The Dick Emery Show (1963)

Directed by

Harold Snoad

Genre

sketch show

Country

United Kingdom

Length

19 seasons, 161 episodes

Rating

8.0 of 10 from 5 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

Dick Emery performs as a variety of oddball characters in quick comedy sketches. The show was a BBC mainstay for nearly two decades.

fast-pacedcomedicabsurddatedzanyplayfulnostalgic

What happens

The Dick Emery Show is a British sketch comedy show starring Dick Emery. It was broadcast on the BBC from 1963 to 1981. It was directed and produced by Harold Snoad. The show was broadcast over 18 series with 166 episodes. The show experienced sustained popularity in the 1960s and 1970s. The BBC described the show as featuring 'a vivid cast of comic grotesques'. Frequent performers included Pat Coombs, Victor Maddern, Deryck Guyler, Roy Kinnear, Joan Sims and Josephine Tewson. The principal writers of the programme were David Cummings, John Singer and John Warren. Additional contributions were by David Nobbs and Peter Tinniswood. Other writers included Dick Clement, Barry Cryer, Selma Diamond, John Esmonde, Marty Feldman, Lucille Kallen, Bob Larbey and Harold Pinter. The American comedy writers Mel Brooks and Mel Tolkin contributed sketches in the early years of the show. The nature of the show with its rapid sketches was initially inspired by the American sketch show Your Show of Shows starring Sid Caesar that was broadcast between 1950 and 1954 on NBC. Emery later developed his own characters for sketches. The show became anachronistic with the advent of the 1980s, and has subsequently been perceived as homophobic, racist, and sexist. In an appraisal of The Dick Emery Show the BBC wrote that none of the show's sketches would 'seem out of place' on the 2000s' BBC sketch show Little Britain. Peri Bradley critiqued the show in the chapter "The Politics of Camp" in British Culture and Society in the 1970s: The Lost Decade. Bradley examined how camp could "operate as a political and liberating force" in the 1970s; and felt that Emery's characters "comprised representations [which] instigated" a "transformation of consciousness" as described by the gender theorist Judith Butler. Outtakes of corpsing from the series were subsequently included in the show in a section called 'The Comedy of Errors'. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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