They are a right pair of shitters.

How can you say that??? Isn't 'Milky, milky' a hil-AIR-ious thing to say??? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

(now THAT'S sarcasm)

They really were good on the Jasper Carrott Show, and I think, had they not been tagged as the "crap, untrendy ones" on Mary Whitehouse Experience, would have found the going easier. I saw them live in a pub in about 1988 and they were an excellent double act.

The stuff since Mary Whitehouse has been iffy, admittedly. Imaginatively-Titled Punt & Dennis Show and its follow-up (just called Punt & Dennis) suffered from pre-watershed slots which made them look like Russ Abbott's mid-season replacements.

However, Steve Punt is forgiven forever in my book, if only because he's on the best ever episode of the radio version of Room 101.

I've never been able to work out quite why they mug so badly when they're performing - is it because they're convinced their material is gut-crushingly hilarious and they're just bad performers, or are they aware of its apocalyptic awfulness and they're over-compensating to try and chivvy us into laughing? Answers on a postcard to that man over there.

P & D wouldn't know a good joke if it strapped on deelyboppers, hired a hot air balloon with "joke" written on it, gatecrashed one of their writing sessions and screamed down a loudhailer into their collected ears "I am a fucking joke."

>How can "the Corpses" defend anything Punt and Dennis did after they left Mary Whitehouse? I recently saw one of them appear as a pisspoor "ironic" (ie unfunny and aware of it) Max Headroom type character on That Awful Jack Dee thing. God.

That is crap, but their own two series were great, especially that sketch where they had to track down Krapotkin (Nick Hancock iirc).

Steve Punt did a lot of the work (most of it) in the Mary Whitehouse Encyclopaedia. Check the entry on 'Perchery' - a work of genius. Yes - most of their post Whitehouse stuff was dodgy, but good piss take on ER (OO-ER) on their BBC1 show, and Punt's Room 101 was a triumph ('this train... has failed.')

I remember when i read the MW encyclodpedia that only N&B seemed to have there entries noted - why was this? was there any reason?

Or is my memory just bad?

Sorry to name drop - well, I'm only dropping the names 'Punt' and 'Dennis' - but I interviewed P&D for my university newspaper in 1991 or something like that. I asked Steve Punt about this initial business and he responded that Newman and Baddiel insisted that all their entries be marked with an initial. Punt wasn't happy about this and only put his initial (S) on one or two entries that he felt were purely solo efforts. (I think there are a couple of D's as well) A great deal of the entries carry no initials and I seem to remember Punt saying that he and Dennis had written all or the bulk of these...

Of course, the traditional reason for the author leaving their name off their work is that it's shit. But that can't be the explanation.

yeah usually... but in this case most of the book is pretty good. I think it's just that Baddiel and Newman were already preparing to disassociate themselves from MWE when the book was written and wanted their own profile raised in the book. Punt wanted it to be more of a collective project, I think.

Or am I just taking this all too seriously? Probably... But the book is good, one of the best comedy tie-in books I've read.