LOOK WHO'S BACK1
It redefined sketch comedy on TV, now The Fast Show is having a one-off revival featuring classic clips and new material...
They’d never get away with it now. And don’t they know it. The stars of The Fast Show, BBC2’s rapid-fire sketch show that replaced punchlines with a cascade of catchphrases, are getting back together to celebrate on the Gold channel.
And they’re doing it ‘in character’, with appearances from all the best-loved personalities in the show... such as the saucy menswear assistants, Ken and Kenneth (catchphrase: ‘Suit you, sir!’), dripping with innuendo.
‘You wouldn’t be able to say any of that now, sir,’ says Ken (Paul Whitehouse). ‘Long gone are the days when you could innocently ask a couple “whether it was carnal between the pair of you last night”!’
The original idea came when Whitehouse and co-star Charlie Higson saw a trailer for Harry Enfield’s Television Programme, which they’d helped write. Harry’s characters and catchphrases were instantly recognisable — as funny in a three-second glimpse as they were in a three-minute sketch.
But it wasn’t quite as simple as that. The real joy of the series — which ran from 1994 to 1997 with short-lived comebacks in 2000 and 2014 — was the way every catchphrase was re-used in different settings. Arabella Weir played a woman who constantly fretted about the size of her backside — an anxiety, she says, that began in childhood with her own mother’s catty remarks about her weight.
One week she was a stressed businesswoman pulled over for speeding in a company car, the next a nun in a black habit, but her worry was always the same: ‘Does my bum look big in this?’
John Thomson was TV jazz presenter Louis Balfour — based on two of Thomson’s favourite impressions, Bond actor Roger Moore and DJ ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris. Louis’s trademark was a sidelong look to camera with one drawled word, ‘Niiiice!’
With a prosthetic nose and a tweed jacket that seemed to be steaming with whisky, Whitehouse delighted in playing a drunken club bore named Rowley Birkin, who burbled in and out of coherence. After 25 years, Rowley looks no different, though his career has apparently boomed since we last saw him.
After the show’s main run ended, the cast took it on a wildly popular live tour. ‘The Fast Show Live was the first time I realised what pop stars must feel like,’ says Weir. ‘You just walked out as the character and they all started screaming the catchphrases.’
Now we’ve got the chance to scream them all over again.
n Christopher Stevens
The Fast Show: Just A Load Of Blooming Catchphrases, tonight, 10.40pm, Gold.