When Keith Allen got us kicked out of hotel

DIRECTOR and screenwriter Peter Richardson will be on familiar ground when he comes to Henley next Saturday.

The creator of the Comic Strip will be at the town’s cinema talking about the hit TV series as well as showing a couple of the original parody films and taking part in a question and answer session with one of his co-stars, Keith Allen.

“I like Henley,” says Peter, now 72. “We did Gino: Full Story and Pics there in the autumn of ’83, which is why we’re showing it at the Regal.

“We were based in Henley and we had a riotous crew and cast led by Keith, who got us all banned from our hotel.

“We came back from a day’s shooting, not very far away, to find all our suitcases on the street. We’d been kicked out.

“I don’t know which hotel it was but that’s how I remember it.

“We shot Gino just over the hill on a big, flat area towards Wallingford, that big area towards the Thames that looks like a different landscape.

“I’ve used it a couple of times for other films. I did Eat the Rich there as well in the summer of ’86. I loved it because it’s very minimal.”

The plot for Gino involves the eponymous character, played by Allen, a cab driver turned “celebrity” fugitive on the run.

He keeps bumping into people who have it much worse than him and the media take chase.

“We were ahead of our time,” says. “The film was about a black transvestite played by Al Pillay, who became Al-Lana Pillay and then went back to becoming Alan Pillay after the shoot, so it was quite
confusing.

“It was very funny with Robbie Coltrane having a breakdown in a Jaguar, knocking back a bottle of whisky and having epileptic seizures as he’s driving at 90mph — it’s black high comedy.

“We used a helicopter to shoot that whole landscape and it was great.”

Peter, who lives near Dartmouth in his native Devon, will also be showing The Best of Comic Strip.

“It’s the best scenes we’ve edited specially for this show,” he says. “They go down very well actually as they haven’t aged because they’re stories and they’re on film.

“They seem to last and hold up — it doesn’t matter if people don’t know who Ken Livingstone is or Arthur Scargill is, the satires we’ve done are funny and they’re played by funny people.”

The very first short film in the series, called The Comic Strip, was released in 1981 and starred Peter alongside Adrian Edmondson, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Nigel Planer, Alexei Sayle, Arnold Brown and the late Rik Mayall.

Peter recalls: “Dawn and Jennifer, Robbie Coltrane, Rik, Ade, Nigel, we all started together in 1980 or ’81. It started as a live show in Soho called Comic Strip and it was in one of Paul Raymond’s small strip theatres.

“We ran there for a year and then we went on tour to Australia and the UK and we became the Comic Strip Group, so we had a group of players and then we became a brand of TV films, Comic Strip Presents, and a production company called Comic Strip.”

The series of short films and special episodes ran to 42 in total, with the last one being released in 2016.

Originally aired in 1993, Detectives on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown starred Keith and Peter along with other well-known actors.

“Jim Broadbent, Jim Carter, myself and Keith played these coppers, all from different generations, from the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, and they’re all trying to solve a murder,” explains Peter.

“It’s a Comic Strip film and so you’ve got Jim Broadbent as Shouting George from The Weeny and we played The Professionals, only we called them The Bullshitters, which was me and Keith.”

Peter, whose son, Red, is married to Mayall’s daughter, Rosie, adds: “We were very close and it became a family really.

“We spent 30 years together making films. The last one we did with Rik was Five Go to Rehab, which was in 2012. Most of them now live down here now. Rik moved down here, so did Dawn, so did Jennifer and Adrian, and Keith lived here for a while.

“We stayed at my mum’s house during Five Go Mad in Dorset and Dawn and Jennifer were in bunk beds. My parents used to run a sort of summer school, so we all stayed in bunk beds and Dawn and Jennifer were 21, 22 or something. We had a lot of fun and I can’t fault it really.”

The evening will be hosted by Robin Ince, who hosted last year’s Slapstick Festival in Bristol where Peter met him.

He says: “Robin did such a great job and seems to know our films very well so that made things very easy for us.

“He could kick off with a line like, ‘Why did you do that in such and such a film?’ and we can just come up with the stories and answer the questions.

“Who knows what Keith will get up to? His reputation precedes him, I suspect. There’s quite a few stories about Keith, there’s chapters of his stories.

“I thought it would be such fun to talk about it, you know, have someone even remember us there and say, ‘Yes, we were glad you were thrown out!’”

• The Best of Comic Strip (100 minutes) and a question and answer session is at the Regal Picturehouse in Boroma Way, Henley, at 5.45pm, while the double bill, The Comic Strip Presents Detectives On the Edge + Gino (95 minutes) and a Q & A is at 8.30pm, both on Saturday, May 18. For more information, call 02073 2l62649 or visit www.picture
houses.com/cinema/regal-picturehouse