It's that time of year again, when the TV schedulers wheel out their annual festive offerings along with a fair sprinkling of repeats. Usually a few comedy classics are dragged out to fill the schedules.
The perennial Christmas comedy classics are of course the likes of Dad's Army, Are you being served? and Porridge. These usually get trotted out over Christmas either as early evening or peak time fillers on BBC2. This year however, their seems to have been a really bizarre piece of scheduling when it comes to comedy repeats.
The Goodies has been chosen this year. This classic series is a bit unusual in that it can't be clearly defined as a more adult comedy series although their are plenty of adult themes and jokes. At the same time you can often find a high content of physical jokes that hark back to the days of 1920's or 30's silent films. So something for both adults and children to enjoy, containing both Monty Python surrealism with good old fashioned slapstick. The obvious place for a repeat you might expect a series like to be shown would be sometime between 5 and 8.30pm. Well.......you'd be wrong. The BBC schedulers in their infinite wisdom have chosen to show them at 11.30pm or later in some cases. Quite frankly a ridiculous piece of programme planning.
The BBC do seem to be almost embarrassed to be repeating it at all, they seem to be treating the series like a hideous vase that your auntie bought you, that only gets dragged out on display when she comes to visit. The Goodies has barely seen a repeat in the UK in the last 25 years, except for a couple of special occasions when they usually dragged out "Kitten Kong". Why are the BBC seemingly ashamed of this programme?
This year is the 40th anniversary of the first episode's broadcast. Did we get a short repeat run of classic episodes?. No. We got a welcome repeat of The Return of The Goodies, a tribute show first seen in 2005. It was good to see this again but a few actual episodes wouldn't have gone amiss.
Some may argue that the series isn't really a programme for children. Try telling that to my six year old daughter who has recently discovered the show (in fact she discovered my DVDs when she was bored one afternoon). As far as she is concerned the award winning "Kitten Kong" episode is a hilarious masterpiece, an opinion which I can only to readily agree with.
The three stars and creators of The Goodies are all very much from that same 1960's school of humour as Monty Python. In fact the series partly came into being because they didn't want to create a sketch series that was seen to be too similar to Python and draw inevitable comparisons. As it was they had already had a pretty good run with a sketch series "Broaden Your Mind" in 1968-69 and were looking for ideas.
The series ran on the BBC from 1970 through to 1980. Famously, in 1975 a viewer died laughing while watching an episode (no I'm not making this up I promise). The series had no shortage of guest stars willing to over act when required and generally enjoy themselves in the escapism. Then in 1980 the BBC decided that they wanted a rest from The Goodies, not a cancellation, just a break. Partly, it seemed due to the increasing costs to make the series (The BBC spent the allocated budget on making The Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy).
This led to the move to LWT, in the hope that commercial TV would lead to bigger budgets and more freedom. The Goodies made their debut on ITV over Christmas in 1981 but after one series LWT called time on The Goodies. After a single series accountants must have had a near fit when the costs had been counted. The freedom to make the series as they wanted turned out to be a bit of a myth,. If anything the constraints of commercial TV were even greater than they were at the BBC. In fact it's alleged that The Goodies were paid to NOT make anymore shows, not due to low ratings or adverse criticism of the show, but mainly because the series was so expensive to make. This left them in a bit of a void with a contract that had potentially several years to run, but unable to make anymore shows, bringing the series to an abrupt close.
Thankfully, in recent years the series has been re-appraised and has seen a few episodes successfully released on DVD (a new set has just been released in November), with an increasingly loyal fan base.
Here's a couple of classic clips:
First of all the finale of "Bunfight at the OK Tearooms":
Next, possibly the most famous episode ever made "Kitten Kong":
Finally, "Saturday Night Grease" and the legendary carrot down the trousers joke that caused a complaint from Mary Whitehouse (much to The Goodies pleasure):
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