The Goodies

The Goodies was a surreal British television comedy series of the 1970s combining sketches and situation comedy and starring Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie.

Characters and production techniques

The show featured extensive use of slapstick (often performed using speeded-up photography and clever, though low-budget, visual effects), 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. The group also acknowledges their debt to the usage of music in silent movies. Some early episodes were interrupted by spoofs of contemporary commercials.

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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). The group have suggested that the characters of Graeme, Tim, and Bill represent the Liberal, Conservative and Labour wings of British politics 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" http://www.smh.com.au/news/Arts/Laughs-to-the-power-of-three/2004/12/13/1102787009735.html) and Oddie is a pacifist, ornithologist and active environmentalist.

Related Topics:
Royalist - Liberal - Conservative - Labour - Ornithologist

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The show benefited greatly from the input of director Bob Spiers, who later directed Absolutely Fabulous, Press Gang, some episodes of Fawlty Towers and the film Spiceworld.

Related Topics:
Bob Spiers - Absolutely Fabulous - Press Gang - Fawlty Towers - Spiceworld

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