The Goodies (TV series)

Did You Know?

• An early title considered for the series was Narrow Your Mind, and prior to that the working title was Super Chaps Three.
• The Goodies won the Silver Rose at the Festival Rose d'Or in 1972 for "Kitten Kong: Montreux '72 Edition" and again in 1975 for "The Movies".
• The Goodies were twice nominated for Best Light Entertainment Programme at the BAFTA Awards, in 1972 and 1976.

Premise

The series revolved around the trio, always short of money, offering themselves for hire under the tagline "We Do Anything, Anytime, Anywhere" to perform ridiculous but generally benevolent tasks. This loose pretext allowed for off-the-wall scenarios, many parodying current events. For example, one episode depicted the entire black population of South Africa emigrating to Great Britain to escape apartheid, leading white South Africans to introduce "apart-height", discriminating against short people. Other storylines were more abstractly philosophical, such as an episode where the trio spend Christmas Eve waiting for the Earth to be blown up by prior arrangement of the world's governments. That episode, titled "Earthanasia", and another called "The End" were bottle episodes shot entirely in one room when the location budget was exhausted.

Episodes

The Goodies made 76 episodes including specials. "Kitten Kong" (series two, episode seven) is the only episode officially missing from the BBC archives, as the original videotape was wiped for reuse. An expanded version, "Kitten Kong: Montreux '72 Edition", exists. Several other episodes originally in colour survive only as black-and-white telerecordings; "Come Dancing" was later found on a videotape with weak colour, which was enhanced for DVD release in 2005.

Production

The show featured extensive slapstick, often using speeded-up photography and low-budget visual effects. In one episode, construction equipment came to life and battled like dinosaurs. Another episode involved a fake railway crossing stunt, achieved by combining footage of a lorry with a train image and separate footage of an express train. The team also used film editing to create a "portable hole" device from cartoons. Bill Oddie composed parodies of contemporary pop music, some becoming commercial hits such as "Funky Gibbon". Early episodes included spoofs of TV commercials. The group acknowledged their debt to silent movie music; in "The Movies" episode, after buying an old movie studio, each member made a film in a different style, culminating in an extended silent movie segment.

Characters

The characters were based on stereotypes: Graeme Garden as a bright but bizarre mad scientist; Tim Brooke-Taylor as a conservative, vain, sexually repressed, upper-class royalist coward; and Bill Oddie as a scruffy, occasionally violent, left-leaning rebel from Lancashire. These personae were not necessarily based on the actors, though they shared their names and some minor characteristics. In reality, Garden is a medical doctor, Brooke-Taylor was a lawyer who was not conservative, and Oddie is a pacifist and environmentalist.

The trio often played additional roles, including robot duplicates in "The Baddies", mime duplicates in "Daylight Robbery on the Orient Express", their own sons in "2001 & A Bit", and their own ancestors in "Alternative Roots". They appeared as "Pan's Grannies" in two specials, and as ancient Goodies in "Rome Antics" and two-year-olds in "War Babies". Tim's uncles appeared in episodes such as "Camelot" (Uncle Arthur King), "Farm Fresh Food" (Uncle Tom, played by John Le Mesurier), and "Hunting Pink" (Great Uncle Butcher, played by Tim).