For 2022, I saw the New Year in right. Yes, I watched some comedy from exactly 40 years ago. Why, what did you think I was up to?
So thanks to Ian Greaves, here is 81 Take 2, a sketch show produced by Sean Hardie which was originally broadcast on BBC1 on 31st December 1981 at 11:20pm. Described by the Radio Times at the time as “guaranteed unrepeatable”, that is in fact exactly what it was.
I’m not about to do a lengthy, in-depth review of the programme. It fully deserves one, of course, but not today. Suffice to say that the Not the Nine O’Clock News and A Kick Up the Eighties DNA is supremely apparent. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t, and it’s worth watching for the The Hee Bee Gee Bees segment alone.1
I do, however, want to draw your attention to the final segment at 27:43, after the fake end, where we join “Caesars Palace in Las Vegas”… and a certain Dicky Dynasty. Where Rik Mayall gives a quite astonishing performance. It’s by far the best part of the whole programme.
And anyone who knows anything about The Young Ones will recognise the character instantly. Nearly a year later in “Bomb”, broadcast on 30th November 1982, we get…
As has been pointed out by Mike Scott, amongst others: the whole programme, and the Dicky section in particular, really is a bit of a missing link when it comes to early 80s comedy. A programme which should have been clipped up and talked about endlessly, but really hasn’t.
It reminds me that there’s always something new to discover. No matter how much The Young Ones has been talked about over the years, the above has remained genuinely obscure for four decades now. Instead of going over the same old anecdotes, we should be digging up things like this.
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In the spirit of the above then, here’s a brand new piece of information about 81 Take 2 which is relevant to this site’s interests. Because despite their absence in the credit roller, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor contributed a sketch to this programme. It isn’t their first broadcast TV material; for a start, they had contributed to Series 1 of A Kick Up the Eighties a few months previously. But it certainly counts as some of their very earliest.
Tracing exactly which material they wrote is slightly tricky. The paperwork for the programme doesn’t give the names of each sketch, but just lists the duration and its writer roughly in order. Moreover, some of the durations don’t 100% match… because of course they bloody don’t.
I think we can have a stab, though. Here’s the last few credits listed in the paperwork:
Andy Hamilton: Sketch: Dur 2.35
Simon Holder/Dudley Rogers: Oneliner: 12″
Colin Gilbert: Oneliner: Dur 23″
Donnie Kerr: Oneliner: Dur 12″
Donnie Kerr: Oneliner: Dur 15″
Peggy Evens: Oneliner: Dur 8″
Niall Clark: Quickie: Dur 25″
Philip Differ: Oneliner: Dur: 10″
Rob Grant/Doug Naylor: Sketch: Dur: 39″
Mike Radford: Oneliner: Dur: 10″
Ian Pattison: Quickie: Dur: 15″
The big Hamilton sketch at the top of that list is at 21:38 into the YouTube video, and is the Godfather parody. Skipping a few, I think the 25″ Clark quickie is at 25:43, and the lethal package sent to Mrs. Thatcher. We then have the 10″ one liner written by Differ… meaning that the Grant Naylor sketch is almost certainly the cricket scores sketch at 26:22. It lasts 34″ and not 39″, but I put that down to the usual inaccuracies you get with this kind of thing. Moreover, the sketch feels very Grant Naylor to me.
Happy 2022 everyone.
It is tempting to complain that BBC One should be showing new comedy on New Year’s Eve now, and that a best of Have I Got News For You doesn’t quite cut it. Then I just thought I’d check what BBC One Scotland were up to, and noticed that they not only had a brand new episode of Scot Squad, and also had a brand new sketch show Queen of the New Year. ↩