Kev F. Sutherland: Comics, Cult TV, and the Rise of the Sock Puppets

Hello, strangers, welcome to Television Times Episode Two.

On this podcast, our guest today is Kev F.

Sutherland.

He's a comic artist, a puppeteer, a comedian, and a graphic novel author.

I first met Kev about seven years ago, and I've since kept in contact with him via social media, so it does have some uses.

Kev's a very talented man, and he's here to talk to us about television, because he prefers to call it broadcast, and we'll find out the history of that particular term shortly.

So please enjoy this, the second episode of Television Times.

And be under no illusion, I'm very grateful that you've chosen to listen to this podcast when there's so many choices available.

Thank you.

Welcome to Television Times, a new podcast with your host me, Steve Otis Gunn.

We'll be discussing television in all its glorious forms.

From my childhood, your childhood, the last ten years, even what's on right now.

So join me as I talk to people you do know and people you don't about what scared them, what inspired them and what made them laugh and cry here on Television Times.

There's one podcast I really enjoyed, which is Steve Keyworth doing the history of the BBC.

It was from his podcast.

I learnt the origin of the word broadcast is its television term.

Because until 1922, it was an agricultural term, meaning flinging seeds widely rather than casting them narrowly.

You would plant seeds or you would...

Is that what it comes from?

Yeah, you cast.

Like you cast a fishing rod, you cast seeds.

He cast his seed upon the ground.

It's an ancient, it must be Middle English.

So you cast something, throw it away.

And someone divined.

It might have been Marconi.

It's around the time of Marconi and people wanting to send out radio.

And they said, I think what we're doing here essentially is broadcasting.

That is, we make a signal that everybody can hear.

And they worked out that there was a difference between narrow casting, which is when you talk person to person, which is what radio had done right up until that point.

And broadcasting, well, you put up a signal and absolutely anybody with a receiver could hear it, which was mind blowing at the time.

And simply nobody had thought of the notion.

And then they had to find a word that suited it.

And broadcasting was born as a term.

But previously, if you look in a Victorian book, and the word broadcasting comes up, you think, what are they talking about broadcasting in Dickens for?

Well, it just means scattering seeds.

It's funny how terminology, it just gets a completely different meaning.

Like my children, you say to stream something, you know, it has nothing, they don't even think about these words, it's always to do with nature, isn't it?

Even seeding when you're talking about torrents.

Yeah, well, capturing concepts.

Anyway, have we started yet?

Obviously, I know you, I've met you, worked with you, I know your talents, but do you want to tell the audience a bit about yourself?

Well, where Steve knows my talents from is he had to sit in a room for a month watching me wiggle my hands above my head.

He couldn't see my face, and he couldn't actually see my hands.

There you go, there's a concept to try and find words for.

Well, it does, I'm afraid, it's the puppet show.

I do the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre, and at the Edinburgh Fringe, I've been doing that show since 2007, and I did it last year, 2022 was the last time.

Hopefully, I'll be coming back in 2024, and it's a comedy show that Steve was working as a technician at the time.

In fact, you were the head, weren't you?

You're the boss of all the technicians.

No, I did.

In 2016, I was the sound engineer for the Sportsman's very small venue within Gilded Balloon, and I came back two years after that as the technical, well, the production manager basically of the whole thing.

Right.

And then I never did it again.

Yeah.

Well, a thankless task.

If anybody listening has never been to the Edinburgh Fringe, it involved an awful lot of people locked in the dark for a month.

Basically, people treated like fungi.

I think for most people, it's a stepping stone to better work.

It's certainly amongst the worst paid work they'll do.

I mean, it's one of those weird things for me.

The job itself was absolutely one of my favorite jobs I've ever done.

It was terribly paid.

I was exhausted.

I did more hours than I had to.

I'm not saying that I was different to other people because my interest in comedy is very, very broad.

I would find that I would be spending extra time in the venues and going to see as many shows as I could, meet as many people, hang out afterwards in the bars and immerse myself in the comedy culture.

That was my favorite part of the entire thing.

I've made a lot of contacts because of that, which is going to help this podcast.

Yeah.

Well, that's what the Edinburgh Fringe is.

It is being in a place where everybody else is.

And being up in the Loft Bar or the Abattoir Bar, these celebrity bars, are using these terms.

They're so familiar to people who have been to Edinburgh.

They mean nothing to you if you've never been to the Edinburgh Fringe.

In short, you get to hang out in these bars with the famous people.

I, at one point, was hanging out with, there was Ian Morris off the Inbetweener, so I actually knew of old.

And then there was Ricky Gervais over there.

Steve Merchant, who I also knew of old.

The Kaiser Chiefs were playing pool.

Yeah.

The last time I was there, I was standing next to Tom Davis, Mark Steele, and then the entire cast of Derry Girls came in, and they were like looking for the bar, and it was like they were in character, and they sort of ran in a sort of conga unison in and out.

And I thought, is this real?

Is this like a real moment?

That is the nature of Edinburgh.

My three favorite jobs, not that this is a podcast about jobs, would be delivering pizzas on a motorbike, because I could listen to music, making coffee in Coffee Republic on the Strand for a couple of years.

That was fun.

I actually really liked that because I just talked all day and the time went really, really quickly.

They were just silly jobs, but they were great.

And then obviously working on the Edinburgh Fringe in any way, even production manager, even with all the stresses, it was still worth it.

It's very interesting when you're evaluating these things that are good for you, because feeling good, they actually endorphins produced by doing what you'd have to describe as a dead end job.

That is a job that's not linked to a career or progression.

Can be great.

I remember I worked in a factory for a while.

There was a few factory jobs, but the first job I got out of art college, I am an artist by training, but I was working in the point of sale design department, which was up above a printing work.

So regularly, as well as doing the studio junior stuff, which was my job, I'd go downstairs and we'd do packing boxes and folding up this point of sale cardboard things that would be chopped out or operating a big machine as part and parcel of the company.

And it's really satisfying to do dull work.

There will be something about, it's similar to exercise.

If you jog, you're going nowhere.

If you jog on a treadmill or do Peloton, you're wasting your life, really.

You're not going anywhere at all.

You have progressed in no way.

But on the other hand, it feels good.

And so it's very, very interesting.

A lot of jobs, you know, look back on them.

Well, that's what you're doing.

You're looking back on it.

Those two years of your life didn't move your life up a social ladder, but they felt good.

And they were terribly paid, all three of them, even the Edinburgh ones.

You So, Kev, one of the things I know about you is you have these online diaries from your childhood.

Yeah.

And I've noticed that in those diaries are a lot of TV shows that I certainly remember as a young boy.

I can actually see them from here on the shelf.

Bear with me, bear with me, dear listener.

I shall just randomly pull one of my childhood picture diaries off the shelf.

They're fantastic.

They immediately drop you right in the moment, if you're alive in that time.

I'm a bit younger than Kev, but I do remember a lot of what he drew, especially in the sort of late 70s stuff.

Yeah, well, the big thing about being a kid is that you seem to have an infinite amount of time to spend and waste.

I managed to produce this fully illustrated page every single day from my childhood from, I begin it at about the age of 12, and I keep going until the age of 16.

So actually it's not very many years, but it fills up a good few of these volumes of books.

I had to phase it out when I was getting into my O levels.

And so the diary fizzles out.

But it comes back as a written diary a few years later.

What years are we looking at there, Kev?

We are looking at, it begins in 1974 and it fizzles out in 1978.

So the years 75, 76, 77 are meticulously catalogued, but nothing much happens in my life because of course I'm just at school.

So it's like had breakfast, went to school, did these subjects, chatted with someone in AIN about something in AIN.

And then on the right hand side of one of these illustrated pages, you can see that I've devoted most of my time to illustrating the TV shows that I watched.

Well, not really illustrating, I've just done logos for the shows and then cut out pictures from the Radio Times and from Look In comic.

And I also had a feature called RFTD, which is the record for the day.

You'll regularly get earworms.

Well, you'll never get earworms like when you're a 12 year old, 14 year old kid.

Because when you're a 14 year old kid, I was listening to Radio One at all available hours and buying records as well.

I will write down records here.

And then I look back at these and I have never heard of these things since.

On the July the 1st, 1975, my record for the day, Rhythm and Blue Jeans Baby by Lindsay DePaul.

Nope, I could not pick that out from a line up.

My record, oh, there's, I've illustrated Jim'll Fix It.

Oh my goodness.

There's Jim'll Fix It as drawn by me.

Horrific image.

I have made him look quite evil.

I have, haven't I?

You didn't have to do much.

My diary captured the TV I watched, the music I listened to, and the few things I did in my childhood.

Apart from going to school, of course, I was in a band, which was a big thing of my generation.

You would be in a band.

So many of us were in bands of whatever degree of ineptitude.

And my band was called Walter Tottle and the Expanding Liberals with a member of the Royal Family, the Corgis and a Shaggy Dog with special guest star Gertrude Grunting Thuttit.

Amazing!

We weren't the most successful new wave band of 1978.

I was in a band as well when I was 15.

We called it Wolfgang.

But I remember arguing with my friend and I really wanted to call it Ziggy Zogwanna and the Zimbabwean Zits.

Kids are idiots, aren't they?

It's so ridiculous.

So again, back to your TV diaries there, even though you do sort of have a lot of imagery from that time, was there a TV show that was on that you feel was pivotal?

Oh, it's really too hard to pick out one, because when you look at that spread, you'll see that I'm watching half a dozen shows a day, seven days a week.

Some kids are latchkey kids, and I was what would have been called the TV remote control kid, except the TV remote control hadn't come to the UK when I was a kid.

You actually have to get up off your ass and press a button in order to change channels.

Luckily, there were only three channels to change.

So the ITV Kids television was very influential.

And one show that I would single out, which has just had its 50th anniversary, was The Tomorrow People.

Now I remain to this day a big Doctor Who fan.

Anybody who's met me and spent too long in conversation will find that Doctor Who comes up very, very quickly.

And I started because of my age, with my first doctor being John Pertwee.

But in 1973, The Tomorrow People came along and it took over.

I preferred The Tomorrow People, the Doctor Who.

Now I think they probably didn't overlap.

I think Doctor Who finished its series and then The Tomorrow People started its series.

And so being a kid, you know, the thing you're watching right now is the biggest thing in your world.

And then when Doctor Who came back on, it was probably the biggest thing again.

But I do very much remember The Tomorrow People because they had an accoutrement.

They had a thing called a jaunting belt that you wore on your belt buckle.

And I made one in metalwork and I wore it to school.

And in fact, I wore it to the exhaustion of my friends in the band.

So when we, the band, Walter Tottle, went on our first, it wasn't a tour, it was a holiday.

We went on a summer holiday together because we were the gang as well as being the band.

So we went off without our instruments.

We went to Blackpool and they chucked my jaunting belt in an outdoor swimming pool in Blackpool and I was never able to rescue it.

For all I know, it's there to this day.

Was there a television version of Planet of the Apes?

Is that my imagination?

Of course.

Oh, one of the things that you'll find are the same vintage as my diary are my Planet of the Apes comics.

That is the comics that I drew myself.

I have on the shelf behind me the British UK Planet of the Apes Marvel comics, which I used to get every week.

They were the first Marvel comics I got.

But I then started doing my own version with new and original stories.

And I produced 30 odd issues of my own Planet of the Apes comic.

Each issue was only about eight pages long.

But yeah, Planet of the Apes, I was obsessed with.

And it started with the Planet of the Apes TV series, which my generation saw first and then subsequently discovered that there had been movies.

You were basically doing fan fiction before people did fan fiction.

Yeah, yeah.

A lot of my generation of comics artists did that very thing.

And kids in schools do now.

They make Minecraft comics.

They make Roblox comics.

They make, the kids who are likely to do comics.

All your head is full of is the stuff, you know, from games, from movies, whatever.

And so the stuff you start drawing is inevitably derivative.

It's a very, very rare child whose stuff isn't copying and replicating or making a very thinly veiled reworking of the stuff they've been taking in.

Lots of Star Wars comics.

A few years ago, kids doing their versions of Daleks, which will come back in a couple of years' time.

Yeah, absolutely.

Oh, sorry, the reason I know all this stuff about kids, the reason I have this knowledge of what kids doing comics is because I go into schools and teach comic art masterclasses.

The reader at home should know.

And you're right, I spotted you on The Apprentice a couple of years ago.

That's right.

Well, my job for a long time was just writing and drawing comics.

And through the 90s, I'm writing and drawing comics for Marvel and designing t-shirts for Red Dwarf and doing Hanna Barbera comics.

I did a lot of those humor comics which were ripped off from Viz comic.

I was also in Viz comic.

I was in a comic called Oink to begin with, which was like the gap between Beano and Viz comic.

That's where I started.

And so I've worked in loads and loads of comics.

So I'm starting to think now in the 90s when I went to college, I made a massive error of walking in wearing a Red Dwarf t-shirt.

What did it have on it?

I'm not, I believe it said, let's get out there and twat it.

That was me.

I designed that t-shirt.

It was, according to the NME Christmas 1993, the best selling t-shirt of 1993.

I designed it and I got paid the grand total of 50 quid for that day's designs.

So the batch of designs that I sent off, I got paid 50 quid for that day's work.

And Let's Get Out There and Twat It was one of them, along with Ace Rimmer's Alternative Universe Tour, which had a whole load of tour dates on the back of made up universes that the character Ace Rimmer went to because he was a multi-dimensional, multi-verse character.

That's mad, Kev.

That means I was wearing your arms.

You were wearing my arms.

On my front.

Yeah, all of the Red Dwarf t-shirts and some of them still exist.

They still print.

Let's get out there and try it, I think.

I walked into, I was doing, what was I doing?

Sound engineering at Paddington College.

And I walked in and I was into, I mean, I loved Red Dwarf.

I absolutely loved Red Dwarf.

I used to buy the, when they released them on VHS and there'd only be like three episodes on each VHS and you have to wait another six weeks for the second batch of VHSs to come out.

But I remember like wearing this t-shirt and this one kid who ended up being quite annoying.

The most geeky kid in the entire school just sat next to me and latched on to me and went, oh, so you like Red Dwarf, do you?

And it took me a year to shake him off.

He was a nice, he was nice enough, but he would only talk to me about Red Dwarf in a way that put me off my favorite TV show.

Yes.

Well, I had the same problem with Red Dwarf because I got to work for Red Dwarf's magazine.

Which I used to buy.

Which was the Fleetway Comics.

Well, I wrote Ace Rimmer stories and I drew androids.

Everybody needs good androids.

It was written by Pat Keller and drawn by me.

And I did a couple of other things in that.

And so we, the Red Dwarf's magazine team, got invited along to a Red Dwarf convention.

It may have been the first Red Dwarf convention.

It was in Northampton.

And this is 1994 or five.

May have pushed into six.

I can't remember.

That's the height.

That's the height.

Yeah.

And this is when we realized that basically different viewers were seeing a different show.

I was watching a comedy show called Red Dwarf, which had great science fiction concepts in, but was primarily a comedy show.

The people at this convention were watching a science fiction show, a cult thing that they could get obsessive about.

And this has always been fascinating because obviously I'm a big fan of Doctor Who, and I mentioned the Tomorrow People earlier.

And so a lot of the things I watch, and of course I was raised on Marvel Comics, so a lot of the things that I've consumed have been science fiction and fantasy.

But I'm not a science fiction and fantasy fan.

I'm a fan of that show in Doctor Who.

It's a comedy and drama show.

And the person who got most caught out by this clash of worlds at the convention in Northampton was Hattie Hayridge.

Because Hattie Hayridge turns up, she's a comedian who appeared in this show.

And so she sits there ready to take questions from the audience.

So we should just say Hattie Hayridge was the voice of Holly.

She was the second person to play the voice of Holly.

Norman Lovett did series one and two.

Hattie Hayridge did series three.

And she sits there ready to take questions from the audience.

And they ask her the sort of questions that nerds and geeks will ask at a cult convention.

They'll say, so at the end of series two, there's a continuity gap between series three, which is obviously irreconcilable.

What do you have to say about that?

She says, I don't know.

I just turned up and performed.

So she ended up having to fall back on basically doing stand up.

She started just doing material to them, because that's all she could do.

She could not answer any of their questions.

These two worlds did not coalesce.

And that was fascinating to me.

Yeah, that is very interesting.

I definitely came from a comedy, a love of comedy.

It wasn't a sci-fi thing.

I did watch, I was a big fan of Doctor Who, things like that, but I wasn't a sci-fi guy.

There was a show, maybe you remember this, I loved when I was a kid.

It was called Space 1999.

Do you remember that?

Of course, yes.

Space 1999, which appears in my picture diary.

My copy of Look In, which there's a very memorable front cover when Space 1999 started, and Look In magazine used to have painted covers by the artist Arnaldo Putsu, who used to also do the posters for the carry-on films.

And Arnaldo Putsu would paint the characters from the TV shows.

And his Space 1999 is an amazing one of Martin Landau and Barbara Bach in front of the exploding spaceship on the moon.

But my version has a big hole in it because I cut them out and I stuck them in my diary.

It took pride of place on that day.

I remember doing it.

I was babysitting at the time as I was doing the cutting out and papering out.

These people must have come back to pick up their kid and the place smelled of cow gum, which was the gum that I used to stick the images in the book.

Oh yeah, with the rubber.

Yeah, I must have brought a whole traveling kit with me in order to do my diary wherever I was.

You The thought of collecting comics didn't exist, you see.

Keeping comics was a thing that happened if you simply didn't throw them away.

But collecting them, and especially buying them in order just to collect them.

Yeah, you weren't doing it for any monetary gain.

Well, exactly.

That didn't, it literally didn't exist.

When I was a teenager in 1977, the British comics that we were collecting would never have had any market.

If you went to what we called the jumble sales, what you'd now call a car boot sale, you would find old comics and had I know now what I know then, I'm sure passing through my fingers were an infinity of really valuable comics, but they went.

In fact, all of my comics from before 1973, so remember, I started getting comics at the age of five with things like Fantastic and Terrific, which we used to reprint the Marvel comics, but all of those comics went in the great paper recycling of 1973, which was used to fund the building of Kibworth Scout Hut in the village in Leicestershire where I lived.

How recycling paper generates money, I don't know, but it did.

And so all of our stuff got recycled.

My comics were recycled by putting them in the open fire in the lounge that my granddad put coal in and then proceeded to smoke cigarettes into my face.

But paper recycling had a history, and it's one of the reasons why Superman Number One is worth $3 million and why The Dandy Number One is worth tens of thousands of pounds.

And that's because it was illegal to hang on to your paper.

You had to do paper recycling in the war.

And again, what good it did, I don't know, the paper pulp must have been reused and there was, well, in the war, there wasn't money for it.

There was just duty for it.

But by the 1970s, you got money back for it.

Blue Peter used to do paper recycling as.

Well.

And so if you've got a Superman, you weren't supposed to have it.

You were supposed to have recycled it with the war effort.

So we have Hitler to thank.

You see, he gets a lot of stick, but indirectly, indirectly.

Torchy the Battery Boy.

That's terrifying.

So along those lines, is there a show that you saw as a kid, which obviously they would not make now, and scared the hell out of you?

Yeah, well, you mentioning Torchy the Battery Boy reminds me of the very early instances of Uncanny Valley.

In more recent years, the Uncanny Valley effect has come about because of things like motion capture, and everybody remembers Polar Express, where the faces look odd, because they are almost human, but they're not quite human.

And I was freaked out by puppets.

People have long been freaked out by marionettes and ventriloquists dummies.

And there's a TV show, when I was very, very young, I would be four, five, six years old, when The Telly Goons was made.

You can find examples of The Telly Goons on YouTube.

It was The Goon Show from the 1950s, Spike Milligan's The Goon Show.

But they reenacted the scenes with puppets.

So they didn't redo the voices.

They mimed to the radio recordings, but with these grotesque puppets.

And the grotesque puppets were based on Spike Milligan's drawings, which he'd done as marginalia on his scripts.

He had a way of drawing Nettie Seagoon and all the other characters.

And so they took these drawings and they made them into latex puppets, I assume.

I assume they were the same technology that went on to be the sort of spitting image type puppet.

And so they had opening and closing mouths and they freaked the hell out of me.

I was absolutely, I would run crying to mum at the sight of the telly goons.

And of course the gibberish they were talking in those freakish voices, they've fallen in the water.

That is pretty nightmarish to a four or five year old kid as well.

It's funny that you were scared of puppets and you end up basically a puppeteer.

I end up doing puppets, that's right.

I can understand though, why people are scared of puppets because this thing is talking to you and it can't talk.

And so the uncanny valley is a syndrome that gets discussed a lot.

AI is the most recent reason that it's been coming up because AI recreates faces.

Most recently, I've seen animation and things that look like real life, things that looked like a pop video.

You may have seen these examples in recent weeks.

The deep fake stuff is, there's a comedy show, I believe in Channel 4 have done it, where famous people are living on the street.

One of them's like Idris Elba.

And they're just all walking around talking to each other.

Right.

Deep fake is the new caricature.

It is the new hand puppet.

And deep fake and AI between them make things that look like the real thing, but they're not quite.

Uncanny Valley, I think sometimes gets a little bit skipped over by AI, which is to AI's credit.

But there are recent examples like when they remade Peter Cushing to appear in a Star Wars film, long after Peter Cushing had died.

And it's using a mixture of motion capture and CGI.

And I don't know the part that AI played in it.

But these have always operated on something in our mind that says, I must fear this because it's not real.

An article I was reading just yesterday suggested that it could be a thing in our mind that makes us fear dead bodies.

Because obviously you should fear a corpse because of disease, because of the other predators that might be around.

If you see the face of a corpse, you'll know it's like a living person, but it's not alive.

So that could be what makes us react to the uncanny valley thing.

I also get uncanny valley.

And this is the modern version of politically incorrect to say, when people have had work done, when people have had work done on their lips, when they've had Botox done, when they're over peeled, when they've got the over trimmed eyebrows.

So it's like a human face, but it's gone one step beyond.

So it's not quite human.

And I go, I do.

I react to those faces that have distorted and disfigured themselves so far that they are like a wax work version.

And I'm sure those people are used to seeing that reaction all the time.

I remember 30 years ago, John Waters referring to plastic surgery, and he says so many people here in Hollywood have had lifts that you go into a party and you'd think a bomb had just gone off.

I've asked a few people.

I'll give my own answer first, which was Sabrina from Charlie's Angels.

Poo was the first person or character, maybe in your case, who you saw on screen, but you just knew, huh, I quite like that, and I don't know why I like it.

Awoke those sudden funny feelings.

Yes.

I'm reminded of the phrase from Porridge when Fletcher is talking to Godpa, and he says, she loins.

You loins?

What are you loins?

Well, you know when you're looking at Pan's People on the TV, and you're looking at Beautiful Babs, you know that feeling you get.

You know where you get it.

That's your loins.

Well, the first thing to give me, I think it was Tara King in the final series of The Avengers with Stephen Peel.

Well, it's Stephen Tara King, it was.

The Canadian actress Linda Thorson, and I remember, so I would be eight years old, and I remember seeing mum's copy of Woman's Own, which would have had a colour picture of Linda Thorson in, and sort of, you know, just looking at the face thinking, oh, I like that sort of face.

Get your scissors and your glue out, did you?

And that's pre-puberty, pre-puberty, noticing a face that I thought was, I suppose, sexually attractive.

Yeah, first one on the TV.

She's a few years later, totally supplanted by Agnetha out of ABBA.

Oh, well, yeah, we all had that one.

A generation chimes with that.

The next time I felt something like that, and it was way stronger, was when I saw Sapphire and Steel.

With Joanna Lumley, yes.

Remember that?

Now, her in that, that did something a little more.

I was like, oh, well now, not only do I quite like her, I need to watch this and I don't want to miss an episode.

And I knew the other guy, David McCallum, from The Invisible Man, obviously.

So I was like, it's already invested.

It's very interesting the way that sort of people were presented and packaged.

One thing that I realized at the time, and you realize if you look in my diaries at the TV show from 1976, 77, people would be paired up and one would be blonde, one would be brunette all the time.

Starsky and Hutch were a good example of that model.

The Dukes of Hazzard are another example.

There was a show called The Quest.

There was Rich Man, Poor Man.

Those are all male examples.

Chips.

Yeah, you get the female versions as well.

Charlie's Angels had two brunettes, one blonde.

Why they didn't have a redhead, I don't know.

Why, of course, they didn't have a black cast member.

But the 1970s, don't go there.

Yeah, I mean, that's a very significant and surprising thing when you're looking at our casting, which brings me back to the TV show I mentioned when you first asked about a TV show, which was The Tomorrow People, because The Tomorrow People, having just celebrated its 50th anniversary, people shared photos from it, and I used to read the comic strip in Look-In, the original cast has got four leads, one female, one black.

Now, that's diversity in casting, almost perfect diversity in casting, except we do have two females, maybe, but that's in 1973.

A lot of thought, especially in children's TV, children's TV has long led in diversity and representation.

Way back in the 1960s, there was a program for the deaf.

Because of the television's remit right back in the 50s and 60s, both ITV and BBC had to have religious programming, and it had to tick boxes.

Back in the day before we coined the term box ticking, you had to address certain demographics from a social and culturally representative point of view.

I mean, religious programming and programming for women was a small and patronizing way of doing it, but there was also foreign language programming.

There was, as soon as there was a second language diaspora, diaspora in this country, there was Indian language programming that used to appear at seven o'clock in the morning on BBC One, but you ask anybody from that generation from the 70s and 80s about it, and they'll tell you, I can't remember the name of the program, but I used to remember it seeing it every time in the listings, and it was Indian programming.

And the BBC in particular, but also ITV because it was a public service broadcaster, they led the way in these because it was being thought about and looked on from above.

These things slipped.

So you get to the end of the 80s and the 90s, and diversity and representation in programming has kind of gone out the window because it's a sort of free for all, but it does get reigned back and it does get addressed.

What you just said actually reminded me of the diversity in Sesame Street, because that's a public broadcasting network from America that we would actually see, started in 1969, I believe.

That was very culturally diverse.

I mean, I never heard Spanish.

Very interestingly, America seems to have addressed these matters before we did.

There was a lot of work done in the 1970s to look at representation in television.

Sesame Street and National Public Radio addressed these things right from the start because of how they're funded.

But also TV does.

And it's because of advertising demographics.

They had to tick boxes because they made money out of them.

So you get African American TV.

You get Cosby and the Kids.

I know we can't talk about Bill Cosby now.

The thing is, Bill Cosby was the market leader and for a long time was the only person in TV.

But shows like Sanford and Son, when Steptoe and Son is remade for the American market, they choose to do it as reaching a certain audience and they realize a certain audience has got to have black leads.

It's got to have black creatives as well.

Black creatives comes further down the list because people can't see them.

But faces on screen, America had to address that first because you couldn't afford to miss people out.

There was money to be made from them.

In the UK it was done from a different starting point.

The show, was it called like Three of a Kind or something?

Like a comedy show in the 80s, and in my mind, it was a woman, a white guy.

Oh, was that Lenny Henry, David Copperfield, not the magician, other guy, comedian, and Tracy Oldman?

That was Three of a Kind.

There we go, that's what it was.

So the fact that it was called Three of a Kind as well is a little on the nose.

Yeah, I mean, you know, a lot of these things are clunky, but well-intentioned.

I've always been a defender of the well-intentioned.

That's why when you look back at the programs in the 1970s, some things get tarred with the same brush when we're looking at sexism and racism and telly.

Programs like Mind Your Language is one that gets singled out on the racist front, and it was, I believe, well-intentioned.

It's just awkward because it's white writers, white producers, white directors, making this show, trying to be in some way representative.

Similarly, Love Thy Neighbor, the most well-intentioned show.

Love Thy Neighbor was endeavoring to try and balance up what had happened in Alf Garnet's Till Death Us Do Part, which is Johnny Spade, white writer, but he's trying to, well, he's successfully satirizing a sort of character who's racist and sexist and represents a very conservative mindset.

Unfortunately, a lot of viewers didn't get that, and he becomes the person who puts words into the mouth of racists.

Love Thy Neighbor was trying to do a similar thing, but to big up the other side.

So you've got the black couple who live in one house, and you've got the white couple who live in the other.

Yeah, I remember watching this.

Yeah, it's trying to create harmony, but unfortunately, it still uses the racist term.

When the Jack Smethurst character, the name of the actor, when he uses racist terms, which he does do, that's what we repeated in the playground the next day.

Putting words into the mouth of children is unfortunately what happens.

Kids don't get irony.

Kids just hear words, and the laugh that goes with it and thinks, oh, I'll say that word tomorrow.

So it's a very difficult thing, but the 70s was learning those lessons.

You cannot look at these TV shows through the lens of now, obviously, but it's interesting you bring up Love, Lie, Neighbor, because I did watch that as a child.

I wouldn't have got the subtlety, but I do remember thinking that Rising Damp was a little racist when I was watching.

That seemed a little meaner.

That becomes harder because Rigsby, who is supposed to be the victim of your laughter, you're supposed to think Rigsby is the foolish person who doesn't see everything, but he was so lovable.

In the same way as Basil Fawlty also says, racist things, he says sexist things.

And he is the endearing heart, while also being the monster at the center of the sitcom.

That you're supposed to be saying, this is ridiculous, I should not say this.

But yes, there's a difficulty.

I mean, satire will always have this difficulty.

What is a show that you saw that you just cannot believe was on television for whatever reason?

I mean, in the future, people are going to say naked attraction.

So what is the TV show that you're kind of amazed that they made back in the day?

Yeah, The Black and White Minstrels is definitely in that category because it's mind boggling.

But the older you get, the more you realize how old people were who were making stuff on the telly.

So if somebody, when The Black and White Minstrels starts on telly in the 1950s, is in their 40s, and that's not an uncommon age to be a producer who's saying, I've got a great idea for a TV show.

Well, they're harping back to the 1920s, or even they could be old enough to harp back to before the First World War.

In which case, they're drawing on things that weren't thought twice about.

Because there was no black population in the UK.

The minstrel shows where people blacked up and sang songs which had been imported from America and were sung originally in America by African Americans, but then in America were parodied or parodied by white actors who would wear black face.

It became such a big thing, and then this is in the 19th century, such a big thing, that there are black comedy performers.

Pigmeat Markham is a very famous example.

Who would wear black face?

That is to say Pigmeat Markham, who is an African American who starts doing comedy in the 1920s on stage in America.

He puts on white makeup around his mouth and white makeup around his eyes to look like one of the black minstrels, and to look like a white guy painted black.

It's a crazy thing, but it was a thing.

It was just a vogue.

Currently, we have vogue with drag fashions and queer fashions, where there are rules and regulations about who's allowed to get away with this, and there are codes that, if you know, you know, if you don't, you don't.

Well, the same on stage with the black and white minstrels of the 19th century, which carried seamlessly into the 20th century, came over to the UK at the end of the 19th century and continued on the stage right through the 20th century.

And then someone in the 1950s doesn't think twice about it.

The Windrush generation have been in the UK for less than a decade, and the black and white minstrel starts on telly, and people simply aren't asking the questions.

Viewers aren't asking the questions, people behind the camera aren't asking the questions.

By the 1970s, they are asking the questions, but then one of the people who, you know, is at the forefront of making that question, the first black British comedian to appear on TV.

Yeah, he'd just been starring in a thing on ITV called The Fosters, and then he gets the gig on the black and white minstrel show.

So Lenny Henry appeared on the black and white minstrel shows because the black and white minstrel show thought, this will make up for what, people will get this.

This will make it okay, they thought.

And Lenny Henry bought into that.

I mean, he was only 17 or 18 at the time, but-

Yeah, he since regrets it, he said.

The world was very different.

The questions that are automatically being asked are very different.

The journey of education, that all these various cultures and civilizations are going through, is still being gone through.

And it's at that stage.

It is a measure of where we were at, rather than something to be taken through the framework of 2073 and then condemned.

Well, I find it interesting to look at international telly.

When I'm abroad and you're looking at the stuff that's actually been shown in those countries, because people think differently about things.

I mean, I think racism and sexism, we're getting up to speed with.

I haven't been to a country where anybody does blackface since Little Britain, which was in a country called UK in 2008 or nine.

Yeah, about 10 years ago, I was saying.

That's the country that had Section 28 that used to outlaw the teaching of homosexual sexuality in schools.

I mean, such things only happen in the most primitive of civilizations.

But the thing that I noticed when I got to European countries is that they do unironic variety.

You know, if we have a magician or someone singing folk music or someone walking on a tightrope or doing bouncing act, they have to then be judged by Simon Cowell.

In France, Germany, Austria, they just do their puppet act.

They do their ventriloquism.

They do their fire breathing.

And then they get a round of applause and they move on to Saint-Aubre.

What was the term you said when you're scared of people with deformed faces like...

Uncanny Valley.

Uncanny Valley.

Is this okay to say?

I sometimes feel exactly like that.

I don't like, I'm not a big fan of clowns.

I don't have the fear of clowns, but I'm certainly creeped out by them.

And I did actually scream down a North London venue when I was three, when a clown walked towards me.

And I had to be taken outside.

But I do, I don't, I'm not saying this easily and I don't want to offend anybody.

But when I see certain drag acts that are just so over made up, I get that same feeling.

I get that feeling immediately.

And I know I'm not supposed to, I'm not saying anything wrong with it or anything like that.

But I get the feeling, oh, I don't like that.

And I wonder as well, that in the future, all these shows, like I've seen Drag Race and when I see Drag Race, I think that this is not going to be judged well in 20 years.

So this isn't, I don't know why it's going to be a problem, but I feel like it's going to be a future problem.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, that's, I think, a thing I feel as well.

When I said a thing earlier about age and the codes, and if you know, you know.

And so I have long had a question about drag because, and I've worked with drag acts a lot, and I'm thinking, you know why this is okay.

And you know why it wouldn't be okay for some people to do what you're doing and some people to say what you're saying and some people to wear what you're wearing.

I don't know that.

I have to have that explained to me.

I don't intrinsically get it.

And so I feel like you about that.

I'm thinking, in years to come, will this look different?

I think, I think it will.

I think in the same way as, you know, when we see Matt Lucas in Blackface, in 2009, for some reason, unremarkable.

In 2023, remarkable.

So, yeah, I feel that.

It just reminds me of, you know, like the controversy around straight actors playing gay parts.

I mean, that is now a problem.

Ooh, there is a rich debate there.

Just last night, I was watching what had been, for many years, one of our favorite TV shows.

It's gone off the boil in recent years.

The Marvelous Mrs.

Maisel on Amazon Prime.

If you've not seen The Marvelous Mrs.

Maisel, first two or three series, absolutely fantastic.

But there's one big problem, and it's a very Jewish show.

Jewish writer, Jewish milieu, except for Rachel Brosnan, who plays the lead character, not Jewish.

So, in the same way as Blackface, Jewface is one that some ask about, and then that big show, someone says, that's okay.

That reminds me of another TV show that was on recently.

The Shrink Next Door.

Starring Paul Rudd as a therapist, who slowly, slowly rinses out the character played by Will Ferrell.

Now, Will Ferrell is playing a Jewish guy who has a sister, played by Katherine Hahn, and neither of those in real life are.

And this was recently flagged up as a very good example of what you were talking about.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't know what I think about it.

Part of me thinks, yeah, that's probably not okay.

But another part of me thinks, but they're actors.

So aren't they allowed to just act that that's what we would have said about, like, Peter Sellers blacking up in, is it called The Party?

The Party, yes.

Birdie num nums.

That would be unacceptable by today's standards.

Yes, and what Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan were doing was doing impersonation and not thinking twice about the fact that I'm now impersonating someone who, in order to do part of impersonation, I'm going to have to change the colour of my skin.

Other impersonators and characterizers like Steve Coogan is a good example, who put on new characters and you distort your nostrils, you distort your ears.

But distorting the skin colour, that is a big bone of contention for reasons that is not my province to say anything about.

I will agree with whoever is who has the right to make that call.

Exactly.

I think that's a very good stance.

And the Jewish actors, well, David Baddiel makes the point in Jews Don't Count, that because most Jewish performers, characters, people, that we'd be looking at a white, that it's the being white that allows for this blurring.

You know, you don't have to put on a face.

I mean, if you look at people who don't have any caricaturable characteristics, that if someone were doing an anti-Semitic caricature, you might be drawing someone like the comedian Ian Stone, who has long opened by pointing out the sides of his nose, or David Baddiel, who has in most recent years observed the fact that when he grows his full beard, he just looks like a rabbi, he can't help it.

Well, most people, you know, the phrase that we use is you pass.

Yeah, that's terrible.

If you look at Paul Roddy, if you look at Natalie Portman, people pass.

And that has long been the case.

It's a very derogatory term when you think about it.

It's a rich history that, you know, we can study this forever.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, we're hitting all the controversial subjects, which is good, especially considering what Diane Abbott said last week.

Did you hear that?

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

I mean, did you not get the memo?

You know, it's absolutely insane.

I'm not going to even say what she said, so you can check that out yourselves.

Well, with all these instances, with all of these cultural concerns that we have, it's a matter of thinking and it's a matter of talking.

And it's a matter of listening to the people who, like I say, are in the position to make the call.

I mean, I'm someone who's not.

There's very few of the groups that we've discussed that I'm actually a member of.

I'm slightly foreign because I'm Scottish and then I moved down to England and grew up.

So in a way, that...

Yes, look Kev, you pass.

You pass as an Englishman because of your Leicestershire.

What it gave me...

You're like Gordon Ramsay.

What it gave me was the understanding of being an outsider, which means that when someone else is telling their outsider story, like my school friends who were Indian, that was in Leicestershire, that was a thing that I recognized.

I recognized my example was different, but on the other hand, so many things were similar.

They had parents who would correct the way of talking when they got home.

My Scottish parents would correct the fact that I was saying things wrong because I was saying things in a Leicester accent, or even an English accent, which is compared to a Scottish accent, getting the language wrong.

So most of the Indian kids at school, the kids at school who had Indian parents would speak far better proper English because they were going home and being corrected.

So there's things like that that I don't understand.

But yeah, I can't talk from the point of view of, I can't talk for queer, I can't talk for black, I can't talk for any other minority that I'm not a member of.

Who can?

Well, like you, I share that exact situation.

I'm white, I'm Irish, English, whatever you want to call me, and I had the exact same experience.

I moved to Ireland when I was eight years old and I came back when I was about nine, ten, and then went back at 11 and stayed till I was 13.

And every time I went there, I was the English kid in Ireland in a pretty pro-IRA town, I might add.

And every time I came back...

Where were you?

County Kerry.

I've just been in Kerry last week.

Yeah, yeah, I saw it online.

It's lovely now, beautiful, different place, completely different as it was in the late 70s, early 80s, living in a different place entirely.

All my friends had paramilitaries on their walls.

I had like, you know, Bowie.

So it's all very, very different.

And then I would come back to England and I'd be the Irish kid.

So I have experienced that, but I don't want to say it's racism because it's just, you know, Britain and Ireland, it's just white people and white people, as Diane Abbott would say, you know.

But I did feel that.

I felt like I was being picked on because I wasn't from the place they were from.

And when I got back here, I was like, but I am actually from here.

So I do know what that feels like, that sort of Celtic racism.

There is a propensity to discrimination that some people have, and they exercise it upon whoever's available.

So from the post-war period, in the period that I grew up in in the 1970s and the 1980s, racists immediately would have people of Indian ancestry and people of African ancestry to seize on because you could see them from a distance and rock against racism, which was the big thing from my childhood, teenage years.

That was its focus.

That was the sort of racism that was big.

120 years earlier, they had antisemitism and the Irish.

The Irish would have been the primary recipients of active racism in England at the end of the 19th century.

And it's racism.

It's not an ethnic racism because you're not talking about people who you could tell apart by sight in the same way as antisemitism, but it's a racism.

All right, let's take a big left turn for the end.

I don't want to keep you too much longer.

Your show, The Sitcom Trials, which I was lucky enough to witness in Edinburgh as a theatre show, was turned into a television show about 20 years ago, I want to say, is that right?

It was exactly 20 years ago.

It was in spring 2003 that we were made into a TV show, yes.

So thinking about the premise of that particular TV show, have you considered bringing it back?

Because it does seem like something that was way ahead of its time.

Maybe you could bring it back as some kind of modern reboot.

Have you ever thought about that?

Lots of times it comes up in conversation.

Whenever we do it, all the participants think it's great.

Now, for the listener at home, the sitcom Trials was a show that I devised on stage because I was writing sitcoms and sending them off to the TV and to the radio.

And the best response you would get is a polite letter back or an email back.

You couldn't really tell if you were making any progress.

At the same time, I was starting doing stand-ups.

So I decided to subject my sitcom writing and the sitcom writing of other writers I knew to the same acid test that you would get for your stand-up.

On stand-up, you get up on stage.

If it works, you do it again.

If it doesn't work, like if the audience don't laugh, you change it.

So we took sitcom scripts and we performed them at the comedy club that I was regularly emceeing.

So we do a special night, which was called Situations Vacant, and we perform our sitcoms.

And then I devised the sitcom trials, which was a way of getting the audience more involved.

So you'd perform the first half of a sitcom, say 10 minutes, and then you'd leave on a cliffhanger and the audience would see two, three, four of these sitcom first halves.

Then they'd vote for the one they liked best.

So they only see the ending of the one they like, which means I was able to say, you're never more than 10 minutes away from something you might prefer.

This allowed us to experiment with a variety of styles.

Something could be really surreal, something could be mundane, something could be based around a writer-performer and their one-person show and so on.

And yeah, a great format.

And when we did it for TV, it was a half-hour show.

So you get one sitcom, then the second sitcom, and then the ad break would be where the phone vote would happen.

And then after the ad break, you'd see the ending of the winning one.

Turns out you can't get many votes in during an ad break.

But this took place in 2003, way back in the days of broadcast, where everything was on when it was on.

You could record it on VHS or your DVD recorder.

You couldn't watch it at any time.

In the streaming environment, maybe the sitcom trials could work.

With an associated app.

Except for, are there still sitcoms, as we know them?

Are there studio audience sitcoms?

This is my point.

Sitcoms and comedy, no one's making anything, really.

I look at, there's a website I go to all the time, and I always type in UK comedy coming soon.

There's panel shows, there's stuff on Dave.

Sitcoms sort of died.

And in America, it's all become Big Bang Theory version, which I would argue is very dated.

That's a very dated format.

Well, you're quite right.

The comedy drama has taken over.

I watched The BAFTAs the other day, and the sitcoms, there's still a sitcom category, but they were all comedy dramas.

They were all things like Am I Being Unreasonable?

and Ghosts, which none of which has a studio audience, all of which are done on film in inverted commas.

And that's the order of the day.

The last two studio audience comedies I can think of would be Mrs.

Brown's Boys and The Goes Wrong Show.

So multi-cam, multi-cam sitcom.

That's right.

Multi-cam, but genuinely filmed in front of a live audience.

And so the dynamic is, if they laugh, the audience at home laughs.

This was how it was always done, because when TV started in Britain and America, it was theatre.

It was theatre with cameras pointed at it, essentially.

So all of the actors would be used to, you learn a script, you are ready to perform for 90 minutes, or in the case of a theatre show.

And that's just the order of the day.

Sometimes you will only have a week, and then you get up on stage and you do your repertory theatre performance.

And so in 1956, if someone's pointing a camera at you doing your repertory theatre performance, fine, that's how it's done.

Zedkars was done as live, it was done literally live.

Doctor Who, when it begins, was done as live.

And frequently, the William Hartnell episodes will have no edits in them at all.

They have performed 28 minutes of telly in one go.

Really?

Like Alfred Hitch got one shot?

Well, yeah.

To do it now would be a gimmick.

And we are our expectations as such that you can't do that.

But the sitcom trials was live.

The sitcom trials was the last live sitcom.

It might have been the first live sitcom of 21st century, but it was the last live sitcom apart from Mrs.

Brown's Boy did one in a few years ago.

And that gave me the opportunity to chip in on social media and say, excuse me, I think you'll find that this program that you've nobody's ever heard of because the sitcom trials was only broadcast on regional ITV in Bristol in the Southwest.

We were live at 11 o'clock at night.

That is very dangerous.

The thing is, I like Mrs.

Brown's Boys to an extent, but I do feel like it gets a lot of praise for things that were done by other people, like the breaking of the fourth wall that Brendan does.

I remember going to see the Seanie show, Sean Hughes in the early 90s.

I was in the audience for that a couple of times.

I loved that show.

In my mind, he was the first guy to do that.

He literally walked through a wall or something.

Well, yeah.

At the same time, Gary Shandling was doing it with the Gary Shandling show in the States at the same time.

But no, Jack Benny, Jack Benny's radio show, which was then turned into a TV show, which is credited as being the first American sitcom by many.

He was a stand-up who then expands it into sketches around his stand-up.

So right from the start, he would break the fourth wall.

He would do, Shakespearean aside, a Shakespearean aside is breaking the fourth wall.

You turn to the audience and telling your thoughts.

Well, Jack Benny, a big part of his regular shtick on the stage would be folding his arms, looking to the crowd, silently giving a smug look.

That is a funny thing.

So he never dropped the fourth wall breaking.

The fourth wall is sort of built up for things like the Phil Silvers show, Bill Co.

That doesn't do any fourth wall breaking.

And that sort of sets it in stone that you can't do it.

Lucille Ball then doesn't break the fourth wall.

It then becomes a rule for the next 30 years.

Oh, and in the Christmas episode, Christmas 1965, the Christmas episode of Doctor Who with William Hartnell, they have a Christmas meal and he raises a glass to the camera and says, Merry Christmas to you all at home.

You The next big break after Shawnee Show is when The Office does the mockumentary.

The Office wasn't the first person to do the mockumentary, but once they do that mockumentary in 2001, so you've got people doing interviews to the camera, and then it's supposed to be a hidden camera that's shooting them, and a couple of years later, the thick of it does the same shtick.

That has created a whole new visual language, which lots of people, they're automatically, when they're thinking, okay, how should we do this?

Well, we could do it mockumentary, or we could do it studio audience camera.

It's just a new thing that's just, you don't think twice about now.

Sometimes you don't look at parks and recreation and think, oh, that's mockumentary, isn't it?

But it is.

When you're watching The American Office, at the beginning of it, obviously, it is a mockumentary and the camera's there, and then it sort of fades into the background and you forget about it, and then right at the end on the final season, they start sort of referring to the cameras being there again, and you go, oh yeah, of course, this is a mockumentary.

It completely leaves your mind.

Yeah.

Okay, Kev, I've got one last question for you.

Have you watched Traitors?

Oh, yes.

We watched Traitors and then watched Traitors USA.

Very interesting to compare and contrast the two, because Claudia Winkleman's, which we were reminded of watching the BAFTAs, when we saw the original Traitors, we saw the clips, and this is my wife and I, welling up again at the clip of the great denouements in the Traitors.

The American one fell flat on Canny Valley.

It's not quite on Canny Valley.

This is a variant of on Canny Valley where the people just aren't genuine.

In the American version of the Traitors, many of them are from reality TV.

Many of them are essentially television professionals whose job is playing themselves.

And so you neither know nor care about what happens to them.

So when they're putting on...

That felt exactly the same way.

Yeah, when they're putting on the pretence, it's like, this is just what you do.

Whereas the British ones were real people.

So when they're feeling those emotions, they're real emotions that you believe.

Yeah, I agree.

Have you seen the Australian one?

No, didn't know there was one.

It's like a hybrid.

It's more like the British one, but the music in it.

That's the thing for me.

It was also in The Traitors.

It felt different.

The production was different, the way that they reinterpreted famous songs.

And then you watch the American one, and it's all, zoom, zoom, do-doom-doom, boom.

Yeah, we were watching the US Traitors trying to work out what was missing and what was so different.

And the songs, we had forgotten.

There must be a soundtrack album of the, there you go, that shows my age, a soundtrack album.

I'm picturing it on vinyl with a sleeve, with the Jeff Love Orchestra.

The Traitors UK commissioned original cover versions done in that kind of John Lewis advert style.

Yeah, I loved it.

Absolutely loved it.

Can't wait for the next one.

Well, one of the things that leads me towards Telecom is in the modern environment, you can't watch everything and you don't automatically watch the next thing that's on, because as we've said, the difference between broadcast and streaming.

With The Traitors, I heard about it on social media.

My wife didn't hear about it on social media.

And so I was saying, I think we've got to watch this Traitors now because everyone's talking about it.

And then she looked at the description of it and it looked exactly like the sort of thing we don't watch.

We don't watch any reality show like that.

Or rather, we've given up on them.

As soon as they go off the boil, the addiction slides.

We watched I'm a Celebrity until the addiction slid.

So for the last decade, I had no idea who Rebecca Vardy was until the Rebecca Vardy, Colin Rooney case.

I'd never watched I'm a Celebrity, not since the first couple of series.

Similarly, we watched the first few series of Big Brother because there had been nothing like it on the TV.

It was great.

It was original.

It was changing the world.

And then after three years, it wasn't.

So we stopped watching it.

And so the Traitors sounded like the sort of thing we wouldn't watch.

So we didn't start watching it until January.

So it was a month old when we start watching it.

And the addiction kicks in because it's more than just the high concept that makes a great show good.

Some things are greater than the sum of their parts as the American Traitors demonstrated.

Same script, same props, same cameras, but you can make a different show from the same recipe.

One will work, one will not.

That's very interesting.

It's like you're talking about us.

Me and my wife had the exact same experience.

We don't watch anything like that.

And I believe there was a clip of it on Graham Norton.

And I remember seeing it at the time and going, that just does not look like something we would watch.

And we waited till it was way in, about two weeks before the end or something.

We actually caught up and we just couldn't stop watching it.

Do you want to watch another one?

Click.

Should we watch three?

Should we actually watch three?

I can't find three hours to watch like a Japanese movie that I've been trying to watch for two years, but I can find three hours to watch The Traitors.

It is quite something.

Addictive Telly is an amazing thing.

Okay, Kev, well, I've taken up far too much of your valuable time.

It's been a great podcast, very educational.

Thank you so much.

Is there anything you want to plug?

Listener at home, you will not believe the amount of editing Steve has got to do because we have rambled for, I can tell you we've rambled for 90 minutes.

So subtract the total length and you will see how much editing he had to do.

What do I want to plug?

I would like to plug my graphic novels.

I'm always plugging my graphic novels.

So if you want to find my work, go to kevfcomicartist.com and you will find most recently, I have been proud of my graphic novel adaptations of Shakespeare, Finlay Macbeth, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Street and The Midsummer Night's Dream Team.

I've also adapted comic tales from the Bible and I have more things in the pipeline which I look forward to revealing to the world sometime.

And where can people read your TV blogspot?

I know I'm a big fan of those.

Oh, at the end of the year, I review all the TV of the year.

But if you go to my website kevfcomicartist.com, you'll find the link to my blog where I occasionally write something of interest, but I'm not one of those people who gives you a good regular feed.

I mostly sum up the work I've been doing with my comic art masterclasses and kids or my touring work with the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre.

Check them out on YouTube.

You have to check them out.

It is, again, one of the funniest things I've ever seen in a room.

Thanks, Kev, for your time.

Hope to hang out with you in person again soon.

Thank you, Steve.

Okay, so that was Kev F.

Sutherland who came to join us there for episode two.

Check out his website and also go on YouTube and check out the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre.

I'm sure you will find at least 10 videos to make you laugh your arse off.

Same tradition as last week, here's a song by me from the past.

This one features Ethan Alley on vocals and is part of the 1117 project that we did in 2009.

So please enjoy the song or don't and come back next week for another episode.

And please remember to follow the show wherever you get podcasts.

Thanks for getting to the end, whoever you are.

This podcast was produced by me, Steve Otis Gunn, for Jilted Maggot.

See you next time.