268: Fag Rock 3 - The Goodies

The Goodies
“Superstar”, 7 July 1973
Written by Bill Odie and Graeme Garden, with Tim Brooke-Taylor
“I don’t want your love” by Bill Oddie and Michael Gibbs

Barbara Mitchell as "Isabel Chintz"
John Peel as Jimmy Saville, the host of "Top of the Pops"

The Goodie’s comic satire of the contemporary music business. The first half isn’t germane to my purpose. Watch it if you like, I’m not the boss of you, see if I care, but you won’t get credit either way. The basic set-up is that The Goodies decide that popular music is becoming too sexual. The upshot of assorted auditions is that only Bill gets signed to an agent. The agent establishes Bill’s image as a virile famous pop star called “Randy Pandy” (a pun on the children’s character Andy Pandy, and the word randy, meaning horny). Fearing that the British public maybe in danger of getting bored with him, she decides he needs an image change, and that he will play the lead in a new rock musical, “St Augustine Superstar”.

ISABEL: You are gonna star in a new rock musical. And this is it: Saint Augustine - Superstar.
TBT: That sounds rather nice.
ISABEL: Don't you believe it. He's Saint Augustine.
TBT (horrified): Him!
ISABEL: Oh yes yes yes. He's pure, he's good and he's holy, but above all he's unbearably sexy.
TBT: No he's not.
BO: Yes he is!
TBT: Not.
ISABEL: He's got all the girls screaming for him...
BO: Yes! Yes!
ISABEL: So what does he do?
ISABEL: He goes into a monastery.
TBT, GG & BO: He WHAT?!
ISABEL: Yes, along with all the fellas, you see what I mean?
(She nudges Tim suggestively.)
GG: Oh, come off it. Saint Augustine wasn't a.... nancy.
ISABEL: He is in here. To an extent.
TBT: How much of an extent?
ISABEL: A large extent.
BO: Yeah, yeah, but what about me groupies, miss? I don't want...
ISABEL: Oh, don't worry, hun. This way you get everybody going for you. See, the butch fellas like you 'cause you're not after their sheilas, the sheilas like you 'cause they want to convert you, and you even score in the twilight zone.


Starts at 1:55


So in this parody, glam rock isn’t about sexual liberation, it’s only calculatedly marketing sexual ambivalence for commercial reasons. While you can make some sort of argument that there is a degree of social comment in all this about music and sexuality - that the music titillates its audience of young girls under cover of gay insinuations - really, it’s an opportunity to make jokes about behaving camply. Which is the major problem with many of The Goodies’ attempts at satire - their idea of what is funny is too similar to what the audience for an ITV sitcom would also find funny. It doesn’t go against the grain enough, and so as time moved on, The Goodies got left behind. Hell, we’re only watching it for historical reasons. Earlier in the same episode there are jokes about money-grubbing Jewish lawyers with comically large noses. It’s all that sort of level. In the same way, later on, it’s funny to call someone a “Superpoof”, but for somebody to think you’re a poof is deeply annoying, and hence also funny. Camp men showing their attraction is also amusing. Between the three different gays played by Tim, Graeme, and Bill, you get them dressed up in leather, furs, and shiny materials. And the need to put on gruff voices, and prove you’re not really poofs.
You also get a parody of “Jesus Christ Superstar”, the film version of which had come out only a couple of months earlier the same year. It’s more a parody of the “Top of the Pops” than the musical. So here’s Bill in outrageous costume, pouting, pawing with his limp wrist, skipping about on the stage, and then stripping down to his undergarments. The Mincing Monks are neither subtle as a joke nor as a performance (though they are played by The Fred Tomlinson Singers, for Monty Python trivia fans).
Youtube is not the finest medium, and so I can’t tell whether the final joke of Tim and Graeme, still dressed as gay men, being chased off by police and sailors, is because the mob fancies them, or because they want to beat them up in frustration and disgust.
There may be little bits cut out of this. Apparently the Australians censored this quite heavily. Gay jokes were not popular in Australia in the mid-70s. When Dick Emery went on tour, some parts of the Australian media said he was disgusting for playing a homosexual.

172: Gay Sports - Football 3

“The Goodies” – “Football Crazy”, 16 January 1982
Start at 8.10

From an episode mainly concerned about football hooliganism. Tim Brooke-Taylor starts off adopting an elder generation denunciation of modern players’ unmanliness and concern for their own appearance. But as Tim lists off how the players’ appeal on the field is more sexual than sporting, he finds himself succumbing to the “sporno” enticements of the game to the point of almost uncontrolled ecstasy.
Where the Pythons just slightly goosed-up contemporary football celebrations, “The Goodies” examine all the other homoerotic appeals of the game and its players, as Football becomes more and more as one with the entertainment/celebrity business.

161: Gay Ad - Butch Tobacco

from “The Goodies” April 9, 1972
starts at 4:46

Like the last “Goodies” gay ad, this offers much the same idea again. A generic commercial ideas of heterosexuality is deflated at the last moment. It’s the same idea as Beyond the Fringe’s “Bollard” sketch, only in reverse. There the models were presented as camp from the start, and so the twist was to see them pretending to be butch. Such an overly performed version of straightness easily topples into campness. It is homosexuals who fetishise and obsess over every detail of displayed manliness, motivated either out of paranoia so to hide their unmanly homosexuality, or to ape and accentuate a macho appeal. The stereotypical idea of the gay male model was exploited in Ralph Steadman’s cartoon. In the end it all becomes an idea of male attractiveness performed to other men which as in this instance literally excludes women. In these two “Goodies” sketches there’s also the possible idea that gays are silly, not just for their effeminate dress and manner, but also because it’s laughable that anyone would want to turn away such enticing, attractive willing nubile young ladies.
“Butch” is not an improbable name, since most ‘70s products aimed at straight men relied on blatantly, indeed even ludicrously, blockheaded appeals to machismo.

159: Gay Ad - Fairy Puff

from “The Goodies”, BBC 2, 8 November 1970
(transcript from http://www.goodiesruleok.com/newsletter.php?issue=10)

A girl (Maria O’Brien) is standing at a washing machine.

GIRL: Oh, wash days! Look at this pile of washing. I don't know what I'm going to do!

Tim Brooke-Taylor enters, wearing a shiny white suit and holding a box of Fairy Puff washing powder.

TIM: (with brash American accent) Hi there, kitten! I'm the Fairy Puff man. (Sings) Gets right to the dirt of the wash! That's me! Hey kitten, that dress you're wearing is grey, grey, grey, grey, grey!

GIRL: I know, but what can I do?

TIM: Here, kitten. Take that dress off and put it in this washing machine with Fairy Puff. (Sings) Gets right to the dirt of the wash!

The girl removes the dress and hands it to Tim.

TIM: Uh-uh, kitten, that underslip you're wearing is grey, grey, grey, grey, grey! Best take it off and we'll put it in as well.

The girl removes her slip and gives it to Tim.

TIM: (sings) Gets right to the dirt of the wash!

TIM: Oh-oh, kitten, those undies you're wearing are grey, grey, grey, grey, grey!

GIRL: I know, take them off and put them in the machine.

We see a head and shoulders shot of the girl as she removes her undies and gives them to Tim, who is leering at her.

GIRL: Now what are you going to do, hmmm?

TIM's leering changes to a look of uncertainty.

TIM (girly voice): I'm going to wash these clothes. I'm the Fairy Puff Man! (Sings): Gets right to the dirt of the wash! I'm a little Fairy Puff man, puff puff!

---------------------------------------

A bit of a damp squib this one. The overly macho pitchman suddenly becomes camp and effeminate when confronted by real female sexuality. While 70s humour is full of unclothed women, the trick is always to find some comic means of conceptual disavowal, so that it’s not merely smut. The sketch has been building to further and further female disrobing and nudity, maybe even the possibility of actual sex, but then at the very moment of climax the male recuses himself in what is a relatively new and shocking mode.
“Fairy Puff” is not an inappropriate name for an old-fashioned detergent, and it’s presented in such a way that the viewer shouldn’t automatically think “Fairy” + “Puff” = homosexual, but still accept the sketches rather suddenly and weedily presented conclusion.
This is a televised version of a sketch which first appeared on the radio series “I’m Sorry I Read That Again” (22 February 1970). The writers thought well enough of it that they included it in the premiere episode of their new TV series.

127: Puns 1

We’re seen cartoonist literalise some phrase for comic effect, i.e “Roaring Poof”
A similar technique is, when some word of longstanding use acquires a new trendy or slangy meaning, to illustrate old phrases in this new light. So humorists and comics exhume quotes and sayings featuring the word “gay” but now give it an obvious homosexual twist or flourish. What follow all date from the 70s, when the public and the humorists who serve it had distinct ideas as to what distinguished this newly emergent and proud socio-sexual demographic. Who knows, 30-40 or so years ago this may have seemed strikingly novel, although today it seems rather laboured. Even as a boy in the early ‘80s, Larry Grayson’s catchphrase of “What a gay day!” seemed to be more of a Pavlov’s bell rung for the more lumpen propulace than anything actually entertaining.

from “Photopoetry” in “Mad” June 1972

- Edward McLachlan in “Private Eye” 13 July 1973

The Gay Gordons is a Scottish highland dance, alluding to the Gordon Highlanders regiment. So here it’s male couples with effeminate eyelashes, making pursed lipsticked pouts at each other, turning vigorous highland dancing into something more intimate and sissified. “Oh God! Not again!” could be a reaction to homosexuality, or that these Gay Gordons appear again and again. If you like, and given McLachlan’s style of humour, there could even be a suggestion that they’re all gay and they’re all called Gordon.

- Nick Baker in “Private Eye” 24 January 1975

Since “South Park”, a gay dog probably now means to most people an actual homosexual dog. But it did used to have the meaning of being “a dashing young blade about town”. Here, in the ‘70s, when Mr Humphries is the foremost gay representation, we get a beribboned and lipsticked dog with over-styled hair, sauntering on its hindquarters so it can hold one paw on its hip and the other outstretched rather limply, whilst swinging a handbag.

And if only to prove that this appropriation of the “Gay Dog” phrase is not just a one-off, here’s a little bit of dialogue from the original broadcast of “The Goodies” 1971 episode “Kitten Kong”, excised from the 1972 Montreaux Award-winning version. The Goodies have become pet sitters (transcript from http://www.goodiesruleok.com/articles.php?id=16 )

As Graeme opens the door to take the kitten out for his exercise, there is a loud barking and he slams the door shut again.
"What's that?" he gibbers, "What's that monster on the landing?"
"That's a Great Dane," says Tim.
"It's as big as a horse!" protests Graeme, adding "I'm not going out there - it looks fierce."
"Well it isn't," Tim assures him, "In fact that's its problem. It's not terribly butch."
"Isn't it?" asks Graeme.
"No," confirms Tim, "As a matter of fact it's ..."; he whispers in Graeme's ear.
"It's not is it?" asks an amazed Graeme.
"As a row of pink tents," assures Tim.
"You mean a Great Dane that's ..." says Graeme
Tim completes the sentence, "A bit of a gay dog!"
"Will you get off ..." says Graeme.

- “Kitten Kong”, 12 November 1971

115: The Goodies - "A Cactus in My Y-Fronts"

“The Goodies – Almost Live”, 2 November 1976

Starts at 6.10

“The Midnight Cow Person” – Tim Brooke-Taylor

Another gay cowboy joke. “Midnight Cowperson” with its pre-Politcally Correct phrasing is a reference to the film “Midnight Cowboy”, in which Jon Voight played a hustler who make occasional forays into homosexuality.

This was originally performed on the 11 November 1973 episode of “I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again”. It was sung by its writer Bill Oddie (the short bearded one). That version has shtick missing from this, where cowboy yodelling becomes a chorus of camp “Ooooohs!”

The song is torn between two different sets of gay clichés and just silly jokes about sitting on a prickly pear and animal gags. The pear/ bottom gags, one could possibly see as deferring any real gags about sodomy or sexual interest. Its all about a comic painful incident rather than any real suggestion of S&M. The frilly pink comical cowboy outfit is slightly at odds with all the fetish gear mentioned in this song, but that’s just one of those confusions which comedy writers in the 70s have difficulty coming to grips with. Predatory or pouffy?

-----------------

My name is Two Gun Pierre
I wear rose buds in my hair
And a chi-chi pink bandanna round my neck

I came down from Tennessee
With a cowboy on my knee
And a pair of leather chaps around my legs ... hold on boys!

I was down in Cripple Creek
I was dying for a leak
So I dropped my pants behind a cactus there

When I fastened up my belt
I can't tell ya how I felt
But I knew the meaning of a prickly pear ... ouch!!

Oh I've got a cactus in my y-fronts and a vulture round my head
I've just been kissed by a Tennessee miss and I wish that I were dead
I've a jockstrap made of leather and pants of PVC (ee - ee - ee - ee - ee - ee)
The cactus in my y-fronts make a loser out of me!

In Californ - i - a
Where the rustlers are so gay
I bought a gentle gee-gee name of Jacques

But he livened up a lot
When he felt my prickly spot
And that buckin' bronco broke my buckin' back!

So I walked up to Nevada
Where the gals try so much harder
And I met a beefy belle called Caroline

But when she felt my prickles
She cried "Oh Lord, that tickles!"
And now she's run off with a porcupine

Oh I've got a cactus in my y-fronts and a vulture round my head
I've just been kissed by a Tennessee miss and I wish that I were dead
Do you like my high heeled horseshoes, I got them from Paree (ee - ee - ee - ee - ee - ee)
The cactus in my y-fronts make a loser out of me!

Oh I've got a cactus in my y-fronts and a vulture round my head
I've just been kissed by a Tennessee miss and I wish that I were dead
I've got sequins on my saddle and I smell like a jasmine tree (ee - ee - ee - ee - ee - ee)
The cactus in my y-fronts make a loser out of me!

Well I'll be hornswaggled! What are you gonna be?!