Not the Nine O'Clock News: Difference between revisions

[[The Eighties|1980s]] British comedy [[Sketch Show]] which starred and launched the careers of Mel Smith, Griff Rhys Jones, [[Rowan Atkinson]], and Pamela Stephenson.

 

The team had a particular fondness for taking real footage and inserting their own around it - for example, having a drunken, swearing Atkinson go put on a blonde wig and blue dress, walk through a door, and then switch to some real footage of Margaret Thatcher leaving Downing Street.

 

 

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* [[Aluminium Christmas Trees]]: Foreign viewers may not realise that the "Get a TV licence--it's cheaper than a funeral" parody (in which the TV Licensing Authority hunts down and murders people who don't pay their TV licence fee) is only a ''slight'' exaggeration of the real PSAs it was based on, and indeed ones that came later on were even more extreme, almost indistinguishable from the parodies.

* [[Incessant Music Madness]]: Gryff-Rhys Jones plays a colonial planter, driven to drink by the noise of the jungle, who staggers drunkenly onto the verandah and demands, "Will you shut up! Will this damn noise never end!" The camera pans back, revealing that what we have taken to be the chittering of night insect noise is really 30 or 40 natives, each of whom is playing with a Rubik's Cube...

* [[Intellectual Animal]]: Gerald the Gorilla. "Wild? I was absolutely livid."

'''Rowan:''' [[Subverted Rhyme Every Occasion|...for crying out loud!]] }}

* [[Missing Episode]]: Only two [[Greatest Hits]] DVDs have been released, which included the most famous sketches ("Gerald the Gorilla", "Kinda Lingers", "the deaf telephone" etc.) and those which don't rely too heavily on the current affairs of the early 1980s. Much like ''[[Spitting Image]]'', some of the references and sketches would probably be somewhat impenetrable for viewers without much knowledge of that period. The full episodes probably ''are'' somewhere in the BBC archives, but if they are it remains to be seen if they'll ever see the light of day.

* [[Names to Run Away From Really Fast]]: The Billy Connolly pub sketch.

** Constable Savage isn't the most decent of people either.

* [[Skewed Priorities]]: One sketch is about an episode of ''[[Question Time]]'' being recorded shortly after the Soviets have just started World War III; aside from an [[Only Sane Man]] panellist whose contribution is "Help! We're all going to die!", the others focus on the 'real issues' such as blaming the crisis on the appalling record of the previous government.

* [[Surreal Music Video]]: Parodied in "Nice Video, Shame About the Song".

{{reflist}}

[[Category:British Series]]