The Goodies at the BT Tower Facebook Live Event

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Event Magazine

(Front cover of 'Event' Magazine from Mail on Sunday, 16th September 2018. - Hard copy)

'The BBC banned us but only white liberals and stupid people find the Goodies offensive': Twelve million viewers watched them do the Funky Gibbon at their peak (and one even laughed himself to death). But you won’t find the Goodies on TV today – and that makes them VERY angry...

By ADRIAN DEEVOY

PUBLISHED: 22:02, 15 September 2018 | UPDATED: 22:02, 15 September 2018

Bill Oddie, television personality, celebrity birdwatcher and one-third of the Goodies, hasn’t found a good word for his former bosses at the BBC – until now, when he explodes angrily, using a phrase unprintable in a family newspaper.

Chastised by his fellow Goodies, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme Garden, Oddie modifies his verdict to: ‘Bloody bastards then.’

Either way, there is little doubt in Oddie’s mind what ‘BBC’ stands for.

The reason for this extraordinary outburst is mention of his abrupt dismissal from the long-running wildlife programme Springwatch just before Christmas in 2008.

‘I never had a proper explanation at the time,’ Oddie fumes. ‘I was called into the office and told, “We won’t be asking you to make any more programmes.” Looking back, unfortunately my bipolar element had come into it and I could be very irascible and tetchy, I don’t mind admitting.’

From left: Graeme Garden, Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor. The Goodies no longer wish to be the forgotten heroes of British comedy

Oddie was plunged into depression by the redundancy. Unable to ‘talk or think’, he would sleep for days at a time, but the blackness became unbearable and he tried to take his own life, twice, in 2009 by overdosing on prescription sedatives.

He was finally diagnosed as bipolar in 2010 and now receives treatment.

It infuriates Oddie that, having let him go, the BBC implied that it had done so due to concerns about his mental welfare. Of course they didn’t know about his illness when they sacked him.

‘Oh yes,’ he sneers. ‘“We wish Mr Oddie a very quick recovery.” They didn’t give a damn.’

But it wasn’t just Oddie. After 1980, the BBC didn’t give a damn about the Goodies either.

For 40 years, since their decade of Seventies prime-time supremacy that routinely drew television audiences of 12 million, the Beeb has refused to regularly repeat The Goodies shows.

Despite vigorous lobbying, the upper echelons of the Corporation have come up with myriad excuses not to re-screen the once-popular programme. ‘Of its time’; ‘not progressive enough’; ‘the demand isn’t there’... they’ve heard it all. Somebody up there doesn’t like them.

‘When fans have written in asking why they aren’t repeating The Goodies,’ Garden divulges, ‘the BBC always reply saying they’re looking forward and want to invest in new comedy. So, I thought, “Well, that means we won’t be getting the 6pm Dad’s Army slot then.”’

The Goodies in 1970, from left, Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor. The trio’s devotees include many of the biggest names from the world of entertainment

Quite what Auntie has against the Goodies’ topical satire, surreal flights of fancy and slapstick tomfoolery is anyone’s guess.

What’s not to love about a huge kitten toppling the Post Office Tower, or black-pudding-wielding Lancastrians in outsized flat caps, experts in the martial art of Ecky Thump?

Now in their mid-to-late-70s, the gently subversive trio have returned, in box-set form, to re-claim the respect that is rightfully theirs.

The Goodies no longer wish to be the forgotten heroes of British comedy. The Morecambe And Wise Show, The Two Ronnies and Dad’s Army are considered classics, while Monty Python have been elevated to the comedy equivalent of The Beatles.

Yet The Goodies languishes in an archive marked ‘naff Seventies, nostalgia’ along with Spangles, stack heels and the Space Hopper.

But the trio’s devotees include many of the biggest names from the world of entertainment: David Walliams, Austin Powers star Mike Myers, Martin Freeman, Reeves and Mortimer and Simon Pegg (who once moved to Cricklewood because it was the Goodies’ fictional home) all adore them (see panel below).

There is no disputing that The Goodies was funny. In one case, fatally so. During the episode, Kung Fu Kapers in 1975, bricklayer Alex Mitchell of King’s Lynn in Norfolk tragically died, aged 50, laughing at the show.

‘We were in the studio when it happened,’ recollects Brooke-Taylor. ‘The newspapers were calling up to ask us how we had reacted to this terrible news, which was not an easy thing to answer.

‘I managed to say, “Well, if I am going to die, watching Morecambe and Wise would be as good a way as any to go.” But it was tricky. He’d died laughing.

During the making of the quietly controversial show, the trio would occasionally be ‘yanked upstairs’ at the BBC and told to re-think a particular programme

‘He had a heart defect and was already poorly,’ interrupts Garden, who qualified as a doctor with a medical degree.

‘His wife wrote to us eventually and said, “Thank you for making his last moments so joyous. I have the lasting image in my mind of my husband laughing his head off. He died happy.” Which is lovely,’ beams Oddie.

Despite its post-teatime slot, The Goodies could be edgy.

During the making of the quietly controversial show, the trio would occasionally be ‘yanked upstairs’ at the BBC and told to re-think a particular programme.

‘I was an androgynous pop star in one,’ Oddie puzzles. ‘They said, “No, we can’t have that.”’

Clean-up television campaigner Mary Whitehouse complained when Brooke-Taylor wore a pair of underpants with an image of a carrot emblazoned on the front.

‘It was the carrot that did for Mary,’ Oddie acknowledges. ‘She sent a telegram to the Director-General, but we didn’t rise to it.’

Their excitable followers even have a collective name: The Giddies. Prince Charles, Brooke-Taylor reports proudly, is an honorary Giddy.

‘He actually said at one stage, “Monty Python... is good but I prefer The Goodies.” He rose in our esteem enormously after that.’

It was the Prince Of Wales who presented Brooke-Taylor with an OBE in 2011, the same year that Garden received his from Princess Anne at Windsor Castle.

Oddie had been awarded his OBE in 2003 and is wearing it around his neck today. He fishes it out of his chest hair for closer inspection.

‘Ours aren’t like that,’ Brooke-Taylor sniffs. ‘We got proper ones with ribbons and everything. I think that might be a fake.’

‘Shut up,’ barks Oddie. ‘It’s wonderful. I got it for conservation and my contribution to ecology.’

‘Bill’s wasn’t for entertainment, you’ll notice,’ mutters Garden. ‘Which I believe ours were.’

The Goodies weren’t just a TV phenomenon, their five hit singles, including the glam rock pastiche The Inbetweenies and a Northern Soul spoof, Black Pudding Bertha, totalled almost a million sales.

Funky Gibbon, complete with its catchy armpit-scratching dance, went to No 4 in the UK charts in 1975.

At their musical peak, Oddie, who wrote and recorded all of the Goodies’ music, recalls mixing with rock royalty, dining with Paul Simon (‘very reserved’) and Mick Jagger, a fellow fancier of feathered wildlife (‘He was really rather nice. We had a very enjoyable lunch at Eric Idle’s, talking about music and birds’).

In 1979, the phone rang. It was Steven Spielberg, enquiring if the Goodies might be interested in making a movie. The Anglophile director was drawn to their curious blend of fantasy and reality and enjoyed their anarchic way with a plotline.

‘We’d have bitten his hand off, but the timing wasn’t right,’ says Taylor.

The Goodies never got to Hollywood, but a few years later Spielberg began work on a film about some bicycling adventurers entitled The Goonies. Mere coincidence, of course.

The Goodies are charming company: Brooke-Taylor, 78, is urbane and genial, Garden, 75 witty and acerbic, Oddie, 77, engagingly eccentric. Garden lives in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire with his second wife, Emma. He has three children: eldest John is a composer and musical director who has worked with Scissor Sisters. Garden senior is a panellist, as is Brooke-Taylor, on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, the improvisational show now presented by Jack Dee that he devised for BBC Radio in 1971.

Brooke-Taylor lives in Cookham, Surrey where he has been married to Christine Weadon for 50 years. They have two sons, Ben and Edward, who are in their late 40s.

‘We hated the bloody trandem,’ grumbles Oddie. ‘It was lethal, it was as if it wanted to kill us’

Oddie is settled in Hampstead, north London, close to the Heath, with his second wife, Laura Beaumont, where his various grown-up offspring ‘come and go, as they please’. His three daughters are all in the arts: Kate Hardie is an actress, Rosie Bones is a musician who has collaborated with the likes of Jeff Beck, while Bonny Oddie is a sculptor.

Between them, the Goodies have eight children and ‘umpteen grandkids’.

There is the occasional senior moment this morning. Oddie becoming enraged about ‘Lionel Blair invading Iraq’ is met with gales of laughter.

Asked if they ever fell out, Brooke-Taylor replies, ‘No, but we fell off quite a lot.’

‘I used to get told off for being out of control,’ Oddie owns up. ‘Years later that was diagnosed as being bipolar. But looking back on it I was extremely hyperactive and that must have been difficult for everyone. Although in many ways it suited the character.’

‘The Goodies actually had the advantage of being tri-polar,’ muses Garden. ‘We didn’t fall into camps like Python, we had a built-in majority. Two against one, done deal.’

The ‘good-natured rivalry’ with Monty Python is still evident. They were all friends and flatmates at Cambridge University (where Garden was president of the esteemed Footlights) though you sense they might also be mildly aggrieved that the Pythons became very wealthy men.

The individual Goodies are comfortable financially, but repeat royalties from the BBC would have provided a handsome pension pot. ‘We never made much money from The Goodies,’ Oddie sighs. ‘I can’t remember what the BBC were paying us but it wasn’t that generous. The only big pay day was when ITV made us an offer and we went there and earned as much in one year as we did in three at the BBC.’

‘People may not agree with this analogy,’ posits Oddie, ‘but I saw the Pythons as the Stones, slightly dangerous and slightly naughty, and we were more like The Beatles because we were family-friendly and appealed to the widest possible audience.

‘Python wasn’t so much of a family show as The Goodies,’ Garden agrees. ‘With us, it was, Go and tell your granny, The Goodies is on.’ They reminisce about the irreverent fun they had with various guests: pretending to murder DJ Tony Blackburn, casting Doctor Who (Jon Pertwee) as an insane Welsh preacher and transforming astronomer Patrick Moore into a safety-pinned punk.

There are other guests they’d sooner forget. ‘Rolf wasn’t actually a guest,’ corrects Garden. ‘He featured. There was one episode where there was a plague of Rolf Harrises.’

‘I think we can look forward to thousands of tweets about that when the box-set comes out,’ says Oddie. ‘They’ll tear us to pieces.’

One controversial episode, South Africa, addressed apartheid – or in Goodie-land ‘Apart-Height’ – where the diminutive Oddie was persecuted under an oppressive size-ist regime. But certain segments involved racial stereotyping, with some of the comedians blacking up their faces, and using what is now considered racially offensive terminology. ‘There probably was [racist language],’ says Garden. ‘But if you put offensive words into the mouth of a villain, is that still offensive or is that making a point? I think at the time we were using language which was pretty well current, but would not be current any more.’

Oddie once played a black Muslim who rejected his ‘slave name’ of Bill and called himself Rastus P Watermelon. The trio admit to being ‘slightly embarrassed’ by scenes and expressions that would be unacceptable today, but Oddie maintains that the only viewers who found The Goodies offensive were ‘white liberals’.

‘And stupid people,’ reckons Garden.

Were there ever Goodies groupies? ‘We did some shows in Australia about ten years ago,’ says Brooke-Taylor. ‘And there’d be these girls at the stage door saying, “Could I have a hug?” I have to say, these sad old men were rather pleased, and hugged away.’

Were they writing and performing together today, the Goodies would certainly be sending up Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, ‘maybe with huge haystacks on their heads’.

Meet their no 1 fans, the Giddies

PRINCE CHARLES

Charles wrote a letter to Bill Oddie where he says: ‘I remember guffawing like a drain at your antics back in the Seventies, especially the Ecky Thump episodes, to the point where my sister, HRH The Princess Anne, was quite short with me.’

DAVID WALLIAMS

‘Little Britain’ mainstay and bestselling children’s author In a selfie taken with Brooke- Taylor, Walliams describes him as ‘my favourite Goodie’ and cites watching the Goodies being chased by Dougal from The Magic Roundabout as his pre-eminent comedy memory.

MIKE MYERS

Austin Powers by any other name ‘He said that The Goodies were a very, very specific influence on him, which I was very happy about,’ glows Tim Brooke-Taylor.

MARTIN FREEMAN

Star of ‘The Office’ and ‘The Hobbit’ ‘They were obviously three clever blokes but they weren’t afraid to just be silly. I was seven at the time and I trust everything I liked when I was seven. There’s a lot to be said for that kind of honest judgement before you start worrying about what you should and shouldn’t like. Does it make you laugh? That’s the only criterion worth bothering about. The Goodies made me laugh.’

There is now a photoshoot with the dreaded three-seater bike. ‘We hated the bloody trandem,’ grumbles Oddie. ‘It was lethal, it was as if it wanted to kill us.’

‘I’d still quite like to take a sledgehammer to it,’ says Garden.

Sadly, there won’t be an appearance from the super-sized kitten, star of The Goodies’ title sequence. ‘She’s somewhere in China,’ Brooke-Taylor jokes. ‘Still getting work but hasn’t been in touch for years.’

‘Probably ended up on a plate,’ says Oddie, the lovable loose cannon delivering a reliably inappropriate parting shot.

‘Bill!’ his fellow Goodies chorus affectionately. Oddie beams, his righteous anger having abated.

Just don’t mention the BBC-word.

‘The Goodies: The Complete BBC Collection’ is released on DVD on September 24, courtesy of Network Distributing

(From the Event section on the Daily Mail website

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-6159025/The-Goodies-Python-rivalry-famous-fans-BBC.html )

The Oldie

The Goodies have the last laugh

Messed around by the BBC, dropped by ITV, and then sadly ignored, Graeme, Bill and Tim are celebrating the DVD release of their complete works, they tell Harry Mount

Harry Mount
Goodies! Goody goody yum yum… To people of a certain vintage, the words snap you back to the 1970s – and a unique mix of slapstick, silent comedy, silliness and satire created by Graeme Garden, Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor.

The Goodies rode high in the television ratings – for the BBC from 1970 to 1980, and then at ITV until 1982. But then ITV cancelled the series. And the grumpy old BBC refused to show repeats in the intervening 36 years, the odd late-night airing apart.

And so The Goodies slipped into a memory hole – cherished by adults and children who were around in the 1970s, but otherwise strangely stranded in time.

But the boys are back! All 67 half-hour episodes are now available on DVD for the first time.

Talking to them, it’s striking what pleasure they take in recalling the programme – and their days in the Cambridge Footlights nearly 60 years ago. Graeme Garden, 75, was in the year below Bill Oddie, 77, and Tim Brooke-Taylor, 78.

When Graeme Garden – training to be a doctor – met Oddie and Brooke-Taylor, he was, at his own admission, a little unsure of himself.

‘I was far too afraid to join the Footlights to begin with,’ he says. ‘I joined Cambridge University Light Entertainments – known as Cules. Thank God I didn’t join the Cambridge University National Trust Society.’

Garden says this deadpan – just like he delivers his one-liners on I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, where he appears alongside Brooke-Taylor – while he waits for me to work out the acronym.

All three come across like their Goodies screen characters. Garden is quiet but breaks the silence to drop in the brilliant one-liners. He recalls delivering babies in Plymouth: ‘Ark Royal had been in nine months before – so it was quite a busy time.’

‘Graeme’s always been like that,’ says Oddie. ‘Says nothing and then drops in the perfect jeu de mots, and everyone says, “Oh, isn’t he witty?” ’

Oddie is effusive and chatty. ‘He always talks more than us two, but he’s manageable,’ says Brooke-Taylor, who’s affable, mild and gentle.

‘The casting in The Goodies is spot-on,’ says Oddie. ‘Graeme has got a touch of the scientist, Tim has got a touch of the golfer, and I wouldn’t wear suits. Class was there definitely.’

Garden agrees: ‘Tim with a hyphen was the posh boy. I was the science boy and Bill was the scruffy little oik. Tim reckons he’s the most unlike his character.’

You can see their dynamic at work on Top of the Pops when The Goodies sing their 1975 hit Funky Gibbon – composed, like all their music, by Oddie.

‘Bill is absolutely enjoying it, Graeme looks like he wishes he was 1,000 miles away, and I’m in-between,” says Brooke-Taylor. ‘Still, I’ve always had two dreams: to score the winning goal in the World Cup, and to be on Top of the Pops with Pan’s People. I’ve done one out of two.’

Garden denies he hated the song, saying, ‘I just didn’t want to show them up with my funky disco moves.’

There is constant teasing between them but it is clearly affectionate.

‘We never had rows,’ says Garden, ‘Because there were three of us, you always had a two-to-one majority. We never took ourselves seriously enough to get vicious.’

They still get on well together but rarely reunite.

‘It’s their fault – they both moved out of London,’ says Oddie, who lives in the capital. ‘Graeme is near Oxford and Tim is in Cookham Dean. I began to bristle when I saw Graeme mutter and look at his watch because he wanted to go home.’

Untangling the birth of The Goodies requires a doctorate in comedy history. Peter Cook was Footlights president in 1960; Tim Brooke-Taylor in 1963; Graeme Garden in 1964; Eric Idle in 1965. And then the future Pythons and Goodies mingled on revues and TV comedies throughout the 1960s.

‘I compare it to a football team or a band,’ says Oddie. ‘They exchange a lead singer every now and then.’

So, when the BBC commissioned the first Goodies series in 1970, all three were drenched in the same influences as the Pythons.

‘The ghost of Peter Cook had been very strong at Cambridge,’ says Garden. ‘Everything we did was labelled satire. We wanted to shake that off. And so we went back to music hall for The Goodies. We were also influenced by silent movies, particularly Buster Keaton, animated cartoons and the Beano.’

The Goodies was distinguished from sketch shows by having a half-hour story, each with a new theme.

‘That’s the problem with a sketch show – you have to have a punchline,’ says Brooke-Taylor. ‘We were anti-Establishment – I think that’s why we’re popular in Australia and Scotland. And not being able to swear encouraged us to be funnier – even if there were some camp parts I wouldn’t do now.’

The only premise was that the three of them lived together and would do ‘anything, anytime, anywhere’.

‘Living together is a good theme, like Morecambe and Wise and the Marx Brothers,’ says Brooke-Taylor. ‘It means you don’t have to go into stories about wives and girlfriends.’

The programme was spiced up with guest stars. ‘Patrick Moore was a punk in one episode,’ recalls Garden. ‘We also had a lot of women who weren’t just eye candy – Beryl Reid as Mary Whitehouse [called Desiree Carthorse in the show], June Whitfield, Jane Asher...’

Garden and Oddie wrote The Goodies, with each writing a separate half, and then meeting to splice the halves together. They would swap verbal and visual gags, too.

‘I did the least,’ says Brooke-Taylor. ‘The hard graft was done by Graeme and Bill.’

Before writing, they drew up what they called ‘a Panorama list’ of themes. ‘Anything with a strong image,’ says Oddie. ‘If it was topical, it was no bad thing.’

That explains the 1975 episode attacking police violence in apartheid South Africa. The BBC objected, complaining it wasn’t funny enough. So they added in more jokes, and the episode was aired.

‘We’d often put two incongruous things together,’ says Oddie, ‘Kung fu was big at the time, and we were all from the North. So we came up with Ecky Thump.’

That 1975 episode – about a Lancashire martial art, involving hurling black puddings while wearing flat caps – was the one that led to a fan dying from laughing so much.

The most famous programme was Kitten Kong, the 1971 episode about a giant kitten terrorising London, climbing the Post Office Tower and squashing Michael Aspel. Oddie devised the idea from a rejected sketch he’d written for Ronnie Barker about Barker taking a super-powered kitten for a walk.

The Goodies moved to ITV in 1980 when the BBC dithered about commissioning another series. They were paid three times as much at ITV – and the series was more lavishly filmed.

When a new boss chopped the programme in 1982, the BBC was still annoyed at the trio leaving – and remained annoyed for decades, refusing to run repeats.

‘ “I have to remind you that the Goodies left the BBC,” was the response when fans asked for repeats,’ says Oddie.

The programme appealed to grown-ups and children, even though it originally went out at 10pm before being brought back to 9pm.

‘I get children from then saying, “I grew up with you,”’ says Oddie. ‘I tell them, “No one watching The Goodies ever grew up.” ’

‘The Goodies: The Complete BBC Collection’ is released on 24th September (£79.99)

If you want to obtain a copy of this issue and interview head below for more info
https://mailchi.mp/theoldie/my-grandfather-wrote-the-princesss-speech-and-more-in-the-june-oldie-3090865?e=1e06f241ca

(The Olde - Online subscription only Magazine. October 2018 issue )

The Times

(18th September 2018 - Hard copy)
(click image to read)

Radio Times

Anarchic comedy trio The Goodies recall the golden years of doing anything, anytime…

Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie once ruled the airwaves with their popular brand of stunt-packed comedy. As their entire BBC back catalogue is finally released on DVD, Mark Braxton catches up with the trio's trusty "trandem"

By Mark Braxton

Friday, 21st September 2018 at 9:00 am

It is the 1970s. A gigantic, fluffy kitten topples the Post Office tower, black puddings fly through the air, Zebedee from The Magic Roundabout trashes Chequers and a squadron of geese dive-bomb trespassers with weaponised eggs.

As far as the millions who regularly tuned in between 1970 and 1980 were concerned, such crazy flights of fancy were the norm. And now it’s yesterday once more: all 69 BBC episodes are set for release, unedited, on DVD.

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The three stars must be proud that their shows are so fondly remembered by comedy fans, and their visual iconography of Kitten Kong et al still looms large nearly 50 years on?

“I’m very proud,” Tim Brooke-Taylor, 78, tells, me. “Though this is tempered, slightly, by what appear to be quite old people coming up to me and saying, ‘My parents used to allow me to stay up to watch you’!”

Bill Oddie, 77, adds, “It is always genuinely flattering when members of the public say, ‘I grew up with you lot!’ My coy – and perhaps graceless – reply is: ‘Nobody grew up watching The Goodies!’”

When I suggest that the box set has been a long time coming, there is a little edge to Bill’s reply. “I used to browse round HMV’s DVD section to see if we were there. Every other BBC comedy ever made was in stock, except The Goodies. ‘Do you mean The Goonies?’ ‘No. Goodies.’ Consults screen: ‘Well it’s not listed’. So is it about time, or too late now?”

The Goodies are often mentioned in the same sentence as Monty Python. Coexisting on television around the same time, both teams emerged largely from the fertile comic fields of Cambridge, trying out material in the fêted Footlights. And there was much cross-pollination between their members in the 1960s (At Last the 1948 Show, radio series I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again, scripts for the ITV Doctor sitcoms…).

But while Python sometimes liked to wear its learning on its sleeve, throwing in references to Proust or Wittgenstein, the Goodies were aiming for something broader. The youngster of the trio, Graeme Garden, 75, explains, “We tended to base our plots and gags around things that were going on in the world: political, social, media, entertainment, the zeitgeist. So we needed to be sure that the audience were familiar with what we were sending up.”

Coming up with the goods

So what was the impetus behind The Goodies as a comedy format? Graeme continues: “Tim and I had done two series of a sketch show called Broaden Your Mind, which Bill joined. The BBC asked for a third series. We felt there were a lot of sketch shows around – The Two Ronnies, Python, Dick Emery, Arthur Haynes – so we wanted to try something different. We pitched doing the silly comedy you got in three-minute sketches but stretched into a half-hour narrative.”

The show launched on BBC2 on 8th November 1970, with the trio deciding to run their own agency – supposedly in Cricklewood but early episodes were filmed in Maidenhead in Berkshire – to help people by doing “anything, any time”. Their first job is to find out who is stealing the Beefeaters’ beef from the Tower of London.

How The Goodies (Graeme Garden, Bill Oddie and a slick-haired Tim Brooke-Taylor) first appeared in Radio Times. Photograph by Don Smith

Episode one set the style for ensuing series, with elaborate sets, guest stars, undercranked film sequences (a process resulting in speeded-up action) and lots and lots of comedy props. But, going out at 10pm on BBC2, it took a while to catch on – later series aired at 9pm – even in a pre-watershed slot.

That first series, viewed today, looks very much like a show finding its feet. Its late-night slot also meant that there was more grown-up material, with nudity and sex and drug references. Bill was often seen sucking lemon sherbet to provide him with inspiration.

“Sherbet: clearly a substitute for hallucinogenic drugs,” jokes Bill. “I was able to turn on and see useful visions on a screen. I did not inhale. Sherbet is not illegal.”

Suck it and see: Bill Oddie seen enjoying some sherbet in the Radio Times billing for the first episode

Much of the humour derives from the clear-cut differences in character. Graeme says: “Tim had a hyphen so he was the posh one – but he was also supremely good at playing silly toffs. I had a sort of science background and wore glasses, so I was the mad scientist, and Bill found his natural role as scruffy little oik.”

A great dynamic in terms of the show, then, but how did that work when it came to writing it? “All three of us would meet to discuss the sort of topics we would cover in the series,” answers Graeme, “and suggest unlikely couplings. For example, kung fu and t’North to produce Ecky Thump. Bill and I would flesh out the storyline between us, then write half each, coming together to blend it into a whole. Subsequent editing went on involving all three of us during pre-production and rehearsal.”

Tim adds: “I think the fact that we were different helped. One huge advantage of a trio is that there’s always a majority!”

A bicycle made for three

Almost another regular character of The Goodies is the specially built three-seater, but it’s fair to say that the human cast were not fans.

Tim recalls: “The trandem was originally a tandem with an extra seat on the back for Bill. It had no brakes and no free wheel. You had to stop the pedals in order to stop the bike. The pedals wouldn’t stop and crashed into the ankles. As Bill had no pedals he wasn’t in time with Graeme and myself and we swung around all over the place. Trying to get up to speed for a 30-yard shot usually meant the chain snapped halfway through the take. The later versions were better.”

Nothing was off limits in terms of comedy targets: police brutality, gender politics, pollution, ballroom dancing, the NHS, the British Film Industry… DJ Tony Blackburn came in for plenty of stick, too. The more random the better, it seemed. As the original theme tune had it, “It’s whatever turns you on.”

Their first RT front cover, to herald series three in 1973 – and a change of location for their HQ

Another striking feature of the series as a whole was Bill’s musical input. An accomplished parodist, Bill wrote music for the Footlights while at Cambridge and released his own album in the 1960s. With The Goodies, Bill was keen to reinvent the language of music in comedy, and got session musicians in to play on the background soundtracks.

“For years,” he says, “incidental and link music on sitcoms had sounded much the same – tubas and piccolos are funny, allegedly. We had some great electric guitar and bass players and some lively drummers. Over the series, I covered just about every style from funk to rock ‘n’ roll, while I varied the vocals accordingly.”

So great was the show’s musical dimension that the trio even became pop stars: “I loved recording. I was called a frustrated rock star. Really? Top of the Pops nearly every week, four top 20 singles and four albums? I was not frustrated!”

Their singles included The Inbetweenies, Black Pudding Bertha and, of course, Funky Gibbon, which got to number four in 1975.

What was it like to be both comedy and pop stars? “The mid-70s were ridiculous,” says Bill. “Hit records, top-ten books in paper and hardback. I, particularly, was a bit schizophrenic about crowds. The adulation was rather nice, but sometimes it got too claustrophobic. The crowd was so big at the Arndale Centre in Manchester the police stopped the event!”

One of the working titles for the programme was the rather quaint Super Chaps Three. I wondered whether they felt constrained by being Goodies. “I confess it was my title,” says Bill, “and there were times I wished it was tougher, wittier, or totally meaningless. On the other hand, it sounded like a rock group – possibly the Monkees?”

The fourth Goodie

If the fifth Beatle is George Martin and the seventh Python is Neil Innes, then the fourth Goodie was most certainly Jim Franklin, a director and producer on the show with special responsibility for the action-packed location shoots and trick-photography sequences. He went on to direct Ripping Yarns for Pythons Michael Palin and Terry Jones.

“Jim was a real hero,” stresses Tim. “Without him The Goodies wouldn’t have existed. Thanks to him the visual sequences were great for the time. He was a great film editor and creator and made the impossible possible.”

Graeme adds, “He made meticulous storyboards so that in pre-production meetings, everyone could see and respond to exactly what was expected on screen.”

An RT feature from 1975 showing an example of Goodies storyboarding – for the episode Rome Antics

If The Goodies’ speeded-up shenanigans have a cartoon-like quality, that’s no coincidence, as Bill clarifies when I ask what their comedy influences were.
“Saturday-morning matinees. Hopalong Cassidy, Look at Life, the Three Stooges, but best of all Tom and Jerry and Bugs Bunny: speed and violence and no one ever dies. Plus the Bugs Bunny music numbers with straw hat and cane. The next animated revelation was The Jungle Book. Fantastic music score. In fact, The Goodies became animals several times: mice, rabbits, a spotty dog, a pantomime horse…”

Quick-change artists

Dressing up was a major part of The Goodies’ success – and it seems as though Tim got to be the most outrageous: “I think I drew the short straw. I had to play the female roles because the other two had strangely hairy faces.”

Big wigs: downtime in the dressing room for Goodies Graeme, Bill and Tim

Tim adds: “I discovered women’s clothes are very uncomfortable for men, though I did enjoy playing Timita, a Margaret Thatcher version of Evita. Thanks to the make-up department I was truly lovely!”

The colourful, comic-strip nature of the show was not lost on Radio Times, which honoured The Goodies with a second cover in 1975, and a lengthy feature that went behind the scenes.

That was very much the year of the Goodie, with a run of episodes that fizzed with comic energy and crackled with imaginative gags. The opening instalment, The Movies, ends with an extraordinary ten-minute sequence that is everything that was great about The Goodies. Tim recalls, “Graeme, Bill and I are trying to make our own films at the same time as each other, and getting in each other’s way: Graeme a western, me a biblical epic and Bill a black-and-white silent movie.”

It won a silver Rose at the prestigious Montreux TV festival, as did Kitten Kong.
Ratings began to tail off towards the end of the 1970s, when it was clear that tastes in comedy were shifting. The trio then moved to ITV for seven episodes in 1981 and 82 that rarely make fans’ lists of favourites. I was surprised to hear Tim’s response when I asked if the channel crossing was a step too far.

“We didn’t want to leave the BBC. They kept delaying the next series because the invaluable special effects department were heavily involved in making The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. This was well worth making, but there comes a time when either giving up the Goodies or accepting an ITV offer were the only choices.”

That was then, this is now

Watching some episodes of The Goodies again in the cold light of 2018 does illustrate the changing – and sometimes problematic – face of comedy.

Sticking the boot into white South Africa, and apartheid in particular, was quite the rarity back in 1975. But viewed today, such laudable intentions are let down by some of the methods, as well as the language. The trio also satirised the then-popular but now reviled Black and White Minstrel Show in a 1977 episode. But the message tends to get lost when the stars black up themselves.

So is it fair to say that not all of the gags work now? “Not all of the gags worked then!” says Graeme. “But we haven’t edited them because the show was of its time, and I think it would be dishonest to tone down anything that may cause a jolt to the modern viewer. I think it’s really interesting historically to see the attitudes and conventions of the 1970s in a modern context.”

The new Goodies box set contains an illuminating interview with Bill, Tim and Graeme in front of a studio audience in Leicester Square in June. It’s conducted, perhaps surprisingly, by caustically brilliant stand-up Stewart Lee, who’s been a fan since childhood.

Discussing the apartheid episode, Graeme tells Lee, “Somebody recently said, ‘You couldn’t make that show now’. To which the reply is, ‘You wouldn’t have to’.”

Expanding on this theme, Bill tells me: “My first job in London was writing for That Was the Week That Was. So I was used to annoying audiences by being ‘satirical’. Compared with TW3, the Goodies were like The Beano, but we did often deal with social, political and racial issues. The fact is that there are some subjects that you only have to mention and somebody will be offended even if no offence is intended or – if they really listened – they might actually agree with us.

Bill cites an example of when the boot was on the other foot, following congratulations from a well-known broadcasting standards campaigner: “We were offended when Mary Whitehouse called us a ‘nice clean show’. For weeks we tried to come up with something she would be horrified by. We did it with Tim’s underpants with a carrot on the front. She was outraged. Result!”

Danger Men

If the past is a foreign country, then Health and Safety were the outer solar system. One of the most entertaining aspects of watching Goodies episodes now is seeing the stars perform many of their own stunts. One early episode sees a sleepwalking Bill atop a moving double-decker bus, for instance.

Which did Tim consider the most dangerous moment? “We were on the trandem hanging from wires in the studio, as you do, escaping from a giant kitten. One of the wires snapped and I fell but was still attached to the brake – we had a brake by then, but it wasn’t much use in mid-air.

“I was safely lifted down and taken to the BBC nurse. She was French and her English wasn’t great. I tried, ‘Une bicyclette pour trois, avec un grand, mais petit chat…‘ She wasn’t impressed, but safely treated my wound.”

It was actually Radio Times photographer Don Smith who saved Tim from more serious injury that day. When the cable broke and Tim was left dangling, Don raced over to hold his legs, thus enabling him to free his pinched hand.

A publicity still centred around Tim’s “throne”

And now, the $64,000 question: which is their favourite episode? The aforementioned The Movies is one. But another theme emerges. Tim: “I also love the episodes where, because we’d already spent the budget, we had to do the whole show in the office – no visual effects, just tight individual dialogue.”

Bill agrees. “I like the episodes when we had to do the show in the studio. It made a change to have to act a bit instead of being human cartoons. My favourite is when we were trapped in our office faced with the end of the world. Its title was Earthanasia. We may all be about to experience it.”

Speaking of planetary concerns brings me to the trio’s post-Goodie careers, which have taken off in diverse and interesting ways.

Graeme, a qualified doctor, and Tim are regular panellists on Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. Graeme has written extensively for television and radio and now appears on ITV’s The Imitation Game.

Tim went from The Goodies into another successful sitcom – “I loved doing Me and My Girl with my good friend Richard O’Sullivan; although Richard and I took part in the editing of the shows, they weren’t our creations” – and since then has been in the likes of One Foot in the Grave, Heartbeat and Doctors.

Bill became a TV expert on wildlife issues, presenting shows including Springwatch and Wild in Your Garden. Can we expect to see him back with his binoculars any time soon?

“The truthful answer is ‘I doubt it’. I have to be asked, by someone who has the power to employ me. ‘We won’t be asking you to do Springwatch this year’ I was told. No explanation. Never has been. I still feel that a large chunk of my working life – and my personality – was taken away.

“Fortunately, I have a fabulous family, a great wife, and some lovely friends. Mainly from the world of conservation and animal care. Frankly, that is a kinder world than the BBC.”

Nevertheless, all three are united in their pleasure that their madcap capers in the 1970s can be seen again. The Goodies were once the talk of the school playground and the office watercooler alike, and the recent Leicester Square audience showed how much love remains for the comedy trio.

Indeed, one incident from the noughties has stayed with Graeme. “We toured a stage show in Australia, and after one performance outside the stage door was a huge Australian bloke, shaggy beard, torn vest, towering over me. He whispered, ‘Thanks for making a pretty sh***y childhood bearable’ and vanished into the night.”

But back then, the Goodies went to great lengths – and pains – to gain approval. As the theme tune had it, “We’re with you right to the end/Everyone needs a friend.”

The Goodies: the Complete BBC Collection is available in a 12-disc box set from Monday 24th September