Comedy Connections (2003) s05e08 Episode Script
Alas Smith and Jones
1 This programme contains some strong language.
Griff was fat in those days, which was marvellous.
But since he's got so skinny and looked so terribly dashing, I've gone off him, to be quite honest.
Bastard, bastard, bastard! We're quite different people in some ways but we had a similar sense of humour, which I'm sure helps in any marriage.
Have you been upset or something? I've been going through a very miserable and very expensive time.
What, you've renewed your Arsenal season ticket again? They were a modern double act and they weren't a Cannon and Ball double act.
They were a highly intelligent, cutting-edge double act that went into the mainstream.
We love to sit in a pile of poo I'd put them in the top 1,000 TV shows ever.
You've probably noticed there's been a rash of these programmes, these connections type of programmes recently.
The public love to see how their favourite comedy programmes were made by an incestuous in-crowd gladhanding each other up the greasy pole.
Thanks, Griff! And here's how they did it.
Over nearly 15 years and more than 70 episodes on BBC1, BBC2 and ITV, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys-Jones were a cornerstone of TV sketch comedy.
Thrown together in the groundbreaking Not The Nine O'Clock News, Mel and Griff emerged as a mainstream double act with a subversive edge, but each started out on a different career path.
Mel was a theatre director and Griff followed route one from Cambridge to BBC Radio.
Like Griff, fellow students and future Smith and Jones writers, Clive Anderson, Jimmy Mulville and Rory McGrath, knew what they'd gone to university for - to show off in the Cambridge Footlights Review.
I dream of entering her chamber dim Slipping naked into her bed And showing off's exactly what they did.
I met Griff in Cambridge at the Footlights, which is where all comedians go to meet each other for later TV series and radio work.
By contrast, Mel Smith - a salt of the earth-type son of a bookie - was not of the Cambridge university elite.
He went to Oxford.
I used to tit about in the Oxford Revue, which wasn't quite the same thing, and we regarded ourselves as third-rate in comparison to the Footlights.
Smith and Jones's first meeting was memorable.
Well, for Mel at least.
I remember we were doing a sort of Oxford and Cambridge drink thing and he was a really bizarre-looking geezer, actually.
He looked like a cross between Tommy Cooper and Donovan.
I think he thought he looked like Marc Bolan, but I'm telling you, it was Donovan.
But then we were thrown together really by Not The Nine O'Clock News.
Griff Rhys-Jones was plucked from the ranks of radio producers as back-up to the original Not The Nine O'Clock News cast of Rowan Atkinson, Pamela Stephenson, Chris Langham and Mel Smith, put together for BBC2 by producer John Lloyd in 1979.
Behind the scenes, Clive Anderson and Rory McGrath were part of a team delivering sketches that were a blast of fresh air in British comedy.
From Not The Nine O'Clock News, Smith and Jones were to develop a lasting bond with these writers, but most of all with each other.
They've suggested it was because they were overshadowed in Not The Nine O'Clock News by Rowan, who was this extraordinary comic genius, and Pamela Stephenson who, apart from anything else, was very female and very easy on the eye and they were in the shadows.
That drew them together.
American Express? That'll do nicely, sir.
And would you like to rub my tits too? What used to happen is Mel and I used to sit in the corner together of a studio watching watching the extraordinary fuss that was made over Pamela.
And we found that we liked writing together and we liked performing together and made each other laugh and so we became a unit all of our own.
Very different characters, physically and personally very different.
And Mel, a big sort of Dickens How would you put it? A sort of avuncular, rotund, cuddly, chuckly figure and Griff rather more sort of a paranoid, neurotic, gibbering idiot.
So Not The Nine O'Clock News finished rather precipitately.
And it was an odd thing for me, cos I was sort of like a professional.
I'd been in this machine, the comedy machine, for some time.
When Not The Nine O'Clock News was finished, we kind of clutched onto one another for warmth and decided really that if we were gonna have any further career in the business, we'd better try doing it together, at least to begin with.
Mel and Griff's work in Not The Nine O'Clock News was enough for Head of Light Entertainment John Howard Davies to feature them in The Funny Side Of Christmas, a one-off special in 1982.
The seed of Alas Smith And Jones was sown in a show celebrating the best of British comedy.
It would be pompous of me to say that I had anything to do with their partnership.
All I did was realise it was happening and take advantage of it.
Merry Boxing Day to you! It was pretty evident that they could go further, but it wasn't until they did a little sketch at the Christmas show that I decided to commission a pilot.
John Howard Davies and John Lloyd and everybody sort of said, "Look, why don't you carry on and do your own thing? "You're forming a very good partnership.
" And so we just thought, "Why not?" CRAZED MOANING Who the hell are you? what are you doing in my surgery? Dr Jekyll, I'm worried about the prescription you've been giving me.
Despite rough edges, the pilot was thought strong enough to go to series.
Fresh from working on Blackadder, director Martin Shardlow was brought in to help shape the new show.
I think because it was being approached as a sort of two-man comedy duo, which although it was, it didn't really work that way.
It needed a different format and that was the big problem, coming up with a different format for it.
We didn't really have much in the way of a very specific plan.
It was gonna be a sketch show, it was gonna be things that made us laugh, sometimes wacky, sometimes a bit more extended than our Nine O'Clock News stuff.
Alas Smith And Jones made its BBC2 debut in January 1984 and introduced a new variation on Morecambe and Wise.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Hang on! Somebody up there shouted, "Come on, Watford!" There was an intro and stuff if you wanted to get the show moving.
Then there was stuff which we called stool stuff, which was just the two of us sitting there as ourselves with me essentially playing, erm usually a slightly, erm haughty, neurotic type, as it were, and Mel playing a much more down to earth, sort of arse-scratching, sort of straightforward football-watching bloke.
There's nothing to be ashamed about in being working class.
I am NOT ashamed.
Right, OK.
I am just not working class.
All right, OK, fine.
Fine.
All right.
Right.
You LOOK working class.
People knew Mel and Griff from Not The Nine O'Clock News and they were likeable characters in their own right.
The fact that they'd got together to do a show I think interested the audience and once they'd seen them doing things that were slightly different and working together as well at the openings and closings, it was a format that they liked.
You look a bit, you know, coarse at the edges.
I mean, in the nicest possible way.
You look a bit Neanderthal.
Piss off! They had a sort of great relationship because they got on, on screen and off screen, so they were easy to write for in a way because on Smith and Jones, you did sketches in which they played themselves or sort of a refined form of themselves.
This is very working-class behaviour Aaaah! Like Rory, many of the show's writers knew Mel and Griff well, having followed them from university by way of BBC Radio and Not The Nine O'Clock News to gather again at Alas Smith and Jones.
The script meetings were usually Griff and Mel at one end of the big, long table and all the keen writers down the sides and me and Clive and Jimmy, the naughty boys who'd known Mel and Griff for a long time, at the back sort of sniggering and throwing paper darts and, erm, getting our hipflasks out.
The way we worked was very similar to the way we worked on Not The Nine O'Clock News.
We'd gather together a mass of script, find what we found was funny or we thought were amusing ideas which we wanted to develop.
Very rarely do scripts - especially in the freelance world - appear in pristine, brilliant form.
We just basically would play around with it during the course of the week, knock it about and hopefully come up with even better lines and just sort of it give it a rhythm, a shape that felt as natural as possible.
Mel was always the one that was laid-back, puffing on the cigar, flicking through, going, "Ha ha! Ha ha!" So you knew, you know, that was in.
Griff would be the other end, going, "Nope," over the shoulder.
"What's this? Nope.
" Griff would jump to his feet and pace up and down and the notes he'd be giving about this sketch, he'd say, "It needs to go "It needs to go bonkity-bonkity-bonk!" You'd think, "Well, I know what you mean in terms of the rhythm, "but what the What is 'bonkity-bonkity-bonk'?" We had to supply what bonkity-bonkity-bonk was.
I'm a bit of an angling freak, you know? Last week, I broke the British pollack record.
Caught an absolute beauty off Newhaven.
So I thought, "I'll have a pair of pollacks tattooed on my back.
" Not content to star in the show, Griff wanted to write it too.
Pollacks 'I wrote massive chunks of it myself,' but I always followed the system.
I was rather scared of trying to force my writing, I never felt myself as being much of a comedy writer so I was trying to introduce it, Gerald Wiley-like, into the pile without sort of necessarily drawing When people read it, they'd look up and see me looking very tense in the corner, chewing and looking at them.
It was helped by the fact that it had Griff Rhys-Jones written all over the top of it but I always hoped that they'd take an objective view of these sketches and include them if they were funny and not if they weren't.
He did initiate a hell of a lot of the sketches and that would form a discussion and if somebody was particularly keen or if somebody input a lot into the discussion, they'd say, "Why don't I do that? That's an area I'd like to do.
" And then you'd write it up and give it to Griff and Griff would fuck it up! No, Griff would change it and improve it, make it funny even though it was already and it would go out.
Griff would be at the coalface all day and working with the writers and Mel would sweep in and say, "How is everybody? Hello, everybody.
"Fantastic, this is all great stuff.
Lunch?" And we'd all love him.
We'd all go, "Yeah!" There were some new some faces at those lunches too.
Robin Driscoll and his Cliff Hanger Theatre group had made a big impression on Mel Smith.
As a result, the writers' surreal sketches regularly made it onto the show.
And Robin did too in the guise of the tongue-tied boxer.
Frankie! Stuff the Frankie! The thing that always interested me the most in comedy was the visual and the odd, you know, the slightly surreal and those were the ones that I managed to sneak through.
The one that comes to mind would be the boxer.
"With all that and everything else and everything that goes with it and everything" I thought it was a fantastic sketch.
.
.
with the bastard ton upfront like that and everything else that goes with it and all that stuff and that and all that and that and that and that.
He's just mouth and everything like that, innit, and everything like that which goes with it and that.
That was a very funny script to look at when it arrived on the desk, I can tell you.
"What the hell's this?" He'd look at the page and it was like, "Erm Er Innit Umph Er" And he was like, "What's this? What is this?" He's like If Sort of like When Like It happens some times sort of thing.
Yeah, right, right.
Bless 'em, they really worked hard and right up until the recording of that, Griff was unsure and it wasn't until there was an audience that actually laughed at it that Griff got it and he did a great performance on that one.
So what with a ton upfront and everything like that and so what and you know, eh? He's got a point, he's got a point.
It's worth Cos like I mean, sometimes you .
.
sort of f-f-f-fish in the sea sort of thing.
Right, fish, yeah, yeah.
Maybe Once the surreal boxer sketch got past the Smith and Jones quality control, the writers knew they could try just about anything.
There was a feeling of liberation because basically we knew that Griff and Mel would play any part.
They'd play a Dalek, a US president, a tea leaf, they were happy to play if the sketch was funny.
Unusually for a comedy double act, there was no straight man.
Both were keen to act the fool.
But when the chance came to wear a frock, there was only one man for the job.
Keep quiet about it.
The great thing about Griff was that, for us as writers, was how do you get Griff interested in an idea? Dress him up.
Give him a funny hat, a funny costume, dress him up in bondage and you knew it'd get passed.
It wasn't gonna go, "Nope.
Ah, bondage" Ladies and gentlemen, slight awkwardness tonight.
Griff, for some reason, hasn't actually turned up.
I don't quite know Oh, he's here.
He's here.
Griff's always been very game about this kind of thing.
There is something of the pantomime dame about Griff and his willingness to put a dress on, I was always very impressed by it.
He never thought twice, you know.
At the beginning of theweek, if we'd said, "We're gonna do Meatloaf," I would have played him.
"Who's playing Cher?" 'And Griff said, "Yep, yep, no problem.
" 'In fact, he was a little too keen, to be quite honest, I think!' I'm gonna make it last Till when? Till about ten past Gonna make you squeal Gonna make you scream Some said Mel's roles were easily definable, Mel being one of them.
Cos I'm a lovin' machine If you know what I mean We looked very carefully throughout the whole series.
I think there's about three characters I do and then I do these three characters with or without glasses so that's six characters I've got and with or without moustache is nine, so in fact I've got quite a range of characters I can play.
Praise be the Lord.
How's the vow of silence, Monsignor? Give us a song.
In 1981, Mel and Griff had founded a company, TalkBack, and created a highly distinctive brand of radio commercials - just two blokes chatting.
For Alas Smith and Jones, they took from Not The Nine O'Clock News the pattern of comedy sketches, studio discussion and song-and-dance routines.
But it was their TalkBack radio adverts that inspired the famous head-to-heads.
I think it was Griff's idea but he was quite right.
We wanted to try and find a way of taking this very simple form, which had worked great for us on radio, radio commercials, where we were just sort of quite loose and you'd have a bit of script and you'd play around with it and it'd feel very, very natural.
And we both realised we wanted to get that element into the programme and I think Griff just said, "Why don't we do exactly what it is, "which is just sit there and do it like we do when we're in a studio?" The very first episode of Alas Smith and Jones took the issue of sperm donation, tackled it head on and a format was born.
I go down there quite often, actually.
Do you? Oh yeah, to the artificial inseminatary.
The sperm bank, yeah.
The idea was these two guys were in cubicles next to each other having this conversation, in the cubicles trying to produce the sample of sperm, erm, by wanking, just in case you weren't familiar with that process.
Griff said, "Get rid of the set, let's just deconstruct the whole thing.
" We took the idea of the radio commercials and simply took the microphone that was hanging in between us and raised the microphone out of the way and sat there and did the head-to-head like that.
I found myself writing almost exclusively the head-to-head, I was head head-to-head writer in the first few series.
I mean, there's a lot of women in the world.
Yeah.
And a lot of them, for various reasons, they can't get pregnant.
No.
Cos their husbands haven't got it in them, see? What, not at all? Well, not as much as I have.
No.
It's a dumb and dumber sort of format.
It's the stupid man talking to an even more stupid friend and the stupid one has got pretensions or ideas above his station and the other one by being even more stupid sort of pricks the pomposity.
You know that new lavatory I had installed? Oh yeah.
Yeah, I've had to send it back.
Yeah, why's that? It had a chip in it.
Oh.
You could have flushed that away, I'd have thought.
I think some of our best acting, our best performances, are in that, because we spent a lot of time working our way through that and then retaining - which is great, which Mel was always very good with - a sense of improvisation because you never knew where the audience would take you.
There was quite a lot of pressure on me.
I don't want to overdo it, I'm hardly suggesting that we were brave, the very idea of brave, very brave, not really.
But it was quite tense making because you knew that you had to get to the end and you knew that somehow you had to hold it together between you.
I'm having this terrible recurring nightmare.
What is it? LAUGHTER It's a dream what comes over and over again.
I know that.
Obviously, I know that.
Five million BBC2 viewers regularly watched their relationship develop over the first few series, but what looked natural on screen was hardly stress-free off it.
'Griff was a great studier.
' He would have to go home at night and really, really learn and I was quite lucky that I had this very retentive memory and could get away without doing much special learning and more or less just do it.
Mel is extraordinary in as much as he never seems to learn any of the lines until 20 seconds before he appears in front of the camera, which is pretty disturbing.
Which made me, of course, feel infinitely superior to Griff and he would come in all tense and worried and I would swan in half an hour later on the Sunday and go, "Everything all right? How's it going?" He would go, "Ah Erm Ah" There were minor elements of Mel's behavioural patterns which sometimes I would find a little bit complicated and there were many, many in mine that he had to keep under control in his reactions to the various things.
Obviously it hasn't always been a bed of roses.
Ha ha ha, no, it hasn't, no.
Griff would say to me, "Tell Mel he'd better be at rehearsals at 10am tomorrow.
" Mel would say, "Tell Griff I've got something better to do "and I'll turn up at noon," and this was my role, to shuffle between the two and Griff at times would complain that he was like the little wife at home getting dinner ready, ie writing and preparing the scripts, and Mel would swan in and say, "Oh, the script's on the table.
" That was the nature of their relationship but always with good humour, and although they would moan a little bit about each other, they got on.
Wanted to see me, sir? Not especially.
I want results and I want results NOW.
Right-o, sir.
Arsenal 2 Chelsea 1.
Coventry 1 Everton 3.
Shut up.
PHONE RINGS By 1987, Alas Smith and Jones was a bona fide success with appreciative audiences and big ratings.
The BBC commissioners loved Mel and Griff and they loved the BBC back.
But something possessed them to cross the river to London Weekend Television and make their next series for the opposition.
We got approached by ITV, actually, who said that we could be the new face of Saturday night on ITV.
Quite a frightening prospect, I think, at that stage.
Good evening, welcome to this, the first programme in a new and very exciting series.
'Well, it was different.
I mean, it WAS different.
' It was like leaving home.
It was like going on tour.
You'd suddenly find yourself at LWT and it wasn't the same.
There wasn't the same kind of depth of back-up and I think also we were just used to working at the Beeb.
But The World According To was just one of several projects Mel and Griff had on the go.
While working on Alas Smith and Jones, they also co-wrote and starred in the sci-fi spoof Morons From Outer Space and in 1987, Griff was cast as Cornelius Carrington in Porterhouse Blue.
I'm told by those who know about these things you've made some name for yourself in the entertainment industry.
Not entertainment.
I consider myself a maker of opinion.
Meanwhile, Mel Smith starred in two series of the sitcom Colin's Sandwich.
In 1989, he resumed his directing career, this time in movies.
Written by Richard Curtis, The Tall Guy starred Jeff Goldblum and Emma Thompson and proved memorablefor Mel.
'When I told Emma and Jeff that I wanted them to get their kit off,' what I didn't say was, "As long as it seems appropriate for the art that we're doing.
" I said, "Basically, it's so we can do lots of funny stuff.
" And they said, "OK, that's fair enough.
As long as it IS funny, we don't mind.
" After The Tall Guy, Mel and Griff were eager to resume their partnership and returned to the warm embrace of the BBC.
By now, they'd recruited Peter Fincham, Griff's friend from Cambridge, to help run their production company TalkBack and gain more control of the programme-making progress.
In negotiations with the BBC for the new run of the sketch show, Smith, Jones and Fincham had a major change in mind.
I went in for a meeting with Mel and Griff with the controllers of BBC1 and BBC2 at the time, Jonathan Powell and Alan Yentob, and we were talking about the future of Smith and Jones and it was gonna change a bit, we were gonna drop the word Alas from the front of it and the conversation went on for a while and then Mel Smith said, "And of course we want to be on BBC1.
" Gareth Gwenlan, the head of comedy at the time who'd set up the meeting, was there and hadn't briefed Alan Yentob and Jonathan Powell that this was gonna be said so there was a sort of dreadful silence in the room and Alan Yentob looked a bit unhappy about this 'cause he was losing a big comedy double act and Jonathan sort of sprang to life and looked rather pleased.
From that moment on, Smith and Jones became a BBC1 rather than a BBC2 proposition.
Come here! Give us your money! Come on! Come on! Give us your money! Come on! Don't muck around, come on! Not enough.
Come on, and the jewellery, let's have it.
Now what d'you want? WHAT DO YOU WANT? Return to Crouch End.
Return to Crouch End.
We cracked in there with a slightly new format and nobody even noticed the changes! I spent every, every series sort of tearing my hair out, trying to basically play around with the way we did this show and sort of make new things and I don't think anybody even noticed the fact that we did.
Just a patchy at its best sort of reaction.
In actual fact, we always liked the idea of doing popular stuff with as many people as possible laughing.
So we thought, "We're gonna have a broader audience here and so let's allow for that.
" They were becoming more mainstream.
They were getting very good ratings.
They went up to about ten million plus.
Our vests are Jean-Paul Gaultier And our caps are Ralph Lauren We've got designer shoulder bags And I'm sorry but I haven't got a pen Could I use your phone? Doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo Doo-doo-doo We're basically crowd-pleasers.
We really are "anything for a laugh", as you can see from the programmes.
There's the odd bit with some intellectual content but fundamentally, it's make 'em laugh! CLANKING Angie? What? I've found the tortoise.
The Alas Smith and Jones show was a springboard for many successful writers.
Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin went on to write Drop The Dead Donkey and David Renwick created One Foot In The Grave.
Jimmy Mulville and Rory McGrath wrote and performed in Who Dares Wins, Chelmsford 123 and with Denise O'Donoghue, set up their own production company, Hat Trick.
Rory, however, still found time to write for Smith and Jones.
There was a time in about series 27 when he got fed up with me and Clive, I think.
We'd known him too long, we'd known him since the turn of the century, that's the 18th century of course, and I think he thought He once described me and Clive as a couple of smartarse wankers and that was one of the nicer things he said about us.
After a while, I was making my own programme so I don't know if I resigned or I was sacked.
Now we meet somebody who I've been dying to meet for a day or two.
Here he is, Griff Rhys Jones! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE But Clive and Griff made up in a way TV does best - as guests on each other's shows.
Clive moved on, he became too famous to turn up and write with us sofair enough! Hrrngh! By 1992, Smith and Jones was in its seventh series.
Some of the best writers in British comedy had contributed to the show, but they'd also moved on.
New talent was needed and it was discovered in Dublin.
We were watching Smith and Jones and we realised that there was a list of credits of writers that was very long and it suddenly occured to us, "They probably take scripts from loads of different people.
" That seemed to be the perfect show to send some unsolicited stuff and see if they liked any of it.
Jim Pullen was the script editor and he rang us up and said, "Yeah, Mel and Griff have seen this and liked it.
" Then we went in to meet them.
By this stage, we were getting very excited cos we thought, "Wow, this might be something.
" I think cos they were just excited cos we were unknown and from nowhere, we got straight in and invited to the top table.
Linehan and Matthews specialised in surreal sketches and many found their way into series seven.
Welcome then to Edmonton, Canada for highlights of today's events.
Derek Ridgely in the studio beside me.
Good evening.
Now we have Yves Montagu of Germany in the hammer throwing.
A very big drug user, Derek.
Yes, Yves really is drug crazy.
He's a big man with a big habit and here we go And into the bowl! The thing is at that time, the show wasn't that hip and Arthur and I, we thought we were hip young dudes so we kind of thought, "Well, you know, we'll write them some stuff "and we'll get them up to date and stuff," you know.
So we were probably a tiny bit arrogant about it, about our place.
We thought we were gonna save the show! HE SINGS OPERATICALLY Wank.
What's he saying there? Wank? Yes, it seems to be a wank.
Er, Gregorio? Si? You seem to be tagging on a wank there.
Could you try it again without the wank? I was not aware of it.
I think there's a wank there.
Nurtured by TalkBack, the Irish writers then created their masterpiece, but not for Mel and Griff's company.
Father Ted was made for Hat Trick, the company set up by Jimmy Mulville and Rory McGrath, now TalkBack's rival.
How did that one get away? Peter Fincham, who's now the controller of BBC1, who was our partner, I remember we had a couple of ideas from them and he said, "I've passed on one, but I think we've got the best one.
" The one he passed on was Father Ted.
I was talking to Mel one day and I said, "We've done these two sitcoms.
"One's with Hat Trick and one's with TalkBack.
" And I described them both and he said, "I'm glad we're getting the racing driving one!" It's a beautiful day out.
Me arse! Would you like it on manual or automatic, Father? Automatic.
It's a nice day, might as well take it easy.
Fair enough! Hat Trick may have landed Father Ted, but Linehan and Matthews paid their dues, delivering Big Train, a bit hit for TalkBack in 1998.
Other Smith and Jones writers also had big success.
Robin Driscoll co-wrote Bean - The Ultimate Disaster Movie, directed by Mel Smith and Rory McGrath found his niche in many series of TalkBack's They Think It's All Over.
Mel and Griff had been well served by their writing proteges, as they recognise.
We worked with some fantastic writers and I can't say enough about them, really.
Bastards! I can think of a number of people who owe their careers to me.
If only I'd been nicer to them about it, maybe they'd still employ me! I think Griff feels that writers come along and they train them and then it's just like they've done some work experience thing and then they leave and do their own thing.
I always to people that writing for Smith and Jones was like going to comedy college for a year.
There's a bit of you that's like Mum and Dad watching them totter out into the world for the first time.
There is a bit of that.
You think, "Aw, bless! "I'm sure they'll do well, but now they must leave us.
" Smith and Jones ran throughout the '90s on BBC1 with a new series broadcast every other year.
By this time, they were in competition with newer sketch shows and sitcoms, many of them made by TalkBack.
In 1991, Mel and Griff had been named the top entertainers at the British Comedy Awards, but by 1998, after 15 years at the top, there was a question mark over the show's future.
Ah, hello, darling! I don't think there is a natural end to a sketch show series.
There's no narrative so it could go on forever.
The characters don't die off or anything.
At the end of the series, we're being handed sketches where I'd say, "Well, actually, we've done this.
" The producer says, "It always feels to you, Griff, you're always saying, 'We've done this'.
" No, no, we have DONE this sketch.
Somebody has written it down.
Maybe it's been told to them but this is MY sketch from ten years ago re-written and sent back into us.
I think that Peter Salmon felt the series had been there long enough, it was time to rest it.
A very, very difficult thing to say and do, the most difficult thing to do in comedy.
It's as if you're saying to these guys, "You're not funny any more," which isn't the case at all but the show probably had reached the end of its natural life.
TalkBack was sold in 2000 for Mel Smith continued to work in movies, directing Blackball and High Heels and Low Lifes.
Back on stage in 2006, he played Winston Churchill in Allegiance.
Griff Rhys Jones's comedy acting flourished in Mine All Mine before he reinvented himself as a presenter on BBC2's architectural show Restoration.
He was also messing about on the river with an old Cambridge chum in Three Men In A Boat, but it's as Smith and Jones that this unlikely duo made their mark on British comedy and they returned to BBC1 in 2006 to relect on past glories.
It made me very nostalgic for doing more, you know.
We always had a very good time working out material and doing it together.
TV PLAYS SPOOKY MUSIC It was a great time to be working because our sense of humour was getting the ratings.
When you found something funny and millions of others found it funny too, you felt on top of the world.
We absolutely owe them everything just because they gave us our break in the world of comedy.
Over a period of doing hundreds of shows, or however many shows, we can safely say we probably initiated every single form of comedy there has ever been subsequently, in the British except for the um The sort of Dom Joly type.
We didn't do any of that.
I'm quite proud to be in the tradition of what you might callpopular double acts.
That's certainly good enough for me.
CYMBAL CRASH Ladies and gentlemen - what can we say, you've been We've had probably the night of our lives up here tonight, which is rather depressing, when you think about it.
As the tears of laughter dry All the clowns have gone away As the curtain starts to fall Goodnight, God bless To one and all As the laughter turns to tears Half an hour can seem like years Here's a list of cast and crew Christ alone knows what they do That's it There'll be no funky bits After this bit This is the end of it This I the end, end, end!
Griff was fat in those days, which was marvellous.
But since he's got so skinny and looked so terribly dashing, I've gone off him, to be quite honest.
Bastard, bastard, bastard! We're quite different people in some ways but we had a similar sense of humour, which I'm sure helps in any marriage.
Have you been upset or something? I've been going through a very miserable and very expensive time.
What, you've renewed your Arsenal season ticket again? They were a modern double act and they weren't a Cannon and Ball double act.
They were a highly intelligent, cutting-edge double act that went into the mainstream.
We love to sit in a pile of poo I'd put them in the top 1,000 TV shows ever.
You've probably noticed there's been a rash of these programmes, these connections type of programmes recently.
The public love to see how their favourite comedy programmes were made by an incestuous in-crowd gladhanding each other up the greasy pole.
Thanks, Griff! And here's how they did it.
Over nearly 15 years and more than 70 episodes on BBC1, BBC2 and ITV, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys-Jones were a cornerstone of TV sketch comedy.
Thrown together in the groundbreaking Not The Nine O'Clock News, Mel and Griff emerged as a mainstream double act with a subversive edge, but each started out on a different career path.
Mel was a theatre director and Griff followed route one from Cambridge to BBC Radio.
Like Griff, fellow students and future Smith and Jones writers, Clive Anderson, Jimmy Mulville and Rory McGrath, knew what they'd gone to university for - to show off in the Cambridge Footlights Review.
I dream of entering her chamber dim Slipping naked into her bed And showing off's exactly what they did.
I met Griff in Cambridge at the Footlights, which is where all comedians go to meet each other for later TV series and radio work.
By contrast, Mel Smith - a salt of the earth-type son of a bookie - was not of the Cambridge university elite.
He went to Oxford.
I used to tit about in the Oxford Revue, which wasn't quite the same thing, and we regarded ourselves as third-rate in comparison to the Footlights.
Smith and Jones's first meeting was memorable.
Well, for Mel at least.
I remember we were doing a sort of Oxford and Cambridge drink thing and he was a really bizarre-looking geezer, actually.
He looked like a cross between Tommy Cooper and Donovan.
I think he thought he looked like Marc Bolan, but I'm telling you, it was Donovan.
But then we were thrown together really by Not The Nine O'Clock News.
Griff Rhys-Jones was plucked from the ranks of radio producers as back-up to the original Not The Nine O'Clock News cast of Rowan Atkinson, Pamela Stephenson, Chris Langham and Mel Smith, put together for BBC2 by producer John Lloyd in 1979.
Behind the scenes, Clive Anderson and Rory McGrath were part of a team delivering sketches that were a blast of fresh air in British comedy.
From Not The Nine O'Clock News, Smith and Jones were to develop a lasting bond with these writers, but most of all with each other.
They've suggested it was because they were overshadowed in Not The Nine O'Clock News by Rowan, who was this extraordinary comic genius, and Pamela Stephenson who, apart from anything else, was very female and very easy on the eye and they were in the shadows.
That drew them together.
American Express? That'll do nicely, sir.
And would you like to rub my tits too? What used to happen is Mel and I used to sit in the corner together of a studio watching watching the extraordinary fuss that was made over Pamela.
And we found that we liked writing together and we liked performing together and made each other laugh and so we became a unit all of our own.
Very different characters, physically and personally very different.
And Mel, a big sort of Dickens How would you put it? A sort of avuncular, rotund, cuddly, chuckly figure and Griff rather more sort of a paranoid, neurotic, gibbering idiot.
So Not The Nine O'Clock News finished rather precipitately.
And it was an odd thing for me, cos I was sort of like a professional.
I'd been in this machine, the comedy machine, for some time.
When Not The Nine O'Clock News was finished, we kind of clutched onto one another for warmth and decided really that if we were gonna have any further career in the business, we'd better try doing it together, at least to begin with.
Mel and Griff's work in Not The Nine O'Clock News was enough for Head of Light Entertainment John Howard Davies to feature them in The Funny Side Of Christmas, a one-off special in 1982.
The seed of Alas Smith And Jones was sown in a show celebrating the best of British comedy.
It would be pompous of me to say that I had anything to do with their partnership.
All I did was realise it was happening and take advantage of it.
Merry Boxing Day to you! It was pretty evident that they could go further, but it wasn't until they did a little sketch at the Christmas show that I decided to commission a pilot.
John Howard Davies and John Lloyd and everybody sort of said, "Look, why don't you carry on and do your own thing? "You're forming a very good partnership.
" And so we just thought, "Why not?" CRAZED MOANING Who the hell are you? what are you doing in my surgery? Dr Jekyll, I'm worried about the prescription you've been giving me.
Despite rough edges, the pilot was thought strong enough to go to series.
Fresh from working on Blackadder, director Martin Shardlow was brought in to help shape the new show.
I think because it was being approached as a sort of two-man comedy duo, which although it was, it didn't really work that way.
It needed a different format and that was the big problem, coming up with a different format for it.
We didn't really have much in the way of a very specific plan.
It was gonna be a sketch show, it was gonna be things that made us laugh, sometimes wacky, sometimes a bit more extended than our Nine O'Clock News stuff.
Alas Smith And Jones made its BBC2 debut in January 1984 and introduced a new variation on Morecambe and Wise.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Hang on! Somebody up there shouted, "Come on, Watford!" There was an intro and stuff if you wanted to get the show moving.
Then there was stuff which we called stool stuff, which was just the two of us sitting there as ourselves with me essentially playing, erm usually a slightly, erm haughty, neurotic type, as it were, and Mel playing a much more down to earth, sort of arse-scratching, sort of straightforward football-watching bloke.
There's nothing to be ashamed about in being working class.
I am NOT ashamed.
Right, OK.
I am just not working class.
All right, OK, fine.
Fine.
All right.
Right.
You LOOK working class.
People knew Mel and Griff from Not The Nine O'Clock News and they were likeable characters in their own right.
The fact that they'd got together to do a show I think interested the audience and once they'd seen them doing things that were slightly different and working together as well at the openings and closings, it was a format that they liked.
You look a bit, you know, coarse at the edges.
I mean, in the nicest possible way.
You look a bit Neanderthal.
Piss off! They had a sort of great relationship because they got on, on screen and off screen, so they were easy to write for in a way because on Smith and Jones, you did sketches in which they played themselves or sort of a refined form of themselves.
This is very working-class behaviour Aaaah! Like Rory, many of the show's writers knew Mel and Griff well, having followed them from university by way of BBC Radio and Not The Nine O'Clock News to gather again at Alas Smith and Jones.
The script meetings were usually Griff and Mel at one end of the big, long table and all the keen writers down the sides and me and Clive and Jimmy, the naughty boys who'd known Mel and Griff for a long time, at the back sort of sniggering and throwing paper darts and, erm, getting our hipflasks out.
The way we worked was very similar to the way we worked on Not The Nine O'Clock News.
We'd gather together a mass of script, find what we found was funny or we thought were amusing ideas which we wanted to develop.
Very rarely do scripts - especially in the freelance world - appear in pristine, brilliant form.
We just basically would play around with it during the course of the week, knock it about and hopefully come up with even better lines and just sort of it give it a rhythm, a shape that felt as natural as possible.
Mel was always the one that was laid-back, puffing on the cigar, flicking through, going, "Ha ha! Ha ha!" So you knew, you know, that was in.
Griff would be the other end, going, "Nope," over the shoulder.
"What's this? Nope.
" Griff would jump to his feet and pace up and down and the notes he'd be giving about this sketch, he'd say, "It needs to go "It needs to go bonkity-bonkity-bonk!" You'd think, "Well, I know what you mean in terms of the rhythm, "but what the What is 'bonkity-bonkity-bonk'?" We had to supply what bonkity-bonkity-bonk was.
I'm a bit of an angling freak, you know? Last week, I broke the British pollack record.
Caught an absolute beauty off Newhaven.
So I thought, "I'll have a pair of pollacks tattooed on my back.
" Not content to star in the show, Griff wanted to write it too.
Pollacks 'I wrote massive chunks of it myself,' but I always followed the system.
I was rather scared of trying to force my writing, I never felt myself as being much of a comedy writer so I was trying to introduce it, Gerald Wiley-like, into the pile without sort of necessarily drawing When people read it, they'd look up and see me looking very tense in the corner, chewing and looking at them.
It was helped by the fact that it had Griff Rhys-Jones written all over the top of it but I always hoped that they'd take an objective view of these sketches and include them if they were funny and not if they weren't.
He did initiate a hell of a lot of the sketches and that would form a discussion and if somebody was particularly keen or if somebody input a lot into the discussion, they'd say, "Why don't I do that? That's an area I'd like to do.
" And then you'd write it up and give it to Griff and Griff would fuck it up! No, Griff would change it and improve it, make it funny even though it was already and it would go out.
Griff would be at the coalface all day and working with the writers and Mel would sweep in and say, "How is everybody? Hello, everybody.
"Fantastic, this is all great stuff.
Lunch?" And we'd all love him.
We'd all go, "Yeah!" There were some new some faces at those lunches too.
Robin Driscoll and his Cliff Hanger Theatre group had made a big impression on Mel Smith.
As a result, the writers' surreal sketches regularly made it onto the show.
And Robin did too in the guise of the tongue-tied boxer.
Frankie! Stuff the Frankie! The thing that always interested me the most in comedy was the visual and the odd, you know, the slightly surreal and those were the ones that I managed to sneak through.
The one that comes to mind would be the boxer.
"With all that and everything else and everything that goes with it and everything" I thought it was a fantastic sketch.
.
.
with the bastard ton upfront like that and everything else that goes with it and all that stuff and that and all that and that and that and that.
He's just mouth and everything like that, innit, and everything like that which goes with it and that.
That was a very funny script to look at when it arrived on the desk, I can tell you.
"What the hell's this?" He'd look at the page and it was like, "Erm Er Innit Umph Er" And he was like, "What's this? What is this?" He's like If Sort of like When Like It happens some times sort of thing.
Yeah, right, right.
Bless 'em, they really worked hard and right up until the recording of that, Griff was unsure and it wasn't until there was an audience that actually laughed at it that Griff got it and he did a great performance on that one.
So what with a ton upfront and everything like that and so what and you know, eh? He's got a point, he's got a point.
It's worth Cos like I mean, sometimes you .
.
sort of f-f-f-fish in the sea sort of thing.
Right, fish, yeah, yeah.
Maybe Once the surreal boxer sketch got past the Smith and Jones quality control, the writers knew they could try just about anything.
There was a feeling of liberation because basically we knew that Griff and Mel would play any part.
They'd play a Dalek, a US president, a tea leaf, they were happy to play if the sketch was funny.
Unusually for a comedy double act, there was no straight man.
Both were keen to act the fool.
But when the chance came to wear a frock, there was only one man for the job.
Keep quiet about it.
The great thing about Griff was that, for us as writers, was how do you get Griff interested in an idea? Dress him up.
Give him a funny hat, a funny costume, dress him up in bondage and you knew it'd get passed.
It wasn't gonna go, "Nope.
Ah, bondage" Ladies and gentlemen, slight awkwardness tonight.
Griff, for some reason, hasn't actually turned up.
I don't quite know Oh, he's here.
He's here.
Griff's always been very game about this kind of thing.
There is something of the pantomime dame about Griff and his willingness to put a dress on, I was always very impressed by it.
He never thought twice, you know.
At the beginning of theweek, if we'd said, "We're gonna do Meatloaf," I would have played him.
"Who's playing Cher?" 'And Griff said, "Yep, yep, no problem.
" 'In fact, he was a little too keen, to be quite honest, I think!' I'm gonna make it last Till when? Till about ten past Gonna make you squeal Gonna make you scream Some said Mel's roles were easily definable, Mel being one of them.
Cos I'm a lovin' machine If you know what I mean We looked very carefully throughout the whole series.
I think there's about three characters I do and then I do these three characters with or without glasses so that's six characters I've got and with or without moustache is nine, so in fact I've got quite a range of characters I can play.
Praise be the Lord.
How's the vow of silence, Monsignor? Give us a song.
In 1981, Mel and Griff had founded a company, TalkBack, and created a highly distinctive brand of radio commercials - just two blokes chatting.
For Alas Smith and Jones, they took from Not The Nine O'Clock News the pattern of comedy sketches, studio discussion and song-and-dance routines.
But it was their TalkBack radio adverts that inspired the famous head-to-heads.
I think it was Griff's idea but he was quite right.
We wanted to try and find a way of taking this very simple form, which had worked great for us on radio, radio commercials, where we were just sort of quite loose and you'd have a bit of script and you'd play around with it and it'd feel very, very natural.
And we both realised we wanted to get that element into the programme and I think Griff just said, "Why don't we do exactly what it is, "which is just sit there and do it like we do when we're in a studio?" The very first episode of Alas Smith and Jones took the issue of sperm donation, tackled it head on and a format was born.
I go down there quite often, actually.
Do you? Oh yeah, to the artificial inseminatary.
The sperm bank, yeah.
The idea was these two guys were in cubicles next to each other having this conversation, in the cubicles trying to produce the sample of sperm, erm, by wanking, just in case you weren't familiar with that process.
Griff said, "Get rid of the set, let's just deconstruct the whole thing.
" We took the idea of the radio commercials and simply took the microphone that was hanging in between us and raised the microphone out of the way and sat there and did the head-to-head like that.
I found myself writing almost exclusively the head-to-head, I was head head-to-head writer in the first few series.
I mean, there's a lot of women in the world.
Yeah.
And a lot of them, for various reasons, they can't get pregnant.
No.
Cos their husbands haven't got it in them, see? What, not at all? Well, not as much as I have.
No.
It's a dumb and dumber sort of format.
It's the stupid man talking to an even more stupid friend and the stupid one has got pretensions or ideas above his station and the other one by being even more stupid sort of pricks the pomposity.
You know that new lavatory I had installed? Oh yeah.
Yeah, I've had to send it back.
Yeah, why's that? It had a chip in it.
Oh.
You could have flushed that away, I'd have thought.
I think some of our best acting, our best performances, are in that, because we spent a lot of time working our way through that and then retaining - which is great, which Mel was always very good with - a sense of improvisation because you never knew where the audience would take you.
There was quite a lot of pressure on me.
I don't want to overdo it, I'm hardly suggesting that we were brave, the very idea of brave, very brave, not really.
But it was quite tense making because you knew that you had to get to the end and you knew that somehow you had to hold it together between you.
I'm having this terrible recurring nightmare.
What is it? LAUGHTER It's a dream what comes over and over again.
I know that.
Obviously, I know that.
Five million BBC2 viewers regularly watched their relationship develop over the first few series, but what looked natural on screen was hardly stress-free off it.
'Griff was a great studier.
' He would have to go home at night and really, really learn and I was quite lucky that I had this very retentive memory and could get away without doing much special learning and more or less just do it.
Mel is extraordinary in as much as he never seems to learn any of the lines until 20 seconds before he appears in front of the camera, which is pretty disturbing.
Which made me, of course, feel infinitely superior to Griff and he would come in all tense and worried and I would swan in half an hour later on the Sunday and go, "Everything all right? How's it going?" He would go, "Ah Erm Ah" There were minor elements of Mel's behavioural patterns which sometimes I would find a little bit complicated and there were many, many in mine that he had to keep under control in his reactions to the various things.
Obviously it hasn't always been a bed of roses.
Ha ha ha, no, it hasn't, no.
Griff would say to me, "Tell Mel he'd better be at rehearsals at 10am tomorrow.
" Mel would say, "Tell Griff I've got something better to do "and I'll turn up at noon," and this was my role, to shuffle between the two and Griff at times would complain that he was like the little wife at home getting dinner ready, ie writing and preparing the scripts, and Mel would swan in and say, "Oh, the script's on the table.
" That was the nature of their relationship but always with good humour, and although they would moan a little bit about each other, they got on.
Wanted to see me, sir? Not especially.
I want results and I want results NOW.
Right-o, sir.
Arsenal 2 Chelsea 1.
Coventry 1 Everton 3.
Shut up.
PHONE RINGS By 1987, Alas Smith and Jones was a bona fide success with appreciative audiences and big ratings.
The BBC commissioners loved Mel and Griff and they loved the BBC back.
But something possessed them to cross the river to London Weekend Television and make their next series for the opposition.
We got approached by ITV, actually, who said that we could be the new face of Saturday night on ITV.
Quite a frightening prospect, I think, at that stage.
Good evening, welcome to this, the first programme in a new and very exciting series.
'Well, it was different.
I mean, it WAS different.
' It was like leaving home.
It was like going on tour.
You'd suddenly find yourself at LWT and it wasn't the same.
There wasn't the same kind of depth of back-up and I think also we were just used to working at the Beeb.
But The World According To was just one of several projects Mel and Griff had on the go.
While working on Alas Smith and Jones, they also co-wrote and starred in the sci-fi spoof Morons From Outer Space and in 1987, Griff was cast as Cornelius Carrington in Porterhouse Blue.
I'm told by those who know about these things you've made some name for yourself in the entertainment industry.
Not entertainment.
I consider myself a maker of opinion.
Meanwhile, Mel Smith starred in two series of the sitcom Colin's Sandwich.
In 1989, he resumed his directing career, this time in movies.
Written by Richard Curtis, The Tall Guy starred Jeff Goldblum and Emma Thompson and proved memorablefor Mel.
'When I told Emma and Jeff that I wanted them to get their kit off,' what I didn't say was, "As long as it seems appropriate for the art that we're doing.
" I said, "Basically, it's so we can do lots of funny stuff.
" And they said, "OK, that's fair enough.
As long as it IS funny, we don't mind.
" After The Tall Guy, Mel and Griff were eager to resume their partnership and returned to the warm embrace of the BBC.
By now, they'd recruited Peter Fincham, Griff's friend from Cambridge, to help run their production company TalkBack and gain more control of the programme-making progress.
In negotiations with the BBC for the new run of the sketch show, Smith, Jones and Fincham had a major change in mind.
I went in for a meeting with Mel and Griff with the controllers of BBC1 and BBC2 at the time, Jonathan Powell and Alan Yentob, and we were talking about the future of Smith and Jones and it was gonna change a bit, we were gonna drop the word Alas from the front of it and the conversation went on for a while and then Mel Smith said, "And of course we want to be on BBC1.
" Gareth Gwenlan, the head of comedy at the time who'd set up the meeting, was there and hadn't briefed Alan Yentob and Jonathan Powell that this was gonna be said so there was a sort of dreadful silence in the room and Alan Yentob looked a bit unhappy about this 'cause he was losing a big comedy double act and Jonathan sort of sprang to life and looked rather pleased.
From that moment on, Smith and Jones became a BBC1 rather than a BBC2 proposition.
Come here! Give us your money! Come on! Come on! Give us your money! Come on! Don't muck around, come on! Not enough.
Come on, and the jewellery, let's have it.
Now what d'you want? WHAT DO YOU WANT? Return to Crouch End.
Return to Crouch End.
We cracked in there with a slightly new format and nobody even noticed the changes! I spent every, every series sort of tearing my hair out, trying to basically play around with the way we did this show and sort of make new things and I don't think anybody even noticed the fact that we did.
Just a patchy at its best sort of reaction.
In actual fact, we always liked the idea of doing popular stuff with as many people as possible laughing.
So we thought, "We're gonna have a broader audience here and so let's allow for that.
" They were becoming more mainstream.
They were getting very good ratings.
They went up to about ten million plus.
Our vests are Jean-Paul Gaultier And our caps are Ralph Lauren We've got designer shoulder bags And I'm sorry but I haven't got a pen Could I use your phone? Doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo Doo-doo-doo We're basically crowd-pleasers.
We really are "anything for a laugh", as you can see from the programmes.
There's the odd bit with some intellectual content but fundamentally, it's make 'em laugh! CLANKING Angie? What? I've found the tortoise.
The Alas Smith and Jones show was a springboard for many successful writers.
Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin went on to write Drop The Dead Donkey and David Renwick created One Foot In The Grave.
Jimmy Mulville and Rory McGrath wrote and performed in Who Dares Wins, Chelmsford 123 and with Denise O'Donoghue, set up their own production company, Hat Trick.
Rory, however, still found time to write for Smith and Jones.
There was a time in about series 27 when he got fed up with me and Clive, I think.
We'd known him too long, we'd known him since the turn of the century, that's the 18th century of course, and I think he thought He once described me and Clive as a couple of smartarse wankers and that was one of the nicer things he said about us.
After a while, I was making my own programme so I don't know if I resigned or I was sacked.
Now we meet somebody who I've been dying to meet for a day or two.
Here he is, Griff Rhys Jones! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE But Clive and Griff made up in a way TV does best - as guests on each other's shows.
Clive moved on, he became too famous to turn up and write with us sofair enough! Hrrngh! By 1992, Smith and Jones was in its seventh series.
Some of the best writers in British comedy had contributed to the show, but they'd also moved on.
New talent was needed and it was discovered in Dublin.
We were watching Smith and Jones and we realised that there was a list of credits of writers that was very long and it suddenly occured to us, "They probably take scripts from loads of different people.
" That seemed to be the perfect show to send some unsolicited stuff and see if they liked any of it.
Jim Pullen was the script editor and he rang us up and said, "Yeah, Mel and Griff have seen this and liked it.
" Then we went in to meet them.
By this stage, we were getting very excited cos we thought, "Wow, this might be something.
" I think cos they were just excited cos we were unknown and from nowhere, we got straight in and invited to the top table.
Linehan and Matthews specialised in surreal sketches and many found their way into series seven.
Welcome then to Edmonton, Canada for highlights of today's events.
Derek Ridgely in the studio beside me.
Good evening.
Now we have Yves Montagu of Germany in the hammer throwing.
A very big drug user, Derek.
Yes, Yves really is drug crazy.
He's a big man with a big habit and here we go And into the bowl! The thing is at that time, the show wasn't that hip and Arthur and I, we thought we were hip young dudes so we kind of thought, "Well, you know, we'll write them some stuff "and we'll get them up to date and stuff," you know.
So we were probably a tiny bit arrogant about it, about our place.
We thought we were gonna save the show! HE SINGS OPERATICALLY Wank.
What's he saying there? Wank? Yes, it seems to be a wank.
Er, Gregorio? Si? You seem to be tagging on a wank there.
Could you try it again without the wank? I was not aware of it.
I think there's a wank there.
Nurtured by TalkBack, the Irish writers then created their masterpiece, but not for Mel and Griff's company.
Father Ted was made for Hat Trick, the company set up by Jimmy Mulville and Rory McGrath, now TalkBack's rival.
How did that one get away? Peter Fincham, who's now the controller of BBC1, who was our partner, I remember we had a couple of ideas from them and he said, "I've passed on one, but I think we've got the best one.
" The one he passed on was Father Ted.
I was talking to Mel one day and I said, "We've done these two sitcoms.
"One's with Hat Trick and one's with TalkBack.
" And I described them both and he said, "I'm glad we're getting the racing driving one!" It's a beautiful day out.
Me arse! Would you like it on manual or automatic, Father? Automatic.
It's a nice day, might as well take it easy.
Fair enough! Hat Trick may have landed Father Ted, but Linehan and Matthews paid their dues, delivering Big Train, a bit hit for TalkBack in 1998.
Other Smith and Jones writers also had big success.
Robin Driscoll co-wrote Bean - The Ultimate Disaster Movie, directed by Mel Smith and Rory McGrath found his niche in many series of TalkBack's They Think It's All Over.
Mel and Griff had been well served by their writing proteges, as they recognise.
We worked with some fantastic writers and I can't say enough about them, really.
Bastards! I can think of a number of people who owe their careers to me.
If only I'd been nicer to them about it, maybe they'd still employ me! I think Griff feels that writers come along and they train them and then it's just like they've done some work experience thing and then they leave and do their own thing.
I always to people that writing for Smith and Jones was like going to comedy college for a year.
There's a bit of you that's like Mum and Dad watching them totter out into the world for the first time.
There is a bit of that.
You think, "Aw, bless! "I'm sure they'll do well, but now they must leave us.
" Smith and Jones ran throughout the '90s on BBC1 with a new series broadcast every other year.
By this time, they were in competition with newer sketch shows and sitcoms, many of them made by TalkBack.
In 1991, Mel and Griff had been named the top entertainers at the British Comedy Awards, but by 1998, after 15 years at the top, there was a question mark over the show's future.
Ah, hello, darling! I don't think there is a natural end to a sketch show series.
There's no narrative so it could go on forever.
The characters don't die off or anything.
At the end of the series, we're being handed sketches where I'd say, "Well, actually, we've done this.
" The producer says, "It always feels to you, Griff, you're always saying, 'We've done this'.
" No, no, we have DONE this sketch.
Somebody has written it down.
Maybe it's been told to them but this is MY sketch from ten years ago re-written and sent back into us.
I think that Peter Salmon felt the series had been there long enough, it was time to rest it.
A very, very difficult thing to say and do, the most difficult thing to do in comedy.
It's as if you're saying to these guys, "You're not funny any more," which isn't the case at all but the show probably had reached the end of its natural life.
TalkBack was sold in 2000 for Mel Smith continued to work in movies, directing Blackball and High Heels and Low Lifes.
Back on stage in 2006, he played Winston Churchill in Allegiance.
Griff Rhys Jones's comedy acting flourished in Mine All Mine before he reinvented himself as a presenter on BBC2's architectural show Restoration.
He was also messing about on the river with an old Cambridge chum in Three Men In A Boat, but it's as Smith and Jones that this unlikely duo made their mark on British comedy and they returned to BBC1 in 2006 to relect on past glories.
It made me very nostalgic for doing more, you know.
We always had a very good time working out material and doing it together.
TV PLAYS SPOOKY MUSIC It was a great time to be working because our sense of humour was getting the ratings.
When you found something funny and millions of others found it funny too, you felt on top of the world.
We absolutely owe them everything just because they gave us our break in the world of comedy.
Over a period of doing hundreds of shows, or however many shows, we can safely say we probably initiated every single form of comedy there has ever been subsequently, in the British except for the um The sort of Dom Joly type.
We didn't do any of that.
I'm quite proud to be in the tradition of what you might callpopular double acts.
That's certainly good enough for me.
CYMBAL CRASH Ladies and gentlemen - what can we say, you've been We've had probably the night of our lives up here tonight, which is rather depressing, when you think about it.
As the tears of laughter dry All the clowns have gone away As the curtain starts to fall Goodnight, God bless To one and all As the laughter turns to tears Half an hour can seem like years Here's a list of cast and crew Christ alone knows what they do That's it There'll be no funky bits After this bit This is the end of it This I the end, end, end!