Cult comedy screening to raise funds for Devon seawall repair
'Breakwater is crumbling'
The breakwater was last repaired in 1983 but it has some big cracks and local residents are concerned that a breach in the wall could have a devastating impact on the village."If we lose the sand, we lose the harbour and that would be catastrophic for the village," said joint Harbourmaster Sean Hassall."We'll lose our tourism industry."The locals come down here as well so really we want to make people aware how crucial our breakwater is and how important it is to get the funding and get it sorted," he said.
The benefit night, at Marlborough Village Hall, is designed to try to raise awareness of the breakwater as well as to raise money to support the repair work.
"The breakwater is crumbling and we need to find some way to get it repaired and it costs money these days," said Mr Richardson. "They need to raise it [money] and that is why we are doing a charity benefit showing The Supergrass which features that scene with Robbie on the breakwater."'It's the 40th anniversary of the release of Supergrass so it seems like a good time to do something with it so I've recut it."
The coastline is part of the Crown Estate and the harbour is leased by the Hope Cove Harbour Commissioners.The harbour is self funding and raises money through mooring and launch fees. It is estimated the breakwater repairs will cost more than £1m. The Friends of Hope Cove Harbour is a charity trying to raise money for the repairs. So far they have accumulated £100,000.
"We've had various experts look at it [the breakwater] in the past few years and it is going to go at some stage but nobody can give a date," said Graham Phillips, the chairman of the charity. "Before it goes we want to try to raise enough money to repair it in a substantial way because if it goes the beach will disappear."The Supergrass is due to be shown at Marlborough Village Hall on Saturday 15 March 2025.
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Daily Mail
a day ago
- Daily Mail
First look at Nick Frost as Hagrid on set of Harry Potter TV series as he strides past fast food restaurants to get the tube - and fans are already divided
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The Guardian
3 days ago
- The Guardian
‘Robin Williams said: 'I'll buy the club!'': how The Comic Strip set the UK comedy scene ablaze
It was the moment comedy broke with sexism – yet it happened in a strip club. It was a fervour of free creative expression – yet it retained a commercial, careerist edge. It was one of the longest-running and most successful brands in UK comedy history – which few people could now recognise. At the Edinburgh fringe this summer, The Comic Strip Presents … will be memorialised in a series of film screenings and Q&As with its creator and prime mover Peter Richardson. Richardson was the impresario behind the legendary comedy club The Comic Strip, which opened in 1980. When he and his star performers – Rik Mayall, Alexei Sayle, French and Saunders among them – created Channel 4's The Comic Strip Presents … a couple of years later, he could legitimately claim to be the man who brought alternative comedy to television. This being a celebration of an iconic moment in UK comedy history, one might assume Edinburgh's Usher Hall or the 750-seat Pleasance Grand has been set aside to host. 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One of the show's stars, Mayall, argued that it shouldn't have been called The Comic Strip, and that 'Interesting Films' might have been a better fit. In fact, the series was – like Inside No 9 more recently – a tonally varying anthology show, a suite of standalone films united only by sensibility, and by the performers bringing them to the screen. 'I told Channel 4,' says Richardson, ''These performers are so good they don't need to be stuck playing one-dimensional characters. They can play all sorts. One week they can be a heavy metal band, the next week they can be The Famous Five.' You could call it bad television, because you're not seeing more of the same. But as it's gone on, it's become a collection of very memorable one-off moments and that's what people now remember.' The performers also included Adrian Edmondson, Nigel Planer and Richardson himself, with a rotating supporting cast that included Keith Allen, Robbie Coltrane and more. At the time, they were setting the UK comedy scene ablaze. That all started at the Comedy Store, a strip club and the anarchic HQ of what had recently been called 'alternative comedy'. Richardson's coup was to cherrypick the most exciting voices of that generation, and cart them off to another strip club, a little less anarchic, a few blocks up the road: the Raymond Revuebar. Here, with the financial support of the Rocky Horror Picture Show producer Michael White, he opened The Comic Strip club – a name that seems obvious, although 'the New Depression Club' was, according to Edmondson, a very near miss. For a year from 1980-1981, the Comic Strip was the hippest and hottest comedy night in town. 'The bouncers at Raymond Revuebar had a simple rule of thumb for who was directed where,' Sayle later wrote. 'If they reeked of aftershave they were sent to the strip show; if they smelled of beer they came to us.' Celebs piled in: Bianca Jagger, Dustin Hoffman. Robin Williams came and demanded to perform, to impress his guest, David Bowie. Sayle offered him 15 minutes. Williams said: 'I told [Bowie] I'd do an hour'. Sayle: 'You can't.' Williams: 'I'll buy the club!' Sayle: 'We don't own it. It belongs to a bouffant-haired pornographer.' The buzz even reached the pages of the London Review of Books, whose critic noted, 'within seconds, [Sayle] has the audience agape. Most of them, it seemed, had never been called cunts before.' Then Channel 4 came calling, looking for cutting-edge talent to help launch the new broadcaster on to the country's airwaves. Richardson was given carte blanche. 'They said, 'What do you want to do?' and I said, 'I want to make six films, all different.'' The first, Five Go Mad in Dorset, was transmitted on the station's opening night, and the controversy around its satire of Enid Blyton attitudes gave that event a front-page news fillip. But Five Go Mad will not be celebrated at the fringe this summer, says Richardson. 'Taking the piss out of racism and sexism [in that way] is long gone,' he says. 'It's not a funny issue like it was when we did it in the 80s.' One option might have been to re-edit the episode – a course of action in which Richardson, now 73, has freely indulged as the Edinburgh shows have come together. Not for him a bask in the glory of his youthful success. 'What we've done,' he says, 'is revisited the films and said, '30 years later they need some adjustment.' Because things go faster now.' Western spoof Fistful of Travellers Cheques has been 'cut back a bit'. So too has late-period favourite Four Men in a Car. And a scene has been trimmed from The Strike, the show's faux Hollywood movie making mincemeat of the miners' strike. That one bagged a Golden Rose of Montreux comedy award, and starred Richardson (the only performer to appear in every episode) as Al Pacino playing, er, Arthur Scargill. 'I could do Pacino much better now,' he laughs, 'because I worked with John Sessions on Stella Street.' So now, he says, slipping into a convincing Italian-American accent, 'I can do Al.' Stella Street was another of Richardson's TV hits, undertaken when The Comic Strip Presents, by any measure his life's work, was in abeyance. Even when he was a jobbing comedian, in double act The Outer Limits with Nigel Planer, Richardson was a child of amateur film-makers and a wannabe film-maker himself. With The Comic Strip, he made movies for cinematic release: The Supergrass in 1985, and Eat the Rich two years later. Further TV specials included Red Nose of Courage, telling the tale of John Major's flight from the circus to parliament, and 2011's The Hunt for Tony Blair, imagining the ex-PM on the run having been accused of a series of murders. Both will be screened at the fringe, MC'd by comedian Robin Ince and with special guests including Sayle and Allen. Richardson is modest about the achievement of having brought these 30 years' worth of films to the screen. 'I always thought we were the new Ealing comedies. And [Ealing Studios at its peak] made about 150 films over 20 years, of which about 15 are remembered. So our strike rate isn't too bad. We made some flops, but at least one or two out of each series are really good.' Some, indeed, are carved on this writer's heart – notably Bad News Tour and More Bad News, the show's two-part heavy metal spoof, which predated This Is Spinal Tap and ended up with Edmondson, Mayall and co performing live on stage, under a hail of beer glasses, at the 1986 Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington. Richardson is at peace with the under-appreciation of The Comic Strip Presents, acknowledging that, as a bloody-minded sitcom refusenik way back when, he is the auteur of his own misfortune. He is delighted to be bringing the remastered films to Edinburgh, a city in which, back in the day, he and Planer once toured as a support act to Dexy's Midnight Runners. 'FrontmanKevin Rowland complained,' he says, 'that we didn't do new material at every performance.' Expect no new material at these screenings – but a new experience, perhaps. 'It's a great thing,' says Richardson, 'to show them in the cinema. You don't often get to share comedy television with an audience, and it changes the whole experience: people laughing around you. We've discovered that there is an audience around the country who want to see these films on the big screen and talk about them. It's fantastic that something we created 30 or 40 years ago is still creating laughter. I love it.' The Comic Strip Presents … is at the Fringe is on 2, 3, 8, 9 and 10 August at Just the Tonic, Edinburgh
Daily Mirror
16-07-2025
- Daily Mirror
'Huge 80s star stages astonishing comeback after shock realisation about world'
The godfather of alternative comedy Alexei Sayle has lost none of his Marxist zeal or rage against the establishment – and says his firebrand act is needed more than ever to resist what he calls an 'assault on free speech and comedy'. After over 30 years delivering acidly funny rants at the state of the nation, the 72-year-old veteran of The Comic Strip and The Young Ones is more troubled than ever about the widening gap between the rich and poor – and there's no chance of him getting off his soapbox. 'I would like to retire – but the world keeps getting worse,' he says with a chuckle. 'So what am I supposed to do?' Politics has always been his schtick, and even now, he takes his alternative comedian job spec seriously. He believes comedy is one of the first casualties of an authoritarian society. 'They don't like a laugh,' says Alexei. 'But healthy ones encourage criticism. Comedy is a pressure valve – it's a way to let off steam about the injustice of the world. And comics should also point out injustice.' We meet in a park near his house in Bloomsbury, the literary quarter of central London, where he lives with his wife Linda and their beloved 18-year-old Maine Coon cat, Wilf. The bald, bovver-booted tight-suit wearing bouncer look has gone and been replaced by a slightly avuncular look. Completely white haired and with a beard trimmed into a Lenin point (his barber's idea), he's also wearing a Panama which gives him the air of a professor on his holidays, especially as he's waving a wooden stick. 'It's my martial arts staff – I do Tai chi,' he says, twirling it around expertly. Apparently it's not a peaceful hobby at all. 'No, it's a way of killing people very slowly,' he deadpans. It's been a while since Alexei has been on the stand-up comedy circuit after his comeback tour in 2022 was rudely interrupted by the pandemic. But his delightful travels around the UK with his Strangers On A Train series last year on Radio 4 has found him a whole new audience. He also hosts a monthly podcast with co-host Talal Karkouti, and has even gone viral with the youngsters with his TikTok videos where he explains Marxist theory through interpretative dance. Bringing his surreal side to a brand new medium, Alexei demonstrates the 'bourgeoiose boogie' followed by 'cornered beast' while teaching about how capitalists steal the profits of workers' hard work. 'I mean they're proper viral – we're up to about seven million views,' he says. 'We're going to do more of those, more internet stuff, hopefully another series of Imaginary Sandwich Bar, and maybe some live gigs.' And, Alexei reveals, he's waiting for 'Jeremy to get the new party together'. Always a committed Corbynist, there's no love lost between the comic and the current Labour line-up. 'When Jeremy has finally talked to everybody in the country, and the new party, people's popular front emerges, then I will also throw myself into that until they stop me.' He twirls his Tai chi staff ominously – then accidentally drops it. 'I've also written a poem for the Prime Minister – it's called I Hate Keir Starmer,' he announces, and starts discussing whether he should read it out to the audience when he appears on the Voices of Solidarity stage at the Troxy Theatre in East London on Saturday. Performing on the night alongside Alexei will be comedian and former heart surgeon, Bassem Youssef, singer Paloma Faith, actress Juliet Stephenson and host Jen Brister to raise desperately needed funds for health workers under siege in Gaza. Since October 2023, more than 1,580 health workers have been killed in Gaza and all proceeds from the night will go to Health Workers 4 Palestine. 'It's gonna be a great evening of music and comedy and people will be doing good by coming to see it,' he promises. There will also be a silent auction with expensive items donated by Cate Blanchett and Gary Lineker – while Alexei, naturally, is offering a pint. As a Jewish man, Alexei feels it's important to attend and 'bear witness' to what is happening on the central London protest marches over Gaza. He's spent so many years supporting the march, it's practically his social life these days. But he feels compelled to fight what he calls the creeping authoritarianism in this country. 'You know, if I say I support Palestine Action, I can go to prison for 14 years?' he casually mentions. 'I feel sympathy with younger artists who are caught in a bind about whether to speak out or not,' he adds. 'I can understand why they don't and I really admire the ones who do, like Kneecap, Paloma Faith and Dua Lipa.' Despite his view that the BBC 'has allowed itself to be intimidated' over the Kneecap incident, the veteran comic concedes the broadcaster has always been supportive. 'Radio 4 is a kind of natural home for me,' he says. He's been commissioned for a sixth series of Alexei Sayle's Imaginary Sandwich Bar, which he says is the work he's most proud of over his entire career. 'There's a budget put aside for next year,' he confirms. 'It takes me like two years to write it. So we'll see whether I'm in prison or not!' Unlike younger artists, Alexei says he's free to speak his mind because, 'I've made my mark in my career,' but he also made his career out of ranty monologues when he was young in the 1980s. 'Yes but the situation has become more critical,' he explains. 'You see how the Labour government has reacted to Just Stop Oil for instance, closing down the space for protest. 'And that ultimately is to do with the growing gap between rich and poor. It's inequality. It's a manifestation of that really. Gaza and fossil fuel protests. It's all part of the same thing.' All that marching has clearly kept the comic fit. 'I'll be 73 in a few weeks and I'm in good shape physically.' Born in 1952 in Liverpool to fully paid-up members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Molly and Joseph Sayle, he doesn't get back home so often these days. 'Not since my mum died,' he says. Being brought up in a Communist household by a mother who swapped her 'extreme Orthodox Jewish religion for another' certainly set him apart from his Anfield neighbours. At Christmas she even told him Lenin came down the chimney with presents. 'I embraced the difference, really,' he shrugs. 'It was like growing up in any cult. You think you've got the answers to the world's problems.' He briefly considered becoming a teacher, but his entry into the hallowed halls of stand-up is the stuff of comedy legend. He answered an advert in Private Eye in 1979 and became a compere of The Comedy Store on a tiny little stage in a Soho strip club where acts like Rik Mayall and French & Saunders started their careers. The comedy industry has changed beyond recognition since those ground-breaking days. 'It's a massive industry now, and like any industry, it's become homogenised.' Instead of coming up the hard way and being heckled on stage, many comics now start their careers on social media. In this 'old dog learns new tricks' phase of his career, Alexei could certainly teach the kids a few things. 'I've seen the odd comic who is great on social media, but if you go and see them live, it's painful,' he says, looking pained. 'Friends that I still have in the industry say that is a problem. They look great in an edited clip on YouTube, but they can't sustain anything and act really.' Beyond the stand-up and theatre work, Alexei's also a seasoned character actor and has appeared in everything from Gorky Park and Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade to Carry On Columbus. But it's his time with his old Comic Strip friends when alternative comedy took over BBC Television Centre that he recalls with the most fondness. 'The Young Ones was an extraordinary time,' he says. 'It was tremendously exciting and we were all friends. 'At one point I was making my own series, and Jennifer was making the first series of ABFAB, and Nigel was working on something. It was like we almost had the run of the BBC. He adds, 'I still see Nigel and Peter a lot these days.' Still mourning the loss of Rik Mayall who died of a heart attack aged 56 in 2014, he met up with his old comedy crew at Robbie Coltrane's memorial last year. The Scottish actor, who died in 2022, was a regular on the 1980s TV show The Comic Strip Presents along with Adrian Edmondson, Rik Mayall, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Peter Richardson and Alexei. 'Rik's death was a real shock. Terrible,' Alexei shakes his head sadly. 'I remember speaking to Dawn at Robbie memorial and saying it was a real feeling of family. I think she felt that even if we don't see each other, we've all been through something profound together.' He's never really been away, but it's great to have Alexei back where he's needed – showing us the alternative view to the mainstream. • The UK's largest cultural fundraiser for Palestine, Voices of Solidarity, which will take place at London's Troxy Saturday July 19, 2025 (7pm). Tickets from
