2 Who or not 2 Who
Sean Choolburra and Akmal Saleh

Goody Goody Yum Yum

I spent a fantastic (by my standards - he may beg to differ!) half hour this morning chatting to Dr Graeme Garden, formerly of The Goodies. Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie will be coming to Australia to undertake a tour as The Goodies once again, kicking it off in Parramatta as part of the Big Laugh Comedy Festival.

I haven’t sat down and edited a proper version of the interview yet, but m’colleague John Barron has already edited down a version to play as part of ABC NewsRadio Breakfast this week. Here’s the snippet he excerpted to be broadcast Wednesday morning - it follows on from the question (that he will no doubt paraphrase as part of a live-to-air introduction) “How did this Goodies reunion come into being?”

GRAEME GARDEN: This gentleman John Pinder got in touch with us and said he’d been asking around for people, asking people who they would like to resurrect from the old days, I think, was perhaps how he put it, I don’t know. Our name came up on his list and he got in touch with us and said, “would you three guys like to come over to Australia and have some fun?”

Demetrius Romeo: Now, Graeme, is this the first reunion proper for the Goodies in a while?

GRAEME GARDEN: In a long time, yes. We’ve been together… we’ve done a couple of shows – one at the national film theatre here, and one in a West End cinema – where we’ve had an audience and shown clips and chattered about the show, and making it, and things, and answered a few questions, and the last time we did that was to launch the DVD, which sold very well in Australia, I know. And so it would be taking that one step further, that kind of a show together. I don’t think we could offer an all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza; certainly nothing as physical as the stuff we used to do on the screen. My hip needs replacing for one thing. What we would hope to do is offer some ideas of where we started out together, how we started out, what we were doing, shows before The Goodies that we collaborated on, and maybe illustrate that with some of the material we used to do on radio. Things like that.

Demetrius Romeo: One thing I do notice about the original Goodies shows is that part of the humour you created couldn’t be created in that way anymore because part of it comes from the fact that you had to use props and models, whereas today, so much of it would be CGI.

GRAEME GARDEN: Mm, yeah.

Demetrius Romeo: Do you think that people coming through with the same sort of ideas could ever get a show with that same sort of charm and humour working?

GRAEME GARDEN: I don’t know that they could. You’re quite right, because some of the fun was you could see that if someone fell of a cliff it was a dummy, and then when they hit the ground it was replaced by somebody else, and you laughed if it looked reasonably good because you felt, “well, they got away with that, then! Very funny.” Now, as you say, it would be incredibly elaborate with flying cameras and god knows what, and CGI and stuff, so it would be… I don’t know if it would be more expensive; I don’t know. But you’re right about the charm, that it would lose that sort of ‘home made’ feel that it had.

I will get around to posting the full thing - and its various permutations - up here, along with supporting stuff from the Big Laugh Festival (including an interview with its founder and mastermind, John Pinder).

comments powered by Disqus