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Newspaper article from 1971 by John Halsall

Christine McVie [she‘s not perfect anymore…]

Any small child catching sight of Noel Fielding of The Mighty Boosh in his clown gear would vow never to go to the circus again. Fielding’s torso is encased in a green felt globe, his hands protruding helplessly from the bottom. From beneath lurid make-up, he flashes a deeply unsettling grin, as if auditioning for the role of a psychopathic killer in Test Card: The Movie. “I’m just popping out for some coffee,” he deadpans. “Does anybody want anything?”

His Booshmate Julian Barratt, who currently looks like the victim of back-alley gender reassignment surgery, brushes his new blond tresses away from his face and sighs. “What a job, eh?”

When the duo decided to pose as the pair from the 1970s TV test card, it didn’t take long to decide who should play which part. If you want make-up and a manic grin, Fielding’s your man. He arrives at the studio resembling a time-travelling glam-rock star: pointy boots, snug red trousers, tight T-shirt, pendant shaped like a Flying Vee guitar, alarming bone structure. In one episode of their TV series, Barratt tells Fielding, “Look at you - feather cut, the pointy features. Put you in the 1950s, you’d be imprisoned for being a witch. They’d lock you in a trunk!” He’s probably right.

Barratt carries himself like someone trying to elude capture. It’s this wary unease that defined his performance as misanthropic style journalist Dan Ashcroft in Nathan Barley, Chris Morris’s Channel 4 comedy series. Morris wanted Dan to be someone who “wasn’t really comfortable in his skin”. I ask Barratt if Dan is a version of his own personality and he looks mildly wounded. “Not really, no. There were elements of me - it’s sometimes painful to be around people who are annoying - but Dan was a bit of a tit. I didn’t really like him.”

The Mighty Boosh have already completed two successful BBC series and are currently working on a third. Fielding, 33, thinks comedy is about allowing people to feel young again. “When you’re really laughing, you feel like a little kid and nothing matters. Everyone’s trying to feel as free as they were when they were kids.” Barratt, 38, seems to regard comedy’s inner workings as an imponderable mystery. “You still don’t know why you’re funny, do you?” Fielding says. “Not really,” Barratt sighs.

After almost a decade of working together, the pair are obviously close. When the camera’s not pointed in their direction, they huddle on the studio sofa in earnest conference punctuated by giggles. There is much to discuss: “We’ve got so many things we want to do and we need a basket to put them all in,” explains Barrett. “A structural basket.”

Fielding has a different metaphor. “We know when we’ve got enough ideas. If we haven’t and we try to write, it’s a bit weird. It’s like loading a gun and not having enough bullets.”

They first met in 1996, when Fielding went to see Barratt doing stand-up in High Wycombe. There had been less auspicious nights. Barratt recalls, “I ran off stage at my first gig. Halfway through it, I forgot my lines and didn’t know what to do, so I just ran out of the building down towards a lake. I was going to throw myself in, but the compere came out and said, 'No, it’s going well, come back and finish the gig!’ ”

The two share enthusiasms (Captain Beefheart, Monty Python, Mr Benn) and Barratt launched their collaboration by asking Fielding if he wanted to write the new Goodies. “We wanted to be a gang rather than a sketch troupe,” he says. From the start, their combination of absurdist wit, far-fetched narratives and bizarre musical interludes was the stuff of cult success. Audiences either entered their world and found them the funniest thing around, or they didn’t get them at all. “We used to have to convince people we were funny,” Barratt says, “and it didn’t always work.”

It did, however, work well enough to earn them nominations or awards at three consecutive Edinburgh festivals. A radio series followed and they finally made it to the nation’s TV screens in 2004. Earlier this year, they returned to touring. They get offers all the time, but having got this far on their own idiosyncratic terms, they have no desire to work according to anyone else’s.

“If Tim Burton called up and said, 'I’m making a film about two white Americans who go and become Red Indians’, I’m sure we’d jump at the chance,” Fielding says. “But if it’s, 'Do you want to be in this sitcom that’s a bit like Coupling?’ I’d rather shoot myself.”

When did you first find something really funny?

Noel Fielding: My nan used to look after me in the summer holidays and she had a cat with one eye. It used to walk into walls and tables. I used to think it was hilarious. It was a slapstick cat.

Who are your comedy inspirations?

Julian Barrett: I loved the Goodies’ sense of adventure.

NF: The Young Ones was the first thing I really liked. I was so young I didn’t really know what students were. I just thought they were some men who lived in a house.

What’s not funny?

JB: Cancer?

NF: It can be, though, can’t it?

JB: Yeah, sometimes a tumour will make me laugh.

When did you last laugh?

NF: I laugh all the time. I’m slightly simple. I went to a festival in Cambridge last weekend and there were men standing on a wheelchair and getting their friends to push them down a muddy hill and really hurting themselves. One of them had a fur coat, a dress underneath, massive boots and a witch’s hat. It was so stupid that everyone was laughing at them. It was quite freeing, actually.

What’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened to you?

NF: Once I got stuck in a suit of armour. I had to be a knight in Al Murray’s show for two minutes. I had a gig afterwards and there was no one there backstage, so I couldn’t get out of it. I had to run next door and do the gig in a suit of armour. Al thought it was the best thing ever. “You should do that every night! It’s brilliant!” he said.

What’s the secret of comedy?

JB: The secret of comedy is don’t grow up. That’s why some comedians are a nightmare, because they never grow up.

Tell us a joke

NF: You stop hearing proper jokes when you’re a comedian. I’m always slightly disappointed by real jokes. There’s a lot of pressure to understand them and laugh at them. Occasionally we come up with a proper joke by accident and we almost apologise.

· The Mighty Boosh debut live DVD is released on November 13.

How we made Top Gear, by sniffpetrol (Richard Porter)

My favourite bits:

The actual process for writing scripts, or at least sitting down to fill in the gaps with ‘whatever’, took several forms. Sometimes Jeremy would get a rush of blood to the head and crack on with it on his own, then email me a first draft with a simple note at the top; ‘ADD FACTS AND GAGS’. Sometimes one or more of us would go over to his flat near the Top Gear office and work on it together. Clarkson would usually drive the computer, jabbing awkwardly at the keyboard with a single rigid digit on each hand, like he was trying to CPR a rat.

His ungainly typing style disguised his immense ability as the fastest writer I’ve ever worked with, rapidly producing first draft words that were sharper, tighter and funnier than most word jockeys could manage after 20 attempts. Every so often he’d pause as he searched for a chunky analogy to illustrate a point and we’d spend a minute or two bouncing gags back and forth, trying to make each other laugh. A lot of Top Gear writing was based around men in a room trying to make each other laugh.

And:

During our usual on-air routine, voice overs were done on a Monday evening the week of transmission, each presenter taking their turn to go into the recording booth while the other two loafed around in the control room, saying unhelpful things over the talkback loop, writing lurid slogans on other people’s scripts and generally behaving like children. Restless, middle-aged, deliberately annoying children.

And:

At some point in the morning we’d turn our attention to the massive slick of press releases and pictures laid out on the floor behind us and the presenters would begin reading out things and firing one-liners at each other, the best bits of which I’d attempt to write down and later type up into bullet points from which the rough shape of the news segment would emerge.

And, of course:

Make that dream come true, Michael!

He would be a wonderful drag queen