The Comic Strip Presents...

Peter Richardson interview

Written by: Jay Richardson
Published: Monday 13th February 2023

Peter Richardson founded The Comic Strip troupe of performers - pioneers of 1980s alternative comedy - who went on to make The Comic Strip Presents... series, first on Channel 4, then the BBC and most recently, on Gold.

Launching the careers of Jennifer Saunders, Rik Mayall, Dawn French, Ade Edmonson and Nigel Planer, the much-loved films also regularly featured Robbie Coltrane, Alexei Sayle, Keith Allen and others.

Ahead of Richardson's appearance at the Slapstick Festival in Bristol this weekend, discussing the films with his old double act partner Planer and a surprise mystery guest, as well as screening More Bad News, Richardson spoke to British Comedy Guide about his favourite Comic Strip moments, the book he's writing about the group and the films he still hopes to get made.

So it's been 40 years of The Comic Strip Presents... How are you feeling about it?

During the pandemic, I watched some of the films for the first time since the early 80s. When you make them, you're so obsessed. Then it goes out and you don't want to see it again. Some stand up alright, others don't. I showed Five Go Mad In Dorset recently at the BFI and just thought, I can't ever show this film again. It's just so wrong. The way it was taking the piss out of racism, sexism and class snobbery. People don't think that's funny anymore, you can't take the piss out of it.

I don't know, I think it holds up well. Can you trace how you've developed as a filmmaker over the course of making them?

You certainly get better at using time. Mistakes you've made help you to make things better. I've had several that didn't work out the way I hoped. But our hit rate got better. Once we got to Four Men In A Car, The Hunt For Tony Blair and Red Top, I thought those were good. I liked Gregory - Diary Of A Nutcase. It's funny. But it's also really biting about Hollywood and serial killers. My beef was with Silence Of The Lambs because I hate it.

Do your favourites tally with the fan favourites?

Probably not. I love the first Bad News, which is not one I wrote but which is really, really good. I'm showing a sort of half-hour, best of in Bristol with scenes from Four Men In A Car. I think that's the funniest stuff we ever did.

Was it always fun when you reunited with the core cast?

We were always a family, in that we didn't always get on but blood's thicker than water. We started out together and we're joined by this thing we went through in the 80s. There's a connection. Sadly, we've lost Rik and we've lost Robbie. John Sessions too of course, who I worked with on Stella Street.

And your regular writing partner, Pete Richens...

Yes, Pete went too. God, that was sad.

Did bringing in newcomers reinvigorate The Comic Strip?

I think so. New blood was always something I wanted. And suddenly the others were very busy with their own careers. French and Saunders, Rik and Ade, sometimes they weren't available. Some of the new people have done very well. Stephen Mangan for instance on Tony Blair.

The black and white, noir-ish aspect of that film worked really well.

Yeah. It's funny too, that he can't stop causing death and destruction but does it in such a jolly way.

And you were using stuff from Blair's book verbatim ...

Isn't it extraordinary? Aren't some of those passages just outrageous? He reads those lines in the audiobook himself!

How ambitious were you about television? Because the films often aspired to be properly cinematic, even if you couldn't stop sending cinema up.

I was making films in the 70s, when I was teaching kids, long before we came to The Comic Strip. I always had film in mind. I never liked television particularly, apart from Mike Leigh stuff. Nuts In May, I love that sort of comedy-drama. I never liked sitcoms much, apart from Fawlty Towers. I love things like John Waters, American underground stuff made me laugh, outrageous stuff like that.

With spaghetti westerns for example, Rik and I just loved that whole ridiculous, Zen-like macho kind of thing, it was hilarious. Two wanky guys trying to be that in A Fistful [Of Traveller's Cheques].

We've always gone our own way with the parody, we haven't slavishly copied anything. I've seen people do the Clint [Eastwood] character with the cigar. But we took the supporting characters rather than going down the Clint road. I was trying to play the Italian actor Gian Maria Volonté.

Can you see The Comic Strip's influence on modern comedy, particularly the Hollywood versions of British history?

Certainly, we loved doing that sort of thing, playing American versions. We did that with GLC, turning Ken Livingstone and the Mayor of London's story into a High Noon shoot-out, Charles Bronson playing Livingstone, all that. Giving it the Hollywood treatment was fun. I love the bit where Robbie turns to me, Ade, Dawn and Jennifer and says, "how about you, alternative comedians, you're pretty good at benefits, what are you like in a shoot-out?" Involving ourselves in that, being wankers in that sort of situation, just out of the blue.

The Strike, I find it harder to find the funny bits. Though I think the film worked and it struck a chord.

When we did Gregory though, that wasn't a joke on Hollywood actors. What we researched at the time, there were a lot of copycat incidents because of [Silence Of The Lambs]. Lots of women being locked in cellars, that was what inspired it.

It doesn't seem that dated with the current boom in true crime. And a film like The Crying Game still seems relevant, with so few openly gay male footballers.

Absolutely. The Crying Game had some really good stuff in it. Some bits are a bit too serious but Anthony Sher was wonderful in it. And I liked doing Detectives On The Edge Of A Nervous Breakdown with Jim Broadbent and Keith [Allen]. When I saw that again, I thought that was very funny. Jim was great.

Him yelling "Guv! Guv! Guv!" is possibly my earliest memory of The Comic Strip. I was too young to catch the first ones...

It's funny, I think the BBC ones were better than the Channel 4 ones. But weirdly, people always think of them as Channel 4. Some of them just didn't watch the BBC ones. They didn't move with us. I thought Oxford was good. I thought Queen Of The Wild Frontier is good. It's not hysterical but I like the film. Julia T Wallace was great in that.

I know it's not strictly The Comic Strip, but something like The Bullshitters, where you and Keith Allen were sharing creative control, how did that work?

We got on very well actually. Each film, we seemed to have one row over something. Sometimes in the shooting but mostly in the editing, we would have one violent disagreement. But in most respects it was a good relationship. He was going for the jugular all the time and I was probably going for the shape and the story. The filming side he left to me but he would have these great flashes of inspiration about a certain thing, why it was funny, how we would do it and I got that. I liked working that way with him. He liked to be dangerous [laughs]. I liked having those different relationships. I loved working with Rik and with Adrian and Nigel. We had these different partnerships going all the time somehow.

Watching some of the more iconic scenes in films like The Bullshitters or The Strike, as you're haring around London on a motorbike, it's amazing to think how much filming you got away with on the fly, without permission to be there.

Certainly, when it came to The Strike, with me going up The Mall, we just winged it. I was just following the camera van, him knowing I've got to pretend to run out of fuel and run towards him. And the cameraman said, "I think you're going to have to go again, I didn't quite get it", just as three police cars came racing up to surround us.

"Right, who's in charge here?" I was the director but I told them I was just an actor, they didn't know differently. The motorbike didn't have any insurance, no MOT, I had no helmet and we were in the palace grounds. Fortunately, they laughed and let us go. They did in those days, even after the IRA. They could see we weren't that threatening. But we would never have got permission to film there. It would have taken at least six months.

Were you envious that Spinal Tap came to overshadow Bad News? Or that Austin Powers followed your portrayal of "Jason Bentley" in Detectives On The Edge Of A Nervous Breakdown?

Well, I thought with Austin Powers, I had been there first. [Mike Myers] obviously cottoned on to that character as well. Maybe he saw our thing, I don't know. But he was very clever and very commercial. We were probably never quite commercial enough. We loved doing 40-minute, 50-minute films but movies are quite difficult. They're harder and he nailed it with that one, very well.

Spinal Tap was obviously a big hit. Very different to Bad News though. I remember Ozzy Osbourne saying Bad News, every band knows what that's like, who's got the van, who's got the PA? We were the grubby young band starting out, whereas with Spinal Tap, they were supposed to be big stars, up to a point. We were just a small Channel 4 film, though we had our following. When we got to Castle Donnington, there were huge numbers of banners there with our names on.

Once you'd got into the rhythm of the first few films, were you writing with specific actors in mind?

Quite a lot of the time. We tended to think they could do anything. We knew we had to create two women's parts and parts for everybody really. But something like Gino, we didn't really think who was going to do what. I remember writing the first half of it in one night drinking tequila. And then Pete [Richens] joined me in the morning and we carried on. I like that sort of thing, when you never knew what was going to happen. I was determined when I was writing it not to know what was going to happen in the next scene, it just had to sort of arrive.

When we did The Strike, Alexei's part wasn't written for him. I wrote it for this guy who's a Welsh writer, a friend of Keith, and he was what I imagined this character to be like. In fact, I tried to get Alexei to look like him with the hair. It was a last-minute thing getting him in. I love that part.

Were there many scripts that never got off the ground?

Oh, loads, yeah. I've got one actually that I'm still determined to make, It Ends Badly, which me and Rik were going to do as two scumbag producers, just trying to keep their head above water. I love the script and I know it's going to be a great film. But it's just difficult to get it financed at the moment.

I thought Harry Enfield and Stephen Mangan were attached to that.

That's right, that's exactly what we're planning. Although they're getting too old for it now probably. I'm going to have to cast younger again.

So you're still you're still determined to make these films?

Yeah, I'm still writing. I've got three scripts I've been working on for the last three years. And a couple of movie scripts, 90-minute formats. That's what I really want to get right. I don't feel I've really cracked that. The Supergrass came close to it. It was a success at the time but I don't look at it as being a smash hit.

The Pope Must Die has its fans...

A new edit I did recently helped it a lot. It got it going quicker and better and I took out some embarrassing bits, namely the American actor, the Getty boy [Balthazar Getty] was terrible. It's a better film for it. Alex Rocco was great as the cardinal.

Churchill: The Hollywood Years, I'm doing a 40-minute cut just now for a screening we're doing in Devon in March. The film had some wonderful bits in it because of who we got. Harry [Enfield] was great and Anthony Sher was good. But it should have been an hour rather than 90 minutes probably.

And you were working on a Brexit film?

Oh yes, The French Job! Which again, I haven't been able to get financed because the whole thing was too toxic I suppose. It was basically a European gang, led by a sort of Michael Caine type. So it's The Italian Job but with the Tour De France being used as a cover to rob a train. Middle-aged men in Lycra using the race to get through a town and get the gold out. It's a good script and I think it would make a great film. Movies cost a lot of money, that's the trouble.

I understand you're writing a book about The Comic Strip too?

I started writing it but got so bored writing about myself. Which sounds like I'm being far too modest but I just thought, well The Comic Strip, everyone knows all of this stuff, what am I going to say? Recently, I got into it again though. Writing prose is so different to writing a script. Because in the end, it doesn't matter if you're writing shit in a script, as long as the story and the characters work. There aren't thoughts, you're writing action and dialogue. The script is a map. But with prose, you've got to make the writing interesting and make the reader want to read on. I'm not trying to do things in a linear way in the book, I'm trying to make it more interesting than that.

So with chapters about your pre-television career?

Yes. When I was 17 I took a train to London and got [a part in] Forty Years On by Alan Bennett with John Gielgud and Paul Eddington, and I was living in the West End. I had a whole six months of adventures, working with them was so interesting.

Presumably there are memories of people like Rik Mayall too that might not have been heard before?

I had lots of adventures with Rik, especially in the later years because we lived next door to each other in Devon. We'd go for long walks and talk. But also in the early times, travelling, working together. And Bad News became so big, we became a proper band. We got the deal with EMI, made a record. Worked with Brian May and started playing big venues like Hammersmith Odeon. Bad News became very serious, it wasn't a joke anymore.

The travelling was just absolutely shattering, the constant loud noise of the so-called music and all the hotels, just that whole lifestyle drains you completely. We'd finish a gig and sit in silence in the dressing room, not wishing to speak to anyone. Just the four of us, not saying much. Exhausting but fun. I was so proud of us to go out there and make it work.

I just lost a good friend, Jeff Beck, who did a lot of music for us. We never credited him because I didn't want him to think we were trying to use his name to get attention. He did a lot of music for The Comic Strip. Les Dogs, the one with Kate Bush, he did a fabulous soundtrack for that. He did some guitar on Queen Of The Wild Frontier and he appeared in Gregory too.

Anyway, his funeral was two days ago, attended by just about every rock star I've ever seen in my life. I had to go on and talk first and I just looked at this sea of legends in the church. I had an amazing time with him, travelling America. I was his manager a couple of times when he sacked the previous one. An extraordinary time.

So will there be more of The Comic Strip?

As soon as I can get finance. I was about to do one this summer called Lie Another Day: The Boris Story, for The Comic Strip's anniversary. I had a really good relationship with [former BBC and Channel 4 head of comedy] Shane Allen. But he had another company contracting with us, Lookout Point. And they completely fucked it, said they needed control of casting and crew. And I said no, sorry, when we did Five Go Mad In Dorset, nobody knew who we were and we were allowed to pick anybody we wanted. Now you're telling me you want control? You can't do that.

They also said you can forget about getting any production fee. And I said, well, hang on, whose name is above the title? It's The Comic Strip isn't it? It's not Lookout Point. Anyway, it all got cancelled by Channel 4.

So that's dead in the water then?

Well, of course, Boris left us and Liz Truss took over. I know he'll be in the memory for a while but it would have dated so quickly. It was a very funny script that I worked on with Shane, I loved collaborating with him. It was a shame not to make it.

Still, it sounds like you've enough to work on just now.

Well, I keep writing for when I can make another film. I'm just trying to make movies, I find television so awful. It was very hard to make The Comic Strip, even when times were good. Even with the first series they told us they didn't have the money, they had to get it from drama. Comedy departments don't have any money to make stuff like that now, they're just making panel shows.