About The Goodies

In the wake of Bill Oddie’s death, there’s been much musing about how the show for which he’ll be best remembered, The Goodies, has generally been seen as less significant, less groundbreaking, less serious (if a comedy show can be serious) and above all less clever than Monty Python’s Flying Circus.For what it’s worth, I was always in the Goodies camp but that’s probably a question of chronology as I was just that tiny bit too young to appreciate the Pythons when they first appeared. Ecky Thump, though, might well have been crafted for seven-year-old me.Not that it was really a kids’ show. The Goodies came from the same Oxbridge smartarse stable as their Python rivals and were regularly breaking fourth walls and giving it a bit of the old metafiction. And not just on TV either. The above clip is from the Cor!! annual from 1974, where our heroes work out that they’re not going to die purely from the geography of the comic strip layout. Many, many years later I learned that this was…