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Banned! Bush cartoon joke
ITV News, 27 November 2002
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| The banned ad shows President Bush opening a copy of the video, saying: "My favourite - just pop it in the video player."
He then pops it into a toaster and burns it |
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An animated advert for a spin-off of ITV1's 2DTV satirical TV show has been banned for making fun of President Bush. Makers of the ad have been told they must get permission from the President himself to screen it.
The Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre, which gives the go-ahead on suitability, said the advert is "offensive" to Mr Bush. It shows him opening a copy of the video, saying: "My favourite - just pop it in the video player." He then pops it into a toaster and burns it.
The BACC ruled that the advert would breach the Independent Television Commission's rules that living people should not be caricatured or referred to in adverts without their permission. These rules also apply to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
The only way it could be screened would be to gain "authorisation" from the President himself. But 2DTV producer Giles Pilbrow said: "It's an idiotic request. We'd write a letter to Bush, but I doubt he could read it. Anyway, the Bush joke was innocuous - we're much harder hitting about the President on the TV show."
One of TV's rare female joke writers tells Jasper Rees
who will be targeted in a new series of 2DTV
Telegraph, 25 November 2002
At any given time, there'll be someone somewhere in the world laughing at a joke written by Georgia Pritchett. Satellite comedy channels, long-haul in-flight entertainment - these are the Elysian fields where prime time gags are sent to roam. And they're full of Pritchett's back catalogue. Never heard of her? She's been writer and script editor for Smack the Pony and Spitting Image, a sketch writer for Ben Elton, Smith and Jones, The Real McCoy, Jo Brand, The Strip Show, Jane Horrocks and Paul Merton, and bespoke composer of monologues for Ronnie Corbett. This summer brought her sitcom, Wild Things, to Radio 4. She is, in short, prolific.
Pritchett is also one of the elect who have lent their wit to Angus Deayton in Have I Got News For You. Deayton may be off air now, but she is still putting words into his mouth, or at least into the mouth of his cartoon incarnation. She is the chief writer on 2DTV, the animated satirical sketch show on ITV which won the Golden Rose in Montreux this year and has bulked up from 10-minute episodes to the full half hour for its third series. The show, she hints, may well find Deayton consoling himself in the company of John Leslie and Michael Barrymore.
"I think Angus thinks thank God he isn't John Leslie and John Leslie thinks thank God he isn't Michael Barrymore. And I think Michael Barrymore's in very big trouble career-wise. We are going to have to be careful," she adds. But not too careful. "The good thing about animation is we've managed to get away with far more than I ever have on any other programme. Because it looks nice with bright pretty pictures."
The bright pretty pictures are designed in the crowded 2DTV offices in Soho by half a dozen artists, with further work taking place in "a sweatshop in Milton Keynes" run by the director Tim Searle. But the hub of the operation is a small room in the Soho offices, out of which blurts frequent male laughter. Four blokes are trading jokes about celebs, among them Giles Pilbrow, the series producer.
"There are virtually no women in comedy writing," says Pritchett, "and I don't know why, because 95 per cent of the time it's great. It's lovely being the only woman in a roomful of men. It's mainly executives that are the problem. I was working on a show with three men and we used to get memos and faxes to 'Tim, Paul, Simon etc'. And I was always the etc.
"But it helps to single me out from the crowd. You hear producers saying, 'Who's that girl who writes for such and such?' " In a quiet way, because she is a quiet person, Pritchett has blazed a trail. She got her first big laugh aged five when she chose to run away from home after a chocolate-related altercation.
"I had only got as far as the front door when I heard howls of laughter. Apparently, the note said, 'I hat you al, I'm roning awa.' " Growing up in a creative family - her father is the journalist Oliver, her brother the cartoonist Matt, both of this parish, and her grandfather was V S Pritchett - she identified comic scriptwriting as "un-Pritchetted territory".
"I couldn't write a novel because I don't know enough adjectives, or be a journalist because I'm not interested enough in truth or fact."
Unlike Brand or those splendid hams in Smack the Pony, there was never a suggestion that she would plump the ranks of loud females on the box. "None whatsoever. Far too shy. I would never ever do it." At 21, straight out of Birmingham Poly, she began her "National Service of comedy" on Weekending. "When you've sold a few jokes for L8, then you get commissioned and you write sketches. It was L25 a minute so you used to listen to Weekending at 11 at night with a stop watch. After that, there was never any doubt in my mind. But I certainly didn't make any sort of a living for several years."
By 24, her name had got around enough for Ronnie Corbett to cold-call her at home. "I used to live about 10 miles from him and we'd meet in a lay-by on the outskirts of south-east London, him in his Rolls-Royce and me in my Mini. I'd hand over this brown envelope. It must have looked highly suspicious."
Other strings in her bow have helped stave off penury. For radio, she's written plays, and co-adapted a terrific Nicholas Nickleby for Radio 4. In film, she script-doctored Spice World and co-wrote Mel Smith's High Heels and Low Lifes.
If she's got anything in common with a relative, it's her mother, children's writer Josephine Haworth. Pritchett has adapted Fungus the Bogeyman, Jacqueline Wilson's Tracy Beaker, and a dozen or so episodes of S Club 7's cheerful television series. "In LA, I began to think that I was really hanging with the kids and it was a matter of weeks before it became S Club 8. I was saying to them, trying to be cool, 'Yeah, I really love track three on the second album' or something. And they said, 'Yeah, a lot of old people say that to us.' " She is 34. "I suppose when you're 20, I do look old."
Earlier this year came the final accolade: a summons from George Michael for 2DTV, which lovingly lampoons him, to animate the video of his anti-war single Shoot the Dog. "I thought it was one of our voice artists playing a trick on me because they knew I harboured this secret fantasy of being Georgia Michael. Giles and I went to his recording studio to hear the single and we stood there dancing like third years at school. And he still let us do it. He said, 'Put me in a dress, have me coming out of men's loos looking dodgy.' "
The video showed Michael in bed with Cherie Blair, and depicted Tony Blair as George W Bush's poodle. It caused outrage in America and prompted a series of US radio stations to ban the single. "We were much crueller to him than to Bush or Blair," says Pritchett. "But no one quite noticed that. We did the video at a time when you couldn't be rude about Bush in America. We ruined George Michael's career."
Pritchett still writes every day. "I love writing. What's exciting and scary about writing comedy is people either detest it or they love it. When people ask me what I do and I name programmes, they go, 'Oh, that's crap, I hate it.' Luckily I've mainly had nice things about 2DTV. There is a fantastic story about Tony Hancock being driven home in a cab. The driver says, 'You're so awful and unfunny and never make me laugh and my wife hates you. You used to be good. Now you've just lost it.' Hancock says, 'Well all right, but I think you're not a very good driver.' The driver says, 'Hey, no need to get personal.' "
Pop nuts reunited
The Sun, 10 November 2002
HE’S the gay star who flushed his career down the toilet with an anti-George Bush record, while she pulled the chain on her career by becoming a judge on Popstars.
Yet pop’s nuttiest duo, GEORGE MICHAEL and GERI HALLIWELL, have finally buried the hatchet. They were spotted having an intimate dinner at London’s trendy Zuma. The reunion follows tales of a then bulimic Geri stealing food from his bins.
A pal tells me: "Their differences are over."
I’m assured the bins at Zuma were untouched.
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