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- For information about the actors, and the background of the series, see The Goodies
The Goodies was a surreal British television comedy series of the 1970s and early 1980s combining sketches and situation comedy and starring Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie.
The series was also created and written by Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie and Graeme Garden.
Bill Oddie wrote the music for the series, and "The Goodies Theme" was written by Bill Oddie and Michael Gibbs.
The directors of the series were John Howard Davies, Jim Franklin and Bob Spiers.
Basic structure of the series
The series' basic structure revolved around the trio offering themselves for hire — with the tagline "We Do Anything, Anytime, Anywhere" — to perform all sorts of ridiculous but benevolent tasks. This pretext allowed the show to explore all sorts of off-the-wall scenarios for comedic potential. Sometimes these were thinly-disguised comments on current events, such as a show where the South African government gave up on Apartheid and implemented "apart-height", where short people were separated from the rest of society. Others were more abstractly philosophical, such as an episode in which the trio spend Christmas Eve together waiting for the Earth to be blown up by arrangement of the world's governments. The "Christmas Eve" episode (titled 'Earthanasia') was one of the episodes which took place entirely in one room. This type of episode was usually made when the entire location budget for the season had been spent, forcing the trio to come up with a script that relied entirely on character interaction. These "claustrophobic" episodes often worked surprisingly well.
Characters and production techniques
The show featured extensive use of slapstick (often performed using sped-up photography and clever, though low-budget, visual effects), such as when they built a railway station together, and awoke the next morning to discover that the construction equipment outside (steam shovel, bulldozer, backhoe) had come to life, and were lumbering, growling, and battling like dinosaurs.
Other episodes featured parodies of contemporary pop music (in the loosest sense of the term) composed by Oddie (some of which went on to commercial success in the British charts, among them the hit single "Funky Gibbon", a staple of scout-hut discos of the period) as well as character-based comedy. Some early episodes were interrupted by spoofs of contemporary commercials.
The group also acknowledges their debt to the usage of music in silent movies. In one episode, they inherit an old movie studio, and attempt to make their own epic film: MacBeth Meets Truffaut The Wonder Dog. After several 'takes,' they argue, and each begins to make their own style of movie. The episode finished with an extended silent movie segment, in which each one's movie comically interferes with the others.
The characters are based around the personae of Garden (a "mad scientist"), Brooke-Taylor (a conservative, sexually-repressed, Tory-voting royalist), and Oddie (a scruffy, occasionally violent, left-leaning anarchist from Lancashire). The group have suggested that the characters of Graeme, Tim, and Bill represent the Liberal, Conservative and Labour wings of British politics or middle-class, upper-class, and working-class stereotypes respectively. The characters played up to their stereotypes, but were not necessarily based on the actor playing the character. This is not immediately obvious as they were called by their own names, and had some minor characteristics in common. In reality, Garden is a medical doctor, Brooke-Taylor is not really conservative ("But I had the double-barrelled name so I was always going to play the Tory" *) and Oddie is a pacifist, ornithologist and active environmentalist.
Goodies episodes
A—Z of alternative episode titles
- Please note that all of the alternative titles, which are listed in this section, have
- links to the appropriate episode pages under the titles as given in the section above.
- The seasons are listed after the episodes titles by their numbers - i.e. (1) to (9)
Famous guest stars
- Jane Asher, Michael Aspel, George Baker, Michael Barratt, Alfie Bass, Stanley Baxter, Cilla Black, Tony Blackburn, John Bluthal, Bernard Bresslaw, Richard Briers, Erik Chitty, John Cleese, Harry H. Corbett, Barry Cryer, David Dimbleby, Jack Douglas, Bill Fraser, Liz Fraser, Tommy Godfrey, Patricia Hayes, Peter Jones, Jo Kendall, Roy Kinnear, Sue Lawley, Roland MacLeod, Philip Madoc, Magnus Magnusson, Henry McGee, John Le Mesurier, Norman Mitchell, Patrick Moore, Julian Orchard, Geoffrey Palmer, Jon Pertwee, David Rappaport, Beryl Reid, Joan Sims, Wayne Sleep, Mel Smith, Ronnie Stevens, Mollie Sugden, Frank Thornton, Patrick Troughton, Eddie Waring, Richard Wattis, June Whitfield, Robyn Williams, Frank Windsor, Terry Wogan, Kenneth Wolstenholme, Corbett Woodall, Tessa Wyatt
Trivia
- A devoted viewer laughed himself into a fatal attack whilst watching The Goodies. His wife reported that he had just eaten a very heavy meal.
External links
- The Goodies — BBC Guide to Comedy
- The Goodies at IMDb
- The Goodies — Nostalgia Central
- The Goodies — British TV Comedy
- The Goodies — BeebFun
- The Goodies DVD — information and review
- Street map showing Cricklewood station on streetmap.co.uk - Cricklewood is the location for "The Goodies" office
BBC television programmes | British television comedy | Comedy television series | ITV television programmes | Lost BBC episodes | Surrealist humor | Lists of comedy television series episodes
"The Goodies (TV series)"