Bad Publicity.


I found this flyer while sorting through my bedroom cupboard. Of all our shows’ taglines, this one had the worst.


We must have been possessed by the spirit of ITV. Reading it made me sick in my mouth. It’s the sort of sentence you’d see in a brochure for a Butlin’s Holiday Camp. Not that I’ve ever looked in one, of course. Not that I’ve ever looked.

What were we thinking? ‘Four characters, two situations, one night of comedy’ is less a tagline, more an equation. Perhaps we'd stumbled across the secret formula to funny. It only needs an exclamation mark to seal the deal.

Two’s Company wasn’t our finest hour. As shows go, it was a pretty cut-and-shut. We glued together two sitcom pilots with a couple of sketches. One of the sitcoms, 'Chipped, Battered and Burgered', was set in a chip shop in the early 1980s. The plot was basically a reworking of Fawlty Towers’ 'Basil the Rat'. Thank God Cleese and Booth’s lawyers never got wind of it.

Glyn wore a false moustache in it, thus saving him the bother of having to do much to differentiate from his other characters. The quick change before it was so tight, he only had a few, stressed seconds to glue the tache on. One night, it started peeling off as soon he took the stage. Lines were dropped left, right and centre as he tried to keep it balanced on his face. It amuses me to think that people paid to see this.


The blurb on the back of the flyer isn’t much better. ‘A cast of five comedy reprobates’ can fuck right off.

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