THE GOODIES COMEDY SHOW!

The Goodies were a trio of British comedians: Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden, and Bill Oddie. The trio created, wrote for and performed in their eponymous television comedy show from 1970 until 1982, combining sketches and situation comedy. And we love their name!

The three actors met each other as undergraduates at the University of Cambridge, where Brooke-Taylor was studying law, Garden was studying medicine, and Oddie was studying English. Their contemporaries included Graham Chapman, John Cleese, and Eric Idle, who later became members of Monty Python, and with whom they became close friends. Brooke-Taylor and Cleese studied together and swapped lecture notes as they were both law students, but at different colleges within the university. All three Goodies became members of the Cambridge University Footlights Club, with Brooke-Taylor becoming president in 1963, and Garden succeeding him as president in 1964.

The original BBC television series ran from November 1970 to February 1980 , with 67 half-hour episodes, and two forty-five-minute Christmas specials. The series creators also provided the music for the show.

It was one of the first shows in the UK to use chroma key and one of the first to use stop-motion techniques in a live action format. Other effects include hand editing for repeated movement, mainly used to make animals "talk" or "sing", and play speed effects as used in the episode "Kitten Kong". In the series, the threesome travelled around on, and frequently fell off, a three-seater bicycle called the trandem.

Unlike many long-running BBC comedy series, The Goodies has not enjoyed extensive repeats on terrestrial television in the UK. The cast finally took matters into their own hands and arranged with Network Video for the release of a digitally-remastered 'best of' selection entitled The Goodies ... At Last on VHS and DVD in April 2003. A second volume, The Goodies ... At Last a Second Helping was released on Region 2 in February 2005. Series 9 (including the Xmas special) was released on Region 2 as The Goodies – The Complete LWT Series on 26 March 2007 and a fourth volume The Goodies ... At Last Back for More, Again was released on region 2 in 2010 as well as a DVD box set containing all four volumes to celebrate 40 years of The Goodies.

In September 2018, Network released a box set titled The Goodies: The Complete BBC Collection. This set contains every single episode from 1970-1980 (excepting the lost, original version of "Kitten Kong") and, as a bonus feature, a one-hour edit of the show "An Audience with the Goodies," hosted by Stewart Lee and filmed live at Leicester Square in June 2018.