FLA 19: Moray Hunter
It’s forty years since Moray Hunter’s career as a writer for television and radio got underway, with his writing collaborator John Docherty (later known as Jack Docherty*). The pair were already part of the Edinburgh sketch troupe The Bodgers, along with Pete Baikie and Gordon Kennedy, who all graduated to their own Radio 4 series in 1985.
With the addition of two more writer-performers, Morwenna Banks and John Sparkes, the sextet formed a company to make television’s Absolutely (Channel 4, 1989–93), establishing a cast of memorable, quotable and occasionally grotesque characters: Little Girl, Don and George, Frank Hovis, Stoneybridge Town Council, The Nice Family, Denzil and Gwynedd, and Moray’s own star turn, the pedantic but cheerful Calum Gilhooley.
As Absolutely Productions diversified into numerous spin-off projects and nurturing talents including Armstrong & Miller and Dom Joly’s Trigger Happy TV, Moray continued writing with John/Jack Docherty on mr don and mr george, The Creatives and The Cup. The Absolutely team minus Docherty reformed in 2013 for three more radio series, while Moray has devised and scripted four series of Alone for Radio 4, starring Angus Deayton.
I’ve been a fan of Moray’s work for, well, 40 years, so was delighted he agreed to participate in First Last Anything, one morning in June 2023. I hope you enjoy our chat.
[*In 1988, John Docherty became Jack Docherty for professional performing purposes due to Equity union rules (there was already a performer called John Docherty), but Moray calls him John throughout our conversation. Fellow Absolutely collaborator John Sparkes will be referred to by his full name to avoid any confusion.]
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MORAY HUNTER
My dad sang in the church choir and did light opera, amateur opera with a company called Southern Light Opera Company in southern Edinburgh. He was good, he was usually the comedy foil. They’d do a show once a year in the King’s Theatre, and it was always sold out because it was filled with family and friends.
I’ve not really followed any interest in musicals or light opera, but I did love those shows at the time, usually great romantic stories: The Desert Song, and then My Fair Lady and The Merry Widow. So those records were in the house, and maybe something like ‘100 Best Classical Tunes’? Unlike those Top of the Pops compilations you used to get back then, these were played by proper people. [Laughter]
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FIRST: BENNY HILL: ‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)’ (Columbia Records, single, 1971)
JUSTIN LEWIS
The Christmas number one of 1971, and your first single.
MORAY HUNTER
Okay. I was feeling slightly awkward about this one…
JUSTIN LEWIS
I watched him as a kid a lot because he did TV parodies and I loved anything like that. He was clever on that front in the 50s and 60s with television techniques and playing all the parts in the sketches.
MORAY HUNTER
Yeah, although there was always that end-of-the-pier thing going on, and the scantily-clad women got harder to defend. But ‘Ernie’ did make me laugh.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Strange to think now that ‘Ernie’ was much played by Junior Choice.
MORAY HUNTER
Ignoring the double entendres. Was Junior Choice hosted by Ed Stewpot Stewart? One week, he read out this request from Edinburgh, a message from a guy in Pilton for another chap in Drylaw nearby. These two gangland areas basically, with young boys running around in gangs. And the message was: ‘I’d like you to play “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us” by Sparks.’ A threat on the airwaves – and Stewpot was like, ‘What a lovely message.’ [Laughter]
JUSTIN LEWIS
‘Ernie’ is kind of a Western pastiche, isn’t it? Certainly in its accompanying promo.
MORAY HUNTER
Yeah, that was kind of ahead of its time as well, the video.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Novelty records back then all seemed to be story songs and someone dies at the end. They all seemed to do that. Well… okay, ‘Lily the Pink’ by the Scaffold did it as well. That makes two. [Laughter]
[I thought of other examples afterwards. ‘Paddy McGinty’s Goat’. ‘The Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly.’ ‘Hole in the Ground’ by Bernard Cribbins.]
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MORAY HUNTER
We got an Alba stereo in 1971 – it was like a Dansette, but a bit bigger than that with one separate speaker. Our parents got us The Best of Andy Williams and The Best of the Seekers. But we had some money put aside and we could go out and get our own records.
I had Bridge Over Troubled Water. I bought the lyrics book for that which had the chords – like ‘El Condor Pasa’, which I wasn’t particularly a fan of, but it was quite an easy play for a guy learning guitar. ‘The Only Living Boy in New York’ is probably my favourite track on that. The harmonies, just beautiful. That great story about that song when Art Garfunkel went off to film Catch 22, and Paul Simon was a bit pissed off: ‘What am I doing? I’m here on my own. And why aren’t you here?’
JUSTIN LEWIS
The cracks in the relationship, I guess.
MORAY HUNTER
They didn’t last that much longer.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Obviously they did the odd gig after that. But before the album was even released, they knew they were done.
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MORAY HUNTER
I love singer-songwriters, and the acoustic guitar. That’s been the basis of everything for me musically, really, and James Taylor, with Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, was one of the first for me.
JUSTIN LEWIS
He’s interesting, because he’d signed to the Beatles’ Apple label initially, and then became the biggest singer-songwriter of the time. Has everyone covered ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ now?
MORAY HUNTER
Not even his song, of course! It’s Carole King! It’s his ex, his first ex-wife, so…
JUSTIN LEWIS
Yeah, who plays on the record.
MORAY HUNTER
And then recorded it on Tapestry. But I don’t think she released it as a single.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Another early purchase: Piledriver by Status Quo, from 1972. I don’t think I had ever actually heard a Quo album from start to finish, apart from greatest hits sets. This one fully establishes them with the 12-bar boogie era, after their first couple of years in psychedelia. Apparently they heard ‘Roadhouse Blues’ by The Doors somewhere in Germany, and they thought, ‘Oh – we could do something like that’, and that was the basis for the Quo sound. And they cover ‘Roadhouse Blues’ on this record.
MORAY HUNTER
I remember going to see them. My first gig had been a Strawbs gig (21 March 1973), at Usher Hall in Edinburgh, and they’d just brought out that awful single…
JUSTIN LEWIS
‘Part of the Union’?
MORAY HUNTER
Yeah, but the previous album, Grave New World (1972) had been great. So I went to see them, but the next night (22 March 1973), a lot of mates went to see Status Quo at the Caley Picture House, and that sounded like much more fun: ‘Okay, I’ll get my denims out.’ Quo was always a good night. You’d go and see them playing at the Apollo in Renfield Street in Glasgow, and catch the last train home – and the balcony would famously go up and down when folks were jumping up and down. Quite worrying, if you’re underneath it. Or on top of it.
JUSTIN LEWIS
I wish I’d heard them properly at that time, because by the 80s when I was 14, 15… they were brilliant at Live Aid, of course… but they were almost showbiz rock by then. And I once shared a house at university with someone who had a Quo greatest hits which had this terrible medley single on it [‘The Anniversary Waltz Parts I & II’, 1990], which seemed to be their attempt to cover every song ever written.
MORAY HUNTER
Their nadir, really. But I went to see them a few years after that – John Doc and Pete are also fans – and they’d obviously worked out they should be playing the earlier stuff again.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Next, Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust – was it seeing ‘Starman’ on Lift Off or Top of the Pops?
MORAY HUNTER
I was living a sheltered life in Edinburgh, so never mind the make up and when he’s draping himself around Mick Ronson – I was simply amazed by a blue guitar. So I got into Ziggy Stardust, then Aladdin Sane… I remember a pal of mine, Al, always very up-to-date musically, and him playing me ‘Time’ – ‘Time falls wanking to the floor’… and then I went back and listened to Hunky Dory, which came out before those two. Someone asked on Twitter the other week, ‘run of best three Bowie albums’, and I think those would be mine.
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JUSTIN LEWIS
How did you begin writing comedy, then?
MORAY HUNTER
Growing up in Edinburgh, there were lots of single sex schools and my parents went to a church called Greenbank Church. I wasn’t terribly religious, but there was a youth fellowship there, which was a place to meet girls, really. It was called the Junior Quest when you were about 15 or 16 and then you went on to Senior Quest, but both versions joined forces for an annual show at the Churchill Theatre, the highlight of the Quest year. And we’d write our own material. I think the first-ever sketch I’d written was this Robin Hood item, with lots of gags probably from a joke book, and I cast myself as Robin Hood, but I was told afterwards I’d been mouthing everyone’s lines, because I’d written it. So that was a habit I had to break. And by Senior Quest, I was directing that show a couple of times, writing lots of it.
JUSTIN LEWIS
The four members of the Bodgers – you, Pete Baikie, Gordon Kennedy and John Docherty – were all at the same school, right? In different years, admittedly.
MORAY HUNTER
We were, we were. Pete and I were in the same class aged five, although we weren’t mates then, but this Quest thing brought us together, because we got him to take over the folk group, and he mentored me through it, because he’s obviously an accomplished musician. I could get by on guitar.
Then I wrote lots of our sixth form revue at school, and after university, I was working as an apprentice lawyer, and watching Not the Nine O’Clock News, looking at the writers’ list and thinking, ‘Who’s this Richard Curtis who’s writing every week, and Colin Bostock-Smith? I’d like to be on that list one day’, and I really started getting the bug. I also realised [the legal profession] was not for me.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Didn’t John Docherty also study law, or start studying it at least?
MORAY HUNTER
He was at Aberdeen University, and like me, he knew that this just wasn’t for him. I think he wrote on his last exam paper the words ‘Parting is such sweet, sweet sorrow’.
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JUSTIN LEWIS
Just as you were noting who wrote Not the Nine O’Clock News, I was also interested in who wrote things. So seeing you and John in the end credits of various shows – Radio Active, In One Ear, Spitting Image – meant that I tuned in specially for In Other Words… the Bodgers (BBC Radio 4, 1985), your first series. And quite a few sketches would turn up from that when you began doing Absolutely in 1989. ‘This is radical television… We’re behind the set… Beat this! I’m still in the dressing room!’
MORAY HUNTER
We first did that sketch in the theatre, in the Pleasance in Edinburgh. It worked well, but the best bit was we found that John, if we gave him enough time, could rush upstairs, get into the roof, and there was this well, this trapdoor where he could stick his head out and surprise the audience, having been on stage a minute before.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Apparently, Angus Deayton gave you and John your break as writers for radio and TV.
MORAY HUNTER
Angus had seen us in Edinburgh in 1982, although it was John Gorman who contacted us. He’d been in the Scaffold, but had been working with Chris Tarrant on Tiswas, OTT and now this new late-night show called Saturday Stayback (Central/ITV, 1983). Angus had contacted Stayback about us because he was going to script edit the series. We sold a lot of our best sketches to Stayback and it wasn’t quite our cup of tea, but it paid very well.
JUSTIN LEWIS
A strange show. A sort of variety sketch show with live music, but set in a real Midlands pub with what appears to be real customers.
MORAY HUNTER
But it led to us working with Angus on Radio Active [for three series, 1983–85]. So all this was his doing. God bless him.
JUSTIN LEWIS
It’s back to ‘who wrote things’, isn’t it? I’d watch Alas Smith and Jones, see twenty writers’ names flash by and then the long game was trying to work out who had written what. Like discovering you and John had written the ‘Hi-Fi Sales Conference’ sketch, a favourite of mine: ‘What do all the buttons do?’ [Alas Smith and Jones Series 3, Episode 1: 18 September 1986]:
MORAY HUNTER
That’s probably the best thing we ever wrote for them. When Mel and Griff did the sketch, it was a studio night, we were in the audience, it got a decent reception, and they announced, ‘The two guys that wrote this are actually here’ and they made us stand – though we were a bit shy – and we got a round of applause. Which was a nice touch.
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LAST: WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR: Maverick Thinker (Chrysalis Records, 2021)
Extract: ‘Maverick Thinker’
MORAY HUNTER
A gang of us go up north every September, for a few days carousing and maybe some golf, some fishing, some drinking. I was going up with one of the guys, Doug, in his car, with his music on, and I had my Shazam out. That’s how I discovered William the Conqueror, a trio with Ruarri Joseph from Edinburgh originally but now living in Cornwall, plus Naomi Holmes (bass) and Harry Harding (drums). They’re indie rock, with a slight Americana feel to it. Ruarri had made three solo albums – more acoustic – but now it’s more electric guitar.
Ruarri’s lyrics are quite imperceptible at times, very poetic and a great read, but it’s more a mood thing with him. He’s got a great voice – half-sings, half-speaks. In fact, one of his songs, ‘Maverick Thinker’, starts with him saying about how he spoke to his mum: ‘I phoned my mum and she says you don’t sing like you used to.’ I’m sure that’s autobiographical because he’s just telling a story or talking, but then gradually singing it. It just works.
Doug also put me on to Peter Bruntnell, also a bit Americana, although I don’t know where he’s from…
JUSTIN LEWIS
New Zealand apparently. But he’s been settled over here quite some time.
MORAY HUNTER
I recently saw him in the Voodoo Rooms in Edinburgh, in a room with about fifty people packed in. Absolutely brilliant, and there was a three-piece group, with this local guy, Iain Sloan, on steel guitar, and a bass player called Peter Noone, but not the Herman’s Hermits guy.
Another mate of mine put me onto Colin Hay. There’s a fascinating Netflix documentary about him: Waiting for My Real Life (2015). He emigrated with his family to Australia. He started Men At Work. Huge success. Things fell apart. He’s on his uppers, he ends up moving to LA, and the documentary joins him as he’s gigging again. He’s just one man with a guitar turning up at a venue with maybe a hundred people, and he’s got three or four well-known hits from Men at Work, and his new stuff. He’s very witty. I saw him recently at the Fruit Market in Glasgow, a really special night. And that song, ‘Waiting for My Real Life to Begin’… I’ve always felt like that myself.
JUSTIN LEWIS
That’s a good philosophy – your attitude is still active: ‘Okay, what’s next?’
MORAY HUNTER
Yeah, things could be better. He was rags to riches, and he’s not rich again, but he’s a really contented man. You can tell that he’s just so comfortable in himself, and happy with what he’s doing.
JUSTIN LEWIS
It’s about having creative control. It bothers me when people accuse young people of wanting to be famous – I think the majority of them want some kind of success in doing something interesting.
MORAY HUNTER
That’s what Colin Hay looks like. A man in control when he turns up. He knows that’s all he needs and that’s it. He’s stripped his life down to that.
JUSTIN LEWIS
And in the same vein, perhaps: Rab Noakes. Now, I know you must have seen him live quite a lot, you’ve been a big fan for many years, and I remember seeing your tweet when he died, only last year.
MORAY HUNTER
My older brother who was at Dundee University, was into him. He went to one of his gigs at the University Union, ‘71 or ‘72, and he grabbed a few friends to come along, none of whom knew who Rab was. And there was a raffle for his new album [Rab Noakes, 1972].
JUSTIN LEWIS
The one with ‘Drunk Again’ on it.
MORAY HUNTER
Yeah. My brother won the raffle, and probably deserved to because he brought a few folk along. It was a signed album, but he got Rab to sign it again. There was a little dog in the photo and he signed it ‘Pony’ for the dog. I think it must have been the dog’s name. Anyway. Three years later, I’m at Dundee University, Rab Noakes is playing the Union again, and I grab a few people to There’s a raffle for the new album [Never Too Late, 1975], and I win it. I go backstage and try and explain to him how amazing it is because my brother had won another raffle three years earlier…
Luckily, later on, I got to know Rab a bit. Doing The Bodgers in Edinburgh in 1984, we took over the Calton Studios, and we had a few slots to sell – and Rab came and did a few late-night slots, and he came and saw us and was very nice. And [in the late 1980s] when he became a radio producer [at BBC Radio Scotland], I ended up doing some shows for him, like our St Andrew’s Day show.
I have another memory of Rab. In the 90s, I was working in Glasgow for a few weeks, and on my day off, I couldn’t find his latest album – Standing Up (1994) – in any of the shops. As I came out of HMV in Argyle Street, standing in front of me was Rab. He said, ‘What are you doing here?’ And I said, ‘I’m looking for your new album and I can’t find it anywhere.’ So, being Rab, he asked me for my address, and two days later, it came through my letterbox.
JUSTIN LEWIS
That’s lovely.
MORAY HUNTER
They say never meet your heroes, but that does not apply in this case.
JUSTIN LEWIS
That career path of becoming a radio producer made me think of Pete Atkin who’d been in that duo with Clive James, writing and performing songs, and then he became an entertainment producer at BBC Radio in London. In fact, when Rab became a producer at Radio Scotland, there was a youth programme on the station called Bite the Wax. With a young guy called Armando Iannucci and another guy called Eddie Mair.
MORAY HUNTER
In fact, Rab became Robert Noakes for a period because he felt he wanted to separate the singer-songwriter Rab from Robert. It never took, the Robert thing! A great man.
JUSTIN LEWIS
I found a Melody Maker gig review from 1970, in London. It mentions that the audience, who had probably never seen Rab before, had a rapport with him and the songs, and were already able to join in on choruses. Clearly there’s a real warmth in the performances from the get-go.
MORAY HUNTER
Very self-effacing and I think that endears him to people. He wasn’t a showman, but very egalitarian – just as likely to come in lugging an amp as anyone else. Folk pick up on that. And there are catchy tunes, which help.
JUSTIN LEWIS
And what about the Jackson Browne choice. ‘Late for the Sky’? Which is in Taxi Driver, of course. When Bickle’s watching the TV.
MORAY HUNTER
This one is because of my mate Jem, who I was pals with at university, who had good taste in music. This would have been my second year, 1976. I still adore Late for the Sky. That was my introduction. I realise there’s quite a lot of maudlin stuff in my choices, do you think?
JUSTIN LEWIS
You don’t strike me as that kind of person!
MORAY HUNTER
I was looking at the list, and I think I am ‘glass half full’, but I vary. I have a darker side.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Is that the comedy writing, though?
MORAY HUNTER
A bit of that, yeah. The sad clown thing.
JUSTIN LEWIS
And then there’s Decemberists. I was very lucky to see them live some years ago, at the Brixton Academy.
MORAY HUNTER
Oh, did you?
JUSTIN LEWIS
I didn’t know much of their stuff, I was stunned to discover they’d made about five albums.
MORAY HUNTER
I only really know this album. ‘June Hymn’ so beautifully evokes summer… there’s the line about summer coming to Springville Hill, which is near where they are in Portland, in Oregon. It just makes me think of those endless summers when you’re a kid and you think, ‘I’m never going back to school, this is life now.’ I love the harmonies and Colin Meloy’s got such a great voice.
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JUSTIN LEWIS
How did you and John Docherty become mainstays in the Spitting Image writers’ room?
MORAY HUNTER
We had applied for the annual writers’ contract at BBC Radio, encouraged to do so by Angus Deayton, him again, and we got the gig. We started in April 1984. We were hanging around the Radio Light Entertainment corridor, writing for various shows. At the meeting with [head of Radio LE] Martin Fisher, he said, ‘If you get offered BBC telly, we’d understand – but what we don’t want, is if you wrote for The Other Side, [meaning ITV and Channel 4].’ We went, ‘No problem’, never thinking that only six weeks later, we’d be hired for what was the second series of Spitting Image. Rob Grant and Doug Naylor had taken over script editing the show, and if memory serves, our radio producer Alan Nixon (who had worked with them on Son of Cliché) had talked us up to them. And then ‘Spit” offered us about the same amount of money for the series that we were getting for the whole year of writing for radio. It was a big, big show. We felt we had no option but to go for it.
JUSTIN LEWIS
I remember going to school the Monday morning after the first ever episode [February 1984], and everyone was a bit ‘Hmm, not sure’ – but by the second run that summer, it was absolutely unmissable.
MORAY HUNTER
We loved it when Chris Barrie got hold of how to do the voice of the sports commentator and presenter David Coleman.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Yes, the Question of Sport host then.
MORAY HUNTER
We didn’t really do much politics, John and I, we were kind of ‘the silly department’. We had this idea about Coleman getting confused and commentating on the opening title graphics for Sportsnight by mistake. At the time, the titles for Sportsnight had a clip of the Boat Race, with Oxford and Cambridge sinking, and the previous clip was Everton winning the League. They cut to the Boat Race and ‘Coleman’ is going, ‘Oh my god, and Everton are sinking.’
JUSTIN LEWIS
I love that ‘Coleman’ item where he’s doing the athletics commentary, and the bell sounds for the last lap, and he just goes absolutely bananas: ‘I’ve gone too soon, there’s a whole lap to go. Disaster for Coleman!’ And he ends up exploding.
MORAY HUNTER
That was a favourite trick on the show. Like the death at the end of the comedy song, having the puppet explode was our equivalent.
JUSTIN LEWIS
‘Coleman’ is immediately hilarious on Spitting Image. What Chris Barrie gets right is that detail from time to time that he had the faintest remnant of a north country accent.
MORAY HUNTER
I never knew he was from the north.
JUSTIN LEWIS
He was born in Cheshire [Alderley Edge, it transpires]. It was still the days when BBC presenters had their regional accents smoothed out.
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Absolutely, 1989 (l-r): Moray Hunter, Gordon Kennedy, John Sparkes, Morwenna Banks, Pete Baikie, Jack Docherty
JUSTIN LEWIS
What was the thinking behind setting up an independent production company to make Absolutely? You just wanted to do it yourselves?
MORAY HUNTER
Basically, that. And Alan Nixon at BBC Radio Light Entertainment really pushed us to do that. After including us in a few Pick of the Fringe radio shows, Alan had asked us to do the Bodgers radio series [In Other Words… The Bodgers, 1985], after which there were some complaints that we all sounded the same, and they didn’t know how many Scottish guys were in it. So for a second series, we got some extra voices, our pals Morwenna Banks and John Sparkes, so it became Bodgers, Banks and Sparkes (BBC Radio 4, 1986). So then, there was a woman from Cornwall, a Welsh guy and there’s still ‘is it four or five Scottish guys’?
When we tried to sell Absolutely, for television, STV were briefly keen on the idea. But when Channel 4 expressed interest, Alan Nixon said, ‘You know, we could do it.’ Absolutely was a funny company at the start because the six of us set it up with Alan, and two other producers, Jamie Rix and David Tyler. But clearly to begin with, the company was mainly going to be about the Absolutely show. So Alan became the sole producer until some of us started producing shows ourselves further down the line. But yes, it was really to get control. Once we got a couple of production fees, we could get an office, and see what else we could do. It was a good model.
JUSTIN LEWIS
And obviously Don and George, which was you and John Docherty, had some TV exposure before Absolutely. Friday Night Live (Channel 4, 1988), of course, but also on a variety show in Scotland a year earlier called The Terry Neason Show.
MORAY HUNTER
Oh god, that’s right. We first did Don and George as a couple of tweed-suited peak-capped buffers.
JUSTIN LEWIS
As much older characters?
MORAY HUNTER
For some New Year Hogmanay shows. We did one with Craig Ferguson and Peter Capaldi, we’re all just starting out really, and the next year with [Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson’s] Victor and Barry characters. They’d written a song for the four of us, and I had about a day to desperately learn these lyrics. If you catch the clip of it, I lose it for about a whole verse – much to John D’s amusement later on – which reminds me, oddly enough, of what my dad used to do on stage with Southern Light Opera.
JUSTIN LEWIS
I’ve heard you and Gordon, and John all mention that you were trying to avoid certain types of comedy with Absolutely – so no TV parodies or celebrities or overt politics. Some armchair psychology here, but is that partly because you’d just done four years on Spitting Image? And also, almost nobody’s doing character comedy in ’88. Harry Enfield is, Barry Humphries, and a few others. But almost everyone else is doing sitcom, stand-up or impressions.
MORAY HUNTER
A lot of political comedy stand-up, yeah. We weren’t very political, we didn’t want to be. I think ‘no parody’ was John Docherty’s suggestion initially. I hadn’t thought about the Spitting Image thing – it could have been that. But doing characters helped place it in the real world, somehow, even though we were doing some surreal stuff in that real world. It was a good rule, although it was very annoying at times, if you had a good parody sketch and you couldn’t do it.
JUSTIN LEWIS
All this is to Absolutely’s advantage – it remains remarkably fresh all these years later.
MORAY HUNTER
It’s contemporary but not topical.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Because the trouble with leaning on personalities and impressions is that, 30 years on, nobody knows who most of them are. Interesting from a social and historical perspective, perhaps, but not always in terms of the comedy.
MORAY HUNTER
Though we did cheat once, with that U2/Simple Minds spoof video. I think it was a Pete and John D thing. [Absolutely, Series 2 Episode 8, final item]
JUSTIN LEWIS
I always saw that as a composite parody. There were so many bands making videos like that at the time! On the subject of Absolutely music, was Pete writing all the song lyrics himself?
MORAY HUNTER
Sometimes we’d write with him, they’d toss the lyrics around, but he did a lot of them himself – in the Absolutely Radio Show more recently, just about all of them. He’s a brilliant songwriter.
JUSTIN LEWIS
It strikes me that a lot of the humour in Absolutely is not coming from television, but from other places: absurdist cinema or theatre, or even literature.
MORAY HUNTER
Yeah. Pete’s always tried to do something a bit unexpected, it’s just in his nature – John D too, probably. John Sparkes had trained as an actor and had done a lot of physical comedy, so he wanted to bring that to bear. But we had a lot of time to fill in the early series, a longer slot than half-an-hour, so we’d have these epic 10-minute sketches… like a battle outside a pub with the Salvation Army… But by series four, which was six half-hours, we were doing three-minute sketches. In a way, I preferred the longer stuff because we were really letting go.
After series four (1993), Channel 4 wanted another series, and we had an idea of having a town where all our characters lived, but we never had quite the nerve to do it. And a wee while later, the League of Gentlemen did that and absolutely bloody nailed it! For years I thought we had made a mistake by not doing another series, but we had been running on empty a bit by series four, and I was certainly writing less material by that series.
JUSTIN LEWIS
How did the writing sessions work? I picture a situation rather like Monty Python where the six of you would read stuff out to the group.
MORAY HUNTER
At the start of a new series, we’d go away for a couple of days, an excuse to get in a room together with lovely food and nice drink. We’d put a whiteboard up and discuss things. In the early days, John and I were actually still writing together, mostly physically in a room. Later we’d write separately and bring things in. But also John D would work on stuff with Morwenna, as would I.
A lot of stuff we’d read out would be quite messy, though you could see the kernel of an idea and where it was going. John Sparkes’ stuff, though, was really tight, handwritten scripts – it was finished, basically. Those Denzil and Gwynedd sketches – they are absolutely packed, two and a half minutes. And that room of theirs being slightly askew is a good metaphor for Absolutely. Everything is leaning a slightly different way.
I’m about the words, really, I wasn’t so much into the surreal although John D and I did take Don and George in a very surreal direction in Absolutely and then in their own series [mr don and mr george, Channel 4, 1993]. I like ‘real’ stuff, but obviously there’s a big chunk of me that’s happy doing big and silly.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Was there meant to be a second series of mr don and mr george? You were certainly writing it, I believe.
MORAY HUNTER
We had big plans for it, and they commissioned a couple of scripts because they weren’t sure. and the story we got was it was nixed because [then Channel 4 boss] Michael Grade’s son didn’t get into it. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. It was a shame. It’s one of my regrets that we didn’t get to do more of that. The success of Father Ted shows that going surreal can work.
JUSTIN LEWIS
I always thought Don and George had the potential to cross over to a much younger audience. I could imagine kids liking that show.
MORAY HUNTER
That’s a very good point. We were going out at [half-ten on a Wednesday] with that first series and that turned into a hard slot. You could do edgier, racier stuff there, and we were not doing that! It should have been out at 7 or half-seven.
JUSTIN LEWIS
When you revived Absolutely for Radio 4 in 2013, John D wasn’t involved. I know he was doing Scot Squad, a semi-improvised sitcom for BBC1 in Scotland, very successful. I’m presuming you hadn’t fallen out…
MORAY HUNTER
No, we hadn’t fallen out. He didn’t really fancy doing Absolutely again. I think he just felt it was ‘going backwards’. It could withstand one member not being involved, although in a way John was almost the unofficial leader of the group – he wrote loads of material and was also good at developing other people’s ideas. Initially I wasn’t sure, but I thought maybe we could survive without him. It’s not the same without him, but I still think it stood up as a show. When Python lost Cleese [for Monty Python’s Flying Circus series four], they could still do a decent Python show.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Interesting parallel because Cleese was often described as the unofficial leader of Python.
MORAY HUNTER
‘The tall one with the silly legs.’ It was funny to do Absolutely without John D but, apart from anything, it was a good social thing, getting the gang back together. It was still slightly nerve-wracking to read out stuff to the group, but it’s not a bad process.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Returning to some of those characters, were you wondering where they were in their lives? Had they aged in your minds?
MORAY HUNTER
Definitely. All this technology had been happening in the meantime, so much for the likes of Calum to get to grips with – or not get to grips with. So it was joyous to revisit those characters, and find there’s still life in them, talking about the issues of the day and contemporary life.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Is it true that you’ve written a pilot for the Calum character?
MORAY HUNTER
I wrote a sitcom script for him. I should have done it years ago. There's a lot more depth to that character, I think, than was initially suggested. I’ve just written about four and a half thousand words of what would be a Calum book, which I’m quite keen to try and get someone interested in. Partly to bring him up to date, but also include some favourite sketches from over the years. That could also be quite a nice audiobook.
JUSTIN LEWIS
A Calum autobiography! I’ve always found him endearingly cheerful.
MORAY HUNTER
Yeah, he’s positive, actually.
JUSTIN LEWIS
He’s not a stock ‘nerd’ character. Just as Frank Hovis’s redeeming feature is he’s incredibly apologetic about his predicaments, and Morwenna refuses to do Little Girl as ‘cute’. They’re not clichés.
MORAY HUNTER
Calum has changed, though. John D invented him for our Edinburgh show in 1987 (The Couch), and he said, ‘You’ve got to play this guy’, and I said, ‘Fair enough’ – one of the biggest gifts I ever got. At that stage he was just an annoying friend of John’s – funny in itself.
But over the years, because Calum’s pedantic and annoying, he can point out when other people are being boring and annoying. Like the coffee shop sketch in the radio series where they say, ‘Do you want anything else with that?’, which they always do, even though you haven’t asked for anything. And so he says, ‘Okay, well, what else have you got? Can you list everything…?’ He’s more on our side of it now. Sometimes he’s making a good point.
JUSTIN LEWIS
When we were talking about Benny Hill earlier, it reminded me that he was Tony Benn’s favourite comedian, while Elvis Costello was a big fan of the Peter Tinniswood sitcom I Didn’t Know You Cared. Nicola Benedetti, the violinist, would – according to one interview – watch Seinfeld on a loop. Does Absolutely have any surprising celebrity fans that you know of?
MORAY HUNTER
See, I would put Seinfeld on a loop too. In fact, I have done. Recently, I was doing a scene with Miranda Richardson in Good Omens 2, which is coming up this summer. Don’t make a cup of tea or you’ll miss me, but I’m in there. She was great, really charming, and I couldn’t believe I was working with Queenie from Blackadder II – and so much else of course – but yeah, it turned out she was a fan of Absolutely, so that was nice!
JUSTIN LEWIS
Is that it for Absolutely, then? I know there’s no more radio series, but could there ever be a tour?
MORAY HUNTER
We’ve always failed to get a tour sorted. There’s too many naysayers! I don’t think John D would come back for a start. We thought about it during the original run on TV, and again a few years ago, in the midst of the radio show. But there was always one person going, ‘I’m not in the mood, I don’t want to do it’. That is a regret. We should have done it when we’d just done the TV series.
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ANYTHING – RADIOHEAD: OK Computer (Parlophone, 1997)
[Extract: ‘Let Down’]
MORAY HUNTER
OK Computer by Radiohead was a real game-changer for me. Beautiful melodies… but quite rocky as well. It’s just a masterwork, particularly ‘Let Down’, which I love. And then I worked backwards with them: The Bends and then Pablo Honey. As with the Bowie albums, three albums in a row. But then, for me, I’m not sophisticated enough, musically, with Kid A and Hail to the Thief, when they started getting experimental.
JUSTIN LEWIS
I did respect Radiohead for choosing to do something different at a time when they didn’t have to. That takes real nerve.
MORAY HUNTER
Although I just wish they’d done something else differently from what they did. [Laughter] But it’s like Bowie, always coming back, reinventing himself.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Yeah, see, I think my three Bowie albums in a row would be Station to Station, Low, Heroes. A little bit later.
MORAY HUNTER
Another song from recent times: I was watching Guilt, Neil Forsyth’s series. Not only can he write, he’s also got great taste in music. There’s a song in it called ‘My Backwards Walk’ by Frightened Rabbit, which has a sad story behind it, because the lead singer, Scott Hutchison…
JUSTIN LEWIS
He died, is that right?
MORAY HUNTER
Yeah, a troubled guy. You can hear it in his lyrics, and in his voice. But he was also hugely talented. ‘My Backwards Walk’ is about a break-up and he wishes he could do a backwards walk, go back and sort things out.
JUSTIN LEWIS
I’ll have to look that up.
MORAY HUNTER
It’s a beautiful song. What else did I have on my list? ‘I’ll Take You There’ by the Staple Singers. I’m a Hearts fan and when they won the Scottish Cup Final for the first time in my lifetime, in 1998, I set the video to record the game on BBC, in case we won, and went to the game. And during the little video montage afterwards, they played that song. So I fell in love with that, and of course now it evokes a very good day.
JUSTIN LEWIS
Do you still have a deep connection with the Edinburgh music scene?
MORAY HUNTER
I’ve been listening to Adam Holmes, a singer-songwriter. ‘Edinburgh’, from his most recent album, Hope Park, is a love song to the city. As I’m living back up north now [near Berwick], I’m spending more time there, and appreciating it more and more. And there’s Blue Rose Code, which is Ross Wilson, Edinburgh-born but now based in London. He writes some achingly beautiful songs and feeds my need for melancholy. ‘Denouement’ was the first I discovered, again on that journey to the Highlands. The travel was every bit as good as the arrival in this case.
What else have I been listening to lately? I’ve always loved The Cure, a great mix of some poppy songs, and also some ark, brooding melodies – like ‘Lullaby’. ‘So Here We Are’ by Bloc Party, who I don’t know much about, but this is a mesmerising blend of rock and electronica. Similarly addictive is ‘Changes’, not a Bowie cover, by Antonio Williams featuring Kerry McCoy.
I play in a fun band, The Strawmen, with some pals, most of us fairly new to our instruments – I’m learning bass. Our first song was ‘Strawman’ by Lou Reed, hence our name. Our leader, the proper muso in the group is a guy called Marcus Paine, who, apart from his missionary work with us keen amateurs, also heads up a band called Roark – and he’s just released an album, Pelforth Poolside Dusk. So my last song is my current favourite off that: ‘Gone, But Not Forgotten’. He’s a man who knows how to write a hooky chorus and I really enjoy his voice.
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JUSTIN LEWIS
One final Absolutely question. If all six of you were in a pub, as I believe you often were when making the show…
MORAY HUNTER
Still are sometimes!
JUSTIN LEWIS
…what would each of you put on the jukebox? Were you all aware of each other’s musical taste?
MORAY HUNTER
Pete Baikie would put on something by The Beatles. No question about that.
John Docherty would put on Talking Heads. Gordon Kennedy… Gordie’s quite a good singer, he was in a band with Pete called There’s An Awful Lot of Coffee in Brazil, who then changed their name to the Hairstyles. They were a half-serious, half-comedy band. So Gordon might play something by Free or Bad Company. Morwenna, she might play Belle and Sebastian, she’s a big fan. John Sparkes, I have no idea. Basically the Welsh national anthem, although he’s not sporty either, so…
JUSTIN LEWIS
He could hum ‘Greensleeves’.
MORAY HUNTER
Actually, yes. It would be something off the wall with John Sparkes. What was the one he used to do, as Frank Hovis, with a beer glass, spilling the beer everywhere? ‘Tears’ by Ken Dodd. But his version, it has to be ‘Tears’ by John Sparkes.
The Absolutely Radio Show, featuring all three runs of the BBC Radio 4 series plus extra material, is out now, published by BBC Audio.
The television incarnation of Absolutely is available to stream via the Channel 4 website, and is also still available on DVD on the Absolutely Everything set (which contains many many extras).
mr. don & mr. george, TV series is also available to stream via the Channel 4 website.
Many episodes (currently series 2–4) of Moray’s Radio 4 sitcom, Alone – starring Angus Deayton, Abigail Cruttenden, Pierce Quigley, Kate Isitt and Bennett Arron – can be heard on BBC Sounds. All 25 episodes (including the pilot episode) will be available soon via BBC Audiobook.
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FLA 19 PLAYLIST
Moray Hunter
Track 1
‘One Alone’ [from The Desert Song]
Kathryn Grayson and Tony Martin
Track 2
‘Vilia’ [from The Merry Widow, original 1934 recording]
Kitty Carlisle
Track 3
‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)’
Benny Hill
Track 4
‘The Only Living Boy in New York’
Simon and Garfunkel
Track 5
‘You Can Close Your Eyes’
James Taylor
Track 6
‘Don’t Waste My Time’
Status Quo
Track 7
‘Five Years’
David Bowie
Track 8
‘Maverick Thinker’
William the Conqueror
Track 9
‘Handful of Stars’
Peter Bruntnell
Track 10
‘Waiting for My Real Life to Begin’
Colin Hay
Track 11
‘Just Away’
Rab Noakes
Track 12
‘Late for the Sky’
Jackson Browne
Track 13
‘June Hymn’
Decemberists
Track 14
‘Let Down’
Radiohead
Track 15
‘My Backwards Walk’
Frightened Rabbit
Track 16
‘I’ll Take You There’
Staple Singers
Track 17
‘Denouement’
Blue Rose Code
Track 18
‘Edinburgh’
Adam Holmes
Track 19
‘Lullaby’
The Cure
Track 20
‘So Here We Are’
Bloc Party
Track 21
‘Changes’
Antonio Williams featuring Kerry McCoy
Track 22
‘Gone But Not Forgotten’
Roark