Ripping Yarns

A boy’s own comedy

Radio might be the most intimate medium but TV is the most sociable; a convivial presence in every living room we’ve ever known, ready with gossip, information, comfort or distraction. In The Friend in the Corner we return to significant TV shows to find out what they did for us, and how they pulled it off.

Friend in the Corner: Ripping Yarns (1976-79)

A post-Python Michael Palin (with writing help from Terry Jones) sets about parodying Edwardian adventure stories in a series of one-off comedy dramas including horrific boarding schools, daring (almost) prisoner-of-war escapes, spies, football, murder and crossing the Andes by frog.

As Monty Python ran down in the wake of John Cleese’s departure, someone finally twigged that Michael Palin was perfect TV presenter material. He was offered his own light-ent show, but couldn’t quite picture himself coming down a staircase in a spangly jacket to introduce Englebert Humperdinck and the Michael Palin Dancers.

However, he did like the idea of having a programme of his own. After Terry Jones’s brother showed them a big book of early-twentieth-century stories for boys, Jones and Palin set about writing a spoof school story, ‘Tomkinson’s Schooldays’. It was intended as a one-off, but eventually became the first episode of Ripping Yarns.

The stories they parody were the staples of pre-War boy’s entertainment: boarding school japes, intrepid explorers, ghost stories, murder mysteries. The comedy comes in the shape of Jones and Palin’s customary bathos, which forces determinedly ordinary little men into extraordinary circumstances. The terminally boring Eric Olthwaite (whose conversation is so dull that his father pretends to speak only French) becomes a bank robber; ‘Roger of the Raj’ is heartbroken to discover he’s too posh to follow his dream of owning a little chemist’s shop. The inspired casting of guest actors (including Roy Kinnear, Denholm Elliot and, in ‘Roger of the Raj’, the glorious combination of Richard Vernon, Joan Sanderson and John Le Mesurier) means that Palin’s (terrific) comic performances are embedded within something that could almost pass for a genuine historical drama.

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Why did you spend time with it?

I was only small when Ripping Yarns was first broadcast. As a prep school boarder myself, a lot of ‘Tomkinson’s Schooldays’ resonated. Especially having to fight the School Bear.

The boarding schools I attended were very Edwardian institutions, and their libraries were full of books about Imperial derring-do; I grew up reading Buchan and Kipling and Conan-Doyle, just as Palin surely did at Shrewsbury. The schools clung onto the ethos as keenly as they did the books, steeping themselves in ‘Muscular Christianity’ and aiming to produce cohorts of young men who would go out into the world and tell it what to do. By the ‘70s and ‘80s this ethos looked increasingly farcical.

It wasn’t just that Palin’s small men shoved into outsized Imperial situations were funny; they were also me, stuck in a silly hat, immured in vast Victorian buildings, being educated to run an Empire when all I wanted to do was build increasingly loopy escape plans, like Major Errol Phipps in ‘Escape from Stalag Luft 112B’. Although I also thought it was funny, of course. And as Joel Morris points out in his book Be Funny or Die, the comedy you take in as a child and young adult has an outsized effect on your taste ever after. I’ve taken in a lot of Edwardian comedy and the form has become instinctive. My Christmas story The Adventure Calendar of Mr Timothy Hope is basically a seasonally-themed Ripping Yarns episode.

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What kind of friend is it?

It’s rather a ‘70s sort of friend. It parodies the attitudes and assumptions of imperialism, but it has the attitudes and the assumptions of the 1970s too. There is a lot of public school excitability about the rumoured existence of women’s bodies, and some very ‘70s racism wrapped up in a critique of some very ‘20s racism.

But there’s something else going on with its relation to its source material. The opening to ‘Tomkinson’s Schooldays’ has a joke about celebrity presenters (which relies on knowing that Orson Welles spent a lot of the ‘70s slumming it in low-quality adverts and TV shows). A pompous man in an Edwardian hat and cape stands on a windswept headland mangling a quotation he (probably wrongly) ascribes to G. K. Chesterton: ‘The follies of our youth are in retrospect glorious when compared to the follies of our old age.’

The fondness with which Ripping Yarns parodied the Edwardians suggests that the follies of the 1910s looked glorious indeed to Palin and Jones.It is noticeable that they’re all set in the Edwardian period: no Georgians or Victorians here. These are not stories of the winning of Empire; they are stories of its troublesome maintenance, its apogee, when the schoolroom atlas was stained with pink. And in poking fun at Empire, Palin and Jones begin to excuse it. These weren’t ruthless imperial stormtroopers, they say; they were boring little tits from the Home Counties. They just wanted to build railways and then write all the engine numbers down in a little book.

In ‘Whinfrey’s Last Case’ Palin’s character — an analogue of Buchan’s Richard Hannay — has only to show up on holiday in Cornwall for whole villages of German spies to surrender to him. He doesn’t have to do any spying or thwarting; his superiority is communicated to funny foreigners through the simple medium of his flagrant poshness.

This is the story that Britain likes to tell itself; that it won an Empire by accident. The British weren’t beastly like the Belgians, or profit-driven like the Dutch. Instead they were kind-hearted bumblers stuck in an uncomfortable Imperial position due to the twin ineptitudes of the East India Company and the French navy. Like Roger Bartlesham in ‘Roger of the Raj’, they didn’t want to rule India; they just wanted to be a nation of shopkeepers, like Napoleon promised. These aren’t stories of colonisation, conquest and oppression. They are just Ripping Yarns.

Who were you in the show?

Well, back then, definitely Tomkinson being beaten up by The School Bully. Now, probably Major Errol Phipps in ‘Escape from Stalag Luft 112B’, so distracted by his mad little projects that he completely fails to notice everyone else around him getting on with being successful.

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For more Palin and Jones, try our essay on whether ‘Life of Brian’ is Boomer Bullshit or not (spoiler: it’s not).