We delve into the underappreciated works of Peter Richardson and his 'Comic Strip presents...' films. Enjoy!

If you browse the shelves of the BFI Blu-rays in your local branch of HMV, the names of maverick filmmakers active during the 1980s will likely include Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and Alan Clarke. Celebrating Leigh’s work with Alison Steadman, Ken Loach’s unflinching eye, Greenaway’s theatrical allegories, Mulvey and Wollen’s underappreciated partnership, Clarke’s steadycam shots and Jarman’s artistic contribution to British cinema’s national identity is certainly essential but a name that is absent is Peter Richardson. 

But Richardson’s work is getting more attention this year. I spoke with him after a screening of More Bad News at this year’s Slapstick Festival in Bristol to find out more about a filmmaker whose ideas and creativity have led him to work with Hollywood household names whilst also making miniDV movies with his mates.

“With The Comic Strip, we were doing Snuff Comedy really!” Richardson chuckles with his metaphorical tongue firmly in his cheek. “Going out there and trying to get ourselves killed either by people throwing knives or bottles of piss at us!” Yes, whether it was filming Ade Edmondson playing John Major playing Coco The Clown during an actual circus performance or the joke-turned-real Heavy Metal band Bad News being rained with bottles of audience urine at the ’86 Monsters of Rock Festival, The Comic Strip presents seemed to be a series of cinematic experiments that pushed the boundaries of what a TV comedy could be, both in front and behind the camera from 1982 to 2016.

The Comic Strip was the UK’s first exposure to the talent that would go on to star in The Vicar of Dibley, Absolutely Fabulous, Bottom and much more: Dawn French, Rik Mayall, Jennifer Saunders, Ade Edmondson, Nigel Planer, Keith Allen, Robbie Coltrane and Alexi Sayle were all original cast members, and all went on to became familiar to millions in their own projects.

Like Leigh, Clarke and Loach, Richardson began his directing career while working within TV. In the 1980s, taking advantage of the freedoms the newly formed Channel 4 offered, Richardson transitioned The Comic Strip comedy troupe from the Soho stage of The Boulevard Theatre (then owned by Paul Raymond, the subject of Winterbottom’s biopic starring Steve Coogan) to the small screen but with BIG SCREEN ideas. 

“The plan was that each week it would be something completely different. So there wouldn’t be six episodes of one idea but different looks, different styles of comedy each week” Richardson recalled. After the first two series were directed by known TV directors Sandy Johnson and Bob Spires, Richardson took the reins for the lion’s share of the remaining productions and never looked back. Unlike other contemporary filmmakers, who were also trying to make the most of TV budgets (not to mention the speed and production values TV crews offered), Richardson’s output saw the medium of film to be just another subject for comedy. 

With comedy material that ranges from parody to satire, slapstick to mockumentary, neo-realism to surrealism, the forty-two films all look and feel different to each other as each film experiments with something different to the last and to the next. Where The Strike see Richardson playing a pre-Hooha Pacino playing Arthur Scargill in a Hollywood adaptation of the miners’ industrial action, Susie sees Dawn French playing a schoolteacher so bored with her rural life, she tries to sleep her way into excitement. Satire of Hollywood’s depiction of real events does not seem to have anything in common with Dawn French does Far From The Madding Crowd.

In a franchise-filled, IP-positioning world, this may seem like an active attempt at career sabotage. But inheriting the film landscape of the 70’s, where The Carry On Team had dominated screen comedy (as well as the domestic box-office), changing the setting of each episode doesn’t seem so strange. But instead of keeping the characters the same and changing the setting, like Carry Ons did, each cast member of The Comic Strip would play a different type of character in each production. Kenneth Williams brought his pomposity to each Carry On while Ade Edmondson and Nigel Planner are often unrecognisable from film to film. This developed into a screen comedy where the comedy came as much from how it was shown on the screen as what your favourite comedian was up to this week.

With a seemingly total disregard for career-building-self-preservation, Richardson was reinventing for each production, effectively starting from zero with each film.  Yes, The Comic Strip bomb falling from the sky plays like the MGM lion, but there seems to be very little that is consistent throughout the films that could be seen as brand format/USP/identity (delete as applicable). There is no brand driving Richardson’s films, no consistent tropes, no catchphrases and few reoccurring characters. What is consistent is the group of performers and a lust for new adventures in screen comedy.

All this small screen experimentation naturally led to a feature film with a theatrical release and soundtrack! No, not Comic Strip: The Movie where the recognisable cast play their fan’s favourite characters in a big screen adaptation that uses the usual three act structure of A Hero of a Thousand Faces. No, it was 1985’s The Supergrass. With the cast playing characters never portrayed in the TV films, Richardson took Ade Edmondson’s Dennis Carter from a laughably unbelievable boast of drug cartel affiliation in a pub, to the south coast under the watch of a police investigation led by Harvey (Richardson) and Lesley (Saunders). With a (relatively) gentle narrative that would not be out of place in an Ealing film, Richardson and regular co-writer Pete Richen’s script follows the know-nothing-bloke-next-door as he gets further and further out of his depth until (SPOILER) the crime caper almost solves itself, leaving Carter as the only person who knew what really happened. “Ade is very good at playing an Everyman” reflects Richardson. And a different everyman every time in this writer’s humble opinion!

Eat The Rich in 1987 followed the irreverent politics of some of the TV films closer, favouring a satire of delicious proportions as Al Pillay reaches breaking point serving the snobbish clientele of the restaurant they work at and, ultimately, serving them dinner (if you catch my drift?)

After The Comic Strip moved to the BBC in 1990, Richardson co-wrote and directed The Pope Must Die in 1991. It sees Robbie Coltrane as a simple rural priest who is mistakenly named the new pope and takes on the role in his own homespun way. So far, so farce. That the new pope then has to deal with Mob ties and corruption in the Vatican is where the real farcical comedy kicks in. 

And when Richardson did settle on a format for a show in 1997, it was Stella Street, a camcorder-shot affair filmed on a quiet suburban street. Expect Phil Cornwall and John Sessions, two of their generations most entertaining impressionists, playing a plethora of famous names who have all moved to the same quiet street in Surrey to “get away from it all”. Mick Jagger trying to run a corner shop with style and Joe Pesci trying to get through a Neighbourhood Watch meeting without committing murder are just some of the challenges of living in suburbia. Hilarity ensues!

“Working like that is very quick and instant. It’s very real. You can do it yourself. You can do it cheaply and there is something about the shit quality that helps the comedy. I remember having this conversation with Paul Bartel (cast member of The Pope Must Die and director of the wonderful Eating Raoul) who thought comedy shouldn’t look too pretty. When it starts to look a bit pretty, it looks vain. We've been guilty of that in The Comic Strip sometimes, making nice photography, which I love, but you have to be very careful not to overdo it.” 

Richardson walked this line in 2004 when he co-wrote and directed two theatrical features. One was Stella Street: The Movie. The other is, in this writer’s opinion, a much-underappreciated work: Churchill: The Hollywood Years.

Churchill’s premise begins by revealing that the face we believe to be Winny C was in fact an actor called Roy Bubbles! The real Churchill was actually a United States Marine lieutenant, played by a cigar-chomping Christian Slater with all the zeal he brought to Captain Riley Hale in John Woo’s Broken Arrow.

After a fantastically bombastic Tony Scott-style action flick opening that reappropriates some of Churchill’s most famous quotes by having Slater drawl them as hyperbolic call-to-arms, the movie settles into its main plot: Churchill is in the UK to win the war for the Limeys. When greeted at the harbour by Brit paps and asked “How about peace in our time?” Churchill answers “I’ll give ya peace! Peace of Hitler’s ass!”. A highlight for this writer is when Churchill and Eisenhower, played with parodic gusto by Romany Malco, hijack a stuffy royal event with a hip-hop version of Hang Out The Washing on The Siegfried Line! “I’m not known for rapping prowess” confesses Slater in an on-set interview. You are to me Christian! With bars like “I see you Mr Hitler on the Siegfried line, you must be outta yo mind!” and “Give us the tools, we’ll finish the job! Can’t be messing with the Churchill mob!”, Slater and Malco show the royals how to “get down”, as it were. Churchill then goes on to crack the Enigma Machine and singlehandedly drive the Nazi’s out of Buck House! Hooray for the U S of A!

Churchill blazes a link from Monty Python to Horrible Histories but without giving you a real history to hold onto. Pre-Inglourious Basterds (spelt wrong, not sweary!), this “alternative history” isn’t one where the power of cinema allows us to indulge in a revenge fantasy but, rather, confronts us with how ludicrous cinema’s hijacking of history can be. In an Alternative Fact world, this reimagining of history doesn’t seem too outrageous for someone to actually take seriously! (I’m sure you’ve seen a more ludicrous theory while doom scrolling?) But for Richardson, all this is very much a progression from The Strike and GLC and how cinema can reappropriate history in the name of commercial entertainment. If it has a message, it could be that movies should never be trusted and that perhaps history should be boring? (Maybe not. I dunno! I’m just a humble writer!)

A rebirth of The Comic Strip followed, thanks to UK Gold, in 2016. Five Go To Rehab, The Hunt for Tony Blair and Sex Actually were broadcast along with a new documentary with fresh interviews including fans of the show like The Inbetweeners’ James Buckley and Dragons’ Den Deborah Meaden (I’m out! Sorry Deborah, I couldn’t resist!). This was followed up with Richardson’s take on the News of The Word phone hacking scandal, Red Top, starring Maxine Peake and Russell Tovey and billed as “The Sweeney meets Boogie Nights”. But this move back to the under-one-hour format may have been a welcomed one. 

“90 minutes is very difficult, very tough to get right. Churchill should have been sixty minutes.” Richardson stated with 20/20 hindsight. “Sixty minutes?!” I exclaimed! “Yes because there's a whole part of it the second half where the comedy gets spoiled by the plot. It takes over too much and it becomes less enjoyable. It's either got to be a serious thriller or it's got to be a comedy and it becomes confused. Simplifying the back story, bringing that down, would make a nice version of 60 minutes.” Hence the presentation of Churchill: The Savage Director’s Cut at the BFI Southbank in the Big Smoke of May of this year! Part of a 41st year anniversary of screenings, Richardson presented his exposition-eliminated version of Churchill in the context of art cinema appreciation, world cinema explorations and indie cinema support. And with Severin Films releasing a Blu-ray set of The Comic Strip films produced for Channel 4 this summer, perhaps this is the start of a re-evaluation of Richardson’s career as well as the screen comedy of The Comic Strip? In this writer’s humble opinion, it certainly deserves to be in the same class of cinematic experimentation as the filmmakers listed at the beginning of this piece, and it being in the genre of comedy should not be reason for it not to be….no matter how pretty it might be….or ugly for that matter….blah blah blah.

Article originally appeared in Film Stories here.