YMMV / Not the Nine O'Clock News

• Aluminium Christmas Trees: Foreign viewers may not realise that the "Get a TV licence—it's cheaper than a funeral" parody (in which the TV Licensing Authority hunts down and murders people who don't pay their TV licence fee) is only a slight exaggeration of the real PIFs it was based on, and indeed ones that came later on were even more extreme, almost indistinguishable from the parodies.
• Awesome Music: The team were known for their musical pieces, such as "Nice Video, Shame About The Song" (a Take That! at elaborate New Romantic-style pop videos), "All-Out Superpower Confrontation" (a protest song over the global tensions due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) and "Kinda Lingers".
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • A late sketch parodying Question Time featured Rowan Atkinson playing the terminally boring Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, who is introduced as "a man tipped to be the next Prime Minister". He had to resign from the cabinet a couple of months later due to issues relating to the Falklands War.
  • The ABBA parody "Super Duper" was made a very short time before the group's bitter split.
  • An early sketch parodied the labor negotiations of the late 70's, one condition the employees (Mel Smith and guest Jim Broadbent) demanded was sleeping with Rowan Atkinson's wife. Atkinson offers Chris Langham's daughter as an alternative. He objects that she's just 8 years old (Atkinson proposes 'phasing her in by 1991' by which time she would have been 20)... In 2007, Langham was arrested for possessing child porn.
  • A similar one had Rowan, Mel and Griff snatching kids and taking them to a BBC truck for Rolf on Saturday...years later, Rolf Harris would be accused of and later convicted for child sexual abuse.
  • The (unaired) first episode made a rather unsubtle joke about Jimmy Savile ("Ask him for how much a porter makes"). Enough said (John Lloyd's well-known contempt towards the presenter was more explicitly present in Spitting Image).
• Hilarious in Hindsight
  • The "Stoutist Discrimination" sketch, which used fat people as a stand-in for gay people in debates about gay rights, has become funnier since obesity has become such an issue and some people actually make similar arguments.
  • There's a sketch parodying the Church of England's objection to Monty Python's Life of Brian by reversing it - the followers of the Monty Python religion objecting to the C of E's "Life of Christ" film which they believe is mocking their holy figure - the comic messiah, John Cleese. "The initials are the same!" complains a devout Pythonist. Quite funny at the time, utterly hilarious now that over-quoting and adulation of Python (particularly by foreigners) has led many former fans to view it as indeed becoming a cult.
  • The show mocked The Two Ronnies as The Two Ninnies, claiming they were old-fashioned and out of touch. Then at the Turn of the Millennium, with The Two Ronnies still being very popular, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett reunited for The Two Ronnies Sketchbook, in which they replayed some of their favourite sketches and talked about them. The format was then borrowed by… Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones of Not the Nine O'Clock News for The Smith and Jones Sketchbook!
    • Ronnie Barker was reportedly very offended by the sketch, to the point where he was actually furious — unusually so, as offstage he was normally a fairly quiet, self-effacing person. Ronnie Corbett, however, was very amused by it. After Barker died, Corbett did The One Ronnie with Jones as a regular.
  • In "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold' sketch in series two, Rowan Atkinson's character Adrian thinks he is being recruited as a spy. Atkinson later starred as clumsy British spy Johnny English.
  • In some sketches, Atkinson played priests. He would later play a nervous trainee priest in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Funnily enough, Richard Curtis wrote material for the series.
• Misattributed Song: The "I Like Bouncing" song, which parodied the contemporary Ska revival, has been mistaken by some for an actual song by The Specials or Madness.
• Nightmare Fuel: In "Jacques Cousteau's Bath Salts", a fake commercial for the aforesaid product, Pamela Stephenson steps into a bathtub and happily soaps herself only for a tentacle to rear out of it, attack her by wrapping itself around her, and drag her, terrified, struggling and (apparently) naked, underwater until she drowns, whereupon the water turns red. Cue Rowan Atkinson surfacing in a scuba outfit with a bottle of bath salts. Really not clear where they were going with that one.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Pamela Stephenson was a cast member on this show a few years before she was hired for the tenth season (1984-1985) season of Saturday Night Live, becoming the first female SNL cast member born outside of North America and the (as of 2014) first and only SNL cast member from New Zealand.
  • The miners negotiations sketch features a young Jim Broadbent.
• Special Effects Failure: At the end of the "McEnroe's Breakfast" sketch, Griff Rhys Jones (as John McEnroe) clutches at his head in the middle of his tantrum and manages to pull off his curly wig. There's a blink and you'll miss it moment at the end of the clip where he realises what's happened.
• Spiritual Successor: The series was hailed as the natural successor to Monty Python's Flying Circus, due to its Footlights-originating castmembers, anarchic humour and satirical edge. In fact, John Cleese even recorded an intro for the series.
• Values Dissonance: At the time, jokes about the recent Iranian revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and traditional Islamic dress were acceptable targets. These days, jokes like that would get them in trouble with a lot of special interest groups.
• Values Resonance: The "Constable Savage" sketch has sadly become more and more relevant with each passing decade, especially in America, with racial profiling still prominent.

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