It isn't fair at all on comedians that people say, well,
I'd that I had that Griff Reese Jones at my dinner party the
other night and he wasn't funny at all.
But I mean, that's really not fair.
You have a sewage worker to dinner.
You don't say, Well, I don't even believe he was a sewage
worker. He didn't rummage in our toilet
once, You know, you don't. You don't expect people to, you
know, it's a job comedy like any other.
And of course, Griff can be very funny, for example.
But it's true. The pressure of all kinds on
comedians is immense. I'm an intolerable, I would have
thought. The Hello and welcome to
Goonpod. My name is Tyler Adams, and this
is a podcast in which me and my guests talk about comedy, with
the emphasis usually on Sellers, Milligan Siekim, and so on.
But when I'm lucky enough to welcome to the show someone of
the caliber of this week's guest, pretty much everything is
up for discussion. The guest in question is a
groundbreaking comedy producer and writer who was once
described by the Daily Mail that most thoughtful and nuanced
representative of the 4th Estate as a well known communist at
Cambridge. Welcome to the show, John Lloyd.
Hi, Tyler Do. You recognize that description?
I do. And of course, it was the wrong
John Lloyd. They got the wrong guy.
Oh, really? No.
We didn't know that. No double page spread.
Well known communist at Cambridge.
I wasn't even a member of the Liberal Liberal Club.
I was so apolitical in my early 20s, and it was in fact, the
financial journalist John Lloyd, who edited the New Statesman,
who was a communist in Cambridge.
I know, slightly. But.
But it was interesting because in those days we just laughed
about it, you know, It was a stupid mistake.
I didn't sue anybody. I didn't, you know, get upset
about it. It was just like, yeah, OK,
hopeless journalism. Yeah, was it?
Was it? Am I correct in thinking was it
triggered by the puppet of Prince William on Spitting Image
that that caused this? There was a big Ferrari about
the royal baby, as it was then known William as as he became,
because a brilliant young journalist on the, I think
Birmingham Mercury broke the story that we were doing a
puppet of a baby. And there was a lot of hand
wringing about, you know, how can they do this to an innocent
baby and all that other stuff as if the baby would care to hoots.
Yeah, it was actually brilliant publicity for Spitting Image.
Jeff Baker, his name was. He went on to be the publicist
for Paul McCartney and had rather an amazing career.
Oh, wow. OK, he spotted.
This was a good story and it was splashed all over the Nationals.
I don't know whether that was what got the mail to to run that
absurd story because you know I've BBC trained.
We were trained to be balanced and and so on and it was
difficult in the early 80s with the Labour Party almost
invisible, to try and do a story about them every every week,
which we did religiously. Yeah I want to I want to talk a
little bit more about Spitting Image if we get time shortly.
But obviously I wanted to get you on to talk about your career
and and and whatnot but obviously this is a it's called
Goon pod so it it takes as its heart as its heart the the goons
and them as a group and collectively sorry them as a
group and as individuals and I know that you I mean you I think
you're you're I'd looked actually you're four months
younger than the Goon show John actually.
I'm high. That's a very good fact.
Although it was known as crazy people back then and then it
became the Goon Show a little bit later.
But I know that you you you did indicate to me that as a young
radio producer, you were once invited to give a talk to the
Goon Show, Preservation Society and.
You felt about a fraud, is that right?
Well, I I didn't know much about them either.
It was really, it was the generation before me.
It was people who'd been young in the war, you know?
And it was the go to funny show as Python was for my generation.
Yeah, but to be perfectly honest, as a kid I didn't really
get what they were on about. It's not that I didn't like it,
it's just that it wasn't part of of my landscape really.
There was another thing called the glums.
What was that in? Take it from here.
It's like I just had no idea.
These people seem to be bucking mad.
I never really grasped it and almost those sort of voice.
I don't. I honestly don't know what
they're on about. My I was much more the shows
that we listened to really religiously were the Navy Lark
because my dad was in the Navy. We thought that was hilarious.
Left hand down a bit and then the sound of a warship crashing
the Clitheroe kid. Really like the Clithero kid?
Yeah, we like that. We thought it was very funny and
you know, sit around the roast chicken, Sunday lunch listening
to these things and it was a national institution and also
Round the horn and subsequently beyond our Ken.
Those were, yeah, really the things that influenced my sense
of humor, not so much the goons, although Peter Sellers was very
influential to me because he did a an album.
He did. Do you know it?
I do very much. So you know, Bell, I am Gateway
to the South. You know, I'll make the little
holes in the end of toothbrushes and I used to know all the
voices from that album. That was really such a big deal
for me. But again, I didn't really know
that Peters Fellows was a goon joke person.
I just for some reason my my parents had very few albums in
their collection and that was one of them.
And I listened to it over and over and over again till I wore
it out. Very, very funny.
And still, it's still funny today, actually.
I think little holes in the car are put in manually, or in other
words, once a year. I recently had a honour of
demonstrating Mar Craft before the only of I He stopped by one
day for a couple of words. I did not understand either of
them. It's peripheral to me, the goons
in the sense that, for example, I loved Michael Bentin's.
It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world. I mean, we you know when that.
It's a square world. It's a square world, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
Sorry. We we love that.
All the little, you know, puppy things.
And we just thought that was brilliant.
So being invited to talk to the Goon Show Preservation Society
was fraudulent even then. I mean, went very well.
It was very enjoyable, but I don't know how.
What on earth? I said.
I can't remember. Well, I was.
I was interested to get you on because I want to talk about
your career, obviously, but but also, I mentioned that you're
four months younger than The Goon Show, and its first
producer, of course, was Dennis Maiden Wilson, and I know that
he was a bit of a mentor to you. He was, he was.
He took me under his wing as a very baby telly producer.
I think I even met him when I was still working in radio and
and a wonderful wonderful radical marvelous person not
just the Goon show but of course till death is due part.
A real ground breaking producer. You, you probably know, Tyler
famously that the when it became called The Goon Show, I suppose
must be in the second series. And it went up before a thing
called Program Review Board, which was the, you know, the
great and the good of the BBC sitting around opining on
whether programs are any good or not.
And in those days there were very much Hungarians on the
review board because there's many immigrants, very
interesting, very intelligent. So you'd often have this
conversation, this Hungarian and the chairman saying you know
this is very not British, this is this show is not British.
And one of these things, The Goon Show was up and somebody
said, now, has anyone here come across this go on show?
Because it strikes me very unfunny indeed.
They were. They were.
That was it with us. You know, the management is
always kind of a couple of beats behind the curve somehow.
Wasn't tennis quite a a prolific smoker and drinker and all the
rest of it as well? Yeah.
Well I I'm, I'm, to be honest, everybody was.
I mean people did not look after their health terribly well.
There was a lot of smoking and drinking.
You quite often in the television gallery, you couldn't
really see the screens because there was so much smoking going
on. And it really that lasted really
right up till John Burt's director generalship where he
sort of you know decided that people should go to the gym more
often than they installed a handbag shop in the foyer of
broadcaster of television Center.
I remember I thought, OK, these are not my people anymore.
But yeah, it was, it was madcap, you know, radio and telly back
in the day. It was very, it was very free.
Everything was very instinctual, very People commissioned
programs on the gut, you know, because as a young producer, my
head of department looked me in the eye and say, are you really
sure you want to do this? And I go, yeah, I'm absolutely
sure. OK, fine, off you go.
Make a pilot. Please don't screw up.
That was the way it worked. And, you know, but it's funny,
each generation, you know, grows older, I suppose is probably the
same for me. But I remember Dennis accosting
me in the BBC bar after one episode of not the 9:00 news
saying you've gone too far you you really gone to via John you
you absolutely. This is disgraceful from from
the man. Of course he was the the madcap
radical of his day. In fact they that go on show
conversation happened with the Program View board.
Dennis allegedly went up to the roof of Broadcasting House and
stood atop the building where it just above the Eric Gill statues
and threatened to jump off the roof unless the Goon Show was
recommissioned. I heard that before, really.
Yeah, yeah. Wow.
No. Because it was driven by, you
know, you sort of think of the BBC in the old days as being a
bit stiff, you know, and there were a lot of tweed suits around
and all that kind of thing. But it was driven by passion and
the management understood that if somebody cared that much,
they weren't going to cancel it, you know?
Yeah, yeah. And people really cared about
what they did. People are not very well paid,
but they really believed in the project.
And you know, the whole Rythian ethic, which was that common
people, as it were, might not get this yet, but they will come
round. If it's any good, they'll come
round. And people had a very, very
strong sense of quality, which had, you know, there's not
necessarily any correlation to speak of between quality and,
you know, rating success. And there's a very long
tradition of the BBC of sticking with things that weren't getting
the figures. Python's a very good example.
It rated very poorly. It went out very late at night.
It was a very cult thing to begin with, You know, a lot of
students and things, simply faulty towers, which.
Only faulted horses as well that.
Oh, I lived along for two series, I think before, yeah.
I mean, I really wouldn't have a career if the BBC had cancelled
a Wobbly series after the first go.
You know, not an Icon News Blackadder.
A lot of my friends I'm spitting, which is an ITV show
of course, but a lot of my friends wouldn't talk to me
after the first series. They thought it was so terrible
because if you're going to do something that's ground
breaking, it's not easy, you know, people are late adopters,
they prefer something that's familiar.
And, you know, it's like Sun Tzu said about in The Art of War.
You know no plan survives contact with the enemy, no
matter how good the idea. It takes a while to get it
right, you know, to to tinker with it and get the edges sorted
out. Yeah, but that nowadays, you
know you don't get a second series if it, if it doesn't
rate, that's it, you know you've got you've got one chance.
Well, The Office is another very famous example is nobody really
understood what on earth that was and it was put out very late
at night and people found it. Royal Family is another very
good example. Everyone thought that this very
niche for people sitting on the sofa or whatever it was.
Yeah. This is not ABBC thing.
This is a culture thing, is that people want certainty in art.
Now you know they want to be sure that this is going to the
Beethoven or Van Gogh is going to be world famous off the first
few bars of musical the first painting.
That's not the way it works. You know if you're going to be
any good, if you're going to be memorable, you're going to be
booed roundly for your first opera.
And you know the impression is you know obviously were that was
the IT was an insult. The impression is like what was
this a vague impression of proper painting and that that's
the thing that it's it's I suppose it's my zone really.
I'm not really comfortable doing something which is a brand
leader. I like to be somebody who
everyone thinks this is never going to work.
This is absolutely hopeless. I guess most of the shows you've
been involved with were largely devised by you, or sometimes in
collaboration with others, but you're not one for for coming to
a project late when it's already well established.
Basically, no. I I've never been a gun for
hire. I've always done, yeah, trying
to do new things. Virtually all the things I've
done have been collaborative, usually with at least one other
producer and you know Spitting Image obviously is a huge team
of people all of whom contributed a small amount to
make what it became you know, you can't.
I used to get quite back in the day when I cared quite cross
when people would say things like was spitting image your
idea And I said well I didn't have the idea for doing puppets
or not that I thought news. But really it's the group effort
and and actually pity, which is a terrible idea on paper, which
is we're going to have 1000 puppets of famous people.
Oh yeah, How you going to afford that?
And it's going to go out at 10:00 at night and get 50
million viewers. I mean, obviously that is not a
business plan that stacks up. It's a completely hopeless idea.
Rather like Leonardo da Vinci saying I think people could fly
to the moon. Oh yeah, and how you've you've
got a thing looks a bit like a helicopter, but have you
invented the internal combustion engine and, you know, rocket
fuel and, you know, the computer?
It requires a lot to do something which, you know, it's
like the famous Woody Allen one. I I liked the early funny ones.
You know, the people to say about it is films when nobody
watched them. But then it with hindsight
everyone thinks, Oh yeah, I was there when it was new.
No, you weren't. Most people aren't.
So it's interesting with the goons, you know that there's
something so bonkers could have you know apart from a little bit
of wobble with the management really.
You know, the nation took the goons to to its heart really
very quickly and maybe that's a war thing.
You know, you've just lived under through the most terrible
survival thing and and suddenly everyone's, you know, dressing
up in silly costumes and larking about because, you know, they're
so grateful to be alive. Did you work with Milligan at
all? Yes, twice.
And Spike obviously as a as a sort of lifetime comedy servant,
of course, a genius, you know, of course, brilliant books that
you know. And as as of having researched
him since, not as a consumer as a child, but as an adult, you
think, well, they're very few people who've made such a dent
as Spike has. But, you know, famously a very
mercurial person. Could be extremely difficult.
Could be utterly delightful and charming and you just never knew
which spike you were even going to get.
You know the famous saying was never worked with dogs, children
or Spike Milligan. That was the the the business
saying. And so the first time I worked
with him was on a new newish quotation series called Quote UN
quote that ran for 40 years. I think it was very early on.
Yeah. And I learned as a young
producer that people actually really like doing radio.
You don't have to dress up. There's no makeup.
You know, the car parking is very easy.
You just pitch up, you do your thing and you go home, go to the
pub. It's lovely.
So we, if you look up the casting of the first series of
quote UN quote, it's really good.
I mean, it's Tom Stoppard, there's Jonathan Miller, Spike,
as I say. No.
No, it's fantastic. I mean every week.
So it wasn't nearest Hughes. Every.
Week No, no, no it was was really it was very good actually
the early quote UN quote we were very very brave and and people
delivered and so Spike was on with Terry Wogan.
I come with the 4th person was, but I had, as a young single man
been watching Telly 1 and I saw this program called I think it's
called Man Alive must have been made by Granada.
And there was a incredibly beautiful young reporter on this
thing called Anna Ford wearing a sort of white French Mac and her
hair blowing in the wind. And I I said I was single.
I thought, gosh, I'd really like to meet her.
She looks really something else. So I phoned her office and said,
I'm hey, I'm work for the BBC. I'm in radio.
She fancy being on a panel for a quotations quiz.
And of course nobody's ever asked.
And who's wrote a report at that question for at least of all
her. And so she she said yes.
And afford your title is. Eating people is wrong.
Eating people is wrong.
Somebody like Desmond des des Desmond O'Connor.
So she turned up at the Paris Theatre in Lower Regent Street
and of course Terry Wogan and Spike Milligan, who was sitting
either side of her, immediately fell completely in love with
her. And so we're all getting them so
well the game sort of was falling to bits and Spike said I
think we need to go and get a bottle of wine, come do with
this BBC coffee. And during the recording in
front of 500 people, he went outside the Paris studios, got
into his mini, drove to an off license and got a bottle of wine
and came back a bottle of wine and several glasses.
And it went with a real swing that that episode.
And afterwards, of course Terry Wogan and Spike.
Milligan, being super famous, took Anna Ford out to dinner and
I never got to meet her. No.
Yeah, they didn't invite you. No Sliding Doors moment, really,
but it was. Anyway, I've got to know Anna
since she's just the most delightful person, and shared
that story with her, obviously. And so that was the first time
and then in the mid 70s. And then it was probably 20
years before I met Spike again and it was a commercial when I
was I directed ads in the late 80s and 90s for about 10-12
years. Yeah, and didn't work entirely
at all apart from that. And I Spike was cast in this ad.
I can't even remember the product was nothing terribly
interesting. And I called him up and said,
you know, what sort of set would you like?
And he said, well, I really don't mind.
I'll just turn up and do the thing.
And so I thought of what I thought was a funny idea for a
set. When he arrived on the set, he
said, whose is this pathetic idea for the set?
And I said it's mine, Mr. Milligan.
He goes, well, it's the unfunniest thing I've ever seen
and it was very difficult actually.
I was really, I was appalled that I'd upset him and he's
quite cross. But I don't know, somehow we got
talking, you know, and we discovered but that we're both
have Irish roots. So that was one good thing and
then that we both very keen on rugby.
So we we sort of bonded and it yeah, and actually went very
well in the end. But he we could, he could just
go off on one like that, you know, And you never knew whether
he was going to literally as he did was quote UN, quote,
literally walk out of the door and disappear for half an hour
or whether he was going to mollify and be brilliant.
Well, he could now. He could turn on a dime.
Really. His moods and and what not I
like as well the the fact that so when when not the 9:00 news
was that the first series at least, which I know was a bit of
a it was. It wasn't a disaster, of course,
but it was seat of the pants kind of stuff the first series,
wasn't it? It's, you know, you're finding a
feat. I think that's, you know, I I
knew Chris Langham oddly better than all of the others really.
But. Well, he was who I was coming to
because he was a link with Milligan, of course.
Yeah, he obviously worked on the Q series with Milligan with him
and but he, you know Chris also, you know he's a he's a
complicated person and he wasn't right for the chemistry
ultimately. And it was only when we elevated
Griffiths Jones to one of the main four that it suddenly
started to gel. And, you know, we were finding
our feet. And I think one of the things
that we were trying to find a new style that was uniquely us.
And I think you'll see that in sketches like Gerald the Gorilla
or the famous sketch about Monty Python, you know, The Life of
Python, the first series, or Andy Hamilton's wonderful sketch
about the stunt, Pope. There were we was trying to find
what our unique voice was and Chris was slightly a kind of
drag anchor, always trying to pull it back to what Spike would
have done or something like that.
And you know it is very difficult when you're trying to.
I mean, all companies essentially the same thing,
obviously trying to make people laugh, but the flavour of it,
the style of doing it is it takes time to to find that
voice. And it was only really when
Chris left that we suddenly found, OK, this is what we do,
which is not like Monty Python, it's not like the Goon Show,
it's it's something else. And I think that's true today.
I think that when you see a good, not that I couldn't use
sketches, not like anything else.
Yeah, because I I know that Rowan tended to be the one that
most people talked about. In terms of.
But I I always, I always sort of gravitate towards Mel Smith in
everything, to be honest, because he brings a real
naturalistic style to everything he appears in.
And is it? Is it true that you offered him
not the 9:00 news the day he was planning on giving up showbiz
and going to work for his father?
Is that? Is that correct?
So I found out many years later, Yeah, and what he couldn't do,
it's nowadays called the pilot, but there was no pilot for
Northern Hancock News. There was AI was given a series
of 6 without a pilot, rushed around trying to find people,
and asked Mel to be in it. And he couldn't do it because
he's working at the Royal Court as an assistant director.
But it definitely was. He was about to give up theater
and go back to work for his dad. He was a bookie in Chiswick and
that gave him the the sort of hand hold.
And then the series was cancelled after the first
episode because the general election was called by Jim
Callahan. And I was able to get back to
Mel and say we've made it. Well, sort of a pilot was the
first episode, but fortunately it never went out.
And he came around to my house and I showed him it and he said,
you know what, John? That's the unfunniest half hour
of television I've literally ever seen.
Because again, we we really didn't know what we were doing.
I'd never made any telly in my life.
I was a radio guy. Yeah.
Mel was such, you're right. Tyler was perceptive.
Mel was such a central person in in northern Halicop news because
he it was his naturalistic acting style that became the
sort of hallmark you know the Python thing is, you know oh
hello missus, pepper pot. You know, funny voices and
people are called things like Colonel Voll Strangler.
And so it's very much in that air to the goon's tradition, I
would say, and not the 9:00 news is a different thing.
It's trying to parody television much more realistically and
exactly. And we used to have these two
methods. We'd get, you know, scripts in
and, you know, very often they would be sort of by the book
scripts and not the nightclub news.
They were known as knock, knock. Come in, Perkins.
Sketches. And there was weird, you know,
not long. Yes.
Come in, Perkins. Hello, Sir.
Now, Perkins, how long have you been at this zoo?
I've been at the zoo 64 years, Sir.
Yes, Perkins. And do you know what a
hippopotamus is? No, Sir.
You know that it's like a yeah, it's got.
A sort of template writes itself virtually, yeah.
Mel's great contribution was to take the dialogue that was sort
of like out of a sort of manual of comedy script writing.
Yeah, very funny and all that, and make it like he meant it.
And so we had these two methods called roughening and
plumpening. And roughening was mucking about
the dialogue so that it was the way it had pauses and arms and
ears in it, the way a person would really speak.
It was a really marvellous thing that he did.
And then Plumpling was adding in extra jokes to the script, which
we sort of kick around in rehearsal.
He had that at at his best, not the 9:00 news.
A bit like Blackout has that very dense style, which is the
jokes just keep on coming at you.
Yeah. Yeah.
It just there's never a moment where there isn't another joke
just lurking around the corner. Two please.
Are you out at 18? I'm 29.
You don't look 29 for me. Well, I am.
How old's the jail bait? My wife is also 29.
Have you got passports to prove it?
Look, is this some kind of a joke?
Are you sure you wouldn't prefer to go and play?
No, I'd like to see the film, please.
I'm afraid that's impossible until you can prove you're 18.
You see, people are maturing a lot younger these days.
Sonny say Can't tell. Apparently one in three
schoolgirls has a teenage child by the age of 14.
Listen. Listen, I'm 29 and I look it.
How old are you then? 9292 Well, there you go.
You see, appearances can be deceptive.
Look. Come on, come on, come on.
Your long head layabout. Hurry up.
Get back to school where you belong.
Hey, what? Look, if you can't get in, why
don't you just accept it, eh? And let some adults get in and
see the show. Look, I am an adult.
I've got a job and I wear suits. Who?
Does he think he's fooling? That's a disgrace that we become
a nation of liars. I haven't heard a true word
spoken since, Lord Lucan said. I'm just going down the path.
They're probably on drugs. Look, I'm not on bloody drugs.
Don't you swear in front of me, young man.
It's a disgrace, isn't it? Ever since the Queen married
that Greek, it's been bloody this and bloody that.
Just shut up and let me in. I'm nearly 30 for Christ.
'S sake. I don't care how bloody hell you
are. It'll be 150 for all I can.
You're not coming in. Out.
You can't do that. I voted for Margaret Thatcher
and I know what I bloody well like now.
Tremendous integrity as an actor.
And Rowan caught that off Mel because he thought, OK, this guy
really knows what he's doing. I think Rowan learned a lot from
Mel. Oh really?
OK, And they a lot of their partnerships.
I often thought, I wonder what would have happened if instead
of it being Smith and Jones, it would have been Smith and
Atkinson because. Blimey.
They really got the point of each other on the set.
You know, they've they've formed an amazingly creative
partnership between them. I.
Don't know if this was directly related to Mel, but you've
you've gone a record and said that the best comedy is where if
you turn the sound down, it looks like it could be serious
drama. Well, that's the comedy I like.
I can't say that it's the best, but I I like it that if you do
it really well, that's so well acted that you don't know it's
funny until you hear what they're saying.
And you can see that for example, is definitely
something. Well, Ryan always had a bit of
that, the famous schoolmaster sketch.
There's no hint that this guy thinks it's funny.
He's being really cruel and vicious.
And that of course is that's the bit of Rowan's acting ability I
love is the very dark stuff. I I'm less keen on the Mr.
Beanie thing. So I like him when he's the dark
side of Blackadder is very, very strong I think.
And again, that's something was definitely a lot of Mel Smith in
there I think. OK, because obviously Rowan
left, Not the 9:00 news. Or at least he basically said at
a dinner, didn't he? Sorry chaps, be very nice
working with you, but I'm going off to.
Yes. To do something else and he went
off and made what was originally going to be called one of the
working titles, Prince Edmund and his two Friends.
That's what I understand, yes. And I didn't do the pilot, which
eventually became the Black Adder.
It was produced by John Howard Davis and I think I'm right in
saying and, but after they'd done it, they came back and
said, oh please, please do the series.
And I I kind of relented. Can I can I just say because
I've said this many times, I've said it to him, Blue in the
face, and people don't believe it.
But after Black added two, the blackout of the first series is
my favorite. Well, I'm.
I'm so pleased you say that, Tyler, because again, like the
first series and not the 9:00 news, it's not without merit.
And actually the third episode in the first series, the
Archbishop actually won an Emmy. So it wasn't somebody thought we
were doing something properly. But we.
And again, it's partly my fault. They re showed the pilot on UKTV
recently as part of a new documentary, and it was
perfectly obvious to me what the mistakes we made were, which was
with you can see what look looking at the pilot now with
all that distance, you can see immediately that Rowan's
skiving, you know, scheming character is the core of the
thing. And the rest of the royal family
really completely irrelevant. Nobody cares about them.
But we kept those elements which meant it a bit hard work and
then I had the stupid idea of giving this silly pudding bull
haircut which has made him into a nerd which is hard to relate
to and but nonetheless you can see the beginnings of classic
Blackadder with that the triangle of Baldrick and you
know Lord Persky and and Blackadder working together.
There's some very, very good bits in there and of course some
great dialogue with the, you know, they're going through the
sacred relics and the Archbishop of all the Sacred.
What, what Jesus made in the carpentry shop is a very nice
cheese board here. It's just marvellously cheeky.
Look, I can. I can tell you that in the last
out of the last, probably 5 or 6 episodes of Goon Pod with
previous guests, for various reasons, we've we've talked
about the first series of Blackadder, specifically the
Witch Smeller Persuasion, yeah. And the Queen of Spain's beard
with wonderful Mary Margulies and broadband.
Yeah, yeah. It's a funny thing that this
sort of it's almost a path and that you can't escape, which the
first series has radical things in it which are really
marvellous, but it's messy because people don't really know
what they're doing. And then there's a golden period
in the middle where people have completely got how to make it.
They found their voice, but it's still really surprising,
including to the people who are making it.
Of course, by the time you get to the 4th or 5th series, you've
sort of got what your joke is, You know, with not 9:00 news, it
was stock footage of the Queen Mother on a horse, and the horse
jolts slightly and there's a farting noise, You know, that's
what we do. It's like with Monty Python,
it's Hell's Grannies. You know, you take 2 completely
incompatible things and you put them together.
So a philosopher's football match, you know, once you get
that which which happened to Python the 4th series was really
well made. But somehow it did stop being
funny it because there's no surprise in this anymore.
And I think that's slightly true of of not the 9:00 news.
I don't think it's true of Black Adder, but I think when people
say oh you should do repeat that, I think it's such a
terrible idea. You can't top the end of
blackout of four. You just can't do that.
You can get back from that and do another series.
It would be. It would be insulting, I think.
Would you say that the last episode of Blackout of goes
forth? Because what are your mantras if
you like? Is disaster as a gift?
Yes, it is. Would you say that the ending of
Blackout of Four as you originally shot it out of the
disaster came a gift? Yes.
I mean it's a story I've I've told before.
If so forgive me listeners, if you've heard it, but the way
Blackadder worked was that everything was workshopped to
death in the in the studio, every line was gone over, every
syllable was gone over by everybody.
And of course, almost all the actors are also well known
writers and they weren't about to do a sort of second rate line
if the person before them had just had a cracker.
So a lot of time was spent, you know, trying to work out whether
Courgette was a funnier vegetable and cabbage and so
forth. So we were always very late with
the printed script and poor Rowan had to stay up, you know,
all night learning this blowing thing.
And when it came to the last episode, absolutely brilliant
writing by Ben Nelson and Richard Curtis.
I mean terrific writing and brilliant performances to to
match that with an extraordinary sort of emotional curve in the
episode where it starts all lucky and jolly and everyone's
looking forward to, you know, going home after the war is just
one big push. And gradually all the humor
drains out of the episode and it becomes more and more serious
and indeed very moving and sad, and you begin to feel sorry for
people you'd rather despise. Listen, our guns have stopped.
You don't think maybe the war's over?
Maybe it's peace. Oh hurrah the.
Big knobs have got round the table and yanked the iron out of
the fire. Thank God we lived through it.
The Great War, 1914 to 1917. Hooray.
I'm afraid not. The guns have stopped because
we're about to attack. Not even our generals are mad
enough to show their own men. I think it's far more sporting.
Let the Germans do it and then they're all lined up in the
trench and the whistle blows and the idea that they would then
run over the top and, you know, it would all be incredibly
dramatic and exciting. And we hadn't had time to
rehearse the actors in the the set of No Man's Land, which is
so huge we'd had to take a whole other studio for it.
And the set was covered with, you know, real wooden ladders
and but real barbed wire and puddles and, you know, enormous
expense to do this and stuff called full as earth, which is a
kind of fake soil. So it was as realistic as we
could make it. And the actors were rushed into
the studio with just 10 minutes to go before we ran out of
recording time and action. And they went up the ladder.
Somebody hurt their leg on the ladder.
You can hear them cursing. Oh God, this is where you could
hear them saying. But if we haven't even rehearsed
this is fucking Dick And they go over the top and then the
fireworks started and nobody had warned them they were going to
be pyrotechnics and these massive bangs and the light
going off. There's people cutting their
legs and and they're trying to run on this earth and they can't
get traction and they're you can hear them just really upset.
And we are sitting in the main studio with, you know, 600
people in the audience watching this complete disaster go in
front of us, went off forever. And everyone's looking at their
feet going, Oh dear, how embarrassing.
What are we going to do? And I got on the mic to the PA
who was looking after the actors and said we need to do another
tape. We just got 5 minutes to another
take because we can't use that. And Rowan grabbed the
walkie-talkie from the PA and said John, that was absolutely
disgraceful. It was a terrifying experience,
the worst thing that's ever happened on the set, and we are
absolutely not doing a second take.
I'm sorry, but we're on strike. So we got to the edit and we've
got this beautifully made episode, brilliantly directed by
Richard Bowden, wonderfully performed.
Everything was right about it, and then this terrible amdram,
awful, embarrassing scene stuck on the end.
But because by that time is very welded production team,
everyone's in the room. How are we going to make this
work? And piece by piece, each person
in the room had one idea. Chris Wadsworth, the brilliant
editor, said, John, I tell you what, maybe if we slow it down,
I mean do not just a bit, but let's go counter intuitively.
They're running too slowly. So let's go the other way.
Let's make them really slow. So it takes them two seconds
just to do a step. And you think, wow, that's
interesting. And then the assistant editor
says, like, why don't we slow the sound down too, so that all
the explosions are, like, all in slow motion.
And Howard's music played in a on a single piano and a
gymnasium gets this wonderful plangent, spooky noise.
And then they think, wait, wait, hey, what if we let's turn it to
sepia like it's an old photograph, and it would be
beginning to getting goose pimples, just talking about it.
And then Jenny, my PA, says, John, just give me a minute.
I just got to go up to the photo library.
I've had an idea and she comes back with this wonderful still
of poppies growing in a field in France.
Just millions, billions of them. And the two editors just do this
amazing slow mix. They mix between the poppies,
the bright red poppies and the sepia of the four actors running
across the field and some by some magic thing.
It was not no trickery, there was no CGI, no no technical
expertise. What appears to happen is the
actors disappear into the earth like ghosts.
They faded away and out of the land comes these wonderful
flowers and we're all standing there just humbled by this
extraordinary thing that's happened.
A catastrophe has turned into one of the great moments of
television. I think it still remains there
and I'm sitting there have having had not contributed a
single thing to the conversation apart from going, yes, that
works and I said we can't have credits on this, You can't have
best boy and assistant lighting director over this.
We're just going to have a caption right at the end saying
Blackadder 1485 to 1917. So that's how it came about and
it was, you know, a really magical moment.
Good luck everyone. And I I can remember very
vividly watching it for the first time.
And I would have been 15 when I saw it.
And I cried and I and I was embarrassed.
I must admit. I was about, I couldn't help it
because I had my family were there, but I was.
I cried. I was just so incredibly moved
by it. Well, it it's not expected.
Yeah. And that's, it's something that,
I mean, I'm not a conventionally religious person, but sometimes
you have a sense that the universe is bizarrely on your
side as a pat on the back. You tried really hard and we're
going to give you a little treat here.
And the two effects of it, I remember one is that Ben Elton's
uncle was a famous historian called GR Elton.
And when Ben announced we were going to do a sitcom set in the
First World War in the trenches, Jeffrey Elton wrote to Ben
saying, I can't believe a nephew of mine could think of something
so appallingly tasteless. And after the last episode he
wrote again to Ben saying, OK, I see what you mean.
That was amazing. And Rowan had so many letters
from old ladies whose fiance's and husbands have been killed in
the First World War saying thank you for understanding.
And you know, so it's always ridiculous when Michael Gove
says things like Blackadder shouldn't be taught in schools
because it's not patriotic. You said come on, you just
haven't watched it heavy. You haven't watched how much we
care, how much we cared and how much respect we had for those
people. You know, and of course you know
soldiers are all kinds. There are brave ones and
cowardly ones and you know, beautiful 1 slackers and.
Yeah, well, I mean, Go probably didn't like the fact that you
were satirizing Hague in the final episode.
Hague was probably a hero. Well if there's if Blackout owns
owes anything sort of serious historical research it's there's
a book called Lions led by Donkeys which is the was the
standard view that the Tommies were great and the generals were
no good. But of course, it's much more
nuanced than that. My great uncle was one of the
people who started what became the Tank Corps in the First
World War. So they weren't all idiots at
all. It was a thing, you know, nobody
really understands what exactly what happened with the First
World War. It's just the sort of
inevitability to do with, you know, timetables and, you know,
economic restings of power and the end of empire and all that.
There's nobody's one person's fault but to kind of make the
claim that it was all jolly good fun, First World War and, you
know, and everybody should celebrate how great it was, it's
like, no, it was a horrible experience for all sides.
Absolutely. And you shouldn't go on, you
know, glorifying it. We should.
We should be sorry for everybody who lost their lives in such a
terrible, terrible situation. In Blackadder Goes Forth, didn't
you come up with the the German spy idea in the hospital?
I don't remember that. I I never can remember, you
know. So I'm a very collegiate
producer. I hope I mean well, I'm at least
I listen to everyone in the room and the best idea wins me.
Of course, I historically got to decide which is the best idea
which would be my view. But everybody gets a say in
anything that I produce because I think if you've got, you know,
10 bright people in the room, why not?
Why not have everybody's views? So I can't remember who, who
thought of which line And there are still people on on the crew
are still arguing to this day who wrote which line where I
think that's not we did it together, That's the thing.
That's what I feel. Sure, sure.
Do you remember anything about Reg Aykroyd's City scandals?
Yes indeed. And Barry Cryer, bless him, one
of the great human beings ever absolutely used to remind me of
being in that it was Barry and Jimmy Perry, one of the writers
of Dad's Army. And Nick Rowley's music from my
old Footlights days was silly, a very old fashioned thing.
And Barry was used to say that draw, that great promise that
John Lloyd showed with Red Jack Royd's silly scandals.
Whatever happened to him, You know, we had a go.
It didn't really work. It was a bit old fashioned, good
bits. But you know, I was going
through a patch, Tyler, where I have no idea why, but I
suddenly, as a very young radio producer, probably 25 or so,
quite famous people, much more famous obviously than me, wanted
to work with me because I'd had a couple of early successes and
they wanted to work with me. But when I said I don't think
this is really working, they go, excuse me, we are actually
rather famous comedians. You're 25 and I think we know
best. So I wasn't as tough on Barry
and Jimmy as I would have been with my peers, you know with
Mount Griffin. You know Richard Curtis where I
I was a peer-to-peer and I was going to be if I didn't think it
was good enough, I was certainly going to say so and insist that
it'd be better. Whereas I I didn't really feel
it was my part to say to Barry, that's a bit of an old you know,
bit of an old joke or something. And I did a similar series
called Offbeat with Braden with the Bernard Braden who was a
wonderful Canadian comedian where the same thing I I
basically I deferred to his experience and celebrity when I
wasn't really my heart wasn't really in it And that again only
lasted one series and and after that I swore I'll never do that
again. I mean I the way I was trained
was go and make stuff you like. And I said at 22, what do you
mean what I like. And they said, well at least you
guaranteed an audience of one aren't you.
But if you try and guess what old people like, or people of a
different cultural background like, or what young people like,
you're bound to get it wrong. So your best judge your best and
least patronising and actually most respectful way of treating
the audience is to treat them like they're you.
And Martin Scorsese, I was, loved this quote, he said.
When I make a movie, I am the audience.
So it's good enough for Scorsese.
It's good enough for me. Totally.
Do you remember writing with Douglas Adams, The remarkable
Fidgety River? Yeah.
Which which was one of two episodes of Doctor Snuggles that
you. Read.
I remember that very well. Yes.
We used to moonlight in the evenings.
We were both radio producers and we had the next door office and
we would moonlight trying to get sketches on.
Well, I used to do a lot of stuff for the Two Ronnies.
I actually got 21 liners on the Two Ronnies in This opportunity
came up for this animated series made in Holland by.
I remember we used to find this terribly funny.
I didn't in those days speak any Dutch, which I now do, but the
producer was called Yoopfish and his secretary was called
Veronica Plink and we thought that was terribly funny.
But they were very nice and very good.
And Peter Ustinov was the voice over and it was great fun.
They would. Who actually paid rather well
for it. I seem to remember we really
enjoyed doing it, because great, you know, you can imagine
Douglas's imagination in animation.
You can do literally anything you want and you're you're not
tied to what an actor can form. It was a very hot day.
We were all trying very hard to cool down while we waited for
coot boot to return from ankle Bill's lobster scape deep under
the Pacific Ocean. It was so hot I needed a glass
of water. Oh, what on earth are you doing
in there, Nabi? Just.
Trying to keep cool What? Do you remember of doing the
Land of Confusion video for Genesis?
Well, this is. I was just telling someone this
story the other day actually, because.
And so Genesis or their management anyway, came to us
and said we want to do a a pop video with music video with all
the puppets. And we thought, wow, this is
amazing. We really made it.
MTV was king and those there was quite new, very exciting and
everybody watched it. And so it was 385 puppets I
think and I was the person I wrote this storyboard and drew
that painstakingly and and they put the management put on the
the job a guy called Jim Yukic who was there live video
director so he would shoot all their concerts but obviously
when the drama directions said never worked with puppets nice
guy. So Jim and I, Jim sat in the
back and I drew, I knew how to drag puppets and puppeteers and
it was my script. So I shot it, edited it.
Jim went back to LA and he won everything, you know, he won a
Grammy and Evan knows what. But I never got asked to any of
the awards summary. So years later in the 90s, I
think I was, I was watching AI was on an ad shoot in LA and
after the shoot I went to my hotel room.
I thought, I have room service, I have a drink and the program
came on the telly called Mt VS 100, greatest Music videos of
all Time. And I thought, well, land of
confusion must win something. And so I started watching at the
beginning of the show and it went up through the hundreds and
the 90s and the 80s and I sort of get depressed.
I thought we must have got something, must be somewhere in
there in the 50s and the 40s and the 30s.
And I suddenly by that time I'm halfway through the mini bar and
beginning to find it quite difficult to focus and it gets
up to the top ten. And I buy now I'm really, you
know, this is really, I've put so much work into that and must
get something. On the window ledge by this
point. Pretty much.
And then it gets to and ladies and gentlemen, and number one in
the Mt VS Greatest music videos all time, Genesis, Land of
Confusion. Jim Yukich gets up in Century
City, wherever it is in his Dicky bow and goes and accepts
the award. And he didn't even tell me it
was up for it. I've never spoken to him since,
and I probably won't, but it was like that.
Seemed to be a bit rude, you know.
Yeah, absolutely. I I read that Mike Rutherford's
puppet was later repurposed as A to be Jesus Christ in a Spitting
Image sketch. Oh, my will have been.
Yeah. I saw Mike the other day,
actually, because I've spoken to Mike since then.
I remember talking to, we were calling up Phil Collins and
saying what's this line mean in the song?
Phil And he goes, doesn't mean anything, it's a song.
What are you talking about? Oh, OK, fine, I can do what I
want then. But it was a it was a real
highlight. We love doing it and it was
quite innovative in its day. We used Oxford Scientific films
to do some of the shots, which is very radical, interesting
tracking shots as unusual cameras normally used for
wildlife shots, you know. Can you tell me about the Golden
Brain hunt? Yeah, so we it was a competition
to find Reagan's brain, which was a golden walnut that we were
very off, a place called a place called Thatcher Rock off the
coast of Devon. And due to the normal shambles
of my hopeless administration, it was going to be radioactive.
So you could only find it with a Geiger counter.
I wrote the quiz. The very complicated Quizzle
written in Morse code and the NATO alphabets and things.
All sorts of clever tricks. It was a doable puzzle, but very
difficult. And somebody realized that by
the time we published the book, they couldn't get to Thatcher
Rock because it was illegal to bury things on it or something.
So we never actually buried the brain.
But somebody did solve it. They worked it out from first
principles, and they they got the prize too.
I think it was 1000 lbs. Wasn't there meant to be a
celebrity who who knew the answer or knew the location and
people had to work out who the celebrity was?
I can't remember. About five years ago somebody
sent me the article of the person who D worked it out and I
must admit I was quite taken aback with how difficult it was,
the puzzle. But it did it all.
It all stacked up apart from that.
We didn't physically bury it, but when they worked out where
it would have been buried, we gave him the prize.
Brilliant. OK, well, listen, John, time is
against us and I really do appreciate you, you know, giving
up your part of your evening to talk to me.
We, we haven't even had a chance to talk about Qi or hitchhikers
or a news quiz Museum of Curiosity as well.
I mean that's that's still going strong, isn't it?
Well, I don't know. They haven't mentioned the new
series. So we've we've we've yet to.
I bumped into the producer, actually it's a Christmas party
just now and I said if you had anything, you said, no, don't
say anything to me. So you, you, you just never
know. But I mean, at least you can
see, Tyler, that it's not been a smooth Rd. a lot of the time and
and nor is it likely to be. If you're going to do things
well, it's going to be difficult.
That is definitely another of my mantras.
You know, if it's easy, it's probably not very good.
Probably not. I mean, I'm not saying that it's
universal, but oh, that's a general rule of thumb is it?
To do something well takes a lot of hard work and a lot of
mistakes and it is generally quite difficult, I think.
I think most artists would say that's again, it's not true, for
example, of songs, I don't think.
I think a lot of songs have been written in 10 minutes that are
very famous. But of course, it's rather like
the Chinese artist who goes to the emperor.
And the emperor says, I hear you, a brilliant painter of fish
draw me a fish and the guy does 3 strokes of a brush and there's
an amazing fish. And the emperor says, well, I'll
pay you for that. He only took you 4 seconds.
And the painter says no, no, that took me 60 years.
Yes, to be able to do that. What a what A very deep note to
end on. Well thank you for your
research, Tyler. Very thorough.
I'm I'm sorry, I haven't. I haven't gotten longer to.
No, listen, it's been brilliant. Pejor with you and you can do a
Part 2 maybe sometime, but I don't have any more goon
stories. That's the only problem.
That's fine. That's fine.
At least there's no this, this I you know, I I'd love to talk
about comedy in general. Comedy that I love and and
you've been responsible for so much of it.
So tip of the hat to you John and have a brilliant Christmas.
Thanks, Tyler. It's been an absolute pleasure.
Hey, man, it's. What a.
Terrible dream. I am parched.
That's better. I could use another one of
those. That's one heck of a nurse.