MOONLIGHTING FROM pulling rubbery faces and dressing up as comedy punks on NOT THE NINE O’CLOCK NEWS, MEL SMITH did this uncomfortable Books Are Fun, Kids! comedy/educational effort on Tuesday afternoons together with long-serving kids TV face. BOB “ACE REPORTS” GOODY. Almost certainly not on the director of Mr Bean’s CV nowadays. Thunderously ill-advised title sequence involved a fuzzy cartoon approximation of the duo belting out a tuneless theme song, to wit: “Good books, bad books, funny books, ever-been-had books and sad books/There’s a book about a ship that disappears without trace/There’s a book about a thing that came from outer space…” and so on. Despite the literate tomfoolery, the show quickly followed its own advice and “disappeared without trace”.
Smith and Goody
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Tom Ronson
March 31, 2022 at 3:22 pm
A couple of brief clips of this turned up in BBC2’s tribute to Mel Smith, I’ve Sort of Done Things (named after a song he performed in Alas Smith and Jones, spoofing Frank Sinatra). It looked quite interesting – the flat Mel and Bob shared, overflowing with books, newspapers and magazines, would have been my idea of heaven as a child, and they did a Christmas special on roller skates. Goody was quite an odd-looking chap, somewhere between Bob Grant from On the Buses and Cardew Robinson, and went on to co-write the awful sitcom Wilderness Road with Richard ‘Marty Storm from Hi-De-Hi!’ Cottan.