Category: Comedy
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Ben Elton Live
Just a few weeks after the Daily Mirror had declared Ben Elton a Not in its daft Hot Or Not column, they turned to the man and commissioned him to write a weekly column for the paper. Ben took them up on their offer, and this is the first of those columns, which appeared on…
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Rik Tells A Joke In Poor Taste
Here’s a little slice of comedy history lost to time. It’s 1990, and Rik Mayall’s winter tour with Andy De La Tour in 1989 has now spilled over into the new year. Here’s how tickets were being sold in the local press, in this instance the Bracknell Times on Thursday 18th January. As the winter…
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The Common Pursuit
Rik Mayall and Stephen Fry, alongside John Sessions and John Gordon Sinclair, all starred in the revival of Simon Gray’s play The Common Pursuit. It was previewed in Watford in March of 1988, before it moved to the Phoenix in the West End in April. Here’s the cast on Wogan, on the 28th March. And…
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The Thin Blue Clips
It won’t surprise you that as the BBC prepared to broadcast The Thin Blue Line, it got quite a bit of newspaper coverage. That was due to the return of Rowan Atkinson in a Ben Elton written sitcom. As with all these things, the earlier bits tend to try and tie them into the news…
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Some Fast Show Clips
The TV Weekly page in the Daily Mirror on the 24th September is titled Smashie Pens A Real Smasher. We’ll have a look at most of what’s on the page, just to get a sense of where TV comedy was at on the weekend before the first episode of The Fast Show aired. The write-up…
