Characters and Production Techniques
The show featured extensive use of slapstick, often performed using sped-up photography and clever, though low-budget, visual effects, such as when they built a railway station together, and awoke the next morning to discover that the construction equipment outside (steam shovel, bulldozer, backhoe) had come to life, and were lumbering, growling, and battling like dinosaurs.
Other episodes featured parodies of contemporary pop music composed by Oddie, some of which went on to substantial commercial success in the British charts, among them the hit single "Funky Gibbon" as well as character-based comedy. Some early episodes were interrupted by spoofs of contemporary TV commercials.
The group also acknowledges their debt to the usage of music in silent movies. In "The Movies" episode, they buy an old movie studio, and attempt to make their own epic film, MacBeth Meets Truffaut The Wonder Dog. After several 'takes', they argue and each begins to make his own movie in a different style. The episode finished with an extended silent movie segment, in which each movie comically interferes with the others.
The characters are based on the personae of the three characters: Garden, a bright but bizarre "mad scientist"; Brooke-Taylor as a conservative, vain, sexually-repressed, upper-class royalist; and Oddie as a scruffy, occasionally violent, left-leaning rebel from Lancashire. The group have suggested that the characters of Graeme, Tim, and Bill represent the Liberal, Conservative and Labour wings of British politics or middle-class, upper-class, and working-class stereotypes respectively. The characters played up to their stereotypes, but were not necessarily based on the actor playing the character, even though the actors played characters with their own names, and had some minor characteristics in common. In reality, Garden is a medical doctor, Brooke-Taylor is a lawyer who is not at all conservative ("But I had the double-barrelled name so I was always going to play the Tory") and Oddie is a pacifist, ornithologist and active environmentalist.
Read more about this topic: The Goodies (TV Series)
Famous quotes containing the words characters, production and/or techniques:
“The major men
That is different. They are characters beyond
Reality, composed thereof. They are
The fictive man created out of men.
They are men but artificial men.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.”
—John Steinbeck (1902–1968)