The only thing I remember about TPBR is a sketch about a phlegm shop. Don't remember if it was funny though.
Yeah, good idea - we'll put together a proper piece on this series soon. It's a minefield of Edit News, of course.
Sadowitz released an LP in 1988 called 'Gobshite', which was withdrawn almost immediately for libel reasons (references to Jimmy Saville, etc). It's pretty much the same live material as the 'Comedy Club' video, but with all the magic cut out.
I saw Sadowitz's 'Total Abuse show' at the Assembly Rooms during the last night of the 1987 Edinburgh Festival, the best peice of live stand up I have ever seen. I was outraged when BBC2 did that half-witted 'History of Alternative Comedy' show last year with Angus Deayton, and gave no mention to Sadowitz whatsoever. The man single-handedly responsible for the anti-Ben Elton/PC back-lash in the late 80's was wiped from history to make way for Donna McPhail clips galore.
Incidentally, I sneaked in a tape recorder into that show in '87, and still have a copy of it to this day. I cut some of the magic out of it myself, cause, being a twatty 16 year old, I recorded on a C60 cassete for a 70 minute show. It was the same run 'Gobshite' was taken from, but on a different night, so there is some extra stuff (berating Malcolm Hardee in the audience for not getting him enough work).
I saw Sadowitz live at Cardiff University in October 1989, and he was shockingly brilliant, so I awaited Pall Bearer's Revue with bated breath. It was a really strange programme - four half-hours on BBC2 in early 1992. But four's an unlikely number, which led me to wonder if it had been cut down from six half-hours (look forward to Edit News on this, cheers). The shows were absolutely all over the place, a mixture of superb and atrocious, but the fault could have been with the Beeb and not Sadowitz. Certainly, The People Vs. is a more suitable forum for his talents (be nice to see more magic though - he is a seriously gifted magician, and I seem to remember he did a short series for C4 on close-up magic one Christmas way back - possibly about 1990)- Channel 5 have done something right after all (although when are they going to show the rest of Twin Peaks - they stopped after episode six about three years ago).
Another thing that SOTCAA could do is dig up a copy of TimeOut from 1987, or thereabouts, which has a front cover showing Sadowitz strangling a Ben Elton doll. He did loads of anti-BE interviews, there was one in Melody Maker where he said "Alexei Sayle opened the door to a whole new wave of comedians and Ben Elton closed it" (I remember that because they used it in an advert). Did Ben Elton ever rise to the criticism?