Biography

MUSIC FOR PICTURES

Way back in the folds of time – well, about 15 years ago, ITV made the dubious move of serialising ‘Illkillya’, a £200 blockbuster Kung Fu Spoof set in the Peoples Republic of Yorkshire that I was partly responsible for .

Bingo! we thought, and then Bollocks! – We’d plastered it with commercial music. As a seasoned frontman of seminal 80s beat outfits like “The 3 Aviators”, “Scrambled Dregs” and “Diverse Oscillation”, I thought I might have the chops to write the entire score in a week.

Out came the trusty Atari, Cubase, and traditional instruments like The Casio Rapman

Since those salad days I’ve bought more gear (of a musical variety), gained lots more experience and written commercially in a huge variety of styles for shows on all the major UK broadcasters as well as overseas.

COMEDY

I fell foot-first into making comedy TV down a strange snicket – Being at school in 1986 was a dark and bleak place until Julian Butler, Bob Priestley and I were inexplicably allowed to use a ‘state of the art’ Ferguson Videostar VHS camcorder instead of doing PE. We then spent a couple of years worth of Wednesday afternoons mucking about, shouting and gurning at ourselves with anyone unfortunate enough to pass by.

This process was repeated, refined and regressed until the present, with a number of landmarks…

Illkillya

Still the world’s cheapest feature film, funded by that kindly British movie studio, the DHSS – Yorkshire’s finest Kung Fu movie was made for £200 and was serially broadcast on ITV. Starring Graham Duckworth as the hapless hero Ken Fury, it featured on lots of shows- including our infamous appearance on The Big Breakfast where Bob’s flatulence down a camera lens did little to endear us to Gaby Roslin.

- ‘Quite simply hilarious’ Loaded, June 95
- “SFX worthy of any St John’s ambulance training day” Deadline July 95
- ‘A Kung Fu Hungerford’ Mark little, The Big Breakfast Sept ‘97

Fatliners

Science failed, religion failed, philosophy failed.
Now it’s time for wrestling to come……..and HAVE A GO!!!!!!!!!!

This was to be our 1941 – Fatliners boasted a strictly amateur cast of >100, a convoluted time hopping epic about British Wrestling, a costume budget of £0 and Julian and my extended nervous breakdowns. After completing the shoot maverick filmmaker and distributor John Bentham* bravely ploughed money into the edit and we jetted off to Cannes and our luxury bed on a tiled floor.

The Fatliners Riviera marketing campaign was not helped by accidentally knocking a bookshelf on top of Barry Norman while dressed in cheap market Lycra leggings (an attempt at wrestling costumes- an impressed Andie McDowell delightedly referred to my costume as ‘Freudian’). We were also frogmarched by Troma people to explain to Lloyd Kaufman why our flyers were covering up their ‘Tromeo and Juliet’ promotions. Fatliners even got a proper distribution and was lauded because it could be found next to Father of the Bride in HMV.

*Incidentally John B was way in front of the pack on how filmmaking would be revolutionised by small cheap camcorders and the internet.

- ‘It’s bloody awful but it will make you laugh’ The Times ‘97
- ‘I haven’t seen Fatliners!’ Barry Norman

Focus North

We had made a cheap DV pilot for this show inspired by the exalted Calendar, Look North and other riveting local strands like Edit V. Like many in the region, we’d also seen Tom Adams in the DFS ads (Did you know he was actually considered for the part of Bond in the 60s?) and thought that we couldn’t find a better and funnier anchorman.

The completed pilot was randomly dispatched to Stevan Keane, who ran the 4Later strand at Channel 4, to our shock he commissioned a whole series, directly from us!

Even though the true horror of running a production company without any experience left us with some scarring, we actually delivered the shows. Some people even thought they were funny.

Classic storylines included Feral Animal Logistics at the Business Enterprise Awards, a county forbidden from using the toilet and the Dole Office Christmas Party.

- “viewers who stumbled on to this series were in for a treat” Mark Lewisohn, Radio Times Guide to Comedy

Banzai

The brainchild of Gary Monaghan, this was a blast, especially as most of the strand ideas were thought up while slaughtered at a pub round the corner from Radar TV’s Notting Hill office.

I’m Spazticus

Jamie O’Leary had this great idea of doing a kind of disabled Trigger Happy TV and got me in to Associate Produce on a ground breaking and warmly received Comedy Lab.

Best of British

Robert Popper of Look Around You and Robin Cooper infamy, commissioned this Comedy Lab while he was still at Channel 4. A kind of John Waters-ed up piss take of Superstars, one of the funniest bits for me is still Austin Oates’ mad Yorkshire VO……

Channel K

I spent 3 years working with Matt Tiller (who is ace) as Head of Development at the Manchester arm of Channel X, amongst other things I managed to get the improvised spoof phone quiz show ‘Swizz Call’ off the ground at C4 despite the public furore.

Youpigs

This is the production company that I’ve got going with Julian, we’re always writing and developing stuff but last year we got a little C4 pilot of the ground in the form of ‘Public Air’ . We also wrote and put together this didactic pilot for Henry Normal