Original subtitles

Good evening.

Hi,

Ruby. Just lashings of ginger beer.

Thank you. Good evening. We are French and Saunders.

We are the dangerous.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I'm going to be hosting the show.

Hello, everybody.

There were so many great comic strip films. I mean, a whole generation were

brought up on comic strip films, you know, which is testament to its lasting

power, really.

My favourite comic strip presents was The Bullshitters. I like Gino a lot,

actually, I must say.

Fistful of Traveller Checks.

Bad News.

Beat Generation.

The Crying Game.

Yeah, that was good fun, wasn't it? Five Command and Dorset. Eat the Rich.

The Yacht Supergraph. Strike.

Wow! This is great!

These guys can do anything!

Unlike a lot of other people, they never repeated each film. It was like they

did 40 original films.

The plan was that it was like you'd see something one week and then next week

it'd be completely different.

So there wouldn't be six of an idea, but there'd be a different look, just a

different style of comedy, hopefully.

Pete's idea was always really to have a sort of alternative carry -on.

idea, which would be a series of films.

We always thought of them as self -contained films, although they were

telly. They were always shot like films, like very low -budget movies.

In fact, you could watch them on the screen quite happily.

I could play Stairway to Heaven when I was 12.

Jimmy Page didn't actually write it until he was 22.

I think that says quite a lot.

Did they get it this time?

What? And have they got another hair in the gate or what?

Shut up, then.

Eh? I said shut up. Having done all the comedy where you're just in the club,

where you're just going for the next biggest laugh and the bigger laugh, it

wonderful to think we could stretch it out and get mood as well.

In Bad News, the element of documentary making ties in with what we were doing

earlier in the clubs, which of course now is really common with Mrs Merton,

Steve Coogan's work, which is to invent a character and do it for real.

You're supposed to come in there, Colin.

All I'm asking, Bim, is that you let me think just one number. Yeah, I know, I

know, and I fear you can't, OK? Well, it's just not...

That's when life started to imitate art. That's when we started falling out. Me

and Nige had such a row, and we, you know, we were pals.

And we had such a row over sound levels on stage.

Somewhere, there's a lot of footage of us, you know, arguing in the minibus and

things, that you could stick into a bad news episode and you wouldn't know if it

wasn't part of the scripted film.

Except we didn't have wigs on at the time, I don't think.

I was really stoned, you know, and I drank a bottle of brandy. Yeah,

I was with this chick, and we were just about to get down to it.

I went and put my foot through the television set. I bet your mum was

angry.

With Bad News, we then took it on tour and played rock venues. We played Castle

Donington. That was our first gig.

But there's this shot, and there's the four of us looking really small, and we

come up the stairs, and it's exactly as it felt, that shot. It's exactly...

You need them all out there like that. It's like a valley, it's like a valley

with a medieval army in it.

You know, and you're about to take them all on.

I wasn't as scared of the others, which gave me strength for myself.

Shit, it gives me heart.

We are the party!

That were absolutely...

What the comic strip film showed was diversity.

Pete wanted to show different styles. You know, Dirty Movie was not like Beat

Generation. You know, Five Girl Mad was not like Slag. Slag was not like Summer

School. Sometimes people, it looked like an art film, sometimes it looked like a

sitcom, and I think I quite like that.

I don't know why I feel so crazy, Alan.

It feels like I'm going through a Stargate.

Maybe it's the diet pills.

I love Dawn in Beat Generation.

I love that shot of her legs in the stockings as it goes down. Fantastic.

I only want to be happy, Alan.

When I get home, do you know what I'm going to do?

I'm going to leave Simon.

Yes, I'm going to find myself a really wild jazz guitarist and shack up in a

ghetto. And we were always made to wear quite short skirts and fishnet -type

high shoes by Peter, even if you were playing, for instance.

A lumberjack. That would be a suitable costume.

It was just Peter's fantasy, I think, a lot of it.

Come on, Charles.

Give us a kiss, you old closet car.

My God, is it ten o 'clock already?

Come on, Charles. I ended up playing the sort of bums and the hippies and the

ageing perverts, the weirdos, sort of strange agents and rather anally

retentive. Oh, dear.

People in wigs.

Oh, dear.

Oh, dear.

Peter's got a very unusual take on the world.

So that you find yourself giving a performance that is quirky, that's odd.

So I wouldn't say it's more over the top, but he's got a very strange angle

performers, which I really like.

But this train doesn't stop at Santo Domingo.

This train will stop at Santo Domingo.

Old woman.

I think in the same way that everybody else wanted to be a musician, I think I

really wanted to be a cowboy.

So we went to Almeria.

I can't tell you anything about that.

That was a good time.

When it was something which people recognised, like a fistful of

Checks, the Spaghetti Western, all the rest of it, you could see instantly and

get the references instantly.

And those are bad news. People got those ones very quickly and latched on to

them. Even when we were doing period stuff, we wanted to be contemporary, I

think, in the way that we approached it.

And it's the American to be bold.

american way you know i mean that was always a natural reference john waters

spaghetti westerns it was that natural it suits comedy i think that kind of

and sort of size and everything you know playing things against opposites you

know so that you had things that seemed all that were actually quite mad

underneath it and trying and films quite good for that i mean i still think the

best headbutt in showbiz is uh that one with me and danny peacock and it was

fantastic because it was against that metal garage door

And that ludicrous, everybody happy.

That, you know, always sticks out in my mind.

Tell me, amigo, what's the meanest, nastiest, dirtiest hotel in town?

Yes, for two mean, ugly, gunslinging bastards like us to stay in for two

Want to hotel Bastardos? It's a bitch.

This is the manager. He's my best friend.

Nice to meet you, Mr. Bastardos.

You'll be in my hotel at four o 'clock, you bastard English.

You know, I didn't get on with the members of the comic strip. I mean, it

my game.

You know, I didn't belong to that.

And Peter used to feed me titbits. You know, basically, that's the truth of the

matter. He's a very cocky person, Keith.

He's very happy to jump on the bandwagon as long as he could be shouting they're

all wankers as he did it. Yeah, he likes to just be loud, really. Quite a lot of

people with small genitals do that, don't they?

Ticket 38.

Ticket 42.

We wrote in a little hotel in Tenby called The Hilton.

Nightmare. Two massive egos in a tiny room, you know.

I never liked Martenshaw.

I thought that he denied his existence as a professional.

And he was starting to take himself seriously as an actor, which is why we

all that stuff in there.

You know, about him being on stage in the West End, because that's what he was

doing at the time.

I mean, it's very personal, the bullshit. It was very personal about

I used to walk past the theatre hoping to bump into you.

I thought I'd lost you.

The best ones

were just very good films, really, and also brought a lot of people who have

since become big stars to the publisher's attention and gave them a

write, I think, do their first, like Dawn and Jennifer and stuff, to do their

first writing.

If you had an idea, you sort of submitted it and clenched your buttocks

see if anybody liked it, and then if they did, you went away and wrote it. It

was quite simple, really.

England, ah, England, at last, darling.

Yes, at last, darling.

We wrote that together.

Why did we? Because we felt the pressure that we had to keep up in some way, and

that was the only way to do it.

And because we said we would, and when you've said you'd do something

occasionally, you actually have to go through with it, and we had to write

something.

I don't know why we chose that, except we'd probably seen Rebecca the night

before. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Everybody's egos needed to be serviced somewhere along the line, and they were

by the nature of that kind of format.

There must have been producers eating their balls off, thinking, oh, God, why

I eating my balls off?

But there must have been other producers.

sitting there thinking, why don't they turn one of these into a series? Why

don't they just make a bad news series, you know?

Or why don't they just make a famous five series or something? But no, Pete

no. It's very hard, actually, to do a series when you have six or seven main

characters all the time, which is why the comic strip, you could have a small

part in one, a big part in the other, and all the rest of it.

And play any age.

Pete always...

Showed complete confidence in the performance, actually. It's one of his

endearing qualities. He'd just say, you know how to do a guy who's having a

nervous breakdown, his wife just left him in the fucking house, he's falling

flat, don't you?

But funny.

He'd go, yeah, Pete, right, on you go.

I think black shoes.

And then away he went.

I haven't slept for seven days.

I'm a nice guy, aren't I?

What the fuck is going on?

I've been driving around in this car for three days and I don't know who I am

anymore. People were tremendously tolerant of each other. Even Keith, when

was being his most mischievous, was always funny and basically quite kind

underneath it.

Look, Max, when this car slows down, I'm going to get out and take this shit out

of you. All you have to do is call her, tell her I'm sorry, and I'll do

anything. Tell her, tell her I love her and I'm really calm down.

The funny thing is, people just get more and more professional, that's what was

interesting.

And I guess, if I'm honest, it gets less and less fun as you get more and more

professional.

Explosions, there's another thing that happens very, very often.

Usually to finish the story.

Because you couldn't. Because it didn't have any endings.

I learnt that technique there.

Yeah. You learnt explosions and falling over there, didn't you? Falling over is

a big one. Yeah, and you fall over, explode and kill someone. That's the

way out of anything.

Yeah. I'll count to five and you stick these through the letterbox.

One, two, three, four, five.

No, through.

Push them, push them up.

Right, take them out, take them out. Put them in your pockets, put them in your

pockets and run over there. Run very quickly. Run, run, run. Off you go, off

go. Bye, bye, bye.

Happy birthday.

how quickly you lose reception once you leave London, isn't it?

Where are you going?

8303. It's the pretty route.

Why? If I go on the motorway, I usually nod off and then crash.

Go to the pretty route.

He always goes back down to Devon to film anything, and you see things that

wouldn't normally see England looking like that.

I think it's like the sort of... film version of, you know, a dog pitting on

territory, I just squirted the film off.

I concentrated on the directing because if you try to be jack -of -all -trades,

you're kind of master of none sort of thing. So I thought, well, I'd better

spend some time trying to master it and get taken seriously as a director.

I like, you know, I like putting it all together. I like working on the script.

Getting the costumes and the locations and the editing and stuff. I find the

whole thing enjoyable.

We're going on holiday.

Oh, yeah?

Where's that, then?

France? No, no, West Country. You know, cream tea, surfboarding, all that.

Oh, you see, the reason I said France is because I thought you might be getting

in some practice, you know, for driving on the wrong side of the road.

Pete's certainly very good in getting me to get the best out of that part, yeah.

I mean, I've really been better, really.

What are you up to?

It's confidential.

I see.

It's just that... Is there something undercover?

You know, a secret operation or something?

I can't tell you. Is it drugs?

It's none of your business.

Oh, how do you get into playing clothes?

I remember always being very in awe of actors that did come into it because

they're really concentrated.

And you try and say, it's really exciting, what's for lunch?

We were very interested in the catering. And they actually weren't interested

and you thought, oh, God, what a professional.

How did they manage to keep that concentration with that smell of the

They've done the same line twice.

I know.

I was always the one who said, oh, no, I can't eat this, I'm going to go to bed

early because we've got an early call and sort of sulked and threw tantrums

things. Oh, you're not happy with your room? You don't like the sleeping bag?

It's really quite clean.

What? Well, you have the other bunk. What, you didn't want biscuits for tea?

You have the other bunk.

We wouldn't do anything for months, anything up to a year, and then we'd all

come together again, and it was like family reunions. It was great fun.

But particularly, remember, it was all on location.

So we'd just all appear at some hotel in Devon and how are you and what's going

on in your life and get pissed for a week.

It's great, isn't it?

OK, I've got a good one.

Leslie, who's got the biggest knob?

Me or Harvey?

He's a fantastic director, Peter. He's very original.

But he kind of, he was ahead of his time, really. He knew what he wanted to

and we didn't. We were all kind of larking about.

Peter's sister told me that he used to make, he used to direct little films

before he had a camera. So when he was a kid, he used to direct all these, all

his sisters and his brother, get them to do little plays and pretend. He said,

pretend I'm a camera.

And he did.

He did.

Sad.

Robbie's walk down the water break in Supergirl has got to be one of the best

cinematic moments of the 80s.

It's absolutely terrifying that the safety boat refused to go out.

He said it's too dangerous.

But there were a lot of girls there that day.

And, you know.

Boys have to do dangerous things when there are girls around, don't they?

It was scary, and they couldn't get a wetsuit to fit me, so I got absolutely

soaked.

And we eventually had to put really heavy things in the case because the

kept getting blown away.

But it does look fantastic.

I think it's one of the most moody things I've ever done in a film. I was

proud of that.

I remember getting pissed and being cross that I wasn't in Supercross.

You know, you get a phone call from Pete and say, do you want to do a film? I

say, yeah, I'd love to do a film. He says, right, come round this afternoon,

we're shooting.

I go, what?

You know, it's like, you know, I've got family to support, I've got work, you

know, I've got another... other aspects to my career and i'd be in the middle of

a series of the new statesman and peter say well why can't you work next monday

peter always got rather hurt if you went off and did other things i've been

offered the lead in a really brilliant series of emma thompson and john

burnsworth and he got oh what do you have to i suppose you'd rather you did a

sort of five minute part in one episode of it i mean i understand peter's

feelings now having had our own series and everything else because you do think

what do you mean to get another job

But I might suddenly decide to write something else. Why don't you just get

another job?

And it's hard, that.

People go off and have their own careers and become more famous than you allow

them to.

It's brilliant.

Quite brilliant.

Yes, well, what initially attracted me to the idea... That's this.

The strike had everybody in it. We dropped everything to be in that film.

way Paul's captured the sheer size of the struggle... Anything but a Coca

thank you.

Millions of people unemployed, families whipped apart, whole communities

untranquillised. Thank you. I mean, if we're going to revitalise the British

film industry from an American perspective, then Miner's Strike is

the sort of film that we should be doing this year. Oh, I agree.

What about Al Pacino's Arthur Scarborough?

OK, Pacino, back.

The most successful one was the strike. It was the strike that brought back the

Golden Rose and, in a way, kind of indicated everything we'd done. It was

actually quite nice that the whole of Europe got the joke.

I do have one or two little niggles, yes, Bernard.

Mm -hm.

You see, for years, I've had this, like, mental picture of Arthur Scargill as

this middle -aged, balding Yorksman.

Yeah, yeah.

But it seems all these years I was wrong, because Arthur Scargill is, in

mumbling ball of sexual tension from Brooklyn. By that stage, we were very

at executing, um...

People who didn't act well.

Very good at executing scripts.

So all that mattered then... Quick, they're after me.

All that mattered then was that if the idea was good, then we could achieve it.

We knew how to act, we knew how to shoot it, we knew how to sell it, we knew how

to put music on it, sound effects.

All that mattered was a good idea, and it was a very good idea.

It was a film about the film business, really.

More than The Miner Strikes.

Right now you're hot.

You're hot and you're really depressed.

It was popular within the industry, I always thought, and people outside the

industry didn't quite get it, you know, I thought. I was surprised how well it

was received.

I didn't even want to go to the Montreux. I thought, let's waste the

don't want to sit there and become the second author.

I know what you're thinking.

I can't move on at the time.

The press hates me.

The government hates me.

Now the goddamn proletariat hate me.

Jesus H. Christ.

You're a schoolteacher.

A great schoolteacher.

But you don't always like to be Arthur Scargill.

Leader of the bigger... What the f*** is that?

It's an orange.

Is that it?

I can see it's a goddamn orange. I want to know what's doing my scene.

I'm sorry. I just felt it was right for me to be peeling an orange somehow.

Okay, Jerry.

She's peeling an orange. I want to be loading a handgun. Okay, Al. A magnum.

Someone has said...

What Hollywood actors do, or maybe specifically her, I don't know, is that,

course, there's a fight for who gets more camera time, more close -ups, and

an upstaging thing to have something to do in the background that makes you look

more fascinating than the person.

But I think she actually did it in Fence of a Tenant's Woman.

I think it was an article in Time Out.

Watch out in Meryl Streep's films, she's always peeling an orange or something.

She likes to do something with her hands, you know.

And so I don't know why I just picked up on that and thought, well, I'll do

that. That's a funny idea.

I'm sorry, Arthur.

I love the workers as much as you do.

God damn it, Arthur, you're going to have to choose.

It's me or the union.

I'll tell you that.

Don't ever say it to me again.

He was extremely bossy and very possessive, but it wouldn't have existed

him. Simple as that. I think... Peter's a genius, actually.

I'm sorry, but it's true. I do think he is, and I think he's severely

underrated. And I think he was very true to the comic strip for a long time

after everybody else wasn't. The truth of the matter is, Peter did put a hell

a lot of energy into developing their futures unknowingly, you know,

at the time.

Peter Richardson was what kept it going so long.

Yeah, I mean, he was the energy and the driving force.

How y 'all doing?

Good time.

Very, very fucking good time.

Yeah.

And they're about to make another comic strip film, so, you know, those days

aren't over. That work is not completed.

And Miss Meryl Streep for Strife.

We're through with trying to establish ourselves as people and

get a house and a roof for our families.

And we can now, we could now, go on to much, much higher things.

Well,

I always thought as we were doing it that if it finished, you know, tomorrow,

thought, well, I had a really brilliant time doing it.

And I thought that just about all the time we were doing it.

And I realized, you know, actually, how, you know, incredibly lucky.

Sounds like I'm incredibly lucky, darling.

So lucky.

You know, to do those, to have the chance to, you know, think up stories

film them, you know. I mean, a lot of people spend their whole lives trying to

make films and never do, you know.

So I do, I'm very grateful to that, you know, for being able to do that.

But, of course, you know, I'm not dead yet, so I still want to do it, you know.