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Barred: The Mary Whitehouse Experience

You’d think one of the most popular comedy shows of the 90s, featuring four performers who became household names – and to this day are largely bankable TV names – would have been a shoe-in for a DVD release. Or at the very least, a run on Dave.

Yet the Mary Whitehouse Experience exists only as bootlegs and Youtube uploads, somehow escaping the comedy nostalgia wave that can see even the likes of After Henry make it to shiny disk somehow.

The show – particularly the TV version – made stars of Rob Newman and David Baddiel, who went on to be feted like rock stars in the mid 90s, making comedy cool and supposedly selling out Wembley Arena. Meanwhile Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis – the supposedly unfashionable pairing of the quartet – were already well established thanks to regular slots with Jasper Carrott.

Originally a late night Radio One show, the Mary Whitehouse Experience kicked off in July 1989. The central quartet – all Cambridge graduates – were joined by a variety of support acts for each half hour episode, notably including Jo Brand and Mark Thomas, who spent the first couple of series doing a similar worthy comedy schtick to what would later become The People’s Manifesto.

Over the course of the next 18 months, it would provide supposedly topical comedy on the music network, though often the topicality was, at best, marginal – political stories would often descend into extended silly digs at BBC political editor John Cole, and his coat.

Early into the third radio series, producer Bill Dare departed to be replaced by Armando Iannucci – yes, that one – and with him came an even more freeform and seemingly anarchic approach to producing the show than the first two series.

The radio show wasn’t afraid to court controversy, notably attacking Times radio critic Martin Cropper after an indifferent review of the show in 1990, which featured Baddiel calling for him to be ‘shot dead’, and Baddiel and Newman trading cheeky underage sex barbs about each other when one missed a show for another gig.

Even the title was, for a while, in doubt as the BBC considered the risk of Whitehouse suing over it, with the less catchy William Rees-Mogg Experience considered as an alternative.

Just as the fourth and final radio series was about to air, a pilot episode for the TV version was also made, screening on BBC in early October 1990.

Joined by Doon Mackichan – who played all the female parts – it was a mix of new material and revised version of radio sketches, all with an added layer of topicality as the episode preceeded the BBC’s controversial adaptation of Portrait of a Marriage – ultimately ending with Baddiel wrapping up proceedings on the show early so the team could go watch the lesbian sex scenes immediately afterwards.

I remember watching the pilot of the TV version and genuinely being in pain with laughter by the end of it. Having been unaware of the radio version at that point (it aired in a late night slot largely) and only really knowing of them because of Hugh Dennis and Steve Punt’s slots on Carrot Confidential, it was like nothing the 12-year-old me had seen before.

Funny, witty, silly, profane and, above all else, different, I was probably just about the right age for it to grab me like few other comedy shows had at that point.

It wasn’t just me, either. Pretty much everyone in my year at school loved the show, and when it came back as a regular series in the New Year, it was a hit.

A further radio show, and two TV series followed before the group went their seperate ways. Baddiel and Newman, represented by the comedy management behemoth that is Avalon, were marketed as the cool ones and went on to have an ‘edgy’ late night BBC 2 show – Newman and Baddiel In Pieces – while Punt and Dennis continued to work with Carrot, toured their own stand up show and had their own BBC One series.

Punt and Dennis notably continue to work together through a variety of topical comedy shows on Radio 2 and Radio 4 to this day, with the Now Show a staple fixture in the latter’s schedules, and Dennis a family favourite as the put-upon dad in Outnumbered.

Baddiel and Newman went their own ways, though, in reportedly acrimonious fashion. David Baddiel found a new partnership, with his old flatmate Frank Skinner, doing Fantasy Football League and then later Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned, while Rob Newman became an eco-activist alongside his comedy work, touring with former Mary Whitehouse Experience colleague Mark Thomas.

And amid all that later success, not a sign of the Mary Whitehouse Experience being available for fans again. A spin-off book from 1991 is the only official piece of merchandise available. The radio show got a run of limited repeats on the then Radio 7 about a decade ago, but the TV series rarely surfaced.

Reasoning behind the lack of availability varied depending on which comedy forum/conspiracy theory you believed. The BBC felt the topicality of the episodes made releasing them commercially invalid. The use of commerical music caused rights issues. And Avalon, too busy marketing the cool pair, didn’t want the public reminded of their days working with Punt and Dennis, and doing jokes about Thatcher rather than the darkly romantic bedsit poet stuff that was coining it in.

Whatever the reason, it meant the series – either as audio or video – was never made available commercially. Dodgy bootlegs and off-air recordings circulated among collectors and then on eBay, but never to the shelves of HMV.

Looking back on the episodes now feels reminiscent of another hit BBC2 show which originated on radio – the League of Gentlemen. Specifically, that the radio episodes are far, far better. That’s not to say the TV ones aren’t funny – they are, and then some – but there’s a relaxed spontaneity about those radio shows that the BBC2 show lacks.

The big industrial set, slick titles – directed, ironically, by League pet director Steve Bendelack – and running characters (most notable in series two, with Ray and the History Today sketches) felt more like a traditional comedy show than the anarchic radio counterpart.  Though there were some truly genius moments on the show, too – including one of my favourite comedy skits of all time:

Hopefully one day we may yet get a commercial release. There’s a whole crop of comedies from the early 90s which have somehow failed to make it to the DVD shelves while interminable series of After Fucking Henry somehow get released. That needs to change.