The Comic Strip Presents...

The Comic Strip: 30 years on

Dawn French et al look back on the halcyon days of Paul Raymond's Revue Bar.

The alternative comedy collective could be wonderful and they could be awful, often within the same episode. These two tales, first screened in 1984, display the best and the worst of the team's endeavours. Dawn French plays the lead in the love-story parody Susie, while Rik Mayall takes centre stage (surely not?) in the spaghetti western homage A Fistful of Travellers' Cheques. Sitcom veteran Bob Spiers directs both. Patchy scripting was a curse but ambitious, cinema-style visuals and a desire to experiment made the Strip a force to be reckoned with.

At the same time as Harry Shearer, Christopher Guest et al were making their replica Stonehenge and whacking the volume up to 11 as Spinal Tap, The Comic Strip gang were also on their own, lower-key rock odyssey. Shown on Channel 4 in 1983, the year before This Is Spinal Tap hit cinema screens, Bad News Tour has suffered unjustly by comparison. But, ahead of BBC4's celebration of British heavy metal on Friday, now's the perfect time to revisit the comic misadventures of Vim Fuego, Den Dennis, Colin Grigson and Spider Webb as they tour small-town Britain.

You can see why this Famous Five parody caused a stir when it was first broadcast as part of Channel 4's opening night back in 1982. Seeing a sacred cow like Enid Blyton slaughtered in such a fashion must have been a shock for some, but it remains a spot-on spoof. Peter Richardson and Pete Richens's script takes in the Five's casual sexism, their obsession with food and the clunky plot exposition of the books ("blah blah blah stolen plans, blah blah blah missing scientist") while gloriously ratcheting up the racial prejudices of the 1950s. Merciless, but jolly entertaining.

As Comic Strip films go, Sex Actually is not as good as The Strike, Didn't You Kill My Brother? or Gregory: Diary of a Nutcase. But it's not as bad as Queen of the Wild Frontier or The Funseekers. It's simply a muted and underachieving step back into the arena when most viewers were doubtless expecting a lot more, especially as the recent DVD box set release of their previous works throws its shortcomings into sharp relief.

When the two worlds of comedy and sci-fi collide, the recent is usually calamitous. In the cinema Mel Brooks's Spaceballs proved to be about as amusing and successful as the launch of Challenger, while on TV the lamentable Red Dwarf shows that four-dimensional space-time continuums do not comnpensate for one-dimensional characters. But last night on Comic Strip Comic Strip achieved a triumphant synthesis, with a dense, merciless parody of the excesses of Sixties and Seventies sci-fi movies - an absurd fantasy world full of intergalactic space craft shaped like cervical caps and futurist women in micro skirts and Mary Quant eye liner.

As I watched Comic Strip (BBC2) I heard a mad cackle of laughter like the first Mrs Rochester on the loose. I really could not believe it was me. I rarely laugh at comedy because it swamps the next line. I think that's why.

It is a curious thing that when their Comic Strip (C4) began my house was empty but by the time it finished people were sitting on the floor because all the chairs were taken or were standing on one leg as if they had been bewitched in the act of passing the TV set. And the only two I recognised were the dog and my daughter.