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RADIO LANCASHIRE, BOOM!

 (contributed by Kay Dickinson)

(from C&G #63  March 2001)

Tim Brooke-Taylor was recently interviewed by BBC Radio Lancashire presenter Dave Swanton, and the interview was broadcast on Saturday 3rd March on Dave's "Sounds Like The Seventies" show.

The interview starts with The Goodies Theme tune.

DS: Well, that's the biggest clue you're going to get tonight.  My favourite television programme in the 1970s and one of the stars of the Goodies, good evening Tim Brooke-Taylor.

TBT: Hi there.

DS: Well, I was just looking through the record books - The Goodies ran for twelve years - it must have been a lot of fun?

TBT: Yes it was - the great thing was that we were good mates anyway.  It was hard work, I have to say, trying to make a programme look expensive when it wasn't that expensive but it was great, it was - we were very lucky.

DS: You had some top guests on the show round about that time - Cilla Black; Tony Blackburn, a big guest [laugh from Tim]; John Cleese, Patrick Moore and Eddie Waring.

TBT: Eddie Waring was great, yes, he was on a few times I think.  John Cleese came on under sufferance - called us "childish" [laughs].  I'm not sure Cilla was actually on, I think she was only a... we had her in the background I think - we tried to put her down...

DS: Aaah - who wrote the scripts to the shows - did you all three of you pile in together and say "right, this is what we're going to do"?

TBT: I have to give the credit to the other two really - I mean, I wrote bits and we used to at the beginning of each series, we'd sit around and think of different ideas.  We usually, actually, had quite a straight list of subjects and the one I can always remember is - we all came from the North, I came from Buxton and Graeme came from Preston and Bill came from Rochdale - and we were going to do "The North" in flat caps and things like that.  And kung-fu was around and something else and we did a whole thing about "Ecky Thump", which was the Northern kung-fu.  And it was one of those ways you could do a sort of sketch with a story that was running through, that was the idea of it.

DS: One thing I always remember about The Goodies as well, was you always used to wear the suit with the Union Jack waistcoat - how did that come about?

TBT: Well... it didn't start that way.  Basically, the premise was that we represented sort of Tory, middle-of-the-road, bolshy left - you can guess which one was which!  And so I played the cowardly upper class twit, and gradually the Union Jack came in as a part of my patriotic side.  I was a fairly unpleasant character, actually!

DS: No, I wouldn't say that [Tim laughs] - no, I don't think anybody would agree!

TBT: I've agreed with the "cowardly" bit!

DS: [laughs]  I've got the CD actually - there were loads of hits - obviously, The Funky Gibbon, The Inbetweenies, Black Pudding Bertha and a very, very famous Christmas one which I play every year, Father Christmas Do Not Touch Me...

TBT: That was never played at the time...

DS: No, I'm not surprised!

TBT: It's one of the reasons that The Inbetweenies sold so well - it's because it was the naughty double-A side, I think it was.

DS: The sad thing about it is that The Goodies has never been re-run on British television, but they're absolutely massive at the other side of the world, in Australia!

TBT: Yeah - they're bright people! [both laugh].  I went there, as you probably know, last April to a Goodies convention and the point is that it's gone on being shown there, and they used to show it sort of early evening, with Dr Who - and the great thing was that the kids that watched it when they were young came back to it when they were in their twenties and suddenly realised there was a bit more than they'd realised the first - a bit like the Simpsons, actually.

DS: I was going to say, to be honest, I think all our listeners should write to the BBC and ask for it to be on - even if it goes on a cable channel.  If Ted Rogers with "3-2-1" can be on, The Goodies should be on there as well.

TBT: Well I think what amazed us was they've just done "I Love The 70s" and they were going to put a Goodies out each week 'cos we covered the whole decade and then it was going to be one show and then they didn't put out one.  And you thought, if you're dealing with comedy in the whole of the 70s, surely they should've, instead of another repeat of The Good Life or Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em which we do see - good though they are - rather too often.

DS: As well as that, people can still hear you on the radio today - you must have one of the longest running radio shows with "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue" - been on radio 29 years.

TBT: Funnily enough, I've just been watching - because there was nothing else on - University Challenge yesterday and suddenly somebody in desperation said, "Mornington Crescent!" - that's a radio game now played, which of course we do on I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, but it was the idea that on University Challenge it should come up in a question, it's bizarre!  But it is, it's 28 years - 29 years...

DS: As well as that, in the mid-1980s there was another television programme, very successful, "Me & My Girl"

TBT: Mmm - with Richard O'Sullivan, who was a terrific comedy actor, great guy, good friend. 

DS: And when we were discussing it on the telephone this morning, I actually said to you, "you were in the film Willy Wonka, weren't you?" - Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory?

TBT: Yes, yes - you have to be quite bright to see me, I'm there for about a minute, I think.  I was a guy in charge of a computer, trying to spot where the golden tickets were, and I eventually told the computer what to do with its golden tickets!  But it's one of those things that when it first came out, Willy Wonka, it was no success at all, it didn't even get general release, it's one of those things that appears at Christmas and actually, I think, gets better and better somehow.  I think Gene Wilder's a genius in it. 

DS: He certainly is.  Never get tired of watching that film, actually.  I remember buying the book for my kids and they said, "No, we don't want the book, we want to watch the film.

TBT: Well, they're bright kids... [both laugh]

DS: Yeah, well that was a while ago - they're teenagers now and know it all!

TBT: Well now they can see The Goodies - I think there are still a couple of videos the BBC keep very very quiet about...

DS: Top of the Pops as well - that must've been a lot of fun, doing things like The Funky Gibbon and Black Pudding Bertha?

TBT: That was brilliant - because it wasn't our job, if you see what I mean, we weren't pop singers - and to go on something like that and dance around and then go out to eat with Pan's People afterwards was my idea of sheer heaven!  And I was going to say "and be taken seriously" but only seriously in a musical sense in that actually, our backing tracks were brilliant - the problem with us was that we had to do it with the live band there - most people nowadays mime, never mind do it to their backing track, we had to do it to the band, which was fairly hair-raising but great fun because it was one of those things, "Am I on Top of the Pops? - Yes!!"  I used to say we were far too old, because we were in our mid-30s but actually, half the people on the show were probably in their 60s and the other half were about 14 [laughs] - hence, "The Inbetweenies"!

DS: Do you still keep in touch with the other two, Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden?

TBT: Yeah - Graeme I still do I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue with, of course, so I see him regularly and Bill and I just phone each other every now and again - usually to whinge about the fact the BBC haven't repeated The Goodies! - and various other things and, we're still friends but obviously for about 11 or 12 years we practically lived together - people thought of us like The Wombles, really - just lived in some burrow somewhere.

DS: The other thing as well - "One Foot In The Grave" - 1997 Christmas edition.  [TBT: Yeah] You were in that - did you enjoy working with Richard Wilson?

TBT: I loved that - the really annoying thing about that was - Angus Deayton moved out and so - they do a lot of auditioning for people and after a lot of it, it came down to me, and I moved in and there was a Christmas special.

DS: Well, what we're going to do, we're going to ask all our listeners to write to the BBC, as we said earlier, to get The Goodies back on TV and we're going to take full credit!  Tim Brooke-Taylor, thanks for your time, thanks for joining us.

TBT: Cheers.

Plays out with "Funky Gibbon"

I wonder if Tim realised that, as with the BBC Entertainment website's "Sketchpad", he yet again had the ignominity of following Nicholas Parsons, who was interviewed by Dave Swanton the week before!!