Series One - A Handy Reminder
There is a popular myth, born out of lazy journalism and a few power dressing idiots, which dictates that ‘peak’ patches rather than purple ones are the only treasures in comedy land. This explains the absence of repeats for critically ignored/maligned but nonetheless keystone programmes. Rutland Weekend Television, series four of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the first runs of French and Saunders and A Bit Of Fry and Laurie all fell foul of this. And all of The Goodies too.
September 2000’s BFI listing of the 100 most vital television programmes in British history holds some currency here. Selected by critics and industry figures, the absence of The Goodies was notable. It had been nominated, but didn’t quite make the grade. Sure there were dozens of programmes that bettered it in terms of a consistent and delicate production or multiply drafted scripts, but rarely in invention. Almost all of those single programmes, series and serials have been repeated in recent memory - Brideshead Revisited, Pennies From Heaven, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - and in some cases - Absolutely Fabulous, Fawlty Towers, Dad’s Army - excessively so. These all have secure positions in the chart because they not only have a cultural resonance, but proven track records with ratings and/or video sales.
The Goodies has none of this and floundered outside the top 100. Other factors could be at play, such as an industry indifference over its political correctness (more of which when we actually spot it), or a fading memory by the panel of voters. Either way it demands a reappraisal and an urgent repeat run on BBC2. There’s plenty of interest, but even after a complete-ish season on UK Gold in 1992/3 people remain none the wiser of a steadily evolving show which was as pertinent to it’s time as it was impertinent.
Such a valuable document deserves this kind of coverage. What it would also serve to highlight, aside from some terrific jokes, is the evolution of television within that twelve year period - away from the free-for-all rush of The Wednesday Play and TW3, paralleling Play For Today, Boys From The Blackstuff and towards the stagnating Grade/Street-Porter era of the BBC. The Goodies made the passage from a time in which they could fire off a series of shows with little or no interference, to the paranoia of Alisdair Milne’s obfuscating tenure as Head of Programming (cf: Scum, Brimstone and Treacle, The Spongers (all 1977, all banned)).
With a 7pm pitch for much of 1973 the process of making the series led to Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie encountering endless difficulties with the compromises for an audience of kiddywinkies. It was often an unhappy balance of adult material and accessible family fare. This long history will be documented in future articles, but for the moment let’s enjoy a time when they had none of these problems, sneaking out after 10PM every Sunday night.
The original proposal to Michael Mills (Head of BBC Television Comedy) was pretty skimpy and later fitted into the theme song, revolving purely around "an agency of three blokes who do anything, anytime". In Roger Wilmut’s helpful From Fringe To Flying Circus (Methuen 1980), Mills was quoted as saying 'Well, I get that idea on my desk twice a week, but if that’s what you want to do, I’m prepared to believe that you can do it' (p.163). First Narrow Your Mind , then Super Chaps 3 - the trio finally settled on a title. Yum yum.
After a combined track record of I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again (BBC Radio 03/04/64-23/12/73), At Last The 1948 Show (ITV 06/04/67-07/11/67), Twice A Fortnight (BBC1 21/10/67-23/12/67), It’s Marty (BBC2 29/04/68-13/01/69), Doctor In The House (ITV 25/07/69-03/07/70), and, in particular, two series of Broaden Your Mind (BBC2 28/10/68-29/12/69) their promise as a team was assured. Individually they were known as adept writers, performers and, in the case of Oddie, an effective songwriter. But with the looming presence of their past associates in MFPC , the impulse for Oddie, Garden and the double barrelled one to find an equal footing was pretty acute.
Mills’ confidence in the trio cannot be overstated. He hailed from a type of programme controller which no longer exists. Not unlike Sydney Newman’s entrepreneurism with Armchair Theatre and Dr Who, he valued new writing talent and saw their importance over directorial control as with current television. Modern programmes can still be effective but it is all too rare for anything to be written, recorded and broadcast in a matter of weeks. When BBC2 screened Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkins’ topical A Very Open Prison in 1995 this was promoted as a novelty factor. Conversely, The Goodies did this as routine.
It is no coincidence that people spoke more about television back then. Sure, the media has saturated everyday life and diversity of choice has killed big TV ratings, but the freshness of fast produced programming in past decades retained a relevance, even if it wasn’t shoving politics down your throat. New programmes were always evident, often shit, but at least there was plenty to choose from. This quick delivery of material naturally created a deadline with which writers could sink or swim. Without a sea of memos between script and screen, the pressures of coming up with good material would often back-fire. Vitally, it’s visible presence could also reap the greatest rewards.
Let’s not beat around the bush here. The Goodies did not begin as a perfectly formed comedy feast. In brutal fact it floundered for a few series. The scriptwriters, Garden and Oddie, realised their vague format in a way that could have been tightened much earlier. Some scripts are clumsy, others fantastic. However this evolution was hard-fought, fast and necessary.
The team earnt a quiet cult in the early series, which helped to maintain the show’s presence in the schedules. Series one, running for seven weeks, changed very quickly and there are signs that the studio audience were familiar with the team’s past credits (knowing laughs etc.). This allowed a confidence in the material which glossed over poor plotting and instead highlighted good writing. Look a little closer and the cracks begin to show.
The initial format, which carried into series two, relied on audience identification of the weekly guest star. The script too would depend on them with a high quota of the dialogue given over to Mollie Sugden, Richard Caldicot, George Baker or whoever was appearing that week. When speaking to Graeme Kay for Deadpan magazine in 1994 (issue 7), Oddie commented 'but that was the joke. The person who came in was always much more famous than any of us were and we’d just sort of end up standing around while they got all the best lines. We did at least two series like that and then we thought that’s wrong for whatever reason and it started getting better after that.'
This is an opinion held by Garden and Brooke-Taylor also, yet they are guilty of selective memory. It was their option to provide the best lines to a guest, but they negate to explain the limitations of their own lines. Early scripts are littered with ‘now’s and ‘right’s suggesting dreadful repetition disguised as confused vogueishness. A key element is Bill’s weekly sherbet vision, which he bemoans the loss of to this day. In truth, it tied the show a little too closely to The Monkees for its own good. This isn’t to suggest that Davey and the boys were bathing in heroin or rubbing coke into every orifice, but Oddie’s drug references were a cute plot device and nothing else. With Bill in hippie ‘uniform’, Graeme the tweed wearing pseudo-intellectual and Tim an escapee from Carnaby Street, they strutted around like a watered down spectrum of late Sixties culture. This worked for a while, but the later device of a political triangle allowed for greater depth. Series one was merely a smart run around.
Distinctive elements from the off were the film sequences, created by Jim Franklin - originally for Broaden Your Mind - and using a sped-up technique which Tony Palmer pioneered on Twice A Fortnight. That 1967 vehicle for Terry Jones, Palin, Oddie and Garden is poorly archived (audio recordings and assorted clips are in private hands), so it is very hard to draw conclusions and contrasts between Palmer and Franklin’s separate approaches. The TAF technique was to shoot the action in reverse and render it ‘normal’ by reverse playback. Franklin would vary this, with a mixture of real time footage and sped-up run arounds. The film sequences remain stunning in any given episode and over twelve years became an indisputable trademark and event. Their evolution is documented in each episode entry - shot by shot, no less - so I suggest you look there.
As for studio sequences, there was a high dependence on the office as some kind of centrality for the show format. A phone call sparked off the plot and the preceding lulls were the only spaces for juicy badinage. Oddie and Garden were keen to create an adventure element, separating and panicking the characters so as to avoid any light and shade. They were almost scared of silence.
A great amount of the first seven episodes is joyous, not least because the film sequences have aged so well. The team feel comfortable there with a scattershot and loaded array of jokes and sight gags fuelling the pace nicely. In studio sequences this was not needed. As they grew confident, they would often wander into VT land as though exhausted with belting around fields in Shropshire. It was an enjoyable opposite - inhaling the insanity on film and exhaling the plot onto video.
In short, the quality of gags was not any huge struggle to maintain. Robert Ross seemed to be apologising for the trio’s entire career in The Complete Goodies Companion (Batsford 2000) by constantly referring to their jokes as "corny", suggesting that the excellent delivery was not enough. They all had their fair share of decent one-liners and the problem did not truly lie in the structure. Instead it lay in the meshing together of a surreal sitcom. In series one there is the pervading air of a script being thrown up in the air with resignation, sodden with tears over how brilliant MPFC was. In actual fact they needn’t have worried.
And so to the episodes. Each is detailed to an alarming degree elsewhere, but they must also be viewed in relation to one another. In transmission and production order ‘Beefeaters’ remains the introductory show. It immediately sets off a pattern for multiplicity - a much overlooked aspect of The Goodies as a whole. In the first scene they arrive and bless the portrait of Tim’s aunt (modelled on...er, Tim) for funding the agency. Graeme is eager to take them on a guided tour which celebrates the limitations of the budget as much as it introduces surrealism. Between two doors he reveals five images of rooms, thanks largely to the wonders of the then burgeoning technique of CSO In quick succession this is both a cheap and effective gag because we are forced to accept that certain absurdities of the show will be beyond logic. We are now ready to take on the Goodies’ milieu.
The second recording was ‘Playgirl Club’ (#04) which wears the late night slot on it’s sleeve. It is one of the smoothest productions from series one and required viewing should you ever have the opportunity. It is sleekly edited, surprisingly complex and remains pertinent as a distant satire on the Profumo scandal. Tragically the condition of the existing print means that it may never see the light of day, so the exhaustive transcript provided here is the best you’re likely to get. If no one else is bothering to preserve this stuff then we will.
‘Playgirl Club’ is completely out-of-step in terms of production order. The next three, ‘Give Police A Chance’ (#03), ‘Snooze’ (#02) and ‘Servants’ (#06) are all pretty damn hesitant with their aims and, in the case of ‘Snooze’, fall way short. They are not bereft of good bits although newcomers should approach them with a sympathetic eye. Robert Ross was right to observe that ‘Servants’ contradicts the aims of The Goodies by following a prosaic sitcom approach. This should never happen.
The final two recordings are essential documents of series one. ‘Army Games’ (#05) may use the familiar safety nets but the script is full of goodness. It’s star turn is Richard Caldicot (Brigadier) who never assumes a superiority over the rest of the cast. There is real discipline at work here.
‘Pirate Radio’ (#07) finishes the run and for once escapes the guest star net, the office net and the sight gag net with consummate ease. The repetition is hysterical ("...and now, ‘A Walk In The Black Forest’"), with Graeme’s derangement signalling a new approach for the show. Oddie and Garden at last dare to throw the format to the wind. The result is a classic.
The Goodies, then - sharp, funny and unrepeated. Seeing the show in sequential order undeniably informs an appreciation of later shows. They appear even more valuable and series one’s currency grows as a result. Every episode has its role to play. Even ‘The Lost Tribe’. And just wait until you hear about that.
