The famous "Goody goody yum yum!" jingle plays as the picture mixes through to the familiar Goodies office, with several things covered in dirty white sheets. Bill and Graeme are heard mumbling outside, then Bill is thrown through the (closed) door. Both men are wearing yellow safety helmets, Graeme's has fake sideburns attached. Tim emerges sheepishly from the toilet, where he has locked himself in for twenty-five years completing a very difficult crossword puzzle.
"I've sunk very very low...I've had to accept an OBE, just so I could flog it on Ebay" - Bill Oddie.
Clips are shown from the original 1970s shows, and we are introduced to some of the evening's participants, who appear as 'talking heads' throughout. These are -
JOHN CLEESE - comedian, actor and writer
EMMA KENNEDY - actress and presenter
MARTIN FREEMAN - comedy actor
RONNI ANCONA - comedian and writer
JON CULSHAW - impressionist
TONY BLACKBURN - radio DJ and figure of fun
ROLF HARRIS - presenter and "all round entertainer"
PHILL JUPITUS - comedian
MARK GATISS - comedy writer and actor
STEVE PUNT - comedian
DAVID QUANTICK - journalist and critic
ADAM HILLS - comedian
BRUCE DESSAU - journalist
SANJEEV KOHLI - comedian
JAMES RAMPTON - comedy critic for the Independent
BOB SPIERS - former Goodies director
JIM FRANKLIN - former Goodies producer
JOHN HOWARD DAVIES - former Goodies producer and BBC head of comedy (1980-85)
Back in the office, the Goodies pose with lifesize cutouts of themselves as they were in 1970. They argue about who was the "dashing, debonair babe magnet", but none of them were. Graeme upgrades an old BBC computer by bashing it into his (still huge) computer with a sledgehammer. A modified title sequence follows for 'Return Of The Goodies'.
In the office, the Goodies keep hearing a strange noise. Bill thinks it's sealions, but it turns out to be the clapping and laughter of the studio audience.
"We always used to have a live - nearly - audience in the studio" - Bill Oddie.
Graeme remembers that they also had commercials, and two of these spoof advertisments follow - Captain Fishface's Cod Pieces, and Soft Golden Dairy Margarine that "spreads straight from the fridge". We are then reintroduced to Tim's 'beans boy' with two spoof adverts for 'Beanz Meanz Heanz', in which Tim plays an annoying schoolboy who is slapped in the face and clobbered with a punchbag.
TIM : "Why was it I always played women and little boys who got hurt? I suppose it was because you two were so hairy you couldn't play those parts"
GRAEME : "No, it's because we wrote it."
"They were obviously three clever blokes but they weren't afraid to just be silly" - Martin Freeman.
The Goodies' media machine, we are informed, sold 900,000 records.
The three characters are discussed in detail.
"When the Goodies opened up shop in November 1970, it was an instant hit that was only going to get bigger" - Caroline Quentin (narrator).
The narrator tells us that thefirst Goodies episodes were shown on BBC2, the arts and cultural channel, followed by a repeat run on the more mainstream BBC1, home of family shows such as Basil Brush, Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em and Dad's Army (brief clips are shown).
"People have been sending me up for years, and I love it" - Tony Blackburn.
"Tony Blackburn copped it Goodies style for five long years" - Caroline Quentin.
Bill is shown battering his Tony Blackburn punchball, and Graeme operates a Blackburn ventriloquist's dummy. Then we see Blackburn's appearance on Scatty Safari, and his inevitable 'death'.
The Goodies' pop career comes under scrutiny. Five hit singles in twelve months was no mean feat, and we see clips of The Inbetweenies and Funky Gibbon.
"At their peak there was a form of Goodies mania, if you like, that gripped the nation" - James Rampton.
"The dungarees were deeply embarrassing" - Bill Oddie.
Back in the office, Graeme recreates the kitten's famous ascent of the Post Office Tower with a none-too-convincing remote-controlled dummy. This leads to Tim's anecdote about crawling over dog shit for a filmed sequence in Kitten Kong (you can hear a version of this on the audio commentary track on the first Network DVD), and the scene in question is replayed in slow motion with gross sound effects.
Bill says he still gets letters from people saying he was "not very nice" to animals or wildlife in general in his Goodies days. "Not very nice? We were flipping horrible to them!", he laughs.
Clips are shown of animal 'cruelty' from the Goodies, including the giant cod, a budgie riding a bicycle, a dog as an organ grinder (with Tim dancing), Tim eating Gilbert the mouse, Black and White Beauty, a sheep attacking Tim, and Henrietta hedgehog with a handle up her bum. Bill reveals that the scene where he thrashed Tim and Graeme while they were dressed in a horse skin actually drew a complaint from a short-sighted viewer.
The next sequence concerns the Goodies' comedy roots. Clips from That Was The Week That Was, Beyond the Fringe, Cambridge Circus, BBC3, the Ed Sullivan Show, I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, Broaden Your Mind and At Last the 1948 Show get another airing.
"A terrible thing happened. The trandem became the star of the show" - Graeme Garden.
The 'Greased Cycling' sequence is shown, along with other trandem clips, before the three-seater bike is unceremoniously crushed into a cube ("just putting it in for a couple of minor adjustments") by Graeme. It still manages to whack him one last time.
The Goodies' budgetary constraints and the practice of pricing jokes comes under discussion, and this is followed by several clips from Kitten Kong. Jim Franklin is interviewed, and we see numerous guest stars making their appearances on the series, including Joan Sims, Stanley Baxter, Beryl Reid and Roy Kinnear.
"We stopped that after a couple of series because they were better than us" - Bill Oddie.
A couple of clips from The Movies are accompanied by Emma Kennedy commenting on the occasional 'pantomime quality' of the performances. Bill fakes outrage ("cheeky minx!") but a clip of the 'private screening' segment from the same episode moves Tim to concede that maybe she had a point! More clips from The Movies are shown, including most of the final sequence.
Kung Fu Kapers, one of the team's highest-rated episodes, is the next to come under scrutiny, as the cult of "ecky thump!" is discussed, and the sad story of Alex Mitchell, the 50-year-old Kings Lynn bricklayer who died laughing at the episode is recounted. Several clips are shown, including the sequence that killed Mr Mitchell - it's the one where Tim is dressed as a Scotsman, threatening Bill with bagpipes. Watch it if you dare!
The Goodies' eventual downfall is next on the agenda. By 1980, the series had become "thoroughly mainstream", and a new breed of comedians were breaking through. Punk had come and gone, but The Young Ones and Not The Nine O'Clock News were keeping its spirit alive on television.
"I think every series has its lifetime and plainly the Goodies had reached the end of its life - it was also getting more expensive. After seventy episodes that was quite enough" - John Howard Davies.
A clip of the 'talking' dog introducing The Doggies is shown. John Howard Davies reveals he'd rather have spent the Goodies' budget on Not The Nine O'Clock News, and didn't have enough money to make a new Goodies series and his new 'pet project', The Hitch-hikers Guide To The Galaxy.
"Would you mind waiting to see whether Hitch-hikers Guide is a hit?" - Bill Oddie on 'the offer we could refuse'!
"They were saying that our future depended on the failure of Hitch-hikers Guide, which was not entirely saying that they loved us any more" - Graeme Garden.
A clip of the BBC globe exploding (from Earthanasia) is shown.
Graeme explains how David Bell from London Weekend Television, part of the ITV network, signed the Goodies to a three year contract, and clips from the LWT episodes are shown. But Bob Spiers explains that LWT apparently didn't fully understand how complex the series was to make, and after one series and one special, the whole exercise was judged to be "too expensive", and Michael Grade pulled the plug. The Goodies were paid for their three year contract, but not to make shows, and their one series was repeated until 1984 - their last regular exposure on terrestrial British television. To this day, Tim regards the end of the Goodies as "an anti climax".
We learn how Graeme and Tim continue to make the nation laugh on I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue as well as making regular television guest appearances, and that Bill Oddie has become Britain's favourite naturalist through series such as Birding With Bill Oddie and Springwatch. A clip from the 2000 BBC comedy Fun At The Funeral Parlour, with Bill playing himself and moaning that the Goodies' thirtieth anniversary had not been marked by a single repeat, is also shown.
"Programmes such as Porridge, Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em and The Good Life are repeated ad nauseam on the BBC, but the Goodies has never enjoyed those endless repeats...I wonder why?" - James Rampton.
"The repeat transmission times I had available to me were not suitable for the Goodies" - John Howard Davies.
"When I went back and rewatched it as an adult, I honestly thought that patches of each episode were absolutely brilliant" - Emma Kennedy.
"It's still as vibrant, it's still as enthusiastic, it's still three or four laughs a minute, which is a pretty good hit rate" - Sanjeev Kohli.
"I'm sure a new generation of people would be able to pick up on it and enjoy it for what it is" - Mark Gatiss.
"I think they are one of the great comedy teams, I think the Goodies is a brilliant show - its longevity and popularity shows that" - David Quantick.
The Beanstalk clip with John Cleese ("kid's programme!") brings the comments to a close.
Back in the office, the Goodies try to leave, only to find they've been entombed - again - with nothing to do for the rest of their lives but watch old Goodies episodes. Fittingly, Tim does his 'teapot' panic as the end credits roll over clips from the series. As a fitting finale, the Gender Education clip of Bill blowing up BBC Television Centre is shown! (Trivial note - this special was filmed at the London Studios, where the LWT series was recorded.)
