"End of Part One" (1979) TV series 1979-1980

User Rating:

7.8/10   

Seasons:

1 | 2

Release Date:

15 April 1979 (UK)

Genre:

Comedy

Plot Keywords:

Sitcom

Awards:

2 nominations

Cast

Tony Aitken	...	Norman Straightman (14 episodes, 1979-1980)
Denise Coffey	...	Vera Straightman (14 episodes, 1979-1980)
Sue Holderness	...	Various characters / ... (14 episodes, 1979-1980)
Dudley Stevens	...	Various Characters / ... (13 episodes, 1979-1980)
Fred Harris	...	Various Characters / ... (12 episodes, 1979-1980)
David Simeon	...	Various Characters / ... (12 episodes, 1979-1980)

Runtime:

30 min (14 episodes)

Country:

UK

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Company:

London Weekend Television (LWT)

How to write a TV series, the Burkiss way

In 1979, a pair of precociously talented young comedy writers named Andrew Marshall and David Renwick joined forces to create a series for London Weekend Television that combined elements of sketch, parody and sitcom that would give the Goodies, Spike Milligan's Q series and even the already-legendary Monty Python a run for their money in terms of free-form surrealism, stream-of-consciousness lunacy, meddling with the conventions of televisual presentation and audience-baffling weirdness. In short, they set out to achieve on television what they had already achieved admirably with their BBC Radio Three series the Burkiss Way a few years earlier. The result? Fourteen episodes of memorably bizarre television that pretty much deconstructed the medium wholesale and spat on the pieces, broadcast between April 1979 and November 1980.

At this point, I'd like to be able to say that End of Part One was a runaway success that changed the world, left viewers unable to look at the goggle box in quite the same way ever again, exerted a heavy influence on literally every comedy series in history ever since and saved the whale, but it didn't quite happen that way. LWT executives, rather than doing the decent thing and giving the series a post-pub slot where its target audience could find it easily, tucked it away on a Sunday afternoon (the presence of Play School and, later, Chockablock regular Fred Harris, Jackanory veteran Tony Aitken and Do Not Adjust Your Set's Denise Coffey in the talented cast must have led some short-sighted programme planners to conclude that it was a children's series) where the programme ran for two memorable series before withering on the vine. Marshall and Renwick went on to clock up a string of notable credits between them, such as Whoops Apocalypse, Assaulted Nuts, There's A Lot Of It About, Alexei Sayle's Stuff, One Foot In the Grave, the Steam Video Company, If You See God Tell Him and, er, Jonathan Creek, as well as penning some excellent Two Ronnies sketches, but although those later projects may have had more spit and polish than End of Part One, hardly any of them captured the ramshackle who-gives-a-toss glee of that series. It's the joyous sound of two clearly talented writers larking about with an empathetic cast of try-anything performers in the environs of a television company that had yet to inflict the horrors of Game For A Laugh and Barrymore on the public and was still game for noble experimentation. (Indeed, LWT successfully poached the Goodies in 1981, only to similarly shaft the Cricklewood madmen by sticking their seven episodes in a Saturday teatime slot. Michael Grade pulled the plug when ratings failed to exceed expenditure. Boo!)