Book review: Not The Nine O’Clock News, by Mel Smith, Rowan Atkinson, Pamela Stephenson, Griff Rhys-Jones and John Lloyd
I thought I’d cheer myself up by discovering what I was told is a landmark troupe of comedy history. The mistake I made was watching a DVD of the Not The Nine O’Clock News TV series directly before reading the spin-off book. Although Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith, Pamela Stephenson, Griff Rhys-Jones and the editor and director John Lloyd all had stellar careers in humour, I could then see the book for what it was, a spin-off cash grab with no clever new material added — i.e. valuing it much lower in comparison to, hypothetically, if I’d arrived at this only knowing about the book and thinking this content was all original.
Did any of these sketches come from Oxford University light entertainment or Cambridge Footlights/smokers/CULES shows, in which case perhaps the TV series had some recycled content too? Atkinson’s bio says he did The Oxford Revue show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 1976 and I can see he wrote the genuinely witty Gerald the Gorilla sketch* and the Gay Christian sketch.
*Academic researcher: ”Can I put this in some sort of perspective? When I caught Gerald in ’68 he was completely wild.” Gerald the Gorilla replies: “Wild? I was absolutely livid.”
This volume contains (a) recycled transcripts of the good sketches already shown in the television episodes [no original sketch material, in fact several have truncated endings], (b) pages of unfunny photo and sarcastic caption jibes that anyone given five minutes could have made, © several pages of Mel Smith’s ‘good to be stout’ campaign, space filling text about proud fat men’s rights [not funny at all], (d) quite a few cartoons about crashing passenger planes [not funny but was this somehow topical at the time?], (e) a fair bit about the Shah and Saudi Arabians misbehaving in London, (f) Pamela Stevenson wiping her bum with a tabloid, then (g) I counted 35 x random pictures of ugly nude people sprinkled across the book, some with comedy animal heads on like the cast of Midsummer Night’s Dream [why did they think the crude reveal was humour?].
In summary, all of the good content is lifted/transcribed verbatim from the TV series. The book contains no extra good quality material in addition to that earlier content, so the writers can’t have spent more than an afternoon on it. The gorilla sketch, for example, has pictures of bears in it, presumably because no image of a gorilla could be sourced in the five minutes they had available. The material which has been added in this version isn’t particularly funny, or perhaps just doesn’t pass the test of time. Realistically, the four main actors are writer-performers [like the Python team], so book format only delivers half of their skill-set; although Atkinson tried to include this dimension with a dozen passport-style photos of himself making rubber faces.
It’s disappointing to say it, but don’t bother reading this book and go watch the DVD instead. That, incidentally, is the first time I have ever made that pagan recommendation, which feels like facing in the wrong direction.
