Fabulous Absolutely

It’s fair to say that, however good the writing, sketch shows can be horribly hit or miss affairs. Of late I’ve found the more recent shows a lot more miss, but that may be because I prefer actual jokes to grotesques spewing out dull and repetitive catchphrases.

Still, to be fair it doesn’t mean that everything preceding them formed a veritable golden age. For the most part Monty Python’s Flying Circus leaves me unmoved, that I do know. On the other hand the surviving BBC routines – of which there are far too few – featuring Pete and Dud are stone cold classics that still crack me up.

Over the years there have probably been all manner of shows that briefly lit up the schedules before burning out. With a paper and pencil and enough time I suspect everyone could come up with a decent list of their own.

Probably top of my list, even above Spike Milligan’s hysterical and quite odd free-form Q series, would be Channel 4’s Absolutely, which ran from 1989 to 1993, broadcast late on Wednesday nights, and hasn’t been repeated since as far as I know. Rather than being purely comical, quite a lot of the characters created by the sextet of performers that included Morwenna Banks, Jack Docherty and Gordon Kennedy – who now plays Little John in the BBC’s rather rubbish Robin Hood – were actually either disturbed or very disturbing.

If you saw Channel 4’s recent adaptation of Sarah Williams’ Poppy Shakespeare, most of the Absolutely creations should be seated in the room alongside Anna Maxwell Martin’s N. There would certainly be a chair reserved for Moray Hunter’s marvellously, hellishly annoying Calum Gilhooley, a complete gonk, forever wearing his blue anorak and clutching a plastic bag, as he tediously over described everything.

Even more disturbing was John Sparkes’ characters, Bert Bastard and Frank Hovis. The former was a dishevelled geriatric to whom life was perennially unkind, while the latter doled out particularly foul tales of being caught short from the sort of disgusting toilet cubicle Renton disappeared into in Trainspotting.

Less revolting was Banks’ Little Girl, sitting on her wooden school desk and ultimately declaring that her nonsensical childish stream of consciousness was “true!” Even less harmless were the haplessly deluded councillors of Stoneybridge, forever trying to find ways to promote their drab little Scottish town.

Of course there’s always the danger that the monster that is memory is making these sketches and characters out to be far better than they were. There’s the danger that they aren’t the comedy gems that I remember.


Next week I can find out when Fremantle release Absolutely: Everything!, an eight-disc box set of all 28 episodes, together with a healthy selection of extras put together by the cast. Hopefully I’m not wrong.