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The Comic Strip are a group of British comedians who came to prominence in the 1980s. They are known for their television series The Comic Strip Presents..., which was labelled as a pioneering example of the alternative comedy scene. The core members are Adrian Edmondson, Dawn French, Rik Mayall, Nigel Planer, Peter Richardson and Jennifer Saunders, with appearances by Keith Allen, Robbie Coltrane, Alexei Sayle and others.
Richardson prompted members to sign a contract to signify their attachment to the group. The Comic Strip opened at the Revuebar's Boulevard Theatre on 7 October 1980 and ran until 1981, when the troupe went on a national tour and then a tour of Australia. While the performers gained more exposure, actors such as Jack Nicholson and Robin Williams turned up to watch. A half-hour television documentary about the Comic Strip was broadcast in 1981.
Richardson approached producer Mike Bolland, the newly appointed Channel 4 youth-and-entertainment commissioning editor to propose a series of Comic Strip films for the channel. Bolland agreed to his proposal, his first commission for the station and Jeremy Isaacs quickly approved the budget. Richardson negotiated a deal with the channel for six self-contained half-hour , using the group as actors rather than standup performers. Almost simultaneously, the BBC signed Edmondson, Mayall, Planer, and Sayle to star in The Young Ones, a sitcom in the same anarchic style as the Comic Strip. Richardson was initially to have played the role of Mike (ultimately given to Christopher Ryan), but did not, the result of differences with the show's producer, Paul Jackson.
The first episode was Five Go Mad in Dorset, a parody of the Famous Five. It was written by Peter Richardson and Pete Richens, who wrote most of the early episodes. Five Go Mad... drew anger from some viewers for the way it mercilessly satirised a children's classic, although the Enid Blyton estate had given permission for the broadcast. A meeting was called to discuss the group's future with Channel 4, after complaints from viewers.
The final episode of the first series was to have been a Parody chat show called Back to Normal with Eddie Monsoon (referred to as An Evening with Eddie Monsoon by some sources). It was never produced, as it was considered too vulgar even for the "alternative" Channel 4, and contained material that was possibly libellous. The script—which, uniquely for the Comic Strip, was written as a collaboration by the entire cast—was later published, along with the rest of the series, in book form.
A second series of seven episodes followed in 1983–84, including Five Go Mad on Mescalin, a sequel to the first episode, and the newly written Eddie Monsoon – A Life?, a spoof documentary on the life and times of the title character, an obscene, drunken television host (played by Adrian Edmondson). Michael White, the theatre impresario and Rocky Horror Show producer who had been brought in by Richardson as executive producer on the series, appeared in this episode as Monsoon's producer, who had been responsible for axing Eddie's television comeback show—called Back to Normal with Eddie Monsoon. The reasons given for the cancellation (e.g. "the things you said about Burt Reynolds") are presumably the same problems that led to the real Back to Normal... being dropped by Channel 4. (The name Eddie Monsoon—a corruption of "Edmondson"—was later used by Jennifer Saunders, core member and Adrian Edmondson's wife, for her character in Absolutely Fabulous.) A Fistful of Travellers' Cheques was the first episode to be filmed outside the United Kingdom, being made on location in and around San José, Andalusia, Spain, using some of the same locations as A Fistful of Dollars which it spoofs.
Two one-off episodes were aired on Channel 4 over Christmas 1985, reflecting the tight schedules of the group. Consuela was a French and Saunders-led pastiche of the Alfred Hitchcock film Rebecca (1940), with French's eponymous crazed housekeeper taking centre stage. The second episode, Private Enterprise, was the tale of a music business rip-off, where Peter Richardson steals a studio recording session tape and passes the results off as his own work.
The group made two feature films— The Supergrass (1985) and Eat the Rich (1987) as well as three one-off Comic Strip Presents... episodes which were the next to be screened on Channel 4. The first of these, The Bullshitters, was a parody of television spy fiction and detective shows such as The Professionals. It was not broadcast under the Comic Strip name, partly because of the original group only Richardson appears (he is the only performer to appear in every single episode), and partly because co-star and co-writer Keith Allen did not want to be so closely associated with the group.
The third series was broadcast in 1988, and some episodes had longer running times, mostly around 50 minutes. Five of the six episodes (all except Funseekers) were given a limited theatrical release. They included The Strike, which won the Golden Rose of Montreux; More Bad News, a sequel to Bad News Tour showing the band reforming after five years to play at Castle Donington; and Mr. Jolly Lives Next Door, written by Mayall and Edmondson in the violent style of their sitcoms Filthy Rich & Catflap and Bottom, which featured Peter Cook as a psychotic contract killer (the eponymous Mr. Jolly) and Nicholas Parsons. Peter Richardson and Pete Richens only contributed one episode to the third series, allowing cast members such as Planer and Sayle to get their ideas on screen.
By then, the show had proved a hit, and some big names appeared in later productions, including Leslie Phillips, Miranda Richardson, Lionel Jeffries, Nicholas Parsons, Peter Capaldi, Hugh Cornwell, Kate Bush, Richard Vernon, Ruby Wax, Graham Crowden, Paul McCartney, Ozzy Osbourne, Lemmy, Elvis Costello, and Benjamin Zephaniah (as a Rastafarian police van driver), and several musical acts, particularly from the Bad News series which was also aided by Queen guitarist Brian May, such as Def Leppard and Marillion.
Peter Richardson, who has built his career as a writer-director with the TV series Stella Street and films such as , has not ruled out the possibility of a whole new series of The Comic Strip Presents... featuring younger cast members. "Hints over a new Comic Strip series".
In June 2011, a casting call went out for a new hour-long episode, starring most of the original team. This was followed by an announcement that the Comic Strip was to produce a one-off special entitled The Hunt for Tony Blair, starring Stephen Mangan as Blair and Robbie Coltrane as Inspector Hutton. The one-off show included Jennifer Saunders (as Margaret Thatcher), as well as Harry Enfield, Rik Mayall, and a host of others.
In addition, a documentary broadcast 3 November 2012, 30 Years of Comic Strip, detailed the filming and reception of several Comic Strip episodes including both original Five Go Mad episodes, The Strike and its semi-sequel GLC: The Carnage Continues, A Fistful of Travellers' Cheques, The Bullshitters/ Detectives on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown, Bad News Tour/ More Bad News, and The Hunt for Tony Blair. For A Fistful of Travellers' Cheques, a short sequel was made and broadcast in several parts, showing the two main characters reuniting, despite the ending of the original episode; unshown scenes of the original episode were also aired for the first time. For the Bad News aspect of the documentary, Planer and Richardson dressed up as their respective characters Den Dennis and Spider Webb, recalling their time as Bad News. Some of the telling of the Bad News story was real, due to their real-life signing to EMI; and some fictional, such as the scenes from More Bad News detailing the recording of their debut album. A lot of the original cast were interviewed for the documentary, alongside other people involved with the series at some point such as James Buckley and Stephen Mangan. As Gold, in its current format at least, has never screened the BBC's GLC, ...Nervous Breakdown, or Channel 4's The Hunt for Tony Blair, these were the first time clips from these episodes were aired on the channel.
In May 2018, a two-hour documentary history produced by Sean Doherty aired on Gold titled How the Young Ones Changed Comedy. It combined archive footage with revelations from many of the stars involved – such as Planer, Alexei Sayle, John Lloyd, Paul Jackson, and Lise Mayer – while later comedians discussed The Young Ones impact on British comedy generally.
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