A Horseradish
Sunday 23rd February 2020 5:13pm [Edited]
8,475 posts
Hi.
I have been watching The Goodies (on DVD) for the first time since the 1970s. Quite funny - I think I thought it was hilarious when aged 9 - but more to the point extremely interesting with the benefit of a historical perspective. The sights of a Ford Cortina, a bikini clad woman, old terraced housing, a 20 something bloke in a suit and tie who already seems 57 - and especially outdoors film footage in which everything outside looks like it is a different planet - conspire to place this vehicle firmly in its very special era. I find that of itself quite reassuring. It helps not only to remind me why I have always started each day bouncing around my bungalow on a spacehopper but explains why I love - and worship - the solstice.
It is worth pointing out here that nothing whatsoever had changed (other than a few new slum tower blocks laughably designed to look like Swiss ships) by the time of the Vapors and Minder. However, it is the gigantic pussy which most with a longer memory fondly recall. By the third episode in my collection it was there happily with me in my living room devouring what was then known as the Post Office Tower. That thing deserved to be subsequently rebranded. OK. So it had the temporary gimmick of a revolving brasserie but It wasn't even in pre Shelter Lib days The Monument.
So where are we? To be frank, I wasn't expecting much. I have been consistently disappointed by I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again on 4 Extra so it came as a huge surprise to discover that The Goodies was just so imaginative. What I remembered was the physical humour - the slapstick - and that does work very well although in terms of timing it tended to be overdone. What I hadn't anticipated was the wacky sharpness in the script and its flow of ideas. This is The Magic Roundabout era in which art was so wonderfully drugs on account of 95% of folk outside the Kings Road not actually being on drugs. Mr Benn - the one who shared his name with another with wild staring eyes and a son named Hilary - was the post The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe blueprint for any bearded bird watcher high on sherbet dabs. That's Springwatch or no Springwatch so the ideas about what was behind his and his mates' doors are a joy to behold.
Indeed, they are far more persuasive than the notion of them having at the other side of their apartment a personal computer for that would never have happened beyond the Banana Splits. Meanwhile, any number of Mrs Carthorses were partially finding the right target while somehow managing not to be offended by Jimmy Savile or Rolf Harris, both of whom get a suitably dishonourable early mention. And to think that nobody knew. Natch. In fact, the symbolism is impressively persistent throughout in terms of time contextualisation. Someone appears in black face but only briefly and simply to inoffensively remind us that for all of the Bolans and Bowies we still had one foot in the music hall. The Beatles had suggested as much on Sgt Pepper except on this show some five years later Oddie's backdrop songs nod to various music trends of the time. The erotic Slocombe of Kitten Kong, for example, is absolutely the UK's Theme From Shaft.
Away from Blaxploitation, a black woman cleaner calls for Thomas so as to depict that we are additionally in the cartoon world of Tom and Jerry. Strikers - and football hooligans dressed like Rod Stewart - who would inevitably have disrupted the making of the shows are cleverly forgotten using the device of regular appearances of non threatening camp men and imitations of them. They are presented warmly in the main and reveal that if one were of that character in 1972 Britain was one of the better places to be. And by the look of the empty streets, it is easy for any younger person to see that it was for all. With only 6 million cars on the roads rather than today's 36 million, there was less mania and we were all far more environmentally friendly. The appearance of Concorde is an obvious joke. You just couldn't do that on Freddie Laker.
Did Pink Floyd's inflatable pig over Battersea Power Station come later or earlier? It was later so clearly the Goodies influenced the Floyd rather than vice versa and they totally transformed the future of rock forever until punk a few months or minutes later and Dua Lippa. Meanwhile, the inclusion in the programme of adverts not only predicted what would happen to the BBC before the end of 2020 but encouraged in every comedy production in schools by teenagers who thought they were being imaginative themselves precisely the same. But so much for my earliest memories of the likes of Steve Punt who I would not have had the privilege to know before 1974. Being monetarist, those mock ads were arguably as controversial as the references to sex at 7pm in what was described as fun for all the family. Perhaps we just watched when they did their animals? Whatever - thank god as it turned out - we were strictly for Blue Peter rather than Magpie in our house. Actually, my mates and I were still innocently skipping in a taking the piss way to Crystal Tipps and Alistair.
So, yeah, all very good so far, I think, and I am only through three episodes as I write. Looking forward to the others especially as my anti depression guru has advised me not to watch 21st Century television now. In a normal world, it would have been aired again decades ago. There must be a story on why it never was but I haven't had the time yet to Wiki it and may not even bother to return to reality, so-called. Was it the Muslims? The one in which they make a gender education film has figures dressed in "kind of" white burkas which could have been mistaken for outfits worn by the Ku Klux Klan. Sort of. The animal rights brigade on account of what is done to a bush baby, albeit one made in Hong Kong? The politicians who are depicted as overly authoritarian little kids with double standards way before John Major's bastards and the Parliamentary Expenses affair? Or the Christians given the inevitable pagan "vibe of the times" nature of it all?
Let's just say it was whingers. The show might not have insisted on women enjoying a new sexual liberation as the Benny Hill Show or Man About The House did but it had its moments what with the occasional disrobed dolly birds appearing in its mixture of leaps of imagination and liquorice confection. Furthermore, there were at least as many ideas in it as in Spike Milligan, glam rock and the second series of Camberwick Green combined. That spacehopper by the way. When there is a crescent moon, I don't only get on it but stick a box around my shoulders with a chunk cut out at the front and pretend that I am a packet of Frosties. It beats the page three girl of ethnicity routine of walking around in a dodgy fawn sheet with a drawing of big breasts. Oh, plus it means getting fewer stares from neighbours as I make my way to the local crack den.
'Ava Cariba? Not 'arf!
