Gordon Kennedy - Absolutely Fabulous

Gordon Kennedy is known for a variety of acting and presenting projects over the years, including co-host of the first National Lottery show alongside Anthea Turner, and Little John in the new BBC series of Robin Hood. But it’s for the early ‘90s comedy sketch show, Absolutely, that he’s best remembered.

Though very popular in its day, Absolutely probably endures as something of a cult. Kennedy is realistic enough to admit that any new generation it attracts is probably going to be the children of fans of old, who may at first wonder why their parents are crying with laughter or staying up until four in the morning to watch something that aired 20 years ago: “I’ll take that, that’s fine,” says the amiable 50 year old. “My own children found old videos of Absolutely a few years ago, and once they’d gotten over the shock of their dad actually being quite funny as opposed to old and grumpy, they really enjoyed the show.”

It was at school in Edinburgh that he first met some of future cast members, including Jack Docherty, Moray Hunter and Pete Baikie, and they went on to do comedy shows before joining up with some other friends to do a show at the Fringe: “Because we were locals we always did quite well audience-wise. We never had to worry about that terrible thing where you’re doing the Fringe and two people turn up.”

Encouraged by this positive response and a subsequent nomination for a Perrier comedy award, the group moved to London where a couple of radio shows eventually led to Absolutely being commissioned by Channel 4 in 1989. A silly, surreal, often hilarious sketch show, it’s probably best remembered for Stoneybridge, the Scottish village whose town council was intent on bidding to host the Olympic Games. “We wrote what we thought was funny and then we performed it, and we sank or swam based on our own judgement. We were lucky enough to have a good voice at the time and we worked very hard at the scripts so they were good.”

Unlike many shows of the time, Absolutely has aged reasonably well. According to Kennedy this is probably because it wasn’t an overtly satirical or topical show, and so a lot of the material still stands up: “It’s funny and it’s silly and those few satirical points we made I think are still as relevant today as they were then – they weren’t linked to the news of the day, it was more society. I guess a sketch like the Stoneybridge Olympics takes on a whole new meaning now. We interviewed Ian Hislop for one of the DVD extras and he candidly reckoned that Stoneybridge would probably do a better job of hosting the 2012 Games than London. So it’s funny how those things come around. It’s got a real relevance now that we couldn’t have envisaged at the time. So we’ll just keep quiet about that and let people think how far ahead of our time we were.”

The influence of Absolutely on subsequent comedy sketch shows is something which has been acknowledged by several comedians, including Hislop, Paul Whitehouse and David Baddiel, and Kennedy is very aware of the impact of Absolutely: “I think it probably did influence things, and certainly people like the League of Gentlemen have always said that they really liked the darkness of the show. It was obviously influenced by other comedy shows but it’s still very much of its own type, and there hasn’t really been a show like it before or since. It stands there in its own dark, weird, slightly challenged little world.”

Though four out of the six cast members of Absolutely were Scots, and the show began life at the Fringe, Kennedy doesn’t see it as a particularly Scottish show, but rather that it has a certain Celtic sensibility, given that Morwenna Banks is Cornish and John Sparkes is from Wales. He cites the modesty and the grittiness of it, the railing against the bigger world which a lot of the characters undertake: “But obviously there’s a real Scottish flavour to it, not only in accents but also in the material. But then something like Stoneybridge could be a global thing, the idea of a small town thinking it’s bigger than it is.”

When Absolutely came to the end of its four-series run in 1993, it was probably at the right time for Kennedy, who feels it had naturally run its course by then: “We had probably done as much as we could with the most successful elements, and we all wanted to stretch our creative wings a bit more than a sketch show allowed.”

A successful resurrection on DVD is likely to spark calls for a reunion. Kennedy reckons this is unlikely although he wouldn’t rule out a live tour, something he imagines would be a lot of fun: “It came as a big surprise to me when I read that Jack Docherty said he’d like to tour, because he was always the last one who wanted to do that when we talked about it in the past. If I can find enough in print to make it legally binding then I'll make sure we all do it. Tragically now of course we’re the right age for Stoneybridge so we won’t need to worry about old age make-up and grey hair.”