Parodies
In the popular TV comedy series The Two Ronnies, Ronnie Corbett played a bungling version of Martin Shaw's Doyle in a sketch called Tinker Tailor Smiley Doyle. This was a joint send-up of The Professionals and the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy TV drama, with Ronnie Barker playing George Smiley along the lines of Alec Guinness' portrayal in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Corbett's Doyle provides the brawn to the brains of Barker's Smiley and actually comes out the worse. The sketch guest-starred Nicholas Smith from Are You Being Served?.
In 1984 some of the team behind The Comic Strip TV series produced a spoof entitled The Bullshitters, featuring two characters called Bonehead and Foyle in an episode called 'Roll Out the Gun Barrel".
Bonehead and Foyle returned to TV screens in 1993 in The Comic Strip one-off Detectives on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown alongside 'Shouting George from The Weeny' (Jack Regan from The Sweeney), 'Spanker' (Spender) and 'Jason Bentley' (Department S's Jason King).
Peter Jackson's 1987 film, Bad Taste, featured Astro Investigation and Defence Service employees "the boys", a Doyle and Bodie parody complete with Ford Capri.
In 1996, Nissan cars ran a humorous advertisement based on the series, featuring Bodie and Doyle type characters testing out the Nissan Almera.
Read more about this topic: The Professionals (TV Series)
Famous quotes containing the word parodies:
“The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)