Comedy in Britain in the 1960s was a tangle. John Cleese, Jo Kendall, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie were on a radio show called "I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again." Where Eric Idle is often credited as a writer.
On TV, Cleese joined Graham Chapman, Brooke-Taylor, Marty Feldman and the lovely Aimee MacDonald on "At Last the 1948 Show." Kendall made one important appearance on that show. On "Please Do Not Adjust Your Set" Idle appeared on-screen with Denise Coffee, David Jason, Terry Jones and Michael Palin.
Coffey and Kendall both went on to further fine work on the brilliant radio show "The Burkiss Way to Dynamic Living" while Brooke-Taylor went on jokey radio show "Hello, Cheeky" with John Junkin and Barry Cryer.
Whew. And that's just a start. In the 1960s and 1970s the BBC and the few other outlets were experiencing a new wave of Oxford and Cambridge grads filling various posts and hiring young writers and performers crashing in from both universities in a new old-boy (and girl) network, following up the successful biting-satire college show "Beyond the Fringe" with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett.
From this milieu (especially after the TV programs "Do Not Adjust Your Set" and "At Last the 1948 Show") two new, surreal, TV shows broke out: first, the Monty Python juggernaut of Cleese, Jones, Palin, Chapman, Idle and added American expatriate Terry Gilliam. Then "The Goodies" with Garden, Brooke-Taylor and Oddie.
The point is, the brave, new world of British TV and radio comedy by the late 1960s and early 1970s was small and tight and most of them knew each other. Marty Feldman could just as easily have been plugged into Monty Python and David Jason wondered bitterly why he'd been left out.
Good pals Garden, Oddie and Brooke-Taylor decided to do a show to change the face of British comedy. Then, tuning into Python and seeing that had been done they took a different tack and did "The Goodies."
How did "The Goodies," differ from Python? First of all, it wasn't primarily a sketch show. Each episode might have had various vignettes, but these were set within story-lines filling the time period. Second, the lead boys played the same characters with little variation from episode to episode. "The Goodies" were a team one could hire to clear up any sort of problems. Garden was more often the brilliant, if slightly detached, inventor of gadgets. Brooke-Taylor was the hyper-patriotic type given to satirical speeches about Queen and country and wearing Union Jack waistcoats. Oddie was a down-to-earth slob.
Another way they differed from Python was the ever-changing cast from episode to episode, often featuring guest stars well known in Great Britain if not so much in America: Freddie Jones, Liz Fraser, Joan Sims, Stanley Baxter, Alfie Bass and plenty of others.
Sometimes the full-length stories proved detrimental. If a sketch was failing or taking too long in Python, the writer/performer boys simply discarded it and carried on with something else. The Goodies had more limited options. And since their surreal antics nevertheless had to be confined to boundaries with at least pretense of reality they couldn't just have a Graham Chapman dressed as a viking shove in a "meanwhile."
Their friends the Pythons came first and had a formidable presence. "The Goodies" put on a different kind of show that necessarily played by different rules, and they require acceptance on their own, rather than on comparative, terms.
Besides, the Pythons had twice as many comedy geniuses working to fill their half-hour format.
"The Goodies" were good at what they did, taken on their own terms. But their satire, like the Pythons', often took aim at already soft targets like the Church, giving them the appearance of kicking people once they're down. But thanks to all these lads English-speaking comedy started taking a cruel turn about that time and it's only gotten worse in the intervening years until a nice guy like me no longer pays attention to it.
"The Goodies" is the most surreal sitcom until the arrival of the under-appreciated "Andy Richter Controls the Universe."
On TV, Cleese joined Graham Chapman, Brooke-Taylor, Marty Feldman and the lovely Aimee MacDonald on "At Last the 1948 Show." Kendall made one important appearance on that show. On "Please Do Not Adjust Your Set" Idle appeared on-screen with Denise Coffee, David Jason, Terry Jones and Michael Palin.
Coffey and Kendall both went on to further fine work on the brilliant radio show "The Burkiss Way to Dynamic Living" while Brooke-Taylor went on jokey radio show "Hello, Cheeky" with John Junkin and Barry Cryer.
Whew. And that's just a start. In the 1960s and 1970s the BBC and the few other outlets were experiencing a new wave of Oxford and Cambridge grads filling various posts and hiring young writers and performers crashing in from both universities in a new old-boy (and girl) network, following up the successful biting-satire college show "Beyond the Fringe" with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett.
From this milieu (especially after the TV programs "Do Not Adjust Your Set" and "At Last the 1948 Show") two new, surreal, TV shows broke out: first, the Monty Python juggernaut of Cleese, Jones, Palin, Chapman, Idle and added American expatriate Terry Gilliam. Then "The Goodies" with Garden, Brooke-Taylor and Oddie.
The point is, the brave, new world of British TV and radio comedy by the late 1960s and early 1970s was small and tight and most of them knew each other. Marty Feldman could just as easily have been plugged into Monty Python and David Jason wondered bitterly why he'd been left out.
Good pals Garden, Oddie and Brooke-Taylor decided to do a show to change the face of British comedy. Then, tuning into Python and seeing that had been done they took a different tack and did "The Goodies."
How did "The Goodies," differ from Python? First of all, it wasn't primarily a sketch show. Each episode might have had various vignettes, but these were set within story-lines filling the time period. Second, the lead boys played the same characters with little variation from episode to episode. "The Goodies" were a team one could hire to clear up any sort of problems. Garden was more often the brilliant, if slightly detached, inventor of gadgets. Brooke-Taylor was the hyper-patriotic type given to satirical speeches about Queen and country and wearing Union Jack waistcoats. Oddie was a down-to-earth slob.
Another way they differed from Python was the ever-changing cast from episode to episode, often featuring guest stars well known in Great Britain if not so much in America: Freddie Jones, Liz Fraser, Joan Sims, Stanley Baxter, Alfie Bass and plenty of others.
Sometimes the full-length stories proved detrimental. If a sketch was failing or taking too long in Python, the writer/performer boys simply discarded it and carried on with something else. The Goodies had more limited options. And since their surreal antics nevertheless had to be confined to boundaries with at least pretense of reality they couldn't just have a Graham Chapman dressed as a viking shove in a "meanwhile."
Their friends the Pythons came first and had a formidable presence. "The Goodies" put on a different kind of show that necessarily played by different rules, and they require acceptance on their own, rather than on comparative, terms.
Besides, the Pythons had twice as many comedy geniuses working to fill their half-hour format.
"The Goodies" were good at what they did, taken on their own terms. But their satire, like the Pythons', often took aim at already soft targets like the Church, giving them the appearance of kicking people once they're down. But thanks to all these lads English-speaking comedy started taking a cruel turn about that time and it's only gotten worse in the intervening years until a nice guy like me no longer pays attention to it.
"The Goodies" is the most surreal sitcom until the arrival of the under-appreciated "Andy Richter Controls the Universe."