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The Sunday Times - Scotland

July 30, 2006

Goodies yum yum
More than two decades after their silly but satirical TV show ended, the Goodies are taking to the stage to celebrate a monstrous hit. Alastair McKay reports


Tim Brooke-Taylor does not look like a killer, but it is a matter of public record that in March 1975, he caused a man — Alex Mitchell, a bricklayer from King’s Lynn — to expire. According to an article in the Eastern Daily Press, Mitchell was unable to stop laughing when watching an episode of The Goodies called Kung Fu Kapers, in which Brooke-Taylor, in kilt and with bagpipes, attempted to fend off a malign black pudding that was threatening him with a display of the Lancastrian martial art, Ecky Thump. Brooke-Taylor responded with a display of the Caledonian equivalent, Hoots-Toot-ochaye.

Readers under 35 are excused some bafflement at this point. It is 24 years since the comedy trio of Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie took their comic japes from the BBC to an early grave on ITV, and subsequent generations have had few opportunities to familiarise themselves with Ecky Thump, the Funky Gibbon, or — their most famous image — the Post Office tower being assailed by a giant kitten.

Younger audiences, more familiar with Oddie in his role as the nation’s birder-in-chief, will be given some opportunity to fill in this gap in their cultural awareness when Brooke-Taylor and Garden (with Oddie on video) bring their Goodies show to the fringe. The show is an adaptation of one they took to Australia last year, though there will be some tweaks to compensate for the fact that much of the audience will be encountering the material for the first time. Australia needed no help, as The Goodies has been on constant repeat there over the past 30 years.

The Edinburgh show will be part greatest hits, and part reminiscence, encouraged by their great reception down under. They are confident that the fact that Oddie will not be in Edinburgh will not prove too much of a handicap. The show, with Bill on video, was tried last November on their second visit to Australia, and worked, despite the odd technical glitch.

“Now that we like the show and enjoy doing it,” says Brooke- Taylor, “it seems to be the time to try it out (at the fringe). It’s not the same because you’ve got to be nearly 40 to know about the Goodies here. Even we can’t remember most of it, so it’s more of a risk. We hope it’s not so much nostalgia as ‘have a look at this, you haven’t seen this yet’. Of course we’re able to show the best bits as well as talk about them and do some sketches.”

“We were installed as the pirate government of New South Wales at one point,” says Garden proudly. “The president of the upper chamber gave us tea and scones.”

Both Brooke-Taylor and Garden came to Edinburgh with the Cambridge Footlights, performing with the likes of Trevor Nunn, John Cleese and Graham Chapman.

Garden was present in the university’s McEwan Hall in 1963 for the now legendary event at which a naked woman appeared, in a deliberate challenge to public censorship laws. “She crawled across the audience,” he recalls, “then a nude woman was wheeled across the stage, standing in a spotlight. It was very bizarre.”

Brooke-Taylor harrumphs: “In Scotland?” “Yes,” says Garden flatly. “It was very badly organised and rather tedious as I recall.”

They have fond memories of the fringe, though in 1962-3 is was a much smaller event than it is today. Garden took a part in The Tempest, while Brooke-Taylor had a go at Ibsen. The audience pushed his performance back in his face, he says with mock bitterness.

As well as the play, Brooke- Taylor was involved in a revue at the Traverse. “I remember four of us doing a show for two people there, and they were so embarrassed they wouldn’t sit together. I’m afraid we giggled rather a lot.”

Both recall dodgy accommodation — Brooke-Taylor in a dormitory crammed with bunk beds, Garden in a condemned tenement. “We had a little cafe round the corner run by Edinburgh-Italian people,” says Garden. “Wonderful accents. And deep-fried haggis was their speciality. At least they told us that’s what it was.”

After the Footlights show became a Broadway hit, Garden and Brooke-Taylor found themselves working for BBC radio. “To start with on television we weren’t very visual,” says Garden, “but on the radio we conjured up a lot of images.” From their radio work, he remains fond of the Electric Time Trousers. “The trousers were rather ill-defined as an entity. They had a staircase inside and a guest wing.”

They made a few tentative stabs at television before The Goodies was conceived, albeit in a rather vague form. The initial concept was “an agency of three blokes, who do anything, any time”.

Brooke-Taylor had been friends with Oddie at university, and he had attached himself as the musical element in their BBC2 sketch show, Broaden Your Mind. Around that time, their friends in the Monty Python team were redefining sketch comedy. By contrast, The Goodies had 30-minute episodes, with a story. “Storylines is a bit of an exaggeration,” says Brooke-Taylor. “But we did manage to keep the stuff together.”

Both are happy to concur with Frank Muir’s assertion that The Goodies was childlike, but not childish. “The logic of the stories was childlike,” says Garden, producing a formula for their comedy. “If a), then b) must happen. That led us into very bizarre situations. But also the responses, the way we would react to various things, were childlike. We’d burst into tears, or Bill would have a tantrum.”

Each Goodie had a distinct character. Brooke-Taylor was a royalist in a Union Jack waistcoat, Oddie was a bearded bolshevik, and Garden was a wishy-washy liberal. “I couldn’t bear my character, to be honest,” says Brooke-Taylor. “I have a certain affinity to his cowardice, which I think is a form of intelligence. But no: he was an awful right-wing, terribly posh character. Young people would take it quite seriously. Bill’s daughters always used to think that I really was this person: ‘Why do you love the Queen?’” Garden seems especially keen that the satirical side of The Goodies should not be overlooked. “I was looking at one [episode] the other day which was about politics. It was partly because it was made in Maggie Thatcher’s first year, and the show’s all about image-building and spin-doctoring, which we spotted was going on. We had a go at advertising, we had a go at politics, we had a go at Thatcher — with Tim being groomed into Maggie Thatcher, and Evita later being groomed into Timita, while Bill became Vanessa Redgrave and then Che Guevara. And wildlife documentaries got a look-in.”

“We used to keep quiet about the satire,” says Brooke-Taylor. “And if people found it, that was good. There was a danger of being censored. The BBC was terribly nervous about anything political. We got away with a lot by keeping our heads down.”

Needless to say, the trio were dismayed when Mary Whitehouse, the champion of family values on television, gave The Goodies her approval. They responded by adding a Whitehouse character to the show, played by Beryl Reid. Eventually Mrs Whitehouse wrote a letter of complaint to the director-general. “I never met Mrs Whitehouse,” says Garden. “I always confuse her with Eric Idle’s mum, who was the spitting image.”

For Garden, the Edinburgh show is a sort of homecoming. Though he seems to represent the paradigm of droll Englishness, he comes from Macduff in Aberdeenshire. He lived there until he was four, when his father, a surgeon, got a job in Liverpool. The coastal enclave of Gardenstown in Aberdeenshire is named after his family. His mother’s family, the McHardys, were true highlanders. “They used to win all the Highland Games throughout the 19th century.”

Brooke-Taylor can make no claim to a tartan bloodline, but thinks the popularity of The Goodies in Scotland may be based on the fact that his Lord Snootyish character is, to put it bluntly, an English twit. “Any self-respecting Scotsman would give me a smack in the face. Not that I suggest they do. I must point out that I’m playing a role.”

The Goodies Still Rule OK! is on at the Assembly Rooms from Aug 7 to 27, not Mon 21. Box office: 0131 226 2428