Goodies return with Oddie one out
Date: 01/10/05
By Gregg Tripp 

 

The Goodies are coming back for you and you - well, most of them anyway. After a short season of sellout shows earlier this year, two of the cult comedy show's trio, Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor, are returning for a nationwide tour.

The Goodies, a TV staple for kids who now find they are at least 35, showed on the ABC throughout most of the 1970s and 80s. In their time they battled a giant kitten, set up a radio station under the sea and beat each other senseless with black puddings...it all made perfect sense then. Playing under their real names, Graeme was the intellectual, Tim the royalist and Bill the revolutionary. The Goodies itself was revolutionary, cloaking social comment against themes like racism and sexual conservatism of the time in the ridiculous.

Ironically, the anti-establishment comedy has been all but forgotten in Britain, due to its limited airing. The BBC is finally putting together a documentary on The Goodies which will show at Christmas.

In their upcoming stage production, Graeme and Tim will reminisce about the TV series and they will show clips originally banned in Australia. Their strange 70s' hit The Funky Gibbon will also get a run.

The one who couldn't come back this time, Bill Oddie, has just had recent success with the live BBC nature program Springwatch and will stay in England to do a new series for autumn. "Bill will still haunt the show in various ways, and in various forms," says Tim.

Tim Brooke-Taylor, who studied for his law degree with Monty Python's John Cleese, says he learned of The Goodies popularity in Australia after coming to meet fans here in 2000. "What really impressed me was that they were such
bright people about half my age who I really wanted to hang out with." He ultimately went back to England and convinced the others to be involved in a tour.

Not surprisingly, Tim says he isn't the character he portrayed in the Goodies. "I didn't like him at all," he says. "I have been described as a relentless wuss. We were all actually more like Bill."

Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor have been performing together since the 1960s and have just done a show at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival. Ahead of their Australian tour, the pair will perform in the long-running English radio show, I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue, at the London Palladium.

During their earlier Australian outing this year, the team proved they still retain every bit of their irreverence, timing and good-hearted humour. This show is a chance to see two of the elder statesman of British comedy still in sharp form.

The Goodies, Still Alive on Stage, will begin in Sydney and play up and down the east coast, Adelaide, Perth and Tasmania.

Copyright C 2005 AAP