10 Amazing TV Shows You've Probably Never Heard Of
4. This Morning With Richard Not Judy (1998-1999)
The BBC’s whacked out decision to allow iconoclastic alternative comedy duo Stewart Lee and Richard Herring to present two full series of This Morning With Richard Not Judy is one that may never be fully understood. Broadcast early on Sunday afternoons in spring 1998 and 1999, TMWRNJ (as people have been calling it ever since) was a complete anomaly on BBC TV.
TMWRNJ aped the format of popular daytime magazine show This Morning (which, back then was known as This Morning With Richard And Judy, after the presenters). Each episode was forty-five minutes long (ie, twice the length of a sitcom) and consisted of stand-up comedy segments and sketches recorded in front of a live studio audience, interspersed with sketches recorded separately.
As well as versions of Lee and Herring’s dual stand-up routines (where Lee would play the post-ironic pseudo-intellectual hipster wearily fielding Herring’s cheerfully puerile, libidinous man-child), TMWRNJ’s recurring situations and characters took on the characteristics of running gags, developing and becoming funnier (and more absurd) over the course of an entire series.
Lee and Herring’s onscreen relationship was basically the ego babysitting the id, and the rest of their comedy followed suit, peeling back taboos to chortle like kids at the grimy stains on the wall behind them.
It’s a lot less challenging to push boundaries when you’re broadcasting late at night or on an adult-rated DVD. Lee and Herring repeatedly used wordplay to sneak the worst kind of profanity into their Sunday daytime show (swearing while kind of, not really, swearing at all), alongside constant references to sexual deviance, all the whole cheerfully leading sacred cows to the slaughter.
One of Lee’s pet peeves was (and still is) complacency and laziness in television and comedy: the pair ran routines and sketches that viciously caricatured that smugness, gleefully burning the bridge they stood upon. For every skit hinting at Herring’s bombastic attempts to mate with every member of the animal kingdom, there was a spot-on satirical dig at religion, at politics, at cultural attitudes and traditions.
This Morning With Richard Not Judy perfectly bridged the agit-prop alternative comedy of the eighties and the more surreal, avant-garde character-based alternative comedy of the nineties. It remains a baffling curate’s egg: thirteen and a half hours of callow, childish, clever and caustic alternative comedy, broadcast in a time slot surrounded by kids TV and pop music.