8. The Curious Orange
British comedy in the 90s took a (HAHA) funny turn. It was no longer enough to provoke laughter the laughter had to be nervous, and it had to come between moments of outright terror. The League of Gentlemen and Chris Morris' Jam are the most obvious examples of the FearCom genre I just made up, but probably the scariest (certainly the most inexplicable) specimen would be The Curious Orange from This Morning with Richard Not Judy. For anyone outside the UK struggling with references to The League of Gentlemen and Chris Morris, nothing about the following paragraph is going to make sense. This Morning with Richard Not Judy was a late-in-the-day vehicle for the comedians Stewart Lee and Richard Herring (the title is a reference to the breakfast morning TV show This Morning with Richard and Judy, hosted by married news team Richard and Judy). It was a loose parody of weekend magazine shows, but it mostly functioned as a delivery mechanism for some industrial-strength 90s surrealism. Lee wore a puritan hat and talked about apostrophes. Herring ate cress and obsessed over Andrea Corr (singer in The Corrs- look, I told you none of this would make sense). This lack of filter was probably why the most utterly bizarre segment of the show, The Curious Orange, left such an impact. The Curious Orange was a curious orange. He asked banal questions about things that interested him ("This week, I'm very curious about this little conundrum..."), to Herring's delight and Lee's disdain. Episode by episode, it became clear that The Curious Orange was insane, at first demanding that he be allowed to sing, then escaping the studio and going on a killing spree, before finally taking the guise of a Davros-style tyrant ("One day you will all see my power!") Since humour is subjective, I'm not going to say that a talking orange is inherently funny. I am going to say that an orange biting a man's face off is on some level not a right thing, and because the show was broadcast around mid-day, tykes such as myself (alright, I was never a tyke) could easily switch channels in time to see that not right thing happening. Nonsensical it may have been, but it was done with such conviction that nothing in the world was more terrifying than a screaming maniacal citrus fruit. He still haunts my nightmares.