HEADLINE-GUFFAWING weekly satire-lite hoedown. That HIGNFY-inspiring format in full: competing panel of ‘witty intellectuals’ of a journalistic (Bill Deedes, Ian Hislop, Francis Wheen) or comedic (Jeremy Hardy, Armando Iannucci, Andy Hamilton) bent are challenged to spot newsworthy happenings of the past seven days courtesy of a series of very awful puns indeed, with ‘points’ taking second billing to gags and rounds interspersed by sub-That’s Life! ‘humorous’ cuttings sent in by listeners, and all of it framed by Leroy Anderson’s The Typewriter (ie that thing that goes “diddleiddleiddleiddleiddleiddleiddlei diddleiddleiddleiddleiddleiddlei TING!”). Hosts have included Barry Norman, Barry Took, Simon Hoggart and Sandi Toksvig, while for years the show also acted as an unofficial “there’s only one way to find out – FIIIIGHT!” running battle of the satire rags between Punch and Private Eye courtesy of competing regulars Alan Coren and Richard Ingrams.
Posts Tagged With 'Jeremy Hardy'
Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation
MILD CONTROVERSY-courting series of only very slightly ‘mock’ lectures examining “the vicissitudes of modern living” from the left-leaning BNP-angering comic, with novel psuedo Public Information Film-inflected old fashioned stylings ensuring that nobody ever asks him where the ‘jokes’ are a la Mark Thomas.
I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue
STARTED off as an excuse for the old I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again team to keep on getting their I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again money while tied up with TV projects, courtesy of an improvised panel game made up of smut, innuendo and silliness. Original rotating line-up was therefore Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie, Jo Kendall and John Cleese (with fellow ex-ISIRTA-er David Hatch as producer) being given silly things to do by former Joe Meek-produced Trad Jazz Boom hitmaker and irreverent host of BBC jazz shows Humphrey Lyttleton. Oddie, Kendall and Cleese dropped out after a series or two, making way for external witmongers Barry Cryer and Willie Rushton to make up the long-running classic four-man line-up. Key running themes developed during these early days, most of them still in use to today, include ritual humilation of town and townspeople playing host to that evening’s recording, baiting of resident pianist Colin Sell, ridiculing of comedy panel game contemporaries (“I heard a joke the other day, apparently Quote… Unquote has a Listen Again feature… good one, Nigel!”), ever more ambitious double entendres about scorekeeper The Lovely Samantha, and of course the games – some self-explanatory, others not explanatory in any way at all: Late Arrivals, The Uxbridge English Dictionary, Just A Minim, The Bad Tempered Clavier, Pick Up Song, Cow Lake Bomb, Swanee Kazoo, Letter Writing, Name That Barcode, Quote… Misquote, One Song To The Tune Of Another, Sound Charades (invariably introduced with an anecdote about ‘The Undisputed Grand Master Of The Game’ Lionel Blair), Film Club, Book Club, and of course Mornington Crescent, famed for its innumerable, impenetrable and fiercely guarded rules. Survived Rushton’s death in 1997 by bringing in clued-up guest contestants like Jack Dee, Linda Smith, Rob Brydon, Stephen Fry, Andy Hamilton, Sandi Toksvig, Jeremy Hardy, Tony Hawks, Harry Hill, Phill Jupitus and Ross Noble, bringing their own running jokes with them, and similarly countered Lyttleton’s recent passing with installation of HIGNFY-esque ‘guest hosts’, and long may it continue.
Helping Henry
BAFFLING EARLY C4 kids show (weren’t they all?) which featured a dining chair animated by Fluck and Law and voiced by JEREMY HARDY. Said furniture was actually an alien being (called N-3) who had somehow decided that dining chairs were the most intelligent form of life on Earth and so spent its time trying to communicate with the other dining chairs and failing, until it found a small boy and talked to him instead. It also talked to some glowing lights, one of whom may have been Richard Vernon.
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Wrestling’s Golden Age – Grapples, Grunts and Grannies
Sunday, 22.05, BBC4Mick McManus died this week, alas, and remember him this way with another outing for this absolutely brilliant documentary from just before Christmas about British wrestling at its earthiest. There are some hilarious bits in it, like Johnny Kincaid being told he had to pretend he was from Barbados even though he’d never been there, Klondike Kate reminiscing about the fishwives throwing foot-and-mouth-disease injections at her, an interviewee saying “excuse my language” after he’d said the obscene word “bum” and the fantastically good value Max “brother of Shirley” Crabtree, the big kahuna in the “sport” in its imperial phase, explaining how they came up with the concept of Big Daddy after Shirley complained to him that “me whole career’s gone to cock!”. Great stuff.
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