My favourite Comic Strip films...

As the team return, founder Peter Richardson recalls the best of the last 30 years

Five Go To Rehab (2012)

It's gone down very well so far. Perhaps I don't quite know how it feels as I’m so close to it, but the story builds nicely on how the characters have changed 30 years on. Jennifer [Saunders] is brilliant, Stephen Mangan is great, so's Adrian [Edmondson]. The whole cast is fantastic:

Gregory: Dairy Of A Nutcase (1993)

We parodied scores of films over the years. This one is about a guy watching a serial killer movie over and over and over. At the time Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer was around, and there were lots of sick copycats. We ripped into how exploitative these films are.  

We took Silence Of The Lambs apart scene by scene and imagined what minor characters were doing, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. There was one scene in the original where Hannibal Lecter rips a man's face off and puts it over his own to escape, so we had these two cops imagining this great 'what if' scenario, then Lecter walks past and they just say, 'Night, Gary' to him. It still holds up quite well

I always liked the darker ones most.


Gino: Full Story and Pics (1984)

I like the feel of Keith Allen on the run. There are some great scenes in this, as he steals a cab and becomes a celebrity

This is available to watch on 4OD here.

The Strike (1988)

How Hollywood might have treated the miners’ strike. We showed this at Hollywood at one point,in a bid to raise my profile there – and it was a big learning curve. They laughed at all the British characters being crass and gritty, but they changed when it became all glamorous and 'Al Pacino' came in and wanted to change the ending of the strike so Scargill and the miners won; suddenly no one's laughing.

Then I realised that to them it's a business, and why wouldn't you want to change the ending to make a better film?

This is available to watch on 4OD here.

Four Men In A Plane (2000)

I just saw this again, and I was really proud of it. Myself, Adrian Edmondson, Rik Mayall andNigel Planer are driving a plane across a desert.

It sounds expensive, but the plane was our only prop. But in the end we couldn't land it anywhere we wanted, so we'd drive it from place to place and make it look as if we'd landed there.

This is available to watch on 4OD here.

Detectives On The Edge Of A Nervous Breakdown (1993)

Jim Broadbent and Keith Allen were brilliant in this, and it contains some excellent stuff. It was the follow-up to The Bullshitters, the character who are always going: 'Shut it!" And there was this Jason King character,too.

We were going to have to real thing but he turned out to be so loopy. He wanted to wear riding pinks, and we said fine, then he wanted to ride a horse or something – a scene that just wasn't there – and his demands got more and more eccentric and we just gave up. Instead we took the piss, but quite affectionately, I hope.

This is available to not available to watch online, but The Bullshitters is on 4OD here.

  • The Comic Strip Presents… Five Go To Rehab is on Gold at 9pm on Wednesday.

Published: 5 Nov 2012

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