Five Go Mad on TV

Rip It Up, Issue 109, 1 August 1986, Page 18

Five Go Mad on TV

In a country being gradually closed down by an accountant’s : government, London stays conspicuously on the up-and-up. While the “For Sale” and “To Let” signs go up and stay up in Northern centres, property values in the dirty old city soar, things happen and space is at a premium. . Anything could happen, and it could be right now ...

But there’s an ironic edge to any term like “city of opportunity.” Certainly, there are dozens of paths with AA signs reading sicituradastra, but the gates are narrow and there’s a mob clamouring outside each one. For this reason we get popstars more dedicated to their own success than their pop — the difference between a baseline standard of living and (just the other side of the line) “making it” is massive.

The Comic Strip people are not rich, but — office in Soho, artistic freedom — they can be said to have “made it". In New Zealand they’re known for the odd one-off Comic

Strip episode that TVNZ has deigned to show, like Bad News Tour and the Famous Five spoofs. More particularly, four — Adrian Edmonsdon, Rik Mayall and Nigel Planer and fringe member Alexei Sayle — are loved from the almost inevitably successful The Young Ones, a TV comedy breakout of a like unseen since Monty Python tumbled across the screen. Now they’ve just made their first feature film, Supergrass, which has even turned a small profit from its UK box office. Six years ago they were doing comedy in a Soho club that hosted strip shows every other night of the week. It was called the Comedy Store and Alexei Sayle presided as MC, sounding a gong if he decided the audience was giving the thumbs down to some hapless joker who had taken the stage in return for a free drink and his entrance fee back. One night the only person who actually paid to get in duly got his free drink and his money back. But the venue gradually gained popularity (it still exists today in a similar form) and when TV chatshow hosts Clive James and Janet Street Porter paid a visit, there was still more publicity. One of the regulars, Peter Richardson, who was to become the Comic Strip producer, perceived the time was right for a move on. He chose the six best acts and moved to the Raymond Revue Bar (another, classier, sometime strip club). The new show became trendy — Jack Nicholson and Mick and Bianca Jagger were among those to pass through the door in 1981-82, and the Comic Strip shared the stage with the likes of a fledgling Pamela Stephenson. After UK and Australian tours in

1982, a deal was struck for a series of short comedy films with the new private TV channel Channel 4. In a situation not dissimilar to that which has seen locals Funny Business offered a show by TVNZ, the BBC got a little nervous about the new competition and an idea Rik Mayall had had for a while became The Young Ones. The Young Ones was a huge popular success, but it always had a limited lifespan and it finished more than two years ago after two series (which NZ viewers saw end-on-end last year). But the Comic Strip gathered more talent about itself and has made 14 half-hour TV films, and hour-long one called The Bullshitters (a spoof of The Professionals), and has just begun on a new series of hour-long films. There’s also, as mentioned, Supergrass.

The series have included a number of part-timers like Sayle and Robbie Coltrane and even the regulars (including Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, who also write as a team) don’t appear in everything and tend to have their own projects on the go at various times.

This much is evident in the Comic Strip office, as Rose the receptionist works through a swath of phone calls, trying to co-ordinate everyone for rehearsals, meetings, interviews... current project is a sequel to Bad News Tour. It might almost be an ordinary business office, were it not for the garb (jeans, sweatshirts, sports shoes, unfussy haircuts) and the attitude (the friendly, prodding way that people involved in the biz of wit and articulacy generally talk to each other). A rather funny business indeed ... RB