The Goodies are a trio of British comedians (Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie), who created, wrote, and starred in a surreal British television comedy series called The Goodies during the 1970s and early 1980s combining sketches and situation comedy.
Cambridge University
The three actors in The Goodies met as students at the University of Cambridge, where Brooke-Taylor was studying law, Garden was studying medicine, and Oddie was studying English. It was as undergraduate students at the University that Brooke-Taylor, Garden and Oddie met John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Eric Idle, who would later become founding members of Monty Python. This group of students became close friends and Brooke-Taylor and Cleese, who were both law students, but at different colleges within the university studied together, swapping lecture notes. They all became members of the Cambridge University Footlights Club, with Brooke-Taylor becoming president in 1963, and Garden succeeding him as president in 1964.
Garden was himself succeeded as the Footlights Club president in 1965 by Idle, who had initially become aware of the Footlights Club when he auditioned for a Pembroke College "smoker" for Brooke-Taylor and Oddie.
Career before The Goodies
Brooke-Taylor, Garden and Oddie were cast members of the highly successful 1960s BBC radio comedy show I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again , which also featured Cleese, David Hatch and Jo Kendall, and lasted until 1973. I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again resulted from the successful 1963 Cambridge University Footlights Club revue A Clump of Plinths . After having its title changed to Cambridge Circus , the revue went on to play at West End in London, England, followed by a tour of New Zealand and Broadway in New York, United States of America (including an appearance on the top rating Ed Sullivan Show ).
They also took part in various TV shows with other people, including Brooke-Taylor in At Last the 1948 Show (with Cleese, Chapman and Marty Feldman), and Brooke-Taylor taking part in Marty (with Marty Feldman, John Junkin and Roland MacLeod). Garden and Oddie took part in Twice a Fortnight (with Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Jonathan Lynn), before Brooke-Taylor, Oddie and Garden worked on the late 1960s TV show Broaden Your Mind (of which only about ten minutes survives).
The Goodies television series
The Goodies was created by Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie.
The episodes for the series were originally co-written by all three Goodies (Tim, Graeme and Bill). Later, the episodes were co-written by Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie.
The music for the show was written by Bill Oddie, and The Goodies' theme music was co-written by Bill Oddie and Michael Gibbs. The show also benefited greatly from the input of director Bob Spiers.
The television series ran from November 1970 to February 1982 on BBC 2, with 70 episodes, mostly thirty minutes in length except for two forty-five minute Christmas specials ( The Goodies and the Beanstalk and The Goodies Rule – O.K.? ). The costume designer for this episode was BBC costume designer Dee Robson.
It was one of the first shows in the UK to use chroma key and one of the first to use stop-motion techniques in a live action format. Other effects include hand editing for repeated movement, mainly used to make animals "talk" or "sing", and play speed effects as used in the episode "Kitten Kong".
The threesome travelled around on, and frequently fell off, a three-seater bicycle called the trandem. One of these trandems was later cycled across Africa, a trip immortalised in the resultant book Three Men on a Bike .
Although The Goodies are well known for performing spectacular but comedic stunts, it was Tim Brooke-Taylor who performed most of them.
The Goodies never had a formal contract with the BBC, and when the BBC Light Entertainment budget for 1980 was exhausted by the production of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy TV series, they signed a contract with London Weekend Television for ITV. However, after one half-hour Christmas special ("Snow White 2") in 1981, and a six-part series in early 1982, the series was cancelled. In recent interviews the cast suggest the reasons were mainly economic — a typical Goodies sketch was more expensive than it appeared.
Awards and nominations
A special episode, which was based on the original 1971 Goodies' " Kitten Kong " episode, was called " Kitten Kong: Montreux '72 Edition ", and was first broadcast in 1972. The Goodies won the Silver Rose in 1972 for this special episode at the Festival Rose d'Or, held in Montreux, Switzerland. The Goodies also won the Silver Rose in 1975 at the Festival Rose d'Or for their episode The Movies .
The Goodies was nominated for a BAFTA award in 1976, as the Best Light Entertainment Programme, but lost out to Fawlty Towers .
TV series: releases and repeats
In Britain
Unlike most long-running BBC comedy series, The Goodies has not enjoyed extensive repeats on terrestrial television in the UK, the BBC refusing to allow them since 1986 because the controller of the BBC during the 1980s did not personally like the series. Because the series appeals to children for its visual humour, in Britain it is often incorrectly described as a children's programme. Therefore, the series has never enjoyed the same artistic respect as contemporaries such as Peter Cook and the Monty Python team. Also, when the BBC released two videos of the series in the 1990s, the BBC did not seem enthusiastic about promoting them.
In the late 1980s, the pan-European satellite-channel Super Channel broadcast a couple of episodes and the short-lived Comedy Channel broadcast some of the later Goodies episodes in the early 1990s. Later UK Gold screened many of the earlier episodes, often with commercial timing cuts. The same episodes subsequently aired on UK Arena, also cut. When UK Arena became UK Drama, later UKTV Drama, The Goodies was dropped along with its other comedy and documentary shows.
The cast finally took matters into their own hands and arranged for the release of a digitally-remastered "best of" selection entitled The Goodies ... At Last on VHS and Region 0 DVD in April, 2003. A second volume, The Goodies ... At Last a Second Helping was released on Region 2 in February, 2005. Series 9 was released on Region 2 as The Goodies - The Complete LWT Series on 26 March 2007.
They also presented the Christmas 1976 Disney Time from the toy department of Selfridges store in London. It was broadcast on Boxing Day at 5.50 pm.
In 2004, an episode of the BBC documentary series Comedy Connections was devoted to the Goodies.
Christmas 2005 saw a 90-minute Goodies special, including a documentary about the series, Return of the Goodies , broadcast on BBC Two. However, only clips of the series were shown, rather than any full episodes.
Early on in 2006 a single episode about the Winter Olympics was broadcast on BBC Two but was not followed by any more.
In February 2007, the 1982 LWT series was repeated on pay-TV channel Paramount 2.
In Australia
In Australia, the series has had continued popularity and many Australians are surprised to learn of its absence from British screens. It was repeated through the 1970s and 1980s by the ABC — although, as the show was typically broadcast in the 25-minute 6:00 p.m. children's timeslot, portions often had to be cut. The LWT series was played once on Seven in the early eighties, and the BBC episodes were heavily edited when repeated on Ten in the 1990s. The unedited episodes were repeated frequently on the pay television channel UK.TV during the 1990s and early 2000s. The DVDs are available in Australia under different titles to the UK releases: The Goodies: 8 Delicious Episodes , The Goodies: A Tasty Second Helping and The Goodies: The Final Episodes , respectively. The Goodies' DVDs are also available in a box set with a commemorative booklet ( The Goodies: The Tasty Box ). This collection contains the same 16 episodes as the original two DVD releases but with additional material such as commentaries on several episodes and the original scripts of some episodes in PDF format. Picture quality has been greatly improved using digital restoration techniques and the episode Come Dancing , which was originally thought to only have survived in black and white, is presented in low-band colour from a chroma-keyed video recording.
In the United States and Canada
In the United States, the series was shown widely in syndication during the late 1970s and early 1980s, but has been little seen since. It was shown also on PBS stations, sometimes in tandem with Monty Python's Flying Circus . The series was also shown in Canada on the CBC national broadcast network during those same years, in the traditional "after school" time slot and occasionally in a midnight slot. Several episodes were also shown on the CTV Television Network and on TVOntario.
In Germany
In Germany, The Goodies
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