Tag Archives: spittingimage

John Sessions (1953-2020)

Posted on by

It’s one of the great mysteries of pop culture, up there with who buys The Wire magazine and who goes to Snow Patrol gigs – why wasn’t comedian/actor John Sessions a bigger star (born John Marshall, he sadly died in 2020)?

Only very occasionally these days do you see something on TV that stops time. It happened to movingtheriver recently watching Sessions performing a monologue in the style of James Joyce on classic late-‘80s improv show ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway’ (RIP the brilliant Tony Slattery, by the way).

He also did a note-perfect impression of theatre director Peter Brook in the programme around the same time. No wonder he was one of David Brent’s comedy heroes.

It was a reminder of that period when comedy could be intelligent, educated, even ‘literary’, dammit. You weren’t terminally terrified of talking down to your audience. Performers like Sessions, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Steve Martin and Robin Williams raised you up, made you want to learn more about their references, generally punched up rather than punched down.

He was born in 1953 to Scottish parents, and studied English Lit at university, then attended RADA and had early TV successes with ‘Porterhouse Blue’, ‘Spitting Image’ and Simon Gray’s ‘Common Pursuit’ play alongside Fry and Rik Mayall. Then, from my perspective as a casual fan, he seemed (a bit like Slattery) to slightly disappear.

He went to the States to co-star in a few dodgy American rom-coms such as ‘Sweet Revenge’ with Rosanna Arquette and Carrie Fisher, as well as a few movies directed by his RADA schoolmate Kenneth Branagh, but you wonder if he could have broken through to a much bigger audience – could he have played Chaplin in Richard Attenborough’s 1993 biopic? Could he have come to Woody Allen’s attention?

There were also some one-man shows on TV, ‘Stella Street’ in the mid-1990s (surely he does the best-ever impression of Al Pacino), and a whole host of guest appearances including ‘Outnumbered’. It’s always a pleasure to dip into Sessionsland.

Nine Memorable 1980s Pop Parodies

Posted on by

The HeeBee GeeBees

One adjective you couldn’t use about 1980s pop is ‘boring’. The music had way too much character and the artists too much physical presence for that.

But 1980s music culture was easy to lampoon. And there was so much mainstream TV to do the lampooning, from ‘Not The Nine O’Clock News’ and ‘The Goodies’ to ‘The Kenny Everett Video Show’ and ‘Spitting Image’.

And across the pond, of course, there was ‘Saturday Night Live’. Then there were the radio spoofs and specially-constructed ‘bands’ like The Hee Bee Gee Bees. All in all it was a golden era for satire.

So here we round up some classic spoofs of 1980s music, with a few recurring subjects…

9. Not The Nine O’Clock News: ‘Happy Crappy Nappy Song’
Inane pop pretenders or joyous post-punk tunesmiths? If you thought Altered Images were the former, Pamela Stephenson and pals pretty much nailed the Glaswegian band’s shtick right here.

8. Stevie Nicks: ‘What The Hell Is She Saying?’
Who the hell is responsible for this classic?

 

7. Not The Nine O’Clock News: ‘Nice Video, Shame About The Song’
It’s the naughty gang again, this time brilliantly skewering early ‘80s pop videos, particularly the work of pioneers Russell ‘Vienna’ Mulcahy and David ‘Ashes To Ashes’ Mallet.

 

6. The Hee Bee Gee Bees: ‘Quite Ahead Of My Time’
Angus Deayton, Phil Pope and Michael Fenton Stevens brilliantly lampoon David Bowie’s 1976-1980 era, with nods to ‘Golden Years’, ‘Ashes To Ashes’, ‘African Night Flight’, ‘Fashion’, ‘It’s No Game’ and even ‘The Secret Life Of Arabia’. There’s also a touch of Eno and Bowie’s ‘point to some chord signs with a baton and get the band to play them’ Berlin-era modus operandi about the music here.

 

5. Spitting Image: ‘We’re Scared Of Bob’
Lyrically and musically spot-on, and also highlights the use of minor celebs in ‘We Are The World’ and ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’.

 

4. The Kenny Everett Video Show: The Bee Gees
Ten years before Clive Anderson’s disastrous TV interview, Kenny nails the inescapable naffness of the Brothers Gibb.

 

3. The Hee Bee Gee Bees: ‘Too Depressed To Commit Suicide’
The first of two Police pastiches, Messrs. Deayton, Pope and Fenton Stevens (apparently with amusing lyrical input by Richard Curtis too) offer a great distillation of their sound, somewhere between ‘Walking On The Moon’ and ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’. Also check out the delicious piss-taking of Stewart Copeland’s penchant for adding ‘delays’ (echoes) to his drums.

 

2. Weird Al Yankovic: ‘Velvet Elvis’
Not as good as the previous track – his voice is pretty poor – but musically it’s pretty damn sharp.

 

1. Saturday Night Live: Frank Sinatra and Stevie Wonder
Just a timeless classic…

Any classic ’80s parodies missing here? Leave a comment below.

Spitting Image: We’re Scared Of Bob

Posted on by

In the ’80s, there was no shortage of pop coverage to inspire conversation in the playground, whether it was Boy George’s first appearance on ‘Top Of The Pops’, Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video or Matt Bianco being verbally abused live on children’s TV.

Of course it really helped that there were only four terrestrial channels to choose from, breeding a feeling of community and sense of occasion.

But one TV show absolutely guaranteed to get the creative juices flowing and rescue many a depressing Sunday evening was ‘Spitting Image’.

Just a cursory look at a show from its mid-’80s peak leaves one stunned at the craftsmanship and production values on offer, especially as they only had a few days to write, build and shoot each episode. There were some good musical spoofs too, composed by Philip Pope, fresh from UK comedy classic ‘Not The Nine O’Clock News’ and his parody band The Hee Bee Gee Bees, who even managed a few hits in the early ’80s.

‘Spitting Image’ also featured some memorable Phil Collins, ZZ Top and Madonna skits, and they even managed to rope Sting in to re-sing this. But ‘We’re Scared Of Bob’ is full of surprises and surely the best spoof. Its sheer potency is still a shock to the system. You also suspect that Sir Gandalf was watching, so unmissable was the programme in the mid-’80s.

Why isn’t there anything like this around now? Oh, lack of money and talent, probably. A show like ‘Spitting Image’ also highlights the paucity of genuinely interesting musical (and public) figures these days.