for one of the most difficult to categorise comic characters – though ‘bastard son of E. L. Wisty’ would be a starting point – Mayall himself told Roger Wilmut in Didn’t You Kill My Mother-in-Law? ,‘My comedy is a lot less pointed than other people’s – the meaninglessness of my comedy is really the message. There’s hardly ever any constructive message in there … I don’t deal in words and rational ideas. I deal in the unusual, the exciting, the very personal …’
Before long Mayall and Edmondson had moved from the Store to the Comic Strip, to form a solid team of new comedians, each one ready to find a place for their humour on TV, as Rik had already managed, to an extent. Kevin Turvey may be an undervalued part of British Comedy history, but he remains the one thing most people remember about A Kick Up the Eighties . Though several writers worked for both shows, and Sean Hardie himself was executive producer for the first series fn3 , none of the new pretenders could compete with Not ’s ongoing success. With the fourth series lined up for the start of ’82, Lloyd and Hardie called their team together to lay out future plans.
Why Don’t You Grow Up, You Bastards?
‘We had an empire, we had a franchise,’ laments Lloyd, ‘and what I wanted to do was break into America, and I wanted to do movies, and, you know, make something that would last forever. Sean and I asked the cast to dinner, and the proposal we were going to make was that we were going to do exactly what the Pythons had done, when they started Monty Python Productions.’ With everyone gathered, however, Rowan had to offer an apology – in not so many words. ‘You’re all very nice people,’ he began, ‘and I like you a great deal and you’re all very talented … but I’ve talked to my agent, and he thinks that I shouldn’t play with the second eleven any more.’
Jaws dropped all around the table. ‘You won’t get Rowan being rude to people,’ Lloyd insists, ‘he doesn’t do rude to people. He was passingon a remark … He then left the restaurant and everybody else got fantastically drunk, because we all thought that was the end of our careers, basically. And we had to go in the next day and be polite to each other in rehearsal, which was pretty tricky.’ The BBC’s thirtieth-anniversary tribute of the debut, Not Again , did allow Atkinson a belated apology, when he jovially admitted, ‘Retrospectively, I’d like to apologise for my high-handed attitude towards the whole thing.’ But the fact remains that back in 1982 he had big plans: movies to make, and perhaps – like many a great comic keen to cement their place in comedy history – a solo sitcom vehicle which he and Curtis had already begun to toss back and forth. They were done with sketch comedy, as the third member of their trio, Howard Goodall, reflects today: ‘It would have been an odd thing had he stayed in a topical weekly TV show forever. You’re talking much more Chaplin, Jacques Tati-type character. Rowan needed to find a bigger, wider stage to play on. And boy, did he …’
Nevertheless, there were still six episodes slated to begin broadcast in February, so it was time for everyone to watch their backs, look to their own futures, and get back to work. It was more than a year since the third series had closed on a muted note – being broadcast a week after the murder of John Lennon, the screen had finally cut to black and ‘In My Life’ played as the credits rolled. fn4 Despite this long time away, the fourth and final series of Not hit the ground running, every episode packed with sketches which were soon to become classics.
Most people nowadays only know Not the Nine O’Clock News as an array of differing compilations or, of course, audio highlights (many taken from the fourth series). It may be that the rights holders fear that twenty-first-century sensibilities might be offended by some of the gags in uncut episodes, which could be
Before long Mayall and Edmondson had moved from the Store to the Comic Strip, to form a solid team of new comedians, each one ready to find a place for their humour on TV, as Rik had already managed, to an extent. Kevin Turvey may be an undervalued part of British Comedy history, but he remains the one thing most people remember about A Kick Up the Eighties . Though several writers worked for both shows, and Sean Hardie himself was executive producer for the first series fn3 , none of the new pretenders could compete with Not ’s ongoing success. With the fourth series lined up for the start of ’82, Lloyd and Hardie called their team together to lay out future plans.
Why Don’t You Grow Up, You Bastards?
‘We had an empire, we had a franchise,’ laments Lloyd, ‘and what I wanted to do was break into America, and I wanted to do movies, and, you know, make something that would last forever. Sean and I asked the cast to dinner, and the proposal we were going to make was that we were going to do exactly what the Pythons had done, when they started Monty Python Productions.’ With everyone gathered, however, Rowan had to offer an apology – in not so many words. ‘You’re all very nice people,’ he began, ‘and I like you a great deal and you’re all very talented … but I’ve talked to my agent, and he thinks that I shouldn’t play with the second eleven any more.’
Jaws dropped all around the table. ‘You won’t get Rowan being rude to people,’ Lloyd insists, ‘he doesn’t do rude to people. He was passingon a remark … He then left the restaurant and everybody else got fantastically drunk, because we all thought that was the end of our careers, basically. And we had to go in the next day and be polite to each other in rehearsal, which was pretty tricky.’ The BBC’s thirtieth-anniversary tribute of the debut, Not Again , did allow Atkinson a belated apology, when he jovially admitted, ‘Retrospectively, I’d like to apologise for my high-handed attitude towards the whole thing.’ But the fact remains that back in 1982 he had big plans: movies to make, and perhaps – like many a great comic keen to cement their place in comedy history – a solo sitcom vehicle which he and Curtis had already begun to toss back and forth. They were done with sketch comedy, as the third member of their trio, Howard Goodall, reflects today: ‘It would have been an odd thing had he stayed in a topical weekly TV show forever. You’re talking much more Chaplin, Jacques Tati-type character. Rowan needed to find a bigger, wider stage to play on. And boy, did he …’
Nevertheless, there were still six episodes slated to begin broadcast in February, so it was time for everyone to watch their backs, look to their own futures, and get back to work. It was more than a year since the third series had closed on a muted note – being broadcast a week after the murder of John Lennon, the screen had finally cut to black and ‘In My Life’ played as the credits rolled. fn4 Despite this long time away, the fourth and final series of Not hit the ground running, every episode packed with sketches which were soon to become classics.
Most people nowadays only know Not the Nine O’Clock News as an array of differing compilations or, of course, audio highlights (many taken from the fourth series). It may be that the rights holders fear that twenty-first-century sensibilities might be offended by some of the gags in uncut episodes, which could be
Similar Books
