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I was sad to hear of the death of Tim Brooke-Taylor. He is one of those comic figures who has always been there as far as I am concerned. I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again. The Goodies. I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue.
The Goodies was one of my favourite shows when I was a young teenager and I now suspect that is the age you had to be to enjoy it. There were some repeats a few years ago and the quality of them was desperately uneven.
But when the three of them - Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie - appeared with Matthew Sweet on BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking a couple of years ago, they made a strong case that The Goodies raised political issues that the BBC was often wary of covering elsewhere.
Listen to the programme.
3 comments:
Jonathan - I do agree with you that they were political. My strongest memory is of the episode where they use a vending machine and the pretend bank note they use has a picture of Margaret Thatcher on it. At school we were agog about this!
What would life be like, if we had never heard the Angus Prune tune and what preceded it. I still have some cassettes from the original broadcasts and will have to get them out and see if they are still playable.
I should also mention Jo Kendall who voiced all the female parts apart from Lady Constance de Coverlet, and received an equal billing with her male colleagues.
I never perceived The Goodies as political allegory at the time, but I was young. It was just silliness to my mates at school. It hasn't been repeated because it was something for the moment in time.
Likewise for The Young Ones, which combined a political element and silliness. I thought it was more a documentary than a comedy. Some of my friends lived in flats where one of the gas cooker burners sent up a flame that toasted the ceiling. I listened to David Bowie on a portable record player powered by the bulb socket in the outside toilet.
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