Smarter Than The Average!

"Breaking news at this hour!"

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 20:41:27 +0100

“Breaking news at this hour!”

- Catchphrases That Somehow Never Caught On: PFFR

John Cleese and Michael Palin interviewed on The Dick Cavett Show

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 04:30:04 +0100

John Cleese and Michael Palin interviewed on The Dick Cavett Show:

With thanks to the original uploader

The Quietus Reviews: Monty Python's Flying Circus - The Infamous TV Soundtrack

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:08:44 +0100

The Quietus Reviews: Monty Python's Flying Circus - The Infamous TV Soundtrack:

Immense kudos to De Wolfe for putting this CD out. Buy it here

My excellent cockney accent

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:41:48 +0100

Letter to the Daily Mail, 15th July 1982:

The real thing!

In her TV review of Twentieth Century Box, Mary Kenny reaches the conclusion ‘as in My Fair Lady’ that my excellent cockney accent ‘just can’t be real’.

Mary thinks I either learned it from a ‘Teach Yourself Cockney’ cassette or else I am Hungarian.

Quite obviously Mary grew up in a quaint little Oirish village where she gathered her stereotypes from stiff British black and white films wherein the maid would whine about ‘toffs’, exclaim ‘cor bloomin’ and never dare get involved in this ‘ere new fangled television lark’.

Sorry to spoil the joke gal, but colourful Baker was born in Deptford and has lived for the past 24 years in the well known Hungarian hamlet of Bermondsey, SE16. He never attended university, nor RADA nor even the fiendish Loveaduck School of Ethnic Linguistics, Budapest.

He does, however, enjoy eels and mash (for which he is learning to use cutlery).

Consider yourself one of us, Mary!

DANNY BAKER,

London, W.

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog makes his first Tonight Show appearance

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:07:54 +0100

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog makes his first Tonight Show appearance:

If anyone could send us a link to clips which can be viewed outside the US, we’d be most grateful!

Vintage Stand-Up Comedy

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:16:25 +0100

Vintage Stand-Up Comedy:

“Out of print, spoken word stand-up comedy from the 1930s through the 1990s. Plus… the occasional musical funny.”

SOTCAA is back! No, seriously this time

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:43:29 +0100

SOTCAA is back! No, seriously this time

Meaning of Life stencil, spotted at Islington’s Chapel...

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:16:11 +0100

Meaning of Life stencil, spotted at Islington’s Chapel Market by friend of STTA Oliver Levy

Oh No, It’s The Neighbours!

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:00:00 +0100

From page 29 of the Evening Standard, 22nd November 1990:

Dramatis Personified

The thespian’s lot is not a happy one-or so Nicholas Craig would have you believe. His creator Nigel Planer talks to FRANCIS WHEEN about the agonies and the agonising of the actor

NICHOLAS Craig is an actor, with the emphasis strongly on the second syllable. Whatever part he is rendering – Lord Foppishness in School for Fops, or (on all fours) Towzha in Hovel’s brilliant satire Dogs of Tblonsk at the Cottesloe Theatre, or even the punk rock son Gob in the TV sitcom Oh No, It’s The Neighbours! – this disciple of Thepis takes his craft seriously.

“The actor,” he once wrote, “must know what it’s like to be everything from a Mongol Emperor to an Elderly Passer-by, he must know how the Frenchman feels when the alarm clock goes off, he must know how the alarm clock feels, he must experience the pain of the carrot on the chopping board, or how is he to tell the Truth?” In a new television series starting tonight, Nicholas Craig – The Naked Actor (BBC2, 10.10), Craig aims to share that truth, and indeed that pain, with us.

Nigel Planer, the man who begat Nicholas Craig, is also an actor. Though many people still think of him merely as Neil, the Hippy from The Young Ones, he has been quietly extending his repertoire in the past two couple of years – a leading role in Dennis Potter’s Blackeyes, for instance, and a part as a pregnant man in Emma Tennant’s recent television drama Frankenstein’s Baby. Now he is treading the boards at the Globe Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, in Alan Ayckbourn’s Man of the Moment which has just been named Comedy of the Year in the Evening Standard Drama Awards.

In the awards game, however, poor Planer still hasn’t caught up with his alter ego Craig, who won “Best Actor in a Hitherto Unperformed Late-Jacobean Tragedy” for his performance as Truepate in The Cuckolde of Leicester a few years ago – though he modestly dismissed the trophy as an invidious gewgaw.

“Art is not competitive,” Craig nobly pointed out at the time. “There should be no prizes. So, to see it engraved on a bronze statuette that one is a better actor than Jeremy Irons (it doesn’t actually say that, but that, effectively, is what it means), is simply embarrassing for both of us.

“It’s absurd. I’ve seen Jeremy be bloody good in some shows. I’m sure we all have.” For the benefit of other thesps who find themselves in this position, he has devoted a whole episode of his new series to Awards Technique – with particular reference to the acceptance speech, including obligatory mentions of one’s agent, the rainforests, the Rose Theatre and VAT on theatre seats.

The character of Nicholas Craig was conceived four years ago by Planer and the playwright Christopher Douglas. His first public appearance was the book, I, An Actor (1988), a brilliant satire on dramatic affectations, which – much to Planer’s delight – was taken seriously by at least one reader. “It could almost be a send-up of a theatrical autobiography,” a baffled reviewer wrote in the Yorkshire Post. The verdict in the trade journal, The Stage, was blunter: “Ha, bloody ha.”

Craig’s television debut was an “Interview Masterclass” on the Late Show last year in which – using clips from Wogan – he coached his fellow actors in Chat-Show Skills. (Which uproarious anecdotes about Johnny Gielgud should one tell? Are blue blazer and Garrick Club ties de rigueur, even for actresses?)

The new series follows this model. Tonight’s episode, on “Actorship”, has a glorious montage of chat-show veterans – Anthony Sher, Maureen Lipman, Anthony Andrews, Jane Asher, Peter Barkworth – all furrowing their brows and telling us what sheer bloody agonies they endure for their art. Like a stuck record, a grim-faced Anna Massey turns up every so often to repeat that acting is “torture”.

Meeting Nigel Planer in a Soho café last week, I was disconcerted to discover that he sometimes slips into the sort of portentous talk that is mocked in the Nicholas Craig programmes. “We are talking about levity and giving gravity,” he said with a frown when I asked about the new series – though he did then add “it’s bloody funny as well”, which it certainly is. The same thing happened when I asked Planer whether, as an actor, he might find himself turning into Nicholas Craig. No, he said, because he already is Nicholas Craig in many ways. “His attitudes, the way his mind works, are very much an exorcism of one’s own way of thinking.” Heavy, as Neil the Hippy might say. But then came the deflating coda again. “It’s a funny old business,” he mused. It sure is. Whereas Nicholas Craig’s TV series may look like a pretty sharp put-down of grease-painted luvvies and darlings, Nigel Planer seems desperate to assure is that it is all done with tremendous respect. “It’s not the backbiting jealousy that passes for satire these days. There’s a lot of crap that’s just bitching at each other, slagging each other off. I’m too soppy for that.”

Oh yeah? What about the review of Kenneth Branagh’s autobiography which Planer – in his Nicholas Craig persona – wrote for The Sunday Correspondent? It seems that Planer was guilt-stricken immediately afterwards. I had to leave a message on Branagh’s answering machine, saying I’m sorry. He rang back and said don’t worry.” Besides, Planer added, although he had been willing to criticise the Branagh book, “I wouldn’t attack his film of Henry V.” Soppy is the word.

The Naked Actor, then is wholesome entertainment, with no slagging or bitching, but with plenty of useful and indeed nourishing hints on theatrical moustaches, vintage cars (essential in TV drama) and the use of waistcoats as props. Back to Nicholas Craig for a final, and typically modest, comment: “I hope viewers have as much fun watching The Naked Actor as I had making it. It really is much too early for all this premature prattle about nominations and awards and so on. The Naked Actor is just a simple statement about actors, for actors, by an actor.” The Golden Rose of Montreux may soon join The Cuckolde of Leicester trophy on his mantelpiece.

Life's Too Short To Keep Talking To Executives: A Decade of Unproduced Eric Idle Projects

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:59:25 +0100

“I’ve got lots of projects. I love thinking of ideas and coming up with the projects; I find that much more satisfying than just staying on, trying to sell a thing I wrote years ago. I just leave ‘em there, so people can find them.” - Eric Idle, Starlog #142, May 1989.

1981 - The Pirates of Penzance: Kim ‘Howard’ Johnson reports in Prevue #44, February/March 1981, that “Idle will script and star in a $12 million film version of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Pirates of Penzance. It’s unrelated to the current Broadway production starring Linda Ronstadt. Shooting is scheduled for April”. On Page 20 of the Friday the 22nd of August 1986 edition of the Evening Standard Idle said that “I actually spent a long time on a screenplay of The Pirates of Penzance for Hollywood but which was actually to be shot in Cornwall. Then they went and filmed the stage show. That’s the film business - but at least I got the cheque” The Broadway version was adapted by Universal and starred the majority of its Broadway cast, including Kevin Kline in only his second film as the Pirate King, the role Idle would have played. A illustrated copy of Idle’s screenplay resides in the BFI Library’s Special Collection. In September to November 1986 and February to April 1987 Idle appeared at The Coliseum with the English National Opera Company in Jonathan Miller’s production of another Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, The Mikado, where he played Ko-Ko, The Lord High Executioner of Titipu. It was shown on British television on ITV on Wednesday the 30th of December 1987, and in America as part of PBS’Greatest Performances series on Wednesday the 28th of October 1988. An abridged album, recorded on Sunday the 11th and Monday the 12th of October 1986 at Abbey Road EMI Studios, was released on That’s Entertainment Records in Spring 1987.

1983 - The Rutland Isles: Various drafts of a screenplay for Paramount. Idle explained to Monty Python news source The Daily Llama about this script in an article uploaded on Sunday the 9th February 2003: “At some point in the early 1980s I got the idea of doing a documentary about a group of islands that don’t exist. What a terrific idea, I thought, a story of a place. Not just the story of a few people, but whole peoples, different cultures, different ways of life. They would be called The Rutland Isles and they would be a parody of a travel documentary with weird animals. We would visit strange places and use real documentary footage. I wrote quite a lot of material and then did outlines of a visit to six of these different islands - Poluçion, Paranoia, Amnesia, Contracepçion, Revoluçion, and Liberaçion. Nobody was interested. Not agents, not friends, not people in the media, not even relatives. Not even my dog. It was weird. The reaction was nada. Zero. Zip. Fairly early on my main character became clear to me. I always heard his voice as that gentle insistent civilized informative voice of David Attenborough whose immensely popular and entertaining series on Life on Earth and its various inhabitants were just beginning on BBC TV. I had just finished writing and directing The Frog Prince for cable and I would often sit around and play guitar with Ricky Fataar and Van Dyke Parks and Charlie Dore. I began writing songs for The Rutland Isles. I find this a great way forward in any project. About 1983 we went into a studio in Santa Monica and made some very nice tracks with this bunch of friends. I had spent a lot of time on the Caribbean islands of Barbados and Trinidad and the music we made then was heavily influenced by those great times. It still remains joyful and relaxed and this recorded music has always kept my love of these Rutland islands going. Imaginary music from imaginary places”.

1983 - The Road To Mars: Various drafts of a screenplay for Embassy Pictures, and Warner Brothers. Described on Eric Idle’s 1988 press release, Eric Idle (his life), as “a science friction look at the future of Showbusiness”. Interviewed by Kim ‘Howard’ Johnson for Starlog #142, May 1989, Idle said that “I love The Road To Mars. I spent years on it. In my dreams, it was always for Robin Williams, and either Dan Aykroyd or Bill Murray, playing two comedians in space. Bowie’s trying to pick it up at the moment for him and Bob Goldthwait, with Bowie playing the sexy robot who gets all the girls. I’ve always thought Robin should play a Bob Hope character, where he would be free to comment and be free within a character. The Road To Mars was actually finalized - we had based it at $11 million many years ago, and it finally went around. Hollywood at $19 million. I wanted it to be the first space comedy, though now Mel Brooks has done Spaceballs. I always felt there was room for a space comedy, and I didn’t want to do a Star Wars parody because I don’t think that’s real. I wanted to make it reality-based, a ‘Road Film of the Future’ - that was my idea. It takes place 100 years from now. People out in these boring space stations have everything they want on video and film - what they don’t have is live entertainment. So, there are comedians going around doing shows - that’s the premise. They tour these space stations, and it’s really the pits in show business, travelling by spacecraft to go to these gigs. There is a cruise ship in the script, with all these old women, and it’s based on something that my mother said. She told her friends, ‘I’m going around the world again. This is my third time. I wish there was somewhere else to go!’ And it was perfect. I figure that in the future, the only people with time and money are the retired, who can afford to spend three years getting to Jupiter. There would be huge space cruisers, like there are ocean liners, touring with lots of little old ladies! I love that project, and always enjoyed it, but life’s too short to keep talking to executives. I turned down Paramount. They wanted to do it, but change everything. It was a classic case. They wouldn’t touch the cast of Robin Williams, Dan Aykroyd and David Bowie. They thought it was really uncommercial at the time I was doing the deal. It’s a really mad idea. These people will never sell!’ Then they wanted to alter the basic premise from comedians in space to people who remove furniture in space. I decided, ‘I don’t need this. Life’s too short.’”. Years later, during his run in The Mikado, Idle was rewriting the Little List song nightly so as to comment on topical events. It received big laughs at each performance and launched Idle’s ambition to finally create a musical of his own. The first attempt was a reworking of The Road To Mars by Idle and composer John Du Prez into a musical called Outta Space! (or Out of Space, as it was called in the 1993 press release for Missing Pieces). Idle quoted some of the lyrics in a piece promoting Spamlot uploaded to the Daily Llama on Monday the 26th July 2004: “It was about a couple of comedians on the road in space but the best moments featured a chorus of quite possibly gay Welsh Robots singing to a Diva they adored: ‘Do we love Irena Kent?/Yes we do. Yes we do./Is she down from heaven sent?/Yes she be. You can bet your sweet butt she be’. Still the first white gay Negro spiritual. Nobody bought it”. It nearly made it onto British television when London Weekend Television bought the rights to another Idle-Du Prez musical production, but this too fell through. Idle finally managed to get The Road to Mars released when he reworked it into a a novel, published by Pantheon in 1999.

1984 - Seaview Drive: Half-hour teleplay for ABC.

1984 - Hot Property: Screenplay for Paramount. A rewritten version of The Rutland Isles. As Idle told The Daily Llama, “one day I was sitting around in the South of France when my phone rang. It was Hollywood calling. Don Simpson, a famous movie producer, and partner of Jerry Bruckheimer, had somehow got wind of my script, read it and loved it. He went on and on about it. He talked about Jonathan Swift how it was the greatest piece of satire etc etc - on and on for an hour. Non stop. How could I be anything but bowled over? At last, everything I had always wanted to hear about my project. I got off the phone totally blown away. So, of course, this being Hollywood calling I had to fly immediately to New York to meet this man. Next thing I am in a smart hotel on Fifth Avenue ringing on the Suite door. A thin anxious looking man answers. This is Jerry. He looks kind of worried. ‘Don’s not up yet’ he explains and we have some coffee and bullshit until, from the wreckage of a nearby bedroom, Don finally emerges in a bath towel with wet hair looking kinda the worse for wear. But soon it’s all business as Don gets down to notes. He loves it, but of course things are going to have to be changed. To start with this is now a movie so we are going to need some characters. And a plot. I remembered an opening I wrote for The Meaning of Life, a long piece of prose about a plane crash in the open sea, where the hero ends up on the First Class Life raft. So that’s gonna be the movie. It’s now about a small group of people, a rock star, a TV journalist, a Bishop, a bimbo, and an angry politician, who arrive on the beach of a strange island”.

c.1984 - National Lampoon’s Australian Vacation: Uncompleted screenplay for Warner Brothers. After appearing in National Lampoon’s European Adventure, Idle and the film’s star Chevy Chase planned out a possible sequel. He told Kim ‘Howard’ Johnson for his book Life Before and After Monty Python: The Solo Flights of the Flying Circus (U.S.: St Martin’s Press, U.K.: Plexus, 1993) “it’s a little-known fact that I wrote a Vacation for Chevy - Vacation Down Under. We spent some time working together on it. It had some nice shark gags, but I can’t pretend it was in any way finished…”. Since there is no mention of it in National Lampoon chairman Matty Simmons’ detailed year-by-year autobiography If You Don’t Buy This Book We’ll Shoot This Dog: Life, Laughs, Love and Death at the National Lampoon - which fully describes the production of other aborted National Lampoon movies such as National Lampoon’s Jaws 3, People 0 and National Lampoon’s The Joy of Sex - it can be assumed this was never a serious contender to be the next in the Vacation series. In 2003 Simmons wrote and executive produced the direct-to-video National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie’s Island Adventure, which boasted a special appearance by Idle.

1985 - Hamlet Prince of Dallas: Teleplay for Showtime.

1985 and 1986 - The Rutland Triangle and And Now This. Screenplays for Columbia. Both screenplays are reworkings of The Rutland Isles. Idle told the Daily Llama: “It’s now about a guy who joins a US TV station and whose TV van washes ashore after a violent storm sinks their ferry, with an obnoxious TV presenter called Maisy whom he hates. They begin to broadcast from these islands which no one can seem to find or identify. Something very weird is happening and at the end, after having been kidnapped, they escape by boat just in time as - get this - the islands take off. That’s an image I always loved, a whole island group lifting off and sailing away into space. Water dripping off as they lift away. They were aliens you see…. But that’s the problem. The Rutland Isles to me are real islands, inhabited by real people. They are a parody of the real world, a way of laughing at the ways we look at ourselves and our cultures. It doesn’t work to have plot and character shoveled in. Don moved on to his own private tragedy and I picked up a new producer and good friend in David Giler who took the project to several studios while we played that form of touch football known as development. Various studios seemed interested but no one committed, and it eventually sank back into that sand bank that is the graveyard of good ideas…”. Ideas from all drafts were adapted into a CD and calendar, both called The Rutland Isles, released by BMG in March 2003.

May/July 1986 - The Legendary Syd Gottleib: Teleplay for Showtime. Idle’s 1988 press release describes it as “a Hollywood mockumentary about the Lost Tycoon”. Idle told Kim ‘Howard’ Johnson for his Starlog interview that the title character is “this awful Hollywood producer who made endless films like Lunch at Tiffany’s. It’s aRutles-type documentary on this guy who has just died, a tribute to him”. This interview also spells the film’s title differently to the press release, calling it The Legendary Sid Gottlieb.

c.1987 - Taxi To Hell: Screenplay for Prominent Pictures. Idle says in Starlog that “it’s about an ordinary guy who gets possessed by the devil. The devil comes out of the guy’s stomach and starts ruining his life, for various reasons of his own, and we end up in hell! It’s a mix between the Faust and Orpheus legends, and is good fun”.

1991 - Behind The Crease: Musical teleplay for London Weekend Television. In his 1987 Starlog interview, Idle mentioned he was working on a musical production called The Back Page, and that it was set in the West Indies and “is about cricket, sex and royalty - the three English obsessions!”. It was written with John Du Prez shortly after their collaboration on Outta Space! and, over a few years of alternate drafts and new titles (one of which was Sticky Wicket), the show became a seventy-five-minute BBC radio play called Behind The Crease, starring Idle and Gary Wilmot and produced by the late Harry Thompson. It was recorded in front of a live audience at the BBC’s Paris studios, Lower Regent Street, on Friday the 27th of April 1990 and broadcast on Radio 4 on Sunday the 28th of July 1990. According to the second issue of short-lived comedy magazine The Heckler, June 1991, Behind The Crease was commissioned for development by London Weekend Television. No visual version of the musical was forthcoming.

BONUS UNPRODUCED ERIC IDLE PROJECT:

In 1993 Eric Idle and John Du Prez wrote the story and songs for what they hoped Hollywood would turn into a theatrical animated musical based on Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat. In an article on PythOnline.com Idle talked about one of the pitch meetings he had a year later: “I had a pleasant meeting with a Mr. Steven Spielberg, who listened politely to my pitch (with a streaming cold) and kindly declined because he said ‘Animations with animal leads don’t make money.’ I was encouraged to discover that even the greatest of names can be mistaken when The Lion King opened a few weeks later! He then cast me as Dibbs in Casper to prevent my writing anything further…”. Obviously, after seeing him in Casper Spielberg must have been enamoured by Idle’s acting abilities as on pages 1 and 2 of the Sunday the 22nd of May 1994 edition of the Mail On Sunday the following was reported:

Dr Who’s flying circus

By PAUL NATHANSON
Media Correspondent

MONTY Python star Eric Idle is to play the world’s most famous time traveller in a Steven Spielberg version of Dr Who.

He will enter the Tardis with Baywatch actress Pamela Anderson as his assistant and Peter O’Toole as his father in the multi-million-pound television series The New Adventures Of Dr Who.

Spielberg approached Idle, 51, who enjoyed huge success in America with the film Nuns On The Run, thinking he would appeal to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.

Idle, who appears in Spielberg’s new film, Casper The Friendly Ghost, is expected to earn £34,000 for each episode of the £20 million series. Filming is due to start in California in July.

The British director of Thelma And Louise, Ridley Scott, has been asked to handle the pilot programme.

The BBC axed Dr Who in 1989 after 26 years. Ratings had slumped from 16 million to four million. It was the world’s longest-running science fiction series and had a maximum audience of 110 million in 70 countries.

Spielberg’s original choice for the role was British actor Alan Rickman, who stole the show from Kevin Costner when he played the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. But Rickman did not want to commit himself to 30 episodes in America.

Idle will become the eighth actor to have played the Doctor. The BBC character was portrayed by William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy.

Dr Who Magazine assistant editor Marcus Hearn admitted that Rickman was the favourite candidate among the publication’s 31,000 readers because ‘he could have brought out the darker, mysterious side of the Doctor’.

But he said last night: ‘Eric Idle could be a great success. Jon Pertwee was one of the most successful actors in the role and he came from the radio comedyThe Navy Lark.’

Scarf

Michael Palin, a fellow ex-Python said: ‘Eric would be a spiffing Dr Who - he has a youthful quality though he’s middle-aged. He’s mischevious like Dr Who, and he’d look great in a scarf.’

The series is a co-production between the BBC, Universal Television and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Television. The BBC expects to reap a significant advantage from the expected £66 million merchandising sales. It will retain ownership of the Dr Who character and benefit from a follow-up Dr Who movie.

In October 1996, The Quite Remarkable Adventures of The Owl and the Pussycat was released as a book by Dove Books, and a talking book with songs by Dove Audio.

The main difference between the modern actor and the player of old is “telly”

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:00:00 +0100

From The Radio Times, 17-23 November 1990, page 11:

COMIC STRIPPED?

A FOP, A DANDY in a fedora, above all an actor – thespian Nicholas Craig is the terribly creative alter ego of Nigel Planer. In a new series of spoof documentaries, Craig draws back the curtain on his theatrical life.

‘Every night of the week, twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays, someone’s life is changed by a live theatrical performance of extraordinary raw power. That’s only possible because of the extraordinary race of people called Actors.’ So says Nicholas Craig, as he muses on the innate extraordinariness of theatrical types, in his new series, The Naked Actor.

Craig hasn’t always been a famous face. He first realised he was special as a young shaver at Bexhill-on-Sea, before going on to appear in Benjamin Britten’s opera, The Squashed Boy, and Blake’s Seven. All the blood, sweat and tears along the way forbid him to be precious about his profession. ‘We run out of coffee like Mr Joe Ordinary on the top of the Clapham omnibus and we occasionally throw our lunch at people just like everyone else.’

In this personal study of the acting discipline, Craig looks at rehearsals (‘climbing the mountain’), the method (‘it’s all very well going “mumble mumble” and staring at your navel, but American acting lacks the gut-wrenching primal thrill of English acting’) and the art of television. ‘The actor is a troubadour – but the main difference between the modern actor and the player of old is “telly”. I like to think of telly as my own portable village green, keeping me in touch with the real people. Whatever medium one’s in, be it classical theatre, films, telly or dressing up as Mr Kia-Ora at the Ideal Homes Exhibition, the same rules apply. Nigel Havers brings as much emotional fire-power to a Lloyds bank ad as he would to an episode of Bergerac. RICHARD JOHNSON

Nicholas Craig, The Naked Actor - Thursday BBC1

“Why can’t the bastard just stick to plasterers and kebab shop owners!”

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:00:26 +0100

From The Guardian, 28th November 1989. Note the reference to Harry Enfield’s Norbert Smith: A Life:

Nigel Planer, actor and parodist, tells Robert Gore-Langton of his progress from Neil to Nicholas and a one-man show

Darling, you’ll be wonderful

WHILE Nigel Planer stars in the new Dennis Potter BBC series, Blackeyes, his alter-ego, the award-winning Nicholas Craig, (“acto ergo sum”), will simultaneously make his debut at the Hampstead Theatre. Craig has now written his autobiography (I, An Actor), he has done his radio series, and the time is now ripe for an appearance in a one-man show. Audiences can experience for themselves the gut-wrenching primal thrillingness of this major talent. For the first time, Craig can truthfully say “Actavi” – I have acted.

Craig of course is the ultimate in in-house actor satires, a Comic Strip offshoot which lampoons the “darling, you were marvellous” stage world. A blend of pastiche, cliché and observation, Craig represents the bitchy, self-regarding side of the trade. There is currently a vogue for such actor send-ups. John Sessions did much to remodel Olivier in his own Sir Larry O’Lovey image, while Harry Enfield’s recent spoof South Bank Show special on Norbert Smith, shot on location in the actor’s Dunhammin retreat, was an exquisitely produced master-class in Ealing film parody. Like the lentil-brained folk-singer Neil in the Young Ones, who became author and pop-star, the character of Nicholas Craig is, explains Planer, in the process of expansion.

“Nicholas’s ego has grown. The stage we are at now with this show is slightly more than a book reading but not quite a full-blown Dame Edna experience.” Craig’s rise to prominence has also proved a point. “When the character of Neil in the Young Ones started to accelerate out of control, I wanted to show that what I do is not just a hippy. What I do is create a detailed character and develop him into a monster….

“There has been Mr Dear MacTavish – the animated correspondence between Sir Walter Scott and his publisher, but that was a slacks and lentern job – a dead writer show,” says Planer. “This is more like, say, Ian McKellen’s show where he is being Ian McKellen doing bits of Shakespeare. If it works ten it will develop into something bigger perhaps. In fact we did write a treatment for a TV documentary called “I Must Act.” Alas, this was pre-empted by Harry Enfield’s documentary. “Why can’t the bastard just stick to plasterers and kebab shop owners!” moans a cheerful Planer.

The character of Neil, an appalling folk singer, in fact predated the Young Ones by several years. Neil’s Book of the Dead was the result of much research in the British Library poring over copies of Oz. The same is true of I, An Actor, which draws on a close working knowledge of straight acting (Planer was Che in Evita and Christopher Douglas, his collaborator, is a writer and actor, veteran of 43 episodes on The Onedin Line) and their own collections of old Plays and Players magazines and books by other actors.

Readings from I, An Actor given at the Cottlesloe Theatre – “far more challenging than a comedy venue, doing it at the National is after all a bit of a bank raid. I love the espionage of it all. The covert nature of it. Chris and I are actually great theatre fans. I suppose when we started to do a book of an actor’s rehearsal diaries it was to exorcise our bitterness and envy of people more good looking and successful than ourselves. What we are doing is satire, it’s cruel and we’re not wimpy about the fact. We have created a live human being. You can’t then insult actors by getting the details wrong.

“The joke is not that Craig is a bad actor. He is actually a good actor, or what passes these days for a good actor. For me the humour is the bad concealment of his huge vanity, and, of course, his completely bastardish behaviour, which is so rife in the profession. There’s a huge amount of back-stabbing and the efforts to conceal it are desperately funny. It’s the new generation of actors we target, but we ourselves are part of it all. We are as bogus as the best of them.”

Research has been extensive and cruel. The actors’ books (titles are a source of laughter, currently it is Berkoff’s new tome, I Am Hamlet), the cuttings, tapes of Callow’s Masterclass to Anthony Andrews’ Desert Island Discs have all been played and replayed. The Guardian, too, has been an invaluable source of quotations. Planer lovingly recites a personal favourite from actress Tilda Swinton: “Anybody who thinks acting is easy hasn’t seen the armpits of my War Requiem costume.” Most wicked was the compilations of actorisms for the Late Show in which, to Planer’s delight, one actress remarked that the profession was just “incredibly (pause) incredible.”

I, An Actor will naturally receive a midnight matinee so that all Craig’s “bloody good mates” in the biz can see the show after their own “perfs”. The rest of the nation will be more likely to catch him another step further from the world of light entertainment in the dramatically heavyweight arena of Blackeyes, Potter’s adaptation of his novel. The controversy is already flaring, and the entire series has been condemned by Time Out as “a pile of sexist shit”.

Planer remains sanguine about the series which he considers “no more sexual exploitation that you get in a Flake ad.” His own role is that of Jeff, the New Man, a figment of an old lech of a novelist’s imagination. “I’m hoping that it was ill be disturbing to men rather than offensive to women.” From Planer’s point of view it offers a chance merely to act. At Hampstead, as Nicholas Craig, actor, he will attempt “to other be”.
• Blackeyes begins on BBC2 on Wednesday at 9.25; I, An Actor opens at the Hampstead Theatre (01-722 9301) on Wednesday

One supposes one has to put down some yawn-making facts

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:48:50 +0100

From The Guardian, 27th August 1988:

Actors bared between covers

Dennis Barker

DEAR hearts, such goings on! A very forward man named Nicholas Craig, calling himself an actor, invited one to a cup of coffee in the lounge of the Holiday Inn, Swiss Cottage – an area in which one occasionally sees men of the theatre go clanking round the streets in leather and chains – to discuss his new book, I, An Actor, revealing the secrets of his profession.

Judging by the tone of the invitation letter, this person was as camp as a summertime activity of the Boy Scouts, and sly with it. “Laurence Olivier, Anthony Sher, and Simon Callow have all made tremendously plucky stabs at writing books, but it seems to have fallen to me to pen the definitive ‘inside story’, to assess the talents (and shortcomings) of my colleagues, to hunt out some pricelessly rare photographs of them, in short to rip the covers off the acting profession…”

Nor bad one found the contents of what he calls his “oeuvre” free from cattiness. In a so-called glossary of theatre terms, we see: “Sinden (noun). Formally-structured theatrical anecdote ending with the sentence, ‘Amazingly, the audience were entirely unaware of anything amiss’.”

This is surely disrespectful of our greatly beloved Queen who, as anybody who is anybody knows, is trying so desperately to force a Knighthood on dear Donald, who is, of course, too modest to accept it.

Naturally this person has underhand views on critics: “I think they have an immensely difficult job which they carry out with great integrity, flair, and, when you consider that most of them have been heartbreakingly unsuccessful as playwrights themselves, remarkable lack of bias.” This, ducky, is not the sort of undermining remark that our own hardworking Michael Billington and delightful Nicholas de Jongh wish to hear as they go about their arduous job of sitting upright in a seat for seven nights a week.

At Swiss Cottage a tall man who looked as if he had just fallen flat on his face on his way to inspect the drains introduced himself not as Nicholas Craig, whose frills and jockstraps in classical roles are so proudly illustrated in the book, but as Nigel Planer, an actor and writer for Channel 4 among others. With another actor, he said, called Christopher Douglas, whom he met in a play at the Lyric Hammersmith and got on with frightfully well, he co-wrote I, An Actor, as a spoof.

Craig/Planer showed no interest in the normal journalistic interview. He was more interested in why journalists picked on perfectly mundane things actors said, like, “I am allergic to coffee,” and tried to make something significant out of it.

Because if one didn’t, dear, no one would bother to read about some fleabrains one could mention!

One supposes one has to put down some yawn-making facts: Born in Kew 33 years ago, lives in Hammersmith…at school always wanted to be an actor…drama-mad…tried to get into acting training at universities and failed…period of emotional trauma when he worked briefly as a gravedigger…one year at Sussex University…finally admitted to drama school…TV comedy in The Young Ones with Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson…film scripts and acting in films…latest performance in Number 27 by Michael Palin for BBC TV…

Some may say I, An Actor is a delight, the best theatre spoof in years, a rare explosion of sheer fun; but some people will say anything. Undeniably it is published by Pavilion Books at £12.95, but on no account read it. And, dear Larry and Donald, just ignore the man!

Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde: an unproduced Peter Cook screenplay

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:11:00 +0000

This day last year Smarter Than The Average posted its first real blog entry, an analysis of the unproduced Peter Cook screenplay Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde. What better excuse, then, to reprint the article, with a few newly-discovered additions.

One of the greatest misconceptions in the history of comedy is that Peter Cook simply didn’t write enough of it, choosing to eschew comedy-writing in his later years to spend his professional life taking an increasingly uninteresting selection of acting roles and his personal life smoking, boozing, womanising, and outright hellraising.

Truth is, Cook never stopped writing comedy productions throughout his life - it’s just that the majority went unmade. Currently scattered about the world are dozens, probably hundreds, of aborted comedy projects by Peter Cook ranging from concepts scrawled on scraps of paper to fully-completed screenplays, and even a partially-shot motion picture or two. And why? Because Cook was such an outsider with his esoteric ideas and risky reputation that most production companies and producers wouldn’t have dared to collaborate with him on a project that he had originally conceived.

Michael Medwin was not one of these producers. The actor, best known for his role of Corporal Springer on The Army Game, had entered the world of movie production in 1965 when he was invited by Albert Finney to become artistic director for film, television and stage productions at Finney’s company Memorial Enterprises Ltd. (Albert… Memorial… Get it? Finney’s fascination with puns on his first name re-emerged when it was printed in the 28th August 1977 edition of the Sunday Times that he wished to record a live concert album at the Albert Hall: “I’ve not written the songs yet, but I’ve already got a title. I’d call it ‘Albert at the Albert’”.)

Memorial Films, the film-producing section of Memorial Enterprises, was dedicated, as Michael Medwin told Derek Malcolm in a piece printed in the Tuesday the 17th February 1970 edition of the Guardian, “to making films as we wanted them to be made, not as someone else decided for us”. And so, after making a substantial sum of money financing a pair of plays - Bill Naughton’s Spring and Port Wine (Memorial’s profit from this was eight-thousand pounds) and Peter Nichols’ A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (Memorial’s profit here was ten-thousand pounds) - the company’s first feature film production was released by Memorial Films in 1967. Charlie Bubbles, Finney’s first (and only) feature film as director and Liza Minelli’s debut performance on screen (barring her brief appearance as a baby at the end of In The Good Old Summertime, and her scene from The Long Long Trailer which was deleted before release) turned out to be a huge critical success, winning both a BAFTA and a New York Film Critics’ Circle award for star Billie Whitelaw, but a box-office flop, and cemented Memorial Films’ reputation as producing arty, offbeat features, often at the expense of financial gain. Nina Hibbin summed up the company’s philosophy in her article published in the Tuesday the 18th February 1969 edition of the Morning Star: “The productions that Memorial have been associated with have certain qualities in common - highly personal material, highly original treatment, richness of human feeling, and social implications beyond the specific situation being dealt with. The films, in particular, it seems to me, are important not only in themselves, but also that they are firmly set in our own national framework and therefore represent important breaches in the current trend for mid-Atlantic, toothless fare”. This way of working paid off both critically and financially in 1968 when the company scored a massive hit with Lindsay Anderson’s if…..

Michael Medwin was interested in and enjoyed working with people like Albert Finney and Lindsay Anderson - creative people with intelligent and satirical ideas; indeed, his first act at Memorial was to try to secure Kurt Vonnegut’s services as a scriptwriter. So it is no surprise that after seeing Good Evening on Broadway circa 1975 he chose to go backstage and meet the show’s writers and cast, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

During this encounter Cook told Medwin of an idea which was, to quote an article on Medwin printed in the Saturday 17th July 1976 issue of the Guardian, “to have a Dr Jekyll who mutated not into Mr Hyde, but into a beautiful woman who was really the first Woman’s Libber”. Dennis Barker, the writer of this article, asked Medwin if this woman was “a sort of Myra Breckenridge”. “She was quite a radical, was she?” replied Medwin. “Not up to good works, if I recollect”.

Medwin and Cook had several follow-up meetings to discuss the idea, firstly in Detroit on a Sunday “when it was impossible to get a drink” according to the Guardian. They then discussed it “rather more pleasantly in Philadelphia, and at various other venues”. Medwin took to the idea, and thankfully saw Cook differently to other producers. Far from being the unreliable rebel his reputation presumes, Medwin told the Guardian that “if you look at Peter’s track record, you will see he is relentlessly commercial”. Medwin commissioned Cook to write the screenplay for Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde and announced, in an interview with Sheridan Morley printed in the Saturday 12th July 1975 issue of the Times, that the film was in preparation and “we hope to make it in the next year”.

Peter Cook, rather proving the reputation of which Michael Medwin didn’t think he deserved, finished his script not in 1975, or even 1976, but on Wednesday the 19th of January 1977, presumably after struggling through many structural problems regarding the film’s story. And indeed, not even this script was intended to be the final version - the last line of Cook’s (auto?)biography printed in the theatre programme for the 1976 Amnesty benefit – A Poke In The Eye (With A Sharp Stick), held on 1st, 2nd and 3rd of April 1976 – mentioned that he was currently working on the screenplay for Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde; his biography in the programme for a second benefit the following year - An Evening Without Sir Bernard Miles, held Sunday the 8th of May 1977 - ended with exactly the same sentence.

Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde, as described by Cook in the script’s foreword, “though predominantly a comedy, is also a love story, a study in narcissism and an exposé, in funny terms, of the hypocritical Victorian attitude towards women. Dr Jekyll, though outwardly respectable, is an adventurer. His alter-ego, Mrs Hyde, the only woman he can really love, represents everything a Victorian lady should not be”. The foreword concludes: “Mrs Hyde’s outrageous modes of dress and behaviour cause understandable shock to her contemporaries. To many of them she seems as horrifying as the Mr Hyde in the original Stevenson story”. As for the actual story of the film, that was summarised by Dudley Moore in the November/December 1979 issue of Film Comment: “Dr Jekyll turns into a woman and falls in love with the woman, but can never meet her because he either changes into her or Dr Jekyll. It’s a wonderful premise”.

Cook’s idea may superficially resemble the 1971 Hammer film Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde, in which Ralph Bates takes female hormones to turn into beautiful murderess Martine Beswick, but cries of plagiarism fall on stoney ears because whereas the Hammer film was played for horror value, Cook’s would have leaned more into the realm of social satire. In addition to this, some of the topics contained in Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde - namely mad doctors, supernaturalism, and horror - were topics Cook had been toying with turning into screenplays for some time. Interviewed by Kathleen Tynan in an article published in the Thursday the 9th May 1968 edition of the Evening Standard Cook said he was planning to, with Dudley Moore, write and star in a film about quackery: “Something rather nasty about rejuvenation, acupuncture and spiritualism”. Two-and-a-half years later, he proclaimed to Derek Malcolm in an article published in the Guardian on Thursday the 12th November 1970 that “I’m writing a film script at the moment, and with a bit of luck I may even direct the finished product. It is an old-fashioned horror movie. Not one of those modern giggle and ketchup affairs. It is really intended to frighten and no messing”. Cook had shown creative interest in the horror genre even as a schoolboy when at seventeen years old he had an atmospheric little chiller, titled Bric-A-Brac, published in the Sunday 6th February 1955 issue of his school magazine The Radleian.

But now he was mixing these old areas of interest with those of feminism and Women’s Liberation, which raises the inevitable question: why did an old misogynist like Peter Cook write an intricate and passionate satire on the way society treats women? The answer is that the film is not so much pro-women as pro-underdog. Females, racial minorities, the working class, the handicapped - all get a fair and affectionate treatment in Peter Cook’s screenplay, which they certainly don’t in his vision of Victorian England. The underdog is certainly the cinema-going audience Cook would have had in mind while writing the screenplay - workers of the seventies in particular would have been able to relate to the mass strikes that go on in the film. Cook as the writer clearly feels sympathy for these real-life strikers; it can be no coincidence that one of characters in the script who strikes in solidarity is a cook.

By extension, the film being pro-underdog means it is also heavily anti-establishment, something Peter Cook most certainly was. The majority of the upper-class white males in the film are depicted as fascists and bigots, and inevitably are exposed as hypocrites, criminals and perverts. Getting a particular satirical kicking are the biased, execution-hungry judge, who behaves in a very similar fashion to the judge Peter Cook would portray in his Entirely A Matter For You monologue at The Secret Policeman’s Ball nearly three years later, and those high up in the army, whose actions of sending hundreds of innocent men to die in the Crimean War closely mirrors the then-recent war in Vietnam. (Incidentally, this warmongering is approved by a Prince Albert with a very poor grasp of the English language, over a decade before Richard Curtis and Ben Elton wrote the same joke into Blackadder’s Christmas Carol.)

Despite the extra year of working on the script, it’s clear that this version of the screenplay was not quite yet up to a filmable standard. Too long at one-hundred and sixteen pages, it features a number of superfluous scenes that would almost certainly have been hacked out before production began. Most noticeable are the long, unnecessary and not particularly funny opening flashback to Jekyll’s schooldays, and a complete non-sequitur of a cameo when Mrs Hyde finds herself sat next to… well, let’s not spoil it. The script is lacking in directions also, with ambiguous lines devoid of how they should be delivered, and scenes opening with no indication of the style in which they should be shot (although the foreword advises that “the film will be shot in muted colours, with the pictorial effect of John Huston’s Moby Dick”). There are also a number of misjudged or misplaced comedy sketches in the script: a funny riff on Victorian walkie-talkies breaks up the flow of an exciting plot development towards the film’s end, while the demonstration of England’s new secret weapon to Queen Victoria would have been very complicated and expensive to film indeed. In fact there is a marked shift in tone throughout: what starts off as a satirical horror turns into a sex farce before finally ending up as a courtroom drama, obviously the result of stapling together many, many insufficient previous drafts.

It is difficult to read the screenplay without imaging Peter Cook in the male title role - the character of Dr Henry Jekyll certainly carries the aloof, methodical and slightly cynical qualities at which Cook was so adapt at portraying. It’s uncertain, however, whether this would have been the case had the film actually been realised; Cook wouldn’t have quite had the international stardom needed to carry such a film (at least not at this point of his career - it would have been a different story in the early eighties with his appearances in Supergirl and The Two Of Us), but this wouldn’t necessarily have bothered the art-over-commerce attitude of Memorial Films. And bearing in mind that Memorial was the film’s production company, it’s likely that Albert Finney would have at some point been considered to play Dr Jekyll; he would unquestionably have been excellent in this part, and it certainly would have knocked him out of the typecasting black hole he was in after playing Hercule Poirot in the 1974 film version of Murder on the Orient Express. However, his appearing in the film would have proved impossible as from September 1977 he was bound into a sixteen-month stage commitment with the National Theatre.

It’s not implausible to say that if Cook had himself in mind for Jekyll, then Dudley Moore could have been his original choice for Jekyll’s best friend John Utterson. Although by this time Moore had permanently moved to Hollywood with the plan to become a movie star (which he did with Blake Edwards’ 10 in 1979), he would often return to England specially to work with Peter Cook, not least on the Derek and Clive albums which would eventually split the duo apart. To further suggest that this piece of casting was in Cook’s mind during the writing, the film’s foreword notes that “the relationship between Dr Jekyll and Utterson is one of hero worship on the part of Utterson. A parallel would be Watson’s attachment to Holmes”. As we know, Cook and Moore had previously played Holmes and Watson in the Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the One-Legged Dog sketch at the start of the second episode of ATV’s Goodbye Again, broadcast on Saturday the 24th of August 1968, and would do so again in Paul Morrissey’s 1978 feature The Hound of the Baskervilles, the script of which was written by Cook, Moore and Morrissey before Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde. No question that it would have made perfect sense to cast Moore at the metaphorical Watson to Cook’s Holmes here, although perhaps he would have had more fun playing Jekyll’s alcoholic, cross-dressing butler Poole.

The biggest mystery is as to which actress would play Mrs Hyde. Peter Cook in the script’s foreword states that “the film will have an international cast observing the convention that American stars can perfectly well play English characters (i.e. Spencer Tracy in Metro’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde)”. A note to entice potential financiers certainly, but remembering this with regard to Mrs Hyde’s similarities both physical and mental to the character of Myra Breckinridge, could it be that the part was designed for Cook’s Bedazzled co-star Raquel Welch? Slightly too old for the role at the time, perhaps, but as an appearance on the first series of NBC’s Saturday Night (soon to be renamed Saturday Night Live) on the 24th April 1976 proved she was still more than talented as a comedy performer while simultaneously exuding the sex appeal that made her famous in the sixties. We can but ponder.

For a while it looked like the film was going to be made - Peter Cook would allude to it on chat shows, and an article on Albert Finney published in the Wednesday 7th September 1977 edition of Variety noted that the film would soon be produced for EMI. Alas, for whatever reason Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde never made it off the printed page, the most likely explanation being that its existence was usurped by the troubled production schedule for Hound of the Baskervilles. Written in early 1976 Hound of the Baskervilles was mentioned by Peter Cook on Parkinson as going into production in May 1976, but when May was almost over the film, according to Dudley Moore in an interview printed in the Monday 24th May 1976 edition of the Daily Mail, was being rewritten by Cook and Moore in the Beverly Hills Hotel suite in which Peter Cook was staying, and not set to begin shooting until the end of July. If the film had gone into production at this time then it would have been fully shot by the time the script for Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde was completed. Unfortunately the filming ended up being delayed for a year so that director Paul Morrissey could tinker with the script, with shooting finally commencing at Bray Studios on Monday the 11th July 1977, a time that Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde could have comfortably entered production. Originally set to last seven weeks the shoot overran for at least a month, production shutting down temporarily at the start of August so that Paul Morrissey could get over a bout of hepatitis. Following the shoot, Hound of the Baskervilles went on to suffer multiple edits by multiple editors well into the next year; two editors are credited on the released film, and Dudley Moore talks about how he was attending re-editing sessions when he was interviewed by Anne Brayler for the Daily Mail of Wednesday 8th March 1978. It was finally released, to very bad reviews, on Sunday the 5th of November 1978, almost two years after the screenplay for Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde had been written and nearly four years since it was first proposed by Peter Cook to Michael Medwin backstage at Good Evening. Time enough for it to have been forgotten.

Final attempts to produce the film were made as late as 1979, with Cook wanting to put Dudley Moore in the male title role following his storming of Hollywood with 10 that year. Moore, talking about the project “that I like very much” in the November/December 1979 edition of Film Comment, announced that “[Cook] wants me to do Dr Jekyll and to direct it himself” - Cook, it would seem, was still harbouring the directorial ambitions he’d revealed to the Guardian nine years earlier.

The ghost of this unproduced screenplay made only one fleeting appearance after this when Michael Medwin bemoaned the film’s fate in the 4th to 10th October 1980 issue of the Radio Times: “They want bankable stars,” he said of both the film business and film audiences, “and those are thin on the ground. Even Clint Eastwood can lose money these day. But we’re sticking to our policy of putting the story first. My chief regret is that a few of our projects didn’t take off. One was Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde, with a script by Peter Cook”. After a pause he added, with a note of whimsical optimism, “I wonder if we could ask Dudley Moore to put some money up…”. (Note that the 1995 movie Dr Jekyll and Ms. Hyde, an American comedy in which Tim Daly as Dr Jekyll’s great-grandson in the present day transforms into Sean Young as nymphomaniac Helen Hyde, is completely unrelated to Peter Cook’s concept.)

Exactly thirty-two years after the script was completed there is still no sign that Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde will ever be realised, but we are lucky enough that we can at least read Peter Cook’s original screenplay, still unpublished and still unproduced. It is available for download here: http://www.sendspace.com/file/rki3xo. Read the script for yourself, and perhaps your reaction to it will be the same as one character’s summation of Mrs Hyde: “Hysterical. Demented. I’ve never seen anything like it”.

An unofficial wooden Buster Bunny from Tiny Toons Adventures, as...

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 01:56:00 +0000

An unofficial wooden Buster Bunny from Tiny Toons Adventures, as spotted in the window of a restaurant in London’s Chinatown.

"The culture of disrespect is typified by Rowan Atkinson's blasphemous sketch in front of the Prince of Wales on Saturday night and by the treatment of Andrew Sachs by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand. People have ceased caring about each other."

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 12:58:00 +0000

"The culture of disrespect is typified by Rowan Atkinson's blasphemous sketch in front of the Prince of Wales on Saturday night and by the treatment of Andrew Sachs by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand. People have ceased caring about each other."

Sparky - Shaolin Style

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 08:54:31 +0000

Sparky - Shaolin Style

Twelve O'Clocks, And All Is Well

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 16:21:00 +0000

A while back you may remember we blogged about a pilot for a Krazy Kat television series which was never picked up. Since then Cartoon Brew have, after reminiscing about the short in November, found and embedded the short from YouTube. To finally see the short brought out some mixed emotions in people, and the comments to that post make interesting reading, in particular those of J.J. Sedelmaier.

Here are my opinions on the short, as posted in Cartoon Brew’s comments section:

My problem with this short is that it feels British. It’s hard to explain, but the action/movements, even when exciting and violent, are too fluid, too soft, whereas in the original strip they were sharp and fast, inspired presumably by current vaudeville. The Fleischer Studio was perfect to adapt the similarly-styled Popeye strip because they had that New York urban attitude. British animation has always been more languid, which is fine for the relaxed, psychedelic world of Yellow Submarine or the sleepy Middle England of Wallace and Gromit (or, indeed, of Derek Mogford’s most famous production Postman Pat), but inappropriate for something as anarchistic as the scratchy, energy-filled pages of Krazy Kat.

I reckon the overbearing narration was a desperate attempt to ‘Americanize’ the cartoon. Spitting Image Productions had prior to this had great success putting an American voice over British stop-motion with The Big Story, the BAFTA-winning short in which Frank Gorshin plays three Kirk Douglases. Further to this, a decade earlier episodes of the Spitting Image TV series - a satirical puppet show its creators were always trying to bring to America, each time with little success - the few stop-motion sketches they did were with American caricatures; one showed the then-president as a California Raisin - called “California Reagans”, get it?? - while another recreated Woody Allen’s role as a unwilling sperm (and is on YouTube here).

Animator Joel Brinkerhoff then posted the original strip the animation was based on, along with his own intelligent critique of the short on his blog.

The Immaculate Conception of Monty Python's Life of Brian

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 00:02:00 +0000

Never mind that Jesus Christ fellow - this Christmas let’s celebrate the birth of Life of Brian. Printed upside-down on pages 32 and 33 of Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine, Volume VII Number 6, July 1975:

and now for something completely different

MONTY PYTHON’S FLYING CIRCUS
by robert hayes

Those mirthful miscreants, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, having terrified the British peoples for years on BBC, have now landed in the Colonies to settle with us for 1776 revisited. What heinous form of vindication will sate them? Hola, it is, yes, a film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, an unholy romance set in the Druidic monuments of Mediaeval England. Oh, lamb of God that takest away the sins of the world, take away this disreputable assortment of cocktail nuts. It is their intention and achievement to imperil for eternity the sanity of literate men and chivalrous church goers.

Prepare thee for a ribald hoedown of Arthurian conceits and deceits, lilting chansons and gay folk dances. Thrill to the commands of King Arthur astride his awesome bipedal steed Fibia Femur. Wonder at the agon and perplexity in building the mighty Trojan Rabbit. Smirk in silent terror as Sir Launcelot, against all, fags, does his bit for gay liberation, and giggle carelessly when the murderous bunny gorges its sanguine jaws on knights errant. Theirs is the story of men struggling with infernal nonsense, so confused, that one has difficulty keeping the divine dixie cup in mind - but so do they. No matter, the holy trail leads to epic laughter whatever turn it takes and in this their latest film Monty Python unleashes sustained moments of superb comedy. Unshackling the comic antic from comedy (all too) routine they leave the door open for anything to happen and, of course, anything does.

INTERVIEW recently spoke with Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam, two men who are reputedly very heavily responsible for Monty Python.

RH: First how did you all collect yourselves into the Flying Circus at the outset?
EI: I am afraid I don’t know the answer. Have you got a second question you can start with?
RH: Well then, do people here in New York recognize you on the street?
EI: Yes, a bit but they’re nice when they do. They don’t kick you or anything.
RH: Tumultous screams for autographs, anything like that
TG: No, it’s more like a couple of whispers like this, “autographs, autographs,” and then they give you their autograph. It’s nice.
RH: Could you tell us about something about other members of the Monty Python group, John Cleese for instance.
EI: He is the tallest and then there’s Graham Chapman, the next tallest. I’m the next tallest and then Michael Palin who is the next tallest.
TG: No, No, Mike and Terry, Mike and Terry are Identical height and also Identical weight.
RH: That is an interesting fact I was unaware of.
TG: Yes, and Terry Jones is very squat and that’s all.
RH: They were in New York about three weeks ago travelling with an unfortunate Armadillo; has that landed in Britain yet?
TG: Yes, it’s on Mike’s mantlepice. It was given to us in Dallas and Mike has it inside with it’s little bum hole.
RH: What is involved in getting your television show into production?
EI: We don’t work on shows. We tend to go away for a fortnight and write a mass of stuff. Then you come back and meet, everybody reading their material. If it is laughted at, it is put in one pile. If it is not laughed at, we sell it to somebody else’s show.
RH: It’s that clipped and final, no reprieves?
TG: In desperation towards the end of the series everything starts getting used.
EI: That’s Terry’s material.
TG: Some brilliant experiments in using a blank screen which you’ll be seeing in subsequent series.
RH: With the exception of Carol Cleveland you all frequently play women’s roles. Do you think the audience likes seeing men dress as women?
TG: No, we just like dressing up as women.
EI: I think that with a cast of six in a half hour show; everybody is so busy vying for parts that we stole the women’s parts for ourselves.
TG: One of the things has always been finding women who could play the parts as well. I mean, the eternal ratbag characters.
RH: Yes, they are so dreadfully unflattering to women.
TG: But the men’s characters aren’t very flattering either which everyone seems to forget. We don’t have any particular bias towards anyone.
RH: That’s true, there never seems to be any consistent point of view. Do people ever question you as to the political or social context from which you arise?
TG: That is one of the things that I really find amazing. People really do add their own personal hangups and frustrations to the show; it’s really the starting point for a lot of people. The nice thing is having people describe a sketch, they’d seen a couple of weeks earlier and they get it all wrong. They pick out the things they want to pick out.
RH: Are there any censorship restraints or problems with the BBC?
EI: It’s gotten worse. When we first started they didn’t know we were on and it was OK. We made the whole first thirteen and they didn’t know what it was going to be. It was out over the air before anybody had seen it. They they said, “wait a minute this is rather rude.”
RH: It it rudeness, nudity or what that receives opprobrium from the BBC?
TG: I think it’s personal. I mean it depends who actually sees it at any given moment. There was one show we did and a very timid man who was concerned with his job, literally wanted to cut about half that show on many things which he took offense to.
EI: What was thats ketch about —? Ah yes it was a wine tasting sketch. A man kept being given a glass of wine and he’d say as he tasted it, “mmm a nice fruity sort of wine probably a Sancerre.” Another man would then say, “non non monsieur it is WEE WEE.” He’d then be given another glass and he’d say, “definitely this is a Chablis. He’d be told, “non monsieur it is WEE WEE,” and it continued along.
TG: That wasn’t what they really found offensive; the fact is that all the wines were white wines except the last one. It didn’t register with any of us that the last one was a rose. The thing came back to us that it wasn’t the fact that it was WEE WEE in the other ones. The last one being rose could mean only one thing - yes, MENSTRUAL URINE. It was the most bizarre, I mean what are their minds doing. There was another thing with John Cleese who had to push a severed leg through the door to be signed as a receipt for delivering a brain. He thrust the stump of the leg so that the top of it was coming through the door.
EI: And said “sign this please.”
TG: You can’t do that, they said. We couldn’t figure out what it was but they thought that it was a giant penis coming through the door.
EI: We got an urgent message that you must cut the giant penis from the show.
RH: I thought the sketch about the subverted subculture of mice men was rather avant garde for 1969.
EI: Really! Do you have a problem dressing up as Mice?? Well, that was from the first series. I think they cut one line from the first series which was a very silly sketch about a policeman dumping some hashish on a guy. this gut pulls out a brown envelope and says the policeman, ‘here what’s this you’ve got there. the policeman opens it up and he’s got his sandwiches in it. the guy then says “Bligh me what’s the wife got for luch. It then cuts to the wife serving lunch who says, “No matter what it is, it’s better than lunch.” They cut that.
TG: They took it as a pro drug statement the fact that she was like, OK baby (dreamily). It’s extraordinary how it is on a very personal level. There was an Oscar Wilde sketch where we got away with saying; pain in the dong. We could say stream of bat’s piss. We got away with all of those which really amazed me. I must say that the reaction in the States has been much better than in England. Much more enthusiastic!
EI: Do you think so Terry or are you just forgetting? It was 1969 in England; you were pretty big in those days, Terry, the second highest in those days, taller than Graham Chapman.He has the shortest memory and Terry Hones has the second shortest.
RH: Have you ever been tempted to embark upon any production in America?
EI: No, I don’t think we were ever interested. We did the Tonight show or was is the Today show.
TG: We did Today - the Tonight show.
EI: The Today show.
TG: Yes, the Today show.
EI: But we didn’t do it today though.
TG: No yesterday.
EI: The last time we were here in 73 we did the Today show and it was just a disaster. It was wonderful to do. I could actually hear the sound of jaws dropping. We did two middle aged ladies talking how to bury the cat yet. They just stared at us blank faced. They looked like they wanted to laugh but we never said Laugh and there was no sign flashing LAUGH. It was really strange, we just did the piece straight off. The second was a minister in drag -
TG: Government minister -
EI: Wearing this off the shoulder frock and it was just amazing; they were absolutely silent. It was a wonderful experience.
TG: When the sign came up at the end of the program to applaud, they applauded. Otherwise they just sat there stunned.
EI: And that was America.
RH: I’m surprised you’re back.
EI: Of course, Joey Bishop gave us the biggest introduction of all time - “We now have a British group. I’ve never heard of them. I’m told they’re funny.”
TG: Make of it what you will. A couple of shows we’ve done for Germany I think ran into trouble when they were trying to be -
EI: They weren’t really Nazi shows though.
TG: No, not really.
EI: It was the Luftwaffe that invited us over from the RAF. The Germans are very funny. They said, “you must come over we have in Germany no sense of humour, and ve want you British people to come over so we can copy it.” They said we’ll take you to Munich and show you some of the funny areas that you can write sketches about. the first day they took us to Dachau.
RH: That’s an amusing location for a sketch.
EI: Yes, but actually we went to Dachau and it was closed. We couldn’t get in and Graham said to tell them we’re Jewish. We got in eventually, had to pull a few strings.
RH: The CBC in Canada is a fairly stiff if not altogether stodgy network; I wonder why they were first to introduce you to North America so readily.
EI: Very poor the CBC, very poor, took what ever thy could from the BBC. I think ours was in another pile; it probably came in the same box with something else, trying to get rid of it.
TG: They did pull it off you know. I mean after four shows they pulled it off thinking it was rubbish.
RH: It was reinstated though -
TG: Yeah, because of all those students, Commie pinko bastards.
EI: Good God!
TG: Apparently they did fight.
RH: Yes, I was then in university in Montreal and there were actually demonstrations. Riots.
TG: Was that you starting them?
RH: No, but I did hear the stories of fierce battle.
EI: They’re all mad in Canada anyway. We were in Winnipeg doing a stage show and the whole front row orchestra came as a caterpillar, imagine the audience.
RH: There arose a cultish coven in Canada, The Pythonettes, or whatever, with all the accompanying paraphenalia. Terry with your animations do you do all the graphics yourself?
TG: No, it’s a combination of photos and my drawings -
EI: And cheap female labour.
TG: That’s right we exploit them - Heaven and Hope! It’s all done very fast. I’ve got to rely on photographs, engravings and whatever I can lay my hands on.
RH: Your animations seemed to contain, if not altogether held in place, the disparate sketches in your first film And Now For Something Completely Different.
EI: That’s what he says.
TG: Yes, I think you’ve hit upon it; that really seems to sum up the film. I don’t think I can add anything.
EI: It’s actually the reverse is the way we like to think of it.
TG: There is no friction between any of us in the group at all whatever they say.
RH: In the first series I didn’t notice Terry playing so many of the characters.
EI: Yes, he pushed his way in.
TG: It was only because on Saturdays in the studio, with my animation done, I was sitting around getting bored out of my mind.
EI: You could have got your washing done.
TG: Then they allowed me to do the grotesque parts that they would not touch. With those parts I pryed my way in and expanded the roles.
RH: In this new film Monty Phython and The Holy Grail, you are often interrupted.
TG: Yes, I star in it. I play many key roles; I have this very long non speaking part.
EI: He directed it so there are many close ups of him, rather half directed it.
TG: Yes, I directed my closeups.
RH: Have you plans for a film to follow this one?
EI: Yes, we have plans for another film. We are going to make the film Jesus Christ Lust For Glory, which will be the story of a certain person who lived two thousand years ago.
TG: Yours and Mine.
RH: Intriguing, a spectacular biblical epic then.
TG: Son of son of man.
RH: A cast of many thousands?
EI AND TG: No just a cast of aaahh (studiously counting) SIX, with several thousand costume changes.
EI: We want to make a bad taste film.
RH: Does Monty Phython work in foreign tongues?
EI: Well, our show is aired in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Yugoslavia.
TG: Bangladesh.
EI: Hong Kong!
TG: Singapore!
RH: Valhalla???

Bill Hanna: Yogi's Father

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 23:53:00 +0000

From the Sydney Morning Herald, Monday 22nd April 1985:

Bill Hanna: Yogi’s father

By ADRIAN SWIFT

BILL HANNA is the only 74-year-old in the world who can wear a Yogi Bear necktie and get away with it.

Hanna, a kind-faced, silver-haired grandfather, is the former half of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon empire, the company behind such all-time animation greats Tom and Jerry, Yogi Bear, The Flintstones, Scooby Doo and The Smurfs.

Hanna has turned Yogi “smarter than the average” Bear and his variously furry, cuddly and Stone Age friends into a $50 million-a-year business.

He wears his Yogi tie with pride.

He is in Australia to promote a new range of his cartoons released on video cassette.

“Things are probably better for us now than they ever have been,” he said.

“We made the transition from films to television in the 50s when its importance first became apparent and it’s been good for the company.”

Unlike most of the big animation studios at the time, Hanna-Barbera made a concerted effort to get cartoons on television by developing a special process which made their production cheaper.

They were some of the first cartoons to be screened on television and Hanna-Barbera has grown to become the biggest animation company in the world today.

“Even the current trend to do away with shorts altogether before the feature doesn’t really worry us because it forces us to produced a greater range of cartoons for television.”

This year, the 200 writers and thousands of animators will be working on new episodes of old faves like The Superfriends, Smurfs, Snorkels [sic], Scooby Doo and Yogi Bear and some new cartoons.

“We are doing a series called Go-bots, based on Japanese toys that are robots that become cars, as well as Galtar, a super hero.

“There will also be the Paw Paws, which are bears dressed as Indians.”

Hanna-Barbera has produced about 170 cartoon series since beginning operations in 1957, but although it misex older cartoons with new ones, new ideas are not always a success.

“For every real hit like the Flintstones, there are 20 bombs.

“We run a cartoon for a season, and if it doesn’t work, we axe it… things like a cartoon we did on the Three Stooges that we had to can after a season.”

Although Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera came up with the ideas for the early cartoons, ideas for subsequent series have come from various sources.

Some are bought, a few come from employees within the studio, and there is a team of people who do nothing but look for good cartoon properties.

The idea for The Flintstones came when Hanna-Barbera decided they wanted to make a cartoon strip based on a situation comedy.

“We decided to base The Flintstones on The Honeymooners that starred Jackie Gleason. We basically developed some characters then we dressed them as Romans, pilgrims and Indians before finally putting skins on them and setting them in a Neanderthal scene.

“I don’t know how long a good idea like the Flintstones can go on. I’d say almost indefinitely.”

Hanna points out that, almost every year, cartoons have a new market as a new round of kids row up to enjoy them.

“Adults have a memory. These kids don’t. They can see even the oldest cartoons as a first run, so really, most have an unlimited lifespan.”

But there are fashions in cartoons.

“A couple of years ago it was superheroes, then comedy, then the 10-minute format, now the half-hour format.

“At the moment, as well as the inevitable science fiction, superheroes are making a comeback.”

“But, basically, cartoons haven’t changed since 1910. Sure, they’re in colour now and the production techniques have become better, but the cartoons themselves are the same.”

Much thanks to Alison Bean for passing this article on to us.