The Comic Strip Presents…

I’ve spent the past fortnight wallowing in the DVD box set The Comic Strip Presents… The Complete Collection. It contains 39 episodes of one of the longest-running and most variable series in British comedy history, and helped launch the careers of Adrian Edmondson, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, Rik Mayall, Nigel Planer, Alexei Sayle and Keith Allen. The DVDs spans 18 years and are full of surprises – Kate Bush in a wedding dress in Les Dogs, Adrian Edmondson displaying a far wider acting range than his usual shout-and-stomp, late Mike Leigh favourite Katrin Cartlidge in Funseekers, Rik Mayall in Spandex dodging bottles of piss onstage at Castle Donington and Keith Allen (currently more famous as Lily’s dad) acting his arse off. Several of these episodes are stone cold comedy classics:

Five Go Mad In Dorset
This is the one that everyone remembers, a gleefully malicious debunking of the Enid Blyton book series. Contains such classic lines as “Oh Timmy, you’re ever so licky!”, “Blah blah, secret plans” and “What if everybody wanted to be our friend – where would we be then? We don’t even know if he went to a good school”. The original never recovered.

Bad News Tour / More Bad News
This is the British equivalent of This is Spinal Tap, filmed at the same time and covering much of the same ground, although Spinal Tap became much more famous.

Mr Jolly Lives Next Door
A prototype for the extreme seediness of Bottom. Mayall and Edmondson revisit their early Dangerous Brothers stage personas and give Peter Cook one of the best roles of his later years. 

Didn’t You Kill My Brother?
Alexei Sayle rewrites The Threepenny Opera. “You should always put a dead badger on a head wound”.

Also highly recommended: The Beat Generation, A Fistful of Traveller’s Cheques, Gino: Full Story and Pics, The Bullshitters, The Supergrass, Private Enterprise, Les Dogs, Red Nose Of Courage, The Crying Game, Queen of the Wild Frontier and Jealousy.