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The Times July 31, 2006


Goodie, goodie — they're back
Simon Fanshawe

The Goodies (well, two of them) talk about their revival on the Fringe


They’ve scarcely been seen for 25 years, eclipsed in the public memory by the more conspicuous cleverness of their counterparts Monty Python. But for a while there, back in the 1970s, The Goodies was the Little Britain of its day. Not only did Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie get the kind of ratings that only a soap opera would get nowadays, they also took their act’s TV fame and ran with it. There were books, badges, appearances on Top of the Pops. “Kids’ programme!” may have been John Cleese’s snarling putdown of his Cambridge contemporaries — albeit in a cameo on the show itself — but the tridem-riding trio’s subversive slapstick stirred the hearts of young and old alike.
And now they’re back. Well, most of them. Brooke-Taylor and Garden are paying tribute to their own in a live show called The Goodies Still Rule OK! at the Edinburgh Fringe. Bill Oddie, who joined them for the show’s first outing at the Big Laugh Festival in Sydney 2004, won’t be there — or at least not in the flesh.



When they first pitched the TV show to the BBC, they described the idea as “an agency of three blokes who do anything, anytime”. But doing anything, anytime is a young man’s game. Oddie, now better known as a bird fancier than as one of the most successful comics of his generation, is too busy with Sping Watch and his BBC nature series to do more than offer pre-recorded video recollections of his days as a Goodie.

“If he’d been able to say some dates when he would be free, we’d have worked around that,” says Garden. “It was fun together in Australia. We stood there watching Bill just wondering what he might do next. Now we know, we’ve got him on video.”

Still, there’s plenty to celebrate. For 77 shows, from their debut in November 1970 to their final series in 1982 — their only outing for ITV — they played about with animated film, outlandish tricks, daft songs and a dose of satire all built around three characters loosely based on themselves. For Brooke-Taylor, that meant playing a right-wing coward in a Union Jack waistcoat. “It’s not me, to be honest,” he says now. “We’re all left-of-centre. But someone had to do it.”

He has a soft face, pinkish skin and a tongue more barbed than one expects. Years ago I interviewed him with the rest of the I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue team late at night in front of a live audience. Someone stood up and asked them to say who was the worst person any of them had ever worked with. Niceties were passed round for a minute or two with much faux-innocent scratching of the head until Brooke-Taylor delivered his name with startling alacrity. “Edward Fox is a complete c***!” People laughed uncontrollably. Graeme Garden is more restrained. Softly spoken, he is given to understated gags. Is this qualified medical doctor as boffinish as his Goodies character? “Well, I am scientific, but I am not a loony,” he says with a slight raise of the eyebrow to suggest that he might be just that. His character was a megalomaniac, wasn’t he, a bit of a Dr Strangelove? “I don’t think I ever tried to take over the world. I wasn’t that ruthless or amoral. I was just interested in science.” A pause. “Which is the same thing, really.”

Missing today is Oddie, who also bailed out on the Australian tour that followed their Sydney shows. Is it true, as some gossip has suggested, that he’s an angry refusenik about the whole thing? “Well, he’s angry,” says Garden — but that appears to be a general judgment, and nothing to do with the tour.

Given the general view of Oddie as the difficult one of the group, it’s surprising to find that the other two hold him in some awe. There was a gaggle of future comedians when they were at Cambridge. “And none of us would have gone into showbusiness without the confidence we got from other people,” says Brooke-Taylor. “Except Bill,” says Garden. “He had enormous confidence, and quite rightly so.” His music made an immediate impact on audiences from the start, and he went on to write The Goodies’ songs, including their big hit The Funky Gibbon.

The Goodies came out of radio. After the Footlights, via shows such as At Last the 1948 Show, they had all ended up in 1965 in a radio sketch show called I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again (ISIRTA), which also featured Cleese. hey took the anarchic spirit of that show on to TV. Oddly, the end result was cartoonish more than anything. The Goodies were the heirs of Buster Keaton and Bugs Bunny, lacking the verbal sophistication that endeared the Pythons to the college set.

Which caused some problems for them. English is a culture that is, at its core, literary. In France they have an avenue named after Jerry Lewis. Here we have the Royal Shakespeare Company. Slapstick, we think, is for kids. And at one stage, the BBC scheduled The Goodies accordingly. The third and fourth series slipped earlier and earlier, with some programmes going out at 6.45pm.

By 1975, though, Monty Python had ended, the fifth series of The Goodies was moved back to 9pm, and the audiences jumped from three million to ten. “We can’t say we were ignored,” says Garden. “But in the history of comedy we don’t come off as well as we might,” adds Brooke-Taylor.

If there’s one image that persists from The Goodies it’s that of a giant kitten clambering up the Post Office Tower. And at its best, their comedy was brilliantly inventive, filled with visual tricks and stunts that no one else had really tried before. “I remember once I shook hands with myself,” says Brooke- Taylor, “that was incredibly complicated.” The best visual gag, remembers Garden, was when they went into a cupboard as The Goodies and came out as mice. “We had a six-foot hypodermic syringe and that had to go through, too.”

The live show features clips and Oddie’s inserts alongside Brooke-Taylor and Garden answering questions from the audience as well as doing some live comedy. Among the highlights are Garden’s audition from the Cambridge Footlights, called Pets Corner, of which Brooke-Taylor says: “I don't want to embarrass him but it is a little lesson in how to do comedy perfectly.”

Despite their achievements, The Goodies has never been repeated on the BBC. Why? “Don’t get us started,” Brooke-Taylor says, before going on to skewer the previous controller of BBC2, Jane Root, who made it clear that she had no time for the show. “She’s gone now, thank God. Although that means there’s no one to blame now.”

Since The Goodies came to an end, Oddie has become the personification of TV nature-loving, while his colleagues have become fixed in people’s minds as part of the I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue panel on Radio 4. Which, it comes as a surprise to learn, Garden invented. He is still negotiating the royalty, despite the first show carrying his devising credit. It was awful, they remember now. They tried to improvise the whole thing. “Humph [Lyttelton] and I sat in the pub afterwards,” says Brooke-Taylor, “and we said ‘Never, ever again’.” After 34 years they still say that, just in case.

They had a meeting recently with the BBC’s Director General, Mark Thompson, to talk about the radio show. At the end he said, “Shame we have never repeated The Goodies. When are we going to do that?” Goodies fans are waiting. Maybe the live show will jog the BBC into action.

The Goodies Still Rule OK! is at the Assembly Rooms (0131-226 2428) from Friday to Aug 27

THE GOODIES V LITTLE BRITAIN

The Goodies

In the much-loved episode Scatty Safari (1975), The Goodies’ Star Safari Park suffers a blow when its main attraction, Tony Blackburn, is shot dead. So the trio bring in Little Rolf Harris, only to find the Stylophone-playing entertainer starts breeding. The Queen asks them to contain the sudden plague of Rolfs.

An early parody of the blurred line between celebrity culture and sheer fantasy, it makes its points with an inclusive innocence, mixing cartoon logic with satire in a way that appealed to adults and kids alike.

Little Britain

Lucas and Walliams’s sketch show also appeals to kids and adults alike — but in a more grotesque manner. Characters such as only-gay-in-the-village Daffyd or the decadent Bubbles are innocent to their own foibles, true. But a lot of the laughs come from the explicitness of the telling: naked body suits, Welsh grannies merrily talking about rimming, racist old ladies projectile vomiting.

You can object to this regular recourse to excess, just as you can be left cold by the sometimes soft absurdity of The Goodies. But both approaches speak volumes of their times.

What are your favourite Goodies moments? E-mail: debate@thetimes.co.uk