Not Only Peter Cook, But Also Douglas Adams

Amazing to think that there are children growing up who are so young, they never even got to see Have I Got News For You when it was on BBC Two. All that they know is it being on BBC One, clips that were on YouTube months ago and jokes about Eric Pickles being fat*. Because that’s the first thing you’d leap to on a satirical news quiz and you’re tasked with lambasting Britain’s questionable alliance between two political parties who failed to win a General Election, isn’t it? ISN’T IT Oh, and probably Micky Flanagan guest hosting or something equally horrible.

It wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time there were enough comedic legends doing the rounds so that you’d occasionally get an absolutely killer pairing of guests jostling for position between Ian Hislop at his most scathing and Paul Merton at his very funniest (and of course the best host the programme has ever had, despite all The Unpleasantness).

Case in point: 11 December 1992. The guests: Peter Cook and Douglas Adams. PETER COOK and DOUGLAS ADAMS.

Okay, we’ll admit to wearing slightly rose-tinted ironic hipster glasses a bit, and are willing to recognise that your standard early 1990s HIGNFY episode would have someone like Tony Slattery or Jerry Mayes MP on it, AND you do get guests like Armando Iannucci cropping up on modern-era HIGNFY. But still. Peter Cook and Douglas Adams!

Shall we watch? Let’s watch.

At least until the YouTube link above these very words features the dread words “copyright claim” due to legal bastardry. It’s like The Man doesn’t want us to remember how good it could still be.

(*See, during THAT episode, it was Cyril Smith who was being made fun of for being fat. Ah, a different age.)

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Friend Of The Animal World

After we, erm, appropriated (okay, shamelessly nicked.) a cartoon of Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebilng from the website of top comedy mag Mustard yesterday, we got to reading their interview with Commander John Lloyd. In that interview, mention was made of the episode he co-wrote (along with Douglas Adams) of surreal Anglo-Dutch kids cartoon Dr Snuggles.

That very cartoon series is possibly one of our earliest telly-related memories, right up there with being scared when Kenny Everett burst through the Thames endcap, our parents being impressed that we could read Pages From Ceefax at such a young age (28 years old, we were, a-ha-ha-ha-ha), and not quite grasping why our BBC regional news was Midlands Today even though we lived in north Wales.

Now back to modern-day us, and we were already aware that Adams and Lloyd had scripted an episode of Yoop Visch’s animated opus, but never expected we’d ever get to see more than a grainy tenth-gen VHS clip of it on a clip show. It couldn’t be on YouTube, surely? At least not in full.

Oh, how wrong we were. Only in a good way for once, and not at all like the time we thought lemon-flavour Original Source shower gel might taste like the filling of lemon meringue pie.

In the episode, Snuggles MD (voiced by Peter Ustinov, no less) goes looking for a river. SPOILER: the river is hiding in a cave, having undergone an existential crisis. Nope, we’re not joking.

Part of what we think was ITV’s first ever children’s TV strand – the unnecessarily threateningly-titled “Watch It!” – this jostled for position amongst the likes of Vicky The Viking, On Safari and The Book Tower, yet it’s Snuggles which really seems to have stuck in our memory. Seeing the part of this episode where cube-shaped chunks of the ocean have been stolen, we realised we still recall several parts of this episode with slightly unsettling accuracy, despite being about four or five years old at the time. That might not seem much to you, but speaking as a television blog who can barely remember how to wear shoes without iPadding up a video tutorial app each morning, that’s quite remarkable.

Is it any good? Well, don’t go expecting anything to rival the majesty of Dangermouse, but it’s certainly a cut above the landfill Hanna-Barbara fare being spewed out of America around that time. So, worth watching? We’ll say so. But hey, judge for yourself:

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