Trivia / The Goodies

• The Cast Showoff: The show had frequent musical moments. While the other two saw them as an opportunity to muck about, they demonstrated that Bill Oddie was a proper musician and songwriter.
• Channel Hop: From The BBC to ITV (as an LWT production) in 1981. This was sadly short-lived; see Screwed by the Network below.
• Creator Breakdown: Bill Oddie has remarked how he unwittingly used the series, unconsciously, as anger management, and that a doctor told him his bi-polar disorder was obvious from just watching the programme.
• Died During Production: Tim's death in April 2020 put an all-too-soon end to the planned audio series after only one episode.
• Executive Meddling: The 1981 LWT series suffered from executives trying to push the series into being more mainstream and accessible, and be Lighter and Softer than previous series.
  • One BBC exec, who was trying to push the station into a trendier direction and had no time for its heritage of popular old shows, publicly said "Over my dead body!" to requests for Goodies re-runs. The BBC only ever repeated one episode, and that was far from being the best, as a grudging nod to the show's thirtieth anniversary; however, there was a new documentary and a repeat season for the fortieth anniversary over the Christmas period in 2010, albeit in a late-night slot (in broadcast order, the repeated episodes were "The OK Tea Rooms", "Kung Fu Kapers", "The Goodies and the Beanstalk", "The Lighthouse", "Saturday Night Grease", "Double Trouble" and "The Stone Age").
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • Thankfully no longer the case with the release of the complete BBC collection on DVD, but before that, less than half the total number of episodes had been released on DVD and VHS in the UK, allegedly due to the controller of the BBC not liking the show. This sadly became the case again in the UK in 2023 due to Network Distributing filing for liquidation with all their releases going out of print.
  • Due to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation pretty much playing the episodes on constant repeat, the availability of most of the material prior to the complete collection's release was thanks to the efforts of Aussie pirates, where the show has a HUGE following.
• Missing Episode:
  • There are a few episodes where the only known copy is one returned from Australia, and hence either only exist in monochrome or have some minor censorship cuts (the latter were successfully restored for the 2018 DVD release because the excised material was also retained by the censors, although there is some loss of quality where the clips have been spliced back in). The only totally missing episode, however, is the originally broadcast version of "Kitten Kong" — the episode was extensively reshot with new material when it was entered into the Rose d'Or festival, and the BBC considered that cut the "definitive" version, leading them to junk the original one.
  • Tim and Graeme's previous series, Broaden Your Mind, has been almost completely wiped save for about 7 minutes of footage. However, audio tracks exist for all episodes.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: Combined with the use of footage of Mr. Spock from Star Trek: The Original Series in the episode "Invasion Of The Moon Creatures", various other copyrighted imagery use and the use of The Beatles song "She Loves You", some of the BBC-era episodes received edits on DVD.
• Screwed by the Network:
  • Apparently the controller of The BBC hated the series over the episode "South Africa" (a satire about apartheid that did not go very well with execs), but was unable to kill the show off due to its popularity. So while it had a good long run, there have been very, very few repeats of the show on British TV, even in recent years. For instance, their 30th anniversary was celebrated by... a cheaply made documentary and one repeated episode on TV. And Tim, Bill and Graeme had to take matters into their own hands to get the show out on DVD.
  • The BBC eventually did cancel the series (or rather, failed to continue it; there was never a formal contract), and it moved to ITV, where it was subjected to Executive Meddling and died. Ironically, this is the season that Comedy Central UK is allowed to show.
  • Apparently the show was canceled (on the BBC at least) so that the special effects budget for The Goodies could be reallocated to the effects heavy and very expensive TV version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981), which caused the move to LWT (now a part of ITV).
  • LWT themselves screwed The Goodies over as well, signing them on for three series, then cancelling the series after just one due to low ratings. The Goodies did get paid for the three they'd signed on for, however their contracts meant that they couldn't work together using the name 'The Goodies' for two years because of this.
• What Could Have Been: Steven Spielberg was a fan of the show, and at one point actually approached Tim about the possibility of making a Goodies feature film. For various reasons, it never came off.
  • The Goodies emerged from the massive pool of talent emerging in Britain in the middle 1960's, largely but by no means exclusively from Oxbridge. One point lost in comic history was that this was an amorphous pool; its members worked together or seperately on many different shows in film, radio and TV and different coalitions of talent formed and dissolved all the time. ^note The radio show I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again featured all three Goodies plus John Cleese, and it was not unknown for people like Terry Jones, Eric Idle or Michael Palin to contribute jokes and sketches. It took a long time for the "permanent" troupes of Monty Python and the Goodies to emerge, and at the very start there was a possibility Tim Brooke-Taylor might have become a Python team member, or somebody like Graham Chapman might have ended up as a Goodie. How both shows might have developed with different cast members is a matter for speculation.
• Working Title: Narrow Your Mind, in reference to an earlier show that Tim and Graeme had made called Broaden Your Mind, which was lost to the BBC's tape wiping policy.
• Write Who You Know: Averted, despite all three characters being Danzas, their real personalities had little similarity to the characters on the show. Bill the character was a Heroic Comedic Sociopath, Bill the guy was an Actual Pacifist, for example. Both Bills were keen ornithologists, though, because that was something he was known for. Tim would later say that the characters were exaggerations of how the public perceived them; so Bill's passionate outspokenness became heroic comedic sociopathy, Graeme's medical degree made him a Mad Scientist, and Tim's posh accent and name made him an Upper-Class Twit.

---