and so on.
And I think Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, looking at this kind of with a bit of distaste, I don’t think this kind of suits their comedy sensibilities at all.
Abigoliah: At this point, did they still, like, respect alternative comedy? Or did they just fully dismiss it after Nigel was like, “I gotta go talk to the people, man”?
Tom: I don’t want to speak for them. The impression I get is that they’re a little bit threatened, or they feel like this is not the kind of comedy they grew up on.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: They don’t really want to be part of it. And I think Nigel Planer walking out of Roll Over Beethoven was a real kick in the nuts. I think they didn’t take kindly to that at all.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And so Rik Mayall is now guilty by association.
But they find themselves backstage on the same episode of Wogan. So we come up against this a couple of times. This was this big chat show, three nights a week, hosted by affable Irish DJ Terry Wogan, who was all over the BBC in the eighties and nineties.
And so Rik is on there to promote the “Living Doll” single. Marks and Gran are on the same episode.
Abigoliah: Wait a minute. Eighties DJ.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Radio has been cancelled.
Tom: No, actually.
Abigoliah: Well, that’s the first.
Tom: Phill Jupitus described him as the only Tory he’s ever really liked.
Abigoliah: Really?
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: I think he’s a Tory?
Tom: He did a Buzzcocks. He’s like a sort of old-school, “I want to pay less tax.”
Abigoliah: Is he still on?
Tom: Oh no. He’s — he’s been dead a long time.
Abigoliah: He’s dead. Okay.
Tom: Wogan‘s the big chat show on BBC. The whole BBC early-evening schedule was torn up in 1985, and it was Wogan Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7pm, and EastEnders for the first time on Tuesday and Thursday.
Abigoliah: Oh.
Tom: And it was like this — Michael Grade was stamping his authority on the early-evening schedule. And then that completely destroyed ITV’s ratings for years.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Because it was such a stranglehold on the early evening, and then people don’t change the channel. They watch whatever’s next.
Abigoliah: Yeah, of course.
Tom: Anyway, they get chatting backstage to Rik Mayall and they begin to discover they have a little bit more in common than they thought.
Abigoliah: They’re both northern boys.
Tom: Not particularly. It’s just that their comedy sensibilities turn out to be a little bit more aligned.
Abigoliah: Rik from the North.
Tom: He went to university in Manchester.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Thank you. Okay. I just want to stop the comments.
Tom: Marks and Gran, I think, are like East London Jews.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Anyway, what’s in it for Rik Mayall?
So he’s kind of the standout star of The Young Ones. He’s the one everyone’s talking about. And he’s still on television. He’s one half of the Dangerous Brothers on Saturday Live with Ade Edmondson. He completely nicked the end of the first episode of Blackadder II off Rowan Atkinson.
And he was working on Filthy Rich & Catflap.
Abigoliah: Like, with permission?
Tom: Well, we’ll get to that when one day we do Blackadder. But the story is — so he makes a brief appearance, a five-minute appearance, at the end of the first episode of the second series of Blackadder. And the legend is that during rehearsals he basically gave nothing away. He did a very tamped-down, sober version and then only unleashed the full performance in front of the studio audience.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And then, according to Tony Robinson, when the recording finished and they were sitting in the green room, he said, “Did I win?”
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: Tony Robinson puts it as not quite in the spirit of the ensemble.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Yeah.
Tom: So he’s kind of the bright, shining star in this sea of shining stars. And he’s now working on a show called Filthy Rich & Catflap.
Abigoliah: Yes. Which we have talked about because that is another — the guy who wrote Reggie P— No, shoot. I know it’ll come to me. It’s not the same guy from On the Buses.
Tom: On the Buses?
Abigoliah: Isn’t there a sitcom called On the Bus?
Tom: There is, yes, but we never discussed the writer.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: No, it’s written by Ben Elton.
Abigoliah: It was written by Ben.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Damn it. That’s embarrassing.
Tom: It’s kind of embarrassing for me.
Abigoliah: I can’t hold it all the time in my head, but it is sinking in.
Tom: It was essentially the follow-up to The Young Ones. So it was reuniting Rik, Ade and Nigel, and they thought, well, what are we going to write about now? We’re not grown-up students anymore. We’re celebrities. So let’s do a show about being a celebrity.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So Rik Mayall is Richie Rich, slightly over-the-hill light-entertainment celebrity. Ade is his minder, and Nigel is his agent.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: It ran for six episodes and nobody likes it apart from, apparently, Rik Mayall. According to Ben Elton, he’d get him round and say, “Let’s put an episode of Filthy on.”
Abigoliah: Really?
Tom: So he’s this huge celebrity.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: But he hasn’t starred in his own sitcom yet.
Abigoliah: Oh, he’s only an ensemble.
Tom: Yes. He’s been part of a group. Or he’s, as I said, like nicked someone else’s sitcom off them. But he hasn’t starred in his own star vehicle.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So that’s what’s appealing to Rik Mayall.
So Marks and Gran, slightly despite themselves, are getting excited about what it would mean to write for somebody with Rik’s obvious talent. Rik’s ready for a star vehicle, and they both share this anti-Thatcher stance and the same slightly dark sense of humour.
Abigoliah: Okay. This is perfect.
Tom: So the idea starts to germinate. Rik Mayall loves playing grotesques, and the idea they come up with is that he should play the vilest Tory MP that Marks and Gran can conceive of.
Abigoliah: Oh, before Peter Capaldi got in there and went—
Tom: He’s on—
Abigoliah: “Hold my beer.”
Tom: He’s not an MP.
Abigoliah: Oh, that’s right. He’s a fixer.
Tom: Yeah.
They wanted him to play a total bastard. In fact, they called the character Alan B’Stard.
Abigoliah: How clever.
Tom: And the show is going to be called The B’Stard File.
Abigoliah: Horrible title.
Tom: Yorkshire Television agreed. And so it became The New Member.
Abigoliah: Even worse.
Tom: Yorkshire Television said no again. It became The New Statesman.
Abigoliah: Better. Finally. The New Member — if you put that into your search engine right now, Mayall won’t come up.
Tom: No. Something will come up.
Abigoliah: Up.
Tom: So they sort of feel like this might be a bit special, but they’re working quite hard to pin down the tone. They don’t want to box themselves in by writing a traditional synopsis. They just want to be kind of left alone to develop this.
So they get the funding from Yorkshire Television by writing Alan B’Stard’s entry in Who’s Who.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: You know Who’s Who?
Abigoliah: I mean, I’m guessing this is like a Page Six sort of, like, debutantes and—
Tom: Exactly.
Abigoliah: Yeah. But gossip columns.
Tom: It’s a book rather than a magazine, but it’s — yeah. It’s a list of the great and the good and lists, you know, their place of birth, their hobbies and so on.
Alan B’Stard’s entry in Who’s Who, according to Marks and Gran, listed his hobbies as making money, dining at expensive restaurants at other people’s expense, and grinding the faces of the poor.
Abigoliah: Sounds like a tech billionaire.
Tom: Yeah.
They also included a letter from Who’s Who back to Alan B’Stard, pointing out that his entry is of inordinate length for a new boy.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And then Alan’s reply, which simply read, “Bollocks.”
And that got them a seven-episode commission almost immediately.
Abigoliah: That’s so cool.
Tom: So the other key player here is the director, Geoffrey Sax.
Abigoliah: Tell me about Geoffrey Sax.
Tom: So he had worked on Spitting Image.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: So that’s part of where this interest in more visual ambition comes from, because Spitting Image was such a complicated show to shoot. There’s an energy to the camerawork which is not, like, starkly new, but it is part of an evolution that’s carrying on about this time.
But Sax also knew that he had a formidable comic force in Rik Mayall. But he didn’t want to overbalance the whole piece. So finding the tone was really important.
You don’t want to neuter what Rik Mayall can do, but at the same time he has to be believable in the rest of the cast.
Abigoliah: You need to, like, rein him in so it doesn’t become like a world—
Tom: Yeah. If he plays it as Rik from The Young Ones or as Richard Dangerous, then it starts to become totally unbelievable when you cut to the House of Commons, of course.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And Rik actually was quite taken with the challenge of playing it straight. Now, he always describes it as playing it straight. When you watch it, you’ll make your own judgment as to what playing it straight actually means.
Like, if you’re imagining, for example, the difference between Jim Carrey as Ace Ventura and Jim Carrey in The Truman Show—
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: —you might be thinking of too wide a gulf.
Abigoliah: Oh, really? Yeah. Because I was picturing Jim Carrey playing it straight as still Jim Carrey.
Tom: Well, okay. We’ll discuss that when you’ve had a chance to see it.
But he cultivated, as you noticed, a much more kind of sleek and sexy image for himself.
So now you want an ensemble cast. He has a simpering Westminster office mate named Piers Fletcher-Dervish.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And for this they cast Michael Troughton.
Abigoliah: Do I know Michael?
Tom: He’s the son of Patrick Troughton, who was the second Doctor Who in the 1960s, of course.
Abigoliah: And when we one day do our offshoot, All Doctor Who Explained—
Tom: Oh God. That would take a very long time.
Abigoliah: Yeah, but you’d love it.
Tom: I’m not saying no. I’m just saying it would take a long time, and that’s my only comment.
And then possibly the only person on Earth with less of a moral compass than Alan B’Stard was his wife, Sarah.
Abigoliah: Oh, I love a conniving woman. Who was Sarah played—
Tom: By Marsha Fitzalan, who kind of had Sarah B’Stard’s own CV because she was essentially nobility herself.
Abigoliah: Oh, really?
Tom: Yeah, yeah. She had a very fancy family.
And then loads of famous actors crop up in this show, both from the golden age of sitcom and new faces from alternative comedy. So I don’t know how many of these we’ll see, maybe only a couple. But if you watch the whole series, you’ll see John Nettleton, Richard Vernon, Stephen Fry, John Sessions, Celia Imrie, Andy Serkis. Some of them before they were famous.
Abigoliah: Andy — Andy Serkis?
Tom: Andy Serkis of Gollum. Yes. Before he was famous. So you see some of them on the way up and some of them were already established names.
Abigoliah: Now, I don’t think you’ve ever used the term “golden age of sitcom”. What’s the golden age of sitcoms in Britain?
Tom: So roughly this would be, like, late sixties to early eighties. So kind of from — yeah — things like Bless This House in the early seventies, and then through Fawlty Towers, Yes Minister, kind of up to alternative comedy in the early eighties.
Abigoliah: Okay. Yeah. I’d kind of put America’s golden age in that—
Tom: You wouldn’t — it wouldn’t be like the fifties and sixties? It wouldn’t be, well, Dick Van Dyke and Lucy?
Abigoliah: Well, Lucy is ’55, but Dick Van Dyke was, like, late fifties into sixties, which then gave birth to—
Tom: I think things like The Munsters and Bewitched.
Abigoliah: And, yeah. I mean, but then you have stuff that really broke boundaries and spoke, I think, to wider audiences when you get into the seventies and eighties. And that’s when you get The Jeffersons, Bob Newhart, Cheers.
You know, like, if you consider the shift of, say, like, the traditional wife and dad, you know, the Leave It to Beaver, which is essentially what The Munsters is, which is essentially what the other one is, The Addams Family is.
It’s that when you get out of that, it’s kind of when really interesting stuff starts to happen. But then again, maybe I’m just thinking about it through my — because I was born in ’85.
Tom: So — and then in the seventies you have things like Taxi and Happy Days.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah.
Tom: Which maybe there was — maybe the golden age of American sitcom is from the fifties to the 2000s.
Abigoliah: Yeah, maybe. And then we have all the spin-offs from— Yeah. Okay. We digress.
Tom: Yes.
So the other thing they need for inspiration is research. So Maurice Gran wrote to his local MP and said, any chance of having a quick tour of the House of Commons? And his local MP was very happy to oblige.
Abigoliah: Oh, that’s sweet. And who was it?
Tom: Future Defence Secretary Michael Portillo.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow. What a — what a guy to follow around.
Tom: Who, as soon as he became a noted celebrity MP, as soon as he became a frontbencher, everyone would immediately say, well, you’re B’Stard, aren’t you? It’s based on you. Because he’s a Tory MP with sort of slicked-back hair.
Abigoliah: Oh no.
Tom: So now they have to film it, and the studio audience goes nuts. Marks and Gran say they can’t remember ever experiencing an atmosphere quite like it.
If there were some, like, interesting news events on the week of recording, or sometimes even the day of recording, occasionally one of the writers would slip Rik Mayall some extra gags as the audience was being warmed up, which he thought was thrilling, of course.
Abigoliah: Yeah, because it gives you something to play with that’s new.
Tom: And it means that he has something which the other actors aren’t expecting.
Abigoliah: Oh, he loved that.
Tom: Yeah. So there’s a real kind of sense of danger to this show, which is quite hard to capture.
Abigoliah: And how many writers were working on—?
Tom: Just two. It’s just Marks and Gran.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Which is very typical.
Abigoliah: They had the dream of the writers’ room.
Tom: Yes. So they’d seen what was happening in America and they thought, why aren’t we doing this here?
There are reasons why it doesn’t work as well here. Chiefly money.
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: Exactly. So America is creating shows to go on network television for an audience of — a potential audience — like 150, 200 million people. And that means that you can afford to have a permanent writers’ room with all these writers on staff, and you can get them to do 25 episodes a year.
But when you’ve got an audience of 50 million people, even if you are raising money from advertising, you just don’t have the same funds available.
So having people on staff for a year doesn’t seem quite so plausible.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: But they did — we’ll come to this — but at this stage they’re still just writing their own stuff. But they have this idea that, oh, in the future maybe we could do this.
And I like the idea of people who have a big hit and look around and say, what can we do with this power to help other people rather than how can we feather our own nest?
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So first series goes out, the reaction is very good, and it comes back for a second series in early 1989.
But this is a hard show to write. It’s a hard show to make. Rik Mayall is in demand elsewhere, and so they finish it with a late Christmas special called Who Shot Alan B’Stard?, which aired in January 1990. And that kills the character off and brought the series to a close.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow.
Tom: Except Yorkshire Television wasn’t having any of that.
Abigoliah: Oh, really?
Tom: Because it won a BAFTA and an International Emmy. And Vernon Lawrence was like, come on, guys, surely you can find a way of bringing it back to life.
Abigoliah: We’re doing this whether you want to or not.
Tom: So a new director, Graeme Harper, took over for the third series in 1991, and he pushes the visual flourishes even further, with lots of extreme camera angles, clever lighting, tight editing, all without sacrificing the studio audience.
But what else has happened? By the time we get to 1991—
Abigoliah: The Office.
Tom: No, no.
Abigoliah: No.
Tom: That’s ten years away.
Abigoliah: Tony Blair.
Tom: Close. We have lost Thatcher.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So John Major is now Prime Minister.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And so there is a fourth series as well. And in the third and fourth series, you can sort of feel the compass point tilting. So instead of being really about Thatcher now, a lot of the satirical barbs are about Europe, something called the Maastricht Treaty, which was all over the newspapers in the early nineties. Tory sleaze becoming a big thing, rather than the kind of rampant, priapic capitalism of the mid-eighties.
Abigoliah: Was it harder for audiences to get behind because it—
Tom: I think so.
Abigoliah: Because less important. You know what I mean? Like, also firing at sleaze is very different than firing at the power.
Tom: And the Tories were looking like a spent force. That was, I think, the key thing.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Thatcher looked unstoppable until suddenly she was stopped. And John Major doesn’t have anything like the same kind of testosterone-fuelled—
Abigoliah: It’s interesting how pretty much all of these satires we’ve covered have basically fizzled because there’s been a regime change.
Tom: Yeah. It’s a big thing.
In some later episodes, Alan B’Stard even considers defecting to Labour.
Abigoliah: Oh, really?
Tom: Because what he wants is power. He doesn’t really care. He doesn’t have any principles. He wants to be wherever the power is.
So there’s a final Christmas special in December 1994 in which Alan B’Stard attempts to create his own political party because neither Labour nor the Conservatives can give him what he wants.
Abigoliah: Is he, like, Nigel Farage before Nigel Farage?
Tom: That’s an interesting observation, actually.
Abigoliah: Did Nigel Farage look at this and go, I can do that?
Tom: Yes. “You’re my role model.”
Abigoliah: And now look at him standing in election against a bin at the time of recording.
Tom: Yes. It hasn’t happened yet.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: He’ll be returned. But the question then is, will he then be removed by the committee he thought would abandon interest in him if he triggered a by-election?
Abigoliah: I think he — is it just me, or has he made it worse for himself?
Tom: Oh, so much worse. So much worse.
Abigoliah: They won’t — they won’t investigate me if I rerun, and they’re like, oh, now we’re investigating you. We’re putting more money behind this.
Tom: This is what’s called an unforced error.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Oh, I love to watch it. See, this is why I don’t watch British comedy shows. I just watch Prime Minister’s Questions and the six o’clock news, and I’m fucking good, man.
Tom: So that’s why you weren’t watching Bottom?
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: Which was the show that Rik was doing now with Edmondson. So that’s another reason why The New Statesman finished.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Rik now has his own show that he’s writing with Ade.
Abigoliah: So Bottom — were they on at the same time, or did they overlap?
Tom: Yeah, there’s an overlap.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But Bottom was a little bit more consistent. But yeah, there’s an overlap. And it sort of just — it’s hard to keep raising the stakes on what has started as such an over-the-top show.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So we’ll tie up the loose ends after we’ve, as traditional, watched a couple of episodes. And the two episodes that we’re going to be watching are from series one, episode six, which is called “Three Line Whipping”.
Abigoliah: Ooh.
Tom: And then from series three we’ll watch episode five, “Natural Selection”.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Based on what I’ve said, what are you expecting?
Abigoliah: Can I ask one question?
Tom: Of course.
Abigoliah: What is Rik Mayall’s, like, Mr Bean? You know what I mean? Like, which is his bigger character? Is it The New Statesman? Is it Bottom? Is it The Young Ones?
Tom: It’s not The New Statesman. It’s probably Bottom.
Only because, in the last ten or so years, The Young Ones‘ star has dimmed a little bit. It’s just gone a little bit into the past. And when you watch it now, it’s so obviously a product of an earlier way of making television.
Whereas Bottom, I think, still stands up. I think if I was going to introduce Rik Mayall to, like, a 12-year-old who’d never seen him before, I’d probably choose Bottom, even though The Young Ones is more innovative, more ambitious, more pure Rik.
Bottom is the one that’s sustained better for me. It’s — it’s The Young Ones—
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: —but I think for the world at large it’s probably Bottom. And then The New Statesman is quite a good third, but it’s definitely third.
Abigoliah: And I just want to holler out to listeners: please leave comments on the YouTube or on whatever. I want to know, which is your favourite Rik Mayall vehicle? Please let me know.
So what am I expecting? I am expecting wonderful lighting. I’m expecting a lot more on-location shots. Maybe that’s wrong.
Tom: Yeah. Not a huge amount.
Abigoliah: Studio audience. I’m picturing seeing, like, basically what if Rik from The Young Ones grew up? Like, this is who he would become, because he was a socialist, but he was only—
Tom: A socialist anarchist poet.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Because his parents were probably Tories. Like, you know, that sort of young political idealism that doesn’t mean anything but means everything to you.
Tom: Then he discovers he’s broke.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And then — and then he gets into politics.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: So I am picturing the character to be like, what if Rik from The Young Ones grew up?
Tom: Okay.
Abigoliah: Yeah. All right. Let’s — let’s go.
Tom: Let’s give it a watch.
Tom: All right, so that was our first satirical sitcom.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Which is obviously trying to do several different things at once. Trying to establish characters, deliver a strong plot and get some of these satirical jabs in, some of which are slightly lost in the mists of time.
We mentioned this briefly as we were watching. You’ve never heard of Cynthia Payne? So she was a famous madam who ran brothels in London, I think had done since the sixties. And she was briefly a cause célèbre around this time.
Abigoliah: Did they raid her brothel?
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I feel like every big city has one of those stories. I remember when that happened in New York when I was — I was working at the New York Press at the time, and a madam got raided and clients’ names got out. Of course, they’re all very influential.
And I was an intern and our editor at the time was like, if anyone asks you about it, don’t comment, because it’s one of those free papers where the ads in the back—
Tom: Oh, of course. Yes.
Abigoliah: So our advertisers were her girls. And it was just like, we’re not commenting.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: That is — that is how we make our money.
I basically have two conflicting feelings about this show.
One, of all the satire we’ve watched so far — which, by the way, I am loving this series.
Tom: Oh, great.
Abigoliah: So far, this is the fifth thing we’ve seen so far. I haven’t disliked anything.
Tom: Amazing.
Abigoliah: And it is far more comfortable to watch. It doesn’t feel as, like, biting or gripping as, say, a Spitting Image or, I mean, obviously The Thick of It. It almost feels like you could watch it as a comfort show, even though it’s satire. It doesn’t prick as hard, I think, in some ways.
And that being said, Alan B’Stard is a psychopath.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Like, okay. So he kidnaps — in the first episode we watch, he kidnaps a taxi driver—
Tom: Who he thinks he’s killed.
Abigoliah: Who he thinks he’s killed, and tries to destroy the evidence by setting him on fire or sinking the cab in a lake.
And then in the second series, him and his wife conspire to ruin a man’s fortune so much so that he kills himself, and he completely, like, maims and destroys his underling.
Like, if you take away the laugh track, we are watching House of Cards. Like, it’s so dark.
Tom: What I love about this show—
Abigoliah: And yet—
Tom: Wholesome.
What I love about this show is it would have been so easy to take a character like Alan B’Stard and place him in a world where people were noble and morally upstanding and pure, and have everybody fainting in horror and clutching their pearls at his antics.
But what’s so delicious about this is he is the biggest bastard in a sea of bastards. Like, nobody is morally pure. Nobody is above reproach.
And as soon as you meet somebody who looks as if they might be doing things for the right reason, they turn out to be just as big a twat as he is.
When you originally meet Ken Price, you think, oh, he’s, you know, a man of integrity, even if he is about to become a millionaire. No, he’ll shag another man’s wife at the drop of a hat.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. It’s — and I love that the wife is, like, in on it. And I love that they didn’t make her, like, just a good little politician’s wife who stays at home, a little bit more like Paul Eddington’s wife, whom we don’t really see that much of.
Like, I love that she’s a full character and that she’s — she’s diabolical as well. I think that’s far more interesting.
Tom: There’s a later episode where they have to make a kind of video. I can’t remember if it’s a party political broadcast or something else. And they have to, like, be the B’Stards at home and have to summon up this wholesomeness which they’re, of course, entirely incapable of doing.
Abigoliah: Yeah. That sounds really—
What? So Piers, that’s not his real voice?
Tom: No, no.
Abigoliah: He’s putting that—
Tom: On. He is.
Abigoliah: Yes. That isn’t— He picked the right voice for that character. It’s so annoying.
Tom: If you see Karen from Will & Grace not doing the voice—
Abigoliah: I know. I don’t like—
Tom: It. Or Bernadette from The Big Bang Theory.
Abigoliah: Megan Mullally speaking like Megan Mullally, I’m like, get the fuck out. Who are you?
Tom: There’s a whole dynasty of acting Troughtons. So Patrick had two acting sons, and then one of them has a son, Sam, who’s also acting at the moment.
Abigoliah: Wait, Patrick is—
Tom: Is the second Doctor Who.
Abigoliah: Oh, okay. And — okay, so—
Tom: Michael and David are his two sons, and David is in an amazing series which doesn’t quite fit into our remit, but it’s so good. But it’s definitely a comedy drama called A Very Peculiar Practice, which is also what Peter Davison did immediately after leaving Doctor Who.
Abigoliah: See, I love an acting family, like, you know, like the Skarsgårds.
Tom: Yeah. Good example.
Abigoliah: And I know people talk a lot about nepotism in Hollywood and how it’s such a problem. And at the same time, I’m like, but wouldn’t we all if we could? You know what I mean?
Like, that’s — it’s like, I’ll say it here. It’s like flying private. I’m like, horrible. But if I had the option, yes.
I — yeah. I mean, I just thought it was great. He’s so dark and everyone is so dark around him.
Tom: But then it has this kind of cartoon quality. So people do fall out of trains or have their eyes poked out, and it’s like Looney Tunes.
Abigoliah: Yeah. But at the same time, especially for the Piers character, like, when he’s all in the hospital bed and all that, and part of me is like, I know I’m watching, like, the Wile E. Coyote, right? I know it.
But at the same time I’m like, oh, poor guy. Like, I feel real sorry for him.
And then at the end he has to watch his boss have sex with his wife for a matter of seconds while hanging upside down.
He’s a proper psychopath.
But they do insert the comedy so well because it could easily turn into just, like, a dark comedy, and they really do balance it.
And I said when we were watching it, just, like, the insults are so creative. And we had that with The Thick of It too.
It’s just, like, when I say we don’t write like that anymore, I really do mean, like, now — and I will include myself in this — it’s like you just go to, like, the basest words. Like, “That fucking arsehole,” or something like that.
And to watch someone just paint a beautiful, insulting, disgusting picture is just so much richer.
Tom: Yeah, yeah.
Abigoliah: It was great. I really loved it. And he is a handsome devil in it. And the fact that he’s such a horrible person just makes him sexier.
Tom: Yeah. When he was so well known for playing these grotesques — have you ever seen, you’ve probably never seen, the Dangerous Brothers, which is this recurring sketch he did with Ade, where he’s got the most absurd hairdo and just makes himself look revolting, obviously with all those zits all over his face, courtesy of the BBC make-up department.
When he’s Rik in The Young Ones—
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: —and then to see this so sexy, slicked-back-hair, debonair version, it’s really something.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: It’s another kind of grotesque.
Abigoliah: Yeah, but still an awful person. Like, he just — he just didn’t have the make-up department do it.
Tom: And you see what I mean? He’s playing it straight because he isn’t doing all these great big ridiculous gurning and physicality. But it’s still a big performance.
Abigoliah: Yeah. It’s still Rik Mayall.
Tom: Yeah. Everyone else does have to size up to match it, but I think they do very successfully. They let him be the star, but he doesn’t seem like he’s wandered in from another show.
Abigoliah: I wonder if he’s hard to act next to.
Tom: I think he’s probably—
Abigoliah: Like, I think he’s a giving actor. Obviously he’s very competitive—
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: —from the Blackadder story. But I wonder if—
Tom: I think he was very well liked. I never heard any stories of people not wanting to be on set with him.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if he’s, like, really gracious and giving, or if he’s more of a, like, do it this way, don’t do it that way kind of guy, you know?
Tom: I’ve never heard that. I’ve never heard of him trying to take over. I think he had a lot of faith in his own talent, and so he was just happy to be like, I’m going to do this.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: What you’re doing seems great.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Let’s have fun.
Abigoliah: Shine along or — or — or you will get lost. But it’s okay because I’m here.
Tom: Yeah.
I think he did feel a tiny bit of vulnerability. I think that’s why that first director, Geoffrey Sax, was so important in helping him calibrate the performance.
I think he did feel, oh, this is a little bit different from the thing that’s made me famous, so I kind of need to get it right.
Abigoliah: But just different enough. You know, I remember Tom, my partner, did a lot of interviews for this magazine — I think it’s called Cineworld — where he interviewed directors and casting people and, you know, people behind the scenes.
And someone said, like, a breakout show is familiar with a twist.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: And that’s kind of what Alan B’Stard is. It’s like, okay, we’re getting Rik, but with a twist. You know, it’s not a surprise that he rose as big as he did. And it’s such a tragedy that we didn’t have him for longer.
Tom: Yes. Well, I’m coming to that.
You heard versions of this story before, but I’ll give it to you in this context. Before I do: with sketch shows, it’s not really possible to do this, but with sitcoms it is. Now, I haven’t been able to rewatch all of these episodes. I’ve picked a few before making my choice.
Abigoliah: Is this on iPlayer?
Tom: This is on ITVX currently.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But do you have any predictions about what other episodes might contain?
Abigoliah: Yeah. I was thinking — usually when we do predictions, I usually guess what the episode’s about, but we’ve covered so much sketch I kind of forgot to do that.
So I think in the later years there’s going to be one where he runs for PM.
Tom: I mean, it—
Abigoliah: Tries—
Tom: To—
Abigoliah: Take the—
Tom: Seat. He essentially — he tries to become kind of dictator of Britain at the end of the series, yes.
Abigoliah: Okay. Yeah. So I was right about that.
And I bet there’s somewhere in there an episode that has since come true. You know what I mean?
Tom: Because that’s definitely true of The Thick of It, but I don’t remember—
Abigoliah: They had a pig’s head just randomly on that—
Okay. You go, what episode was it? Series one, episode six. They’re in — just to paint the picture because you all didn’t watch it — he’s being interviewed on TV, and no one explains why, but there is just a pig’s head, like a fake one, on the couch.
Tom: The TV studio. That was the TV-am presenter, and you could see her corpsing at one point.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah, because it’s said in the credits “as herself”.
Tom: But I think that is just part of the set dressing.
Abigoliah: They knew something was up. They knew. Baby Cameron — that’s when that was, in the eighties. That’s when he was putting his penis in dead, dead pigs’ heads, which everyone was so surprised about when it happened. And my only thing was like, how else do you become Prime Minister?
Tom: That’s true.
Abigoliah: But yeah, I think there’s something like, oh, getting caught kissing your underling at work, like Hancock, or a party that wasn’t supposed to happen, you know, Boris Johnson. Something like that.
I bet there is an episode that it’s like, oh fuck, that happened years later. He crashes the economy with his new big plan.
Tom: But he does — he does consistently get away with it, which is also what makes it really refreshing.
There’s no need from the writers to put this in a more moral framework and show him getting his comeuppance. He never does.
Abigoliah: Which — did they ever try to do an American version? Because that’s how they’d break it.
Tom: Yeah. No, they never did.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: There is a kind of follow-up, but we’ll come to that.
So, yeah, Marks and Gran—
Abigoliah: Sorry. I just want to say real quick, the camera angles. You’re right. It makes it so much more of a delicious watch.
Tom: Camera movements, camera angles, high angles, low angles, a shot which discovers somebody, like Alan moving through the party. It’s not like a sea change, but it’s noticeable.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And it’s something which will develop from there.
And I think by the time — we talked about this when we watched The Vicar of Dibley — by the time we get to The Vicar of Dibley, it’s almost like it’s so sophisticated that you start to not believe the studio — I start to not believe the studio audience is really there anymore, because it looks like a film.
And I think ultimately that is a negative effect. I sort of think you can — you can have one or the other.
You see little bits of it in Ab Fab as well. Like, you remember the shot from inside the isolation tank.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Yeah. So that’s Bob Spiers pushing the envelope a little bit in the same way as Geoffrey Sax and Graeme Harper are doing here.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Which we argued about because I said they put the cameraman in an isolation tank, and you’re like, no, they just filmed the—
Tom: A piece of an isolation tank.
Abigoliah: A piece of an isolation tank. But again, I have a partner who is a filmmaker, and he would have gotten stuck in an isolation tank.
Tom: Who knows?
So this was a big shot in the arm for Marks and Gran. They were already on the up, but this was a big hit for them. And they started their own production company, Alomo.
And then they created a show called Birds of a Feather.
Abigoliah: Birds of a Feather.
Tom: So actually, this is their big hit, not The New Statesman.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Birds of a Feather. And once that was a hit, they then began creating the stable of writers.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But they always said, New Statesman is ours. No one — no one gets to write New Statesman but us. Birds of a Feather, anyone can have a go at that.
Ran for 102 episodes over ten years.
Abigoliah: That is so many episodes.
Tom: I know. By UK standards, that’s—
Abigoliah: An American number of episodes. That’s — that’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue number of episodes.
Tom: Not quite. That’s over 600.
Abigoliah: But yeah, that’s true.
Tom: Yeah. But yes, it’s a very, very big hit.
And they also produced but didn’t write the very strange Nightingales, which keeps coming up, and we will — we will watch it one day.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But they sort of sponsored this new young writer called Paul Makin to do a show that would never have got off the ground if it hadn’t been for Marks and Gran saying, we trust this guy. This is good.
Abigoliah: Really? Oh, I like these guys.
Tom: And then they wrote a time-travel comedy called Goodnight Sweetheart, starring Nicholas Lyndhurst.
Abigoliah: Ooh. Is it good?
Tom: It’s all right. It’s not my favourite, but it has — it has its fans. And the episodes I’ve seen have been very charming.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And Nicholas Lyndhurst is a very reliable comedy actor.
Abigoliah: Is it a bit Quantum Leap-ish?
Tom: It’s a bit of a funny one because it is a bit of a kind of male wish-fulfilment fantasy, because it’s about a man who has separate relationships, one in the present day and one back in the 1940s.
Abigoliah: Have I heard about this? That sounds slightly dark.
Tom: It’s surprisingly sweet.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Yeah.
They’re both still alive, Marks and Gran.
Abigoliah: Good for them.
Tom: Maybe we can get them to do an interview. Who knows?
Abigoliah: I would love that. Gentlemen, if you’re listening, I know you are checking your Google Alerts for The New Statesman. We’re big fans. Come on.
Tom: Rik Mayall was not so lucky.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So we discussed this before, but he had concussion from a quad-bike accident in 1998. By 2002 he had recovered enough to start another Marks and Gran sitcom called Believe Nothing, which was not a success.
Basically, they tried to do The New Statesman again, but they cast Rik Mayall, instead of being a politician, as a university professor called Adonis Cnut.
Abigoliah: Okay. But the same sort of vibe.
Tom: Same sort of vibe.
Abigoliah: I mean, maybe it’s my 2026 brain, but it doesn’t work as a teacher.
Tom: No.
Abigoliah: You know what I mean? Too many people to take advantage of who wouldn’t take advantage of you. Whereas in politics, they’re all monsters.
Tom: They had more luck with The Blair B’Stard Project, which was a stage version of The New Statesman, which was in the West End in 2006 and touring the UK in 2007.
But Rik was finding it hard to learn his lines. His understudy went on several times during the tour.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Imagine turning up to see The New Statesman on tour and you get the understudy.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: I mean, no matter how good they are, they’re never going to be Rik Mayall, are they?
Abigoliah: I mean, I think we’ve all done that, where you go see something to see the person in it and you’re—
Luckily it’s never happened to me, but I’ve always been— So I didn’t get to see Jonathan Groff in Spring Awakening. Lea Michele was there, but Jonathan wasn’t. And I was really upset about that because Jonathan was also my yoga student.
Tom: Oh, really?
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Amazing.
Abigoliah: I don’t know if he’d remember me, but he used to take my yoga class all the time, and I really wanted to see him.
Tom: He’s one of the voices in Deborah’s animated film.
Abigoliah: No way.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Well, if you ever meet him — have you met him?
Tom: No, I have not.
Abigoliah: If you ever wind up meeting him, one, invite me to the party.
Tom: Okay.
Abigoliah: Two, ask him if he remembers Abigoliah, the yoga instructor.
Tom: He’ll remember the name, I would have thought. You’d think.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Rik Mayall died in 2014, and Marks and Gran published an obituary which claimed Lord B’Stard of Haltemprice died peacefully at B’Stard Manor on Monday the 9th of June in the arms and mouth, respectively, of his two faithful Polynesian masseuses.
Abigoliah: I think Rik would have really enjoyed that.
Tom: Yeah. I think so.
Abigoliah: Oh, that’s beautiful. What a wonderful send-off to their friend.
Tom: They did — in 2017 they were talking about a revival, something called The B’Stard Legacy. And I’m not quite sure — that seems to have been talked about both as a potential stage show and a potential TV show. But whatever it was, it never got off the ground.
Abigoliah: I feel like there’s a lot more television shows in Britain that get turned into stage shows than, like, in America. Like, there was never a Will & Grace on stage or a MASH* or anything like that.
Tom: I think that’s partly, again, what we were talking about before. If you’ve created Will & Grace, you’re set for life.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Whereas if you’ve made 15 episodes of an ITV sitcom, you might be able to buy a new car.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: But if you have a hit West End show, maybe you’re not set for life, but you could probably buy a house.
Abigoliah: Yeah. You have to — I mean, you have to keep working.
Tom: That’s why this country creates—
Abigoliah: Such beautiful things.
Tom: Yeah.
So that’s pretty much it. As I said, all the episodes are available on ITVX now if you want to watch more. Couldn’t be easier.
I think it is still worth watching. Some of the references will be things to specific things like Cynthia Payne, which might not mean much to you now, but I think it does have a kind of freshness and an energy and an attack to it which really makes it stand apart.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Yeah. I really enjoyed it. And I definitely want to watch more of it.
I — I see why you showed it to me. It’s funny how just — how it somehow felt cosier, I guess because it’s a sitcom. It’s like, okay. Whereas The Thick of It—
Tom: I had to be—
Abigoliah: Like, it’s—
Tom: Not real.
Abigoliah: Yeah. It’s not.
Tom: Yeah.
Tom: Well, The Thick of It keeps trying to make you feel like this is real. Like you’re eavesdropping. Like this could be happening over your own shoulder.
This is constantly reassuring you: it’s not real.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And part of that — I hate to keep harping on about it — but part of it is those camera angles reminding you not just that this is a play and there’s a studio audience there and everyone’s pretending, but it’s a filmed play, and we’re choosing these angles in order to make it seem more dramatic, more potent.
Or that nice three-shot with the journalist in the background telling the story visually.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Whereas The Thick of It makes a virtue of the fact that the camera angles are all rubbish because it’s been filmed on the hoof.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
And with this one too, like, when they went into the dark, scary music at the end of series three, episode five, and she goes up the — you know, turns into a bit of a horror film.
And I really did feel like — I was like, I know there’s going to be a funny payoff, but it’s genuinely building suspense in a way that I’m like, I’m kind of — am scared.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: They’re doing a good job at this. They just switched genres in the last two minutes of the sitcom. Amazing.
Tom: Shall we bring on the Shelf of Fame?
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: These decisions get harder and harder all the time.
Abigoliah: You know, here’s the thing. I kind of walked in — because I’ve been waiting since we did The Young Ones back — what? That’s the second episode we ever did.
I’ve been waiting to watch The New Statesman, and I was so excited about it. And now, after watching it, I don’t want to put it on the Shelf of Fame, but I can’t tell you why.
Tom: I mean, like I said, that shelf is stacked now. This is the problem we have created for ourselves.
But I always imagined that we would get to this position where things are really going to be jostling for position. They’ve really got to earn their spurs in order to get on.
Abigoliah: The thing is, too, with this season, like I said, we’ve watched so much that I like. It’s almost — now I have to find an excuse not to put something on the Shelf of Fame so my whole Shelf of Fame isn’t just the satire season.
Tom: And recency bias is a real thing. You always feel, oh, I’ve just watched that. It’s fresh in my mind. It seems so much more sexy and appealing than the thing I put on the Shelf of Fame last year.
Abigoliah: Which—
Tom: But that’s not fair.
Abigoliah: Which isn’t fair. And that’s why when I look at the Shelf of Fame, I always try to go back to, how did that make me feel when I watched it?
And again, going back to Victoria Wood, it’s just like the — this is possible. You know? That wonder.
And this — this didn’t give me that sense of, like, oh, like other things have. So it’s going to stay off the Shelf of Fame.
Tom: Fair enough.
Abigoliah: But I highly recommend. Very curious to watch more.
Tom: All right. So we have another satirical sitcom next.
Abigoliah: Do tell.
Tom: Which takes a very different approach to the business of creating a satirical sitcom. It’s called Drop the Dead Donkey.
Abigoliah: Okay. And this is the one that takes place in a newsroom.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Because when you have a serious bit of news come through, you have to drop the human-interest story.
Tom: Exactly.
Abigoliah: So you drop the dead donkey?
Tom: That’s right.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Which is a phrase — and we’ll go through this next time — but that is a phrase that Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin, the writers, invented.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But they have had people come up to them afterwards and say, “Oh yeah, we know what that means.”
No, you don’t. We made it up.
Abigoliah: But now it has a meaning. Surprise!
Tom: You did it.
We’re going to watch, if you want to get ahead of us, series two, episode 13, widely thought to be the best one ever, and series five, episode three, which is very typical of the later period.
Abigoliah: Okay. Very cool. Oh, I’m excited. I’m excited about it.
Guys, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of All British Comedy Explained. If you want to support the show, a couple ways you can do it.
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And at the end of November we will be watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Tom: Oh, okay. All right. Really looking forward to that. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, though of course I know exactly who she is.
Abigoliah: You know everyone who’s—
Tom: In it. Yeah. And I’ve seen her in The Dick Van Dyke Show, which I have seen a few episodes of.
Abigoliah: Okay. I’m excited. I’m excited to show her to you.
Tom: All right. Thanks a lot for listening. Cheerio.
Abigoliah: Bye-bye.