Launched in 1982 - on the very first night Channel Four started broadcasting to the nation - The Comic Strip Presents… brought alternative comedy to the masses. As part of the annual Square Eyes TV Festival - a mouthwatering mix of archive rarities, classic series and recent favourites - MAC Cinema will host a special event with Comic Strip writer/director/godfather Peter Richardson and impressionist Phil Cornwell. What’s On spoke to Peter (pictured with Adrian Edmondson below) about how it all began...

How did The Comic Strip Presents... begin back in the 1980s?
Well, The Comic Strip started as a club in Soho, which I opened in the Raymond Revue Bar. They had a spare theatre that we managed to rent from them, and that’s where I met Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson, Alexei Sayle and Nigel Planer. I think the show had been going for about four months, and then these two ladies turned up to audition, to see if they could be guests in the show - that was French and Saunders. So we all became a big troupe of people and did a year in Soho.

I always wanted to make films. I went to Channel Four and said, ‘Look, we’ve got a great bunch of comedy actors here. Rik, Alexei, Nigel and Adrian can do anything, play any parts. They don’t have to play just one character for multiple series - we can make separate 30-minute films.’ So one week we might do Five Go Mad In Dorset (which was a take on Enid Blyton and how awful those kids could be), then another week we’d be taking the mickey out of racism, sexism, all that stuff. I gave them a list of six fims, and they gave us the okay.

How did you come up with the idea to screen the films as part of a UK-wide tour? 
We made about 40/45 films in total. Out of those, about 10/12 really stood up well. They still play very well in cinemas too, because they look great on the big screen. So we started touring with these, playing to audiences who loved The Comic Strip when the films first started airing.

You’re seeing it with a bunch of people on the big screen, which is a very different experience because everything’s illuminated, and some of the films really work well like that. One example is Red Nose Of Courage, which we’re showing at MAC. That one is set in a circus, and it’s about [former prime minister] John Major, who gets into politics because he’s bored of being a clown. We did another prime-minister story called The Hunt For Tony Blair, which is a black-and-white film where Tony Blair is on the run for murder following the Iraq War.

What’s funny is that these two films in particular don’t seem to age. I mean, the Blair film is set in the early 60s and black-and-white, so we removed it from the present day to another period to give it a sort of theatrical glamour - it doesn’t feel like a documentary.

Phil Cornwell and [the late] John Sessions are brilliant impressionists, as seen in the cult BBC comedy Stella Street, clips of which also feature in the show. What’s special about their comedy offering? 
They don’t just do voices - they create an inner world. They make the stars [who they impersonate] their own characters, but they also create generic characters - like the cleaner or the gardener - which are just as interesting as the celebrities they take on. We’ve got Mick and Keith from the Rolling Stones running the corner shop, always arguing about prices and stuff, and it’s quite funny - it’s just these two great giants of rock & roll doing very mundane jobs, and people come in and out. Jack Nicholson comes in to buy Shreddies, you know, and Michael Caine pops in all the time…

You were a longtime collaborator and friend of the late Rik Mayall - how did you meet?
Nigel Planer phoned me up one day and said, ‘You know, there’s this club called The Comedy Store going - let’s go down there and see if we can do an act with just the two of us.’ Back then, you could just go in and say, ‘I want to go on stage’, and they’d let you go on; if you weren’t funny within five or so minutes, Alexei Sayle would bang this gong and you had to get off. He was really funny but an absolutely brutal compere...

There, standing in the shadows, was Rik Mayall and his long-haired friend Adrian Edmondson. Rik went on before us and did this brilliant act where he recited really rubbish, crap poetry, but it was designed to make the audience laugh. What was lovely about Rik’s act is that when they laughed, he’d get upset. He’d go, ‘Please, please shut up! Listen, please don’t do this. Don’t do this to me,’ like a sensitive poet. It was so funny - the more they laughed, the more upset he got, and the more upset he got, the more they laughed. It was just a brilliant act!

How is the comedy landscape different today, and are there any comedians you’ve been watching recently?  
Instagram, TikTok and YouTube seem to be where people get discovered now - television comedy in the UK seems to have just become a series of panel shows, as far as I can see. They don’t put as much money into it on television, and it seems to have gone out of fashion a little bit.

YouTube seems to produce some wonderful people now, particularly from the States. Stanzi Potenza is a great talent from Boston, and there’s also Gianmarco Soresi, who seems to be able to tackle difficult, serious current-affairs topics with this amazingly funny approach. And my son, Red, is conquering the world through YouTube. He’s become big in the States and tours all over the place now, which would never have happened without the internet. Not to blow my own son’s trumpet, but I think he’s doing some amazing stuff!

The Comic Strip Presents… + Q&A shows at Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) on Sunday 15 November, as part of Square Eyes TV Festival which runs from Friday 6 to Sunday 15 November

By Rosi Byard-Jones