Today’s disc is the 1980 LP from a TV show called Not the Nine O’Clock News. [Side note – do people even know what LP means these days? It’s from ‘long playing’ or ‘long play’ and it’s what we used to call an album, a big record usually with several tracks on each side]. The show Not Nine O’Clock News was created by John Lloyd (who also produced Blackadder, Spitting Image and created QI) and it ran on BBC from 1979-82. It mainly featured the four performers Rowan Atkinson, Pamela Stephenson, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones and the writers included Colin Bostock-Smith, Andy Hamilton, Peter Brewis, Richard Curtis and Clive Anderson but the performers all got writing credits on the LP too (so I’m bit unclear why they aren’t listed as writers on Wikipedia).
Anyway, many people talk about Monty Python as the big influential UK sketch show but for one reason or another we had not been much of a Python family. It was a bit before my time and my oldest brother preferred the Goons (and all Spike Milligan stuff), if anything, while I think my Mum had been a fan of That Was The Week That Was (1962-3) and then in the 1970s she largely preferred her comedy via the mainstream joy that came from Morecambe and Wise, the Two Ronnies and sitcoms like The Good Life and Fawlty Towers (I enjoyed all these too - I watched pretty much any and all 1970s comedy).
Not the Nine O’Clock News was the first comedy show I remember watching that felt less safe (by 1980 I was 13 and looking for trouble). The show had silly faces and daft songs but, though a while before the rise of what was called alternative comedy, it had satire too and could be quite unpredictable. Also some of it was really funny (handy for a comedy show) – sketches like Gerald the Gorilla (a memorable one for Rowan Atkinson and included on this LP) still work very well. Atkinson was a big name in comedy for some time and became almost national treasure material via Blackadder (but don’t mention the Bean business). I can’t say he’s ever been my favourite but he did make a very good pompous ape. Smith and Jones did (and still do in Jones’ case) heaps of TV and other things. In 1981 the two of them founded the TV company Talkback that has produced many, many shows (they sold it in 2000). Mel Smith is the only one of the four no longer breathing (he died in 2013).
Doing my oh-so thorough research for this series, I was astonished to read that the ‘one woman’ spot (something that is only now going out of vogue in comedy) was first offered to Victoria Wood, who turned it down. This would have been a very different show with Wood in it and, much as I love VW, it was the very much not-British craziness and random glamour of Antipodean Pamela Stephenson that made the show a little different to everything else I had seen up to that point. With more than a touch of wildness and her many outfit changes, songs, wigs and false teeth, you never knew what she was going to do from week to week (a love song to Ayatollah Khomeini one week, teeth in for Esther Rantzen and Janet Street-Porter the next). After seeing nearly all men in TV comedy for most of the 1970s her presence certainly made my Mum and I sit up and watch her on this show. Here she is doing TV presenter/producer Street-Porter (with Rowan Atkinson doing his OTT thing – it’s lasted less well, I think):
Stephenson went on, of course, to retrain as a clinical psychologist, write bestsellers about her husband (actual national treasure Billy Connolly), and present a fascinating set of TV interviews under the name Shrink Rap (her episode with Robin Williams was brilliant). Stephenson was also great on Strictly when she took part in 2010 (and had the best nearly-fall in the show’s history).
Comedy records/LPs were quite the thing (before you could have VHS and then DVD and now Netflix specials of your favourite comedy shows and comedians). I still have one of my Dad’s comedy LPs (from 1961, see below), though this one is all songs. I keep it for totally sentimental reasons. In some ways I don’t know much about him but I know he loved comedy and so does most of the family. Keeeeep laughing.
And back to something more like music tomorrow.
For the first intro post to this series go here.
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